Do you have to abstain until marriage if you have already had sexual relations with the person you intend to get married?

Question:

If I have already been twice with him, how is it better now? To abstain from sexual relations until we marry? We have been dating for a year and we have at least three years until we graduate from college. He believes that God has already given us His consent, since our love is honest and we do not deceive ourselves. I explained him that we agreed by ourselves, without Him, because we did not get married to be able to take what belongs to us without hiding. I’d like some advice to help both of us from now on.

Sexual relations are permissible by God only in marriage

You said well when you explained to your boyfriend that you had taken by yourselves and stolen what God had prepared to give you at the right moment and legally, by marriage. Marriage is the conclusion of the covenant of marriage. God created sexual relationship and the only legal framework for it is marriage between a man and woman, between a husband and his wife. This is one of the first truths shown by God in the Bible:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)(NASB)

Every sexual relationship outside marriage is sinful

In the Epistle to the Hebrews God says:

Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. (Hebrews 13:4)(NASB)

By the fact that you started to have sexual relations when you were not married, you have defiled your bed, i.e. your future sexual life and you have drawn God’s judgment upon you. To continue to have sex without being married means to insist on your fornication and thereby to further defile your marriage and MARRIAGE as the divine institution.

Avoid sexual immorality

God calls all Christians to this:

For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5)(NASB)

Neither the fact that you have known each other for one year nor the one that you have three more years until graduation is an excuse for fornication. If you fear God and if you care about your future marriage and your children, then you have to cease sexual relations until marriage. It is your choice to get married now or wait until you graduate college. But beware of fornication. God help you so.

Translated by Felicia Rotaru