Is sex before marriage wrong?

Question 12057.

Is sex before marriage wrong? Yes, and I am aware that saying so plainly puts me at odds with almost everything a young person in Britain has ever been told. What I want to do is show you why Scripture says it, because a rule without a reason will not survive a single lonely evening.

I also want to write this in a way that is useful to the many Christians reading it who have already crossed that line, since a great deal of teaching on this subject is pitched only at the theoretical.

What Scripture says about sex before marriage

The New Testament word doing most of the work here is porneia, usually translated sexual immorality. It is a broad term covering sexual activity outside marriage, and it appears in every list of behaviours the New Testament tells believers to abandon. Flee from sexual immorality, Paul writes, 1 Corinthians 6:18.

Paul is more specific in his letter to Thessalonica. This is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honour, 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8. He then says that God has not called us to impurity but to holiness, and that whoever disregards this disregards not man but God.

Hebrews adds that marriage should be held in honour among all and the marriage bed kept undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. So the position is not a Victorian invention or a cultural hangover. Scripture treats sex before marriage as a sin against God, against oneself and against the other person.

Why it matters, rather than simply that it is forbidden

Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 6 is not that sex is dirty. It is the opposite. He says that the two become one flesh, quoting Genesis, and that a union of that depth cannot be treated as a casual transaction without doing damage. Sexual intimacy makes a promise with the body, and sex before marriage makes that promise without the commitment that would keep it.

That is why he can say that the sexually immoral person sins against his own body, which is a strange thing to say about a shared act. Something is being given away that cannot be retrieved. Anyone who has counselled couples for long will recognise the pattern, though I would never use that observation as a threat.

Marriage is the covenant that makes the promise honest. It is public, it is witnessed, it involves obligation, and it is designed to hold two people together when the feelings are thin. Sex belongs inside that because sex is a covenantal act, whether or not the couple intend it to be.

What Scripture is protecting

It helps enormously to see that God is not standing over this subject with a clipboard. The command against sex before marriage protects something He made and called very good, and every prohibition in Scripture on this theme has a positive behind it.

Genesis has the man and the woman naked and unashamed, which is a picture of total exposure without fear. That is what sexual intimacy is designed to express, and shame is the thing that ruined it. A relationship that has to keep secrets from parents, from the church and eventually from itself is already carrying the shame the design was meant to exclude, and that is one of the quieter costs of sex before marriage.

Paul goes further still and says that marriage pictures Christ and the church, Ephesians 5:31-32. That is an astonishing claim to make about an ordinary human institution, and it explains why Scripture guards it so carefully. Something is being illustrated about the faithfulness of God every time a husband and wife keep their promises.

The pressure this puts on single believers

I do not want to write about this as though obedience were easy. For a Christian in their thirties who hoped to be married by now, this teaching costs something real, and glib encouragement makes it worse. Paul acknowledges the difficulty rather than dismissing it.

What I would say is that Scripture nowhere treats marriage as necessary for a full life. Jesus was single. Paul was single. The single believer is not waiting to begin living, and a church that implies otherwise has absorbed something from the culture rather than from the Bible. Teaching against sex before marriage without honouring singleness leaves people with a prohibition and no vision. I have written on singleness at more length.

The arguments I hear most often

We are committed, we are getting married anyway. I understand the reasoning, and the honest reply is that an intention is not a covenant. Engagements end. If the commitment is real, it can survive waiting, and if waiting is impossible then something has been revealed about the commitment rather than about the rule.

How can we know we are compatible? This question assumes that sexual compatibility is discovered rather than built, which does not match what married couples actually report. Intimacy in marriage is learned over years, through patience and honesty, and a trial run tests something quite different from what marriage will require.

Times have changed. They have, and the change is not obviously working. Britain is not noticeably happier, more secure or better at forming lasting families than it was, and the people who bear most of the cost of a casual sexual culture tend to be women and children. That is not an argument from Scripture, but it is not nothing.

What about those who have already crossed the line?

Most people asking about sex before marriage are not asking theoretically. If that is you, hear this clearly. There is full forgiveness in Jesus for sexual sin, without exception and without a probationary period. Paul lists the sexually immoral among those who will not inherit the kingdom, and then writes, and such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, 1 Corinthians 6:11.

Notice the tense. Washed. Past. Done. The church has a shameful habit of treating sexual sin as a permanent stain while treating gossip and greed as minor eccentricities, and that is not the mind of Christ. If you have confessed it, it is dealt with, and no one has the right to hold it against you.

What forgiveness does not do is remove consequences, and part of repentance is dealing honestly with those. If you are currently in a relationship where this is happening, repentance means changing the arrangement rather than feeling bad about it. My answer on cohabiting before marriage covers the practicalities.

Practical wisdom for those waiting

Decide in advance. Nobody decides about sex before marriage well at midnight on a sofa, and a couple who have never discussed their boundaries will find them by accident. Talk about it early, in daylight, without embarrassment.

Get other people involved. Secrecy is where compromise grows. A couple who are known by an older married couple in the church, who see them regularly and can ask direct questions, have a substantial advantage over a couple nobody is watching.

And do not extend the engagement indefinitely. Paul’s counsel to the Corinthians is remarkably practical on this point, that it is better to marry than to burn with passion. Some Christian couples create years of unnecessary pressure for reasons of finance or convenience that would not survive much scrutiny.

A word to the church

If we are going to teach that sex before marriage is sin, then we have obligations. We must make marriage attainable rather than treating an expensive wedding as the standard. We must not leave single believers isolated in congregations organised entirely around families. And we must be safe places to confess, because a church that only ever condemns will be told nothing at all.

I would add that our teaching should be positive far more often than it is prohibitive. Young Christians should hear the goodness of God’s design for marriage described with warmth long before they hear a list of what is forbidden. See also what Scripture says about sexual purity.

So, now what?

If you are dating, decide today what your boundaries are and tell someone who will ask you about them. If you are already compromised, deal with it this week rather than promising yourself you will do better, because that promise has already been made and broken.

If you are carrying guilt from years ago that you have already confessed, put it down. The Lord is not asking you to keep paying for something He settled at the cross. And if you are single and weary of waiting, know that your obedience is seen, that it is not wasted, and that you are not a second-class Christian for lacking a wedding ring.

What would change in your relationship if you both genuinely believed that God’s design for sex before marriage was for your good rather than against your happiness?

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor.

1 Thessalonians 4:3-4, ESV