Malachi 2.13–16; Matthew 5.27–32; Ephesian 5.15–33
A sermon preached at Nedlands Anglican Church 11th February 2024
We come to the seventh commandment: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” I begin by speaking in praise of marriage. Recently I sat by the bed of a deeply depressed woman who was grieving that she had never married. I was tempted to say that marriage was not that good. How stupid that would have been! She was imagining marriage as it could be—should be. And that is a precious thing to keep before us; it is what is in the minds of many young people as they look to their future. Alas, the dreams of youth are often dashed to pieces on the rocks of reality— not because the dreams are necessarily unreal, but because of our little knowledge of ourselves and the person we hope to marry. The joining together of two sinners is no mean feat! There is no area of life where sin is more sadly destructive than in the area of marriage. Some of us know the pain of a marriage gone wrong, but there are many, who, despite its difficulties, have found marriage to be a thing of health and joy.
“It is not good that man should be alone,” God said of the man he had newly created. “I will make a helper suited to him.” Here are two things at the outset: How horrible is long-term loneliness, and how wonderful to have a companion: one person at least to share with us the joys of life— and its sadnesses. And at the same time a helper: he for she, and she for he. I am frequently called on to twist the lids off jars, she to hold one end of the measuring tape, or help lift a beam into place. Shame! We were building a shed; I have a clear memory of Lorraine standing on the roof of our old Hiace van, holding up a roof truss while I anchored it with ropes. A helper, a companion, a friend—also a lover— someone to share a bed, a sex partner and a partner in creating human life. It is no small thing that God should make a man and a woman sexually complimentary, able to find pleasure in sex, at the same time as they give life to a new human being. Awesome! And then there is the fun of being a family. Watching our children develop; then grandchildren. Last week for the first time Baby Hannah dragged herself upright on my leg, and then on everything else. What fun that was for all of us: Mum, Dad, the sisters and brother, and how pleased she was herself. Lots of hard work bringing up kids, but lots of fun too.
I move secondly to consider the commandment itself. What is it we are being told not to do? “You shall not commit adultery.” I always thought it must have something to do with being an adult—you know, “the following program contains adult themes.” But no, the two words look the same, but are not related. Adultery comes from a Latin word which means “mix,” “pollute,” or “defile.” Adultery is about adulterating your family: mixing into it a pollutant that doesn’t belong there. I have a teenage memory of a dazzling businesswoman coming to town and doing a line for my Dad. He was swept away by it—quite confused—until my mother went for her told her a few truths. We never saw her again. The family remained unadulterated.
Adultery is when a man has sex with someone else’s wife, or a woman has an affair with another woman’s husband, or someone who is married sleeps with someone other than their spouse. The commandment is very specific; it concerns marriage. Fornication is something else. It is not what this commandment is about, and I won’t speak of it today.
You would have to say that this commandment is the least understood of the ten. More than anything it probably gives rise to the suspicion that God is a kill-joy.
A great concern for Israel with adultery was introducing illegitimate children into a family, and that can still be a problem. It can cause relationship problems with children, and complicate things like inheritance. It can also bring disease into a family. We were in Africa for much of the AIDs epidemic. A student back at college after the long break told me he had spent much of his time with funerals. He would go to the cemetery on Saturday and all the other ministers would be there. They would work all day burying people. A lady doctor said to me at the time: “You know, one man married to one woman, and faithful to each other, are immune to HIV; it cannot get in. Any other arrangement and they are sitting ducks. A faithful marriage is an island against sexually-transmitted diseases. Not just in Africa: imagine the feelings of a young wife, who discovers she is ill from her husband, who, unbeknown to her, has been sleeping around. It is more common than we think.
The worst damage adultery does is to the actual relationship of the married couple. Loving and being loved is something we grow up dreaming about; it effects the very core of our being. To discover that your spouse is enamored with someone else: that can create inconsolable grief.
Which brings me to a third question: What is marriage? Ask most people today and they will say it is a love relationship. I visited a young person and found a group of not-yet-marrieds together. The conversation turned to marriage. Someone said marriage was a relationship; I said, no, it was an institution. There was shock and horror! They couldn’t believe I would say such a thing. “Institution” was a dirty word. “Relationships,” was becoming the flavour of society. It was an eye-opener for me. Marriage involves a relationship, I said, and hopefully a good one. But there can be a close relationship between a man and a woman that is not marriage, and it is possible for the relationship between a husband and a wife to run rough; that did not mean there was no marriage. I realized that day that marriage was seen by many in our society as an intimate, sexual, fulfilling relationship. If it wasn’t, then the best thing was to end it.
But family is not a societal construct to be monkeyed with as we feel; it is God’s creation—his intention. In Malachi 2 Israel complains that God is failing to bless them. Malachi answers that God witnessed the vow of faithfulness they took when they married. God made them “one.” Why? So that they might raise God-loving children. He hates divorce, and forbids adultery.
Not many marriages enjoy continuous intimacy, without ups and downs. But husband and wife are more than lovers; they are the legs which support a family. A family will normally include children, but not necessarily. Husband and wife also support each other. It is no fun going through life alone. We are made for fellowship. Friends come and go with life’s changes, but a marriage is a unit and is meant to hang together. Marriage pleases God. Faithfulness is commanded for the children’s sake, but also for the couple themselves.
There is another reason God commands faithfulness. He made us male and female, and intends that the marriage covenant should mirror his own covenant with his people. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Israel: you shall have no other gods but me.” God does not play with us for a while, and then cast us off when we become tiresome to him. Believe me, we are constantly tiresome to him! So, a man and a woman covenant with each other to stay together “in sickness and in health till death us do part.” When we join ourselves to Christ, he commits to watching over us. That’s what we are meant to do with our marriage partner.
God showers gifts on a married couple. Love is one of them; I am referring to romantic love, sexuality, erotic love. Falling in love is a wonderful thing. Happy the couple who experience and enjoy it together. Sex is a wonderful thing, intended to add pleasure to our marrying, to help the bonding process. God designed it. God blesses it. One book of the Bible is devoted to it. The refrain which runs throughout The Song of Songs says, “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you stir not up love until it please.” Falling in love is such a wonderful thing that it is easily corrupted. We are in a fallen state, and things do not always happen the way they should, and the way we wish. Some people fall in love with love; they try to force it. Some tire of their first relationship and see the answer in another. It seems that the greater the gift, the greater the potential for it to be corrupted. It is so with sex. It has great power. God gives it to be part of the bond which cements a marriage together and leads to new life. But humans have corrupted and defaced it. The Devil is at work to destroy the image of God, wherever he can.
I need to say something about de facto marriages, because they are becoming more common than those that happen with a minister or a celebrant.
A de facto marriage can be a real marriage. Adam and Eve didn’t have a minister to marry them; they married by having a sexual relationship, and becoming one—a family unit. The Bible doesn’t specify how you should marry. Cultures do it differently, but most do it some way or another. A church or registry is not required for a marriage to be real. In God’s eye’s when a man and a woman start living together, they are married. The law has always acknowledged this. In God’s eyes to cheat on your partner in a de facto marriage is just as much adultery as cheating on your husband or wife. For a man to abandon “the wife of his youth” is divorce, whether their marriage is registered or not.
A de facto marriage is a legitimate marriage; but it is not all that a marriage should be. A God-pleasing marriage involves a commitment to each other to remain together. Some de factoarrangements have this. I was once approached by a couple who had four or five children whom I and everyone else thought were married, since they all used the father’s name. But no, they told me they had never married; most people thought they were. They were new Christians and realized they should tie the knot properly. We had a beautiful ceremony in their home with a few friends and family who were in the know. But she—I am talking about the new wife—wept all through the service. I thought to myself: “There is a woman who has lived for years with uncertainty, and her man has now told the world she is his.”
However, many de facto relationships are tentative: “We will stay together for as long as we both are happy with it.” That is not a God-pleasing marriage. Irregular marriages also tend to cut out the two families that brought the partners up and prepared them for life. And of course, a marriage should be public. Everyone should know that this couple belong together. As I heard David Boan say in a memorable wedding sermon, “Today God draws a circle around you both and says to all others, ‘Keep out!’”
I used to marry a lot of young people, many of them already living together. I did not tell them they were “living in sin.” There probably was sin in their initial coming together, but their life together as a couple was marriage in God’s eyes. Nevertheless, because of the confusion involved, I would ask such a couple to abstain from Holy Communion until their marriage was official. I told them they were already married in God’s eyes. I would love to be the minister at their wedding, but what we would really be doing was declaring and celebrating their marriage publicly, and before God. I don’t recall anyone disagreeing with this.
Fourthly, I want to consider what has happened in our society. D.H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928. It became a hit in our town in the early sixties. Erotic literature was rare in those days. If it appeared on a library shelf, it was soon removed to the back room. Kids managed to get hold of it. Lady Chatterley was the young wife of a disabled soldier from WWI. He was paralysed from the waist down, and not much of a lover. She has an affair with the gardener. It is portrayed as a healing, self-building relationship. You had to feel sympathy for her. It became popular to think that marriage could be restricting to the development of your personhood, that an affair could be healthy and ennobling. No matter that God’s law said no. Why would God command something most people regard as impossible, or even undesirable—damaging to your mental health even? But all of God’s laws are aimed at human happiness. God created human life; he knows how it works. Adultery creates misery, no matter how alluring it seems at the time. We ignore his laws; we suffer in the end–quite apart from final judgement.
The availability of birth control made an affair without children possible. No fault divorce followed. The thing became unstoppable. Roughly fifty thousand divorces happened in Australia last year, but this is only the tip of the iceberg, given the huge number who live together for a while, and move on when it no longer suits them. My daughter was the only person in her class at school whose parents still lived together. I suspect most children today will come from broken homes. I cannot imagine what that will do to the nation. The youth crime that is presently in the spotlight is perhaps a glimpse of the anger and confusion that is brewing.
Israel ran after other gods. The popularity of idols was often their easy-going attitude to sex. Sex was celebrated and ritualized. Many of their temples were financed by male and female prostitution. Israel couldn’t keep away from it. But it destroyed marriages, destroyed families, destroyed people’s health, and destroyed lives; and it destroyed their relationship with God. Jesus called the people of his day “a crooked and adulterous generation.” They didn’t worship idols anymore, but their hearts were far from God, and unfaithfulness in marriage must have been a big factor. Today, when you add all the de facto divorces to those that are registered with the government, and make some estimate of the amount of unfaithfulness that goes on in existing marriages, it is plain that we too live in an adulterous age. Western society has been seduced by the false promises of sex—and all kinds of sex. It is supposed to bring fulfilment and contentment, but yields the bitter fruit of hatred, disease, and loneliness. Every week we are witness to a couple who once pledged undying love, tearing each other apart in the law courts.
Finally, I need to speak to you and me as individuals. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” I used the old form of the commandment to stress that it is a command to us as individuals. Adultery starts with one individual propositioning another. When I preached in South Africa, I assumed there would be people in the congregation who had committed murder. When I preach in Australia, I know I will be preaching to some who have been unfaithful to a wife or a husband.
What then shall we do? The truth is, adultery, and sexual immorality is in our hearts, just as murder is. We can wish it out, but it does not go.
Our sexuality takes us to the core of our being. It can be a door to happiness, ennoblement, fulfilment; or it can bring corruption and shame. We are all so vulnerable at this point. This is one of the weak points at which the Devil attacks. We cannot expect society to be moral. With the powerful motivation of a friendship with God, we still are stalked by it. None of us is strong. When we consider Jesus’ warning that adultery is something we can commit in our imagination—it begins in the heart—we have to say, “Who has not?” We are all damaged goods. We need the Saviour, we need his forgiveness, we need the help of his Holy Spirit.
And this is what he offers us. His terms are simple: “Believe in me, accept me as God’s king, which is what I am—your king, which is what I must be—trust me to forgive you, and remake you in my own image.”
What is needed is a deep work of the Holy Spirit. For this to begin we must first make our peace with God—be reconciled. Jesus lived and died to make that possible. God offers total forgiveness if only we will acknowledge him for who he is, our Creator, our Lord, our God, and his Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour, our Lord, our King. And he offers more. He promises to come into our life—his Holy Spirit—and begin a work of transformation. We need to accept him into our life. Only God’s Spirit can change our hearts, make us desire what is good, hate what is evil.