Lessons on sexuality: ‘Goodbye, Garden of Eden’

I believe that it will only be when we get to heaven that we can truly understand what God’s original design for our sexuality as members of the human race would have looked like. I believe that the moment sin entered the garden of Eden, our sexuality was so radically tarnished, that the violation of this beautiful gift began to manifest with immediate effect. In case you are not familiar with what happened in the garden I would love to explain. 

The Bible teaches us that God created Adam and Eve eternally perfect, as the first human beings, giving them complete dominion over the earth. They were permitted to eat any fruit or vegetation in the Garden of Eden apart from the fruit from a tree called the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Unfortunately, Eve was deceived by the devil and disobeyed God, subsequently eating the forbidden fruit. Adam followed suit. Enter original sin. Goodbye Garden of Eden. Goodbye Perfection. Hello death and decay. Hello violation of sexuality.

Confident and comfortable in their skin

Allow me to take you to Genesis chapter one, before the fall. Picture the scene with me. Here we have two gorgeous human beings. Exactly how God made them. Sheer perfection. Beautifully uncovered. Beautifully free. Totally naked, yet totally modest; totally honouring; totally pure; totally whole; totally made in God’s image: both male and female, made equally in God’s likeness; corresponding opposites, intrinsically equal, complementary in their functions.

They are given joint rule and joint responsibility as it is written: to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and to have dominion over every living thing. Wow! How is that for a mandate to start the adventure of married life?

Eve must have radiated mystery and sheer majesty from the moment she was formed

Adam was the spiritual head of the union. Eve was ‘Ezer Kenegdo’ – a strong and powerful equivalent to him. She was fashioned to stand opposite him. Created to assist him in his divine assignment. She was the flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone: one who resembled his perfection.

I am sure that Adam would have been simply beautiful in his manhood, so commanding and regal. Distinguished and dignified yet humbly confident and secure in his masculinity. He would have been awestruck by Eve’s beauty, no doubt.

She must have radiated mystery and sheer majesty from the moment she was formed because this is ultimately how God has made women. I imagine for Eve, confidence in her sexuality would have come naturally.

Now obviously she wouldn’t have had the foggiest about stockings and suspenders…a strip tease would have certainly been an alien concept and I doubt Eve would have mastered the art of pole dancing. Yet I am convinced she would have been beautifully comfortable in her uncontaminated, unadorned but for the hand of God, feminine sass.

I am sure she would have been wholly content with her sexuality, albeit in a very innocent way – and you can bet your life she wouldn’t have the hang ups that many women can unfortunately wrestle with: about body shape and modesty, timidity and sexual repression.

She would have been hot and holy and that was that, end of story. And I am certain that she would have been able to appreciate her womanly body, celebrate it and own it, with a whole heap of unadulterated swag.

A beautiful connection lost

As I consider Genesis 2:21–25, I can only conclude that Eve must have set her hubby’s heart racing: “So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam; and while he slept, He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man He made (fashioned, formed) into a woman, and He brought her and presented her to the man.

Then Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed or embarrassed.”

Surely, as Adam came out of this deep sleep and checked out this ‘babe’ for the first time he would have been mesmerised. Eve wasn’t anything like the gazillion animals he had just named who he had been hanging out in the garden with. She was part of him.

She was totally different yet completely familiar to him. She had beautiful body parts that would have attracted him no end…her beauty and radiance would have stirred up his inners like nothing he’d encountered thus far…no doubt causing him to make a pre-historic statement similar to “How you doin’?” before declaring that “this was the bone of his bone and the flesh of his flesh.”

Adam’s sex drive would have been at its most untarnished, in its most perfectly functioning condition. He would have had an innate sense of connection with Eve because she was made from him. However, from what we know, they did not make love at this point.

Scripture indicates that the first time Adam lay with Eve they had already been evicted from the garden of Eden because of their sin, which means they would not have had sex in that perfect environment of love and acceptance that the garden provided before the fall, where they would have been in complete soul harmony with God and with one another. It is my belief that due to the fall they never tapped into the full joy and freedom of their God ordained sexuality.