Let me remind you once more that the Ten Words form the core of the Covenant the children of Israel entered into with God at Sinai. God took the initiative in delivering them out of slavery in Egypt, promised them a land of their own, appointed them an exalted task in the world and pledged His faithfulness to them for all time. In the Ten Words He spelled out the response He wanted from them. They constitute Israel's side of the agreement. And no word in the ten has more bearing on the theme of Covenant than the seventh, for its aim is to protect the Covenant of Marriage.
The story of God's relationship with the people of Israel had an element of romance in it. Let me refer you first to Ezekiel 16:8:
"When I passed by and looked upon you, behold, you were at the age for love; and ... I plighted my troth to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord GOD, and you became mine. I clothed you with embroidered robes and shod you with leather, I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with silk, I adorned you with jewellery ... and a beautiful crown. You grew exceedingly beautiful ... grew into a queen. And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, because the splendour I had given you made your beauty perfect, declares the Sovereign LORD."
And then Isaiah 54:4, "Your Maker is your husband."
The whole saga of God's relationship with Israel is like a marriage saga: the free choice of Israel the bride by God the bridegroom, His wooing her in the desert years, the covenant at Sinai where unbreakable faithfulness and lasting love was solemnly pledged and the tokens of marriage given, like the Sabbath (as we have seen) and the Passover.
I still remember a time in my teenage years when my soul was ravished by the language of Hosea 2:14: "I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the LORD."
The people's response is not infrequently expressed in the language of love: "Early will I seek thee; my soul thirsts for thee, my flesh faints for thee."
And how often is the nation's idolatry described as 'adultery.'
What God sought to do and to be to Israel is brought to its climax and fulfilment in the relationship set up between Christ and His bride, the Church, the New Israel: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to consecrate her, cleansing her by water and word, so as to present her to himself all glorious, without stain or wrinkle or any blemish." Ephesians 5:25
Of those who came to faith in Christ through his evangelism in Corinth, Paul says, "I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I betrothed you to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one husband." II Cor. 11:2
Indeed Jesus described Himself unequivocally as His people's bridegroom. As God did of old, so Christ calls the disciples, gives Himself to them in friendship and love, bears patiently with their unfaithfulness and unresponsiveness, pleads with them, prays for them, watches over them and seals His Covenant with them in the Sacred Meal which still we celebrate at the open table of Communion.
The union between Christ and His Church, like that between God and His people of old, is based on the forgiveness of the sins of the bride by the Bridegroom. The marriage is possible only through the faithful, patient and wholly self-sacrificing love of the Bridegroom, who constantly renews and sustains it with a love that "suffers long and is kind, is not jealous or boastful, is not arrogant or rude, does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful, keeps no score of wrongs, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things."
God commends marriage, clearly, as a "model" of the relationship He Himself desires with His creatures. Small wonder He wishes to guard it, protect it and preserve its character.
It is against this background that we today, and especially Christians today, must receive the commandment. I have taken a little time over this I know, but I really do believe it to be important. We tend to approach the seventh commandment today from almost any standpoint but this, seeking to defend it on a multiplicity of other grounds ... like its value for the preservation of family life, or the stability of society, or our personal growth to maturity, or the avoidance of sexual disease, and so on. They're all good and true as far as they go; but it seems to me that once in a while we need to spell out plainly what we mean when we say that the first reason to give God obedience in any matter is "for His glory" before it is for "our benefit."
As to its benefit to us, who could be better placed to interpret God's mind to us than the Son of God Himself? When Jesus was tackled by the Pharisees on the question of divorce (Matthew 19:4 - 6), He replied by first calling attention to God's purpose in bestowing sexuality upon us.
"Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder."
In that brief statement He made three affirmations.
1. Our sexuality is God's creation and gift - He made us so.
2. Marriage is what sex is for! When Jesus said, "For this reason (that God made them male and female) a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh" His use of the words "For this reason ..." means "God's purpose in endowing us with sexuality was marriage."
3. The Nature of Marriage is to leave, cleave and weave.
i. To leave ... the nurturing family unit. We are to train children up to responsible independence of us, as we have seen in this series.
ii. To cleave ... to his wife. Companionship is thereby declared to be the prime purpose of marriage - not the birth of children (that is integral, but not primary). The word "cleave" describes the way mud clods adhere in heavy rain! Separate them, if you can!
Note, by the way, that Jesus said "Wife," not "wives." He took it for granted that monogamy, not polygamy, was God's plan for marriage!
iii. To weave ... the two (not four or six!) shall be one flesh. Husband and wife are to be as closely related as two limbs in the one body.
That is the clear meaning in the symbolism of the act by which God created woman, Genesis 2:21: "The LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."
She is, in other words, as real a part of me as my own body.
The Rabbis had a rather lovely saying about the way God fashioned Eve out of Adam's side. It can sound coy, but it isn't really:
"He took her," they said, "not out of Adam's head to rule him, nor from his foot to be trampled on by him; but ...
out of his side to be equal with him,
from under his arm to be protected by him, and
from next to his heart to be loved by him."
The Lord's conclusion, "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder" means that God's intention for marriage is indissoluble union. He didn't plan on it ending in divorce. "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so." The allowability of divorce was addressed to a situation where marriages were arranged; it provided a remedy for those occasions when a father foisted an umarriageable daughter on an unsuspecting groom.
But the Christian definition of adultery is quite clear and uncompromising. While a person to whom you are married is still living, taking a new partner is adultery - and a sin.
With the background we have sketched in it should not be difficult to see on what grounds it is condemned in the Bible.
The ground is wide, because in the Bible's understanding of it, God designed sex, marriage and family to be a unity, whole and undivided. Sex, marriage and family are all bound up in the one bundle together, so that if you offend in one you offend in all.
The Bible refers to sexual coupling as a man "knowing" his wife, or alternatively, "uncovering her nakedness;" the two phrases underline both the deeply personal nature of the act, and the intimacy of it.
The Bible writers are saying that when sexual coupling occurs, it happens between two persons, not merely between two bodies. There is no way in the world a man and a woman can couple except as whole persons. It is impossible therefore, on the Bible view, to see the sexual encounter as anything but a deeply personal engagement, regardless of the attitude either partner may bring to it. The couple may regard the encounter casually, but a casual encounter it in fact can never be. It is as persons they do it together. Even if they're drunk when they do it, it is as two drunk persons that they do so, and the deeply personal dynamic that inheres in the act is not undone by their inebriated state.
When two people couple, an intimacy is established thereby which "they must forever afterwards either enjoy or endure" as C. S. Lewis so succinctly put it; you cannot undo the "bonding" established by it. That "bonding" is as integral to it all as the pleasure.
That is why the only right way to engage in sex is when the couple take full, personal responsibility for one another - which means you can only do it rightly within a marriage relationship.
To put it as simply as I can, sex is an engagement between two persons of such an unavoidably intimate nature that it involves them in responsibility for each other.
Out of that intimacy and acknowledged responsibility for one another God arranged that children should be born. He set sex up that way.
It is a fitting arrangement! ... God so set it up that love turns out to be creative! He built that into the exercise of our most primal urge. That is part of what it means that we reflect His image; love and creativity are inseparable, in man as in God. And it is human life that is created thereby. You make a human being, not a blob of tissue.
This creativity - the making of a new human being - is clearly not a matter of a mere half-hour's pleasure in bed; it requires twenty years of responsible, dependable caring and nurture. If you do not accept responsibility for that possible outcome, you twist the encounter out of shape ... violate the structure God gave it. You have used a person, not loved them.
Sex itself in that case takes its revenge on you: it gives you fleeting pleasure and imprisons you in permanent loneliness. We may wish it were not so; we may convince ourselves that it is not so; but it is so. For far too many, the discovery comes too late.
You treat the deep mystery, the sacred mystery of life, with contempt. You play with fire. And if you won't play by the rules, do not be surprised that it burns you.
I say again, sex, marriage and family in God's intention are one and indivisible. The lie the devil, the father of lies, has foisted upon us is that the pleasure and the responsibility can be separated out; you can enjoy "safe sex;" sex, that is, sex without responsibility.
It is a lie. The only safe sex is sex in marriage.
This is why, in our Lord's view, you marry, not simply for pleasure, but for life.
It cannot be said too forcefully: the foundation on which marriage rests is loyalty, not romance. It is a matter of living your way into togetherness - taking the raw material of your two selves and out of it building one new personal unit. Marriage is not, has never been, and will never be, all romance and sex. Marriage does not bowl happily along under its own romantic steam; you have to work at it. It makes demands on you, heavy and exacting demands ... as life itself does, and as inescapably.
Meeting them is often costly. But the meeting them, grappling with them, struggling with them, and finally mastering them is what makes marriage great ... and the partners to it! Mere romance will never get you within a thousand miles of that.
Nor do you throw that away for "kicks."
The difficulties a couple face in making their life together really work may be so big, and call for so much from them, that the romantic side of their marriage is swamped for a time altogether. But the marriage is not thereby ended. That kind of difficulty is the stuff out of which real marriages are built. Then - above all - is the time to go on. The tragedy so often is that it is then that one or other of the partners gives up - falls a silly victim to the stupid lie that he or she has married the wrong partner, that this is the end, that they've been cheated, that they must scrap the whole thing and start again.
But you see, if we give up then, we are finished. We shall have made ourselves unfit to face a similar crisis with any other person.
I seriously doubt whether any couple can really claim to have discovered love together until they've suffered together. Love is not laughing together in a field of buttercups and daisies; love is holding hands in the face of loss and lifting your faces together to God. We were born to love and to suffer, and in loving and suffering to grow. *
Because marriage is a matter of two persons in relationship it can never succeed without big, human qualities of character - honesty, patience, understanding, tenderness, generosity, loyalty, and what for want of a better word I can only call sheer grit ... which is why no marriage can succeed without God, for none of us has these big human qualities in sufficient measure. We are none of us big enough for marriage until we find in God a reservoir of sheer character upon which we can draw.
Finally, we must address the daunting thing Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount about adultery in the mind.
Matthew 5:27-8: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Did He mean that if a woman stirs a sexual response in you, you have committed adultery with her? (It applies equally to women stirred by a man, of course.) I think not.
We must preserve the distinction between temptation and sin.
You can be tempted, and not sin. If that were not true, the Bible lies when it tells us that Jesus was tempted in all points as we are, yet without sinning. He must have experienced desire, as you and I experience it, or He could not have been tempted at that point. That He did not sin means that He did not yield consent to it. He did not allow desire to harden into intent.
To be tempted is like having a caller knock on your door. You go to the door, and there the temptation greets you, asking to come in. No matter how intense your response may be to the creature who stands there so alluringly, you do not sin until you say, "Come in" ... and let her over the threshold.
It is that point of consent that Jesus put His finger on. When He said, "Every one who looks upon a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" He meant the point at which a man says, "I'll bed her if I can." ... the point at which intent is born. That is when you sin. Merely to be aware that she is 'beddable' does not constitute sin ... not yet. Temptation turns to sin only at the point of consent - the point at which the will is engaged. James (1:14) traces the process quite plainly: "A person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death."
To be stirred by a woman's sexual attractiveness is not yet to have sinned. To surrender to deliberate dreams of sex with her is.
A distinction without a difference, you say? How do you stop the one leading on to the other?
By turning the temptation into prayer! By thanking God that He fashioned so beautiful a creature and praying that she may be as beautiful within as He has made her without! I wager the devil will fume if you do, for you have turned a perfectly good temptation to sin (as the devil sees it) into an exercise in sanctity! You are not likely to sin if you pray so. Try it!
Once, the three parties to marriage were man, woman and God. Today, where people bother with marriage at all, they are largely considered to be man, the woman and the State.
Of course, the State has an interest in marriage; it is going to have to protect and educate the children born of it; it is going to alter its demands on the couple's pocket. But is there any good reason why, when the state walks in at the door, God should have to be pushed out the window? Marriage can be both a sacred union and a civil contract, and for many couples it is.
The Christian definition of adultery is, as we have seen, clear and unambiguous. While a person to whom you are married is still living, taking a new partner is adultery - and a sin.
Our country's legal definition of course is much less clear. In the eyes of the law, adultery occurs only when you've failed to get rid of the old partner in the courts. So that what in the Christian view is sin may in the legal view be quite respectable.
We must be clear about this, because many folk confuse the two.
The union of a man and a woman is legally right if you have a piece of paper to show, wrong if you haven't. So, clutching their piece of paper, divorced people remarry, and think the moral side of the question has been settled. But according to Jesus they may in fact be living in sin, and no court sanctions make the least bit of difference.
Adultery occurs in many forms.
There is the casual love affair, indulged
because a strong temptation caught a person on the hop.
There is the intense, long-drawn-out triangle liberally adorned with
conflict, heartbreak and loneliness.
And there is the form of adultery which the law has made legal - the
rapid and flippant swapping of partners in the courts.
They are all adultery, nonetheless, and they all come to the same thing: namely, character degeneration in the life of those who go through with it.
Make no mistake about that: when you go back on the vows you made to the partner you married your integrity is broken - whether you feel it or not, whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not. There is corruption of the heart, destruction of the home (not enough by half is said about that: every divorce destroys) and an end to love. For sexual union sets up a relationship which the persons concerned must afterward either enjoy or endure. There is no escape from this. Where the mutual commitment is not complete, not total, then the thing itself is soiled and distorted. You have used a person, not loved them.
Three new marriages in five, statistics tell us, will end in divorce. How many break up without ever reaching the courts we cannot know. How many simmer in bitterness for years, hollow pretences at marriage, we can only guess, more or less shrewdly according to our experience of the modern world. Ours is an "evil and adulterous generation," as Jesus said.
Where did all this mess begin?
We can only guess what marriage was like before histories of them came to be made. Perhaps it began, as the familiar cartoons have taught us, with the cave man conquering his bride with a club. A wife has many uses in savage life; she chews the tendons for your bowstring, she sews the skins for your clothes, she pounds the grain for your bread, and cleans and cooks the meat you kill, leaving you free to hunt and fight. Possession was probably nine points of the marriage law in those circumstances. The chances were that once you'd got a wife, you'd keep her as long as you could stand her, until some stronger fellow took her from you. No doubt there was a good deal of tooth and claw about the business.
As times grew more peaceful, marriage by conquest dies out, and marriage by purchase takes its place. But it was hardly an improvement for the woman. In the old wild days a girl was at least herself, with her own assets, and if she changed hands freely, at least she went to the better man in a fight. But in the new tame days a girl was her father's property, something to be swapped for sheep and cattle and other useful beasts. She was bought or sold without any thought for her own opinion in the matter. Any man who took her from her first partner now was not a hero, as in the old days, but a thief. Somewhere along here, the idea of adultery was born. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house ... thy neighbour's wife, thy neighbour's manservant, thy neighbour's ass, thy neighbour's ox," says another commandment. She seems to have been classified as a bit of property along with the rest. No doubt this commercial view of women was tempered by other and better feelings, but still it was very much a man's world.
It is still pretty much of a man's world. In practise of course, the mastery of the male is usually toned down by the fact that the average man is more or less afraid of his wife! But even so, we in our day are very much more enlightened than the men of Christ's day who were very ready to stone to death a woman taken in adultery but took their own freedom for granted, are we not!
One of the things Jesus did was to attack, squarely, this male chauvinism. He hit it, and he hit it hard. He defined lust, not as an act, but as an attitude - "Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in this heart." In other words, Jesus took this old negative prohibition of adultery, and turned it into a positive affirmation of marriage. Some, naive and prudish, have taken him to mean that all sexual desire is evil in itself. That of course is nonsense. His own words are the answer to that - the famous words that call a man and his wife one flesh. To cut sex out of marriage is to thwart God's intentions - and to let the devil in, as Paul said (I Timothy 4:1-3). Our Lord's command about marriage was as sharp and straight as a sword. Your wife is your wife for good, He said; to put it at its very lowest, you can't get rid of her, except for adultery, and only one gospel permits even that exception; and a divorced woman is committing adultery if she remarries. Jesus was quite clear about this. As the disciples themselves were the first to point out, it is a difficult doctrine, a hard saying. Flesh and blood finds it an unbearable doctrine. Nevertheless our Lord's word is there, and it is perfectly clear. You can get rid of it only by getting rid of Jesus Himself.
But do notice that with this statement of our Lord's, the old standing of a wife, that of a half-slave, was swept away, and a new thought of wifehood and womanhood came in. Every statement our Lord made about sexuality works to protect women, and stab men awake to their responsibilities. He condemned adultery, yet he forgave the adulteress who repented, and addressed the consciences of the men who caused her to sin. All through, men have tended, from the highest to the lowest, to shift the blame on to the women: "The woman tempted me and I did eat," cries the father of the tribe. "The woman tempted me!" has been the cry ever since, whenever someone ate when he should not. True enough, most women try to be as tempting as they can. But what Jesus was saying, and Paul after him, was that although the whole matter is difficult enough at any time, men are far more free on the whole than the women are ... and more responsible therefore, more accountable.
How new and how appalling this doctrine of our Lord's must have seemed to those who first heard it. They divorced at pleasure. And into this corrupt world - tolerant, they called it, and so thought, as men do still, to turn a sin into a virtue by giving it a pretty name - into this dissipated world there tumbled the statement that a man's wife was neither his property nor his amusement, but a part of himself - flesh of his flesh - and must be treated as such. "Husbands, love your wives," wrote St Paul, "as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her."
I once interviewed a divorced woman who wanted to remarry. She felt badly about it, she said, because when all was said and done she knew that she had tackled the thing and failed. And without any prompting from me, she said - "I know why I failed. I failed because I left God out of my marriage." But she'd learned too late.
Marriage cannot succeed, cannot ever become the experience of joy and lasting happiness that you dreamed it would be, and which you know it was meant to be, until you and your partner, at the very deepest level, give yourselves to each other in God. Keep God at an uneasy distance, and your home will end up at best but an institution, held together out of habit, inertia or fear.
The pulp papers and magazines feed our minds on lies. They tell us that the real meaning of life is love in the merely erotic sense - that only unless we are for ever fizzing with sex will our marriage be any good, and if it is not it is over.
It is just not true.
But it is a lie we find hard to resist. We grow up surrounded by propaganda for it. There are plenty of people who want to keep our sex instinct perpetually inflamed to make money out of us; they know that a man with an obsession is a man with very little sales resistance. We have somehow got to put up barriers against it. One of the ways we might start is by looking again at the kind of propaganda that is coming into our homes through the front door; but much more constructive is to really seek God together, and learn to worship together, and with real sincerity to ask what God wants our marriage to be, and not what we want to get out of it.
* The sentence is quoted from the film "The Green Scarf" with Montgomery Clift. A Jewish child, rescued from a Nazi concentration camp where she had been separated from her mother was adopted, after the war, by a childless couple who truly loved her. But some years later, the lost blood mother, who had unbeknowns survived the horror of her captivity, tracked her daughter down and presented herself to the adoptive parents and asked for the child to be released to her. They all agreed, reasonably, to give the child herself time to get to know her blood mother and make the choice herself. As time passed it became obvious to the adoptive mother that the child's affections were turning to her blood mother, and she faced the exceedingly painful prospect of losing her. "Why is this happening?" she asked her almost equally distressed husband. I have never forgotten the answer he gave: "We are born to suffer, and in loving and suffering to grow."
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