VII. You shall not commit adultery.
Adultery, properly understood, is basically participating in any activity that is reserved for marriage, outside of marriage. Marriage, properly understood, is a covenant between a man, a woman, and God. It is not just a union of man and woman.
This is critical to any faith understanding of the issue of marriage.
God sanctifies the sexual relationship as part of that covenant. When entering into a marriage, the bodies of each participant become one and enjoying each other honors Him. Any sexual relationship outside of that covenant is dishonoring. This covenant is also only ending under the conditions that God has placed, which seems to indicate infidelity.
Jesus further clarified for us that a man even looking upon a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart. That doesn’t mean He stated that a man looking at a woman with lust would validate a divorce, but that the seriousness of relational boundaries is severe.
A human government is not involved in marriage at all, in the eyes of God.
Now, if a human government is not part of the covenant, there is no role they should play in licensing. None. It is not their responsibility and they have not been given that authority. The license for marriage comes from God, and any authority assumed by any other entity to author it is void.
O ye Christians of little faith.
Concerned with the idea that some sinful relationships would persist, or that they might even thrive, Christians lined up to bend the knee in deference to human authority in an attempt to regulate the relationships of other people. Human authority, as it is wont to do, as defined it to be whatever they think is convenient.
Is it fear that God will not bless the obedient? Are they concerned that relationships God has deemed abhorrent will continue to look very appealing unless they were to use the violence of government to separate them?
In most matters of state, my fellow Christians are lukewarm, and most of them know what Jesus says should be done with them.
Governing authorities have not strictly promoted the idea of adultery, but they have stripped the church of any semblance of authority on the subject by usurping the authority of God. Over time, laws which held one party of the marriage accountable for the divorce, granting more power to the harmed party during arbitration, have eroded and adultery has been ignored or at least been considered less important.
An adulterous wife could claim she was neglected and emotionally vulnerable. An adulterous husband could claim his wife was not submitting in their marriage.
This erosion of the moral principle at stake in the marriage covenant was only possible by the church subjugating itself to human institutions to define objects like marriage.
Most important of all this is that God uses the imagery of adultery to show Israel that their following of other deities and subjugation to other powers was in violation of their relationship with Him.
Granting the authority of defining and licensing marriage to the state is, according to scripture, the same as adultery. It is turning to another power to fulfill the role and to carry the authority of God. The granting of deference belonging to God, instead to the state, is the same as entering covenant with the state. That covenant, the marriage between state authority and the people of God, is adulterous.
It is tempting, and understandable, that Christians might seek to use the violence and coercion of the state in order to enforce behaviors they prefer in society. In terms of utility, it is the proverbial house set against itself, though. A house divided cannot stand, and a church hoping to espouse Christian values and morals into the society surrounding itself, that places authority belonging to God in the hands of state authority, will not succeed.
Christians would be wise to reflect on their humble beginnings of the faith. State authority was turned against them and wielded inappropriately. As the faith continued to grow, and eventually thrive, they came to represent a politically respected group and state authority began appealing to the growing number of Christians in order to retain their hold on power. The alliance formed with occasional bones being thrown to the church as long as they continued to acquiesce to occasional state abuses.
This continued to evolve until the state began using the immoral relationship with the church to gain assent and even overt support for measures that were antithetical to the teachings of the church. Nowhere did Jesus justify crusades or burning non-believers at the stake, but as the political dissidents often disagreed with the established church, it was an unholy alliance between church and state in which both benefitted.
While the organized church and the religious hierarchy might have benefitted, dissidents, and the true Church, the actual believers, suffered tremendously.
The ultimate in adultery is the engaging with state authority in any method which is supposed to be reserved for God and his believers.
If you need to catch up, catch the rest of the series on the Ten Commandments so far: I, II, III, IV, V, VI. Please subscribe so you can receive the rest of the series when published and let me know what you thing.
In the meantime, if you haven’t purchased your copy of “Faith Seeking Freedom” what are you waiting for? Any respectable Christian at least has to engage with the ideas, even if they disagree with them. Regardless, it is important to note these are not just ramblings of your author, here, but thoughts consistent in a stream of Christian intellectual thought.
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