March 5 Sermon: God is Pure

So we arrive today at the seventh commandment. And unsurprisingly, this is the commandment that more people than any of the other commandments have given me a little ribbing about. When you see something coming up in the text, particularly on this topic, anything involving sexuality, you're wondering, how is that guy going to handle that? And for the record, this guy wonders the same thing. You end up thinking about it a lot. You go through it in your head, what do you want to say? It's a sensitive topic because it's something that is persistently in front of us in our culture. You can't avoid it. Our culture is obsessed with the topic of sex. To preach on it then requires that we have to find some balance. You don't want to be soft on sin. You don't want to sound permissive. Well, then you want to be straightforward, but you don't want to risk maybe sounding vulgar or too blunt. You want to be sure that people understand that there's grace and that there's forgiveness for all sin, and that includes sexual sin. 

We want to make sure we're there. But you don't want to give any hint of permissiveness or complacency on the topic either. Then in the midst of trying to balance all of this, you want to keep it PG for the young ears. That's the challenge today. You can give me a rating maybe when we're done. Not on a scale of 1 to 10, I don't need that, but maybe make sure I kept it PG. Maybe that's the best way to tell me that I've achieved one of my goals. But all of that is a huge part of people asking me, Hey, where are you going with this topic? We got the seventh commandment coming up. What are you doing? They wouldn't want to have to do what I'm doing today, standing up in front of you and talking about it. But this also, for lack of a better term, sympathy that people have been showing me, is also rooted in the fact that we truly feel the extent of the struggle with this commandment, not regarding maybe the physical act of adultery, but the statements of Jesus regarding lust and the condition of our hearts. 

We know this. And so, just like I mentioned last week when we were talking about murder, we're going to find ourselves today not so much considering the physical act involved in the commandment, but in the condition of our hearts. And that's a really humbling thing because our natural inclination is to come to this commandment and to feel relatively good about ourselves because we haven't stepped out on our spouses. But our examination of this commandment, as we look at the words of Jesus, causes us to realize we not only need forgiveness for this commandment and breaking it, but we also need the Holy Spirit to work in us to change our hearts, to desire holiness more and more every day. So, we all know where we're headed with this commandment. But before we go to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, let's consider the extent of this commandment as it sits here in Exodus 20. We know the commandment, you shall not commit adultery. Like I've said before, short collection of words. There's not very many words here, and we can define every last one of them. What we find here is a prohibition of sexual relations outside of the covenantal relationship of marriage between one man and one woman for life. 

That's what it is. We understand that. We understand what marital infidelity means. We get it. This commandment was to be taken seriously in ancient Israel. They meant it. When Moses gave the commandment, when God gave it to Moses, he came down the mountain with the tablets. They knew what this was. They knew the severity of it. In fact, we see in the Book of Leviticus how seriously it was taken. Look what Leviticus 20, verse 10 says, If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. Now, if you were an ancient Hebrew, I'm sure that this lining out of the punishment for this got your attention. In fact, I'm pretty sure it got your attention just now. Wow, an execution for this? So, what is it about this commandment that causes, here in the Book of Leviticus for violating this to have capital punishment? Why is this a capital offense? Well, let's process through this a little bit here. Adultery is arguably one of the biggest forms of betrayal that can occur. The person that you are in a covenant relationship with, not only plots to betray you, but there also needs to be a conspiracy to carry it out, right? 

You also rarely broadcast your betrayal to the person that you betraying. In addition to the conspiracy to carry it out, there also needs to be an extensive cover up. After the physical act has taken place, there needs to be a cover up so that they don't find out. So you have betrayal, conspiracy for betrayal, and a cover up of a betrayal. This is a very serious, serious thing. The idea here is that essentially, if you will conspire to betray your wife or your husband and you'll betray them, you'd be willing to betray anybody. That's the idea behind this and the punishment here. In addition, we have to remember the importance of the family structure. Family is important to us now, but to the ancient Hebrews, family was of even more importance. Husband and wife, like now, were entrusted with the rearing of children. And so, to commit adultery, endangered then, and endangers now, this important God given responsibility of raising children. So adultery, as we understand it scripturally here, is more than just a betrayal of another person. It's a betrayal of the family. In fact, you could say that adultery is treason against the family. Now, when I teach the Ten Commandments, as I've mentioned before, I use my fingers because I can't remember them very well. 

So I have these actions on my fingers that I learned from a little pamphlet probably 15 years ago. And so, that's how I teach the Ten Commandments. And, when we come to the Seventh Commandment, even with junior high kids, this is a sensitive thing. How are you going to explain this to middle school kids in catechism really well? And so, when I use my fingers to teach the seventh commandment, this is what I do. Husband and wife, and the Bible teaches us that when they come together, they become one flesh. We have two fingers here. I say, and we need to value, we need to protect marriage. We need to protect that union, that covenant, that one flesh relationship. We need to protect marriage and the family. Now, that's a pretty simple explanation. I use that with junior high students. But that's the same idea we see here in Scripture, that this is a protection of family, a protection of that one flesh arrangement, protection of this important family structure, where children are raised, where they are instructed in the wisdom of the Lord. That's what this is about. This is why it is taken so seriously. 

We also need to remember, this is also about more than just the value and the importance of the family. I've been driving that home here, but there's more to it. It isn't just about that because it wouldn't be okay for a husband or a wife to step out on their spouse if they didn't have any children. That still wouldn't be acceptable. Or if their children are grown or out of the house. This isn't just about protecting that family structure. This commandment at its root is about purity. It's about holiness. God is pure. God is holy, and He commands his people to be pure and to be holy as well. And so, a significant theme throughout Scripture is that the people of God are the bride of God, right? And we're, as the church, we're the bride of Christ. But this is imagery that is all throughout Scripture. In the Old Testament, Israel was the bride. In the New Testament, and we see this a lot in the Book of Revelation, we are the bride of Christ as the church. The idea is that God is the faithful husband. God is the one who remains faithful. 

He keeps his promise, as Brenda mentioned in the children's message, he keeps his promise to his people. When we leave for other gods, when we worship something else, when we disobey God, we are the adulterous wife. This imagery is powerful and even more powerful when you know that much of the pagan worship to Baal and Asherah. That's the pagan worship we see most in the Old Testament. But when we know that that pagan worship was very, for lack of a better way of saying, very sexual in nature, you understand why God used this imagery, that they were the adulterous wife. They were not only being adulterous to God, but chances are they were, in this Baal and Asherah worship. They were fornicating or they were committing adultery as well. You see this unfaithfulness here. The beauty of all of it is that not only does that describe the people of God, but we get a better glimpse of God, too, because we are unfaithful, we are rebellious to Him. But he remains faithful because he always calls his people back. He always forgives his people. Even when they go off to worship the Baals and the Asherah and they do those things in worship there, God calls them back. 

He brings them back to himself. He offers forgiveness even to his adul wife, whether that would be the imagery used of Israel to their church. He calls his people back. What we see here is that God is pure. That's at the root of this commandment. God is pure, God is faithful, and he commands his people to reflect that character, that character that he shows in being the faithful spouse to the church. He commands us to have. We're to reflect his character. We are to be pure. We are to be holy. As we consider this and we reflect upon it, this is something that I think we can deeply understand. As I said, adultery is an extreme betrayal of that covenant relationship, and we can understand how our sin and our rebellion against God is a betrayal of Him. But as we also know, I mentioned already, we know that this commandment is not just about the physical act of sex outside of marriage. It's not just about violating that covenant. Once again, we go to the sermon on the Mount like we did last week, and we look at the words of Jesus here as we consider the extent of the Sixth Commandment here. 

We know this. You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her and his heart. Now, just as we saw last week when Jesus had something to say about anger, when he was talking about the commandment against murder, these words of Jesus here cut us deep. If we come to the seventh commandment and we think that we've done pretty good at keeping it, that we're doing good here, this reality of what Jesus has to say throws all of that out of the window, doesn't it? It makes us realize the extent of what God intended with this commandment. The language that I like to use about what Jesus does with the law in the Sermon on the Mount is he's ratcheting it down. If you think the law is tight, just wait till Jesus talks about the condition of our hearts and our minds. He ratchets the law down tighter and tighter on us. What's the purpose in that? Well, we've been talking about the second use of the law, right? To show us our sin. 

That's what Jesus is doing here. He's showing us this. We see here that this is about more than the act of committing adultery of violating that covenant of marriage. It's about more than fornication as well. It also covers how we think and what we desire. When we desire the pleasures of the flesh, we are in violation of this commandment. The extent of this commandment is humbling for us, but I want us to make sure that we truly consider the full extent of what Jesus is driving at here. We tend to be drawn to the just thinking of this as a fantasy of the carnal acts of the flesh. When we see the word lust, that's what we think about. With the words of Jesus here, we also generally direct this at men because it talks about looking at a woman and committing adul with her and his heart. We tend to go there. But I'm going to be equal opportunity this morning. Look at what the extent of this is. Let's think about the ramifications of what this is. Now, I'm not trying to get anybody off the hook here. I'm not trying to be soft on men. 

I'm trying to ratchet down the law here as well. But let's think about what this means. We know what Jesus is saying here, and with that in mind, the principle that we have here lets us say this as well. Everyone who looks at a man with lustful intent has already committed adultery with him in her heart. Ever read it that way? But that's what Jesus is saying. The command to be faithful and pure also means that we can talk more about just the lustful carnal acts of the flesh as well. And it also applies to both men and women. There's something else that we can say. Everyone who thinks that they could be more fulfilled and satisfied in their marital relationship if it was with someone else has already committed adul with them in their heart. It's not just about those acts because we can lust after more than the physical. We can lust after the emotional as well. So I try to drive this home pretty clearly with the couples that I do premarital counseling with, because I think that this is a pretty important thing for us to consider in our present age. 

All of this commandment is important for us to consider in our age, but I want us to think back. I want to process through this real quick together. Think back just a few generations. You can easily say that most married couples a few generations back had a very different relationship than most married couples do today. The give and take and the dependency of the husband and the wife relationship was much more complementary back then. The husband would do maybe the strong physical labor because he was more capable of it and he was providing for his wife and he was providing for his family in that role. Then the wife would have taken care of the home and would have raised the children. In many cases, before there were schools, et cetera, would have taught the children because ready made meals weren't taken out of the freezer and popped into the microwave. It took a while. You read back, say, and I always use the example of just the Little House on the Prairie books. Think about all the work that they had to do just to do a meal. They had to grind flour. They couldn't go to a bakery or to a store and buy a loaf of bread and it definitely wasn't sliced, right? 

Preparing all of this took a whole lot of work. The roles of husband and wife could vary, of course, depending on where they lived, if they were town folk or country folk, but the roles would vary. But they were very and deeply dependent upon each other. But with the advent of the modern conveniences that we enjoy, it became a necessity for women to work outside of the home. Things changed. Meals were made more easily. Laundry was done more quickly. And so in order to provide, you needed a second income in most cases. And so everybody left the home. And while there are still many complementary roles in our marital relationships today, let's think about this. The role of husband and wife in our day has now primarily become more emotional and more relational in nature than practical in nature as it was in the past. You were dependent upon each other in a different way. Now you're dependent on each other, don't get me wrong, but it's more emotional and relational. In addition, this has caused the husband and the wife to spend less and less time together. No one could have imagined a few generations back, like I'm talking about, the idea that a man would have spent more time with a woman at work than he does with his own spouse. 

They couldn't even have fathomed that. But now that's the reality. And so we have to guard our hearts against this so much more. Let's think about young couples with kids. Let's be brutally honest about the time you spend with your spouse. If you have two kids and you're going different directions for different activities, the waking hours you might spend with each other, you can count on your fingers. Maybe on one hand, we have to prepare to protect our hearts and our minds from this emotional connection that we might have thinking that if I was in a relationship with somebody else, I would be more satisfied. Again, I'm not trying to soften the physical stuff at all. I'm trying to ratchet this down harder so that we can protect ourselves from that because this is where it begins. This is where the stepping out begins. We have to remember that we can just as easily lust in our hearts for those fantasies of emotional relationships just as much as the physical ones. So we need to guard our hearts. We need to guard our minds from these temptations because that is the seedbed of breaking this commandment. 

Now, last week as we looked at the commandment against murder, I said that it's extremely unlikely that we're going to physically violate that commandment, that we would go out and murder someone. Well, I'm not going to speak so boldly about the seventh commandment because our feelings of resentment or anger towards someone probably won't make us pull out a weapon and murder somebody. But I don't have that level of confidence in human ability to restrain ourselves if we don't restrain the fantasies of the emotional, romantic, or physical relationships. If we let those things run amok in our minds and in our hearts, those fantasies, again, whether emotional or relational, they are the seed for the sin of adultery. We can't let them grow because those seeds are not plants that bear fruit. They are weeds that will destroy you. They will not only damage you personally, they will choke out your relationship with your family and with your God. And we know this to be true. Lust is the sin that consumes you. It's soul killing. It weakens our consciousness because we're continually living out fantasies in our mind, and it can happen that we eventually may want to fulfill those. 

Maybe we would get to that point because we've imagined it so many times in the lust of our minds that we might actually start seeking that out, or we might not be able to say no to what's placed in front of us. With the soberness of this warning from Jesus, we look to apply this commandment. Once again, I want to line this out according to the three uses of the law. Now, remember, the first use of the law is this on a curb for society, that it provides structure, that God's law is good, not just for the individual, but for society as a whole. Secondly, the use of the law that we think of with the second use is a mirror, that we're able to see our sin and that it would drive us to repentance, that we would see that we are in need of forgiveness. That's the second use. Then the third use of the law is as a map, a map to show us how to live a holy life. Now, like last week, I think the first use of the law is clear for us as we look at this commandment. 

I think the sixth and the seventh and the eighth commandment, particularly, you can really easily find the first use of the law here, how this is good for society. Society is best ordered when there's faithfulness in the family and where the family stays together for the rearing of children. Obviously, there are circumstances where the ideal can't be followed. We get that. But the statistics bear out that the best place for children is with their mother and their father. That's undeniable. But the nd while the world might reject the idea that the family is a God ordained institution, it doesn't change the fact that the family is a God ordained institution. It is, and it is what is best for us. We not only need to be advocating for the family, but we need to be educating others in the truth that infidelity of all kinds, whether adul or fornication is not just bad for the individual, it's bad for the culture as a whole. Promiscuity is damaging to all relationships. It's not just about cheating or personal feelings of somebody because you're hurt, because you've been betrayed by unfaithfulness. This has a destabilizing effect on the culture as a whole. 

Now, for the second use of the law, we know the severity of the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. We just looked at him. Even if you're deliberate in faithfulness to your spouse, we know that the lust of the eyes and of the heart is a reality that can easily work its way into our thoughts and into our desires. Those thoughts and desires can quickly become consuming for us. We can also find ways to justify our thoughts. We know what the struggles are here, and we know that the range is wide. The range of this is huge. From the subtle attraction that we might have for somebody, and maybe our thoughts go a little too far from time to time, that's on one end of it. But on the other end, we have pornography, we have committing adultery, we have all of this. We know the range. We get it. We can see this. Wherever the struggle is on this spectrum, it's something that not one human can claim immunity from. The desires of the flesh show that we are not as pure as we might think that we are. As we look in the mirror of God's law, may we be honest with ourselves about just how badly we need the forgiveness of Christ? 

Because the good news of all of this is no matter where your struggle is at. There is one person who did not struggle with this. The Lord Jesus Christ came in our flesh and he did not lust for you. He did it for you. So there is forgiveness, there is growth, there is a place to go. And that's to strive for holiness, to move away from this, excuse me, to move away from our sin and desire a life of purity. That's our application here. I'm sorry. That's our application as we consider the third use of the law today, that we are to desire purity because we can decry the impurity in the world, but the second use of the law shows us that this isn't just a problem in the world. We also struggle with hypocrisy. We look down on others, but in reality, this is a struggle. We see that God's Word calls us to flee from sexual immorality. We see this in 1 Corinthians 6, Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God? 

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price to glorify God in your body. And, we can see why we're called here to flee from sexual morality. God is pure, as I mentioned, and he has called us to be pure. He's been calling us to be set apart for his service. But as I've been pointing out throughout this whole series, we also need to consider how these commands show us how to understand God. Like I said at the beginning, we have a crisis of anthropology of our understanding of man in our culture. We don't know who we are because we don't know who God is. This commandment shows us something profound and beautiful about God. Because in the pagan mindset, as I've been mentioning over and over, in the pagan mindset, there's no distinction between the creator and the creation. All is one. Everything is summed together into the one. But God is a God of distinction, isn't he? He's a God of distinction. He stands outside his creation, therefore, he stands over it. Because he stands over it, because he is outside of it, because he made it, he gets to define it. 

That's his prerogative as a creator. He is a God of distinction. He makes distinctions in creating male and female. He makes distinctions in defining a marriage as being between a husband and a wife. In the worship of the pagan neighbors of the Israelites, as I mentioned previously, these distinctions would have been thrown out the window. They were torn down. Again, if there are no distinctions, then pretty much everything is up for grabs. Everything's on the table. If there aren't distinctions, it's very difficult to have sin without distinctions. But in the middle of these attitudes, in the pagan culture of the Old Testament, God called his people to be holy. He called his people to be set apart. This God of distinction called his people to be set apart and distinct from their neighbors. That's what he did. And so the same thing would have been true in the time of Paul. The same pagan issues, a lack of distinction, and this worship would have been the truth then too. But again, in the middle of all of it, God called his people to be set apart, to be holy, to be distinct. Paul says here, and we shouldn't be surprised with this statement, that Paul tells us that our bodies are a temple for the Holy Spirit. 

He calls his people, he calls the people of God, to flee sexual immorality because they are a temple. Our bodies are to be set apart for God. When we commit other sins, we read here that they aren't sins against our bodies. Our bodies aren't defiled in those sins. But here with this, that's the way it is. Our bodies are a temple, and so why would we want to defile them? The Holy Spirit indwells us, and we should desire to be set apart for his service, not using our bodies as if they don't matter or like they're disposable. The body matters. Paul tells us that our bodies are not our own. How that is a struggle against our modern idea of autonomy. We like to think that we can do whatever we want with our bodies. We're autonomous. We make the laws. That's what autonomy means, self law. We like to think we can do what we want. But here, Paul says that we should be setting our bodies apart for God. He's got a good reason for saying this. He's got a great reason for saying this. He says that our bodies were bought with a price. 

They were bought with a price. Christ suffered and died that his people might be set apart for his glory. Remember that he did this in our very own flesh. Our bodies have value, and it was shown by the fact that Jesus came in human flesh. Jesus did not spiritually win victory for your spirit and for your soul alone. He won victory in the body as well. He came in our flesh to rescue us from sin and death and hell, and he was raised bodily. Our bodies matter. This is a Christian distinctive that is very important that we don't forget. I remind you of it on a semi-regular basis, don't I? We don't confess in the Apostles' Creed, the immortality of the Soul, we confess the resurrection of the body. Our bodies matter. They are important. In Christianity, the physical matters and it matters deeply. In Christianity, the physical matters. But in pagan spirituality, not only is everything summed into the one, but the body doesn't matter. It's disposable, as we try to ascend to the next plane of spirituality, the body doesn't matter. In fact, we're trying to shed the body, we're trying to get rid of it. 

But in Christianity, as I've said, the body matters. We believe, we confess that the body matters. In Paul's time and in our time, it is truly a revolutionary idea that we see here in verse 20, glorify God in your body. You have been set apart because Christ suffered and died to save you from your sin. You have been bought with the price and that price was paid in your very own flesh. So may you and I flee immorality. May we run from it. This means that we run from not only the actual act of adultery, but we run from lust. And so if we struggle with these things, may the Holy Spirit convict us of our sin and give us a desire to honor God with our bodies, that he might be glorified for the work that he did for you and I, because he did it for us in our bodies. So e as we leave from here this week, may you and I remember that we glorify God in our bodies, that we do this for his glory because it was in his body, in our flesh that he died, that we might have forgiveness and newness of life in our bodies. 

Let us pray. Almighty and ever lasting God, we praise you that you value the physical, that you came to rescue us from sin and death in our flesh. Because our problem is a physical one. We know that we will die. And so it's a great comfort that you came to conquer death in our flesh. And so we pray, oh Lord, that you would change our hearts, that you would change our desires to value that and to flee immorality, that we might glorify you with our bodies, that we might be a testimony to the world of all that you have done to rescue us, not just from death, but to rescue us from sin. Grant us the grace to walk in newness of life every day. It's in the name of Jesus that we pray, Amen. 

This message was delivered on March 5, 2023 by Pastor Mark Groen at First Reformed Church in Edgerton, MN. First Reformed is a congregation in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.