Lesson 49
Pre-Marital Promiscuity – 22:13-21
We’ll get back into the text which we left on a three week excursion so
that we could get the background to come back to this text and understand why
certain things are said. Since it’s been
a little time since we’ve worked with the text I want to review just what we’re
doing in the book of Deuteronomy at this point.
We’ve been working through many sections in this book. The details of life begin roughly in chapter
12 and extend through chapter 26. We have divided this section into basically
five sections. First, the center of
unity of the nation
Then we have the problem of rights and freedoms and this is what is
discussed here in chapter 22 on through chapter 24 and we will show in this
section, and we already have in part of this section, that rights are not given
by governmental edict in the Word of God; the rights of man are given by God’s
design in creation, not by government decree.
Government decrees can neither give nor take away those rights; they can
recognize or fail to recognize the rights that God has already given to men,
but the law itself does not make the right nor take it away. So this section is important from that
aspect. Then the last section, chapter
26 deals with, you might say patriotism or the citizen’s spirit would probably
be a better way, citizen spirit, the citizen’s mental attitude toward the
country. This is authorized in the Word
of God in chapter 26. So we have
throughout not only a very interesting section of the Word of God but we have
principles that apply to any national entity and are downright interesting when
we want to study the history of our own country.
This section, chapter 22, deals with rights, and the section we are
dealing with is chapter 22:13-30 deals with sexual rights and these sexual
rights are there because of God’s design in the marriage institution. In other
words, the divine institution of marriage has certain characteristics. One of these characteristics is that there is
a certain set of rights that accrue to each partner and it’s the respect of
these rights that’s the concern of this section of Scripture. We’re going to apply what we have picked up
in the past, plus some of the details that we’ll pick up from this text.
When we left the text I had left you with the different cases involved,
the six cases that are going to be discussed.
Moses is going to give this congregation, remember this is a mixed
congregation of all ages, this is a sermon.
In chapter 22:13-30 Moses gives six illustrations of sexual rights
because of the marriage institution. And
we’ve [can’t understand word] these before but I’ll go over them once again. In verses 13-21 we have the case of suspected
premarital promiscuity. In verse 22 we
have the case of discovered adultery, such as illustrated in John 8, discovered
adultery. Verses 23-24 the case of the
promiscuous fiancée. Verses 25-27, the
case of the raped fiancée, and when we get into that section we’ll discuss the
problem of engagement versus marriage and the difference. The case of the raped single girl, verses
28-29, and verse 30, which is an interesting case, is the case of marrying a
step-mother. These are all deliberately
put in there to illustrate certain rights that Moses is trying to communicate.
Tonight we’re going to take the first case and work with it in detail
and we’ll spend one or two more nights finishing up the rest of the cases. The case of the suspected premarital
promiscuity, verses 13-21. Verse 13, “If
any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her,” now this immediately
gets involved in the divine institution of marriage and therefore gets involved
in this idea of this soulish relationship that God has given man to parallel
his spiritual relationship. So when the
man goes in and takes a wife, this is the act of marriage, goes in unto her and
hates her, “hates her” is a result that occurs after the point of marriage and
sets the tone for this case.
Let’s first look at his problem because in verse 14 the man is the one
who brings the charges against the woman.
So in order to understand why he makes these charges or why he tries to
make these charges we have to go back and review once again the nature of the
sex relationship. We said it parallels
the spiritual relationship. The
spiritual relationship has a need, as a sinner I recognize that I need grace,
that I can’t make it on my own good works and therefore help is going to have
to come from the outside. I need grace,
so I have a need as a sinner and I recognize that from the spiritual
standpoint. In the realm of the sexual
relationship this man has a need and we said his need consisted basically of
two things, two items that every man needs, barring those exempted under 1 Cor.
7 and the gift of celibacy. One, he
needs a helper to fulfill God’s plan for his life. So God has given this man a direction in
life, He’s given this man a plan for his life and now in order that that man
may complete that plan he needs God’s woman.
So he needs God’s helper, or as we say the hazer, God’s helper is needed so that he may fulfill God’s plan for
his life.
The second need that man has in the realm of the sexual relationship is
that he needs the experience of learning to love. It’s not something that people say “I fall in
love.” You may fall into a very shallow
kind of love, but love in Scripture is a learned thing. It goes on, it takes time to mature and
respond, and because we have not emphasized this people get into marriage, they
experience the first heartache and then they’ve got a reason to throw in the
towel. The reason is that they’ve never
learned the concept that love must grow by a series of experiences, some of
them not very pleasant. But
nevertheless, man as the male, has this need. God has assigned him this role in
history, that men might personally in the soulish area experience this process
of learning to love that in eternity he may have a deeper appreciation for
God’s love toward him.
So this is the need then, and just as was the problem of salvation, the
spiritual relationship, we have a solution, there is a solution worked out by
God in this area of the soulish relationship.
The solution in salvation, obviously, is a Savior; it obviously is a
gift of divine grace given toward us; a grace that’s given toward us that
perfectly fits our need and it’s the same thing in the realm of the sex
relationship or the realm of the soul that God has given this man a perfect
provision for his life. In other words,
this is a Miss Right. God has given her
to this man. That is His solution, a woman that is made by God to solve both of
these problems, made to help him with a particular plan of God for his
life. God may have him go into some
profession, God may ask him to take a particular kind of job, God may have him
in (quote) “fulltime Christian service” (end quote), God may call him to the
mission field, God may have an academic career picked out for him or God may just
have him be the janitor in a factory but God has a job, a place and a position
for this man and this woman, made by God, is especially designed to help him
accomplish this task in life.
Therefore this is His solution, and Miss Right, this woman that he has
taken in verse 13 ideally should be the solution to his problems. Now again, parallel with the spiritual
relationship we have the role of volition, for in the spiritual relationship it
is necessary for us to respond to God’s solution or the solution is not
valid. In other words, if you have heard
about Jesus Christ being the solution to your sin problem, the fact that you
are separated from God and you need a Savior, and you’ve heard and heard this
but you have never responded by personally placing your faith in Christ, then
that solution is of zero benefit to you.
And it’s the same thing here with volition. The man must exercise his volition toward the
woman and so therefore as far as the male is concerned he has to exercise
positive volition toward the woman, he has to initiate love, he has to be the
one that takes the first step in the relationship. So just as in salvation we must respond to
God’s solution, so in the realm of the soul in this sex relationship the man
must respond to God’s solution to his problem, he must respond as God brings
this woman into his life by loving her.
Now we have the fourth analogy between these two relationships. On one hand we have the initial and periodic
act of faith in salvation and it is this initial and periodic act of faith that
appropriates God’s grace. For example,
at the point of salvation we believe in Jesus Christ; it occurs in a split
second of time. Acts 16:31 in the aorist
tense says “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,” so
therefore it occurs in a moment of time. That particular aorist is a
constantive aorist which indicates a point in time. Now that we’ve got this established we also
have in our life in phase two to operate by faith. This is how we stay in the will of God, how
we continue to be filled with the Spirit is to walk by faith and not by sight
with our eyes on the Word of God and the Lord Jesus and not upon circumstances,
details of life, other personalities, etc.
So this takes periodic acts of faith, or you might say a continuous kind
of faith.
So also in the sex relationship which is made parallel to the spiritual
relationship again and again in the Bible, we have the Hebrew word yada, and yada means to know and in the Old Testament when the man went into the
sex relationship with a woman, it was said that he “knew” his wife. The reason for this gets into details which
we can’t get into, it’s tied up with this verb yada, but it simply means to discover or to know her in a deep
way. So this occurs at one point, the
beginning of the marriage, and continues on down throughout the marriage.
The fifth analogy of the relationship is that we have spiritual
union. Spiritual union is caused by
regeneration. The Holy Spirit
regenerates my human spirit at which time the Bible says the Holy Spirit
indwells my human spirit and there is a unity in the realm of the spiritual
relationship. So you have human spirit
plus Holy Spirit and you have a union that is established at the point of
regeneration and persists forever, you never break this relationship. Then over here in the soulish relationship in
sex the Bible says there is a physical union and it calls that physical union
“one flesh,” and the “one flesh” means that you have two souls, each soul
having volition, etc. and this soul manifesting itself in and through and on
the bodies, and these two bodies link and you have one flesh. And that one flesh is said to be established
at this point and fortified, etc. down throughout the marriage
relationship. Now the important thing
about this union business is the fact that this is the basis for the roles that
we play in marriage and in the church.
Let’s look at this again. Here
you have the spiritual; here you have the soulish relationship. You have this union that exists between
Christ and the believer, between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit, same
thing, and it’s this union that defines and sets up the role so that once you
have the union established, then Christ acts in a certain way to the believer
and the believer acts in a certain way to Christ. So in the same way in the sexual
relationship, you have the physical union of one flesh and when that is
established that sets up the basis for the husband/wife relationship. So the husband behaves in an analogous way as
Christ behaves to the Church and the wife behaves back to him in the way in
which the believer responds to Jesus Christ.
So you have over here Christ initiating the love, Christ nurturing the
body, Christ sustaining the body, Christ providing for the body, and the
believer in turn yielding his body to Christ that Christ may live in and
through that believer in his life and may accomplish God’s purpose.
So over here you have the same thing, you have the husband and the
husband initiates the love toward the wife, he provides for her, he sustains
her, he nourishes her and as a result, the analogy holding here, you have the
wife yielding herself to him and allowing him to live out and through her and
by means of her. So you have this
parallel established.
Now we have a sixth analogy and that’s the analogy of growth. You have growth over here in the spiritual
relationship; you have growth over here in the sexual relationship and don’t
let anyone ever kid you that there’s no growth; there is growth in both
areas. We’re in trouble today because
people have failed to realize that this is a relationship that matures and
grows and is not accomplished and is exhausted overnight. The Christian life grows and becomes more and
more wonderful as we know more and more Bible doctrine and apply it in our
lives. God the Holy Spirit teaches us
more and more new things. If you ever
see a Christian that’s been a Christian for ten or fifteen years and he has a
disgusted look on his face, this is the most dull life I have ever lived, you
can chalk it up, that person probably hasn’t learned anything since the time he
received Christ, and probably has applied less.
So when you see an older Christian that has been around for a while and
he gives you this exhausted, disgusted look, I’m fed up with life etc, the
Christian doesn’t work, I’ve tried it, you can chalk it up that this person has
flunked and the reason why life is so boring to him is because he has never got
into the Word of God. He has failed to
do many things. He fails to get linked
up with a local church and he goes right down the drain. We have church hoppers, hopping from one area
to the next, etc. because they fail to get linked with a local church. The local church and the local church alone
is the New Testament norm for God the Holy Spirit working in society.
Over here you have growth, it’s the same thing in the realm of the
sexual relationship, these people do not learn everything overnight, it’s a
continual learning process. And again if you have people in the marriage
relationship that are fed up with it, they’re tired and they can’t think of
anything else, you can again chalk it up to the fact that they have ceased to
learn, they’re not interested in learning, they haven’t probed into the depths
of the marriage relationship and it bores them.
That marriage is a flop just like these believers are flops.
Then we have the seventh analogy and that goes back to the dynamics
involved, once again involved in the overall plan, dynamics involved in the
overall plan of sex. Dynamics involved
in the plan of spirituality is, first, you have Jesus Christ, God gives Christ
the plan and that plan is executed through the Church. The Church does not go back and talk back to
Christ and say hey Christ, I don’t like the plan, and we’re going to change
it. That’s what the ecumenical crowd is
doing today, they’re throwing out the literal gospel and they are dictating
back to Jesus Christ the plan. Christ
didn’t bring the Church into existence because he wanted help in designing His
plan or because He needed a council of advisers to tell Him how to run
things. The Church has been brought into
existence to do Christ’s will, not to advise Christ how to do His role and job.
It’s the same thing over here, you have the man and God has given that
man a plan and that woman is to compliment that plan and not twist the plan,
turn the plan, change the plan, etc. If
she has to she’s not the right woman or she’s off beat if she is. So it’s the same thing, you have the man, you
have him with a plan and the woman is to help him fulfill that plan. That plan, of course, is the plan of God for
the man’s life.
Now that is what this man should have in verse 13, but let’s see what
happens. Verse 14, he gets disgusted
with this woman, the word “hate” here can mean just disgust, “And gives
occasions of speech” and literally it means baseless charges. In other words, he’s gossiping behind her
back and making all sorts of innuendos and so on, we might contemporize the
translation by saying he puts out a lot of hot air, false, rumor, “against her,
and brings up an evil name upon her.”
Now why is this “evil name” there, why is this such a big thing? Because each partner in a marriage
relationship, if you have a male and you have the female come, that may have
come as unto the Lord and this is Mr. Right and this is Miss Right and they
have been designed for one another, they follow God’s plan for their life, God
has led them together, then they have the right to expect zero experience in
the sex relationship just as Christ does not expect us to be in Satan’s church
before he regenerates us. Christ does
not expect us to be in three or four different church universals before He gets
us in His, there isn’t any, there is only one.
And so it’s the same thing here, that these partners have the right to
expect the other partner to be in perfect condition.
So Mr. Right, when he looks at this girl and he marries this girl as
unto the Lord, he has the right that that girl that God has picked out for him
be ready for him and she is not ready for him, as we saw last time, if she’s
engaged in promiscuity. Why? For many reasons; number one of course she
has hidden sin in her heart which separates her and so you can’t have love, so
you’ve got minus love. You can’t have a
deep love. The second thing, we went
into the problem of response patterns and so on and she has problems responding
to him because she’s messed around before.
So therefore he is not getting the deal that he has the right to get
under the divine institution of marriage.
He has the right to walk up to this girl whom God has picked out and
have the most lovely relationship imaginable on earth and he’s been sold down
the drain if this has occurred. That’s why such an issue is made here, and of
course, conversely, if he’s lying about this thing and then he’s bringing an
evil reputation, “evil name” simply means this girl has messed around and now
she’s in trouble. God had her picked out
for this man and she’s fouled the whole thing up because she couldn’t wait for
God, she had to get one off with some guy or something else and get involved
with various guys and so on and so now this is her condition. Now she comes into the relationship less than
what God intended her to come into that relationship with. So the man essentially has had his sexual
rights violated by her previous behavior patterns.
Let’s look at it, verse 14, “And he give baseless charges against her,”
he’s insinuating that she has violated his rights, not her rights, his rights,
“and bring an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came
to her, I found her not a maid,” it doesn’t say maid, this is the King James
covering up the original language. The
Hebrew at this point doesn’t say maid, it’s the same word used later on, it
means the signs of virginity which was a valid test at this time in
history. So he didn’t find her as a
virgin, she had engaged in promiscuous activity and so therefore he brings
these charges against her.
Now verse 15, “Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take
and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the
city in the gate.” Now I want you to
notice who is involved in this. This is
a civil trial. The elders of the gate
are the men in the city council. The “gate” was the open market place in the
city where the council met. And so this
is a civil court. That’s what’s
happening here. That’s not the old men
of the city, it means the old men in the sense of the authorities of the city,
“the elders of the gate,” and notice that “her father and her mother” are the
ones that do the brining. Why? Why is it that the father and the mother of
the girl are involved here? Because
during… when the girl was under their jurisdiction was when the violation of
that man’s sexual rights occurred, that’s the point. That’s why both the father and the mother are
called into the court, because it was their responsibility. This girl that’s called a “damsel,” actually
it is the word for teenage girl. So this
is a young girl and while she was growing up she was under the jurisdiction of
her parents and therefore God looks upon her parents. It’s like in the military when somebody fouls
up, the stuff comes down in rank, first the Colonel gets it and then it goes to
the Major, then it comes down to the Captain and finally the Lieutenant.
So you have this father and mother thing, they’re the ones that get it,
at this point. They are the parties that
are called into court. And by the way,
that’s an interesting principle for teenagers. As far as God is concerned as
long as you are in the house of your parents, God holds your parents
responsible and if you foul up, guess who gets disciplined? Your parents get
disciplined so don’t blame your parents if they lay down the law once in a
while, they’re being a little selfish because they know that if God spanks the
paddle is going to land you know where.
So therefore if they lower the boom every once in a while just remember
they are doing it out of self-preservation; if something goes wrong God holds
them responsible and when teenagers are old enough to live outside their home
and sustain themselves and then God holds them individually responsible.
So here’s the principle on why the father and the mother are called into
the court to testify. Now why is this
such a serious thing? Because what we
have here, we have the situation where this man has gone to this woman,
evidently thinking that this woman was the woman that God had picked out for
him and she has violated his rights. Now
notice whose rights it is that are violated.
The claim is that his rights, not hers, his rights have been violated,
but when were they violated? They were
violated back when this girl probably never even knew him. Now do you see the picture of continuity,
this girls is growing up as a young girl, as a teenager and back her she can
drop the ball and get involved with some kooky character and foul up the whole
situation for some other man way down the line and she has violated his rights,
even though she doesn’t know who he is at that moment, but because she has got
involved, etc. she has actually taken from his rights, a person’s rights that
she doesn’t even yet know, in the design and plan of God. So this is why this is so serious. While this girl was under her parent’s
domain, suppose this is the time when she was inside that family unit, and
probably all the way up to the time that she married this man in this
particular culture, so while she was living as a teenager in the house of her
father and her mother, she engaged in promiscuous activity. That’s the charge,
and when she did it back then she violated the rights of Mr. Right, or her
future partner for life.
Now let’s look at the implications of this by way of application. When we involve ourselves, as we do in
American culture, with dating, which is a fine game, it’s an interesting game,
it has all sorts of roles to it and when you get involved with dating, just
remember from the Christian viewpoint that when you go out on a date with
anybody of the opposite sex, remember that you are holding in your hands the
rights of some other person perhaps, or it might be yourself, if it turns out
that this comes into marriage. But on a date actually you can’t tell that right
away so therefore what you have to adopt as a policy, if you have Christian
concern you don’t buy the situation ethics that you do something out of love, a
content-less love that is basically self-deception, I’d like to do something
and I call it love and justify it to my own conscience; this is situation
ethics. Nevertheless, in this situation
what are you doing? When you go out on a
date with another person you are guarding and responsible for that person’s
rights, and not only for that person’s rights but rights on down the line. For
example, this may be X and Y and over here you have X prime and Y prime, and so
here you are, you’re the fellow and you take this girl out on a date. All right, you may never wind up with this
girl as your wife but you’re going to wind up with some other girl as your
wife. Eventually you meet this girl
that’s going to be your wife and you would appreciate it if whoever dated her
before kept hands off. And her Mr.
Right, when she goes out on in life and she finally meets the right man that
God has for her, he’s going to be appreciative if you’ve minded your own
business. So that’s the Christian
philosophy of dating. Now it isn’t
prudish or anything else, it’s simply respecting other people’s rights and this
is the point and why this makes such a big federal case out of this one
illustration, it takes up more verses than any other illustration in the rest
of this chapter.
So now the trial proceeds. The
damsel is a dependent teenager, that’s what the word means, and in verse 16
“And the damsel’s father shall say unto the elders,” notice it’s the father
that gives the report to the court, not the mother, the “father shall say unto
the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife [in marriage], and now he
hates her. [17] And, lo, he has given baseless charges against her, saying, I
found not thy daughter having the signs of virginity. And yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s
virginity. And they shall spread the
cloth before the elders of the city.”
Here we have case evidence, the word cloth is simlah, a simlah was the
outer garment they used and we would… analogous to wedding clothes on the bed
that we sleep in.
So verse 18, “And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise
him.” Now the man has lost the case, he
has falsely accused this girl of promiscuity and notice, they don’t take the
charge lightly. It’s very interesting,
we were having an evangelistic workshop here this afternoon and going over some
of the objections that you encounter as a Christian when you witness for Christ
and one of the objections that came up and I’m sure always comes up is that
well, the God in the Old Testament is an old fogy, look at how he killed all
the people in Joshua’s day, etc. old mean God, and they give you the impression
that the morals of the Old Testament are wrong and despicable, etc. look at the
morals here, they are a lot higher than American in the mid-twentieth
century. So this business about the low
morals in the Old Testament is largely read into the Bible by a lot of
liberals.
Verse 18, “the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise
him,” the word “chastise” is the word whip and that’s one of the ways in which
people were punished in the ancient world.
They didn’t put people in jail, except when they were waiting trial,
except when they didn’t know what to do with the men and they were waiting on
Yahweh at the Temple, that was the only case they put men in jail on the Old
Testament. Why did they do this? Because
they recognized a principle in judicial operation that we do not and that is
that punishment must be immediate. We
have studied this in past time, we’ve gone through the laws of evidence of the
Israelite court, we’ve gone through the court procedures, we’ve shown how they
punished people and what things they never used in the punishment system and
they never used jail but they always used some form of physical punishment,
fines or capital punishment. Those are
basically the three forms of punishment with some exceptions which we will be
running into in the next few chapters.
“…chasten him” and this word simply means they whipped him, it doesn’t
say how many times but evidently judging from verse 19 it was quite a healthy
number because verse 19 is a very extraordinary verse that you’ll never pick up
unless you understand a little bit about ancient money.
“And they shall amerce him [fine him]” it means they fined him, “they
shall fine him an hundred shekels of silver,” now let’s study the word “shekel”
for a minute and see if we can figure out how much a shekel is. The word
“shekel” is used in the Code of Hammurabi, pieces of silver, it’s also used in
the Old Testament and it’s said that the worker’s wage for the year is ten
shekels. The laborer, the common every
day laborer’s wage for the year was ten shekels. Now let’s just do a little computation and
bring that over into our American money system so you can get an idea what this
fine is like. Suppose we set the minimum
wage for this kind of wage at $3,000. That’s pretty minimal. Therefore a shekel, one shekel is $300. Now what’s a hundred shekels? $30,000.
You see I presume that the husbands kept their big fat mouth shut with
this fine going on, $30,000 fine.
Now it’s deliberately high and I’ll show you the reason in a moment but
I want you to catch this, the girl’s virginity is not to be slandered in public
and it’s to be respect and the man who doesn’t respect it gets it and he winds
up with a fat fine of $30,000. Now
that’s would take quite a few bank accounts to pay off. And it turns out in practice in the ancient
world, obviously, no day laborer is going to pay this thing off, so what
happens? Well, there is a very
interesting thing. In order to pay this
thing off, the only way the man could do it under the existing laws of the Old
Testament was to hire himself out as a slave.
So he had to hire himself out as a slave and guess to whom did he
usually have to hire himself? You’ve
figured it out, right. So you have the
height of embarrassment. He winds up
working for his father-in-law for years paying off because he slandered that
man’s daughter. They had some
sophisticated forms of punishment in the Old Testament. Absolutely
amazing! So this is how the Lord just
worked it out that these things just didn’t happen too often and the people
that it happened to got burned real well, and usually it didn’t happen
again. [Verse 19, “And they shall fine
him an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel,
because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel; and she shall
be his wife; he may not put her away all his days.”]
Verse 20, “But if this thing be true,” now here we go back to the court
again and here the case is true and the man is right, that this girl has
brought into the relationship something less than God intended, and so
therefore she, by her volition, no one coerced her, she by her volition, and
I’m going to get back to why this is her volition in a moment, this is not a
girl that had been attacked here, because if she had been attacked that would
have come out before but she has deliberately by her own volition engaged in
promiscuity and not only that, one, she engaged in promiscuity, two she has
deceived her parents, never told the parents about it. By the way, there was not a death penalty for
promiscuity, so she didn’t have to lie about it, she deliberately lied about it
so therefore she had promiscuity, she lied to her parents and then finally she
deceived the groom. So that’s the scope,
three parties involved and probably more people involved here. So this is what this girl did.
“If this thing be true, and the tokens of her virginity be not found for
the damsel, [21] Then they shall bring out the damsel” or the teenager, “to the
door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones
that she die, because she has wrought folly in Israel,” now what does this
mean, the word “folly.” The word “folly”
in the Old Testament means a callous. It
basically comes from the word after somebody has rubbed their hands they’ve got
a callous and the callous had come down to mean something… let’s take this
word, it starts out as a callous but then it had a moral sense, callousness in
a moral sense.
What happens when a person is calloused in a moral sense? It means basically that they have gone
through the process of Eph. 4, namely that they’ve gone on negative volition;
negative volition plus mentality of the soul equals willful ignorance. Eph. 4:20-23, negative volition plus
conscience equals callousness. When that happens the human spirit and the
mentality of the soul fill up with human viewpoint. When they fill up with human viewpoint they
are excluded from fellowship with God, alienated from the life of God, Eph. 4
says, so you have these people out of fellowship. They are excluded from fellowship with God
and the result is that they have misery, sorrow, heartache, suffering, and all
the other things and so finally what they do is, they can’t take this any more
and yet because they continue in negative volition they never can claim 1 John
1:9, they stay out of fellowship and since they deliberately want to stay
outside, the problem is where am I going to get happiness. And so they cry out fill me, this is what
Philippians is saying, fill me with happiness, fill me with happiness, they
start a frantic search for happiness and this goes on and on and on and
on. You can see the process sin
Ephesians.
So what has happened is that through negative volition the soul gets
calloused and finally fills up with human viewpoint to the point where the
person becomes totally insensitive to spiritual things and so therefore she
goes out on a frantic search for happiness and this is what this girl has done
in this “folly.” This means she has
“wrought callousness in Israel,” she has gotten to the point through this
process of becoming so insensitive to the Word of God that she could care less
about what God’s will is for her, what God’s will is for Israel, etc. and she is
just out to [can’t understand word] self, she wants happiness and she’s going
to get it and she’s going to try all sorts of things. And so actually then God has to face the
problem of promiscuity inside the marriage.
In other words, this was done before the marriage, back here. Here’s the marriage, starting here and the
promiscuity in effect has been brought over inside the marriage.
Now what is God going to do about it.
This is the reason why in verse 21 you see it says, “they shall stone
her” because when they kill the girl they dissolve a marriage, and that’s God’s
solution. In other words, what He says,
He pronounced that marriage wrong because that marriage represents a violation
of what He intended the divine institution of marriage to be and therefore
since it’s wrong, it’s been brought about by deception, and notice this, you
could have this kind of promiscuity occur, have it confessed, have it brought
into the marriage and there wouldn’t be this discipline that you see here, but
the reason is this is a deliberate negative volition on this girl’s part and
what has happened and what has gone on is that she has covered it up, covered
it up, covered it up, showing callousness, callousness, callousness, to the
Word of God and so she comes into this marriage relationship with a negative
volition and it goes back to marriage.
What is marriage? Again, man plus the plan plus the woman. Well if the woman is operating on negative
volition and she’s insensitive to the plan of God, how’s the marriage going to
work out? So now we can go back down
through this thing and examine how this marriage is going to work.
Let’s look again at the need.
What has she done for this man?
This man had the need; he had the need for a woman that would be God’s
woman for him, to help him go through life. So therefore, number one, how she
fouled that up is that the will of God is absent from her mind, she doesn’t
care about the will of God because the word “folly” here means
callousness. She could care less. This guy happened to be a good looking guy
and had lots of money and so she jumped in and that’s basically the attitude
she has here. So you have this will of
God missing, so she is not really ready to fulfill the need of this man. So then we come to the next problem, the
problem of solution. The man has the
need of this person who is going to need the will of God for his life, she
doesn’t care about the will of God for his life, so she just knocks herself out
as far as helping him in his need, and therefore she ceases to be the solution
for this man. The sexual response
pattern that she has is already molded to a group of men or at least a few men
involved here, so she can’t respond to him and help him out in life like she was
designed to do. So therefore since she’s
out of it God just says forget it, I’m just dissolving the marriage.
And then we go to volition, it’s the same thing. This man initiates the love, he believes this
woman is God’s woman for him, but he can’t get any response. And why can’t he get any response? Because she’s out looking for a good time,
she’s on a frantic search for happiness, going around from this thing to the
next thing, trying for money, trying for this, trying for that, and she never
can get straightened out, so therefore volition has become inoperative. You could go on down through the rest of this
relationship and you can just summarize it by the fact that she has gotten
herself involved such that she has disqualified herself from being God’s woman
for this man and if this marriage would go on, would hinder this fellow. So
God, to show the totality of this thing and the principle, via the principle
we’ve seen again and again operating here in the Old Testament, He just simply
dissolves the marriage. See, the
marriage can’t be dissolved any other way at this point. The way to dissolve the marriage is by
death. Therefore she is executed, and
the verse concludes that “she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore
in her father’s house; so shalt thou put evil away from among you.”
Now, I want you to notice something, that this death penalty that is
given in this passage is not necessary for promiscuity in the Old
Testament. It is not a death sentence as
you will see later on. The reason why this becomes a death sentence is that
this girl has deceived people and gotten locked into a marriage relationship.
That’s what has caused this to be a capital offense. If she had stayed out of this thing, or if
she had confessed it, as we said last time, if she had instituted a crash program
of recovery from promiscuity before she got involved in the marriage it would
be all right, the issue of her virginity would never have come up here. The
reason why the virginity issue comes up at this point is because this the court
evidence to substantiate the claim that she has deprived this man of his sex
rights before she even knew him. And
that’s the whole issue involved now in this chapter.
Once again we want to review the recovery procedure that she could have
gone through had she had positive volition back here. Suppose this girl had gotten in trouble back
here of her own volition. Again, this is not a girl that has been attacked,
there is separate provision for that.
This is a girl who by her own volition got deliberately involved with some
fellow or fellows back here. Now what
could she have done? Let’s look at it
positively. Before she got involved in
the marriage relationship she could have done several things. We said last time the first thing she should
have used is 1 John 1:9 as known in the Old Testament economy through Psalm 55,
etc. She could have confessed her sin;
she could have gotten back into fellowship.
This girl could have gotten back into fellowship with God and once she
got back into fellowship with God she could begin to do something to straighten
out her mentality, thought processes and response pattern; it would involve a
crash program of intake of the Word of God.
So you’d have her soul looking this, this is the way it could have
happened: volition, conscience, personal affections, mentality, human spirit
out here and she could have been taking in the Bible doctrine, going into the
mentality of her soul and this Bible doctrine would have been circulated
through the human spirit and since she’s in fellowship with God, Bible doctrine
when you are in fellowship with God solidifies in the human spirit to form what
in Eph. 3, Gal. 4 say, “Christ formed in you,” and so she could have purged out
all this garbage in her human spirit by gradually walking day by day in fellowship
and as she claimed the promises and faced the testings and trials and maybe
faced the snickering of the wise-guy crowd, and oh look at so and so, she’s got
religion and all of that, she could have gone on and claimed the Word of God
under these adverse circumstances and had a wonderful transformation occur in
the human spirit. It is not beyond
grace, this girl did not have to go into marriage and destroy herself and the
marriage. She could have saved herself
by appropriating God’s grace. And as this
Word circulated you had many things happened, you’d have the mental thought
processes straighten out in her mind; you’d have divine viewpoint up here,
you’d have divine viewpoint over here, you’d have her conscience oriented once
again to the Word of God, you would have in the realm of personal affections a
sensitivity redeveloped that would [blank spot].
He held out to the Corinthians a redemption that included the present
tense and we know from history the background of those Corinthian believers.
When they accepted Christ they had engaged in every form of promiscuity known
to man and some that are still aren’t know to man, and yet God had his church
at Corinth and those Corinthian believers, those who got with the Word of God
went on and were great believers.
All right, there’s another thing that she can do. She finds, as she uses 1 John 1:9 she’s
filled with the Spirit, she engages in a crash program of intake of the Word of
God, she finds she is living in the Word. What do we mean by this? We mean, for example, she take it in
regularly and by the way, when you’re on a crash program like this you ought to
take it in regularly. If you’ve had any
kind of spiritual problem like this your job is to get with the Word of
God. And person after person you tell
get in the Word, get in the Word, and they never see the inside of a church.
What do they do? They wind up misery, misery, misery, misery and what do you
do? It’s like a doctor, the person is
dying of a solvable disease, a curable disease, you hand them the medicine and
then they won’t take it. And that’s the way stupid believers are. They get themselves in a mess and the
solution is staring them in the face and they won’t take of it. There’s nothing a pastor can do, when that
point is reached I just wash my hands of it.
Then we find that she would be digesting the Word; it means that she
thinks about it and she takes it in and as a young teenager involved in this
problem she begins to say I’m going to make the Word of God first and when I
walk into this classroom, I don’t care what that teacher says, I’m going to
take it down, I’m going to compare and find out if this is straight with the
Word and if it doesn’t reject it; if it does, accept it. Then she finds that she begins to develop out
of this a critical attitude in the good sense of the Word, she begins to be
able to analyze human viewpoint; she begins to sit down and read the paper and
she can say this is wrong, this is human viewpoint, this author doesn’t know
what he’s talking about, he violates the principle of grace, he violates the
principle of divine institution number four, national entity, this is a
one-worlder, he has never heard of Gen. 11 and the first United Nations
building, the tower of Babel, etc. Then
she goes on and she gets involved with the old crowd again, they come by and
what’s the matter honey, don’t you want to be part of the group now, are you
stuck up or something and they put all the social innuendo’s and at that point
she goes back to the promises of God and she trusts the Lord, the Lord is going
to take care of her and He’s going to take care of her social reputation as
well. And all the wise guys can laugh at
her and make all the remarks they want.
So here we have her, she claims the promises and she says all right, you
can laugh at me but that’s not going to hurt me because He that is in me is
greater than he is the world.
And then finally she discovers divine guidance, she begins to move with
the Lord, the Lord starts taking hold of her life and she begins to progress
and finally He leads her to Mr. Right.
And now she can, because she has been restored, she is back in shape for
marriage again. But notice, it doesn’t
happen overnight, it happens over a prolonged period, it happens when thought
patterns are transformed by the Word of God and this doesn’t come by going to
some retreat and having a mountain top experience; this happens by taking in
the Word of God on a regular basis.
Next week we will discuss the rest of the cases in detail; discuss the
problem of engagement versus marriage and the difference and the sexual rights
with each one.