Stay home, make love, read your Bible, repeat

“Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well.”
-Proverbs 5:15

Chapter 5 of Proverbs mainly focuses on the “forbidden woman” or “adulterous woman.” Solomon is going to turn away from her for a little while and to someone a little more close to home – your spouse.

This analogy of drinking water from your own well may be a little lost on our generation. We have filtered water, bottled water, and laws that regulate the quality of tap water. But still, there is something about the water you have at home. Hopefully it is water you can trust. You never know what you’re going to get when you drink the water somewhere else. When you go to Mexico, for instance, people will tell you to stay away from the water completely.

So this is something we can understand, but it had even more meaning then. A well was something you probably dug yourself, or one of your ancestors did. It was YOURS, and no one else’s. You put the work into it, forming it as you desired. By your sweat it was perfected, ready to offer clean water to quench your thirst.

The Bible speaks in much the same way about marriage:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.
-Ephesians 5:25-30

It is something you put your heart into, something that becomes so much a part of you that to dissolve it would be almost like death. Not that there isn’t work. Not that there aren’t problems. But by grace these come to produce something truly wonderful.

A thirsty man may think that any water fountain is okay. But like that well at home, a wife has been given to satisfy those longings. Like the water produced by the well you built, the satisfaction you get comes from the marriage of your making.

God is not opposed to sex. We may look at this whole section of Proverbs and wonder about that. No, God invented sex, and He’s plainly telling us here how to have our thirsts sated, so to speak. That’s not why He tells us not to have sex outside of marriage. It’s that He’s going for something here that cannot be accomplished with the girl in the bar, or on the internet, or in the magazine. He’s going for something that more reflects the relationship between Christ and His Church.

The love Jesus has for His bride cannot be compared with anything we have encountered before. Though we were lost in our sin, He came from heaven, lived on earth, and died on our behalf. He bought us with His very Blood. He purifies us in His sacrifice and prepares us, sanctifies us, for eternity.

And He is true. He does not stray. He is faithful to us in all times. There’s something beautiful about His love for us. The love God desires in our marriages looks more like that. It goes beyond sex and into something far better.