“Whom God Has Joined” (Part 1 of 2)

Today's books and magazines, TV shows reflect a culture that is increasingly confused about relationships, especially traditional marriage. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg looks at the importance of sexual purity and marital fidelity in the midst of this broken culture. For those of you who may be visiting with us today, we're in a series on the Ten Commandments, and this morning, as you will note, we've come to the seventh, which reads as follows, You shall not commit adultery. … are reputed to have been or are involved in extramarital affairs.

A third of the women in the United States of America are also so described. At the same time, the Christian population makes big claims for and loud cries about traditional values, and yet it would appear that many of us are equally confused about the very values we choose to shout about. In a very recent study, some two-thirds of the Christians interviewed said that divorce was a, quote, reasonable solution to a problem marriage. And forty-five percent of the Christians interviewed stated that the children produced by unhappy marriage partners should not serve under any circumstances to keep the family intact.

So we have a strange problem. We have moms and dads, on the one hand, extolling the virtues of purity before marriage and fidelity after marriage, and then themselves devastating and disappointing the very children that they are seeking to rear in the framework of these biblical principles. As long ago as 1631, the producers of a version, an edition of the King James Version Bible, were fined three hundred pounds by Archbishop Laud. The fine was significant.

Three hundred pounds was probably equivalent to a lifetime's earnings. And the reason for the fine was simple. The folks who had produced this Bible had been responsible for leaving a word out of it. It was the third word in the fourteenth verse of Exodus 20, thus rendering the commandment, You shall commit adultery. From 1631 on, this edition of the Bible became known as the Wicked Bible. And sadly, and without any humor, we might ironically admit that it would seem that all too many preachers and healers have been putting the Wicked Bible to bad use.

And we don't need to start rehearsing the last few years of American Christianity and the tawdry, dreadful example that has emerged from the walls of Christendom. We are all tarred with the same brush. As Christians, while we know that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said we were to be salt, thus having an impact upon our culture that would bring taste and would bring distinctiveness to that which was putrefying, that we were to be light in the midst of darkness, sadly, we are not quite as salty as we might be.

Indeed, we are somewhat tasteless, and our light would seem to be very dim—at least in the matters of sexual purity and marital fidelity. The problem is that we have half of it correct. Jesus in John 17 prays for his followers, and he says, I pray, Father, that you do not take them out of the world but that you leave them in the world and that you keep them from the evil one. So if we might picture that, the boat is in the water as it's supposed to be, we live where we're supposed to live, we haven't gone up a hill and hid, we are in the thoroughfares of life, that's right, and that's where we should be.

But sadly, the boat is taking on water at an alarming rate. Instead of being able to channel our course without imbibing the mindset and the thought forms of a culture which is alien to God and to God's Word, we are shipping water faster than ever we should. Lord Justice Denning, writing in the United Kingdom, said, We've reached the position where adultery or infidelity or misconduct, as soft-hearted people call it, is considered to be a matter of little moment. It is no longer a bar to advancement to any offices of state high or low, whereas any other form of stealing would mean the end of a career. And frankly, we know that to be true.

It is exemplified on every occasion that we turn around in the political processes of this country. Strange ambivalence. Now, it was in the sixties and the early seventies, on the heels of the sexual revolution, that psychiatrists and sociologists began to give a measure of intellectual sophistication to old-fashioned sin. Morton Hunt, a sociologist writing in 1969, said, The disapproved model, namely polygamy, seems better suited to the emotional capacities and requirements of many people, particularly men.

It offers renewed excitement and continual expressions of personal rediscovery. It is an answer to the boredom of lifelong monogamy. We are, he says, by nature, polygamist. What he should have said was, we are by nature dreadfully sinful. Rather than accommodating ourselves to a lifestyle which is warped, the Scriptures—the Ten Commandments here in particular—call us to line up against a perfect standard of righteousness, call us to bring ourselves, with the enabling of God's Spirit, into a line which, far from tyrannizing and destroying, releases us in perfect freedom. It is the ultimate freedom to become a bond slave to Christ and to his Word.

It is the ultimate enjoyment to live in obedience to God's truth. Now, this introduction concerning the confusion of our culture is in order to help us understand that as we take these ancient words from Exodus 20, they do not simply reverberate in the air with insignificance, but they actually come to our lives with great import and impact. The confusion that is represented in our present culture in relation to all matters of sexual and moral purity is having an impact that is so incredible that it is virtually out of control. It is estimated that eighty percent of adolescents in psychiatric wards are the product of this kind of marital chaos, that three out of four teenage suicides emerge from the inability of the adolescent psyche to cope with the fact that his dad or his mom or her mom or dad let them down. Well, we're very expert at making it appear that we are able, with a little support group here and a little counseling there, to absorb all of this. It's not the case. We're confronted by broken-up people with their broken-down lives.

They've got broken-up homes and broken husbands and wives. You'd think that it is almost time for people to waken up and say, You know, I wonder if we were to go back to the Maker's instructions if we wouldn't find something there to address the predicament. Wouldn't it be an amazing thing to hear one of our leaders bold enough to simply say, Guess what? This week I was reading my Bible.

And as I read my Bible, I discovered that Almighty God, in whose hands is our breath and our destiny, has determined that life is so sacred and marriage so precious and purity so important that we're going to convene a gathering of people who will examine what it might mean for our society, for our schools, for our towns, for our universities, to begin to live life in accordance with the principles of God's Word. In your dreams. In your dreams. Don't wait for it. Don't expect it.

Don't even waste your time trying to make it happen, I would say. Because never in the history of humanity has there been a significant turnaround in a culture as a result of the embracing of external factors and trying to lay them down on people. Every awakening has come as a result of the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the only power to change a life. And only with a changed life will there be a changed mind, and with a changed mind will there be a changed lifestyle.

If you think that I am more than a little pessimistic, and I don't want to be, because of all people we want to stay where we began this morning, there is hope, we want to believe the best and hope the best, we want to try for the best, we want to impact our culture for its good. But listen, in Difuniac Springs, that well-known place to some in Florida, wherever it is, lawyers for a man charged with child abuse asked the trial judge to remove a plaque containing the Ten Commandments from outside the courtroom door. The reason being, said the attorney, was that it prejudiced the jurors as they entered. His client had clearly broken the seventh commandment, and he didn't want anybody seeing that commandment or any other commandment as he walked in.

Nobody had the guts to remove it or to, say, leave it, and so they fudged it and they all left. Subsequently, in the state of Georgia and in the state of Florida, two other cases were brought concerning the Ten Commandments on the wall outside the court. And in each case, the judges ruled for their removal, declaring the display of the Ten Commandments to be unconstitutional. So we live with this strange schizophrenia. Inside the courtroom, the plaintiff stands and looks at the words written behind the judge's head, In God We Trust. No one has a clue in their minds what that means. And they certainly ought not to be so foolish as to believe that to trust in God means to obey his Word and means to honor these Ten Commandments, which we want to unscrew from the walls of our courtroom.

See, we're unscrewing hopefulness and replacing it with hopelessness. We're unscrewing principle and replacing it with that which is merely puerile extensions of men's fleshly interests. Well, what does the Bible say in the midst of this confusion? Well, the good news is that as confused as things are around us, the Bible is really clear. And what I'd like to do is address with you the clarity with which the Bible speaks concerning the sanctity of marriage and therefore the heinous nature of adultery. Let's be very, very clear that every time the Bible speaks about marriage, it makes it obvious that it is a high view of marriage and all that is part and parcel of marriage God has ordained and loves and is committed to, including all the physical enjoyment that that union contains. The Bible makes it equally clear that marriage is not a sacrament, as some of us have been brought up believing, nor is it a redemption ordinance unique to Christians, but marriage is a creation ordinance. As Jesus spoke, he said that it was from the beginning that God ordained that a man should leave his father and mother and the two should become one flesh, so that from the very beginning of the creation of man and the construction of the civil order, God intended that marriage should be what was involved in the lives of men and women. This is something that we need to think out.

We won't take time to think it out now. But God's design for the continuance of the human race was marriage. And there are good marriages that aren't Christian.

You believe that? Because God established marriage as a creation ordinance. And there are bad Christian marriages. Because in Christian marriages you have sinners saved by grace who still sin.

We need to think biblically about these things, and many of us have determined that because something happened before we were Christians, that somehow or another God wasn't interested in it before we were Christians. Do you think God wasn't interested in marriage before you became a Christian? Do you think that he didn't care about your marriage because you weren't a Christian?

Of course he cared! He established it from the beginning of creation that marriage would have significance. That is not to say that Christian marriages do not have unique potential and unique power because of the presence of Christ. But as Christians, we need to be concerned about all marriage. The marriage is even of our non-Christian neighbors and friends.

Its status is not in question, and its standard is also clear. In Ephesians chapter 5, you may like to turn to it to remind yourself it's there, we have Paul announcing the nature of marriage, calling upon husbands and wives to live together in a certain way. And the picture that he uses of the love between a man and a woman is the love between Jesus and his church. And he wants husbands to love their wives in the same way that Christ loved the church. Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. Because we never hated our bodies, but we feed for them, we care for them.

In what way? Just as Christ does the church. And so says Paul, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. He says, This is a profound mystery, this thing, but I'm talking about Christ and the church.

Now, will you notice in passing there, especially young people, as you look down on this, in Ephesians chapter 5 and the process here in verse 31, what happens? How does marriage take place? Well, first of all, you leave your mom and dad, okay? You should ask them about it, and certainly if you're gonna ask for a girl's hand in marriage, you should go and ask her dad, because he may have a lot to say and with a lot of justification, which if you thought about yourself for a moment or two, you would understand why. But you go, and you leave your father and your mother, and then you get united to your wife—that's why we have marriage ceremonies—and the two then become one flesh.

Now, don't miss this. Do you understand? What our culture says is you go out and you find a girl or a guy, and you become one flesh with them. That just is par for the course.

And then it may well be that you like them enough to go and ask their dad if you could marry them, and then perhaps if they say it's okay and even if they don't, you'll go ahead and legitimize your illicit sexual relationship. This is the Word of God. This is the Maker's instruction book. This is the pathway to purity, to joy, to fulfillment, to God's best, and everything else, less than or other than, is a dead-end street, is a tragedy, is a disaster waiting to reach out and grab you. And some of you already know that to your own personal pain. Listen to the Word of God. Do not despise the instruction of God's Word. Pay attention, pay heed to the standard and status and sanctity of the marriage bond.

It is to be held in honor. It is not to be entered upon lightly nor carelessly, as the marriage service says, but thoughtfully, with reverence for God and with due consideration of the purposes for which it was established by God. In marriage, two people are not entering into a contract. In marriage, two people are entering into a divine covenant. It is a great mystery. They become one.

It is one plus one equals one. They become interwoven with one another emotionally and psychologically and physiologically, and in every dimension. And it is this great union of all of that that makes marriage what it is. And that you see in passing loved ones is the monstrosity of removing one element of marriage from the context in which it is set, namely the sexual element of marriage. When you remove sex from the context of marriage, it becomes a monstrous thing. It becomes a disappointing thing. It becomes a devastating thing. It becomes less than what God has intended. When a man says that he wants a woman, he is not telling the truth.

He wants something that a woman makes possible. And no one keeps the packet when they've smoked the cigarettes and the discarded lifes around our nation, and the heartache and the pain and the shame and the disappointment that are represented in a congregation such as ours that bears testimony to the vacillation of many of us in relationship to absolute biblical truth is unbelievable. And we are not alone. So before we all get on our high horse to go and hit the Main Street to tell our non-Christian friends about, quote, traditional values, let us examine our own hearts in relationship to these same values. And the answer is not in our homes.

It's not in our huddles. Because, as I say to you, in our homes and in our huddles, we are equal to some of the most significant abuse of the very principle that is here contained. Do you hear me? Do you hear God's Word? The sacred union in marriage is not to be intruded upon by anybody.

It is not to be arbitrarily broken by anyone. I don't care what Cosmopolitan says. I don't care about People Magazine. Trashed a lot of them, I say. Start reading your Bible. If some of you young women read your Bibles as much as you read that hogwash, you'd be a lot more fit for getting married than you are right now. And if some of you men paid attention to the principles of the book of Proverbs rather than filling your head with junk, you would be a lot more attractive to some of those young women as they try to make their way through life. As for God, His way is perfect.

Perfect. The Bible is clear about the sanctity of marriage. You're listening to Truth for Life.

That's Alistair Begg warning us against accommodating the culture's warped lifestyle. It's surprisingly easy to get pulled into distorted thinking when we don't know our Bibles. That's why it's so important for us to study Scripture. And today's book recommendation will help you reflect on God's Word every single day for a full year. The book is titled Truth for Life, 365 Daily Devotions, and it's written by Alistair Begg. The Truth for Life devotional will engage your mind and stir your heart as you spend time each day with God in His Word. You'll enjoy reading passages from Genesis to Revelation and learning how to apply what you've read. Alistair often encourages us to read through the entire Bible. It's a practice he's found profitable in his own life. So he's included a Bible reading plan in the footer of each page.

If you include those passages as part of your daily devotions, you'll read through the whole Bible in a year. Request your copy of Truth for Life, 365 Daily Devotions, today. It's yours when you donate to support the teaching you hear on this program. Visit us at truthforlife.org slash donate.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you enjoy your weekend. Hope you're able to worship with your local church, and then join us Monday for the conclusion of today's message. We'll hear about the extensive damage adultery causes, and we'll learn three ways to safeguard ourselves from the lure of infidelity. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.