Deuteronomy 5:18 Neither shall you commit adultery. I. THE COMMAND. The command is a simple, unqualified, irrevocable negative. "Thou shalt not!" No argument is used, no reason given, because none is required. The sin is of so destructive and damning a nature that it is in itself sufficient cause for the stern forbidding. 1. It is a sin against the individual. This needs no proof. Nature visits the sin with the heaviest penalties in every department of the complex being of man. The terrible results of unchaste life in the purely physical realm are such as cannot be named here. Every man of science will bear his testimony to the awful demand that nature makes for purity, and will assert that she has no pity for the unclean. 2. It is a sin against the family. The sacredness of motherhood and childhood, and the demands they make upon the care and thought of all, are secured and met in the Divine institution of marriage. Wherever the rights of the marriage relationship are violated and set aside, God's provision for both is broken down, and the disastrous result of the breakdown of the family circle and entity results. When the family is destroyed as a perfect whole by the sin of unchastity, an incalculable harm is done to the children. There is no more. heart-breaking announcement in the newspapers than that which declares that in the granting of a decree nisi, the charge of the children has been given to one parent. Therein lies the destruction of the family after the Divine pattern, and the sin that leads to it is indeed terrible for this reason also. 3. It is a sin against society. Society is a union of families. Every attempt to create society upon any other basis is wicked, and ends in disaster. The sin which blights the marriage relation and destroys the family is the enemy of all true socialism. All the things that may be had in common can only so be shared, as it is forever understood that communism in the realm of sex is the most damnable sin against the commonwealth. 4. It is a sin against the nation. The greatness of a people depends upon the purity and strength of the people, and in every nation where the marriage relation is violated with impunity the virus of death is surely and certainly at work. 5. It is a sin against the race. No man can deny his accountability for a share in the development or destruction of the race. The solidarity of humanity is more than a dream of visionaries. It is an indisputable fact. Every life is contributing its quota of force to the forces that make or mar. All are hindering or hastening the perfect day. The crime of prolonging sorrow and agony lies at the door of every impure human being. 6. It is a sin against the universe. The life of the universe is love. The origin of all is love, for "God is love." The propagation of all is love. From the highest form, that of the unity of the marriage relation, through all the lower spaces of action, love is the law of growth. The lair of the wild beast is fiercely guarded by the love that holds it sacred. The nesting of the birds is token of the impulse of the love life that throbs through all creation. The bee that carries the pollen from flower to flower is the messenger of the same instinct. Love is everywhere. The sin of lustful unchastity is the violation of love, blighting and destroying it. 7. It is a sin against God. (Revelation 21:8.) II. APPLICATION OF THE COMMAND TODAY. There are certain signs of the times which point to the necessity for a re-statement of this commandment. The first of these is the tendency, which is only too apparent, to loosen the binding nature of the marriage tie. There seems to be an increasingly popular notion that the marriage relation is a civil one only. This is a vital error. It is wholly Divine. Another sign of the times in this direction is the filthy fiction which has polluted the realm of literature in recent years, fiction in which the marriage relation is treated with amused pity, and whoremongers and adulterers are pitied and excused, if not defended. Then, again, is there not a growing danger of ministering to impurity in the multiplication on every hand of callings for women which throw them among men and give them wages which are insufficient? Then holy one would thank God if some word that was not prudish or narrow might be spoken to the women of this country about their dress. The half dress of the society woman is surely a sign of reversion to type, and has in it the pandering to animalism which has for ages been the curse of the marriage relation. And yet once more. There is an anomaly that dies hard in the distinction that is being made between the guilt of man and woman in this matter of unchastity. When General Booth issued that remarkable book, Darkest England, he said, in defence of his using the word "fornication," "Why not say prostitution? For this reason: prostitution is a word applied to one half of the vice, and that the most pitiable. Fornication hits both sinners alike." The importance of that statement cannot be over-estimated. Until the man who sins is branded with as deep a scar as is the woman, that public opinion which shields him is guilty of complicity with this vice which is deadly and damning. III. THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC. After all that has been said, there yet remains the most searching, withering words of all to repeat. They fell from the lips of the Incarnate Purity in that manifesto of His kingdom which He gave to His disciples during the days of His sojourn on the earth "I say unto you, that everyone that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart, etc. (Matthew 5:28-32.) (G. Campbell Morgan.) Parallel Verses KJV: Neither shalt thou commit adultery. |
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