Deuteronomy 5:18
You Shall Not Commit Adultery
Is there ever good adultery? We try to make it that when we participate in this sin. The legal definition of adultery is voluntary sexual relations between a married person and a person who is not their spouse. It’s pretty cut and dried. If you are married and you have sex with someone who is not your spouse, it’s adulterous sex, plain and simple. When we participate in this sin, we try to justify it in our minds. I deserve to be happy. How could this be wrong. I married the wrong woman or man. These are just a few of the justifications. I have been there. I had these and more.
In my first marriage, my wife had gotten involved in abuse of prescription drugs for the first eight years after her brother’s death in a car wreck. My life was constant worry about what I would find when I got home. She had her own affair with a man she met while she was in her first rehab visit. The marriage was beaten and battered by her drug abuse, me having to clean up the messes, both literal and figurative, she made in her life. It was a living hell during those years. I played the martyr very well. Everybody talked about how Mark was this great guy, holding his family together through sheer will. Finally, by a miracle of God and the 12-Step Program of AA and NA, my first wife got clean and sober in 1988. Things began to get better but the damage had been done. I was tired. I had lived through a dark valley and I was angry deep down in my soul. Suprisingly, my first wife’s addiction to drugs began to transfer to an addiction to buying things. She didn’t care, it seemed, whether there was money in the bank or not. I was now chasing bad checks all over town. The anger was brewing and building. Life was not supposed to be this hard. I had a right to a normal life, right? I had a right to have a wife that was normal. I had right to have a normal life like other couples that I see who seemed to have it all together. The stage was set.
In walks the woman who would become my second wife. She came into my life when I was the most vulnerable to adultery. She was in a bad marriage. I was in a bad marriage. We found each other at work. We fell for each other hard. And over the last two years of my marriage to my first wife, the woman who would become my second wife and I had an on again off again affair. We committed adultery physically very rarely during those two years. But we committed adultery spiritually through the way that we had closed off our marriages and gave our devotion to one another. My first wife discovered our affair but wanted to keep the marriage together. However, my first wife made my life almost like a prisoner on a leash after that. So, with the beauty, calmness, and seeming normalness of my lover who became my second wife, my disgust of my first wife grew and grew until I could take no more. I could no longer be without the woman who became my second wife. My first wife and I split up for good in the Spring of 1993. I was married to the woman I had the affair with and who became my second wife in the Spring of 1995. Story book ending I thought. I thought that my second wife was the answer to my dreams and aspirations of a normal marriage and a normal wife. Thus, the adultery was simply a means to an end. The ends justify the means! We sometimes have to commit sins to get to a greater good for all…right? That’s how I justified it. By marrying my lover, it legitimized our sexual relationship of the past. By marrying her, it erased the sin, as I justified it in my mind. It was OK to commit the sin because it was just a vehicle to get me to the place I wanted to be…in a normal marriage. I justified it. However, no matter how I justified it, sin is just sin. Sin is an ugly pig that we try to make beautiful by putting our justification lipstick on it.
That’s the thing I thought of today (how we try to justify adultery) as I read today’s passage/verse, Deuteronomy 5:18, which reads as follows:
18 “You shall not commit adultery.
There it is. Plain and simple. Simply stated. You shall not commit adultery. It does not say “you shall not commit adultery unless…you have one or more of the following extenuating circumstances (see list below)”. It simply says you shall not commit adultery. There are no exceptions. There are no extenuating circumstances. There are not buts or ifs. We simply cannot do it or we have sinned.
That is one of the things that keeps me up at night at times is the fact that, even though I know that I am saved and my eternity is secure, I will have to account for my past life (what I did with my life before I accepted Christ as my Savior) and then what I did with my salvation after I became a child of Christ. Every sin will be on full display. Every lustful thought. Every fantasy about women. And then especially this two year affair while I was married. I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. I justified it in my mind as being right and OK because my second wife and I loved each other. But standing before the Ultimate Judge, the crime is the crime. In a court of law here on earth, we have to pay for our crimes in one way or another – a sentence must be carried out. The same is true when we stand before God and account for every sin, ever rebellious breaking of His laws that we have ever committed. One sin is enough to send us away to our sentencing. Just one. My adultery is enough to send me straight to the sentence of all sinners. Add to that all the sins that I commit daily even now. I am screwed not only by the adulterous screwing but lap on top of that each and every sin that I have ever committed. I am totally boned. It’s not like I can say before God that this adultery thing back in 1991-1993 was the only time I ever did something so blatantly wrong. That would be a lie. The prosecutor would then bring up every sin I have ever committed. There is a pattern of sinfulness in me. I cannot explain away my adultery as an aberration.
It is only through the grace of Jesus Christ that I avoid my sentence. No that is not a license to commit sin over and over. Through accepting Christ as my Savior, He sends the Holy Spirit to dwell in us because we have been made a clean place for Him to dwell by Jesus. Through the action of the Holy Spirit, He has convicted me of my past sins and I cry over them and I seek repentance for having committed these sins in my past. The Holy Spirit convicts me of the sins I commit now and shows them to me and tells me that I cannot justify them and to seek forgiveness from God and to turn away from such behavior. But it all starts with throwing ourselves at the mercy of the Lord, Jesus Christ. He has already paid the price for our sins on the cross. He tells His Father that this one is mine and that the sentence due this one has already been served. It is only through Jesus Christ that I am not due the penalty of my adultery. That one sin is enough to send my straight to hell on the hell express. Add on top of that all the other sins that I have committed in my life, I should be sentenced to the deepest, darkest parts of hell.
If you are in the midst of an adulterous affair right now. Let it go. Turn around. Run. Repent of your sin. Is your eternity worth this sex that you are justifying as OK. You know in your heart, even if you are not a Christ follower, that it is wrong. God imprints the law upon our hearts from the beginning of our lives regardless whether we believe that He exists or not. You know the adultery is wrong. No justification for it. And the consequences of adultery on your future life you are not even looking at yet! Your life with this person may seem like it’s going to be better than what you have with your current spouse, but let me tell you…you don’t even know the problems that you are going to meet in this relationship that was born in sin. Stop it. Flee from it. Repent!
Amen and Amen.
