Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned to treat desire like a problem God allows rather than a gift God authored. We got thorough training on managing it, guarding against it, being wary of it — and comparatively little training on the idea that God looked at it, at the very start, and called it good. Before there was ever a fall to recover from, there was a garden, and in that garden, desire itself was already part of the design.
“It was very good” — including this
Genesis 1:31 says, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” This comes after the creation of male and female, after the command to be fruitful and multiply, after bodies were formed with the specific capacity for desire, attraction, and union already built in. God isn’t reviewing a finished product and merely tolerating the parts related to sex and desire. He’s looking at the whole of it — bodies, longing, the pull two people feel toward each other — and calling it very good, full stop, no asterisk.
This matters because a lot of church teaching, often unintentionally, tells a different story: that desire is dangerous first and good second, something to be managed before it can be enjoyed. But the text doesn’t introduce desire as a post-fall complication to be regulated. It introduces desire as pre-fall design to be received. Sin didn’t create desire. Sin corrupted something that was already, by God’s own verdict, very good.
“It is not good that the man should be alone”
Genesis 2:18 gives us God’s own diagnosis, spoken before sin ever entered the story: “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” This is God identifying a lack — aloneness — and moving to resolve it, not with a task or a rulebook, but with another person. The desire for closeness, for someone to be known by and to know in return, isn’t a wound needing correction. It’s a design feature God named before anything had gone wrong.
I’ve sat with couples, often the ones who grew up in fairly strict purity-culture environments, who came into marriage feeling like their own desire for their spouse was something to apologize for — like wanting to be desired, wanting closeness, wanting to be pursued, was a little bit shameful even inside a marriage bed with a wedding ring on. One wife told me, plainly, “I didn’t know how to just want him. I only knew how to be wanted responsibly.” That sentence broke my heart a little, because it’s the direct fruit of years spent hearing far more about desire’s dangers than its design.
The body, unashamed, before anything went wrong
The chapter closes with a detail worth sitting in: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Full exposure, physical and otherwise, with zero shame attached — that’s the original condition, not the exception. Shame around desire and the body entered later, as a consequence of sin, not as a built-in feature of how God made us. If shame is what you feel most naturally around your own desire, that’s worth examining honestly, because it did not originate in the garden. It originated after.
What this actually changes for you
This isn’t permission for desire to go unformed or unexamined — Scripture has plenty to say about that too, in its proper place. What it is, is a correction to the starting point. If you’ve spent your marriage treating your own wanting, or your spouse’s, as something faintly suspect that needs constant managing, start further back than that. Start at Genesis 1:31 and 2:18, where desire is God’s idea, called good, before it was ever anyone’s problem to solve.
The line I want you to keep
Your desire for your spouse isn’t a post-fall accommodation God is graciously permitting. It’s a pre-fall design God called very good — and it’s allowed to be received that way, not just managed.
Chapter Three of the book, “In the Beginning, God,” traces this all the way through Genesis and the rest of the biblical story — it’s some of the material I’m proudest of.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below for more of this, every week.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Guide to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
