LAW HOMILY: The Sin Under Every Sin

Every week we go through the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say to his people, and we want to understand his heart, and we want to understand what it means to obey him.

And we don't cut off the Old Testament. 75 % of the Bible is something useless. We read it because we know that it was how

God prepared his people for Christ. And as we prepare each

Lord's Day to come into the presence of Christ and meet Christ at His table, we read through the law, we confess our sins, we renew the covenant that we have broken that he's been faithful to, and the

Lord blesses us as we do that. Now today we're on the seventh commandment, and I'm calling this one the sin that is under every sin.

The scriptures speak with shocking bluntness when they describe human sin. God doesn't merely call it a weakness.

He doesn't sanitize it as poor judgment. Again and again he calls it what it truly is, adultery.

The seventh commandment is you shall not commit adultery. And all throughout the Bible, there's a litany of sins that are called adultery.

Whoredom even. Covenant betrayal. The breaking of sacred vows made to a faithful husband.

None of this is metaphorical. It's theological. From the beginning, marriage was designed as a living parable of the triune

God. A husband binding himself to one woman in exclusive lifelong faithfulness. Not merely to create social order and to be fruitful and multiply.

Yes and amen. But also to mirror something much older that exists within God himself and the covenant bond that he establishes with his redeemed people.

This is why the scripture speaks of God as the husband of Israel and his people both Old Testament and New Testament as the bride.

This is why idolatry is never treated as some kind of neutral mistake, but as marital treachery.

When Israel bows down to Baal, God does not merely say that was a bad move.

He says that they played the harlot. When Jerusalem compromises with false worship, God doesn't accuse her of minuscule sins.

He accuses her of being an unfaithful wife. When the prophets search for language that's strong enough to talk about the sins that they're seeing in their people, they reach for the most devastating human betrayal language that they can muster.

A wife climbing to the bed of another lover. That's what they're describing the sin of Israel as.

And we might recoil at that image, especially some of the passages in the Old Testament are not very

Christian if you think of Christian as in they must always be nice and never say anything hard.

Hosea is a tough book if you read it. Hosea 2, 19 through 20 says,

I will betroth you to me forever. Yes, I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice and loving kindness and compassion and I will betroth you to me in faithfulness.

Then you will know that I am the Lord. And yet the entire rest of the book of Hosea is

God through pain and through very sharp and strong language calling her an unfaithful bride.

The book of Hosea is a metaphor. Hosea himself marries a prostitute and the prostitute runs away and he goes and chases after her and brings her home.

The whole book is this great metaphor of how God has been chasing his people. Israel is a faithful husband and she continually falls into all sorts of idolatry and sin.

And the point that we're supposed to get out of all of these things is that our sin is treacherous.

Our sin is serious. Our sin is not. Small, minute little mistakes.

Our sin is covenant -breaking treachery against a perfect and faithful husband in God.

One of the most powerful aspects of sin is that sin convinces us that it's not a big deal.

That's one of the most powerful aspects of our flesh is that we bury it, we excuse it, we turn away from it and we say, that was one time,

I'm not going to... We make all sorts of justifications for it, don't we? And yet, if your spouse comes to you and tells you, hey,

I made a mistake, one time won't happen again, I cheated on you. It's not a small deal. That's a life -changing, devastating deal.

So the fact that sin is looked at like adultery means that we should look at sin actually quite differently than we do.

So whatever it is that's in your heart right now that you know that you have not confessed before God, you know that this is an area of weakness for you,

I want you to think about it through the lens of, this is spiritual adultery against my God, against the faithful husband.

I'm the bride, he's the husband. And that I'm coming right now to him to confess that to him.

And remember, while it is a painful thing to confess such a thing to a faithful husband,

I do want you to remember that this faithful husband has already paid for your sins and will receive you back into his arms.

So let us pray and let us ask the Lord to forgive us of our sins, amen? Lord, in an existential level, every sin is a kind of adultery against you.

Lord, there are times where I am a whiner and a complainer, and that's adultery.

And Lord, there are times when I think nasty thoughts about other people, just like all of us in this room, and that's adultery.

Lord, would you forgive us of these covenant -breaking sins?

Lord, you say in your Word that a husband or a wife, it's permissible for them to get a divorce over adultery.

Lord, you divorced Israel for adultery. You divorced

Judah for adultery. Lord, help us to hold in one hand the great doctrine of the perseverance of saints that we are safe and secure in Christ, but in the other hand, let us hold to the doctrine of total depravity and the ugliness of our sin.

And let us, Lord, as Paul said, have a kind of godly sorrow that would lead us to repentance.

Help us, Lord, for all of the sins that we are laying at your feet this morning, that we would be forgiven, and that,