Between Idolatry and Murder

How deep the guilt of adultery is — and by the nature of the offense it is a matter of sexual immorality as well — the Law of God is the first thing at hand to show us. And it is true — as of course it is — that after forbidding the superstitious service of foreign gods and the making of idols themselves, after commending the keeping of the sabbath, after commanding that parents be honored second only to God, the Law laid down, as the next layer bracing and fortifying all those counts, no other command than this: “You shall not commit adultery.” Purity and holiness of spirit came first, and integrity of the body came after; and the Law fortified that at once by outlawing its enemy, adultery. [a]

So understand what kind of sin this must be, when the Law ordered it put down next after idolatry. Nothing that stands second is far from the first; nothing is as close to the first as the second is. What comes out of the first is, in a way, a second first. And so adultery borders on idolatry. Idolatry itself, after all, is thrown in the People’s face again and again under the names of adultery and sexual immorality, and it will be joined to adultery in its fate as it is joined to it in the order of the list — co-heir in condemnation as it is partner in rank. And there is more. Having set down “You shall not commit adultery,” the Law adds next, “You shall not murder.” It did adultery an honor, of course, giving it precedence over murder — at the very front of the holiest of laws, among the leading counts of heaven’s edict, entered under the heading of the chief sins of all. From a thing’s position you can judge its size, from its rank its standing, from its neighbors what it deserves. Even evil has its rank, and that rank consists in standing at the summit of what is worst, or else at the center of it.

I can see a kind of state procession around adultery. On the one side Idolatry goes ahead and leads the way; on the other Murder follows in attendance. She has certainly earned her seat between the two most conspicuous peaks of wrongdoing, and she fills the empty space between them with a criminal majesty equal to theirs. Walled in by such flanks, ringed and braced by such ribs, who is going to wrench her out of that single body of connected parts, out of the bond that holds neighboring crimes together, out of the embrace of her own kindred wickedness, and set her apart by herself to enjoy repentance?

Will not Idolatry hold her on the one side and Murder on the other, and claim her back — if they have any voice at all? “She is our wedge; she is what clamps us together. By Idolatry we are measured; by her stepping in between us we are joined; to her, jutting out from our midst, we are united. Divine Scripture has made us one body, and the very letters are our glue. She herself cannot exist any longer without us. “Time and again I, Idolatry, supply Adultery with her opportunity. Look at my sacred groves and my hilltops, my running springs, and the temples inside the cities themselves — what powerful agents we are for pulling modesty down. “And I, Murder, sometimes put myself out on Adultery’s behalf too. Never mind the tragedies on the stage; look at the poisoners of our own day, look at the sorcerers, and count how many seductions I avenge, how many rivalries I take revenge for, how many guards and informers and accomplices I make away with. Look at the midwives as well, and count how many children conceived in adultery are slaughtered. “Even among Christians there is no adultery without us. Wherever the unclean spirit does his business, there is idolatry; wherever a person is defiled and so destroyed, there is murder too. So the healing helps of repentance will not suit them — or else they will suit us as well. Either we keep Adultery here, or we follow her out.”

That is what the sins themselves say. And if sins have no speech, then there by the church door stands an idolater, and there stands a murderer, and in the middle of them stands an adulterer as well. All of them alike, as the duty of repentance requires, sit in sackcloth and go rough with ashes. They groan with the same weeping. They make their rounds with the same prayers. They kneel on the same knees. They call on the same mother. What are you doing, kindest and most humane Discipline? Either you must be all this to every one of them, since “blessed are the peacemakers” — or, if not to all of them, then you must come over to our side. Do you condemn the idolater and the murderer once and for all, and then take the adulterer out from between them? The adulterer, who comes after the idolater and before the murderer, and is the colleague of each? That is showing favoritism. The repentances you have left behind unpitied deserved pity more.

Now then: if you are going to show what heavenly precedents and commands give you cover for opening the gate of repentance to adultery alone — and to sexual immorality along with it — this is the very line at which our fight begins and the swords cross. But first I have to lay down a rule for you. Do not reach out your hand after the old things. Do not look back. For “the old things have passed away,” according to Isaiah; and “a renewal has been renewed,” according to Jeremiah; and “forgetting what lies behind, we are reaching forward,” according to the apostle; and “the law and the prophets were until John,” according to the Lord. [i]

Even if we are only now beginning with the Law in order to show what adultery is, we are right to do it, because we are using that side of the law which Christ “did not abolish but fulfilled.” It was the burdens of the law that lasted “until John,” not its remedies. The yokes of works have been thrown off, not the yokes of discipline. Freedom in Christ has done innocence no harm. The law of reverence, holiness, humane dealing, truth, chastity, justice, mercy, kindness and modesty stands entire — the law about which “blessed is the man who will meditate day and night.” And about that same law David says again:

The apostle says the same thing: “And so the law is indeed holy, and the command holy and altogether good” — “You shall not commit adultery,” of course. But he had already said, further up: “Are we then abolishing the law through faith? Far from it. We are establishing the law” — and he establishes it exactly at those points where the New Testament, forbidding the same things now, forbids them with a still more emphatic command. In place of “You shall not commit adultery”: “Whoever has looked with craving has already committed adultery in his own heart.” In place of “You shall not murder”: “Whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ will be in danger of Gehenna.” Ask yourself whether the law against committing adultery is still standing, when a law against even the craving has been added on top of it.

Besides, if any precedents out of the old order are working in your favor in the privacy of your own heart, they are not to be set up against the discipline we are maintaining. An additional law has been raised up, condemning the source of sins — the cravings and the will — no less than the deeds themselves; and that law has been raised for nothing if the fact that pardon was granted to adultery in certain cases long ago is going to be the reason for granting it today. What reward is there in the restrictions laid on the fuller-grown discipline of the present day, if the older discipline is to be made the agent for licensing your prostitution? On that principle you will pardon the idolater too, and every apostate, since we find the People themselves guilty of those crimes over and over, and restored to their old standing just as often. You will keep fellowship with the murderer too, because Ahab washed away Naboth’s blood by pleading for mercy, and David purged the killing of Uriah by confessing it, and the adultery that caused it along with it. And once you have done that, you will excuse acts of incest for Lot’s sake, and sexual immorality combined with incest for Judah’s sake, and degrading marriages with prostitutes for Hosea’s sake — and not only marrying over and over, but being married to several at once, for our fathers’ sake. For of course there ought to be a perfect equality of favor toward every deed that was indulged in days gone by, if pardon is going to be claimed for adultery on the strength of some ancient precedent. We have precedents of our own from that same antiquity, on the side of our own view — cases where judgment was not merely left standing but carried out on the spot against sexual immorality. And surely this one is enough: that so vast a number of the People, 24,000 of them, fell in a single plague when they committed sexual immorality with the daughters of Midian.

But with an eye to the glory of Christ, I would rather draw my discipline from Christ. Grant that the days of old had — if the Soulish are pleased to have it so — an actual right to every kind of shamelessness. Grant that before Christ the flesh may have amused itself, may even have perished, before its Lord went out to look for it and bring it home. It was not yet worth the gift of salvation, not yet fit for the office of holiness. Up to that point it was still reckoned as being in Adam, with a vicious nature of its own, giving in easily to craving after whatever it had seen to be “attractive to look at,” and looking back at lower things, and quieting its itch with fig leaves. The poison of lust was in everything, everywhere — it is in the dregs that curdle out of milk — and those dregs were fit to hold it, since not even the waters themselves had yet been washed.

But then the Word of God came down into flesh — flesh that not even marriage had unsealed — and “the Word was made flesh”: flesh that marriage was never to unseal; flesh that was to make its way to a tree, not of self-indulgence but of endurance; that was to taste from that tree nothing sweet, but something bitter; that was to belong not to the world below but to heaven; that was to be wrapped not in the leaves of lust but in the flowers of holiness; that was to give the waters a purity of its own. From then on, whatever flesh is “in Christ” has lost its old stains. It is a different thing now. It comes out in a new condition, no longer generated out of the slime of natural seed and the grime of craving, but out of “pure water” and a “clean Spirit.”

So why plead old precedent to excuse it? It did not carry the names “body of Christ” and “members of Christ” and “temple of God” back in the days when it used to obtain pardon for adultery. And so, if from the moment when the flesh changed its condition — when it “was baptized into Christ and put on Christ,” and was “bought at a great price,” that price being “the blood of the Lord and the Lamb” — you can lay hold of a single precedent, whether a command or a law or a verdict, of indulgence granted to adultery and sexual immorality or to be granted to them, then you have from us in return a fixed date, and the question runs only from there.