What would we be if God had not breathed his breath into us? Darwin’s whole theory of evolution, by itself, is dangerous and futile because it is not God-centered. Something inside each of us cries out against the idea that we have been hatched by a purposeless universe. Deep within the human spirit is a thirst for what is lasting and imperishable.

Since we are made in God’s image, and God is eternal, we cannot, at the end of life, merely vanish again like smoke. Our life is rooted in eternity. Christoph Blumhardt writes, “Our lives bear the mark of eternity, of the eternal God who created us to be his image. He does not want us to be swallowed up in the transitory, but calls us to himself, to what is eternal.”2

God has set eternity in our hearts, and deep within each of us is a longing for eternity. When we deny this and live only for the present, everything that happens to us in life will remain cloaked in tormenting riddles, and we will remain deeply dissatisfied. This is especially true in the sexual area. Casual sex desecrates the soul’s yearning and capacity for that which is eternal. No person, no human arrangement, can ever fill the longing of our souls.

The voice of eternity speaks most directly to our conscience. Therefore the conscience is perhaps the deepest element within us. It warns, rouses, and commands us in our God-given task (Rom. 2:14–16).

And every time the soul is wounded, our conscience makes us painfully aware of it. If we listen to our conscience, it can guide us. When we are separated from God, however, our conscience will waver and go astray. This is true not only for an individual, but also for a marriage.

        Already in Genesis, chapter 2, we read about the importance of marriage. When God created Adam, he said that everything he had made was good. Then he created woman to be a helpmate and partner to man, because he saw that it was not good for man to be alone. This is a deep mystery: man and woman – the masculine and the feminine – belong together as a picture of who God is, and both can be found in him. Together they become what neither would be apart and alone.

(This excerpt is from the E-book: Sex, God and Marriage reprinted from www.bruderhof.com, copyright 2002 by the Bruderhof foundation, Inc., used with permission)