Adultery Breaks Too Many Commandments

YOUR FAMILY MATTERS FROM THE DIARY OF PASTOR CHANDA
I met Moses again today. He told me that after our last chat, he met a friend who knew about his woes with his wife. Moses shared with this friend what I had told him concerning the seriousness of the sin of adultery.
Moses’ friend did not agree with my line of argument. He told Moses that every sin is the same. The Bible says if you break one of the Ten Commandments it is as if you have broken all of them. They are like a chain. Which link you cut does not really matter.
Moses asked me what I thought about this. Of course, I sympathised with his friend for thinking that all the commandments are the same. He was simply seeking to guard God’s law, lest we think that some of God’s commandments are not important.
However, I could not agree with Moses’ friend. When Jesus was asked which one was the greatest commandment in Matthew 22, he did not say, “Why are you asking that? All the commandments are the same!” No, he gave the greatest and then gave the second greatest.
I went further and repeated my earlier assertion to Moses that the order in which God gave the commandments to Moses was deliberate. If one were to examine the place that he gave to the commandment against adultery, it shows its relative importance.
Seeing that Moses looked a little confused, I decided to use another line of argument. “Moses, one reason why adultery is so serious is that it rarely ever breaks only one of God’s commandments. An adulterous affair breaks many commandments at once.”
That really made Moses sit up! His eyes opened so wide, I feared his eyeballs would drop out. “What do you mean?” he asked. I opened the Bible for him in Exodus 20, where the Ten Commandments are. We started with the last one and made our way upward.
The 10th commandment says, “You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.” Is that not where adultery starts? It begins with lusting after that which is not yours. The woman who is yours is at home but in order to commit adultery you go for another woman.
The ninth commandment says, “You shall not bear false testimony against your neighbour.” Lying is an integral part of maintaining an adulterous affair. You lie to your wife about where you have been, to your mistress about how bad your wife is, etc.
The eighth commandment says, “You shall not steal.” Adulterous affairs are very expensive. A man who has a mistress steals from his wife and children in order to keep her happy. Kids fail to go to school because their money has gone to support the other woman!
The seventh commandment says, “You shall not commit adultery.” I did not need to say anything to Moses about how an adulterous affair breaks this commandment. Even a child in kindergarten would have told him that. So, we went on to the next commandment.
The sixth commandment says, “You shall not murder.” How many people have been murdered because of adulterous affairs? The graves are full of them. Husbands have connived with their girlfriends and hired assassins in order to murder their own wives.
Sometimes it has been the other way around. An insecure wife has gone to the home of a woman interfering in her marriage to tell her off. In the ensuing fight, the enraged wife has murdered the husband’s mistress, and she has spent the rest of her life rotting in jail.
“Love is as strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave” (Song of Solomon 8:6). I could see by this time that Moses had been won over. He was shaking his head as we reached this point. He added, “Another murder that often accompanies adultery is abortion.”
Moses was right. Many babies have gone from the womb straight into the tomb because the adulterer and the adulteress wanted to hide their nocturnal affair. So, here were five out of ten commandments broken by adultery—including murder. Adultery is terrible!
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Posted by Editor on August 18, 2013. Filed under LIFE & STYLE, STYLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry