Bible Text: Deuteronomy 5:18 | Pastor: Eric Danielson | Series: For Our Good | Marriage and sex is becoming an open-ended free-for-all in the world today, so the command “You shall not commit adultery” is often seen as pleasure-killing and restrictive. This sermon looks at how that command was given only for our good so that we can fully enjoy God’s gift of marriage and sex and experience the ultimate fulfillment it points us to.

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Designed for Our Delight
Deuteronomy 5:18

In the world of baseball cards there are a few that top the list as the most valuable cards of all time. One of these is the 1952 TOPPS Mickey Mantle rookie card. This week on eBay you could have bought an original for a mere $139,512. Granted, this card is not in perfect condition, but to get one of those, you’d probably have to drop over $1 million.

Now let’s pretend you’re a dad who loves baseball cards, but you love your 10-year-old son even more, so for his 10th birthday, you decide to show your love to him by giving him your Mickey Mantle rookie card that your father handed down to you. You know it’s worth tens of thousands of dollars, but you love your son so much, you want to give it to him, so it can be his prized possession like it was for you. Your son is overjoyed at the gift and you try to explain to him how special it is and how he needs to keep it in a very, very safe place.

What would you do, if the next day you got home from work and your son’s bike was in the way, and when you got out to move it, you saw this? (Picture)

One of the reasons Mickey Mantle baseball cards and others like it are worth so much money is that 50 years ago, before they were worth anything, kids would get those cards and do this – they wanted to make their bike sound like a motorcycle, so they clipped their cards to the frame where they would slap against the spokes and make a puttering noise like an engine.

Nowadays if a dad gave a card like that to his son and saw him do that to it, he would probably have a heart attack. “What are you doing with my gift!? Do you realize what you’ve done!?”

Sometimes I wonder If God doesn’t think the same thing when he sees what we’ve done with some of the valuable gifts he’s given us in this life. When God created mankind he gave some precious, foundational gifts for us to enjoy. Genesis 2 lists them in order. The first gift he gave us was the breath of life (Gen. 2:7) – he made us into living beings who are able to experience and enjoy life. The second gift he gave was a beautiful garden (Gen. 2:8-9) – an earthly paradise with delicious food to enjoy. The third gift he gave us was meaningful work (Gen. 2:15) – the ability to join him in creating and bringing order to world. And the forth gift he gave us was marriage (Gen. 2:22-25) – a powerful union between a man and woman from which we enjoy companionship, children and sexual intimacy and demonstrate the glory of God.

When mankind chose to disobey God and was corrupted by sin, we ended up misusing all of these precious gifts and ruining them because of our sin. And I have to wonder when God sees what we’ve done with these wonderful blessings, if he doesn’t say: “What are you doing with my precious gifts? You’re misusing and ruining them.”

This morning we are going to focus our attention on one of them – the gift of marriage – and see how a commandment that is often seen as pleasure-killing and restrictive, is actually intended to be only for our good.
Deuteronomy 5:18
18 “’And you shall not commit adultery.

Before we narrow our understanding of this gift too much, I want us to think about the context in which it was given. When originally given, this command would have been a contradiction to the practices the Israelites had been part of when they lived in ancient Egypt. According to what I learned, marriage was important in the Egyptian culture and faithfulness within marriage was also important, but divorce was easy and common, and outside of marriage there was a lot of sexual freedom. Those who were not married could sleep with whomever they wanted, and the human body and human sexuality were openly and freely displayed. I also believe that at times sexual promiscuity had a part in some of their religious worship and was something the Israelites picked up on, as was demonstrated on the day they worshipped the golden calf at Mt. Sinai when they “rose up to play.” So there wasn’t much restraint or boundary in the culture they were coming out of. I picture it being similar to where things are at in the United States.

The culture they were heading into was much worse. Ancient Canaan was known for its rampant sexual perversion. Ritual sex and religious prostitution were actually built into their worship of the fertility goddess Asherah and sexual immorality was deeply embedded in that culture. They purposefully engaged in sexual perversion because they thought it would result in bountiful crops and prosperity – blessings from the goddess Asherah. This was one of the reasons that God commanded his people to completely remove the Canaanites from the land, so they wouldn’t have a corrupting influence on them.

So when God gave his people the command: “You shall not commit adultery,” I think he had all these things in mind. They were not to indulge in the sexual perversion of the pagan nations but practice marriage according to his design – use his gift as he intended for them to use by remaining faithful to their marriage partner and the covenant of marriage. In Leviticus 18:1-3 it says: “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 ‘Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the Lord your God. 3 You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes.’”

He specifically forbid the practices of incest, homosexuality, bestiality, and adultery – things that were common among the pagan nations and lead to destruction in their relationships, families, cultures, and lives. They resulted it pain, chaos, and dysfunction – broken families, broken identity, turmoil, stress, neglect, instability, divorce, poverty, and the list goes on. God did not want an open-ended sexual free-for-all for his people that would leave them in the same pit of depravity and destruction as the Canaanite nations. God’s gift and his design for marriage and sex was so much better and would provide so much more stability, strength and fulfillment. So in commanding them to not commit adultery, he was commanding them to follow his good design instead.

That design was revealed in the very beginning. After God created Eve and brought her to Adam, it says in Genesis 2:24-25: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” A man is to be faithfully devoted to his wife in the lifelong covenant of marriage. In that covenant, they become one flesh, and in the protection of that covenant they shamelessly enjoy the powerful bond of sexual union – naked and unashamed. That’s God’s design. God is not being a pleasure-killer in giving us his design; he is giving us the pathway to freedom and joy in the area of marriage and sex.

But there’s more to God’s design than just getting the mechanics right. God further reveals the details of how that design is supposed to function in a harmonious and joyful way in Ephesians 5:21-33. In verse 21, the apostle Paul teaches us that in order for husbands and wives to enjoy the fullness of joy and satisfaction in marriage there must be a mutual “submission to one another out of reverence for Christ.” He goes on in the following verses to teach that wives submit to their husbands by treating them with respect – the same respect they would show to Christ. Husbands submit to their wives by treating them with love – the kind of love Christ demonstrated when he laid down his life for the Church.

This is the fullness of God’s design for marriage and sex. It’s when husbands and wives treat each other in these ways out of reverence for Christ that they experience the ultimate goodness of God’s gift as he intended. This brings harmony, strength, joy and fulfillment not only to a husband and wife, but to their children and extended family, and to the society as a whole. Communities and nations are blessed when people follow God’s design. You can see that. God is not out to kill our joy and pleasure; he’s out to fulfill it. He gives us his commands for our good.

But now it’s time for a major reality check. It’s easy to see the goodness and blessing in following God’s design, but it’s also easy to see that following God’s design has proven to be extremely difficult for every human being to do. The Israelites didn’t do it. They have a long history of ruining God’s gift. They repeatedly gave themselves over to the practices and sexual perversion of their Canaanite neighbors. And if we take an honest look at our lives we all will likely have ways that we’ve turned away from God’s design.

What makes this command so difficult to follow is that every human is born with a sin nature that produces a litany of powerful cravings and fleshly desires. And at the core or our corruption is the desire that each one of us has of wanting to do things our way and not God’s way. We take the gift of marriage and sex that God has given and do whatever we want with it. And because our fleshly cravings are so powerful, it leads us into all kinds of disobedience to seek to find satisfaction. God’s gift requires patience, waiting, and self-sacrifice, but we are driven by instant gratification and self-indulgence.

It’s that sin nature that leads us to engage in every form of disobedience. Many give in to temptation and engage in pornography, premarital sex, and sexual experimentation. We’ve bought into the lie that our desires are just natural and therefore good. We sleep with our boyfriends or girlfriends or fiancé rather than waiting for marriage. It’s so normal in our culture, we don’t even bat an eye at it. We rush into a bad marriage. People who are married will go outside their marriage to seek fulfillment by looking at pornography or sleeping with someone besides their spouse. Others give in to the temptation to engage in homosexual desires – a practice that is encouraged and celebrated in our culture today, even though it clearly violates God’s design and Scripture explicitly forbids it. Others have the desires to commit sexual acts with children or animals or family members.

Even within the marriage between a husband and wife there are desires that violate God’s design. Husbands have the desires to get what they want so they mistreat their wives and selfishly use them for sex. Wives have the desires to get what they want so they control their husbands and manipulate them using sex. People who are married also quickly turn to divorce and remarriage to try to get what they want even though they may not have biblical grounds. They didn’t get what they wanted the first time around so they try again rather than fighting for marriage and remaining faithful to the covenant.

There are all kinds of different desires and temptations and these desires are extremely powerful and don’t seem to go away. So instead of using God’s gift as he intended, we misuse it to gratify our desires. And all of us is guilty in some way. We’re all in the same boat. Sins in these areas are extremely common. And to make matters worse, whatever fulfillment we seek is never enough. Taking matters into our own hands is never enough. It might give us some quick and easy thrills, but it’s never enough. Even following God’s design in marriage doesn’t fully satisfy these desires. Whatever we try to do, it’s never enough. We keep wanting more.

So the answer is obviously not going to be in seeking to gratify these desires by turning to our own way. What is it then? What are we supposed to do?

Even though the gift of marriage and sex isn’t the ultimate answer, I do believe that God gave it to us to point to what it is. In Ephesians 5:31-32 it says this: “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” God gave us the gift of marriage to point us to Christ – whether you’re currently married or not. The gift of human marriage that is on display all around us, is meant to point us to the faithful, personal, covenant love that Christ has for us. And it’s only in experiencing that kind of love that the longing in our souls will be fulfilled.

Whether you’re single or married, and whatever temptations and desires you face in this area, the only thing that will give you the joy and fulfillment that you long for is a close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He is the one that loves you so much that he willingly suffered and died for you, in order to forgive all your sins in this area and every area of your life. No matter what you’ve done; no matter how detestable you think you may be, Jesus wants you. He loves you. He wants to be close to you. He is committed to you. He is faithful.

So as you seek to obey God in following this command, the greatest blessing isn’t in the gift itself. The greatest blessing is the One this gift points to – the one who can satisfy your soul as you trust him and seek to be faithful in obeying this command.