Malachi Chapter Three, Witness Against Adultery

 

Adulterers are listed after practitioners of sorcery. The foremost on the list dealt with spiritual adultery, pursuing spiritual truths outside of the living God. In God is life, and if we know God we have truth, because that is who He is. “I am…the truth, and the life,” John 14:6. The second is like it. Save now it is adultery with one’s recognized spouse and only legitimate marriage partner. Again, the writer of Hebrews says in no uncertain terms that marriage is a sacred institution, and God will sorely judge those that transgress its purpose, Hebrews 13:4. Those who are unfaithful toward their spouses whom they can see, how is anyone to trust that they can love and practice fidelity toward the God they cannot see? If we cannot be faithful with what is another’s, who will entrust us with anything of our own?

Adultery is the breakage of trust; we’ve severed the bond of marriage by turning the pure act of intercourse into lewdness. Solomon’s Song, a reverent and beautiful poem about the joys of knowing your spouse intimately, is an excellent example of something meant to be entirely private, but not from shame. Nakedness represents us at our most vulnerable and exposed: we are transparent, baring all to the person we have committed ourselves to, and in the knowledge of such vulnerability, or with that shared vulnerability as a bond, share something no one else may have: each other. “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love…let my beloved come to his garden and eat its pleasant fruits,” Song of Solomon 2:4, 4:16.

 

Physical infidelity definitely goes beyond merely the carnal. It betrays trust, hope and love. It says to one’s spouse that such a bond wasn’t unique, the vows made and the will set to seek your partner’s good by no means permanent or agreeable. Infidelity reveals that you are a liar, stable as water, incapable of loving as an action, unwilling to support and provide for your spouse emotionally, physically, and mentally. Why do you believe it hurts so badly when such a betrayal occurs? Because that bond, humanly speaking, is the worst kind of breach since the two joined have shared a union unlike anything else on earth. It severs beliefs, opinions, and conceptions. Your married life, as you foresaw it, ends in a way very much like death.

 

If sex were consigned to the institution of marriage, what would become of adultery? In olden times it was viewed as an abominable, odious crime of the lowest sort, perpetrated by people little more than beasts. Why? Adultery is often the effect of lust: its cause. We lust and do not have, James tells us, James 4:2. But we do not have because what we desire is to sacrifice virtue on the altar of pleasure, James 4:1, 3. If marriage preceded “living together,” and sexual promiscuity then we could genuinely determine if someone is a good marriage partner without the sinful additions of already surrendering to them the very moment that was meant to consummate the marriage union. Children then may be welcomed rather than murdered because, as a married couple, bound by an active love, said children were sired purposefully, rather than as a byproduct of treating sex like a past time. We have brought intercourse deep into the gutter, and there it lay, spattered in mire and worthless, because that is what we have made it out to be. We look at members of the opposite sex as if they are merely the objects of our sensual gratification, not as unique people made in the image of God. We know that marriage, and by intimation procreation, will be done away with in the resurrection, Matthew 22:30. The institution was given on earth for the purpose of raising up children to teach them the ways of the Lord, so His word carried on from generation to generation. When the generations end, then so too will marriage, save for the final marriage between the Lamb and His bride, the church.

 

Adultery then is merely another perversion of God’s purposeful creation of the marriage institution and the function of procreation. It seeks not commitment or obedience but pleasure. The man or the woman committing it is turning their partner into an offering on the altar of their lust. God will judge the adulterer for their unwillingness to be faithful to the person they had sworn to give their life to. It is listed as the seventh commandment in the Ten Commandments: “You shall not commit adultery,” Exodus 20:14.