Lesson 50
Engagement versus Marriage – 22:22-30
We’ll finish Deut. 22 that deals with sex life. This is the section of Deut. that stretches
from chapters 22-25 and deals with the concept of freedom and the base of all
true freedom lies in God-given rights.
And we’re going to go through many of these types of rights. The first several in the first few verses of
chapter 22 dealt with the individual rights, dealt with certain other concepts
of rights and we derived the basic principle that these rights are inherent,
they are not granted by a government, they are not granted by man, they are not
granted by an edict of man. They may or
may not at any given point be recognized by man but still, the right itself was
given by God.
Now we come to verses 13-30 of this chapter and we deal with the concept
of sex rights based on divine institution number two. There are basically four divine institutions
in the Bible; a divine institution is a mode of operation in history that
applies to both believer and unbeliever.
Divine institution number one has to do with volition. Both believer and unbeliever share in
volition. Divine institution number two
deals with the concept of marriage; the institution of marriage is for believer
and unbeliever. It is not a Christian
institution and incidentally there is no precedent in the Word of God for being
married in a church either. You can’t
find one evidence in the New Testament or the Old Testament where a marriage
ceremony was conducted by (quote) “clergy” (end quote). It was always a civil function in the Bible
and although people made a religious ceremony out of it, the marriage ceremony
itself is a civil, not a religious ceremony.
The reason we think it’s a religious ceremony is because we haven’t yet
gone the whole range of the Reformation; we have still some residual Catholicism
left. But still the concept of marriage
is strictly civil and secular from the Word of God’s viewpoint. And when I marry someone, and any minister,
at the point that he pronounces the couple man and wife he never pronounces
them man and wife from the standpoint of the Word of God, he always usually
says a phrase, now by the laws of such and such I pronounce you man and wife,
because at that point the minister is not acting as a minister of Jesus Christ,
he is acting as an agent of the state and he has been empowered by the state,
the secular state, with the concept of pronouncing a person married.
So marriage is a divine institution, not a Christian institution. The third concept is the concept of family,
both for believer and unbeliever, and the fourth divine institution is
nationalism or the concept of independent sovereign governments versus say,
world governments. These are instruments
of history and they have been put into history so that the human race may be
preserved. It’s not that God is trying
to be a stick in the mud but He has simply designed history for a purpose, to
glorify man, to help man accomplish the plan of salvation so therefore, since
this is so, God has set in motion these four divine institution’s throughout
history and every time you see apostasy, every time you see some form of
anti-Biblical Christianity you can always spot it because it will be an attack
against one of these four divine institution’s.
For example, today we can have the attack against volition. The attack against volition today takes many
forms, chiefly the form it takes is to deprive people of adequate information
so they cannot choose, and so you get them all emotionalized and you get them
to go through all sorts of rigor morrows.
Fundamentalism is guilty of this because fundamentalism in the past and
often times today has advocated forms of emotionalism whereby the rationality
is discounted and emphasis is put on how you feel. And this violates the divine institution of
volition because if you’re going to live your life on the basis of how you
feel, you can never live it Biblically.
You must live on the basis of what you know in your response to known
information. You see an attack on
marriage today with the concept of the liberalization of divorce laws, etc.
breaking down the whole marriage institution.
Of course this is going to destabilize our society and you cannot have
the continual breaking up of marriages on the scale that we are having where
two out of every five marriages ends in divorce, you cannot carry this on for
many more generations without completely destroying the base of society.
We have the family unit being destroyed where through the school systems
and other systems of attack that are being made upon the family the allegiance
of the children are being transferred from the parents to the (quote) “big
brother” teachers so therefore you tend to have a shift of allegiance. No longer is the father and mother the
authority over the children, but some secular teacher becomes the authority and
begins to replace the role of the parent, so you have the parents being
maligned, criticized, etc. again furthering the collapse of the nation.
And the fourth concept, nationalism, is being subverted today through
the emphasis upon world government, it doesn’t matter what the United States
believes, it doesn’t matter what her boundaries are, we don’t care as long as
she kicks into the pot called the United Nations and furthers the concept of
world government because this is how peace is going to be brought about. Of course this is satanic, no peace is ever
going to be brought about by mankind through a world government. The Lord Jesus Christ has the only authorized
world government, that does not begin until the Millennium. The way of existence today in history is to
individual national entities free.
So these four divine institutions have to do with the preservation of
man’s rights. And we come to this section, verses 13-30 and we are encountering
several cases that Moses gives. He gives
six cases illustrating the concept of sex rights. The first case is in verses 13-21 which we
dealt with last time, the case of suspected premarital promiscuity and here we
dealt with the concept that every person, male and female, in God’s sight has
an ideal partner. So you have male and
you have female and there is always a perfect match that God has made. And if you are a believer then it is your job
to claim divine guidance to be led to the perfect person that God has picked
out for you. That does not mean the
person is going to be perfect, it doesn’t mean the person is going to have no
sin nature, but what it does mean is that of all the people in the world God
has a special person for you and therefore you have the right as a believer, as
a child of God, to claim divine guidance to be led to this individual
person. We find that these people have
certain rights and we dealt with those last time and we’ll briefly review them
again.
Case two is the case of discovered adultery in verse 22; the case of the
promiscuous fiancée, verses 23-24 and here we get into the concept of
engagement versus marriage and the difference between them. We have the case of the raped fiancée in
verses 25-27, the case of the raped single girl in verses 28-29 and the case of
marrying a step-mother in verse 30.
Please remember that all of these six cases are simply representative
cases; this is not a comprehensive catalogue of all possibilities. There are
more cases in Leviticus 18 but the whole issue is that here this is a sermon;
Moses is simply bringing in certain cases to illustrate certain principles,
certain points, therefore he leaves out a lot of material, he just wants to hit
the highlights, to give concrete illustrations of how these principles work
out.
Last time, in verses 13-21 we dealt with the case of suspected
premarital promiscuity and we found out the fact that in verse 13 this man
would take a wife, “If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her,”
and give baseless charges against her, in other words, he would accuse her of
not being a virgin, and it was a big federal case in that day because of the
concept of virginity and sexual rights.
Our conclusion was simply this, that you have a person over here and a
person over here, male and female and divine institution number two, marriage,
demands that both of the parties to the contract bring in and respect the
rights of the other. Therefore, this man
has the right to expect that this woman that God leads him to is going to
respect his rights and therefore not have engaged in promiscuous activity
before marriage out of respect for him.
Although this girl may not know to whom she will ultimately be married,
she, if she is a Christian, will understand that God is going to lead her to
that man and therefore in anticipation of the leading of God she will save
herself for that one man so that when she enters divine institution number two
she enters as God would have her enter, respecting the rights of that man that
God has designed for her.
So similarly the man, she has that right to respect that when she is led
to the man of God’s own choosing for her that man will have saved himself for
her, so that again, when she enters divine institution number two she will have
had her sexual rights over him respected.
The concept, therefore, in the Scripture is that each party to the
marriage, each party to divine institution number two has the right to demand
certain rights, certain sexual rights, and this is because of the design of
marriage. It is not because the state
recognizes it, it is not because society recognizes it, it is not because
individuals have certain standards that they prefer, that’s not the point. The point is that God has designed marriage
and since He has designed marriage He has designed it with this concept of
right and wrong involved.
Now we come to verse 22 and we have the problem of married couples
engaging in promiscuity. “If a man be found lying with a woman married to an
husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the
woman, and the woman. So shalt thou put
away evil from
What the Lord Jesus Christ means by “he who is without sin among you let
him cast the first stone” refers back to the feast that they had inside the
So when we come to verse 22 it’s important to remember that it’s this
verse that requires the people, when they come to the Lord Jesus Christ with
this girl to say that we’ve caught her in the very act. If they didn’t say this, then of course verse
22 could not be applied to the situation.
“If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then” such
and such will happen. What is the story
here, why did this happen.
Let’s go into the concept of adultery for a moment and let’s see how
this thing develops. Turn to Eph. 4,
once again we go to this crucial passage in Eph. 4 that gives us the mechanics
by which many sins, and particularly sexual sins come about in society. It’s a well-defined process outlined in the
Word of God and today you are seeing this process go on and on and on and on
all around you. Verses 17-19, “This I
say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth not walk as other
Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, [18] Having the understanding darkened,
being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them,
because of the blindness of their heart’ [19] Who, being past feeling, have
given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with
greediness.”
Now Paul is giving you here a blow by blow account of how people get
involved and how people get in trouble.
It doesn’t happen overnight.
Somebody just doesn’t fall into adultery without having first gone
through an extensive preparation process outlined in these verses. It begins, because of the grammar, not in
verse 17 but in verse 18 and it begins with the last part of verse 18, with the
phrase, “through the ignorance that is in them,” now the word “through” means
on account of or because of, so here you have a causal clause and here’s the
start of the cause and effect, cause and effect chain that operates. First you have the concept of “ignorance that
is in them” and the word “ignorance” means willful ignorance; it is the concept
of negative volition plus the mentality of the person yielding willful ignorance. This is not just neutral ignorance, it is a
deliberate negative volition toward God with the result that the mentality of
the individual person is become darkened, so you have actually a willful
ignorance, an ignorance of the things of God and God’s plan for their
life.
“Through the ignorance that is in them, because of,” this is the second
cause, actually there should be two “becauses” here, “because of the ignorance
that is in them, and because of the blindness of their heart,” except the word
“blindness” here doesn’t mean blindness, it means callousness, so you have this
concept, you have a callousness and this word usually refers to
conscience. So you have the second
concept, negative volition plus conscience equals callousness. So these two are the root causes that set off
this process in the individual person. Because of their negative reaction
toward God, either at the point of God consciousness because they are
unbelievers, yet they know of God’s existence through their own life, through
the environment, they know God exists but they don’t care to know Him, they
essentially say I know God exists but I’m not interested in a personal
relationship with Him, so I go negative, negative, negative, and this
immediately has repercussions on the inside of the individual. Negative volition plus mentality, willful
ignorance, negative volition plus conscience equals callousness and this is the
beginning of this carnal process that begins to grow inside the human
being.
So we have this in verse 18, the first concept ignorance, secondly
blindness. That’s the first step
involved. Now we come down to the third
and fourth steps, the first part of verse 18, “having the understanding
darkened, being alienated from the life of God,” you see we’re going backwards
because we’re following the logic of the grammar; we have to follow it
backwards because this is the way the Greek construction is set up. “Having understanding darkened” and the word
“understanding” here doesn’t refer to mentality so much as the thought
processes. In other words, the ways in
which you think become darkened and so you not only have willful ignorance, in
other words the content is zero, but you begin to have the process itself
disrupted and we call this blindness or darkness. So that’s another result. Out of willful ignorance you begin to have
the rational processes of the human soul distorted, and this is why if you’ve
ever counseled people involved in adultery and why if you’ve counseled people
involved in sexual problems you will always find them highly irrational. They’ll sit down and they’ll agree with you,
they’ll agree this is bad, but they keep on going into it. And you say well don’t you know this is
wrong, don’t you realize you’re going to get in trouble. Yes I do but I can’t help it, and so here you
begin to have the thought processes destroyed and this is why counseling in
these cases is very, very difficult, because you’re trying to reverse a process
that already has been set into motion and to counsel effectively you need a
person who can be rational.
The fourth item involved in this, actually only the second step, these
first two form one step, the third and fourth form the second step, “being
alienated from the life of God.” Now
this refers back to the human spirit.
Here we have the soul with volition, conscience, personal affections,
and mentality. Out here we have the
human spirit; the human spirit is the place of the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit and the unbeliever doesn’t have the Holy Spirit in his human spirit, and
therefore this human spirit is cloudy, it’s dark, it’s inoperative, therefore
since it is inoperative we say it is alienated, the person is alienated from
“the life of God.” What is “the life of
God?” “The life of God” is the
indwelling Holy Spirit. It’s
regeneration, the concept that the Holy Spirit when He comes to indwell
recreates the human spirit or He renovates it if you want to say that. So the
unbeliever is now “alienated from the life of God.” In other words, the result of all this
process back here of willful ignorance and callousness is that he rejects the
gospel, is that he rejects the plan of salvation and therefore he is not
regenerated, therefore his human spirit is alienated, completely turned away
from any concept of regeneration.
If the person is a believer the same thing operates although the
person’s human spirit is still regenerated, you have it essentially nullified
with the concept of the flesh influencing the human spirit, in spite of the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit he is operating as an unbeliever. When a Christian is carnal, when a Christian
is out of fellowship there basically is no difference in his behavior pattern
than that of the unbeliever; generally of course there’s problems of conscience
and usually a believer if he engages in carnality will become upset, to a
degree perhaps greater than the unbeliever but on the outside there’s very
little difference a carnal believer and an unbeliever. In fact oftentimes if you are around carnal
believers you will quickly discover that you’d rather be around unbelievers
than around carnal Christians. They’re
more relaxed, you can carry on a conversation with them and things are a lot
more socially pleasant to be around unbelievers, rank unbelievers than carnal
believers. That’s why legalism and why
all sorts of things that have come into fundamentalism to destroy this concept
of the filling of the Holy Spirit are detrimental. This is why so-called Christian groups and
Christian parties and all the rest are not very enjoyable oftentimes because
all it is is a group of people that get together and gossip about somebody else
and you have 90% of the people there all out of fellowship and when I go to
those things I usually try to get out of there as fast as possible. Believers out of fellowship are horrible,
they’re stinkers and you can’t stand to be around them; they can’t stand to be
around you and you might as well just forget it.
So this is the result, “they are alienated from the life of God.” Now we have a third problem, verse 17; after
the processes of verse 18 go on for a while we have verse 17, they “walk in the
vanity of their mind.” And the word
“vanity” refers to human viewpoint, the idea that vanity means vapor, it means
the fact that this is unreal, it’s just like vapor, it’s there but it’s not
there and this refers to human viewpoint.
We have the concept of human viewpoint, when a person is out of
fellowship as a believer, when you are out of fellowship as a believer or if
you are an unbeliever you have a sort of vacuum set up here and this vacuum
sucks human viewpoint into it. So here
you sit and you just absorb human viewpoint like crazy, and yet the average
Christian never realizes that this is one of the greatest detriments to the
Christian life, this sucking in of human viewpoint. Every time you get out of fellowship with the
Lord you become a victim, you become a vacuum that sucks in all of this stuff
and if you don’t watch it your soul will be chuck full of human viewpoint. Human viewpoint in all areas, and you’re just
a blotter, every where you’re around human viewpoint you soak it up. So people soak up human viewpoint but there’s
a problem and that’s why it’s called “vanity” here.
People suck up human viewpoint thinking that that’s the way to
happiness, thinking that if I can just get this, if I can just get that, then
I’ll be happy, but vapor means that once they get it, it disappears. So therefore we have the word “vanity” used
because even though their mind fills up with this stuff it’s never
satisfied. It’s just like cotton candy,
you bite into it and there’s nothing there.
That’s why the word “vanity” is used throughout Scripture to refer to
human viewpoint, it means people try to fill their souls with these concepts of
going out and doing certain things, not doing certain things, doing this, doing
that and all the rest to get happiness, and yet they find after they’ve done it
there is no happiness there, with the result that verse 19 happens.
“Who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lasciviousness,
to work all uncleanness with greediness.”
Now “who, being past feeling” means that at this point the person has
lost all spiritual sensitivity. If they
are an unbeliever their sense of God consciousness has been so thoroughly
repressed that they are just totally beyond feeling. It’s a perfect tense in the Greek which means
an action that occurred in the past with results which continue to the present. “Who, being past feeling, have given
themselves over,” notice “given themselves,” somebody else doesn’t do it, and
this is inevitably the problem you’ll wind up with people, I couldn’t help it
because such and such happened. And yet
the Bible says yes you could help it because you gave yourself over, it was an
act on the part of your volition. You
gave yourself “over unto lasciviousness” and this is the concept of going out
and trying to get happiness in every manner imaginable. These people are on a frantic search for
happiness and they’re going to get happiness if they have to tear the world
apart to do it and they’re going to try this way and that way and another way,
they’ll try a drink, they’ll try sex, they’ll try drugs, they’ll try anything
because their soul is so full of human viewpoint they don’t know what happiness
is and yet they know they’re missing it.
So therefore they seek everywhere for happiness, is there happiness over
here, is there happiness over there, and they begin this mad rush through life
to try to find happiness and yet happiness always eludes them. And it always will elude them as long as they
stay out of the filling of the Holy Spirit, because one of the fruits of the
Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering and the concept of joy in
Scripture isn’t some supersilious idiotic trans-like state; the concept of joy
in Scripture means inner stimulation, it means life has a taste to it, life is
not blah and dull to you if you are a Christian and operating in the filling of
the Holy Spirit, you’re never bored with life because life has a character, it
has color to it, joy, inner stimulation.
This, therefore, is the source of peace for the Christian. If you are a child of God, God has so
designed your life that you are never going to be happy until you are filled
with the Spirit and walking in His will; that’s the disciplinary teaching of
the Christian life. He’s deliberately
designed it so you can’t be happy out in the toulies some place. He’s designed it so you have to be in
fellowship with Him in order to be truly happy. That’s where Christians will find their
happiness, when they are operating in the filling of the Spirit in the will of
God.
So we find this process in the book of Ephesians; this process is
outlined in many other portions of Scripture and today we find this concept
going on and it occurs and breaks out inside the divine institution of
marriage. As I said, we live in a
generation in which all of the divine institutions are under a tremendous
assault. We, as believers, in our twentieth century America, are looking at
God’s judgment upon this nation. Don’t
think God’s judgment is future, when you begin to see the kind of things that
we see in our society, Rom. 1 tells you God has taken the lid off and when God
takes the lid off that is the beginning of judgment. So we are beginning to see these divine
institutions break down in front of our eyes and one of these divine
institutions is marriage, so therefore in our time we find believers and
unbelievers involved in this marriage thing, we have it ending in divorce; we
have wife-swapping, we have all the rest going on in our society and it is
because these people are trying to find happiness and they can’t find it and
they’re beginning this frantic search for happiness. And we compare this problem with the seven
points of the doctrine of the sexual union that we went through and we will
examine each one of these seven points to show how adultery is due to a failure
in the area of the sexual life of a couple.
One, we find that one of the concepts of the sexual union of the people
in the Bible is the need, the concept of need.
So we have this hypothetical couple, we’ll call X and Y. X and Y are involved in an adulterous
situation and so therefore this is going to become a clinical study and we are
going to try to understand why X and Y have gotten involved in this
situation. First of all, we know from
Bible doctrine that every couple has needs; every male has a need, every female
has a need and we went through this. But
this couple has failed to see that the issue is God’s plan for them. The man inside this relationship, X, has
failed to realize that the overwhelming point in his life is to follow God’s
plan, so the man neglects God’s plan for his life. He fails to realize that divine institution
runs on a commitment to Jesus Christ; that divine institution number two
functions in its perfections, in the way it was originally designed to work,
when the man takes the leadership, when he finds God’s plan for his life and he
insists upon following God’s plan for his life.
So somewhere along the line this man in this adulterous situation has
either fallen apart spiritually or has failed in some other way to find God’s
plan for his life. The woman involved in
the relationship has failed to realize something else, that her need is to
compliment him in the accomplishment of that plan and it’s probably because he
hasn’t made it clear in the marriage what God’s plan for his life is, he hasn’t
put a vital spiritual life in the marriage, so she has dropped out of it spiritually
in response to him and so now they’re both on very dangerous ground.
The next thing is the problem of solution and if the marriage is
operating correctly then the male would realize that there’s only one woman for
him; there’s only one woman in all the thousands and millions of women in the
world, there’s only one woman that God has picked out for him and that woman
and that woman alone is capable of helping him solve and accomplish God’s plan
in his life. And that woman in that
relationship will realize that out of the thousands and thousands of men
there’s only going to be one man that basically is operating in the will of God
that has a plan to which she can give her total self and to which she can
totally yield herself in the accomplishment of this plan. In other words, there’s a perfect thing here
but they don’t recognize that solution, they’ve dropped all this out because
they fail to recognize their need, they fail to recognize the solution.
The third point, the problem of volition. If the marriage was operating correctly we
would realize that Mr. Right and Mrs. Right would respond only to one
another. The fact that they have
positive volition toward other people outside of the marriage shows they are in
deep trouble. It shows them, for
example, it would be an analogous thing as for a believer responding to false
doctrine. Now you couldn’t imagine a
believer taught by the Holy Spirit sucking up and responding to false doctrine. And yet that’s exactly what’s happening in an
adulterous situation; you have one or both partners involved in the marriage
institution, responding to somebody outside of that marriage union and the
reason is because their volition is not sensitive spiritually, they have no
concept of the plan of God and they don’t realize that their volition is
designed to respond to one person that God has picked out, not to 2,000 other
people.
Then we come to the fourth thing, we come to the fact that there is an
initial and a periodic renewing of the sex relationship inside marriage. To see this as it operates in marriage, turn
to 1 Cor. 7 again. Again you will find
cases with adultery where you have this fluid situation operating within the
divine institution of marriage, you will find problems in this area. And 1 Cor. 7 is not there by accident. We’ve gone through this passage 2 or 3 times,
I want to go through it once more because I want to point something out in this
passage I’ve never pointed out before and that is the concept of a present
negative imperative in this passage, verses 1-8. “Now concerning the thing about which ye
wrote unto me, it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” In other words, Paul is saying he has
received a request from the Corinthians.
The word “Corinthians” was used as a slang term for a swinger, so
instead of saying a swinger, they would just say the person was a Corinthian
and that was just a label that they used.
So in 1 Cor. 7:1 he evidently got a request from the Corinthians saying
look, we realize we have these problems, Paul, is it good that we don’t even
bother with the marriage institution, and Paul says it’s all right, it’s good,
if a person wants to stay single you’re not violating any Word of God to stay
single if that’s God’s will for you.
He further amplifies this in verse 7-8 where he shows that a single
person will be one to whom God has given the gift of celibacy. In other words, God takes care of the libido,
etc. in this particular individual so that their sex drive, the slack is taken
up by God. And this is the gift of
celibacy that He gives to certain people.
Again, He gives this to many Christians because He will call you to a
ministry where you cannot be married.
Like Paul, for example, Paul could have gotten married, there’s nothing
that says Paul couldn’t have gotten married.
In fact, he says in 1 Cor. 9 don’t I have the power to lead about a
sister, and the word “lead about” is what they used to lead a cow about with a
leash throughout the ancient world, and it’s very humorous, he says don’t I
have the power to lead about a sister on the end of a leash, and he certainly
did have the power but he said I’m not going to exercise my right because God
has called me to a ministry where I don’t want to take a woman into situations
where it would be disastrous for her, where she would be injured, etc. So Paul forsook his right, and obviously God
gave him a gift in verses 7-8 so that this was a need he had, a sex need, God
took up the slack by giving him the gift of celibacy.
Verse 2, “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own
wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” And here Paul says that one of
the greatest solutions to the problem of a society that is sexually degenerate
is to establish a strong sexual union inside marriage. In other words, instead of being a Victorian
prude about it, what Paul is saying that negative out here but okay
inside. And he says the greatest
detriment, the greatest hindrance to a breakdown of marriage will be an
adequate, mature sex life inside divine institution number two.
Verse 3, “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence; and
likewise the wife unto the husband,” and the word “due benevolence” means a
payment, a legal payment. It was used
for taxes in the ancient world where the government has the right to demand
taxes from you and so Paul is saying that the husband is owed his sex rights
from the woman. So we have the husband
here, we have the wife here; that wife has an I.O.U. over to the husband, and the
husband has an I.O.U. to the woman and this is created at the point of marriage
and it goes on throughout marriage. The
man owes the woman this and the woman owes the man this.
Verse 4, and this is an explanation of it, “The wife has not power,” the
word “power” means authority which goes back to the legal rights. This is not talking about the physical,
although the physical is involved here; the emphasis Paul is making is on the
legal and he says the wife has not the legal right over her body and the man
does not have the legal right over his because of this exchange system that is
worked out inside divine institution number two. The woman owes something to the man, the man
owes it [can’t understand words].
Now we come to verse 5, one of the most interesting verses in this
regard for something was happening here in Corinth and we get a hint of it in
the way Paul says this verse 5. He says
“Defraud ye not one the other,” and the word “defraud” means to abscond with
funds that are not your own. And what he
is saying here, it is in the present imperative negative. Now when you have a present imperative about
60-70% of time in the New Testament, when you have a present imperative it
doesn’t mean don’t do something, it means stop doing what you’re already
involved in. You could have an aorist
for example; an aorist imperative would be “stop it.” But if you have a present imperative it means
you’re involved in the action, now cut it out.
So what is happening here in verse 5?
You have an interesting phenomenon, and I think it’s doubly interesting
and I point this out to you because remember the background of Corinth, this is
the town of the swingers, here’s where sex is free for all and yet isn’t it
interesting that within the divine institution of marriage you had problems
with sex. And the proof of it is that
when he says stop defrauding one another he is saying that the partners within
the marriage relationship were not granting to each other sex rights. In other words, the sexual activities of marriage
were totally broken down in Corinth.
Now don’t you think there’s something peculiar about this? Here you have a society in which it’s going
on all around you, and yet within a marriage relationship it’s completely
fouled up, it’s completely destroyed.
Now here you have a law that operates inevitably in history, sexual
promiscuity outside of marriage always destroys sex inside marriage. It’s the law of inverse relationship. If you have… it’s as though God has given a
total amount here and here you have marriage, marriage, marriage, marriage. If you have sex out here, sex out here, sex
out here, you will not have it inside here.
That’s just the way it works, and this is what is happening in our
society. As we loosen up the sexual restraints we are at the same time
destroying sex inside marriage. And this is why we can look the unbeliever who
likes to sneer at us and say oh, aren’t you Christians the biggest prudes that
ever walked this earth; we can look him in the eye and say listen, you are the
people who are destroying sex, you are the people who are destroying the
pleasure of sex because you are slowly eating away the very foundation of
it. The more you have sexual looseness
in society the less you are going to have it inside the marriage relationship.
These people of verse 5 of which Paul says stop defrauding one another
are people with very lascivious backgrounds.
These Corinthians had lived it up, oftentimes many of them had lived it
up, become married, and later after they were married they became Christians
through Paul’s ministry and through the other men and so they were already
married and so they had the problem of what I call a garbage can
background. And the garbage can
background means that they came into their marriage relationship or were in
their marriage relationship and it takes time to get rid of this, and here you
see one of the great problems that Paul is having to face. These people are
baby Christians, there are men and women who are married in this church and
they have not brought their sex life unto the relationship outlined in the
Scriptures and they are continuing to engage in activities which are typical of
what’s going on in the unbelievers around them, with the result that their
marriage is falling apart from the center.
Stop defrauding one another, unless, and this is the one exception,
“unless it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting
and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your
incontinency.” And this is a flat rule
of marriage and it will always work, always will work, and always has
worked. And where you find a society
such as ours that is deliberately tearing down values, you are going to find
less and less and less sexual fulfillment inside marriage because we’ve had
this complete breakdown of the individuals involved and you’ve just ruined the
whole thing. And that’s what’s going
on. And we have Christians who feel
intimidated because perhaps they are the only ones in their class at school, or
they’re the only ones on the job, on the campus, that have any standards any
more and are living by them. Let me tell
you, if you are a Christian and you experience the innuendos of the unbeliever
and they like to titter behind your back, and make all sorts of snotty remarks,
you can just look them in the eye and say listen, I intend to live my life unto
Jesus Christ and you live yours, I’m not telling you how to run life and I
don’t intend to have you tell me how to run mine. I do not understand how Christians can become
intimidated because some unbeliever makes a crack about them, Christians who
are so weak that they can’t stand up to a few comments. I’ve had that happen several times and I’ve
told the person making the crack, look, you live your life and I’ll live mine, you
mind your business and I’ll mind mine, and usually you say that once or twice
and they shut up. If you find yourself
in this situation my advice to you would be to tell them off and usually after
you’ve told them off once or twice you won’t have any more trouble. Lay it on the line, let them know where you
stand and once you clarify the air people generally leave you alone.
Now we come to the last part of verse 5, “that Satan tempt you not for
your incontinency.” What he points out
here is that if you are a Christian couple Satan is going to try to attack you
and one of the places he is going to attack is in the area of sex and don’t you
think he’s not. This is a legitimate
domain as far as Satan is concerned and he’s going to give you a rough time. So don’t think that this is some area of your
marriage that is immune from satanic attack. Satan will try to use this for his
betterment all the whole time and if you are alert you will meet it with
Scripture and these Biblical concepts we’ve been teaching.
We’ve worked through the need, the solution, we’ve worked through
volition, we’ve worked through the initial periodic sex relationship inside
marriage. We come to the fifth element
of marriage and that is the physical union.
The Bible says that when two people are married they become one
flesh. The reason it says that, notice
it doesn’t say “one body,” it says “one flesh.”
Why does it say “one flesh” and not “one body?” Because you still have two bodies but the
flesh or the characteristics progressively get the same or similar. In other words there’s changes that go on and
response patterns and so on, so that these two bodies become homogenous and
compatible one to another and so the Bible very carefully recognizes this, not
saying one body but it says “one flesh.”
So here you have physical union and this, of course, in an adulterous
couple, such as X and Y of which we’ve been speaking, they have failed to
recognize the existence of a physical union.
You have this couple that are engaged in adultery, you have this couple
that are involved in promiscuity and what X and Y have failed to realize is
that there is a physical union that has been established between them and every
time they engage in some promiscuous act out here they are setting up physical
relationships with these people. The act of sex is important, it’s not just
biological as far as man is concerned, it has tremendous spiritual overtones
and it is a very serious thing, and when you engage in promiscuity you are
engaging in trouble because you are destroying yourself and you are destroying
someone else. Don’t think you can play
around with this thing and not get burned, you’ll always get burned. God has
set it up this way and this is why God is so insistent the fact that there are
standards and these standards must be held to.
So this couple engages in these sexual activities outside of marriage
and they begin to set up these unions with all these other people and finally,
the more of these unions are set up the weaker this becomes and you have a
tremendous massive confusion coming out of this.
Sixth, we have the concept of growth in marriage, the concept that you
don’t learn all in the first 24 hours.
You learn day after day, week after week, month after month and year
after year. It is a growth process just
like the spiritual relationship of a believer with the Lord Jesus Christ. [Blank spot].
And so rather than have the guts to face growth they slip out and try to
have some fun with somebody else. Now
again, this is the concept of a weak individual and these people that are
engaged in these practices are basically mousy weak individuals and if they are
believers they are the lowest of the low as far as strength is concerned for
Jesus Christ. They are very weak
personalities, they can’t stand to be under pressure, usually they are the kind
of people that the first time they have a problem in their life they fall
apart. So it’s always the concept of
weakness.
And finally the seventh factor involved in this adulterous relationship
are the dynamics of sex. Here we have
the whole range of the thing involved where we have the man, we have the plan
and we have the woman and that equals divine institution number two. Divine institution number two is made up of a
man to whom God has given a plan and the woman comes in to complete that plan,
enabling the man to live out the plan of God for his life. And this is all
fouled up in this adulterous relationship.
Turn back to Deut. 22. Verse 23,
“If a damsel who is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her
in the city, and lie with her, [24] Then ye shall bring them both out unto the
gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the
damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath
humbled his neighbor’s wife. So thou
shalt put away evil from among you.”
Here we have the concept of engagement in the Bible—engagement versus
marriage. What is the difference? Here you have the difference. The first thing about engagement that you
learn in God’s Word is that it is legally similar to marriage in one respect
and you see it here by the use of the word “wife.” Notice verse 23, “a damsel who is a virgin be
betrothed” that means engaged, “unto an husband,” and notice down in verse 24
this fiancée is considered to be the wife of the man. So in one sense the Bible says that both
parties are considered legally reserved for each other. So therefore any person breaking into the
relationship from the outside is on the same par as adultery. So one of the concepts of engagement in the
Word of God is that it’s legally similar to marriage in that each party to the
engagement, as long as the engagement lasts, is considered to be legally a husband
and a wife versus other relationships they would have in society.
“If a damsel who is a virgin be betrothed,” notice a virgin; this means
the second concept of engagement and that is no sex relationship. Why?
Because sexual relationships are permitted in the Word of God only when
the basis of the relationship is permanent.
Engagement has one loophole, and that is that it can be broken and
therefore God says because this relationship is not a permanent relationship
and can be broken, then there is not to be sex within this relationship. Now the reason for it again is to preserve the
individual couple because the time of engagement generally is a time when the
final decision is made or not made. It’s
a time when the couple has decided that it’s the will of God for them and they
want to be sure and so the engagement is the preliminary to marriage. 99 times out of 100 they go ahead and marry
but there’s always the 2 or 3 percent, or maybe more than that that fall apart
and that engagement is broken. As long
as that out remains in the engagement relationship, God says because that out
or that open door is there, there is not to be sex activities inside the
engagement. And it again is not there
because He doesn’t want the couple to enjoy each other; it is there simply to
protect the rights of the other.
For example, let’s take a young couple that’s engaged. Here’s the man and the woman; they are
engaged. Suppose they come down, they
really realize toward the end of the engagement period that God has not led
them to one another, although they love one another, and you can love many
people but there’s basically only one person set up for you, so you come down
here and the engagement breaks off so you have this man going out and meeting
another woman and this woman goes out and meet another man. Now if they’ve had sex together you’ve
destroyed the next relationship that comes along. So this is why God’s Word
says in verse 23, “A damsel that is a virgin who is engaged,” in other words,
she is still called a wife, her man is still her husband legally, yet in
actuality and physically they do not have a physical union. That is what
separates in the Bible the engagement relationship from the marriage
relationship. “If a damsel that is a
virgin be betrothed unto an husband,” that’s her fiancée, “and a man find her
in the city and lie with her,” and of course this is a case where she was
promiscuous, and she’s evidently involved with this man or something, and this
is to show, verse 24, it’s been put in there by Moses to show you the
importance of engagement and to show you that it is an important time in your
life and you are to respect the boundaries that God has set up in this thing,
because, verse 24, “he,” this is why the man is killed, “because he has humbled
his neighbor’s wife,” and humbling means that he has reduced the value of that
woman, that’s basically what the point is.
Now she brings into the marriage relationship less than what she could
have had this thing not happened.
Verses 25-27 deal with the case where a fiancée is attacked and it’s not
her fault. “But if a man find a
betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her, then
the man only that lay with her shall die. [26] But unto the damsel thou shalt
do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death. Because [For] as when a man riseth against
his neighbor, and slays him, even so is this matter.” That refers back to the provision that we
studied before about ambush and the idea that a person can set up a situation
where another person is injured and it obviously has nothing to do with the
person. So in this case, in verse 26,
the girl is excused. Because verse 27,
[“For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was
none to save her.”] she cried and literally the Hebrew says she screamed and
she had no savior. And of course God
never holds you responsible for something that’s beyond your control. That’s
one of the great things about the Bible. Don’t you walk around with a big fat
guilt complex because something’s happened in your life and you had no control
over it?
I went through a situation where you’d be driving along in a car and all
of a sudden some kid jumps out in front of you and you roll over him. Now you can’t help it and you are wrong if
you carry a guilt complex with you the rest of your life because the Bible says
in that situation God has put the child under your hand. That’s exactly the expression Moses
used. In other words, you trust the
sovereignty of God; it was beyond the power of your volition to act and
therefore it’s God’s problem and not yours and you have no right to carry
around a big fat guilt complex and so similarly this girl in verses 25, 26 and
27, she may feel horrible, she may feel that she’s been attacked, she may feel
that now she brings to her husband, the man that she loves, she feels terrible
because she’s going to bring to him less than what he could have had and she
might walk through the rest of that marriage with a big fat guilt complex and
God says don’t you walk through marriage with a guilt complex, that wasn’t of
your doing, forget it, leave it to Me, I’ll handle it. So therefore this girl is not to have some
big guilt complex because she was attacked, etc.
Verses 28-29, this is a case when a single girl who is not betrothed is
involved in a sexual activity. “If a man
find a damsel who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and
lie with her, and they be found; [29] Then the man who lay with her shall give
unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife;
because he has humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.” In other words, he does not have the right to
divorce her. Now with this we want to understand
several things.
First of all, the girl may be involved in this thing or may not be, but
the point is in verse 29 there’s a compensation made and the compensation is
exactly one half that of verse 19. In
verse 19 there was a man and a woman in a marriage relationship, the man
slandered the woman’s virginity and the woman countered and her virginity was
priced, it was priced at $30,000 in God’s Word, and we figured out why it had
this price and that man slandered her virginity and he had to pay $30,000 in
fines. That’s a pretty healthy check. It
usually wound up, as we said, he usually had to sell himself into slavery,
usually to her father so that was a beautiful situation; he had to work for his
father-in-law because he had slandered this girl and I imagine that really had
some grating effect, and I would imagine that verse 19 did not have to be
activated too often. So verse 29 we have
a similar situation except here it’s $15,000; now that’s a pretty healthy
chunk. I often wondered what would happen
if we invoked that in society today, every time some guy gets involved he gets
slapped with a fine of $15,000. It would
be interesting to see what that would do to some of the activities going
on. So we have the man in a financial
compensation.
Now there’s one part of this verse I want to explain to you or you’re
going to get the wrong idea and that’s the last part, “she shall be his
wife.” Now please don’t think that the
girl had to marry this man; this is not gun-shot wedding. To show this turn to Exodus 22:16, God’s Word
is not crude, gun-shot marriages never work.
What it means is that you put another mistake on top of a first one so
you wind up with two errors instead of one.
“And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he
shall surely endow her to be his wife.
[17] If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay
money according to the dowry of virgins.”
$15,000, so if the girl’s father say no, you’ve already messed this girl
up, she’s my daughter, you just get out of here, and so the fellow would be
obligated to pay money and that’s it. So
this shows you then that God’s Word does not require gun-shot weddings and I
say this because oftentimes people have used this passage and some young couple
gets into trouble and they don’t love one another basically and so they force
them to get married and then usually it’s the preacher three or four weeks
later that has to counsel with them and they wind up divorced anyway so it
doesn’t solve any problem.
Verse 30, the last case, the case of marrying a stepmother, “A man shall
not take his father’s wife, nor discover [uncover] his father’s skirt.” Now the father’s wife means that this is a
stepmother, not his real mother. In
Scripture if it meant a mother it said a man shall not take his mother, but
this means the man shall not take his father’s wife and to see this and to see
why turn to Leviticus 18 and with that we will summarize and conclude this
chapter. I don’t pretend to understand
all that’s involved behind Lev. 18, I have given this many hours of study and
I’m still not convinced I understand why some of these passages are here, but
let me point out some of the relationships involved here. What Moses has just done in this passage
before us, in verse 30, is he has given us one relationship that heads up a list
of relationships in Lev. 18. What verse
30 is in Deut. 22 is actually the lead of a whole list of things in Lev. 18 so
what he means to say here in verse 30 is “and all the rest of it,” it’s kind of
an etcetera, do this etcetera, dot dot dot dot.
It’s like for example the concept of Gal. 5:22, the fruit of the Spirit
is love, joy, peace, long-suffering and so on, now actually that is a list and
you remember in 1 Cor. 13 it talks about love, love is greater than all these
things. Well, Paul in 1 Cor. 13 is using
love to stand for all the fruit of the spirit of Gal. 5:22. In other words, when you have a list in the
Greek, instead of repeating the list every time you want to repeat the list you
take the first item of the list and use that use that for the label to the
list.
So that’s what’s happened here in Deut. 22:30, there’s a whole list of
things in Lev. 18 where it’s developed but Moses doesn’t want to bother with
all this list so he just takes the first item and that’s in verse 8. “The nakedness of thy father’s wife shalt
thou not uncover; it is thy father’s nakedness.
[9] The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter
of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their
nakedness thou shalt not uncover,” etc. etc. etc. Now evidently here what we have is that God
is saying that even the concept of marriage is wrong under certain
circumstances. Now obviously there are
genetic reasons for this but that does not solve all the problems. For example, it does not solve the problem of
the stepmother. So evidently we have
warnings here against genetics, in other words the problem of intermarrying
someone that is physically related to you, but it also has some relationship to
do legally with a relationship directly physically to you.
For example, here’s the man, here’s his father. Here’s the father, he has a son. The father dies, and this is common in the
ancient world, the father would have several wives and the only way these wives
could sustain themselves was either to be married by somebody or to stay in the
family, often times the son would marry his father’s wife. And say this is his mother, she’s dead, but
his father has remarried a stepmother, and now his father dies and so this son
comes up and marries the stepmother. Now
the Bible says that this kind of a relationship is wrong and evidently why, and
the nearest I can guess as to why this is and I’ve looked at all these
relationships is that every one of these relationships has this in common, that
the one that is married here, such as the stepmother, has been in a physical
union with one who is physically related to that person. So you have the son, he is physically and
genetically related to his father. But
in every one of these lists in Lev. 18, for some reason, every one of them, the
man, say the fellow here who marries the stepmother is marrying someone who
herself has been in a physical relationship with one who is directly related to
him.
Now exactly what this is hinting at I do not know. It may be, as often times I have said in this
book that we have here something that men have not yet found out, that we could
find later on through research, etc. that perhaps there is something here that
Moses is pointing to. We have seen this
several times; we have seen it, for example in the provision of circumcision,
why is it that the Bible says circumcision on the seventh day? Nobody knew that until the 20th
century, until they discovered the prothrombin in the baby’s blood doesn’t peak
out until the seventh day and so God told them only circumcise the seventh day,
because if you circumcise before that there’s no prothrombin and the infant is
truly in danger of bleeding without clotting.
So the clotting time was involved there, there was a physical reason in
back of this. And I suggest that perhaps
further research along these lines might indicate that there is a physical
reason why these relationships are prohibited.
I can only say to you from my study of the situation that there are some
direct genetic reasons why marriage is prohibited under certain situations and
there are these other things and what these other factors are I do not know,
except it means don’t marry someone who has in turn been married to someone
physically related to you. There’s one
exception to this and that’s the Levirate marriage which we’ll get into later
on.