Love and Sex: Beyond Law, Into Coherence
By Jean-Philippe Gabriel — frameworklove.com | January 16, 2025
Few areas of human life reveal the struggle between law and love as clearly as sex. From Moses’ law to Jesus’ teaching to our modern debates, sexuality has been a battlefield of guilt, survival, and longing. But if we look through the logic of love, a new coherence emerges.
The Law and Love Pertaining to Sex
When Jesus spoke about lust and adultery in the Sermon on the Mount, he was not raising the bar to make life even harder for us. He was showing the endless reach of the law. The Pharisees could claim they had never touched another man’s wife—but Jesus unmasks the illusion: “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
The point is not that every passing attraction is sin. The point is that the law, once chosen, never ends. It demands not only perfect behavior but perfect thoughts, perfect intentions, perfect fidelity of the heart. In the same way, he equated anger with murder: if you claim righteousness by the law, then you must accept that even a flash of anger is blood on your hands.
This is what the law does: it exposes the impossibility of perfection. A man who has promised himself to his wife under the law must not only never betray her in deed, but never in thought—100 percent loyalty, 100 percent of the time. No human being can keep such a standard, and that is exactly Jesus’ point: the law leads only to guilt and shame.
Love, however, works differently. Under love, it is not about impossible perfection of thoughts. It is about trust and mutuality. If a husband and wife know each other deeply, if they grant space for biology to wander, or even choose to experiment within agreed boundaries, then no law condemns them. Love itself becomes the measure.
This does not mean anything goes. Love still demands coherence: honesty, safety, protection, trust. If lust is indulged in secrecy, if it erodes the bond of trust, then it becomes betrayal. But if desire is admitted, shared, understood—even if acted on within consent—there is no law to condemn.
Law says: desire itself is already adultery. Love says: desire is human. What matters is what we do with it, and whether we remain faithful in the deeper sense of trust. Law leads to shame. Love leads to grace.
The Incompatibility of Biology and the Image of God
No other law trips us up as much as the law of sex. Why? Because it cuts against our very nature. We can restrain anger, regulate theft, outlaw violence—but sex is built into our biology. It is not an occasional temptation; it is an existential drive.
And that is why it feels almost like a cruel joke of the “sons of God” to mingle with humanity and pull the image of God into the sphere of biology. Scripture names this union—the Nephilim—as a mingling of heaven and flesh. And here we are, caught in the tension: created in the image of God, which is moral and relational, yet driven by biology, which is restless and reproductive.
By definition, sex reveals the gap. The image of God points toward self-giving love; biology demands self-satisfaction and variety. The image of God calls us to relational trust; biology calls us to spread seed and survive. Sex is both the most intimate act and the most selfish. It creates life, yet often fractures relationships. It embodies love, yet constantly strains against it.
This is why law cannot contain it. Law demands a standard that biology itself resists. Under the law, marriage is fixed, absolute, unbending. Once pledged, no deviation, no wandering thought, no possibility of change—ever. But biology does not play by those rules, and so the law inevitably turns sex into a source of guilt, shame, and judgment.
Love, however, reframes it. Love can admit biology for what it is: natural, powerful, unruly. And love can still redeem it. Under love, sex becomes possible within marriage not because the law binds it there forever, but because trust and consent make it coherent. Two partners can choose to honor each other, even to experiment, even to allow freedom—so long as trust and protection remain intact. Under law, such arrangements are impossible unless codified from the very beginning, and even then they can never change, even if they break. But under love, flexibility and forgiveness remain.
So sex becomes the perfect test for love. If love can handle sex—the most volatile, biological, selfish drive—then love can handle everything. Law exposes the impossibility of reconciling biology with the image of God. Love makes it possible.
Love as Structure
This is why love must become our structure. The law never ends; it always finds a way to condemn. Even our thoughts betray us. To try to live by a little law and a little love is to live torn between shame and hope, never free, never whole.
Love demands something more radical: to leave the law behind entirely. To step out of the courtroom of endless guilt, and to live under grace. This is the existential paradox. It feels safer to cling to the law for boundaries and then add love on top. But love cannot coexist with the law in this way. If love is conditional, it is no longer love—it is law by another name.
Love as structure reframes everything, even sex. Desire is not sin; biology is not corruption. What matters is coherence: that our choices are governed by trust, consent, honesty, and protection. When we choose love, we choose to see ourselves and others without judgment, to accept freedom as real, and then to use that freedom to protect what we truly love.
This is where grace emerges. Grace is not indulgence; it is not permissiveness. It is the fruit of love’s structure. To admit desire without guilt, to consider freedom without shame, to choose fidelity because we love, not because we fear—this is grace. And grace is what makes love possible.
That is why we must let go of law, not partially but entirely. Love cannot share the throne. Only love can give coherence, only love can restore trust, only love can create grace.
Honest Desire and Grace
And this is liberating. It means that our desires, our biology, our passing fantasies are not proof of a corrupted mind or fallen nature. They are simply human. We may think about them, even imagine acting on them—and then, out of love, choose not to. Not because we fear sin, morality, or a stern law, but because love draws us to protect, to honor, to remain faithful.
It is better to admit the thought, to consider the freedom, and then put it aside—than to bury it in guilt and shame. Love gives us a better foundation: one that allows honesty, and out of honesty, grace.
And it also frees us to extend that grace outward. Knowing ourselves—our own biology, our own desires—we no longer need to judge others for theirs. The “crazy aunt” who enjoys an open lifestyle with her partner? If it works for them, then love allows us to admire it without condemnation, while freely saying, “Not for me.” Love does not demand uniformity. It demands coherence: that each person or couple lives their freedom without exploitation, without betrayal, without harm.
In that light, sex is no longer a battlefield of guilt and prohibition. It is a field where freedom and responsibility meet. Law gave us boundaries. Love gives us choice, honesty, and the grace not to judge.
Exception Clause
Granted, biology drives us—and evolutionarily, variety has been important for reproductive success. But a range of factors can override even the most basic sexual impulses. Other biological needs come into play, such as the need for pair-bonding, love, and safety. Genetic variations, hormonal changes, and even personal temperament shape desire, sometimes dampening or redirecting the brain’s reward system so that the drive for novelty can, in effect, be “switched off.”
Cultural and religious taboos can also rewire the brain’s reward pathways, aligning sexual desire more closely with moral standards for some people than for others. These differences are not matters of accomplishment, strength, or superior willpower—they are internal developments of biology, culture, and environment.
This is why, even within the same couple, tension may arise. One partner may feel desire more strongly while the other feels little at all, not from ill temper or perversion, but from the differing paths of hormones, genes, culture, opportunity, and personal understanding. Love makes space for this. Love gives understanding, and understanding strengthens love. As Jesus said, we are not to add unbearable burdens onto each other’s backs. Much of this is not our doing—it is simply the condition of our humanity.
From Biology to Love
And this is why understanding nature—our biology, our drives, and our differences—matters. It gives us compassion for ourselves and for each other. What we often thought was weakness or sin is, in many cases, simply biology. And this is why the law never works. The law requires perfection, but we are finite: finite in our understanding, finite in our knowledge of ourselves, finite in our ability to control what even we do not fully grasp. The law must be infinite to succeed, and that is beyond us. Love, however, does not require infinite understanding. Love makes room for our limits, and in that room gives both grace and coherence.
Put Away the Old Law
And so we are called to put away the law. Love adapts. In youth, it often means protecting family, children, inheritance, and stability. But in later years, when illness, loss, or loneliness come, commitments may shift. Older couples may seek companionship in new forms, sometimes unconventional, sometimes outside traditional marriage. Under law, such choices carry stigma. Under love, they can carry grace. Love frees us from guilt, teaching us not to judge ourselves or others, but to honor the humanity in every stage of life.
We are called to love, not to obey. And in love, sex is no longer about shame or sin. It is about coherence, dignity, and freedom.
This is also why the witness of the Israelites matters. Moses’ law, with all its sacrifices and prohibitions, was not primarily about morality but about survival. It gave a fragile people structure, a way to endure. This is a common understanding within Jewish thought. The rules we find in Leviticus and Deuteronomy—against incest, adultery, homosexuality, or bestiality—were not mainly about divine holiness in the modern sense. They were about protecting the social fabric.
In short, the Mosaic law framed sexuality as structure—a way to contain its social volatility and preserve a people’s survival. And even then, sex was never simple, never idealized as one man and one woman in perfect bliss. The same Torah that condemned adultery allowed polygamy, levirate marriage, and concubinage. Even prostitution was tolerated at times. Jewish thought today still tends to reject the overly moralistic interpretation that Christianity later attached to Jesus’ teaching, precisely because it has always maintained a more practical, survival-oriented view of law and sexuality.
The law reveals what was always known: sexuality is messy, and the best that law could do was set boundaries to limit damage. But love does more. Love turns boundaries into freedom, guilt into grace, and survival into coherence. Where law could only restrain, love can redeem.
Why Love as Structure Gives a New Angle
Despite the logic, the scripture, and even Jewish tradition, this still feels foreign—almost wrong. It is hard to unlearn the categories of sin and morality we were raised with. To speak of abandoning the law entirely can sound heretical. Yet this is exactly where the breakthrough lies. That is why, in Silent God, I returned to love and asked: what if love is not just a virtue or a feeling, but a structure—the very logic that holds God’s love, and our lives, together?
Structure is form and logic together: the visible shape that makes sense of things. When we separate love from God for analysis, we discover that our story is part of a larger arc. It begins not on Earth but with the war in heaven—a rupture in the first creation that demanded a new setting, a second creation. That is why our world could not be created directly by the hands of God, but had to emerge through the created. We are born through biology, not through love.
This reframes our bodies. Sex is not holy or unholy. It is an existential drive within our biology, a strong, integrated part of our nature. Yes, humanity is said to be created in the image of God—but that image does not mean our biology. It means our moral nature, our capacity for love and justice. Our biology came to us through the mingling of the Nephilim, as scripture eludes. That tension still defines our very nature: created in God’s image, but born through biology’s demands.
And sex, when seen in this light, exposes the conflict. At its core, it can be a selfish act, a drive for release and variety, a non-relational demand of the body. Biology seeks novelty; love seeks fidelity. Biology pulls us toward desire; love pulls us toward trust. That tension is not proof of sin—it is the shape of our existence. It is why law could never resolve sexuality and why love can.
Love as structure allows us to step back and see clearly. It shows why sex feels both necessary and dangerous, both intimate and selfish, both beautiful and messy. It integrates biology into the larger arc of God’s love: not as corruption, but as the stage on which love proves itself stronger than desire.