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I recently had the opportunity to review an advance copy of Sex and the Supremacy of Christ. Forthcoming from Crossway Books, it has a collection of chapters by various authors, all of them edited by John Piper and Justin Taylor. Piper’s Desiring God Ministry hosted a national conference in 2004 by this title (audio available here), and this book is the natural outflow or summation of the conference.

Sex and the Supremacy of Christ brings us a refreshing viewpoint on sex; Piper manages to avoid both tiptoeing around the subject and bludgeoning the reader with heavy-handed “thou shalt not”s. What we get instead is a series of reminders that sex is a God-created part of life, and as such we should glorify God with our sexuality by submitting even that area to His supremacy. To quote from Taylor’s introduction:

Suppose you wanted to know what the Bible teaches about sex. How would you go about finding out? A word search on variants of the word sex in an English Bible shows that it almost always occurs in the context of sexual immorality (Greek, porneia—from which we derive the word “pornography”). So you might conclude that the Bible does not have much to teach us about sex, and that when it does address sexuality, it does so only in a negative, prohibitory, prudish fashion.

But this would be a rather shallow conclusion. Scripture has a lot to say about sex, because Scripture has a lot to say about everything. So rather than searching the Bible only for the word sex, a more productive strategy would be to search the Bible for the term all things, since sex is obviously a subset of all things.

And so off we go, applying principles that the Bible has for how we should treat all things, and then applying them to sex. Indeed, he argues in the introduction, we can’t have a right understanding of sex without having an understanding of how sex relates to God. This volume then sets out to teach us how we can understand sex in relationship to all of our life and worldview, with the ultimate view of living to the glory of God.

The book is split into five sections: God and Sex, Sin and Sex, Men and Sex, Women and Sex, and finally History and Sex. The topics are fairly and practically addressed. Both single and married men and women are given practical advice on how to glorify God in their sexuality. Sexual sin is addressed appropriately, as sin, but with the immediate reminder of God’s desire for repentance, forgiveness, and healing. In the History section, we receive a wonderful story about Martin Luther, one-time celibate priest turned married reformationist. His marriage to and relationship with his wife, Katherine von Bora, is a valuable study to anyone either in or considering marriage.

Sex and the Supremacy of Christ is well worth buying, reading, and then, if you’re bold enough, sharing. It is a much-needed breath of fresh air in the somewhat stale atmosphere that is the Christian library on sex. And if my opinion counts for anything, it comes highly recommended.