Common Lies in a Sex Crazed World Muestra

Lie #3: Nobody Has to Know

When it comes to the sin of adultery, God doesn’t play around. There is no nuance or negotiation, no disclaimer or exception in His warning in Proverbs 5:8. When it comes to the sin of adultery, God doesn’t play around. Perhaps no other sin displays a heart of idolatry more clearly than that of committing adultery. It is literally a breaking of a covenant and an assault on God’s design for sex. Adultery in the literal sense is decisively dealt within the Old and New Testaments as sinful and prohibited by God. Adultery as a metaphor takes on a larger role in the storyline of the Bible, depicting the seriousness of the unfaithfulness of God’s people to Him. Similarly to how the union of a husband and a wife displays the union of Christ and the church, adultery is the metaphor the Scriptures use to illustrate the betrayal committed when God’s people love other gods by choosing to disobey Him.

James directly rebuked his Jewish-Christian audience with the same metaphor, saying, “You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So who

Ever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God” (4:4).In a devotional commentary on this verse from James, Ligonier ministries explains:

The apostle labels his original audience as an adulterous people, despite there being no indication in the epistle that sexual sin was a significant problem for his Jewish-Christian addressees. This indicates that spiritual adultery is what James has in view. At the same time, however, there is no hint that James’ original readers were guilty of some kind of crass, pagan idolatry. No, the lover the audience pursued was something more subtle than outright idolatry and was therefore more dangerous.

That danger, James says, is friendship with the world based on the false belief that the world has what we’re looking for and can provide for our greatest emotional needs. This belief in the saving power of this world is summed up in the Bible as spiritual adultery. The spiritually adulterous are those who have rejected God and instead have followed after alluring and tempting things that are not God. The visible act of adultery committed by a husband or a wife shows us the invisible reality of God’s people’s rebellion against their Creator. It is the failure to uphold one’s part in a covenant relationship.

Physical adultery is the working out of spiritual adultery, believing the world is our friend before Christ. God has something much better for His people in how they use the gift of sex as He has designed it. Rather than being drawn to the lips of the forbidden woman mentioned in the early portion of Proverbs 5, God calls us to “drink water from your own cistern, water flowing from your own well” (v. 15). He then shows us the beauty of the gift of sex and the great pleasure He has created for His people as they participate in it as He intended: They should be for you alone and not for you to share with strangers. Let your fountain be blessed, and take pleasure in the wife of your youth.

Adultery is the ultimate act of betrayal against another human. It is the breaking of a covenant. While forgiveness is certainly a Christian command and should be given to anyone who has committed adultery and repented, it is often truly difficult to save a marriage after an affair. I’ve seen it done, and God is good, but Scripture’s allowance of a divorce by the victim of infidelity speaks to God’s understanding of the pain adultery inflicts. In our efforts to patch the union together, we can’t minimize the reality of what has taken place. When we disregard God’s design, brokenness is the result.