What Does the Bible Say About Sex Before Marriage?
1) Direct answer
Sex before marriage is sin. The Bible calls it fornication. God reserves sexual intimacy for a man and a woman joined in the covenant of marriage. Anything outside that covenant brings judgment, not blessing.
2) Scriptural explanation
- Marriage is honorable... and the bed undefiled, but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge (Hebrews 13:4).
- Flee fornication... he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body... your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 6:18-20).
- This is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5).
- To avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband (1 Corinthians 7:2).
- Fornicators... shall not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).
- A man shall cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh (Genesis 2:24).
- Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart (Matthew 5:28).
3) Simple clarifying logic
Now notice, God joined “one flesh” to a covenant, not to casual desire. You see, love keeps God’s Word; lust breaks it. Engagement, feelings, or promises do not replace the marriage covenant. The Spirit doesn’t say “experiment and see”; He says “flee fornication.” Our bodies belong to the Lord; intimacy is holy when the vow makes two one. Outside that vow it wounds the soul, the body, and the testimony.
4) Reinforcing statement
There is mercy. If you’ve fallen, repent and turn from it now. The blood of Jesus cleanses when we confess and forsake our sin (1 John 1:9). Walk clean, guard your heart, and honor God’s pattern: purity before marriage, faithfulness within marriage.
Ask a Follow-up Question
What did the Laodicean Church Age (our age) Angel (- messenger) Say about this?
Ranked passages from the local William Branham sermon and Church Age Book database. Relevance is relative, not a statement of doctrinal certainty.
Marriage and Divorce
65-0221M §78
...conciled back to her husband. She cannot remarry; she must remain single. But notice, he never said about the man. See, you can't make the Word lie. From the beginning, the sex law by polygamy. Now, the Word of God runs true with nature of God, runs in continuity. See how there is one school went east and the other one went west on it? You got to come back to the truth to find out what it is. It's always been that way. That's the regular covenant with God from the beginning. First, before the beginning, from the be...
Satan's Eden
65-0829 §81
Satan did it by the woman's lust for knowledge, for sex, which she chose by her own choosing. Now notice, it was Eve that led Adam to the wrong, and it was the woman that took off her clothes before her Adam took off his, see. It is a woman---always. It has always been. It still is the same way. It's the church that leads the man astray. It's the church, see, that leads the man that wants to be a son of God; it's a woman, the church. Not the Bible, God; for the Bible is man. Oh, yeah, the Word was made flesh, and H...
Marriage and Divorce
65-0221M §80
...But the members of His wife are many, thousands times thousands of thousands. Is that right? His wife, the bride, the church. You understand now? That's why He said to Adam before sex was ever induced ... or, introduced, "Multiply to replenish the earth"---when he was yet in the beginning, when he was yet both male and female in himself! There it shows then that the bride's got to come from the Word, by spiritual multiplications. See? Replenishing the earth.
Marriage and Divorce
65-0221M §81
Now, in the sex act... See, the school's got those two things mixed up. Therefore you can't do it. You've got to bring it back to the truth of it, in the beginning. And at the end there will be one Lord Jesus and His bride many---singular. You get it? There was one David on one throne, one king after God's own heart, with five hundred wives! Jesus, sitting on His throne (Hallelujah!) in the Millennium, with a wife like it was at the beginning, created out of the earth by the hand of Almighty God in the resurrection...
The invisible union of the Bride of Christ
65-1125 §39
...olds it but a woman. That is right. That is committed to her by God. She must not defile that virtue. If she even does something wrong, she must confess that to her husband before he takes her, and make it right. Just the same as the church that was married to the law has to come also before Christ, before the second marriage. She has to confess that. If she doesn't and she lives with her husband for ten years and then confesses it, he has a right to put her away and marry another woman. That is the Scripture. Forn...