Today we come to realities that are sadly widespread: adultery, sexual immorality, and divorce. These are so widespread that it’s reasonable to say 80-90% of Christians today are affected by these issues. This has tragic results. The very mention of these words cause a kind of shuddering in those who have been plagued by them. But, the time we live in is ironic. It’s commonly known how devastating these issues are, yet we have never been more bombarded with the erotic than we are right now.[1] Where can we go to not be exposed to sexually explicit and suggestive images? From billboards on the side of the road, to movies, TV, the internet, or social media, the world and its lusts bombard us.
But I want to be careful as I begin a sermon on this topic, because the problem isn’t just out there in the world, it’s in here in the Church. It is not only true that these issues have affected so many in the past, it’s also true that so many within the Church struggle with these issues presently. R.C. Sproul once said, the battle for purity and chastity in the Church today is a battle more Christians are losing than winning.[2] No doubt that is reflected even here among us today.
Long ago in the second century the well-known theologian Justin Martyr defended Christianity to the Emperor at that time saying, “If you want to see visible proof of the truth of Christianity, observe our chastity.”[3] Could the Church of our day make such a claim? Sadly, I don’t think we can. So here at the outset I need to say it. We have a massive problem. But from recognizing our problem we can repent and we can grow healthier.
So before us is a text that indeed brings not only great challenge to us, but by God’s grace we’ll also see great gospel comfort here as well.
Allow me to orient us as to where we are in the Sermon on the Mount.
In 5:17 we read Jesus came, not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. That is, to bring them to their long-anticipated completion. To show this to us Jesus gives six examples in the rest of Matthew 5. In each of these examples Jesus quotes the OT directly or quotes the interpretation of the OT taught by the scribes and the Pharisees. So what Jesus is doing in these six examples is not comparing the teaching of the OT with His new teaching, no. Rather He’s comparing the scribes and Pharisee’s false interpretation of the OT with the true interpretation of the OT.[4] For far too long the scribes and Pharisee’s handled God’s Word as a matter of mere externals, in effect teaching that as long as you don’t physically commit these sins or cross these lines you’re innocent and righteous before God. Jesus goes deeper. He goes beyond the letter of the Law to the heart and spirit of the Law, showing in all six of these examples how the OT deals not only with the external life but with the internal life too. In this way we see what true righteousness looks like.
We’ve already seen Jesus’ teaching on the sixth commandment regarding murder and anger, today we move on to Jesus’ next two examples: adultery and divorce. Taken together this forms Jesus’ sexual ethic. Two headings today. See first…
Adultery Defined (v27-30)
“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 in his heart.”
Here Jesus quotes the seventh commandment, Exodus 20:14. But though Jesus quotes the OT Law here exactly, He isn’t taking aim at the Law, He’s taking aim at how the religious leaders of the day understood and taught this Law. That’s what going on here. They taught that as long as you didn’t actually commit adultery you weren’t breaking this commandment. This interpretation was conveniently narrow.[5] How? While it gave the appearance of great godliness it left wide open room for all kinds of sexual immorality to exist. So Jesus continues in v28 by going deeper, linking the external action of adultery with the internal action of the lustful look. Clearly Jesus is again teaching that sin is not a matter merely left to outward actions alone, no. Sin is something that first begins in the heart. So if one looks on another in lust, adultery has been committed in the heart. He’s not forbidding or condemning basic attraction, that’s part of being human. What He is forbidding is the kind of look that lingers, or the looks that looks first and then keeps on looking back in order to feed an internal sexual desire.
I imagine many people will read v27, and feel one of two things. You’ll either feel an immediate sense of exposure, knowing this is calling you out that says ‘Ouch, that’s me.’ Or you’ll feel a kind of smug superiority that says, ‘I’ve not committed adultery, I’m not like those that have. I’m pure. They’re the real sinners. I’m sure glad I’m not like them.’ However v27 hits you, when v28 comes it lays us all low with the reminder that God looks at the heart. That God sees the thoughts and motives and inclinations of the soul. That to God adultery doesn’t begin when a physical line is crossed. Adultery begins in the heart. Thus, our adulterous hearts are exposed.
This truth is clearly seen in many places in the Bible, but no place is as famous for this very reality as 2 Samuel 11, where we read of the affair between David and Bathsheba. There we find David made the choice to stay home when it was time to go out to war. He made another choice to go up on the roof to stroll on the nice weather. And then made the choice to look out over the wall down into the bathroom of a house nearby. And what do you know? A beautiful woman was there bathing. David’s chose to not look away, he lingered. On this rooftop David did what Eve did long ago in Eden with the forbidden fruit. David saw that Bathsheba’s beauty was good, that she was a delight to his eyes, so he desired her, and took her for himself. Saw…desired…took. The point is clear. Sexual sins are committed internally long before they’re committed externally. Or we could say, adultery always begins with adulterous fantasies.[6]
See what Jesus is doing. As anger was to murder in the previous verse, so too is lust to adultery. The internal thought is just as wicked as the external action. Jesus is pointing out the nature of our sin, that it goes far deeper than we know. What He’s saying here is that the seventh commandment was never just about not crossing lines with another physically, it was about the inward thoughts that led to the physical action. How surgical are the words of Christ?! In one single sentence He raises the bar of His Kingdom’s sexual ethic to its true and righteous level.[7]
But see the kindness of Christ here. He doesn’t just state the spirit and heart of the Law and reveal our great adulterous hearts. He goes on and teaches us how to deal with it. See then the extreme measures in v29-30, “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. 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.”
Be careful here. Jesus is not teaching the practice of self-mutilation here. That the godly remedy to the lustful look is to remove a limb or gouge out the eyes. I don’t think this is what’s going on. This is extreme and this is drastic yes, but it’s metaphorical and figurative, a deliberate overstatement to prove a point. After all, it’s very possible to be blind and crippled in some way or another and still sin sexually.[8]
So what then is this teaching since it's to be taken as metaphorical and figurative? Well in one sense this is a general principle to be applied to all the Christian life, but here Jesus uses it specifically to teach us how to deal with our adulterous hearts. And it’s clear is it not? Don’t complicate this, take it as it is. He’s teaching that if anything stands in the way of our growth in Christ, our pursuit of godly and holy living, our maturing in Christ, we should be willing to cut it out of our lives. As dear as it may be to us, if it gets in the way of Christ, it must go. If it makes righteousness seem strange and sin seem normal, it must go. If it leads us closer to temptation, it must go.
Two illustrations are helpful in this.
First, sexual desire is a fire within us. Fire is good, if it remains in the fireplace. What is the fireplace God intends sexual desire to remain in? Marriage. What happens if you take the fire out of the fireplace and put on the living room floor? It burns the house down. Jesus is clear. All of us have a fire within us, thus, we should do whatever we must to keep it in the fireplace.
Second, there’s an old Greek myth about a man named Odysseus.[9] He was traveling on a ship and they were approaching a place where Sirens would come out tempting the sailors. Do you know what a Siren is in Greek mythology? They’re sea creatures that pose as beautiful women who sing songs luring sailors into the sea to their death. The Siren is actually the Starbucks logo, so take that as you’d like. Anywho, Odysseus knew this was going to be a problem for himself so he had his men tie him to the mast of the ship so he wouldn’t hear the Sirens alluring songs and steer the ship into ruin.
I think every Christian knows this. Its basic common Christian sense. We know sin is bad, but far too many Christians aren’t willing to take extreme measures with sin, so they take halfway measures.[10] Halfway measures that do put our sins at a distance from us, but not altogether out of sight. Jesus is clearly teaching us that it’s not enough to maintain physical purity alone, we must go deeper and fight against adultery in the heart and mind, because that’s where it all begins. How to fight this at the heart level? We must guard the heart. How do we guard the heart? By extreme measures.
So far we’ve seen Jesus teaching on the true interpretation of the seventh commandment. But Jesus doesn’t end His sexual ethic here, He keeps on going to a subject that naturally follows adultery, the subject of divorce. See this next in our second heading…
Adultery Continued (v30-32)
I must pause for a moment and say that there is a good reason why many preachers and people avoid this passage. This passage is hard because many of us have divorce in our past. And divorce never ends. For the husband, the wife, and the kids, divorce is like a stamp on the soul that still impacts decades later. And not only this. Ask any pastor, any theologian, read any commentary on Matthew here and you’re likely to get a different opinion of what Jesus is teaching, making this all the more difficult to rightly handle. But, Church, is this not the Word of God? Did Jesus not teach on this? We must face it and we need to hear it. So as painful and hard as it may be, we need to be taught on this.
So, let’s finish out this text together. v30-32, “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Here Jesus isn’t quoting the OT directly. He’s alluding to Deut. 24 and stating the common teaching on divorce by the scribes and Pharisees. Let me set the context briefly on this. There were two main schools of thought on divorce in early first century Judaism. One school, called the Shammai school, taught divorce was only permissible when physical adultery occurred. The other school, called the Hillel school, was a bit looser. They stated simply that a husband who found ‘any good cause’ could divorce his wife.[11] Both of these, the Shammai and Hillel schools of thought were within the Pharisee reform movement. But by the time Jesus was teaching, the looser Hillel school of thought was embraced by most. Into this context, Jesus’ words come, and when they come, they hit hard. Because He goes further than both of these schools of thought, not only in His teaching on adultery but on divorce too.[12]
We see that here. He states what the Jewish leaders teach in v31, and then gives two statements on divorce in v32. First, He says divorce is permitted when sexual immorality has occurred. Though other things could be in view here in the phrase sexual immorality, I do think Jesus has adultery mainly in view.[13] And when adultery has happened divorce is permitted. But, while Jesus does allow divorce as an option in these cases, I would argue that divorced is never commanded.[14] Permissible? Yes. Commanded? No. When adultery occurs the foundation and covenant of marriage is broken. But it’s not broken beyond repair. Husband and wife really can reconcile and heal and grow and begin again. I would argue this is the position of later passages, like Matthew 19 where this is expanded further. This is the first thing Jesus says on divorce. He doesn’t command it, He permits divorce when adultery has occurred.
Second, Jesus says when divorce occurs and remarriage follows, adultery will be continued if the divorce was unbiblical. So the phrase “whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” really means “whoever marries a wrongly divorced woman commits adultery.” This implies that remarriage is not always permissible, while reaffirming clearly that any other reason for divorce other than adultery is invalid.
What do we do with this? I have two responses to this.
First, on adultery and remarriage.[15] Divorced Christians who have remarried should not, after reading, studying, or hearing a sermon on this passage, divorce your current spouses and seek to be remarried to your first spouses. I think this would add sin onto sin. Rather, divorced Christians who have remarried, for biblical grounds and for unbiblical grounds, should seek to begin again by embracing the standard of faithfulness Jesus gives here.
Second, on our adulterous hearts in general. This is one of those sermons that can tend to feel like a reprimand, where you come away feeling more heavily burdened than when you came in. I don’t want that to happen today, so hear me loud and clear. Adultery is a terrible sin, with terrible consequences. But adultery is not the unforgivable sin. No one should hear this and feel that you’ve sinned yourself outside the love of God.[16] We admit that we are sinners, true. But we know Jesus Christ, who suffered in our place and made atonement and satisfaction for us, and we know at the feather touch of faith in Him, the vilest of sinners are welcomed home in the gospel. Now that we’ve been welcomed home, let’s live in accord with ethics of our Father’s house.
Conclusion:
Luther, “May Jesus Christ bear with us, be patient with us, and finally free us also from ourselves. Amen.”[17]
[1] R. C. Sproul, Matthew, St. Andrew’s Expositional Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 92.
[2] Sproul, 93.
[3] Justin Martyr, quoted in Sproul, 94.
[4] Donald A. Hagner et al., Matthew 1-13, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David Allen Hubbard, and Glenn W. Barker, WBC (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1995), 111.
[5] R. Kent Hughes, The Sermon on the Mount: The Message of the Kingdom, Preaching the Word Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 110.
[6] Hughes, 111.
[7] Hughes, 112.
[8] Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture, NAC (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 1992), 109.
[9] Sproul, Matthew, 94.
[10] Hughes, The Sermon on the Mount: The Message of the Kingdom, 113.
[11] Blomberg, Matthew, 110.
[12] Blomberg, 110–11.
[13] The word porneia has a broad meaning, referring to many things included under the umbrella of immorality. But in context, the word carries adultery most prominent in its meaning and usage during Jesus’ time.
[14] Hughes, The Sermon on the Mount: The Message of the Kingdom, 123.
[15] Blomberg, Matthew, 111.
[16] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon of the Mount (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 1:261.
[17] Martihun Luther, What Luther Said (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1986) 1321.
