Deuteronomy 5:18, The Seventh Commandment

The Seventh Commandment and the Puritan Case of Church Discipline

Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 18, hear the word of the Lord. And you shall not commit adultery. May the Lord add blessings to the reading of his holy word. When I was doing my research for my dissertation at the University of Chicago Library, reading through Puritan books and articles, records, it's like looking through haystacks to find needles useful for my purposes, I came across the record of a church discipline case in a Puritan church.

It involved sex. A Puritan lady was bringing before her Puritan church the problem of her Puritan husband not having enough sex with her. I saw that. I first thought, well, that should make for an interesting members meeting.

But I also thought that if you wanted to see in microcosm, in one case, how different Puritans are from us, from evangelicals today, from us today, with our often fake spirituality, our superficial view of sin, our kind of pietistic view of discipleship, in other words, all about feelings, I feel close to God, that's somehow discipleship, our American individualism, our nearly non-existent understanding of the church, and often our unbiblical view of, or at least feelings about, sex, well, here it is.

A Puritan woman takes the problem of insufficient sex to the church, and the church deals with it. Now, while I'm sure that you all would love to hear me give a 45-minute lecture on Puritan spirituality and the doctrine of the church, but I'm afraid we're stuck with the subject of the Seventh Commandment, which is sex.

What that Puritan case shows is that if there were more real biblical disciples, serious Christians, in our society, there would be more sex. That's because the worldly attitude, although I don't know that they articulate it, but it's the feeling.

The worldly attitude is that a couple has sex whenever the desires of the two partners happen to overlap. But what if, in the case of that Puritan husband, there's a lack of desire by one? The biblical prescription, that was different.

That is that a couple has sex whenever either spouse needs. That's why the Puritan woman was right, even if you think maybe a public meeting in the church is not the, maybe not the best venue for it. That means, then, that a Christian couple living by biblical principles will have sex more often than a worldly couple living by just the selfish philosophy of our age.

Now, further, not only that, so also imagine about adultery. So much adultery out there that it begins as someone is attracted to a person that they are not married to. And to get a little, quote, something on the side, they're looking for some added pleasure on top of the pleasure they get already from their spouse.

But then the lies and the deceit that used to cover up the affair usually is exposed. And the person ends up either being divorced or going through a long time of being in the doghouse, being rightfully suspected, with no pleasure in the rect.

And perhaps recovering marriage. If the guilty person is divorced, either he or she ends up with the former, the lover. And that relationship, relationships like that usually end up being very rocky, much more likely to end badly.

Or he or she simply ends up being alone. So what began in the adultery as a quest for more pleasure ends up with much less pleasure than if he or she had just remained faithful to the marriage. So those two factors.

This leads to an unusual, maybe ironic, maybe a bit funny, but true, I think, conclusion. That is, if there wasn't so much adultery in our society, that is, if there were more faithful Christians, there would be a lot more sex.

Sex, Creation, and the Meaning of One Flesh

Well, the Seventh Commandment, we must remember, does not say. Look at it, just the words, does not say no sex. Just like the Sixth Commandment, it is in Hebrew a two-word command, only two words in Hebrew.

But unlike the previous commandment, it doesn't state a sweeping kind of categorical no and then give us several exceptions later on. Remember last week, we saw that the commandment said, no killing, and then later gave exceptions, exceptions that uphold the rule.

There's capital punishment, and there's wars, and all that.

But that's later.

The commandment was simply no killing. The bias was against killing. Even if it is necessary, it's still regrettable. But here, the commandment, and I guess God could have inspired it this way, but he didn't.

He did inspire it to say no sex, and then maybe exceptions later. You bet you can in these certain situations. He could have done that. He did it with killing. But he didn't do it with this one. Here, it focuses right on the illegitimate sex, the adultery.

That is prohibited. The Bible does not have a low view of sex. It does not have a bias against it. It is not regrettable. It does not see it as something debased or carnal that truly spiritual people can somehow rise above.

Sex is created by God, and it was created before there was sin. If there had been no sin, there would still have been sex, pure, undefiled, holy sex. Sex was given by God in creation. It tells us in Genesis 1 so that we're going to have children and fill the earth.

It tells us in Genesis 2 so that a man and woman can be united, so that they can be married. Sin only comes in in Genesis 3, and it really has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with us choosing to do what we will do, because we want to do it.

And no one's going to tell me any different. Putting ourselves in the center of the universe. It is willfulness. The very first command we humans are given in the Bible, in Genesis 1, verse 28, think of that.

The first command is to have sex, and be fruitful, reproduce, procreate, fill the earth. We have natural children and spiritual children to fill the earth with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea, as it says.

And if we're to do that naturally, well, guess what? We've got to have sex. But sex is not all about children. In Genesis 2, God creates Eve, presents her to Adam, and he exclaims, verse 23, we just read this last night, wow, that was basically what it means there.

This is at last, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, no, at last, this is what I've been waiting for. Wow. And this is the companion that I need. And then in the very next verse, it's explained, therefore, because God made them for each other, therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become, here's the phrase, one flesh.

The apostle Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 6, verse 16, that that phrase, the two shall become one flesh, refers to a spiritual uniting of a couple that happens during sex. In other words, sex unites a man and a woman.

It brings them together in more than just physical ways. It makes them one flesh. Now, we often say in our language that marriage is consummated with sex, and that means completed, finished. And that's true, in a way.

The vows are made publicly. The couple commit to living together as husband and wife until death do them part. And then later, marriage is completed, is sealed when they have sex. The sex makes them one flesh.

It unites them together so that not only does one property become the possession of the other person, but one's very body belongs to the other. Now, marriage is a creation ordinance. That means it's something formed by God for all people to enjoy.

That means that you don't have to be a Christian to be legitimately married in God's eyes, not like the Lord's Supper, which is only served to Christians, or baptism. But just as for children, so, too, marriage takes on a different dimension for the Christian.

In the world, people get married. Maybe they have a feeling, this overwhelming feeling, that they need to be with that one, special one. They want to care for him or her and be cared for by them. And those feelings, for the Christian, they can be one way that God guides us to the one he wants us to marry.

That's not wrong. But that is never the reason why we should marry. As Paul wrote, whether we eat or drink, we do all for the glory of God. This is especially so with marriage. We do it for the glory of God.

Even in Christian circles these days, some teaching makes it sound like God exists to help our marriage. The way it's sometimes presented, you get that feeling. What we need to see is the other way around.

We are married to help us serve God. The only good Christian reason to get married is the conviction that you and your spouse will serve the Lord Jesus better in marriage than in being single or in being married to other people.

You see, if the reason we're getting married is, you know, we will do what we will do. I just have this feeling, and I can't deny it. I'll have what I want. No one's going to tell me any differently. This idea is just romanticized and almost celebrated as the romantic relationship is the ultimate good that everything else must serve.

We're told, you know, in Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and many other things put out there. This is what life is about. Anything that tries to deny that is wrong. No, if that's the approach to it, oh, then we're like Eve in the garden, picking the fruit because it looks good, because I want it.

Nevermind what God says. We are being willful, putting ourselves in the center of what's right and wrong. We're sinning. But if we get married with the intention of glorifying God in our marriage, she will help me serve the Lord, and I'll help her, hopefully, serve her, the Lord, better, that we live not for ourselves nor even for each other, but to help one another be obedient to God.

Then we can have a marriage that pleases Him. And one way we do that is by having sex with our spouse only. If you want to help your spouse be a faithful follower of Jesus, someone who is unlikely to fall into the trap of adultery, one very effective way of doing that, and we're told this by the apostle Paul himself in 1 Corinthians 7, verses 2 to 5, is to frequently have sex.

The apostle instructs couples not to deprive each other of sex, but to engage in it regularly. How regularly? Well, that's for each couple to figure out for themselves. But the biblical rule is it is as regular as the neediest spouse needs.

Now, it's not one spouse demanding something from the other. It's selfishness. That's the willful, kind of self-centered, sinful approach. The spouse is there to serve me. But the biblical way is that I'm in this marriage to help my spouse serve God.

And one way we do that is to satisfy his or her sexual desires. The only exception is, not a headache, but if by mutual consent, both partners want a time of devotion to prayer. So if you're getting tired of sex, you had better work on getting your spouse to be willing to spend more time in prayer.

So does that mean I should conclude that our sometimes sparse attendance at our prayer meeting is a sign? Never mind that. Sex is so not sinful, doing it can actually be one way to help your spouse glorify God.

Some might say, but doesn't the apostle Paul, in the same chapter, 1 Corinthians 7, say that it's better not to marry?

Well, yeah, he does. He says that.

But the reason he gives has nothing to do with sex. It's not like sex is contaminating. And if you're really holy, you can do without it. He suggests, in 1 Corinthians 7, verses 33 to 35, that it's better for some people to be single, if they have that gift of self-control, because then they have more time to focus exclusively on the things of God.

They don't have a husband or wife whom they must spend time with trying to please. It's not because of sex that Paul prefers singleness, but because of time. So this is the heart of a truly Christian marriage.

The purpose of it is to glorify God. We have children to glorify God and raise them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We have a husband or wife to help him or her serve God. So we have sex to celebrate our being united with them and to help them to not have excess, unsatisfied sexual desires.

And we even do this, not just to indulge their sexual appetites, but because satisfying them decreases their vulnerability to sin and helps them obey the Lord. It's all about God. In this kind of marriage, God is at the center.

The husband and wife are not primarily committed to each other. They each have a higher commitment than their marriage that even motivates their sex. As helpful as some of the ministries are that remind us to nurture our marriages, and some of them are very helpful, have a lot of good insights, the focus of a truly Christian life is not the family.

It's not. In fact, the Christian family is to focus on God. The members of the family should be helping each other focus on God. Some marriages begin happily, it seems, passionately, but they peter out into a state of miserable tension because they began with a couple primarily loving each other.

They put all their hopes for happiness in each other. And that's just too much weight for any of us to bear. It's like putting too much weight on a table. You know, if you've never been here for gym, if you come for gym in the sunny evening, you'll see these big, some of these guys are big, and they'll be sitting on these big tables we have around, usually like, now used like benches, and those big tables are sturdy.

They can hold up all those guys. But a couple of times there's been guys trying to sit on that little flimsy ping pong table.

Over there.

No, I have to go get off. That table won't, if we try, if we could get more than, probably just one, if they stood on there, sat on it long enough, but you get like two or three, they would just, table would just collapse.

That flimsy table can't hold the weight. And that's the way we are as people. We can't hold the weight of the happiness and the fulfillment of other people.

Understand?

So, and so eventually, a marriage based on that, my happiness is in what she can give me, then that will eventually collapse. Putting all your hopes in the relationship.

Will crush the relationship.

It's sort of the irony of it. It's the tragedy of it. We think we're making so much of this, we're making too much of it, that we destroy what we put so much into, what we made so important. And so they end up miserable, the couple.

They're not miserable because they're not committed to marriage, because that was their only commitment. Human beings were not intended to bear the weight of so much commitment and devotion. We cannot, by nature, hold up under it.

We will be disappointed if we go into marriage with these kind of, these Hollywood, these romantic illusions that this person is the answer to all my needs. We make an idol out of the one who was supposed to help us worship and serve the true God, and in the end, we cannot help but be disillusioned.

With him.

But if we keep God at the center, we love our husband, our wife as a way of loving God, then we will not only have a happier marriage, I think, in the long run, we can keep the seventh commandment. We can keep our covenant with God and keep our covenant with the one God has given to us.

Adultery is the breach of this covenant. Adultery is an attempt to enjoy the pleasure of a covenant, to become one flesh with someone without the responsibility of the covenant. It is all about my pleasure.

It's about me. What I can get.

No one else.

Oh, sure, in the heat of the temptation, some people are convinced themselves that they're drawn to the one with whom, you know, that I should say that they love the one to whom they are drawn, but if they really love them, they wouldn't impale their sins on this, their souls on this sin.

As someone has said today, often, I love you means I love me and I want to use you. Adultery then is selfish. It's willful. I'll do what I want to do. So it's essentially sinful. This is why the Lord Jesus told us in Matthew five, that just a merely legalistic approach to obeying this commandment can still be just as adulterous, just as sinful.

The Lord Jesus said that you could scrupulously keep yourself away from all sexual contact with anyone but your spouse. You can stay physically in bounds, but if in your heart, you still make yourself the one who will use others for your pleasure, if you're still making yourself the sinner of the universe, if you still just love yourself, well, then God sees.

Like the murderer who doesn't have the gumption, you know, to act on what he really feels, he wants to kill the person he's angry with, but he's just too lazy, doesn't have the opportunity, doesn't want to clean up the mess, whatever it is, to act on his desires and murder.

So too, don't expect any credit from God if you have all the drive to be an adulterer, all the secret longings, but you just lack the opportunity. You just never seem to be able to get alone with the desired person at the right time.

Or maybe you just have bad breath, or maybe you're just not very good at the seduction business. You know, you just don't have the skills. Don't expect any credit from God because you're never able to get that fling,.

Oh, that you'd love to have.

You're still an adulterer. The legalistic approach thinks that this command is all about lines. As long as you have it crossed the line, you're okay. So the legalist asks, how far can I go? Legalist thinks that just because he or she has it crossed the line, gone all the way with the body, that there's not guilt for adultery.

But the legalist is selfish. He or she is asking, what can I get? How much can I get away with? Am I in bounds? He's not asking the covenantal question. What can I give? Who am I committed to? The legalist is self-centered.

He's committed to himself, his own pleasure. Always looking after himself, not after his neighbor, not even after his girl or boyfriend, or if married, looking after the spouse who lies next to him or her in bed.

The legalist doesn't think about the covenant. And so in that sense, he's just like the adulterer. Adulterers don't think of the covenant. The legalist is not thinking of the covenant. They're both just trying to get what they can get.

They just have different ideas, different opinions of what they can get, that's all. Instead, he or she should be asking whether he is leading the other person out of bounds. The smug, self-righteous, religious person might think that he or she has pleased God simply by, just because he has it crossed the line.

Meanwhile, they're burning with the lust of a heart where self rules. The Lord Jesus comes to this kind of religion and tells it, you're adulterous. You wanna play with sin. You think you can keep in bounds just in the heart, in the mind, or on the computer.

You think as long as it doesn't come out in actual practice in the body, as long as you don't cross a line, you're okay, but it's still adultery. And the only way, and that whole way of thinking misses the point entirely about sin, what sin is, and about you.

Sin is a matter of the heart. It's a matter of what you love and hate. Jesus said that if you could eliminate sin by cutting off your hand or gouging out your eye, it would be worth it. You should love God so much that you hate sin so much that you are willing to mutilate yourself to keep from sinning, but of course, sin is not in your hand or in your eye.

It's in your heart.

And no amount of amputations is gonna cure that. And the only way to deal with it is if your heart is made new, if the source of your sin is changed, if that heart that used to tell you to lust, to take, to hate, or whatever it was telling you against God now has God's covenant written on it, and so out of the heart comes God's ways.

Puritan Wisdom, Augustine, and the Cultural Shame Around Sex

This is what the Puritan church got right, and we so often get wrong. If it seems strange to you that a church would consider church discipline for not having enough sex, is that because you still have the feeling, even maybe you know better than to say it with your doctrines, but that this feeling that sex is at best kind of dirty.

You know, there are two major cultural influences in Western culture. Christianity was one through the Bible, and the Greco-Roman, mostly Platonic philosophy. And that Platonic philosophy in Western culture sees sex as debased, animalistic, necessarily demeaning.

The otherwise great theologian Augustine wrote that sex was always sinful. And he didn't get that from the Bible, but from the Platonic philosophy he was educated in prior to becoming a Christian, and then he became a Christian and he didn't get his mind renewed in that one area.

And that feeling often lingers on still, even with so much immorality in our culture, there's still kind of the feeling that it's dirty. Maybe you can't help yourself, but you know, your body is debased.

You could tell the difference on this subject culturally when comparing it with Chinese Christians who don't have that influence. I could give several examples, but when I remember my younger son, Joshua, when he was about nine or 10, I think, I asked him if he knew where babies came from, and he gave me an answer that could best be described as clinical.

It's kind of disconcerting to hear like a nine-year-old boy give a very precise, scientifically accurate.

Description of reproduction.

And that's because he was raised by a Chinese mother. There was no silly talk of storks or whatever. And the Puritans being truly biblical had also a healthy view of sex. And I can think that's because they were biblical.

They had a biblical view of sin too. A sin is not primarily a list of certain forbidden acts. And if you can keep yourself on those forbidden acts, then you've not sinned. And the worst of those acts are the sexual acts, sexual sins.

Sin is the impulse within us to be willful, to be selfish, to say, my will be done. And it can often dress itself in religion, or it can follow the impulses of the Bible, of the body, excuse me, and be sexually immoral.

But either way, it's still sinful. So the man who apparently, that Puritan man who apparently wasn't serving his wife sufficiently, he was indeed being selfish. He was being unloving.

He wasn't caring for her.

So he was sinning by not having sex. Now, if it's your view that sex makes something sinful or that sexual sin is worse than other sins, you didn't get that from the Bible. Understand, if you think you did, you're reading it into the Bible.

In the Bible, the Lord Jesus would gently tell sexual sinners to go and sin no more. And he passionately denounced religious hypocrites. Now, try reading Matthew 23 sometime in the sin that he most fiercely denounced.

Even in 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul tells the Corinthians to cast out the sexually immoral man, which is true. Then he says that they should do the same for the greedy. Had nothing to do with sex. The idolater, covetousness, longing for the stuff you can have, what we might call materialism.

Paul says elsewhere is idolatry. The reviler, the disrespectful, arrogant person, cast them out. That's not done anything to a sex. The drunkard, the swindler. Titus chapter three, he says to cast out the divisive person and 2 Thessalonians chapter three, verse 14, he says the same about the lazy and the man who won't support himself.

So it's not that sexual sin is especially heinous,.

A spiritual capital crime.

Kind of all the other sins are spiritual misdemeanors. You know, you can kind of understand those. No, all sin brings death. What the Puritans understood,.

What is it?

It was lack of repentance. It was obstinance. It was stubbornly continuing in sin that brought discipline. Not just the fact that it was sexual or not. Indeed, it could be lack of sex, obstinately continued in that could earn it.

At least for one church. Well, even for single people, we must understand that adultery is something that you can do too. Remember what we saw earlier, sex is the act which consummates your marriage. Sex joins you to the other person.

So trying to have sex outside of marriage is taking it out of its place. It's never casual. That's why you must only have sex with the one with whom you got thoughtfully entered into a covenant. You make your vows first, then become one flesh.

Because once you have sex, you are binding yourself to that person in a way that is at least confusing and damaging if you then walk away single. I just said that all sin is equally deadly. And that's true.

All sin is equally deadly. But not all sin is equally damaging. Sexual sin damages you more than many other sins, even more than just lust. The apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 talks about becoming one flesh, there's that phrase again, that is joined to a prostitute in sex.

He uses there sex with a prostitute, probably the most casual kind of meaningless sex.

You could imagine.

But it's still, he says, it's making you one flesh. It's binding you to that person. So if you then go away casually, you have damaged yourself and the other person. Even if that's not what you went into it for, to be joined to them.

Even if you've convinced yourself that that will not be the case, that you won't be joined to them. Even if you've done it and you still don't feel bound to them, yet you are. You were made one flesh and then you have damaged yourself by ripping that one flesh apart.

Part of the hurt of sexual sin is that it numbs you. At first, the wound is often not felt until much later when we come to regret some past act. Or maybe it will damage you so much that your conscience is seared, it's unfeeling.

Sex is a holy thing and it remains that holy binding thing no matter how casually we want to spread it around. This is why sex, even though it is as holy and good, should be kept strictly private. Ways of dressing or acting that are intentionally sexually provocative, being sexy, should be confined to the privacy of a married man and woman alone.

Single people should not use their bodies to get attention for themselves by being sexually enticing. Daughters especially, I think, need to be taught how they might be perceived even if they just innocently act or dress in certain ways.

Modesty is a Christian virtue, not because the body is evil or sex is dirty, but because it's so holy, it should be reserved for special private occasions in a covenant of marriage. It is something special and safe for one special person, not used as bait to attract attention.

We are responsible for the thoughts and feelings that we encourage other people to have. For an attractive young person to use his or her body to allure and manipulate others, that's selfish. It shows no concern for the mind and the heart of the people that we are tempting.

It only cares about what we can get for ourselves. It is, once again, the essence of sin. Pornography is all about stoking lust. It's about lighting a fire that your spouse should be lighting and fulfilling.

It entices us to desire the people we see, not our spouse. If there is not a mate lying next to us in bed to arouse and then satisfy us, we shouldn't be viewing images or reading words to provoke lust and then leave us unsatisfied.

Sex was never intended on being a spectator event. And if we receive it, just receive the pornography, we encourage those who are selling their bodies and their souls, we encourage them to continue on their path to destruction.

The Apostle Paul tells us, 1 Corinthians 6, that the sexually immoral will not inherit the kingdom of God. In other words, they will be left out at the final judgment. In other words, they will go to hell.

And when we give to that business, to pornography, we add our little donation to their damnation. Sex is good, but for the sake of others, especially for those who do not have a legitimate outlet for their desires, we should strive for a culture in which nudity and sexuality is a private, personal, and marital experience.

If for some of you, don't have a spouse, and you have no, right now, no legitimate outlet for your desires, I'm kind of afraid this sermon could be a stumbling block. Words about having sex could stick in your mind and bother you, but remember the context, the commandment, no adultery.

It bans all sexual diversions outside of marriage, so keep that in mind, transform your mind. Don't let it be saturated with lust, and so your very thoughts become detestable to God. Instead, set your mind on things above.

Meditate on scripture. Your mind goes toward lust, maybe then divert it to the word of God. If lust is chasing you, pursue holiness. Sometimes being chased, you know, why does God give me these desires?

Well, maybe being chased is the incentive you need to run faster, run after the holiness, without which no one will see the Lord. Now, I know it's difficult in our culture. You know, we live in a sex-soaked culture because advertisers in Hollywood has discovered that sex sells.

Advertisers typically use scantily clad women to sell everything from hamburgers to shoes. Television reveals more and more skin in order to get more and more people to watch, so they will see advertisements with more and more scantily clad women, or men sometimes.

Who uses chastity or modesty to advertise? You don't see that virtue being held out there as a way to gather attention. Advertisers use sex because they know sex sells, but along with the shoes or hamburgers, that it supposedly sells, such advertising sells sex itself.

They make it seem normal to be promiscuous, to be immodest, to be focused on the sexy body. And so out of control, such a culture does not cultivate modesty, chastity, humility, or self-denial because such virtues do not make for, you know, an eye-popping 30-second ad.

Meanwhile, Jesus calls us to take up our cross and deny not our physical needs, but their claim to rule us. Seek first the kingdom, the rule of God. Adultery is breaking a covenant because you want the pleasure that you're not supposed to have, that belongs to another.

You don't want any rule over you.

You don't want any covenant restraining you. You want your spouse or someone else's spouse or your partner in adultery to be at your disposal, to give you something that doesn't belong to you. You want to consume them for your pleasure.

You wanna be the center. You wanna be God. But if we have been born again, if we have new hearts that now seek to live under his rule in his kingdom, then he's written a new covenant on our hearts. Not just rules outside of us telling what to do, it's the rules he's put in us because he's ruling us.

It's a covenant that teaches us modesty and chastity and humility and self-denial so that now our lives, all our lives, can be lived as sacrifices to God, acts of worship. Now, even our sex is not just for ourselves.

It can be not self-centered. It can be for our spouse, it can be for our own discipleship because we don't want to sin, but most of all, for the pleasures of God. And that will only come about when we see that this law, here, the commandment, shows us that we have not been free from sin, that we freely admit that we are guilty, even if we stayed within bounds with our bodies.

In our hearts, we are adulterers. We'll stop being adulterers when we so long to be made right, we're willing to chop off our hands or gouge out our eyes, but we know that's not where the trouble lies.

The trouble lies in our self-centered hearts, which now He has made new, born again, with a new covenant written on it. So from our hearts, we confess that Jesus is Lord. And why shouldn't we do that?

He's a God so good, He gave us laws that if we kept them,.

We would have far more pleasure.

Do you see the tragic irony of our disobedience?

We lose so much pleasure, so many good things, because we don't trust Him.

That He has the most pleasure for us,.

Because we would submit to His rule.

We think He's keeping something from us when He actually has the most good for us. So why don't we stop, turn around and really believe Him now?