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Chapter 7 The
Commandment People Are Ashamed “You
shall not commit adultery.”
—Exodus 20:14 There are two ways of looking at the Ten Commandments: You can read
them with the dark glasses of the Old Covenant, complete with the fire,
thunder, lightning, and earthquakes of Mt.Sinai. Or you can read them in
the sunshine of the New Covenant Good News. Ancient Israel read them with the Old Covenant in mind; and look at
their history. It was up and down (mostly down!) ever since they were at
Mt Sinai. All through their history it was like a dark stormy day with
only an occasional bit of gospel sunshine peeking through a rift in the
clouds. Finally Israel and Judah were taken captive, their temple and
city of Jerusalem were destroyed, and they crucified their Lord and
Savior—all the outworking of the old covenant. Now let’s look with New Covenant eyes at the famous seventh
commandment that has worried so many people. It becomes an assurance:
you will never fall into that trap, you will never be ashamed or
defeated. It says, "You shall not commit adultery." The old covenant glasses make it look like a kill-joy prohibition
that multitudes think is impossible to obey. They ask, "Doesn’t
God want us to have any fun? Doesn’t He understand what our nature is
like? Didn’t He make us like we are, male and female? Why does He
condemn us when we do what we feel like doing naturally?" First of all, He does not condemn us. When Jesus met the woman who was caught "in the act" of
adultery, He said, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no
more" (see John 8:11). God can forgive that sin; but the problem is
that adultery wounds us and destroys our happiness. You can survive if you have an arm or a leg amputated, but the wound
will always be there. God pities and still loves the one who has fallen,
but it’s for our own happiness that He gave us that seventh
commandment to save us from ever having the wound. Giving in to the clamors of our sinful nature brings only a momentary
thrill that afterwards poisons the memory. Not only is the actual deed a
transgression of God’s "law of liberty" (James 2:10-12),
Jesus also said that even watching pornography is the essence of the
sin: "You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall
not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman
to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his
heart" (Matthew 5:27, 28). The Preamble to the Ten Commandments assures us that our Savior will
cleanse the very fountain of our being—the heart. "Blessed are
the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8), and the
Good News is that we won’t have to wait until we are 100 years old or
until we get to heaven for that to be fulfilled. Many a man or woman
burdened with the captivity to lustful thoughts yearns to be free.
Believe the gospel and you will be free, says the Preamble! (But
of course that means you must understand the gospel! Keep reading!) The seventh commandment understood as the seventh assurance means a
thorough renewal, a re-building of the soul from the ground up. Many of
us caught in the adultery trap are inheriting a warped or distorted
childhood. If we are men, we have never learned to respect or understand
womanhood; and if we are women, we have always been afraid of men—yearning
for them but repulsed at the same time. Only "in Christ" are we truly at ease with the opposite
sex. The liberating agent is the love (agape) of Christ. He goes
deep into our psyche to heal wounds that may possibly lie too deep for
us even to be aware of. Jesus is the Great Physician; He loves to heal
old wounds. "But my problem," someone says,
"is that I am in love with so-and-so." What you think is love outside of marriage is fool’s gold compared
to the real thing; sex only appears real. Scratch it and you find out it’s
worthless. That’s why such love (infatuation) doesn’t last. True
"love (agape) never fails" (1 Corinthians 13:8). It’s
a love that nobody is ever born with, it never comes to us through DNA;
it’s a love we have to import from the outside, we have to
"learn" it. And the source of learning: Christ Himself. If you love someone with agape, you cannot harm that person
sexually; you cannot rob him/her of his/her God-given self-worth or
self-dignity. There is no selfishness in agape. Girls, if some
boy tells you, "I love you, give me your body!" he’s fooling
you. He may be fooling himself, too! (You must respect your own
God-given self-dignity.) If he truly loves you, he will not try to use
your body until God has made the two of you one in holy marriage. And
then the true love will never die, and it will always supersede mere
sex. It’s impossible to commit adultery or fornication (pre-marital
sex) if agape is in the heart! And boys, run like a scared rabbit from the girl who wants to
entangle you in a web of sensuality. Rightly understood, the seventh
commandment is all about true love, for it keeps "you from the evil woman, from the flattering tongue of a
seductress. Do not lust after her beauty in your heart, nor let her
allure you with her eyelids. For by means of a harlot a man is reduced
to a crust of bread; and an adulteress will prey upon his precious life. "Can a man take fire to his bosom, and his clothes not be
burned? Can one walk on hot coals, and his feet not be seared? So is he
who goes in to his neighbor's wife; whoever touches her shall not be
innocent" (Proverbs 6:24-29). Remember: anyone whom God has not
made to be your wife in holy marriage is in fact your
"neighbor’s wife" because she is not yours. The Preamble to the Ten Commandments tells us that God has already
saved us from the pain and humiliation that illicit sex involves. Christ
has taken Adam’s place as the new Head of the human race; He took upon
Himself our fallen, sinful flesh and nature. Tempted in all points like
as we are, He lives in us a pure and holy life—which is happiness
unalloyed. And all that He achieved in His person He has given freely to
us. There is a worldwide teaching that denies this
biblical truth. It says that Jesus was "exempt" from inheriting the same
flesh or the same nature as we all have. It teaches a strange idea that
is not taught anywhere in God’s holy word—that when the Virgin Mary
was conceived in the womb of her mother, a miracle took place that
"exempted" her from inheriting the same DNA or genes and
chromosomes that every other son or daughter of Adam has inherited
naturally. This teaching is known as "The Immaculate Conception,"
which means that the Virgin Mary had different flesh, a different human
nature, than what we have. She escaped inheritng our DNA. And of course,
she gave that same supposedly sinless or holy flesh to her Son, Jesus.
So this teaching ends up telling us that Jesus could not possibly have
been tempted "in all points as we are," as the Bible
says in Hebrews 4:15. It is true that Jesus was totally sinless, His character was holy, He
was righteous; but the flesh which He took upon Himself was "the
likeness of [our] sinful flesh," and in that same fallen sinful
flesh "He condemned sin" (Romans 8:3, 4). He felt the
allurement of all our temptations but He said "No!" to each
one, and conquered sin in our fallen, sinful flesh. Glorious
emancipation! This means that the angel told the truth before the birth of Jesus
when he said to Joseph, "He will save His people from their
sins," not in their sins (Matthew 1:21). We have a Savior
who "is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through
Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them" (Hebrews
7:25). You have heard the story of the village at the bottom of a cliff
where people would fall over and be wounded. So the town fathers bought
an ambulance, but what they should have done was to put a fence up at
the top. Jesus is more than a mere ambulance! But many people haven't
realized that He is the fence up at the top of the cliff. He is our only
Savior, and He is a complete Savior from sin, not in it.
He doesn’t need anyone to help Him. There is no co-savior. If a person is converted, that does not mean
that he/she is no longer tempted. Our fallen, sinful flesh or nature will not be eradicated until Jesus
returns and glorifies His waiting saints. Only then will our sinful
flesh become sinless flesh. Then "we shall all be changed—in
a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet" (1
Corinthians 15:52). In the meantime, we all still have a fallen, sinful flesh to deal
with. "As [Jesus] is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4:17).
He says to us, "As the Father has sent Me, I also send you,"
but at the same time He assured the disciples that the same Holy Spirit
who stayed with Him and saved Him from yielding to temptation will stay
with us: "When He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to
them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’" (John 20:21, 22). This is the precious gift that He has promised to every one who
believes on Him. " I will pray the Father, and He will give you
another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—the Spirit of
truth, … the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My
name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all
things that I said to you" (John 14:16, 17, 26). The Holy Spirit is
therefore the true Vicar of Christ; the Father has sent Him as Christ’s
personal Representative. If Jesus were here in person, you and I could
not have a chance to see Him, for there would be so many people
thronging His office. But through the Holy Spirit, Jesus Himself has
come to each of us who will welcome Him. He has promised to be the
Helper [Comforter, KJV], which means, He sits down beside us and never
leaves us. God has promised to hold us by the hand, to steady us when we
are about to stumble and fall (see Isaiah 41:10, 13). Human yearnings for love are unrealized
yearnings for Christ. When you think you have found happiness by looking in someone else’s
face, what your heart is really yearning for is to see the face of Jesus
smiling at you. Let us not be confused and be misled by a
counterfeit love. What our hearts most yearn for is "peace with God." Let us
see His smiling face, and then heaven begins right here on earth. The
Holy Spirit will teach us, as if we were students in school, to be happy
in holy marriage. We often must ask each other to forgive us, and we
forgive the other, even as we appreciate that Jesus has forgiven us.
Happiness begins when husband and wife can hold hands and kneel together
and together ask God in prayer to bless their marriage. He wants to, and
He will; the prayers He most delights to answer are those when husband
and wife agree in what they ask for! A broken home not only brings sadness and pain to the hearts of
husband and wife; it wounds the Savior afresh. His honor is bound up
with the happiness of our homes. He invented marriage! Its break-up
embarrasses Him. It’s Satan who tells everyone that marriage is
hopeless, that it’s impossible for two people to be true to each
other, that God’s invention of marriage is a mistake, that He is
defeated. Every time a home breaks up, there is another vote in Satan’s
favor! "I want to be happy and I want our home to
remain unbroken; but my spouse is the one who is breaking up our
happiness!" A profound treasure of wisdom is found in Paul’s counsel: "The
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the [believing] wife, and the
unbelieving wife is sanctified by the [believing] husband; … For how
do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you
know, O husband, whether you will save your wife? (1 Corinthians 7:14,
16). A miracle? Yes, of course; but miracles of grace are exactly what
God delights to do in these last days when so many homes are poisoned by
infidelity. According to this text, if the one believing spouse can let
the Holy Spirit fill his or her heart with understanding and humility
and faith, the unbelieving spouse can often be led to repentance
and conversion. Accept that seventh commandment as an assurance: believe that the
Lord has led you "out of the house of bondage," He has freed
you from the slavery of sin in "Egypt," believe that He shed
His precious blood to save you, and "you shall not commit
adultery." Nor will you encourage your spouse (or anyone else) to
do so! The love of Christ is stronger than all the wickedness the devil
can try to send into our homes; He so changes you and melts your heart
from within that such a great change will take place in you that your
spouse will fall in love with you! (See 1 Corinthians 7:12-16). Praise God for that blessing! |
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