One of the greatest ironies of the postmodern West might be this: that great symbol of pleasure in our culture for which it (consciously or not) most emphatically rejects God - sex - is the very thing God has given humanity so that it might have an analogy, a category, a language for knowing what the unadulterated enjoyment of him will be like in glory (see Eph. 5:22-33). In other words, we reject God for sex, but sex is exactly what he's given us in order to faintly grasp the experience of a perfect union with him.
D. A. Carson writes:
It is as if the only pleasure and intimacy in this life that comes close to anticipating the pleasure of the church and her Lord being perfectly united on the last day is the sexual union of a good marriage. (Love in Hard Places, 191)
John Piper writes:
God created us with sexual passion so that there would be language to describe what it means to cleave to him in love and what it means to turn away from him to others . . . God made us powerfully sexual so that he would be more deeply knowable. We were given the power to know each other sexually so that we might have some hint of what it will be like to know Christ supremely. (Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor (Wheaton: IL: Crossway, 2005), 28, 30.)
(Jonathan Leeman, The Church And The Surprising Offense Of God's Love (Wheaton: IL: Crossway, 2010), 112-113, and footnote 64.)
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