Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality, by Rob Bell

The Story: This book, as the subtitle says, goes into the connections between God and sex.  It starts out very broad, talking about how we’ve distorted sex and our sexuality until it has little to do with what God has in mind for us.  He talks about how our connections and our love effect everyone around us, and that is a form of sexuality that we’ve just tossed to the side somewhere along the way.  He focuses a lot on the fact that we were created in the image of our Creator and that gives us worth and value beyond what we would ever have alone.  And finding that value and owning it, is what makes us sexy, according to Rob Bell.

As the book goes on, his focus becomes narrower, and he goes into chapters and chapters about marriage and what God has in mind and how sex comes into play and what that means for our spirituality.  He talks about how the whole time Jesus was on earth, he was playing out this wedding story with his followers.  Even the whole “I go to prepare a place for you…” is from the traditional wedding stuff.  He talks about Johnny and June Cash and how their love got deeper and deeper and how they did it.  Rob Bell does a lot of weddings and marriage counseling and he shares a lot of stories from that and gives examples.

The biggest focus of this book is just living love.  Within friendships, and with strangers, and with your spouse. Just love.

What I Thought: I had skimmed this book about 50 times in the bookstore, but never read it all.  I think I was mostly attracted because I read Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell and really liked it, but also the cover is beautiful and it has “sex” in the title and is in the Christian Inspiration section, so that’s different.

The thing that I didn’t like about this book is that by the end, I felt like it was getting repetitive.  I know that you learn things by hearing them a lot of times, but some of the points seem like they were driven home just a few too many times.  I also didn’t like that there wasn’t really a flow to this book.  It kind of hopped around, even within chapters. I almost felt like I was reading just little random thoughts. I would just get locked into one idea, and he’s off on another one and I just got annoyed with that.

However. I loved the ideas presented.  I love the idea of a Christian book that says “sex” about half a million times. I’ve always kind of thought that the way that Christians avoid the topic of sex is a little bizarre.  Without being vulgar, Rob Bell actually wrote a book about sex how it should be, according to the Bible.  It is refreshing.  I like, though, that he didn’t focus entirely on sex, but also talked about value a lot, and the value that we have and how we shouldn’t settle.  I think that is a message that we need to hear over and over and over. His focus, in the last few chapters, about marriage really got me.

My favorite part of the book was the focus on the Hebrew language. I always love hearing what the original Hebrew says and how that translates into English.  There was a ton of this, and I just ate it up. Good stuff.  I also liked the information on how the Jews used to do weddings and what that looked like and how Jesus applied that and how it applies to us.  For me, the chapter about Chuppah was totally fascinating.

I must also mention the footnotes.  I wasn’t reading them at first, and then I flipped to see what one was and was surprised to find that the footnotes take up the last 20 or so pages of the book. There are a lot of them and they are interesting.

Conclusion: I think that this would be a perfect book to read as an engaged couple.  Not only is it good teaching, but it opens up a lot of points that you may not have talked about without the aide of a book.  Not only about sex, but about the Biblical view of marriage and how you should treat each other.  Beyond that, if you’ve never read Rob Bell, I’d say go for Velvet Elvis first.  Its view is broader and will give you a view of how Rob Bell writes and what he believes.  But this book is surely readable for anyone that is interested in what the Bible says about sex and sexuality.