Sermon: 'But I Say to You' (Part Three): Adultery
A Wicked, Far-Reaching Sin
#1688
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 07-Jan-23; 87 minutes
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transcript:
If you sit down and think about think about it a bit, most of the major cultural issues that we have had to face over the past 50 years have revolved around sex. Sex, marriage, and family. That is what spawned, if you will, the sexual revolution in the late 50s and the 60s, and it has not stopped since then.
There is always some frontier that the libertines in this country and around the world, all through Western civilization, they are trying to push the walls out, the fences out, so that they can do more and more as they wish. I mean, this has moved from the free sex push in the 60s (feminism was already at its height about that time and that contributed to a lot of sexual license), and then it moved on to sexual orientation; "homosexual marriage."
Now we are being just inundated with all kinds of stuff on transgenderism. Who knows what sex related "freedom" will be advocated for next. Some people who are watching these sort of things say pedophilia is next or a better term, pederasty. I am almost afraid to wonder what they will do next. They essentially want no restrictions on sexuality at all.
During our lifetimes, there has been a concerted attempt and it has actually been mostly successful, to erase the seventh commandment. That is what it all comes down to. They do not like "You shall not commit adultery" found in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:14), and not just adultery, but all its associated moral and traditional precepts that fall underneath it.
It has even gotten to the point where sex itself is undermined by insisting it is not a biologically based construct. I am talking about what is mostly called gender, but it is really just one's sex. Gender is one of those words that really did not come into usage until the Kinsey Report (about that time roughly) back in the 40s or the 50s, right around there anyway. Because gender before that time was essentially a linguistic term talking about whether your nouns are masculine or feminine. That was the gender aspect of language.
But now, sex or gender is entirely a matter of psychological self-identification. Read: one's sex gender is whatever one considers it to be at the moment. So you may have the plumbing to be a man or a plumbing to be a woman, but that does not matter to these people. All that matters is what you think you are and how you self-identify. There are a lot of weird people out there and they self-identify among hundreds of supposed genders. And outside of the biological and biblical concept of male and female, all of them are weird!
All of the self-identifications are strange and perverse. There are people out there who self-identify as birds and babies and this on this day and this on another day. Do not look into it. It is perverse and weird. But if you see any of those things, even signing up for some social media sites, they want you to pick out your gender and some of them have 50 or 100 or whatever boxes that you can tick to say, you know, I feel like a spider today or whatever it is. It is just absolutely stupid.
Well, in line with this, it is generally accepted these days within society that having multiple sexual partners before and after marriage, totally contrary to God's laws against fornication and adultery, is okay. That is the standard out there. And there is no standard because people will do whatever they want. Only a shrinking percentage of religious conservatives hold out for such antiquated things as virgin marriage and faithfulness to one's spouse. It is really sad.
You remember the 90s and the purity pledges that a lot of evangelical young people were doing? They got laughed out of school by other young people who were licentious to the nth degree, and there are a lot of older people who did the same thing! They ridiculed them publicly in magazine articles and on news programs saying that trying to keep oneself pure for their eventual marriage partner was just silly. That is not the way the world works.
So the seventh commandment was ridiculed openly by a large majority of people in this country. Even mainstream church leaders, most of whom have also capitulated to the homosexual movement and the transgender movement, make ridiculous statements about purity. Like it is an impossible standard in these times to expect young people to stay pure. No, it is not. You just need to teach your children and teach from the pulpit that it is wrong to do that. I mean, wrong to be sexually immoral, to do such a thing, and to enforce the standard. It is not impossible!
They also say, Well, kids are going to do it anyway, so why stand in their way? I mean, it is just idiotic that people who are supposed to be upholding standards are giving in so easily so that they do not seem like prudes. That is really, when it comes down to it, what they want. They want the praise of men, they want to be seen as hip, they want to be seen as up with the times. (Hip, young people, means cool or whatever. Speaking about being up to the time.) But they just want the praise of men and to be seen at the forefront of these cultural revolutions.
Even the word adultery itself, and I could include fornication in this, has become antiquated, like the words forsooth and kine, unhand, and quoth, like "quoth the raven." That is the category that adultery and fornication are put in, like they are old words. They do not fit with the times.
Today, believe it or not, the words adultery and fornication are almost exclusively used theologically. You know, referring to the biblical way of referring to these sexually immoral practices. And the reason is, is that this subject does not come up very much in public discourse anymore, because so few believe that it is wrong. Adultery is on the books as a misdemeanor or a minor felony in 21 states. That was kind of surprising, but they are almost never enforced. The last time anyone in the United States was convicted of adultery was in Massachusetts, believe it or not, in 1983.
Some adultery laws across the nation have been tried to be enforced, but they have been struck down as unconstitutional because the criticism is that they are invasive to privacy and incompatible with limited government and personal freedom. Some of the judges who have ruled on this say that adultery and fornication are purely theological matters, religious matters, and these sort of things are not in the domain of a secular government. And so they just hand it right back to the churches and the churches have simply dropped the ball. They have not upheld the Commandments.
Feminists, as I mentioned before, have been at the forefront to eliminate these laws, these adultery laws, because they see these laws as justifying violence, discriminating and oppressing women. And the reason is that most of the time it was men who used the adultery laws because they were the ones in power. And so they would use them to keep women down.
If you want an example of how this works, just look at the Muslim countries around the world and how Muslim men use adultery laws and the various other laws to keep women down, to keep women out of power. Some African cultures do as well. And actually some highly Catholic cultures do this as well.
So, when it comes down to it, legally adultery is usually only a factor in divorce cases. It sometimes makes a difference in how much alimony is given or whether the kids are given to one partner or another. But that is basically the only time that it ever really comes up legally.
As a matter of fact, the latest alienation of affection lawsuit that was won was here in North Carolina. But alienation of affection lawsuits are the party that, let us say the husband, has an affair. The wife says, Well, the woman, his lover that he had the affair with, broke apart the marriage. And so the wife makes an alienation of affection lawsuit against the female lover. And, like I said, only seven states allow that. And it is actually going out of style, it hardly ever comes up anymore.
Would you not know, the toughest anti-adultery laws appear in the military code of justice. An adultery charge will rise to a court martial offense, not because it is morally wrong, but if the affair that is under question is deemed injurious to the army's readiness, discipline, or reputation. It is not in the military code of justice for any moral reason. It is just there because if soldiers have an affair, it might disrupt the work of the military.
So, as a practical matter, adultery is widely practiced because governments have washed their hands of it and the moral and religious taboo is so weak in this nation that it barely registers on the consciousness of both men and women. They do not see it as wrong. It is just something that they do. They see little negative consequences for practicing it so they engage in it with little fear and hardly any guilt. The only guilt or fear that comes is if one of the partners in the marriage, the one probably not committing adultery, is a religious person.
As the world becomes more secular, and it is getting more secular all the time, and more anti-God or post-Christian, as the term goes, adultery becomes more the norm than the exception. And that is very sad to see.
Obviously we are going to be talking about adultery today as I continue in my series of sermons on Jesus' "But I say to you" statements in His Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.
In Jesus' day, there was a similar but lesser ignoring of the laws against fornication and adultery across the Roman empire, not just the Jews, but yes, the Jews were ignoring this law as well. Easy divorce, just like here in America now with no fault divorce and all of that sort of thing, facilitated serial adultery among the Jews. And that is one of the things Jesus was trying to combat right away in His church among His disciples.
Now before we dive into Jesus' teaching, beginning there in Matthew 5:27, we need to know what the Jews generally understood and taught about adultery at the time. This will give us some necessary background for why Jesus said what He did. And I hope by the end of this little section here about what the Jews believed, you will understand why Jesus had to say what He did because it was a prevalent situation among even the most ardent of Pharisees and scribes and other Jews across Judea and Galilee.
The following quotation comes from the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament by Gerhard Kittel. This is from the section on the word moicheuo. The Greeks had tongues and lips that are just far more agile than mine, but it is the word underlying adultery or to commit adultery, the verb.
The Mishna, especially Tractate Sotah and Talmud, give more precise legal definitions of the adulterous act and the punishment. So far as possible, the rabbis seek to evade the death penalty. Only adultery with an Israelitess is to be punished. There is no penalty for intercourse with the wife of a non-Israelite. Adultery can only be by adults. There is no penalty if there is no proceeding warning and no witness. Only the wife who was set apart for her husband alone by the betrothal ceremony, and not the husband who has behind him the ancient right of polygamy, is exposed to the full threat of the penalties. In the Roman period, the death penalty drops away. The husband is simply forced to divorce an adulterous wife, who forfeits the money assigned her under the marriage contract. [that is from Sotah 43] And is not permitted to marry her lover. [that is from Sotah 51] Divorce is sufficient protection against an adulterous wife.
That is what the Jews of the time taught and believed about adultery. The thing I want you to get out of there, mostly, is that it always, almost 100%, fell on the woman, which brings John 8 into play, which we will get to a little bit later.
In the same way, Greek laws against adultery were only directed against adulterous wives. So the Jews were not much different from the Greeks, as the married man was free to do as he wished. Now she, the adulterous wife, was usually immediately divorced, without question. If the adultery became known, then she was put away. Adulterous Greek men had only to fear private retribution by the woman's family—her father, her brother, or son. And they were allowed, if they wished, to punish the adulterous husband up to the point of death. They were allowed to kill him.
Roman republic laws were even more violent, believe it or not. The Roman husband who had an adulterous wife could enact private revenge against her by putting her to death immediately with his own hand. The adulteress' father could put the adulterous man, the husband, to death if he also killed his own daughter at the same time.
Augustus, now we are in the empire stage of Rome, declared adultery a penal offense with the woman's—the adulteress'—banishment as the penalty. And he forbade the cuckolded husband from pardoning her or quashing the matter. So if the adultery was found out, he had to act. He was under Roman law not to just sweep it under the rug. If he did, if he did try to pardon her or quash the matter or reconcile, he could face banishment too.
You think there should not be any adultery in Rome, right? Across the Roman empire. No, you do not know human nature. Despite these harsh laws, adultery was rampant throughout the Roman empire. These laws were ignored and the infidelity of wives was known to be commonplace. It happened all the time. Nobody seemed to blink about it.
Such was the societal situation across the Roman world in Jesus' day. The marriage institution was weak, adultery and fornication too were common, divorce was easy. What a sewer that was. Sexual license and perversion were prevalent, especially in the big cities—and especially in Corinth. It was really a terrible, terrible place to live. Men, especially, were free to engage in whatever sexual practices they desired to practice without censure or penalty of any sort, especially if he were a citizen. He could do whatever he wanted.
The situation then, I believe, was worse than we see in our culture today. But I think we are rapidly gaining on it.
Now that we have that background, and it is pretty sordid; I am sorry to have to tell you all those details, but I think they really help you to get an idea of what Jesus' doctrine of purity was facing in that world. And of course it faces the same sort of thing in our world. So it is very much countercultural to believe and practice what Jesus says here, as you all know.
Matthew 5:27-30 "You have heard [They certainly did not practice this, but they heard it. They had heard that this was the law.] that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell."
Remember from last time that Jesus' overall teaching in these, "But I say to you" examples is to instruct His disciples about how to think about the law and how to apply it in the situations of life in its original divine intent. He is trying to draw them away from the normal practice of the letter of the law, just looking at the words and the restriction of the words that were there in the law, and expand the commandment to its principles and see what it would cover.
God did not give the Ten Commandments to be restricted to the narrow confines of the words. And that is what the Pharisees did. They were very good at looking at the words of the law and just making everything really narrow so that nothing else would be affected by the pronouncement of the commandment; so they could get away with more is what they were doing. They were making it so narrow and so restrictive that it is only this that God is condemning. Anything outside of that, even though it may be connected, is okay.
So what Jesus did instead of that, instead of that narrow letter of the law approach, which Paul tells us is death, His intent was to give these laws, the Ten Commandments, as umbrella laws we might call them. They covered a whole lot of area. Yes, it does say in the seventh commandment, in Hebrew it is actually just two words. It is the negative and adultery. It is like "no adultery" but in Hebrew. I think the one for murder is the same, and stealing. They are just very brief, but they cover a whole wide area of human wickedness.
These commandments, the seventh we are on right now, actually deals with a wide spectrum of human behaviors that God does not want to see in His people. They are all similar evils. And the two things basically that connect them are sexual perversion and unfaithfulness, or faithlessness, or fraud (you could use the term). So, sexuality that is forbidden, things that are not under the marriage covenant, sexual practices outside of the marriage covenant, plus the idea of faithlessness is the big umbrella. Anything that you can find those factors in come under this particular law. So that makes it very broad.
And that is what Jesus brings back into the thinking process of His church, of His people. He wants them to think of this particular law in a very broad sense, because He hates sexual perversion and He hates faithlessness. He loves loyalty and faith. He wants people to keep their promises. He wants people to keep their vows. He wants people to keep their end of any kind of bargain or contract or covenant that they may might make. But when we go outside of that, He very much frowns upon it. And as Jesus said right here in this exposition of the commandment on adultery, "If you do not abide by that in your sexual practices, you won't be in the Kingdom." That is what He means by "your whole body is going to be cast into hell." He says it twice! Sexual fidelity is very high on His list. It made the top Ten.
That is what He is trying to get His disciples to understand. That He is not making a change, He is bringing back the original intent so that not only is adultery wrong, but all the other sexual perversions that are outside the marriage covenant, what is allowable within the marriage covenant. So His "But I say to you" declaration that He makes here in verse 28, expands the seventh commandment on several fronts. We are going to look at three of them.
The first expansion that He makes hits the rabbis and their disciples right between the eyes. They were all Jewish men and they had interpreted the law there in Exodus 20:14 to mean women should not commit adultery. They did not say that, but that is essentially what came out of their commentary. I read you that quotation from the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament what they believed; and it was essentially men got off scot free because they could look back at the patriarchs and see that they had multiple wives. And so they took that as permission that they could have multiple sexual experiences with other women.
You know what they did? I mean this is really, really low of them. They would essentially marry the prostitute or the the woman that they were having um an affair with by making her a concubine. A concubine, let us say, in Abraham's day was like Hagar, she was a minor wife. Sarah was the main wife. She was the one that the heir would come through. But in the practice of the day, one could have multiple minor wives. They had to be married and they were considered concubines. That was the way it worked out. The legal definition and everything may have varied from culture to culture, but that is essentially the way it worked.
Well, over the years, the Israelites and Jews would justify their affairs by actually making these other women not their wives, but their concubines. And then of course they became one flesh with them and they actually did become their wives in God's eyes, because one flesh and the act of sexual intercourse is what bound them together. Now it does not mean God approved of that. And we will see from Paul, later, how he quashes that idea among the Corinthians. But they were pretty tricky, pretty low about how they tried to get around this commandment.
As I said, His first expansion on this hits the rabbis and all the Jewish men who believe this way, right between the eyes because He made sure they understood that He was talking to them—to the men, not necessarily to the women. So we see here, "whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Clearly the foremost targets of His sentence here, His words, is men. It is men looking at women with lust. They are the ones that commit adultery. So that is the first expansion—that adultery applies to men too.
Now, the word that he uses here for "whoever" is pas in Greek and generally this word means "all" or "everyone." Here it is translated as "whoever." The word is in the masculine gender so He is speaking mostly to men. But there is a possibility that He is using it as we would use he or another pronoun to mean everyone, as generic. Meaning it does not matter if you are a man or a woman, but everyone who looks at another person with lust has already committed adultery in his or her heart.
It is possible in the Greek that that is what He meant, even though, because of the way gender works, all of the words in the sentence had to be masculine, all the pronouns and everything had to be masculine to make it work. But that is just technical language stuff. He is trying to cut through the technical definition that the Jews had at the time of adultery just being a problem with women or for women. He wants to make it very clear that men are included too.
So everyone, regardless of sex, is guilty of adultery if he or she, with lust, looks on a member of the opposite sex. So what is sin for the goose is also sin for the gander, just to use that old saying.
The second expansion of Exodus 20:14, the seventh commandment, is less evident to the eye, but it is certainly present. And that is He does not stipulate that the lustful person must be married, or even an adult. All He says is "whoever" or in the ESV, the word I believe is "everyone." You can be young, you can be old; you could be a man, you could be a woman; you could be married, you could be unmarried, it does not matter. If you look at a member of the opposite sex with lust, you have already committed adultery, or we could say fornication for the non-married. It does not matter because I have got something to tell you about that.
He, as I said, cuts through the technical definition of adultery as sexual relations outside of marriage. That is what adultery is usually thought of, that it occurs within marriage. But Jesus cuts right through that with the way He words things. What it comes down to is essentially the technicality of the definition of the word adultery loses its significance by the way that He uses the language.
Now, you go onto your favorite Bible study software or you get a stack of dictionaries and lexicons out of the library or what have you, and you look at the definition of this word moicheua. Every one of those dictionaries that you look at will say that this word means "to commit adultery" and they are right. It does mean to commit adultery, implying sexual sin while married.
But Jesus never mentions marriage in this paragraph. Have you ever noticed that? His first mention of marriage in this context is in the next one about divorce. But in this one about adultery, it is not even mentioned. He only uses this word, moicheua. (I hate saying that.) And that is one of the reasons why translators translate the word pas as "whoever" or "everyone." Because it looks like Jesus is rightfully expanding the commandment to include all forms of sexual infidelity, fraud, perversion. He is not limiting it just to sexual liaisons outside of the marriage with someone other than your spouse.
I did find one lexicon, it is Liddell and Scott's Intermediate Greek English Lexicon, and it defines this word as "to commit adultery with," just like all the other lexicons and dictionaries. But it adds something that the other dictionaries usually leave out and that is the definition "to debauch." To debauch means "to corrupt morally."
So, perhaps Jesus was using this word moicheua as, or in the sense of "to corrupt sensually or carnally without regard to marital status, age, or gender." He was using it much like the most of the rest of the New Testament uses the word pornea. But He is using the word moicheua because that is the translation into Greek of the Hebrew in the commandment. So He uses the word adultery, but His commentary expands it out to include more than just what we would consider normal adultery, as sex outside of the marriage covenant.
I guess we could summarize this particular expansion as illicit sex is evil whenever and by whoever it is practiced. Whoever practices this, does not repent of it, will die the second death and will not enter the Kingdom of God. If they repent of it, great! But if this is a practice of a person, it will keep them out of the Kingdom of God. It does not matter man—woman, young, old, married, unmarried. If you practice sexual perversion or sexual fraud, it is a sin, it is wickedness.
Let us go to I Corinthians 6, if you will. We were here in this section last time.
I Corinthians 6:9-10 [Paul writes here] Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. [do not think you can find a loophole] Neither [and notice all the different sexual sins he mentions here.] fornicators [but that is pornea], nor idolaters, nor adulterers [that is the moicheua form], nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.
So Paul puts it plainly, whereas Jesus in His commentary there in Matthew 5 makes us work for it a little bit. But Paul makes it very clear that any kind of sexual immortality is wrong, is wicked, is evil, and it will keep you from the Kingdom of God. So we have another place here to say, "Yeah, this is what Jesus meant. Whoever does these things will not be part of the Kingdom."
There was something I wanted to check here, it just popped into my head.
Revelation 22:14-15 Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city. But outside are dogs [That is a sexual thing. The dogs were, I believe, the male prostitutes in the temples.] and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie.
The same thing that Paul said. These kinds of people, if they keep practicing these things, will not be in the Kingdom of God. They will be outside, that is, dead. They will suffer the second death.
Back to Matthew 5 and the third expansion that Jesus makes on the commandment. And this is the one that everybody notices immediately, and that is, as He did in His expansion on murder, He reveals the source of adultery or fornication as the heart. That fornication or adultery begins in one's inner thoughts and attitudes and emotions. Just like anger and demeaning another, calling him a fool or raca, is already murder. We saw that in Matthew 5:22.
So just like anger and that sort of thing is already murder, so is lust or impure desire already sexual immorality. It does not have to be a physical act. The act, if you will, the thought, can occur in the mind and it is still sin. It does not have to go to the point of actually engaging the other person in sexual intercourse. If it is in the mind, it is already sin. So a person who lusts, even just in his mind without any physical act, is not pure in heart.
This goes back to my sermons on the Beatitudes. Pure in heart is in verse 8: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." If we have lust in our heart, we are not pure. We are corrupt, we are sinful, and that heart needs to be cleansed. It needs to be purged of covetousness. That is what lust is, wanting for oneself what is not yours to have.
And there is another thing that is part of this as well. We talk about lust, and this word is not used in the Bible in terms of this sort of thing, but it is certainly talked about a lot in this culture, and that is objectification of the person that you lust after. You know what that really means? It just means that you dehumanize the person. You are taking them from a human being with the potential of being a son or daughter of God and you are making them into a mere object of desire. You are taking the humanity from them and making them a toy, a plaything.
The word I used was dehumanizing, and we can refer right back to the expansion on murder, the example of murder, because one of the things that Jesus mentioned was essentially belittling the other person, making them less than you, making them less than human, an object of your derision.
We can see by having a little thought about these things and studying these things, meditating about them, that Jesus was very concerned about our pride and making ourselves better than or superior to others; where we could take control of their lives, take control of their potential and their future by murder, or by illicit sex. It is not being humble and submissive to put people in these categories as a person who is worthy of your derision, or even murder, or a person whose only purpose, as far as you are concerned, is to gratify your sexual desire. That is making somebody really small and little. Whereas if we were to do the right thing, which is love our neighbor, we raise them up. We make them better than ourselves, greater than ourselves. We treat them in a way that we would want to be treated.
So, a lot of this has to do with, yes, how we think about ourselves, which is way too much, and how we think about other people and help them, love them, raise them up to a position where you think of them as at least as good as you, and maybe superior to you.
Let us go back to I Corinthians 6. This time we are going to start in the middle of verse 13. I do not want to get straight into the weeds of trying to explain this paragraph too much, but the beginning of the paragraph, which starts in verse 12, is kind of like Paul and the Corinthian congregation having a bit of a dispute, talking back and forth. Let us just take verse 12. I am probably going too far into the weeds already, but he says, "All things are lawful for me."
Most commentators believe that he is quoting what the Corinthians are saying. So they say, "All things are lawful for me. That is the way it is under Christ, you know, He's given me freedom." But Paul says, "but not all things are helpful." And then they say, "All things are lawful for me," but Paul says, "but I will not be brought under the power of any."
There is this bit of back and forth between what the Corinthian members say and what Paul says. And what it comes down to is a difference of philosophy or thinking. And it has a lot has to do with a lot of cultural thinking, not necessarily Christian thinking on the part of the Corinthians. They were trying to synthesize their own cultural thought, Greek thought, with Christian thought, and Paul was fighting them on this because they were coming to wrong conclusions. "Hey, you do have a lot of freedom as Christians, but you've got to think of this more completely." Because, as he says, "Even if you have freedom to do something, sometimes it's not helpful to do it. Sometimes it's not good to do certain things even if you're free to do it." You have got to think more deeply about how these things affect other people.
Then, of course, the next one about being "brought under the power of any." Some of these things you may be free to do—you are free to drink coffee, there is not a word in the Bible about drinking coffee, but do you want to be brought under the power of a stupid little cup of liquid? Well, 15 cups of liquid.
That is something I fought through the 2000s because I drank a lot of coffee and it was affecting my health. I was free to drink coffee, but it gave me adrenal fatigue, ultimately. It just knocked out my adrenal function. And so, even though I was free to do it, I should not have allowed myself to become under its power. So I had to repent of that. I had to change. I can drink coffee now. I usually drink a cup or two a day. I make sure I stop drinking coffee at noon and that is about as much as I can take. If I have any coffee after noon, it is decaf, because I cannot let the power of that caffeine keep me awake or I start down the way toward adrenal fatigue again. I have very weak adrenal glands. And so even a short duration of time without sleep, or not enough sleep, or whatever, getting my adrenals up and down, jacking them up and down with a stimulant and bringing them down with something else, will lay me out. And you do not want to see that, I do not get anything done. So I will not be brought under the power of something that is perfectly alright for me to do.
This was the Greek thought that they had full freedom, especially things that concerned the body. This was a form of early Gnosticism called dualism. And the dualistic philosophy that they had is that what happens to the body is not important, but only the condition of the soul is important. And so anything you did to your body did not matter in the long run. You may lose your health or whatever it is, but it does not matter as long as your soul came through, in the end, as righteous or whatever, then that is all that mattered. Spirit was good; physical, carnal, fleshly bad. But it did not matter because you were in the spirit.
I Corinthians 6:13-20 Now, the body is not for sexual immorality [this is Paul speaking] but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! [or as in the King James, God forbid! Are you going to take the members of Christ's body and join them to a harlot? That is the most ridiculous thing ever!]
Do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For "the two," He says, "shall become one flesh." But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body [That is probably a quote from the Corinthians. And Paul comes back], but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. [He refutes it immediately.] Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, which you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.
They started talking about food and they immediately jumped over to sex. The reason why is that the Greeks thought of both of these as normal bodily appetites. And if you fed your mouth with food or your stomach with food, then you should also feed your body with sex. That is how they looked at it. (People have come up with some strange ideas.) But they looked at them the same. So to Greeks, in thinking this way, sex, whether proper or illicit, it did not matter to them, was a bodily function only.
Now, Paul's answer to this trying to get around the commandment is this: He says, "Uh uh! Not so. You guys are absolutely wrong. It has deep implications for one's body because your body is joined to Christ! Because we are part of His body. [Does it not say that just a few chapters later in chapter 12? He is still talking or thinking about this particular idea.] And further, God is going to raise that body in the resurrection by His power."
He is making links here to important things as to why the body is not something to just be flippant about. The body is very important. It also has implications for one's spirit, because we Christians are one spirit with Him. We are in a marriage covenant with Him, He is our husband, so any illicit sexual activity is unfaithfulness to Him. Just like going to a harlot is unfaithfulness to one's spouse or to one's future spouse. He gets into that in chapter 7. Because doing that is becoming one flesh with or, in biblical terms, married to someone other than our divine Spouse or our physical spouse.
Our bodies belong to Him and they must be kept pure. And as possessors of God's Spirit, such sinfulness defiles not just our spirit but our bodies too. So he says, "Get rid of all sexual immorality." So what Paul says here in I Corinthians 6 is even an expansion on what Christ said in Matthew 5. For Christians, sexual immorality is a uniquely wicked sin because of its defilement of both body and spirit.
And further, and this is what makes it uniquely wicked, it is unfaithfulness to Christ, our Savior and our Husband. It is associating Him with our corrupt behavior due to our being joined to Him. We are in Christ and He lives in us. And if we should go to a harlot, we are taking Him with us and that is especially wicked. We are cheating on our God—with Him in the room!—and denying His ownership of us through His redemption by His blood.
So sexual immorality is a lot worse than we think. It is destructive and far reaching, especially for us Christians who are already betrothed to a husband. Not only does it cheapen, defile, and sometimes disease the physical body, it corrodes our human spirit. It destroys relationships and it breaks the precious God-plane relationship with our divine Spouse. In this way, we can say with confidence that sex is not a personal matter because it affects not just the self, but everyone involved in our relationships. Now, certainly, especially a spouse or a future spouse, but also God. And it can come down to children and other members of the family and that sort of thing. So to say it is just a personal privacy matter is baloney. It has eternal consequences and that makes it very serious.
Let us go back to Matthew 5 and we will read again verses 29 and 30.
Matthew 5:29-30 "If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be cast into hell."
Right off the bat here, Jesus is not recommending self-mutilation. He is not saying that you should actually pluck out an eye or hack off a hand. It is similar to Paul saying in his epistles that we should mortify or put to death the flesh. He is not telling you to commit suicide. That is not what he is saying. This is a rhetorical way of getting across an idea, and it is hyperbole. That is the rhetorical word for it. It basically tells us that we must be willing to take drastic measures to avoid committing this sin—whatever it takes. It is better to sacrifice something of a physical thing, even though it has great value to you, than to be rejected from entering the Kingdom of God.
He is talking about sacrifice here. You have to learn to sacrifice to keep His law. And you know, sometimes we have to really sacrifice to overcome a bad habit, to overcome something we have been addicted to. We have got to get it out of our life and we have to do whatever it takes to keep it out of our lives. And that is what He is saying. Be willing to go to the nth degree, because being pure is far more important, entering the Kingdom of God is far more important, even though we may think very highly of this thing. But if it is causing us to sin, it has to go!
So again, sexual immorality is not a minor sin. It is something we have to struggle to overcome. We must make sure that we make the sacrifices necessary.
Now His use of the right eye corresponds to looking or observing another in lust. And men especially become aroused by the sight of a woman's beauty. A lot of the sexual lust comes from seeing, and so of course, He talks about plucking out the eye. We have got to do whatever we can to stop looking at women that way.
This is why the pornography industry is so huge because it is almost all pictures and videos, things that we can see with our eye, because frankly a woman's naked body catches and holds a man's eye like little else. Not even the nicest Mustang or Cadillac or whatever it is that you think is a great looking car, can compare to a woman's body. It just does not, does not at all. A man will give up time and money and just about anything else once he is addicted to satisfy his lust of the eyes, as it talks about in I John 2:16.
But it is not just men, it is women too. A quarter to a third of the audience on these pornographic websites are women. You would think it would be much more tilted toward men, but women use these sites at least a quarter or a third as much as men do. So it is not just men.
We know pornography is a problem in the world, but it is also affecting the church. I hear about it every once in a while and it saddens me. It must stop if one wants to enter the Kingdom of God. As Jesus recommends here, take drastic measures to break the habit if you have it! Disconnect from the Internet, that would be a good thing to do. Throw out your magazines, get it out of your house, do not make it convenient, throw your computer away if that is what it takes. Start a new hobby to fill the time, do something else, get on an exercise regimen, run marathons or something where you have to go out and train 13 hours a day. I am being a little bit hyperbolic there, but do whatever you can. Get counseling. In a word, repent! and seek forgiveness from God, because it is wickedness!
You know what pornography means? Essentially it means the writing of prostitutes. It is comparable to going and seeing a harlot. You are just doing it in your own head. And who knows how much harm it is doing to your relationships, both physical and divine. And not just your current relationship, future relationships. If you are not married, you are taking away from yourself and your future spouse the joys of marital sex. It is a horrible thing. Like I said, it must stop if you want to be in the Kingdom of God.
Now, Christ talking about the right hand has puzzled some commentators, but it is not difficult to understand that it is the dominant hand in most cases. It is the one that they act with. Jesus is showing the progression of the lust in these three or four verses here. He says it starts in the heart, and it goes then to the eye, and then to the hand. So it goes from an attitude or a feeling or an intent, it goes to looking and then it goes to doing. It starts with a thought and ends with a physical act of sexual immorality. It is the hand that reaches out and touches the object of the affection or lust.
It also applies to pornography. And just to mention this, because the lust of the eye often leads to auto-eroticism, also known as masturbation. That is just as much as sin as any other form of physical sexual immorality. Because in this case the object of affection is the sexual satisfaction of the self. You become your own object of lust. It is pure selfishness. And this whole thing about the right hand corresponds to the lust of the flesh in I John 2:16.
So sexual immorality is a terrible evil in this world and in ourselves, even in the church.
I was going to go to John 8:1-11, but I will not because of time. But I do want to let you know here at the end of the sermon that even though Jesus forbids it, and He forbids it in the strongest of terms, He is even more strong about sexual immorality than the Jews of the day were. But unlike them, He is not quick to condemn people for it. He shows it in the example in John 8 where they bring a lady caught in the act of adultery. And His response to her, do you know what it was? "Go, and sin no more."
What does He say? Quit! Quit doing it! Stop! Repent! Mortify the flesh with its wicked deeds and live a life of purity before Him. That is the way, the sanctification, of those who will enter the Kingdom of God.
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