Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

An email from Marak or so ago with a collection of emails he had received from Poland in response from the people there that I went and spoke to and taught the scriptures in the midst of. And these were responses to my going there and to my teaching. And there was a young man I met there at the first weekend at the family camp or Bible conference that they had in the mountains. His name was Pavo. He’s from Gdansk up in the northern portion of Poland up by the sea.

And Pavo is a five-point Calvinist. He’s reformed in his thinking in terms of salvation, but he has not, at least as of the time that I went there, come to full grips with all of reformed theology. He’s a fairly new convert in the last year or so. A wonderful young man. I got to sit next to him on the bus for three hours on our trip back from the conference. And we talked of things of God.

At that weekend, what I did was I spoke on Christian marriage and Christian family focusing on the role of the husband as today’s sermon will do primarily as well. The husband is the covenantal head of the relationship. And so he forms the direction for the family. And I spoke of a truth that you probably are all very familiar with—that the husband’s primary responsibility relative to his wife and his family is to guard and nurture them the same way he guards and nurtures his own body. Ephesians tells us that he protects it and nurtures it and develops it. And I use two case laws from the Old Testament, the case law relative to dowry and the case law relative to the year of exclusion to illustrate these two points of guarding and nurturing.

We’ll be speaking of those laws some next week actually. But in this email that Marak received from Pavo, Pavo said that he thought that he was falling in love with the law of God. That was thrilling to me and exciting and I would give thanks to God for Pavo’s response to the teaching.

It may sound a little odd. I know it probably does to some of you that someone is falling in love with the law of God and it certainly would have sounded odd to us 15, 20 years ago before we developed an appreciation and love for God’s law. But I think when we recognize that in the law we see the beauties of Jesus Christ shine forth—that the law is the way that we spoke of last week—that we need to cleave to the law is the instructions, teaching, the way. Torah means way. We translate it law. That’s okay. There are commandments, but it is a way that God instructs us to walk in. And Jesus is the way and he is the truth. The commandments are truth.

And he is the life. The commandments maintain the life that God has established for us in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. So it makes sense to say that one is falling in love with the law.

I bring this up because in today’s sermon, in our series going through the Bible and marriage—a biblical view of marriage and particularly male-female relationships—we’ve kind of reached a transition point. Now we have finished up with the patriarchs going through the book of Genesis: creation and then the fall and going through the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and even going into Exodus with Moses. And now we have this transition period in the scriptures where we now have the explicit statements of law beginning with the Ten Commandments and then a whole series of what are sometimes referred to as case laws or specific commandments that flow out of those Ten Commandments.

And so we’re moving now from the lives of the patriarchs to the explicit teaching of the commandments of God. And I’ve touched on this and we’ll touch on it more as we get to more detailed laws. But it’s important we see that there is no disjunction here between the patriarchs’ lives and the law of God. It has been amazing to me in my studies of the book of Genesis to see how many case laws are prefigured typologically in the lives of the patriarchs relative to the dowry, relative to the payment price for bondservants, relative to the release of bondservants and wives and whether they be released with their wives or without them.

All kinds of case laws are prefigured in the lives of the patriarchs. Why is that? Did somebody just look at those laws and then create a law based on them? No, of course not. What we have is God who called the people into union and communion with him to reflect his way, his communicable attributes, his morality, his uprightness in their lives. And as those patriarchs worshiped God, they knew in relationship to God what that law was before it was formally given to them.

Now, the scriptures tell us in Galatians that there is this continuity between the law and the Abrahamic promises of the patriarchs. What I want us to do is turn briefly to Galatians 3:15-19. To some of you, this will be a review, old hat, but it’s good to remind us of it again. And to some of you, this may be somewhat new. But this is a very critical text for understanding these laws that we now turn to in our series on the Bible and marriage.

In Galatians chapter 3, Paul says in verse 15, “Brethren, I speak in the manner of men: though it is only a man’s covenant, yet if it is confirmed, no one annuls or adds to it.” Okay? So he’s saying that when you enter into a contract, you cannot unilaterally add terms to that contract that weren’t there to begin with. I can’t write you a purchase agreement for your car and we both sign it and then me add conditions or change the price or somehow alter it or even walk away from it unilaterally. That’s what Paul is saying here. He says even men know this. Certainly this is the way God is as well.

And then he talks about the promise given to Abraham that to his seed. And then he says in verse 17, “I say that the law, which was 430 years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect. If the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise, but God gave it to Abraham by promise.” He’s saying the law was never given as a means of salvation. The law was given to a saved people. And we see that as we look at Exodus 20. It’s to people who have come out of bondage to sin and death typified in Egypt. It’s given to a saved people. It doesn’t affect their salvation. It’s given to them as a way of life, having been brought into relationship with God by his grace of deliverance.

And then in verse 19, “What purpose then does the law serve? It was added because of transgressions till the seed should come to whom the promise was made and it was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator.” What Paul is telling the Galatians is the proper way to understand the law of God is not as some new set of terms that God puts upon the life of his people that he has redeemed. What he is saying is that law must have been incipient in the Abrahamic promise and in the covenant of God of grace made with men through the work of the coming Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.

It must have been incipient in it all along because God is like us. He’s not going to change the terms of the covenant once it’s been established. You understand that the law is incipient in the covenant of grace, in the covenant that God made with Abraham and the covenant that God makes with us ultimately through the greater Abraham, the Lord Jesus Christ. See, this is pictured in what I’ve been speaking of in terms of the lives of the patriarchs. They knew the character, the way, the Torah, the law of God, and their lives reflect that knowledge in terms of dowry, service, etc. And their lives reflect that. And then those things are codified in the giving of the Ten Commandments and the particular case laws because of the increase of transgressions.

As man devolves in his fallen state, man does not evolve from creation. He devolves. He devolved in devolution in his fallen state apart from the grace of God. In his devolution, he hardens himself to the spirit of God, moving his conscience to walk in obedience to the character of God. And so God brings along the law to put in explicit terms what was always there implicitly as well. So when we come to the law, to the Ten Commandments and later to the case laws, we’re coming to things that reflect the lives of the patriarchs. And therefore, there is this unity between what we see pictured in Genesis in the opening chapters of Exodus and the law of God.

And particularly in reference to the commandment today—to not commit adultery—that we’re going to deal with today. This is certainly shown to us in spades, as it were, in great big large real letters written large in the history of the patriarchs in the book of Genesis. We saw in the results of the fall sexual results as well. We saw the disruption to the one flesh unity that Adam and Eve had in their original creation. We saw them turn against one another. We saw Adam move from poetry to accusation. And we know that at the deepest levels of intimacy between husband and wife, there we have the effects of the fall that rear their ugly heads.

We saw in the development of the ungodly line of the Canaanites. We saw in the seventh generation Lamech, who engaged in polygamy, who engaged, in other words, in adultery. We saw adultery develop in the context of the ungodly line as man’s sins became more and more manifest as man devolved, and we saw that continuation in the two lines of Jacob and Esau. And Esau is seen as being adulterous in his relationships by having multiple wives as well. And he’s even adulterous, idolatrous at least, in marrying Canaanite wives and entering into relationships with them. We saw even in the cases of the great saints Abraham and Jacob, we saw adultery in the sense of multiple wives and concubines at the same time.

A clear violation of the command of God. And we saw the disastrous effects of those relationships in the context of their lives. As we said last week in the story of Dinah, we saw the reiteration that she was a daughter of Leah. That that was a vital part of understanding the story is the adultery that Jacob was in the context of his relationship. We saw these horrendous effects. Now he was tricked into it. But nonetheless, he took two concubines as well.

So the law really reflects, “Do not commit adultery,” what had been there from the first. The creation ordinance is that husband and wife shall become one flesh. Polygamy is outlawed in the very creation ordinance of marriage. And all adultery, whether it’s called polygamy, concubinage, or whatever it is, is a violation of the creation ordinance of marriage.

So law reflects the lives of the patriarchs and reflects therefore our standard of being as well, our Torah, the way we should walk in. We talked last week of Dinah and how she swerved from the way and how then the story developed and there was a swerving away from truthfulness or fidelity to truth and then there was the issuance of death as a result of her brother’s actions. We said we have a need to cleave to Jesus Christ who is the way, the truth, the life, and as the scriptures tell us, the way of the Lord Jesus Christ is reflected in the commandments of the scriptures.

We’ve been having multiple exhortations to that for a number of weeks and will for the next couple of months as well, from Psalm 119, saying this is the way. This is the way that produces holiness. This is the way that is the way of blessing. The psalmist wrote that we read today, “I will walk at liberty because I seek your precepts.”

So hopefully in this congregation we are children and those coming into the reformed faith for the first time are developing a falling in love with Jesus Christ, a falling in love with the law that reflects the Lord Jesus Christ and his beauties. We’re called to go forth from this place shining in the holy beauties of God. And we do that by God conforming us to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ by means of his word, which is a law word to us as well as a grace word.

Let us turn now then to that law and see the way in which God would have us walk. This is Roman numeral number two on your outlines. We’re going to talk first about the proscriptions of adultery of this commandment and then the prescriptions.

Now proscription—big word—it means things that are forbidden. You know a protractor, right? You kids use a protractor to draw around to make a circle, right? A protractor. And to proscribe—scribe is to write—to pro is to write around something, a barrier to it. So in the middle of what you proscribe is something that’s forbidden. The commandment proscribes certain actions. It says you can’t do them. And then we’ll talk in a minute that it prescribes—like a prescription, a doctor’s prescription—positive things as well.

So the law of God has negative proscriptions and positive prescriptions.

What is proscribed? Well, the first thing that’s clearly proscribed in this text is adultery. Now, let me say this: there is a distinction made in the scriptures between adultery and fornication. Again, review for many of you, but maybe not for all of you. Adultery is illegitimate relationships in the context of marriage. So it’s a married man violating his marriage oath by having sexual relations with someone not his wife, or it’s a married woman having relationships with somebody not her husband. Okay, it involves married people. Fornication is a more general term for uncleanness. Now, this distinction is made in both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

In Leviticus 20:10, listen to what this says: “The man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbor’s wife, the adulterer, and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” See, that helps us to define what adultery means. Okay? Adultery means sexual infidelity in the context of a marriage oath or marriage covenant.

Leviticus 20 also tells us that the penalty for violation of this commandment is death. Now that’s significant. If you think about the last six commandments that have direct relevance to people: honor your father and your mother—that’s not punished by death, right? I mean, if you really go way far away from that and strike out at your parents and curse them as an adult child, now you got the death penalty. But dishonoring your parents is not punished by death. To kill is punished by death. Kill a man—to commit adultery is a capital offense, but stealing is not a capital offense. Nor is bearing false witness, unless you bear false witness in a capital crime case trying to get somebody killed. And coveting is not punished by death as well.

So what I’m saying is there are just a couple of these commandments in reference to our actions to men that are punished explicitly by death. That is to kill and to commit adultery. It shows you the seriousness of this crime. We need to know that today because we live in the context of a country where this isn’t seen as wrong at all and in fact is actually promulgated by many philosophies, humanistic counselors, etc.

So we need to know that adultery is sex in the context of a violation of the marriage covenant and it is a crime that is punished by death.

Couple more verses on this marriage stuff. In Ezekiel 16:32, God says, “You are an adulterous wife who makes, who takes strangers instead of her husband.” I point that out because it’s important in case there’s anybody here saying, “Well, it just applies to men.” No, it applies to women as well. If a woman takes strangers other than her husband, she’s an adulteress. Okay? And then in Hosea 4:14, God says, “I’ll not punish your daughters when they commit harlotry—different word—nor your brides when they commit adultery.” You see the difference? If a daughter is unmarried and engages in illegitimate sexual activity, it’s not adultery. It’s harlotry. But if she’s married and engages in illegitimate sexual activity, now she’s an adulteress.

So you see the distinction: adultery and fornication. This is important. The same thing is true in the New Testament. There are two specific Greek words: one that is more broad and general, usually translated fornication, and one that is specific and means adultery in the context of a violation of marriage. When Jesus talked about divorce, he talked about divorce being legitimate if there was fornication involved in the relationship—the broad term. So he’s not referring just to adultery in terms of the divorce allowances of the scriptures. He’s referring to a broader category of sin. Okay?

So we got to know what this law says and its original meaning. And the meaning of the law is that you should not have sex in violation of the marriage covenant that you have entered into. And the scriptures tell us explicitly that this is punished by death.

Now, one other thing before we go on: this English word adultery that we use, you might think of it as having the same meaning as adult in its origins. It’s not. Adult is a different Latin word and has a different root. Adultery, in its inception or rather in its etymology, comes from two Latin words, and these Latin words are ad, meaning “with,” and alter, meaning “other.” So ad-alter, “with other.” It means to bring some kind of confusion, to bring an adulterating effect upon the marriage relationship. It means with something else, other than the one you’re supposed to have sexual intimacy with.

Now that’s important. It’s important because, as we’ll see here as the scriptures go on, God links adultery with idolatry. And he links—what the core sin of adultery is—a mixture, bringing into the marriage relationship something that is forbidden to be brought in.

Another point before we go on: notice that this commandment presupposes marriage, right? I mean, if the proscription—the thing being forbidden to us—is sex in violation of the marriage covenant, it assumes that covenantally all of us are married in some sense, right? And covenantally men and women are to be married. Now, I know that certain people are called to singleness. I’m not denying that—that’s true. Very few people, because the Bible says it’s not good for men to be alone. And this commandment in addressing marriage relationships in the broad head of sexual sin focuses upon the fact that people are supposed to be married. Okay.

Secondly, notice that this commandment is aimed at the family. And this is not the first commandment in the decalogue that’s aimed at the family as well. Honor your father and mother, while applying to all authorities, has as its preeminent first application the family and the need for proper order and submission in the context of the family. Adultery, which we’ll see in a minute here, involves more than the simple application to marriage. Nonetheless, it focuses in primary application upon the protection of the family from admixture, from an illegitimate blending with forces from outside of the family with an adulterous relationship that some commentators talk about and the scriptures talk about that pollutes the family, brings adulteration.

We talk about adulterating something—means to take something and blend something else with it, draw us in with goodness so to speak, adulterating a compound. And so the family is the subject—not the sole subject. Ultimately, we’re talking about God here, but the family is a very important institution. The order in the family of parents to children—honor your father and mother—and parents one to the other is seen here as the basic building block of Christian culture.

Now, we could combine with that brother relationships: you don’t kill people. And also property relationships: you don’t take each other’s property. But two references here are to sins against the family, and this adultery reference coupled with the death penalty should one sin against the family, against one’s spouse in this kind of what should be seen as a horrific way to us. So very important, this commandment. Very important to see the importance of the family stressed in this commandment.

However, so we’ve said that in its first application it refers to sexual infidelity in the context of marriage. But what we see and we’ll get to some of these in the weeks to come is that there’s a whole series of case laws that regulate sexual activity outside of marriage as well. And what we see in the development of the law is that the Ten Commandments are then fleshed out in Exodus and Deuteronomy with a whole series of case law applications of those Ten Commandments.

And the point to be made here is that while the original application, the primary application, is forbidding adultery, it covers the whole head of sexual sins, including indecency and all kinds of other sexual activities that people involve themselves in that are improper. Indecency, in other words, is properly proscribed by this commandment as a covenantal head commandment in the whole area of sexuality.

Calvin said, “The whole genus of sexual sins is comprehended under a single species: do not commit adultery.” And so that’s what we read here. Calvin says this in terms of this commandment: “The madness of lust has however invented several monstrous vices whose names it would be better to bury if God had not chosen that those shameful monuments should exist to inspire us with fear and horror.”

So God lists a whole series of sexual sins in the scriptures to inspire us, as Calvin says, with fear and horror. And they’re comprehended on the covenantal headship issue: do not commit adultery. Now, so there’s a general sense that this prohibits uncleanness in terms of actions, but our Lord restores the meaning of this particular commandment in Matthew 5:27-28 when he says this: “You have heard that it was said by them of old time, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

Now what is Jesus doing here? Is he giving us a new law? Is he taking the old law and changing it? No. He tells us explicitly he did not come to abrogate the law but to put it into force, to fulfill it. Charles Spurgeon says this of our Savior’s comments in Matthew 5:27-28. Excellent commentary: “In this case, our king again sets aside the glosses of men upon the commands of God and makes the law to be seen in its vast spiritual breadth. Whereas tradition had confined the prohibition to an overt act of unchastity, the king shows that it forbade the unclean desires of the heart. Here the divine law is shown to refer not only to the act of criminal conversation or actions but even to the desire, imagination, or passion which would suggest such an infamy. What a king is ours who stretches his scepter over the realm of our inward lust. This our king touches vice at its fountain head and forbids uncleanness in the heart. If sin were not allowed in the mind, it would never be made manifest in the body. This therefore is a very effectual way of dealing with the evil.”

You see, Spurgeon’s correct. Our Savior reiterates the law and recovers—his whole sermon on the law in Matthew 5 is to recover the true meaning of the law from the Pharisaic and Sadducaic interpretation of that law which made it of no effect. And Jesus said the seventh commandment all along was intended to prohibit adultery in your heart. It’s no less true today that when a man looks at a woman with lust, and he’s married, he’s committed adultery in his heart. No less true today than it would have been 3,000 years ago.

Nothing in the circumstances of what our Savior describes changes. Men still look at women, still lust after them. And Jesus says whenever they do that, that’s adultery. And it was so in the Old Testament. Therefore, our Savior tells us that the seventh commandment doesn’t just prohibit adultery in terms of external acts. It doesn’t just proscribe indecency, as the case laws show us. It proscribes untoward thoughts, looks, and lusts and desires toward another that are indecent in their character and action.

Our Savior shows the true purpose of the law was a way that referred not just to our external actions but a way that refers to our inward hearts and our thoughts as well. Now this is not new news, but again in the context of our day and age we need to hear this again and again because we live in an adulterous society where adultery is commonplace. Fornication, uncleanness, and unchastity are commonplaces in our world, and we are prone to wander. We’re prone to think as long as we don’t commit the act then we haven’t committed adultery.

We have a president. We have moved from Jimmy Carter who quoted these verses and confessed to lust in his heart to a president now who engages in overt lustful actions and then says that it’s not adultery. It’s not sexual activity. You see, serpent speech again is being used by our rulers to redefine the commandments of God and say, “Oh no, I didn’t break the seventh commandment. I didn’t have sex with this girl because we never actually consummated the relationship.” See, this is the tendency of men in their fallen state. It’s our tendency as well.

And so we need to warn ourselves by saying that when we have lustful thoughts, improper, indecent ways of being, God says we have violated the seventh commandment. We should repent of that sin and we should do all that we can to cut off the head of that vice in terms of the inward thoughts of men. We live in an age of disciplined minds. We live in an age at which people seem to think that whatever thought pops into their head, they have no control over. And if you have no control over lustful thoughts, you’re going to find yourselves inevitably in lustful actions.

But we’re supposed to be men of God, soldiers of Christ, who take control of our mind and control our thoughts and say, “No, I will not direct my thoughts that way.” God trained me in this in a very difficult way. Many of you know that years ago I had tremendous claustrophobia. Once on an airplane trip, I had very difficult time, and what I’ve had to do ever since then for the last 10 years or so is every time I get in a plane, I have to control my thoughts. If I let myself start thinking that I cannot get off this plane for 10, 11 hours—whatever it is—if I start down that path, you see, God chastises me for not controlling my thoughts and leads me into terror.

Well, it’s the same thing true here. If you’re a man struggling with obedience to this commandment and all its implications, cut off the sin at its fountain head. Take control of your mind. The mind and the heart are where all these things stem from. Take control of it.

So this commandment applies to our inward thoughts and our lustful desires as well. George Bush, the commentator of the last century (not the president of the last decade), George Bush, commenting on this text and its implications, says this: “All the arts and blandishments resorted to by the seducer, all the amorous looks, motions, modes of dress, and verbal insinuations which go to provoke the passions and make way for the criminal indulgences, all the writing, reading, publishing, vending, or circulating obscene books, all exposing or lustfully contemplating indecent pictures or statues, all support or connivance with the practices of prostitution, whether by drawing a revenue from houses of infamy, or winking at the abominations of their inmates, partake more or less of the guilt of violating the seventh commandment.”

Well said by commentator Bush. And think of our culture in reference to this. Think of yourselves. Think of what you have exposed your eyes to this last week, this last month, this last year. And sometimes not voluntarily. We’re sort of like Jacob. Laban tricks us into these things. You get a PG movie or something, all of a sudden boom, there’s something that is enticing or alluring. You drive down the street. Here it’s much better than in Poland, and Poland was better than Prague in the Czech Republic. There was simply no means of avoiding pornography in the Czech Republic. You would walk into a gas station that had a mini mart attached to it, and the books, the magazine racks there would not be filled with, you know, Car and Driver. 90% of them were pornography openly displayed.

Now what does that do to women who see themselves being the objects of this kind of lurid display? Well, it embarrasses them and probably eventually it hardens them. We looked at souvenirs in Venice, for instance: ties, pornographic pictures on the ties on the back of many of them. Pornography abounds in Europe and particularly, as I said, the Czech Republic was the worst. They’re all becoming more westernized and pornography is now having free reign, and it’s not that far away for us. We already see its intrusions into us.

Well, these things are all violations of the seventh commandment and they’re things that draw us away, men. If you ever needed to be a soldier of Christ in grabbing hold of your thoughts and your eyes and what channel your hand turns to, now is the time to steel yourselves. Quit you like men. Make a commitment to eschew pornography and adultery and indecent thoughts and attitudes and dress as well.

I don’t know. We could almost say that Dinah violated this commandment by going out amongst the women of the land to see the daughters of the land and put herself in a position where she was seduced by Shechem. And what of Jacob’s culpability in not training his—we don’t know for sure, but we do know that it’s an illustration to us men. Not the scriptures tell us explicitly: do not put your daughter into harlotry. And men, we have an obligation to make sure our daughters do not become harlots the way Dinah did. By training them, by disciplining them, by having control of them in the context as they grow up, training them to become under the internal control of the Holy Spirit to avoid all occasion of sexual sin and impropriety. Don’t get caught close to this sin. It’ll suck you in.

You know the story of my riding lawnmower. Shoot, coming out the side of the riding lawnmower, I’m pulling grass out the chute while the engine is going. You’re not supposed to do that. But I’m thinking, my hand ain’t anywhere near the blade. I can clear that bit of grass out the chute there. Lo and behold, God in his providence had put a piece of baling wire around the blade sticking into that grass out the chute. God set a trap for me. And I grabbed into that grass with the motor going, the engine, the blade spinning.

I grabbed the baling wire, not knowing it was there. It wrapped around my little finger. As I pulled it, the blade engaged the baling wire and my hand is now being sucked into the blade of this riding lawnmower. Now, nobody will have me cut their lawns or use powered equipment, I suppose. But this is what happened. And I had to go. The thing was wrapped right down to the bone on my little finger, and I had to walk into the emergency room with a piece of baling wire about two feet long hanging off my little finger like a complete idiot.

Why? You see, I got too close. I didn’t think I’d get sucked in. I thought I had enough control at the shoot not to be pulled in. But I didn’t know what God had set up. You know, we should pray for each other and exhort each other as men to avoid this sin. It is so rampant in our culture. We should pray particularly for the men of our congregation who have to travel away from home and away from friends and be out on their own and the temptations they are put into.

We have a number of men here who travel because of work a lot, and we should pray for them while they’re gone that they not be enticed and ensnared by getting too close, by turning that TV on in the motel room, etc.

Okay, so Bush says this—that this is a violation of the seven commandments. Then he goes on to say this: “We have only to glance at the sacred volumes to perceive that sins against the laws of chastity are more frequently forbidden, more fearfully threatened, and marked by more decisive tokens of divine reprobation than perhaps more than any other part of the decalogue.”

That’s important for us to know too, because the temptation to sin—we want to just sort of overlook—we say well adultery is like stealing and coveting and all this other stuff, it’s not that bad. No, as Bush says, it is the subject of divine reprobation more often than other sins in the decalogue throughout the rest of the scriptures. “Not only is adultery the name under which Jehovah stigmatizes the sin of idolatrous apostasy from him, but fornication and uncleanness are found in almost every black catalog of crime in the scriptures.”

This is a big deal. And if God reiterates it over and over and over, “Don’t do it,” it’s because we are prone to do it. And it’s because in our nature, particularly as men, we are prone to engage in this sin. And so God addresses us at our point of need and tells us over and over: don’t do it. That way is the way of death, scandal, pollution of the marriage bed, now diseases, etc. come with that way. Stay far away from sexual sin.

Now, Friday night we were talking about the Sabbath, and as normally happens in a discussion with man about the Sabbath, you end up talking a lot about what you can’t do on the Sabbath. And Elder Mayhar got us pointed to the direction of saying well, we should focus on what we can do on the Sabbath, not just the proscriptions, but what are we supposed to do on the Sabbath? And specifically, we should focus on worship and specifically, we had a conversation about singing, okay? And so this is true when we look at these commandments. We want to look at what’s positively implied in them as well.

And so this commandment is given that we might have a positive response to it. So let’s talk now a little bit about its prescription of fidelity and chastity. And this is really pretty simple stuff, but again, it’s implied, but we need to have it pointed out to us. At least I do, and I think probably you do too.

The obvious implication of “do not commit adultery” is to cleave to your wife, to be one with your wife in every way possible, and to have a commitment and a fidelity, a faithfulness, to the marriage that characterizes you day in and day out. It is required of elders—a one-woman sort of man. But those characteristics are true of all of us. Required of all men to be a man who is committed to one woman and not to having the roving eye, the wandering thought, the slight jest and jokes that we often engage in that start to move us toward that lawnmower blade of adultery that’ll whack you in pieces. You see, we want to stay far away from that. And we stay, boyfriend, not just by avoiding it, but by rejoicing in the wife of our youth, by having fidelity to the wife that God has determined you should have.

God says that man’s sin was trying to determine for himself good and evil. God saw that it wasn’t good for man to be alone. And God determined the sort of wife Adam would have. He created Eve and he brought her to him. Now, you had some choice in your selection of wives—some part of the secondary means that God chose. But never forget that the primary mean of your establishment in your marriage was the sovereign God above, who determined for you what is good and evil and determined that your wife, your husband, is the spouse for you.

Of all the possibilities, I believe God says this is the best possible mate for you, the one I have sovereignly brought to you as your spouse. It is adulterous, I think, to reject that counsel of God, to think somehow this may not be the right wife or this may not be the right husband. The difficulties and problems are too great. Now if there is clear rebellion against God on the part of the mate, if adultery is taking place, we can talk about that. But apart from those great sins that are spoken of in that way, I’m convinced that everyone in the hearing of this sermon should know of a certainty that your mate is the one God chose you to be faithful to, to have fidelity relative to.

I still remember John S.’s communion talk, and he talked about faithfulness and he used the term fidelity—high-fidelity stereo systems, one that reproduces that quality perfectly. High-fidelity marriages, that are true to the relationship that God has established. That’s what we at Reformation Covenant Church should present to each other and to the world that is moving quickly away from such relationships. That is the role of true manhood and true womanhood: faithfulness in the context of the marriage that God has brought you into.

That is the prescription of the seventh commandment. And beyond that, if we said the seventh commandment refers to all means of unchastity, then the prescription is not just fidelity to marriage. It is a chasteness relative to all of our lives.

Calvin writing on this said, “Unquestionably what Paul teaches has been prevalently received from the beginning: that a good life consists of three parts—soberness, righteousness, and godliness. And the soberness which he commands differs not from chastity.” He’s quoting from Titus 2:11-15. Turn there please.

In Titus 2:11-15, we read: “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us—okay—why? What do we when we come and hear the proclamation, the gospel of Christ? It is to the end that we are taught something here. What are we taught? Teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lust, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age.”

See, Calvin’s right. There’s that summation of what the grace of God, the purpose of the grace of God appearing to you, has been: that you are taught to despise, to throw off ungodliness and worldly lust, and that your life might be characterized by sobriety—soberly, righteously, and godly—might be marks of your walk, your way as you walk with the Lord Jesus Christ. And soberly is the same meaning as Calvin says, as chastity.

Chastity, sobriety, a cleaving to our spouse, the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the spouses that he gives us, and to mental purity and certainly external purity as well, and all sexual matters in terms of our speech and our thoughts, our hearts, motivation, and our actions. God says this is of utmost importance. And why? The grace of God has appeared to you that you might live so soberly, that you might live chastely, that you might evaluate yourself and continue to throw off the worldly lust that so easily overtakes us in our Adamic nature.

This is the purpose. And we look for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from every lawless deed. We look for his judgments in the context of our world and we look to please him who redeemed us from these lawless deeds of unchasteness, that he might purify for himself his own special people zealous for good works.

Are you purified in your spirit and counsel today? Are you chastened when it comes to sexual matters? Do you eschew worldly lusts and all thoughts, actions, looking, of where you put your eyes, what you say and what you do relative to being chaste in your lifestyle before the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave his life that he might redeem you from those very sorts of sins and who comes in judgment into our lives?

“Speak these things,” Paul says, “exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you.” I speak it to you with all authority. I speak it to myself: “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and all its accompaniment. God says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ has come that we might be redeemed from the committing of adultery.”

The sum is then that those who desire to approve themselves to God should be pure from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit. As it reads in 2 Corinthians 7:1, God calls us to be pure from all these things. He calls us to cleave to him, to cleave to our wives, and to be pure.

One other point here in terms of how we accomplish this. In Romans 1, we have an explicit demonstration of the ungodliness in terms of sexual affairs that men engage themselves in. We all know about that. We all know about Romans 1 and its depiction of homosexuality as a terrible, nasty, rotten thing. But it also speaks of all unnatural lust, which would include adulterous thoughts and behaviors. Now the interesting thing about Romans 1 is that it sees a progression of men. That progression begins with men failing to give thanks and worship to God. They fail to honor God. Even though he’s manifest to all men, they fail to give him thanks.

And as a result, what does he do? He turns them over to intellectual futility. All their thinking is bent in futility. The Jerusalem Bible in Romans 1 says, “They made nonsense out of logic.” God says, “If you’re not going to be thankful to me and worship me, I’m going to make nonsense out of your logic.”

Secondly, he casts us over to spiritual darkness. Their misguided minds are plunged into darkness. Third, he turns men over to incredible stupidity: claiming to be wise, they became fools. The Jerusalem Bible says the more they called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew. That’s what man is in his rejection of God.

Fourth, and this is from Van Til’s work, this sequence that he draws out, fourth, they involve themselves in false religion. And fifth, in this period of devolution of mankind and his rebellion against God, they’re involved in gross immorality. He turns them over to these unnatural lusts that they engage in. And then finally, they involve themselves in social depravity. All of their society becomes unfit.

Point here is that Romans 1 says that the root of at least some sexual sin is unthankfulness and unfaithfulness toward God, which then reflects itself in adulterous actions toward one’s fellow man. Now this leads into our fourth point. Really the scriptures go out of their way over and over to say that adultery is idolatry.

We said that it’s prohibited. We said what’s prescribed by God: chasteness toward one’s wife and spouse, fidelity, and a purity of our thoughts, a chastity of our lifestyle as Christians. And we’ve said that this really stems from a thankfulness to God. And this reminds us of what many scriptures tell us: that adultery is linked in the scriptures to idolatry and thus to adulteration of a society or group.

Now, it’s interesting that some ancient commentators in other languages referred to adultery as the great sin. And if you do a concordance study in the Old Testament of “the great sin,” you’ll come up with Amalech talking about getting close to adultery with another man’s wife. And you’ll see also a reference to the people of God when Moses goes up to get the Ten Commandments committing idolatry with the golden calf worship and also apparently with sexual immorality going on as well.

The great sin in scripture—the point here—talks both about adultery and it’s also a term that’s used to refer to idolatry, because in the word of God, these things are linked.

In Jeremiah chapter 3, God’s people are described as greatly polluted. They play the harlot. In Exodus 34, very explicitly, God says that his name is Jealous. He is a jealous God. And he says, “You should not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land. And they play the harlot with their gods and make sacrifice to their gods. And one of them invites you, and you eat of their sacrifice, and you take of his daughters for your sons, and his daughters play the harlot with their gods, and make your sons play the harlot with their gods. You shall make no molded gods for yourself.”

The point is that the Old Testament in Exodus 34 very explicitly says that when we engage in idolatry relative to God, we’re engaging in adultery, because God has come and wedded us to himself as his bride. The Old Testament teaches that. The New Testament teaches that. In 2 Corinthians, we read, “I am jealous for you with godly jealousy. I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ,” that he might present the church as a chaste virgin to Christ.

When men are idolatrous, the end result is God turns them over to adultery, because of their idolatrous nature relative to him. The second tablet pictures the effects of violations of the first tablet. If you worship via idols, the scriptures tell us that you’ve committed spiritual adultery. And it’s not far for a nation that commits spiritual adultery to engage in physical adultery. And so we see that progression in our day and age.

The scriptures tell us that sexual sin is tantamount to idolatry. And it tells us that over and over again.

What’s the cure? What’s the cure? If we can sum up in one word what the seventh commandment calls us to be relative to both God and to sexual relationships and to our wives, I think that word is faithfulness. Faithfulness to one’s spouse, faithfulness to one’s God. And by way of implication, then, faithfulness to our callings and our vocations, faithfulness to our churches, faithfulness to be good citizens. These things all are encompassed in the prohibition.