Laws of Sexual Morality

We profess to believe all scripture is inspired by God. And this evening we press on into difficult territory because that's exactly what we do believe and we ask the Lord to give us understanding and to give us a seriousness in the study of his word.

Deuteronomy 22 and the Laws of Sexual Morality

We are in Deuteronomy chapter 22 beginning at verse 13. Deuteronomy chapter 22 beginning at verse 13. Once again, one of these texts, a specific text, I will make note of it, one of the more commonly used verses in attacks upon the Bible and its teaching of marriage.

So I will make note of that when we take a look at it here in this section. Deuteronomy 22 beginning at verse 13. If any man takes a wife and goes into her and then turns against her and charges her with shameful deeds and publicly defames her and says, I took this woman.

When I came near her, I did not find her a virgin. Then the girl's father and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of the girl's virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. The girl's father shall say to the elders, I gave my daughter to this man for a wife, but he turned against her.

And behold, he has charged her with shameful deeds, saying, I did not find your daughter a virgin. But this is the evidence of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city.

So the elders of that city shall take the man and chastise him, and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give it to the girl's father, because he publicly defamed a virgin of Israel. And she shall remain his wife.

He cannot divorce her all his days. But if this charge is true, that the girl was not found a virgin, then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death, because she has committed an act of folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father's house.

Thus you shall purge the evil from among you. If a man is found lying with a married woman, then both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman and the woman. Thus you shall purge the evil from Israel.

If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death.

The girl because she did not cry out in the city, and the man because he has violated his neighbor's wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you. But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die.

But you shall do nothing to the girl. There is no sin in the girl worthy of death, for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case. When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her.

If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are discovered, then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife, because he has violated her.

He cannot divorce her all his days. A man shall not take his father's wife, so that he will not uncover his father's skirt. Once again, we find ourselves in difficult territory, primarily because we live in such a very, very different day with very, very different understandings of marriage, society, property, so many other things that make these words seem so very strange to the modern ear.

Interestingly enough, down through the history of the world, they did not seem all that strange, but once you enter into a modern period where marriage is primarily viewed romantically rather than something that is a covenant relationship, something that is very vital to the culture, absolutely necessary to the continuation of the culture, you add into that the fact that in ancient Israel, the very property, the very makeup of the nation itself, how that was to be passed from generation to generation had to do with marriage and the continuation of the people of God as a society, so much so that it's very obvious that one of the focuses at the beginning of this section has to do with the father who has given his daughter as wife to this man.

Much is focused upon his honor. If a false accusation is brought against her, then the fine is given to him because it would be a tremendous dishonor to him even if she is found to have played the harlot.

You notice what the language was? Played the harlot where? In her father's house. So there was an entire element, actually numerous elements, related to the understanding of how the society is ordered, what marriage is, why it is necessary, that simply are no longer a part of Western thinking at all.

And so it's very difficult for us to contextualize these texts amongst people who have no interest, well, no knowledge of those ancient contexts and no interest in discovering those ancient contexts either.

But what you have here at the beginning, of course, is the issue of the necessity, the absolute necessity, of sexual ethics and morality in marriage. And obviously we live in a day where that is simply no longer believed.

In fact, there are many people in leadership positions who either have fully accepted or in fact would say that it is far better if you are an experienced person before you enter into marriage, that you're sexually experienced, that you have had encounters with many different people.

That is just simply a given anymore in most of Western society. The idea of keeping yourself for marriage, the idea of sexual purity, now that marriage isn't even looked at as being relevant to the future, as being something that you have any real desire to enter into because it is honorable, because it's important to your people, because it's important to your family, your parents, anything like that.

Since it's all just sort of a, well, if I choose, if I'm not, if it's all just for my happiness and my self-fulfillment, and I might have kids, might not, don't really care, doesn't really matter to me, everything's me, me, me, me, me.

Since that's the situation we live in, a person approaching this will have no idea why there would be, well, actually even the death penalty applied to situations of infidelity that are found here in this particular text.

So at the beginning we have this situation, and a man marries a woman. This was a situation where the woman has been given, in marriage, to a man. It was the father's decision to do so. There was a financial transaction involved.

There was dowry money paid in regards to that. And hence, the man's, the father's, his honor is a part of this equation that is basically not any longer believed almost anywhere outside of the Middle East, and in some, I guess, far eastern nations as well.

And so, the man makes an accusation, and he says she was not a virgin. And there's two possibilities as to how this turns out. The gate of the city, the elders are involved, there is examination, there is examination of the facts, because obviously history shows us that there's been a lot of abuse of situations like this down through the history of the world.

But two outcomes are possible. If she is found to have been a virgin, this man has made this public accusation, then he is chastised before the people, he is fined, and then the thing that strikes so many of us as so very odd is he cannot divorce her.

Now, in our day, you would think, and she can kick him to the curb and go on and find happiness someplace else. But again, we have to remember in the couple of times here where there can be no divorce of the woman, and the verse that I was mentioning to you earlier about the one that's used a lot is the one later on about the man who forces a virgin and they're discovered and he has to pay the dowry for her and he cannot divorce her.

That's always used in atheist websites and things like that. The Bible says that you have to marry your rapist. Well, again, that sounds really odd in our day. But what you need to realize is in this day, that was a protection for the woman.

There were laws in place regarding maintaining her, providing for her, children, everything. There was laws in place. And once it was discovered, once it becomes known that she has been violated in this way, she would not be able to obtain that position through marriage there amongst the people of Israel.

And so it's actually a protection for her and it is a control upon someone else hopefully, first of all, to keep it from happening. But secondly, if it does happen, it is meant to support her, not to punish her.

But of course, if you view marriage as nothing more than a temporary happiness contract that you can have with male, female, multiple numbers, whatever, and get rid of it six months from now if you don't like it, sort of like buying a new car or something like that, then there's really no connection between that way of thinking and that which we're dealing with here.

And so one might say, well, you know, this idea of evidence and all the rest of that stuff, couldn't there be physical situations that would play into this that might falsely accuse the woman of not being a virgin?

Yes, but I think that what we're dealing with here is God's law amongst God's people and the assumption, I think, that we can operate on is that God is going to protect a true virgin of Israel from this type of a situation.

And again, I could think of all sorts of ways on a naturalistic basis where you wouldn't like that, but we're dealing with God's law here and God is providing this to his people. Now, you may ask the question, why such an incredibly strong penalty?

Well, you'll notice she has committed an act of folly, verse 21, in Israel by playing the harlot in her father's house, thus you shall purge the evil from among you. In each one of these situations, the level of sexual ethics is far beyond anything that we have today and many people would raise the charge of it being simply barbaric.

If we did not have everything else that is in God's law, if we did not have the charges to love the Lord your God, the charge to be walking in your house morning, noon and night, discussing the things of God, to have the commandments posted upon your doorway and in the garments, to put the scroll of the law in your garments and so on and so forth, and if we did not have the regular exposure that was supposed to be part and parcel of what the priests and the scribes would bring to God's people, if we were talking about a secular society here, that would be a different thing.

But for someone to be so hardened and to be so blatant in their rejection of God's law so as to play the harlot in her father's house, she's not just lied to the prospective husband, she has lied to her own father, she has lied to her own family, she has brought this action directly into her father's house and what happens is when you don't punish that, that leads to the next generation and that next generation is not going to uphold God's law and the standard is going to get lower and then the next generation lower and the next generation lower until you have what we end up seeing in the history of Israel and you have Molech being worshipped and children being passed to the fire and everything else and once again, we tend to disassociate everything and go, well, it's just this one instance when it's not just that one instance, very often when you have these very strong penalties, the whole idea is once it happens, it is to stand as a warning to anyone else, don't let this happen and when it starts happening with regularity, we all know what happens.

The Old Testament history of Israel is a constant reminder of the amazing speed of the degradation that can take place within that society and that is exactly what we see in history itself and so, in this section on sexual ethics, it is interesting that the context in which these encounters are discovered becomes relevant.

Notice, if something happens in a city, it's different than if it happens in the field. Now again, when we think of city, we think of our modern context and it's really easy for us to go, well, come on, this couldn't work because I've got double paned windows, you know, someone could cry out in my home and nobody outside is going to hear it, my neighbors aren't going to hear it.

Good grief, I yell for my wife half the time when I've, you know, I forgot my towel in the bathroom, you know, and I have to yell my head off just to get my wife to hear me and she's just around the corner.

So, this is ridiculous, this wouldn't work. Yeah, but they didn't have double paned windows in those days. In fact, they really didn't have windows as we would describe them at all. And so, a city would not be what we have today with a couple million people in it, it would be a very small community in comparison to what we have.

And so, there would be a lot more knowledge about what's going on and it is fascinating to me that the context then becomes directly relevant to the punishment that is prescribed. So, the evil from Israel, adultery, if a man is found lying with a married woman, then both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman and the woman, thus he shall purge the evil from Israel.

So, if there is a, the assumption here is consensual. The assumption here is there is no, there is nothing here about force, there is nothing here about what we would call rape at all, this is simply adultery taking place and capital punishment is what is prescribed for it.

If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and again, I know we all know this, but engagement was considerably more binding and relevant in that day than it is today. I mean, if engagement can be gotten rid of by simply going, go away, that's not overly binding.

Okay? Engagement at that time was a legally binding thing. And so, there is already a relationship. And so, if there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, so it's in the city, then you should bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death.

Remember, whenever the gate of the city is mentioned, there has to have been examination by the elders. The elders are in charge of what happens at the gate of the city, they're the ones that are required to know the law, they're the ones that are required to look into this to make sure this is not a, you know, just someone trying to take advantage of somebody else.

You shall stone them to death, the girl because she did not cry out in the city and the man because he has violated his neighbor's wife. Notice, neighbor's wife. So, the idea of engagement there, much higher level of commitment than what we have today.

Thus, you shall purge the evil from among you. But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die. Why? You shall do nothing to the girl, there is no sin in the girl worthy of death for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case.

When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out but there was no one to save her. Now, think about that for just a moment. There is a presumption provided here that could be taken advantage of.

The woman may have wanted to do this. Now, it says, it seems to be, forces her. So, the idea is that there was force on her part. We don't know whether she cried out or not but the presumption is going to be that she did.

There is going to be a presumption of innocence given the context of the event itself. That's an important thing to notice. The man is put to death. The woman, you shall do nothing to the girl, there is no sin in the girl worthy of death.

When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out but there was no one to save her. But then in another situation, verse 28, if a man finds a girl who is a virgin who is not engaged, so, she is, has, her father has not entered into that very formal situation.

I suppose I should ask, how many of you have seen Fiddler on the Roof? Remember Fiddler on the Roof? Okay. Everyone should watch Fiddler on the Roof just simply because it provides you with some decent biblical backgrounds on a few topics.

And some others that aren't really biblical but are interesting anyways. You remember the situation where Tevye arranged to have one of his daughters married and then he breaks the engagement because, well, she's a modern woman and la la la la la.

But there was a there was an arrangement made and that is what has happened in the engagement situations. But here, so there would have been money given in the engagement, the dowry situation. If a man finds a girl who is a virgin who is not engaged, there's been no exchange of the dowry, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered, then the man who lay with her shall give the girl's father 50 shekels of silver.

Why? Well, because he's not going to be able he's not going to be able to get a dowry in the future because she has been violated. And so the man who does this has to pay the dowry price, shall give to the girl's father 50 shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her.

He cannot divorce her all his days. And there's there's the hard part. There's the part people point to. See, this is terrible. This is terrible. The Bible forces you to marry your rapist. Well, no, it doesn't.

And given the context that we live in today, where this woman is well, there's not going to be any there's not going to be any payment of money. There's no dowry situation. There's no situation where life itself could be depend upon whether you have the support of a husband or not.

None of those things prevail. So the idea that, well, if someone, if a guy well, of course, this is only one situation. This is a unengaged virgin. All of the context of this is no longer a part of what we could possibly understand as the issue of marriage.

And so, in reality, the rapist is the one who should be arrested and the full extent of the law brought against that particular individual. But the point of this verse, as I said earlier, is the protection of the woman and her family.

Both. Both. You might say, I cannot imagine being married to such a man. Well, again, keep in mind that this is just a part of what the law would say. What would this man also have to be doing in regards to the offering of sacrifices?

What did the law say to him as to his heart condition before God? There's everything else that ends up just being pushed off the side and we never think about that. But the fact is, she is put in a position where she now has a firmer position in regards to inheritance and children and so on and so forth than if he had just simply married some other woman and had gone through the normal process and yet he could divorce her.

He cannot divorce this woman. Her protection and her status is absolutely protected by the fact that he did this wrongly. Now, we obviously have to address one rather obvious issue here. And that is marriage in this day was not something that was entered into merely for self-satisfaction and gratification.

It was not the personal fulfillment romance novel type of situation that has become so common in our day. That's not what it was. And trying to transfer wholesale the ancient parameters protecting that institution which were so vital to the very continuation of the people.

To try to transfer that into our modern age will always end up it's a process fraught not only with difficulties for those of us who want to honor the word but obviously those who want to dishonor it pretty easy for them to do so.

Pretty easy for them to ignore the historical context. Ignore what was actually going on. Ignore what the differences really were. But one thing is obvious as we look at these texts entering into this issue of marriage was central to the self-identification of the people of Israel.

It was central to how land was to be parceled and continued in one family. That's why you have, for example, the Levrite Law. That's why you have a section coming up. A man who will not engage in the Levrite Law is to be shamed amongst his people.

That is, if your brother dies, you're to raise up seed to your brother and so on and so forth. We can't even begin to understand these things because our entire culture is not based upon that type of continuation within a particular land within a particular ethnic identity which was the case when speaking to the people of Israel.

And so there had to be protections that were provided. Not only protection against gross evil in the society, but protection against victims of gross evil in that society. And what you have here are actually protections for the women.

For the woman who is engaged and then raped in the field, her innocence is presumed. And here, for the virgin who is not engaged, she is also protected because she is given a special status of non-divorceability and hence all the laws that would require the husband to care for, raise up children with, inheritance, everything else become hers in perpetuity without the ability for that relationship to be broken.

Now that's a protection, that's not a punishment. In our day, with all that other stuff gone, it would become a punishment. You have to marry your rapist. But that's not what it was referring to at all.

And so keeping those things in mind, then verse 30 just seems like a little bit of an add-on, but it's not, given what happened in Corinth. A man shall not take his father's wife so that he will not uncover his father's skirt.

In other words, seemingly the context would probably not be while the father was alive, but maybe he has passed away and then a son marries the widow. This is not to be done amongst the people of Israel, again because of the impropriety of the prior relationship.

And so here you have sort of a section of, remember what was called at the top, sundry laws, but here they have to do with sexual ethics and morality and when we consider what the context of marriage was and what the nature of the nation of Israel was, they are primarily provided to purge evil from the people and to protect victims in those particular situations.

Applying Ancient Marriage Law Today

Now, how do we on a practical level deal with utilization of materials like this? In many of the contexts where we have a very short period of time, in many of the contexts such as social media today, and for those of you who don't use social media, don't even worry about it, you probably are better off without knowing.

But given the fact that the attention span of the average American is about that long, I mean I told you when I, you saw when I went on the Dr. Drew show last year, they specifically have the commitment to change the camera angle, change the topic, change what's being said about every 20 seconds, because that's about as long as you can keep a person's attention on one particular topic.

Well, I'm not sure there's much you can do in a situation like that. You can try your best, you can repeat yourself often, but I'll just be honest and say there are some situations where there isn't much you can say, other than you know, if you ever really seriously want to know what those texts are about, let's talk, but I don't get the feeling right now that you do.

Sometimes that's the best you can do. And that opens up at least a possibility for some level of conviction and an expression of a serious desire on someone's part to actually engage the conversation and to do some follow-up when you could actually provide some of the background, some of the context.

But the reality is we live in a day where even we, in many ways, have imbibed a sexual ethic that is not a biblical sexual ethic. It does not see God as creator, it does not see him as having control over human behavior.

And in many ways, we have all been deeply influenced by the developments in Western society in regards to the nature of marriage. And you simply cannot work with people constantly and be around people constantly who have a mindset that marriage exists to make me happy.

It exists, it's not a covenant on my part. It's solely based upon emotion and not upon commitment. You can't live amongst people like that without at some point imbibing some of that mindset and having to be constantly working to work against it.

I mentioned that one of the I mentioned, I was actually talking to a young Muslim man yesterday. And I asked him how old he was. And he was in his early 30s. I said, are you married? No, not yet. I said, why?

And we started talking about why people are delaying marriage for so long. And things like that. From my perspective, there are three great events that mature you. That radically change your outlook and function to suck selfishness out of you.

The first is marriage itself. Because she thinks and she does things differently and we have to be patient with one another and wow, it just totally changes everything. But you only go so far with that.

Until children. And children being the very black hole of selfishness. I mean, when a child comes into the world, what are they other than a huge pile of me? You know? Feed me. Change me. Just me, me, me, me, me, me.

And it just sucks the selfishness right out of you. There's nothing you can do. You got to do what you got to do. So that's the second thing. But then I said, the third thing is called grandchildren. And it's not because, you know, you get to send the little thing home with mom and dad.

There is an advantage to that. Especially for sleeping and things like that. It's wonderful. Though, I have to say, Clementine has only rarely caused us any sleeping issues when she's been at our house.

But the reality is that it makes you think so much more about what the world is going to be like when you are no longer in it. What's the world going to be like for that little thing that I love so much?

Even more so than children. Because you're still pretty young when you have the children. Once you got the grandchildren, now you've got some perspective. And I've mentioned to Kelly a few times, I think one of the greatest gifts that we can give our grandchildren is that they get to come over to Nani and Punkle's house.

And Nani and Punkle, I'm Punkle, don't even bother. It was the first way grandpa came out and she made sure that she kept going with it. So I'm naming the appropriate guilty party here. But anyway, the point is she can go to Nani and Punkle's house.

And Nani is my mommy's mommy. And Punkle is my mommy's daddy. Not stepdaddy or anything else. My mommy, see I've got pictures of my mommy with Nani and Punkle. And she loves looking at pictures. Who's that?

And we can frequently fool her with pictures of Summer because if any of you all remember what Summer looked like and you look at Clementine and go and we even mess up. I mean Clementine because they just look so much alike.

But she can pick out who Nani is. She was reading a book about some Disney character and there was some blonde princess doing something in one of the pictures and Clementine goes, Nani! So she'll pick out even in the pictures of us with Summer.

The point is a gift has been given to her in being able to see that for almost 34 years Kelly and I have been together and that's what gave Summer and Josh and now she's there and she has her mommy and daddy and there's this stability there.

It's a gift. I mentioned to someone just recently, we're coming up on 34 years and after 30, the next one is 35 and then 40. The ones in between are sort of like it's just a weird number. And I guess 33 last year is like a third of a century.

But she didn't like that idea so we skipped that one. So, you know, but the idea is, I mentioned it to someone and they're like, 34 years? Really? And I remember Summer when she worked at Starbucks. She told us once, yeah, mom came in and after she left she says, yeah, that's my mom.

Your mom? She looks so young. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've married 30 some odd years and they're like, no, no one can be, because no one working there had parents that had been married for almost any period of time at all.

At least the same person. And our fidelity in that situation, our fidelity in these matters, it's a testimony. It is something to cherish when the Lord gives you stable homes and relationships. And in these situations that we find here in Deuteronomy chapter 22, the norm is the result of the blessings of God.

These laws exist to protect that norm. They are not barbaric laws meant to punish innocent victims or anything else. They're there to purge evil, because if you don't purge that evil, eventually the degradation starts to eat at and destroy the very mechanism that God has provided to give us the greatest happiness.

And that's what we see around us in our land today. That's what we see around us in our land today. I think it is absolutely child abuse what we're doing to many of our children today. Put them in situations with two mothers, two fathers, it's child abuse.

How did we get there? Well, we lost sight of the nature of marriage as a covenant, as a commitment, as something that God commands to be protected, even at the cost of life, as we see in these texts. Will the secularist give us the time of day to even think along those lines?

Probably not. Probably not. But we have to be aware of it. We have to be aware of it. We have to know what these texts were actually saying. And hopefully, as we only have a few more of them to work through, once we're done, we will have a strong commitment to a recognition of looking at the whole of the law, not just as parts of it, isolated from each other.

Prayer for Faithfulness to God's Truth

Let's pray together. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity once again of looking to your truth, even looking at difficult texts that call us to a very high understanding of the nature of covenants and commitment.

They require us to recognize the differences between your people of old and us today, yes, but likewise require us to recognize that it's far too easy for us, far too easy for us to adopt an ungodly perspective.

It's far too easy for us to wander away from the high calling. It's easy for us to look back upon ancient man and look down upon him. Instead, we need to recognize in many ways we in the modern period are the ones who are savages in comparison to those of the ancient world.

So help us to remember this. Help us to learn from your truth. May we be faithful to it and faithful to you in this coming week. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.