Matthew 5:27-30
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
What was marriage created to be?
I want us to start by asking this question, because I believe it will put us in the right frame of mind to examine this passage, and will set the table for unpacking these verses. What was marriage created to be? I want to give you three truths that help us understand God’s design for marriage.
THREE TRUTHS ABOUT THE DESIGN OF MARRIAGE
- A God given gift (Gen. 2:18 “It is not good that the man should be alone, I will make him a helper fit for him”) God saw Adam’s state and gave him a wife as a gift.
- Marriage is a man and woman joining together in unity. A unity that brings a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual intimacy like no other relationship.(Gen 2:24 “They shall become one flesh”) (Gen. 2:25 “They were both naked and were not ashamed”) There was a freedom there to fully know and be fully known, and at the same time to love fully and be fully loved. There is a level of trust in this intimacy that is meant to go beyond any other human relationship.
- Marriage is a picture of what God’s love is like for us. (Ephesians 5:25-33 “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.) Marriage was designed to be a bright light shining on the love and faithfulness of God in this world.
What Is Adultery?
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ Adultery is a distortion of marriage in every way. Going back to our three points about marriage, it distorts every one of them.
THREE WAYS THAT ADULTERY DISTORTS GOD’S DESIGN FOR MARRIAGE
- Adultery is a despising of God’s good gift. God says to David after he has committed adultery with Uriah’s wife, “Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?” It is a prideful ingratitude for God’s blessings.
- Adultery is a betrayal of trust which separates what was meant to be unified. Mark 10:6-9 “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, 8 and the two will become one flesh.’So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” And Paul says in 1 Cor. 6:16 “Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two will become one flesh.’” Any form of adultery is a uniting of yourself with another in a way that was only ever meant for your spouse.
Adam and Eve were “naked and not ashamed”, meaning there is vulnerability in this intimacy that could lead to shame, and that is exactly what adultery does. Rather than protecting, it flaunts the vulnerability of your spouse before another and tramples that trust into the ground. That is why the writer of Hebrews says, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure.” Heb. 13:4 The marriage bed is a place where trust is either protected and built up, or betrayed and destroyed. In Proverbs 5 Solomon says, “15 Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. 16 Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? 17 Let them be for yourself alone, and not for strangers with you. 18 Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth,”
- Adultery is a misrepresentation of what God’s love is like. The covenant faithfulness and joyful intimacy of a marriage is meant to display the faithfulness of God, the joy that God has in Himself as the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, and the joy which He has in His people and means for them to have in Him. He is always faithful and that will never change. Paul says in 2 Timothy, even “if we are faithless, He remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself.” That is who He is and the covenant faithfulness of marriage is meant to display that. When we enter into a marriage, we take on the responsibility of representing what God’s love, and faithfulness are like. So when we break that relationship through the idolatry of adultery, we display a wrong image of God’s love to our spouse, to ourselves, and to the world around us.
Why does Jesus equate lust with adultery?
We tend to equate adultery solely with the physical act of sex outside the covenant relationship of man and wife and do our best to avoid that one specific thing. This is what the Pharisees were doing in this time. In the whole realm of sexuality they believed that if they could avoid outward physical action, they believed themselves to be right before God. Just like with the commandment not to murder from last week. If I don’t actually kill someone, I’m free from guilt before God.
This is exactly what we do in our minds as well. We can see the effects of the outward physical sin in many ways: pain, divorce, diseases, abortions, single parents, broken homes, human trafficking, and many other things. So we put up our red flags around this sin, and we avoid it at all costs, or we really beat ourselves up when we fall into it. And honestly, the red flags are not the problem. Jesus is not at all saying, “don’t worry about the physical act.” He’s saying, “you actually don’t have enough red flags. This sin covers way more ground than you thought.” Jesus helps us to come back to what has always been the message of scripture on adultery. “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”. This scripture is directed at heterosexual men, but it applies to everyone. The passage could very well read, “everyone who looks at [another person] with lustful intent has already committed adultery with [him/her] in [his/her] heart.” Jesus speaks to the specific group out of the crowd, but the principle applies for all people.
So what is lust, or lustful intent? The Greek word epithyme?, used here in this passage, is the same word that is translated elsewhere as desire or covet. It has sexual connotations, especially given the context of this sentence, connected to “looks at a woman with”, lust, desire, coveting. I believe that Jesus meant, looks at a woman and desires to have her sexually. But in the same way we discussed earlier, that he was speaking to a certain group in a certain way, I believe that he is also teaching principles here that apply at many other levels. The principle is this. There are many things within this covenant bond that are only meant to be fulfilled within the specific confines of that marriage: the oneness, the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual intimacy, and the security of that intimacy in the trust that is created there. When we long for any person to fill any of those roles which only our spouse is meant to fill, we are lusting after, coveting, desiring that person in a way that breaks what marriage was meant to be. This is a form of idolatry in which we take God and what He has designed for us, either marriage or singleness, and we put someone else in His place. Rather than longing for God and what He has planned for us, we long for our own plans and our own selfish desires. Jesus reminds us in this verse that our actions have never been the main problem, but always our hearts. “You have heard it said…but I say to you…” He is not giving them new laws to follow, but helping them to truly understand what has been the heart of God from the beginning, sin has not simply distorted our actions, but our affections. Our hearts are the problem.
Martin Lloyd Jones, the physician turned preacher, illustrates this wonderfully. He says, “Symptoms can vary tremendously. I may see one person propped up in bed, breathing painfully, and in acute distress; and I say that person is desperately ill suffering from pneumonia or something like that. But I may see another person lying flat on his back in bed, no distress, no acute symptoms, no pain, no difficult breathing, lying apparently at ease and in comfort. And yet there may be some foul disease, some foul growth in that person’s constitution eating away at the vitals, a disease which will kill as certainly and as surely as the other. It is not the mode but the fact of death that matters. It is not the symptoms that finally count, but the disease.” Why does God purge the earth with a flood in the days of Noah? Not simply because of their actions, Genesis 6:5 “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” We see this in how God prescribes repentance. The way He wants to restore us from sin, speaks just as clearly to sin’s deep roots in our hearts. David says in Psalm 51:16-17 “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” and the prophet Joel says, “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” – Joel 2:12-13
Now, why is the “looking upon” pointed out as important in this passage? Our eyes can lead our hearts to idolize something without ever touching it. Job says in Job 31:1, “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” and why does he worry about gazing upon her? He gives us the answer in verse 7 of the same chapter, “If my step has turned from the way, or my heart followed my eyes.” Our hearts are prone to follow what we put before our eyes. How did it start with Eve? “when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes” What about David? “he saw from the roof a woman bathing. And the woman was very beautiful”. What we see following in these two accounts is simply the evidence that the heart has already chosen its treasure. The idol has already been put in its place. The disease has already taken root in the heart and it is the sickness that will lead to death. When we gaze upon another, we see them as a means to our satisfaction rather than what God has prescribed. So what has God prescribed to satisfy our desires in this area of marital intimacy?
First and foremost for every person, married or single, He has given Himself. Psalm 63:1 “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” He is the living water for the adulteress woman at the well. He is the bread of life which we need more than food. He is the healer of disease and sickness, the giver of sight to the blind, and life to the dead. He is the one who bore our sins in his body on the cross to bring us all of these things in Himself. What do we need to be satisfied? Jesus.
Jesus Christ satisfies the single person with the gift of celibacy in singleness. You may think that sounds more like a curse, but Paul tells the Corinthian church in 1 Cor. 7, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman”, and later he says, “I wish that all of you were as I am (unmarried and without sexual relations), but each of you has your own gift from God.” Singleness is a gift from God, and He is able to fill you with the Spirit so that self control might keep you from following the desires of your flesh. That means that as a single person, whether you are dating, or even engaged to be married, or never plan on getting married, you don’t need to gaze at images, or look at people on the street, or fantasize about what might be, or take part in any kind of physical touching, or in any type of self pleasing. Jesus is enough. He is always enough.
In the same way, Jesus Christ satisfies the married person the gift of faithfulness in marriage. Paul also says, “But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband.” Marriage does not leave behind self control, as there are still clearly defined boundaries, and all the same things I said to singles apply here, Jesus is still your satisfaction, not your spouse. The only difference is the allowance of marital intimacy with your spouse and no one else. So you don’t need anything extra when your spouse is away, or you’re on a business trip, or they are sick, or you are having a fight. Marriage is the only God-honoring avenue for this type of intimacy, and Jesus is always enough.
So when we look upon another, who we are not married to, to fulfill our desires, even if we never touch them in any way, we are still forsaking God’s gift of satisfied singleness or satisfied marriage in Christ. We are still tearing apart the union that God designed for intimacy in marriage by bringing another into our heart and uniting our heart to them. We are still betraying the trust that is found in the intimacy of marriage by taking and looking upon that which was not given to us, and exposing the vulnerability of another were it was never meant to be seen. And we are still misrepresenting God’s love, by saying with our lives that He would forsake His covenant, and delight Himself with evil.
This is where I believe that oftentimes, women really have it right, at least in the feeling, and the weight of the response, and this was something that hit he so hard this week as I was preparing. Jesus is really saying that looking upon a woman lustfully IS adultery. I think as men trying to follow the Lord and grow in holiness with our eyes, we can usually see that pornography, or undressing a woman with our eyes, or wishing our spouse looked like this or that is wrong and unhelpful to our growth as Christians and unhelpful to our marriages. However, many times I’ve heard, and I have said myself, “my wife just doesn’t understand, it has nothing to do with her, it’s not personal”. And the Lord has broken me over those words this week. You see the pain and the hurt that your wife feels is real, and they’re not overreacting, because it has everything to do with her, and it is incredibly personal. I have failed so often to see this sin as actual adultery. I think about actually committing the act with another woman and it scares me to death. And then I think about all the times that I’ve failed in this area, and I think, “that’s not good, but it’s just something we all struggle with”. There’s this huge disconnect in our minds, and I believe that’s exactly what Jesus is getting at here in this passage. Lust IS adultery. There’s no excusing it, there’s no getting around it, and when we come to this realization, we need to fall on our faces before the cross and plead the blood of Christ to cleanse us from our sin and make us like Himself.
Jesus commands us to take action in accordance with the severity of this sin. “If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out…if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off” Is this command literal? Those are really drastic measures. Yes. I think that if we would take these words seriously as truth, we would see so much more clearly, the weight of what Jesus is saying here. If your hand truly was going to keep you from eternal life in heaven with Christ, then you would know so clearly what must be done in that situation. You would gladly let go of your hand, no matter how valuable it is to you, no matter how much skill you posses with it, no matter how painful it may be to remove it, if you knew for sure that to keep your hand was to lose eternity with Christ. It’s an obvious choice. 20, 30, even 80 years of pain and discomfort is certainly worth an eternity of pleasure in the presence of Christ. But, the eye and the hand are not really the problem are they? So what do we do?
Jesus says if your eye causes you to sin, or if your hand causes you to sin, meaning that if those things were at the root of your sin, then you better get rid of them. But we know already, that the root of our sin is not in our eyes or hands but in our heart.
There are however things in our lives that can feed the sinfulness in our hearts. Things that will plant the seeds of lust in our minds that the sin nature in us will feed upon. These may be perfectly good things in and of themselves. Titus 1:15 “To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.” The problem there is that our hearts are not pure. Our minds and consciences have been defiled by our sin.
We must make every effort to guard our hearts from those seeds that lead our hearts to wander. Again, remember Job says, “I have made a covenant with my eyes”, and also David says in Psalm 101, “I will set no worthless thing before my eyes.” What seeds are you planting your heart? And if they are unhelpful or dangerous, are you willing to cut them off?
Think about your input. I was talking over email to Greg Riner about this passage and he said something that is so helpful in this area, and so often neglected because of its subtlety and pervasiveness in our culture. I asked him for permission to share this with you because it is so helpful. He said,
“Pornography is more than imagery. It is ideology. Almost all media, even PG, and social media is pornographic, visually and ideologically. It encourages alluring doctrines to inspire compromise, just one compromise. Our enemy is indeed clever. He knows that compromise never occurs in isolation. The first will ALWAYS produce a second, then perhaps a third, fourth, etc.” – Greg Riner.
So what are you putting into your mind through TV, movies, social media, radio, magazines, books, or anything else? What ungodly and unhelpful ideas are being continuously poured into your brain? Think also about your time. Do you spend a lot of time with people of the opposite sex that are not your spouse? Do you spend time alone with them? That’s something to consider even if being alone with that person is part of your job. What about boredom? Do you have lots of free time, or time alone by yourself where you can be idle or lazy? Even where you go can be a problem. Is going to the gym a problem for you? The mall? The grocery store? Park? Are you careful with your eyes when you are out in public? What about your relationships? Do you have any friends who really make this hard for you?
Take time to examine your life and see what you are putting into your mind and what then comes out of your heart. Look for patterns, what surrounds the times in your life when temptations are the strongest? Are there things that you need to get rid of for the sake of your eternal soul?
How can we live in light of the weightiness of this sin without becoming legalistic?
I want to give you five truths that will help you in this fight. First, we must trust in the Lord above ourselves. Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and and do not lean on your own understanding. 6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” Jeremiah 9:23-24 “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.” You can be as careful as you want about what you put into your mind, but if you are not leaning heavily upon the Lord in every moment, you will surely fall.
Second, don’t solely concentrate on keeping bad things out of your mind. Are you also filling up your mind with good things? Read Psalm 119, see that God’s word is a lamp for our feet and light to our path. Remember that David found delight in God’s words, and laws, and precepts. Fill up your mind with good, healthy, righteous inputs while you carefully remove the harmful ones. If we are finding our joy and satisfaction in Christ, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, then we will be fighting our sin out of delight in the one who has given us freedom from it, which is never legalism.
Third, don’t run the race alone. We must allow others into this area of our lives so that we have someone to run alongside of us. If you are married, do you talk with your spouse about these issues? If not I would recommend you start, no matter how hard you think this is going to be. God has given you your husband or your wife to be your closest supporter in this life. Men, whether you’re married or single, do you have a brother or several brothers in your life that you can talk to about this? Women, married or single, do you have a sister, or group of sisters in your life that you can talk to about this? Are you being that person for others? Are you available and ready to listen when someone comes to you? Many times, we grow the most when the Lord gives us opportunities to help others grow.
Now, in every one of these situations, we must be careful. Avoid going into much detail so as not to be a stumbling block to others or to continue to agitate the wound that you have made with your spouse. Use your best discretion while listening to the Lord’s leading, and learn from your mistakes. Care about the people who are caring for you in this area.
Fourth, be careful not to cause your brother or sister to fall. The one another’s of scripture compel us to be helpful toward our brothers and sisters and not harmful to their growth. In the body we are to be about the ministry of building up the body rather than tearing it down. Many times, we think about the things we struggle with and are careful not to be a stumbling block for others in that area, yet we often neglect the areas that are not as big of a struggle for us personally.
Lusting after the appearance of someone may not even be on your radar, but I guarantee that there are people in your life for whom it is a great struggle. Do you think about what you wear, and how it might cause others to stumble? Men this is for you too. Modesty is not just for women. And no your clothing is not blame for someone else’s sin, but you can definitely be either a help or a hindrance to them. Are you careful about what comes into your house, even if it may not be a struggle for you? Your mail, the things you watch on TV, the magazines you read. Are you mindful of what you post on social media? These things may not be a problem for you, but have you thought about the others around you?
In the same way, lusting after an emotional relationship may not be on your radar, but there are people in your life for whom this is a struggle. Are you careful with your relationships with others of the opposite sex? When someone struggles with desiring attention from the opposite sex, we can very easily cause them to stumble by being too available, too understanding, to easy to talk to, and allowing them to share things with us that are only meant for the marriage relationship. You are NOT the solution to every person’s problem. Especially not a person of the opposite sex who is not your husband or wife. This is one reason why we need to be so intentional about making sure men have brothers in their life and women have sisters in their life to talk to about deep things. Once you start going down that road with someone of the opposite sex, or someone that you are attracted to, you open yourself up to either one or both of you idolizing that relationship in an adulterous way. Men, we CAN love our sisters in Christ, and women you CAN love your brothers in Christ without being the person they go to with their most intimate questions, or deepest hurts. It may seem unloving to say this, but we must be careful with our hearts, for we are so easily deceived. Set up boundaries in your life so that you do not become a stumbling block.
And finally, we must remember that there is forgiveness when we fall. You may have committed adultery in the physical sense, you may have looked upon someone with lustful intent. Both are equally heinous before the Lord, and both are equally FORGIVEN at the cross. There is nothing that you have ever done that the blood of Christ has not covered should you trust in Him as your savior, and follow Him as your Lord. We may be hacking away at our our hands, and our feet, and plucking out our eyes the rest of this life, but Jesus is the one that grants us the power to do that, he gives us the strength to fight our flesh. And for those maimed in this life, who seek to continually rid themselves of the filth of the old man inside, who die daily, who take up their cross and follow Him, there is an eternal reward. God created marriage perfectly as a gift for mankind and as a picture of His love. Adultery, in every form despises the gift and destroys the picture of God’s love. We must be resolved to fight against this idolatry in our hearts, empowered by the Spirit and rejoicing in our Savior. Jesus reminds us that no matter the cost in this life, “it is better for you…” Jesus IS better for you.