Seventh Commandment
Exodus 20:14 “You shall not commit adultery.”
Psalms 119:137-138 “You are righteous, Lord, and your laws are right. The statutes you have laid down are righteous; they are fully trustworthy.”
God’s laws fit human nature. Laws that our legislative branch makes should fit human nature and since human nature is fallen this should be kept in mind regarding the laws legislature makes. If the laws do not fit human nature then I would say that those laws are unjust.
A question that then comes up is: What laws are unjust? To answer this we need to have a basis for judging that which is unjust. Right now we have two systems for doing this. The first system is God’s standard which is laid down in the Holy Scripture: The Ten Commandments.
Our Founding Fathers followed God’s standard and for a number of years our society was based on the Ten Commandments, but we are now turning away from it. What are we turning to?
The past number of years we have begun to accept another method of obtaining knowledge and that is through human reasoning based on human experience instead of the revelation from God. So what we have today is fallen man making laws for fallen man. Talk about the fox in the hen house! So what has this resulted in today? We have laws that protect abortion on demand (taking of innocent life), redefine marriage, tax laws that are unreasonable, etc. The result of this is the making of laws based on human reasoning instead of divine revelation.
It was Noah Webster who said: “All carnal intercourse between the sexes, except in lawful marriage is forbidden.” He goes on to say that the consequence of breaking this law is unspeakably great. “The injuries to health, the dissipation of property, the ruin of female character, the destruction of family happiness, and the abandonment of all moral and religious principle, with the final loss of the soul, are among the woeful consequences of this wickedness.” In our society today we see the result of this: fatherless homes, divorce, latchkey children, etc. In other words, the result is the disintegration of the basic building block for a stable society: the family.
The stable family will produce a stable nation. Ephesians 5:21–23 lays out the principles that will produce stable relationships to produce a stable family. A question often debated today is whether a woman can compete with men in public life and the answer is that of course they can. But it is also true what Stephen McDowell brings out: “No one can compete with the mother in the home – no one can fill her place.”
Hebrews 2:1 says: “We must pay the most careful attention therefore, to what we’ve heard, so that we do not drift away.” In 1 Corinthians 7:2 God told us: “Let every man have his own wife, and that every woman have her own husband.” In Hebrews 13:4 God reminds us that, “Marriage is honorable and the bed undefiled.”
In Genesis 2:22 God instituted marriage in paradise; He brought the woman to the man and He gave them to each other in marriage. In John 2:2 we see that Jesus Christ honored a marriage ceremony with His presence. From teaching in Scripture we learn that the special duties belonging to marriage are love and purity.
However, we find today that because we have not “paid close attention to what has been said” we have not only drifted away, but today we find many families, marriages, and homes shipwrecked resulting in heavy cost upon our Western social fabric.
It would seem from this seventh Commandment that the most important thing for the church today is to help establish godly families according to biblical principles.
We know that lust is the very foundation of the sin of adultery. Since the fall of man holy love has degenerated into lust. Scripture brings out that adultery is twofold: It begins in the mind: mentally. Matthew 5:28 states: “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Then the physical act that is forbidden by God’s law: “You shall not commit adultery.”
Job, whom God called a righteous man, calls adultery a heinous crime. Every failing is not a crime, but adultery is a heinous crime. Jeremiah, speaking for God says that adultery is outrageous: “They have done outrageous things in Israel; they have committed adultery with their neighbors’ wives.” Adultery is outrageous because it is a breach of the marriage oath that man and woman made in the presence of God to be faithful to each other. And it is a great dishonor to God because the adulterer sets his will above God’s law.