Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text is found in Deuteronomy 22:13-30. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. If you have the sermon notes for today, all they really are is this text laid out in a particular structure that seems to me to be helpful to remember the flow of it and what’s actually going on in it. You could follow along in that if you’d like or just listen or follow along in your Bibles. Deuteronomy 22, beginning at verse 13.

If any man takes a wife and goes into her and then hates her and accuses her of misconduct and brings a bad name upon her, saying, “I took this woman and when I came near her, I did not find in her evidence of virginity.” Then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. And the father of the young woman shall say to the elders, I gave my daughter to this man to marry, and he hates her.

And behold, he has accused her of misconduct, saying, I did not find in your daughter evidence of virginity, and yet this is the evidence of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloak before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him, and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver, and give them to the father of this young woman because he has brought a bad name upon a virgin of Israel and she shall be his wife. He may not divorce her all his days.

But if the thing is true that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father’s house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman and the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel.

If there is a betrothed virgin and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones. The young woman because she did not cry for help, though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the young woman. She has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor because he met her in the open country. And though the betrothed young woman cried for help, there was no one to rescue her.

If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days. A man shall not take his father’s wife so that he does not uncover his father’s nakedness.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this portion of Moses’ sermon on the seventh word. Help us, Lord God, to understand this text. Help us to see in it the important lessons for our time, in our day and age, given our historical context. Transform us individually, in our families, in this congregation, and ultimately in our nation as well, that we may be a holy people committed to Jesus Christ in every aspect of our lives. In his name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Our country’s in trouble. And it’s not the sort of trouble that’s going to be fixed by a balanced budget amendment. Not the sort of trouble that’s going to be fixed by taking care of our financial house. Couple of stories in the news this last week are evidence of the kind of trouble that we’re in. There was a grizzly report, a report of grizzly things going on in an abortion mill in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. And I actually dreamed about this portion of my sermon two nights ago and I was too graphic in my dreamed sermon and a hubub broke out in the congregation. It wasn’t good. So I’m going to be careful what I say.

But if you haven’t heard the news and you’re an adult, it would behoove you to go read up on this story because it really is horrific. And it’s interesting, the juxtaposition between what happened in Philadelphia and what happened with the shooting in Arizona. Briefly said, there was an abortion doctor who illegally was doing probably thousands of late-term abortions over the last twenty or thirty years. Late-term abortions, third-quarter abortions, are illegal in Illinois and he was doing them anyway and everybody pretty much knew about it.

But in any event, he was also in certain late-term abortions when the baby was six, seven, eight months, he would induce birth and then kill the child. This is his way of taking care of the problem. And so he’s up on charges of killing at least seven such children, probably many, many more that he did this to over the years. And he also had a fifteen-year-old doing anesthesia for him. And at least one mother died fairly recently because of his ridiculous practices.

And really the song we just sang about God, you know, bringing justice upon those who would exploit the poor. This abortion clinic in Philadelphia was exactly that. And many abortion clinics across the country where Planned Parenthood places itself—this was not a Planned Parenthood facility. But many times these are located in poor neighborhoods. There really is exploitation of the poor class of American cities when it comes to abortion. And it was just a horrific situation. I can’t describe what they found there in a mixed audience of children and adults, but it was bad.

And the worst part of it, I think, is that this had been going on. He had not been visited by the state department of health since 1993. Why? And this is an apolitical story because in 1993, the pro-life Democratic governor left office and he was replaced by Tom Ridge, a pro-choice Republican governor. Okay, so the Democrat was the good guy in this case, Republican was the bad guy. And the pro-abortion Republican governor took office and the state health department—and this is according to grand jury testimony, you know, this isn’t just me speculating—they basically kind of thought, well, you know, we’re kind of pro-abortion now and so we don’t want to discourage that by having inspections of abortion clinics, etc.

There were a number of lawsuits filed against this man over the years, I think forty or more, and still the state just didn’t care to go inspect what was going on or these grizzly murders were occurring on a regular basis. It’s just horrific.

Now contrast—you probably don’t know much about this. Contrast what you know about that story that comes out just several days before the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which was yesterday. Contrast your knowledge of that story with your knowledge of what happened in Arizona. We hear every day on every news story updates on this and that victim and the funerals and stuff. Now, you know, I—it was a horrific event that happened in Tucson. Okay. But I think it was a much more horrific event that happened in Philadelphia.

And it’s even more horrific when we know it went on for years and years and years. And it’s even more horrific to know that no doubt this goes on across our country. And even the legal abortion that goes on is of course from our perspective, from the perspective of the scriptures, infanticide. There’s a war against children that’s going on in our country. This is bad. It’s bad news for our country.

You know, after the Tucson shooting, it was all, “Well, we had to get rid of this climate of hate language and stuff.” And I think it was simply an attempt to freeze the Republicans who were coming into ascendancy in the House. But in any case, there’s an analysis. Well, how could we have contributed to this? How could a man in Philadelphia—how—what kind of climate contributed to his regarding children right out of the womb as not children and murdering them and convincing their mothers somehow that they weren’t children?

What contributed to that? Well, Roe v. Wade contributed to that. The laws and the actions of abortionists for the last thirty-eight years has contributed to that. The president of the United States contributed to that when he was a state senator blocking bills that would have protected children who were born but they would just not want them and they’d be left to die. So we have the highest office in the land creating the sort of climate that lets then completely lawless individuals like this abortionist apply his trade in a horrific way.

And yet you know all we hear about is the Congress lady is recovering. Wonderful. So America’s in trouble.

Just last week, to make it more regional, there was a bill introduced last week in the Washington legislature. And this bill would essentially put PRCs out of business. It would treat them as a special class of provider of services. They’d have to tell people, even if they had a medical office, a medical person on staff, they’d have to say they don’t do medical advice. They’d have to lie. They had to have signs in, I don’t know, ten or more foreign languages saying that they don’t do this, that, and the other thing. Every ad they place would have to have all these warnings in all these different languages. It would open them up to lawsuits. For thousand-dollar lawsuits, cheap lawsuits by anybody, not who had gone to a PRC and thought they had been deceived by the workers, but anybody who was an aggrieved party—is the terminology in the bill. Anybody who just didn’t like it could go and sue these people even though they had no specific tort or damage done to them. It will just kill PRCs. That’s its intent.

We have now conspiracy that we just sang about in Psalm 83 going on in this country. There’s a conspiracy of agencies like Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Rights Action League, and others and various members of probably both parties. As we saw with the Tom Ridge thing in Pennsylvania, there is a conspiracy against children and pro-abortion. It’s really quite horrific. And I mean, and the bill in Washington makes it so evident as does what’s the response of the shooting or the killings rather in Philadelphia—because here, what are they, what are they, what are they upset about? They’re upset because PRCs bring in a pregnant mom. They give her an ultrasound and she sees it’s a child. They’re bringing education, right, which is supposed to be the savior in our country. They’re bringing education and knowledge to a pregnant mom who may be tempted to abort what she doesn’t see as a child. And it’s been amazingly effective.

We have multiple responses to the sort of things going on in our country. You’re right, and political action is important. Another good news that happened this last week was the introduction, I think, of HR 3 in the federal Congress that would get rid of all federal funding for abortion, no questions asked. And there are various laws being introduced in the state legislatures and I don’t know if they’re going to or not, but that would mandate that pregnant women get an ultrasound.

So there is some political stuff that is part of our response. There is educational response that has been much more effective in the last twenty years than our political response. Ultrasounds have done far more to curb the rate of abortion and it has been curbed. There is, you know, the curve is now headed back down since Roe v. Wade, but that’s not because of political action so much. It’s part of it, but mostly it’s an educational effort and it’s the personal involvement of mostly women with other pregnant women trying to help them to see it’s not a good idea to so-called abort this fetus—that this is a child.

And so benevolence responses such as are advocated by the PRC handout that was in the handouts today as well. That’s a very important response and is most effective. It’s not big flashy. It’s not changing the laws of the nation or the state, but it’s very effective in the providence of God. You personally are very effective to combat this evil.

There’s a liturgical response and we’re doing that today. That’s what this service is. It’s a liturgical response. And it’s important because people do evil because they forget that God really is seeing what’s going on and judges them—a theological response asserting the sovereignty of God and his judgments that are presently in the earth. Combating cheap grace. A theological or a liturgical response as I said. And then there’s this very personal response that Elder Wilson pointed out so well and him and I didn’t coordinate this—but you know the response of submission to God’s sovereignty in their lives, really is you know kind of a sword to the middle of the sort of evil that is so destroying our nation. To live out lives of solid blessed marriages, to embrace children, to receive them. You know there’s going to be a shower for them. Why do we do that? Well, one reason we do it is because every baby should be celebrated with a party. It’s not that way in the world.

I saw a TED talk this week that Dave H. had sent me a link to. These high-level you know world-thinker types that are always liberal and one of the guys was talking about Thailand and how—you know, please forgive me for the reference—but his talk was how Mr. Condom saved Thailand. And he said it was just so horrible because when we began our work, Thailand had an average birth rate of seven children per family and he has this big slide: “Seven children, 3.3% population growth, and that equals at the bottom: ‘No future.’” No future, because you have all these children.

Julian Simon wrote a book thirty years ago. “The Ultimate Resource” is children. People transform the face of the world. Without people, there is no future. The more people there are, the more future there is. People have gone crazy. “No future.” Now he’s got a bright future because now there’s only 1.1 children per family, whatever it is. They’re going to go negative growth. But somehow that’s defined as a bright future for Thailand.

So, you know, we’re in trouble in this country and we’re in trouble not because of economics. Yeah, that’s good. But we’re in trouble because of this abortion industry, but it’s related to everything else in the culture, right?

The bishop Salvian, shortly before the fall of Rome, wrote this. Now, Augustine and other men at the time were primarily focused on the sins of pagans. But Salvian was more interested in the church’s culpability in what was happening in Rome. And particularly before the fall, he said this.

The church herself—what should be the appeaser of God in all things? What is she but the exasperator of God beyond a few individuals who shun evil? What else is the whole assemblage of Christians but the buildwater of vice? How many will you find in the church who are not either a drunkard or a beast or an adulterer or a fornicator or a robber or a debauchee or a brigand or a murderer? And what is worse than all of this, they do all these things almost unceasingly.

So Salvian saw his analysis of the fall of Rome was not the pagan sins. He thought it was the fault of the Christians and specifically recreational sexuality was one of the major things going on in the Christian church from Salvian’s perspective that led to the destruction of Rome. That’s why we’re in trouble.

Now, on the positive side, we’re not as in much trouble as clearly today. The churches are not as good as we would like them to be, including ours, but this description doesn’t fit most of them. It does some of them, some of the liberal churches, but not most of them. So, I’m not, you know, we can turn this around. I think it’s very interesting, the financial thing, because we may have reached a high water mark with Obamacare from the FDR administration. We might have seen the peak, the zenith, of a progressive socialist mentality in American politics. We may be now at a turning point in terms of fiscal responsibility, the role of the civil state and all that stuff.

I would not be surprised if we look back ten or twenty years into this and said that was the turning point. Obamacare was it. That’s as much as they could get. And now the system is being restored back to a more balanced approach toward the relationship of civil government and business. And may God grant us that same sort of high water mark happening in terms of sexual morality as well. I think in a way maybe it’s happening. As I said, abortions are on the decrease.

But part of what we’re doing is chapter 22 of Deuteronomy. What we have to attend to is the relationship, as Salvian did, between sexual relationships that are essentially recreational and all these other horrors and difficulties—because that’s what happened first, right? What happens is that people don’t have sexuality under the dominion of Jesus Christ. They don’t have it in the context of marriage.

You know, I have a statistic here. Let’s see if I can find it real quick. The relationship of marriage to—now here it is. For every unmarried woman in the United States, all ages, there are thirty-nine induced abortions for every forty-five live births. Almost half of the pregnancies in unmarried women result in abortion. Contrasted with married women with only nine abortions for every eighty-four live births, 11%. There is a statistical, you know, elephant in the middle of the living room in a discussion of abortion and why it’s going on. It’s going on because people aren’t married. It’s going on because sexual activity is seen as recreational and outside of marriage.

Why do we have sexuality outside of marriage? It was a direct result of the sexual revolution. That’s why in our church covenant statement, we detest the sins of adultery, homosexuality, abortion, and I guess maybe we should add fornication at the beginning of the list because that’s where it all starts. That’s where all the other of these poisonous, corrosive elements to a civil culture that leads eventually, if unchecked, to the fall of a country, a nation like Rome. That’s where it all comes from.

So, our text today is significant. It’s significant for battling abortion because it’s significant for getting us to see some very obvious, pointed things that God has to say to us today about our morality, our sexual morality. So I think it’s significant and it plays right into what we’re talking about here today on Roe v. Wade.

By the way, when I said that one of our responses is liturgical, this is liturgical warfare. This is not literal warfare. This is literally going on—Phinehas really did kill a fornicating couple in the wilderness to stop the plague. But this is not what we advocate in the sense of you as an individual doing that. We just sang Psalm 149. We have a two-edged sword in our hand to strike enemies of God and to bind the kings so that the sort of things that went on in the city of brotherly love no longer happen. That does not mean that we take up physical violence. Of course, that’s the worst thing in the world we could do.

The two-edged sword that we exercise as the church of Jesus Christ are the prayers to God that he would move in the context of all these things we’ve talked about—that he would indeed judge this abortionist doctor, that he would judge those members of the health department that allowed it to continue, that various people the sponsors of this bill in Washington state, that they would be stopped and that he would bring temporal judgments upon them. To do it—that’s our response, not taking up the physical sword. So the text today is our response as well.

Our response to the abortion crisis is not to go, you know, point over there all the time. It’s to point right here. And if it’s true that non-marital, you know, non-marital sexuality is so linked to the sin of abortion, then our own sexuality must be part of this discussion. And the church must say that we begin—before we pray for other people, we pray and we repent before God of our part in this and our part of failing to articulate and live out in our homes a sexual morality guided by the scriptures.

All right. So, let’s look at the text and briefly. We’ll look at this again next week. So, I’m not going to do the whole thing this week, but I do want us to look at it simply. And the way I’ve structured it is a good way to sort of think through what the overall flow of this part of Moses’ sermon is about. It’s quite distinctive from the next section which we’ll deal with in two weeks.

But you know it sort of moves from taking a wife, right? That’s what happens at the first. He takes a wife and then at the end you’re not supposed to take your father’s wife. Now that last verse that’s a pointer. It’s one verse, but there’s all kinds of verses in Leviticus. Laws against one-flesh relationships, who you can marry, who you can’t marry, who you can have marital relationships, who you can’t. But suffice it to say that in this text the taking is referring to a marriage covenant. That’s what goes on first. He takes a wife. He marries a wife and then he has intimacy with her. Then he hates her. Then he means brings an accusation. That’s in the beginning of the text at the bottom.

Then I think that taking a wife implies that your father’s dead and you can’t marry your father’s mother or wife, rather, your mother-in-law. But suffice it to say, it gives us a nice little you know, structure here. And then moving in, we have a couple of cases involving fines of men. So, if this guy makes this charge against his wife and he’s a liar, then consequences happen to him. He’s whipped. That’s tough. He’s fined one hundred shekels of silver.

Now, it appears that this is tantamount to giving his entire estate to his wife. You know, one hundred shekels of silver today wouldn’t be worth that much money. But if we look at biblical times, and by the way, this is an argument against hard money. Hard money doesn’t maintain its value three thousand years later. Silver doesn’t isn’t worth as much now as it was back then. It was scarcer back then. Okay. But in any event, a hundred shekels represented a huge amount of money.

The normal dowry was between thirty and fifty shekels representing probably three years’ worth of labor is what commentators estimate—this is six or seven, eight years of labor. Now, if a guy’s making fifty thousand bucks, seven years would be three hundred fifty thousand dollars—would be the fine he would have to pay to the girl’s father who would administer it for her. Huge fine, not a small deal, big deal. And then he couldn’t divorce her all his life. She could divorce him, right? We don’t think about that, but she can divorce him. Women can divorce men. He couldn’t divorce her.

Why didn’t God kill him if he brought this capital accusation against his wife? Well, I’m not sure it was exactly a capital accusation. We’ll talk about that in a minute, but let’s assume it was. Well, you don’t want to kill the guy because then he can’t produce income for the wife who’s the aggrieved party. Essentially, the man becomes the total servant of the woman that he slandered. That’s what happens.

Now, matching that section at the bottom half, if you have the sermon notes, the matching section at the bottom is again involving a fine, albeit a lesser fine, and a prohibition not to divorce or a prohibition of the guy to initiate divorce. And this is in the case of seduction. And other texts in the scriptures are related to this in Exodus 22. This is seduction. It’s not rape as we think of rape. It’s seduction. And when a young man or when a man seduces a non-betrothed woman, who’s not betrothed, and has sexual relationships with her—then she’s done nothing wrong is what the text says. He’s done something wrong. Okay. The responsibility is the man’s and when he does that he is fined.

He can’t divorce the woman the rest of his life if the father consents to the marriage. Right? So if the father and the girl say “yeah, he’s okay, I like him anyway even though he violated me as a woman etc.” then marriage can proceed but the young man can’t divorce the woman.

Now there’s all kinds of you know things at play here. It assumes the woman is a virgin etc. These are cases given at a particular time in culture. This is you know what this is like three or four thousand year old material. It’s easy to forget that when we read the Bible—it’s easy to think that was you know about the Middle Ages or something. No, it’s very difficult to understand how what these things mean. But in any event so the text has this relationship between you know the man who slanders his wife and then a man who seduces a young woman and kind of like date rape you could call it.

And then in the middle of the section, in the middle of that, is the woman—if she’s actually been a harlot in Israel. She’s done a horrific thing and I don’t think that means a single act of premarital sex. By the way, the language there is very strong. If she is really a very sexual loose woman, then she’s executed. And if she’s not a virgin, she in the wording of the text, she’s executed. Matching that is a man who is executed who has sex with a betrothed woman and she tried to avoid it. Okay, so he has sex with a betrothed woman.

This is like adultery because betrothal is tantamount to a wedding contract in the scriptures. You’re mostly married. Okay? And so, you know, if he commits adultery by having sex with a betrothed wife, and it’s in the country. No one could hear. If she cries out, then he’s got to die for that. So, the death penalty is at play.

And again, there’s interesting things going on there because it doesn’t say that she necessarily did cry out. The presumption of her innocence accompanies this case law, right? It says, “Well, if she’s in the country and he has sex with her and she’s unbetrothed, well, he gets killed and she’s okay because she didn’t—she cried. She could have cried out. We assume she did cry out and nobody heard her.” The presumption of innocence of people involved in very difficult circumstances is taught in that text.

Another thing taught in that text of course is that you know you had sex with a guy and you are betrothed. You’re an adulterer technically speaking. But in the Bible doesn’t work that way. If somebody forces you to do something sinful, you bear no culpability for it. The woman’s done nothing wrong. That’s what the text says. So there’s all kinds of interesting, very practical stuff that comes out of this text.

But the very heart of the text then is this section that could be just like two sections. I broke it into three for you. But it’s basically a restatement of the adultery command, right? So if you have sex with your neighbor’s wife, you’re both killed. You’re both adulterers. The death penalty is what happens. And the city is involved in that as they are with all these executions.

And so what we have here is a nice little structured sermon by Moses that gives us a number of particular instances or cases in a particular culture at least three thousand years ago that we didn’t—we didn’t understand three or three thousand five hundred years ago that we can’t really understand very well. So we got to not engage in the sin of hubris that we can figure out what all this means necessarily. We can’t in some cases but there are these cases given that we can articulate from it principles truths that are important to establish a godly culture and society. And that’s what we want to do—is we just want to take a couple of principles.

Now, one other thing before we do that, you know, this is a text that is uncomfortable to read. The first case particularly, but notice as I said before, what’s happening in the text and what isn’t. Now, first of all, just to get it out of your minds, we have no idea what evidence the parents presented. Commentators don’t agree. It’s really very sparse the details. We don’t know the particular cultures and customs that were in place at that time at the giving of the law. We don’t know any of that stuff. All we know is he says she wasn’t a virgin. The parents say she was a virgin and they bring her cloak, her coat, garment of hers. It’s all we know. Don’t go beyond the text.

Calvin said—my wife loves this quote—but Calvin said, “When God shuts his mouth, we dare not open ours.” Okay? So, we don’t have to worry about all that. We don’t know what the evidence was. But what we do know, and this is what we need to focus on, is what’s actually going on and what’s being focused on in the text. And it’s not the non-virtuous woman. The focus of the text is a man who slanders his wife. And notice in the flow of the text, he does it after he hates her. It doesn’t say he marries her, he has sexual intimacy with her, finds out she’s not a virgin, and then hates her. It could have, but it didn’t.

What it says is he marries her. They consummate the marriage, and he hates her, and then he makes up this story. That’s what the text seems to imply. The hatred seems to happen not in direct relationship to what’s going on.

Now, his view of sexuality is probably messed up, too. By the way, the same occurrence of this is when David’s son Amnon rapes Tamar and he hates her afterwards. There are deep psychological truths to men who are messed up in terms of sexual relationships where this can actually, you know, this is what’s happening. So, you know, I think it’s important for us to say the text is really emphasizing a case of a slanderous husband. I mean, that’s what goes on and on about—that’s what all the trial is about.

So, a slanderous husband and if you really want to slander somebody, you attack their sexuality because sexuality is important particularly in the context of marriage. So the flow of these laws really has a great amount of importance at the beginning on this one case and that case is about you know men—the pig dogs, again—attacking and slandering a woman that they’re supposed to be caring for.

Now notice what happens. You know, does she defend herself in court? No. What happens is her parents defend her in court. That’s interesting, too. She’s married. You know, the dad has given her hand to somebody else. She’s under the covenantal headship of the father. But still, the parents have a role in working out what’s happening in terms of conflicts in the context of their marriage. And it doesn’t say just the dad. By the way, we get all this stuff about patriarchy that we can read into these things. It says the father and mother bring whatever the evidence is, we don’t know what it is, to the court.

And it may just have been a ritual. Because again, the assumption normally in scripture is that she hasn’t done anything wrong. So it could just be a ritual thing that they’re doing. And how do you disprove a cloak, whatever that meant? You know, it’s really pretty simple what they have to do. They simply make the assertion that their daughter was faithful sexually. And then there’s some sort of token attached to that evidence, to that statement, which we don’t understand. But in any event, the mother and father both are involved in protecting their daughter against slander and particularly against sexual slander. It was a big deal.

Now the text does go on then to say that, you know, if she is guilty, if she’s done a horrific thing, if she’s played the harlot, then indeed she’s stoned, right? But that’s kind of added on at the end. There are no occurrences of this ever in recorded Jewish history. The rabbis didn’t even know if you know if that was just a some kind of ad terrorem to throw terror into people in terms of sexual morality, whatever it was. It’s hard to understand it. So we don’t know a lot about the specifics, but we do know these basic truths that come out: that marriage can result in hatred. Hatred can lead to false charges, and the worst kind of false charge you can make against someone is sexual slander against your spouse. And the response to that is a severe punishment of the man and he essentially becomes an indebted servant to his wife.

And so that’s what the text tells us.

Now I think there’s three things I want to emphasize that the text, this and the rest of the chapter, emphasizes. The first is the value of chastity. Chastity is certainly emphasized. The word virginity is used over and over and over again. It’s only used I think maybe we have between a third and a half of all occurrences of the word virginity in these laws in the first half of this section of Deuteronomy 22. Virginity is stressed and virginity and chastity in sexual relationships is stressed of course by the entire chapter. The seventh word certainly prohibits adultery in its technical sense. But much broader than that, Deuteronomy 22:13-30 and actually the other proverbial things going on in the first twelve verses. You know, obviously in the scriptures, chastity is a big deal.

Now that needs to be said—didn’t used to need to be said. The country was basically Christian but today it needs to be said. Jesus Christ is lord over sexuality. Period. You have to acknowledge him as lordship over chastity and sexuality.

Chastity rather, as Matthew Henry said, is honor as well as virtue. It is an honorable thing. It is a weighty thing that brings you respect. Chasteness. Now conversely from that, if you act unchaste in your speech and conduct—I’m thinking of you young people particularly—that’s dishonor. It’s disrespect to you. It doesn’t get you anything with the right people. What gets you things with the right people is chasteness in behavior, chasteness in speech, the acknowledgement of Jesus Christ in this vital area, sexuality. I mean, it’s one of the greatest pleasures of mankind to enter into sexual intimacy with one spouse. And yet, that’s the very thing, and of course since that’s the case, that’s where Satan wants to attack. And as young people begin to get ready to get married, he wants to attack that because he knows that in the context, for instance, in Deuteronomy 22, this is the area that is involved with the discussion of slander, hatred, etc.

So, Satan wants to attack that. Young people, defend yourselves against Satan’s attacks on your sense of chastity. Maintain an honorable sense—not just having the virtue of chastity but as a result of that having the honor and glory that comes along with it. This text contains a powerful warning to young women. It’s got it—it’s there. It’s not the focal point of the text. The slanderous husband is, but it is there and I don’t want to do anything to diminish that.

Young women should recognize the need to exercise chastity, to repent of any sins that they have engaged in, and to embrace today chastity in a lifestyle before God. This is very important. And the text tells us that part of chastity and the importance of that, the significance of that, is maintained by the parents. So parents have a role in raising their children to be chaste and then in defending their children against attacks upon their children’s chastity when it comes around to their adult life as well.

So parents have this role. We are to train up our children to recognize that sexual intimacy is not some thing to be locked up in the closet. It’s something to be discussed in our homes and it’s to be discussed specifically from in the context of being chaste and looking forward into the entering of marriage life in a proper way. It’s unchastity and the sexual revolution that has led to all you know the majority of abortions in our country today. And it’s unchastity that’s led to homosexuality. It’s adultery in the broadest sense that leads to homosexuality and abortion as our church covenant statement makes those connections.

And so what we’re talking about here is here’s a way to fight abortion. If what happened in Philadelphia disgusts you, and it should, fight it with a commitment today for chastity. I mentioned last week, you know, the external symbols—the tassels were a reminder of holiness in every area of life, but specifically it’s set in the context of the seventh word. It’s a reminder of holiness in sexuality. And some young girls wear promise rings. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing.

So one way to fight abortion and to fight the horrors of what happened in Philadelphia is a commitment to chastity. In the early church, chastity was an expression and seen as part of the life of faith. Quoting now from Tertullian. Tertullian tells us that the holiness of everyday family life was basic to the Christians’ family life. And Tertullian says this, “At every forward step in movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, when we’re on couch, when we’re on seat, in all the ordinary activities of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign of the cross.”

Now, we’re Protestants. We don’t do this thing, right? This is not a bad thing to do to remind ourselves at every moment in our day, mentally at least, and sometimes to hit ourselves in the face with the tassel, so to speak, to put visual imagery around us, that everything that we do is mediated obedience through the Lord Jesus Christ to the Father. So, the Father can defend us the way the Father defends the girl. So the church, the mother, can defend us when we’re falsely charged the way that the mother defends the girl who is slandered by the guy.

Tertullian said this sign of the cross was done everywhere we went in everything that we did. And what he’s saying by that is every action is consecrated to Jesus Christ. That’s chastity. That’s a proper sense of holiness before the Lord. And that will transform a culture. That will transform a culture and make abortion irrelevant when that kind of chastity inhabits Christian homes and when those Christian homes are the light of the world and people come to that home—the house was seen almost as a kind of church, right? They would cross themselves in church, they’d go home and they’d cross themselves at home—the family, the home, is identified, as it were, with the church. So chastity and the great importance of chastity to us—C.C. Zimmerman in his family study of the last century wrote this:

“From birth to grave, there is scarcely any great section of consequence that can be performed by a person, even in our free society, that is not guided and colored by family relations. The individual in his family, in his family meeting, is the real unit in society. Detached or non-familistically guided individuals exist only in imagination or in discolored surroundings such as prostitution, crime or skid row.”

And what Zimmerman was saying was that this chastity happens as it does in the context of our text—in the context of family. And so the family is tremendously important in the text we read today—the establishment of families, in the maintaining of the integrity of young women as well.

And this is really our second point. First of all, chastity must be stressed. But secondly, all this happens—these matters of intimate sexual details that are going on in Deuteronomy 22—they’re all resolved by public courts.

You know, I—there was a guy on the US House floor a couple weeks ago that said that conservatives are like gerbils telling the big lie over and over again. Well, here’s a big lie that has produced much of the sort of horrors we’ve talked about today in terms of abortion and the problems. The big lie is that sex is a private personal matter. It just isn’t. And that was Zimmerman’s point. In reality, you’re always connected to other people in your culture, right? And you’re connected to families and you’re connected to friends. You’re connected to community. And what’s happened in our time is that sexuality has been put into the closet, so to speak. It’s kind of private, a personal choice. It’s my business. It’s none of your business. That is a huge lie.

This text tells us that your personal private chastity or lack of it affects your relationship to your husband, your relationship to your parents, and your relationship to community because it was the community itself that was engaged in the execution in Deuteronomy 22 of various sorts of violations of the seventh word. The community has a vested interest to punish and restrain adultery and to promote chastity. The text clearly tells us that this is a public matter. It’s not a private personal thing that just, you know, it’s just kind of the desire of two individuals. They can do whatever they want—as the culture has bought that big lie stated over and over again and reinforced in our legal rulings.

Problems have increased and the family has been broken down as we’ve talked about for the last few weeks. And the end result of that is the promulgation of a larger and larger state bureaucracy. So the family is a place of chastity and the family and the chastity of the individual members is a matter of common social interest. There are specific responsibilities of the community to pray for, encourage, chastity and sexual purity and to punish sexual impurity. And when the church of Jesus Christ does that then we’ll have—and this is what is happening—then we’ll have a continuing reduction in abortion in the context of our lives.

Now these texts—I was thinking the other day I was having a discussion with one of my sons and he was talking about the difference between manipulation and transformation. So you know you can learn how to manipulate people right, certain people and in a way, now this is not a good thing to say, but in a way these texts are somewhat manipulative in the sense that they produce great fear when they were given and when they were enforced and as we enforce them ecclesiastically it produces fear in people in the short term. And there’s nothing wrong with a proper fear but that’s not going to get us where we need to go long term.

You know nature abhors a vacuum. Gary North said you can’t beat something with nothing. Jesus says if you cast out demons and you don’t fill the house with good things, more and worse demons come back. So sexual chastity under the dominion of Christ is not just a matter of not doing things. We’re to put on certain attitudes and actions while we pray against the sorts of sins of abortion and infanticide etc.

Today we are also at the same time affirming—as was this wonderful picture to us this morning at the baptism. We’re affirming what God says we’re supposed to affirm. A love of children should be part of the culture that prevents abortions and a love of wives, a love of spouses is commended to us in the scriptures. Ultimately it won’t do you any good just to think of all the things you can’t do. If you just focus upon the law that tells you don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this—that’s part of the solution. God wants us to do that. But the real solution is transformation. It’s each and every one of us personally being transformed by the living spirit of God into the sort of Christian chastity, the love of marriage and family that we speak of here in Psalm 127.

You know, it doesn’t say that children are a problem. In Psalm 127, it says children are inherited from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward. “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them.” It says the future is about having multiple children. We’re to love children, both just for who they are, but also practically and in a utilitarian sense. They’re the ultimate resource that God uses to beautify and transform the world and our lives.

So having, putting on a mentality of love of children and a desire to see more children in the context of our homes and church is part of what’s happening here. In Proverbs chapter 5, we’re exhorted, “Drink water from your own system, flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? Let them be for yourself alone and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth.”

Now there are exhortations in Proverbs 5 against the wrong things. Don’t, you know, enter into adulterous relationship with the wrong woman. But then it turns to the positive. You avoid that by being enthralled with your wife. Streams of water are refreshment, right? In a dry, arid land it’s refreshing to us. May wives be a refreshment to their husbands in the context of this church. And may husbands be a refreshment to their wives. You know, frequently when we come home at night and the wives have done whatever they’ve done all day, we sort of feel like we need refreshing, but they need refreshing too for different reasons.

May the Lord God grant us to rejoice in our marriages, to avoid sexual sin, to avoid the kind of breakdown of the family that I’m describing and it’s such a great danger to our culture—means to embrace Christian marriage, to work at it, right? And we work at it by being joyful in it. Husbands, this week, see your wives as a great refreshment to you. That’s what God has given you them for. Wives, see your husbands as a refreshment. Pray that they would be more refreshing to you. Both husbands and wives—the Bible says we should embrace the refreshment of biblical marriage and that will go a long way toward keeping us away from the sorts of problems described in Deuteronomy chapter 22.

“Why be enticed intoxicated with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? A man’s ways are before the eyes of the Lord and he perceives all his paths. The iniquities of the wicked ensnare them, and he is held fast in the cords of his sin.” So again, the warning at the end and at the center of Proverbs 5 is the positive—putting on a heart of great embracing of our wives and of wives for husbands, a commitment to Christian marriage.

It says in Malachi 2, “You say, ‘Why does he not?’ Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.”

May the Lord God grant us in our homes to be faithful, fulfilling our covenant in that covenant, in Christian marriage and in Christian family, we have all the blessings of God distributed to us and we have a godly offspring. We’re to guard ourselves against the sorts of sins that destroy not just our own lives but the life of our church, the life of the culture potentially. And by embracing the positive, we can then use that as Chris said this morning with the baptism. These are arrows against the deceit, the whiles, and the destruction of Satan. We are felling him by embracing Christian marriage, by embracing the coming of children into our homes.

Yes. Shunning adulterous thoughts in all its different relationships, commitment to be chaste, recognizing that who we are in our sexual lives is a matter of public concern—properly so—and then embracing Christian sexuality in the Christian home. This is much of what we do in response to the problems of our culture.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ and his word. Thank you, Father, for encouraging us today to see ourselves not just battling abortion, but to see ourselves as enabling, fighting for solid Christian marriages. Lord God, I pray for every husband and wife here. May they be a refreshment to each other this week. May they seek that out and may you, as a result of that, turn back the tide of the evil that would otherwise destroy our country. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Amen.

People, give ear, attend to my word. In parables new, deep truth shall be heard. The wonderful story our fathers made known, to children succeeding by us must be shown. Instructing our sons, we gladly record the praises, the works, the might of the Lord.

For he has commanded that what he has done be passed in tradition from father to son. Let children learn from history’s light to hope in our God and walk in his sight. The God of their fathers to fear and obey, and like their fathers to run not away. The story be told to hearts that were hard, rebellious and vain, the soldiers who faltered when battle was near, who kept not God’s covenant or walked in his fear.

God’s wonderful works to them he had shown, his marvelous deeds—their father and known. He made for their pathway the waters divine, his fire was their guide wherever their fall. With ease and safely to go his holy landing, in peace they were brought to dwell in the land. The Lord’s hand had bought.