Who is an adulterer?
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2011 · 6 March 2011
Matthew 5:27-30 says, "You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”
Our Lord is talking here about sin. And this is really the topic of His message from verse 21 through verse 48 of chapter 5. It is a message on daily examples of sin. In Numbers 32:23 it says, "But if you do not do so, then take note, you have sinned against the LORD; and be sure your sin will find you out.”
In Matthew 5 the sin of the Jewish leaders and the sin of the people listening to Christ finds them out. Jesus unmasks their hypocrisy and precisely what our Lord is doing in this passage is giving them a true picture of their sinfulness.
They try to invent systems that justify themselves, and that is precisely what the Judaism of Jesus' time had done. They had substituted their own system for the truth of God's revelation, and their own system was a system of external rules, a system of behavior with no thought for attitude or motive or the heart.
And so Jesus in, in verses 21 - 48 of the Sermon on the Mount gives us 6 examples of how men reduces God’s standards. No matter how religious it looked on the outside, the fact is it was sinful on the inside. Jesus presents a standard they can't keep, and thus faces them with a sin problem for which they have no remedy.
At the end of Matthew 5 in verse 48 He says, "Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect." That is the righteousness My kingdom demands. And obviously they couldn't keep it. They must recognize that in the Law there is no resource to solve the sin problem; they are desperately in need of someone who can and Jesus is just that someone.
God is concerned about a heart relationship, the issue is loving the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself, and that the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law was only a means for regulating that love relationship. God has always been concerned about the heart.
Jesus in His sermon began with a message about blessedness. But in order for one to know that blessedness you must know the proper definition of sin, because sin stands in the way of blessing, and sin has to be dealt with and removed. And if we do not properly understand sin, we will not understand anything else that God does.
The deeper the disease the greater the remedy needed, that's the point. And as long as people think of sin superficially, as long as they think of sin minimally, as long as they make light of sin then salvation is also a minor thing.
But when you understand that sin is something heinous, sin is something deep, sin is something so penetrating that it reaches down into a mans being so deeply that it's absolutely unchangeable except by the miracle of God, then you'll understand that only God can bring salvation.
You will never understand the meaning of the cross, you will never understand why Jesus had to die, you will never understand why when He had legions of angels who could have come to His aid, yet He never used them, you will never understand why He said, "I must fulfill all righteousness," and you will never understand what His death means until you understand how evil sin is that He would have to go to that extreme to accomplish salvation.
And that's why biblically speaking, evangelism always begins by presenting the law before grace. You must preach judgment and you must preach condemnation first. Our evangelism must confront people with the holiness of God; it must reveal His demands for an inner heart of righteousness.
Evangelism must focus on man’s inability to meet God's standard, and we must make men desperate like Jesus wanted to make the Pharisees, the scribes and the multitude desperate so that they stand in fear of judgment to be cast into hell and they cry out for a Savior who can deliver them from a problem too deep for them to handle.
Because God is always concerned not so much with what we do and what we say and where we go, though He is concerned with that, but He's more concerned with what we think in our minds and hearts. There are the pious and the self-satisfied who think that because they don't do certain things and they do other things that they are justified, and that's because they never really examine the evil of their hearts.
Listen, before you ever commit adultery you think it in your heart and before you ever steal you think it in your heart. It is the heart that spews out the garbage that defiles man because "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; and who can know it?" it says in Jeremiah 17:9.
Let's see how Jesus explains it with the illustration of adultery in verse 27. You'll notice three points, the law, the desire, and the deliverance. First of all, the deed, "You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ Deuteronomy repeats it in 5:18, "Neither shall you commit adultery."
Now you'll notice that in our passage in Matthew it was the leaders, the rabbinic tradition that said, "You shall not commit adultery." They were right, they just never went far enough. God did say, don't do it, it was a serious crime and still is.
Now let me talk for a moment about the word itself; the word adultery, it's a very simple word. The root means this: unlawful intercourse with the spouse of someone else.
But most Bible scholars see it not only as a command not to engage in sexual activity with somebody else's spouse but see it in a general sense not to have sex because the word is also used that in a general way. For example in some places the word means to seduce or violate a woman, married or unmarried.
In other places it is translated as committing harlotry. So generally the word has been used to describe any kind of illicit intercourse at all; and anything is illicit outside the bond of marriage. And so primarily it refers to a sexual relationship that violates a marriage. But the spirit of it extends farther to include any kind of illicit sexual behavior.
This is indicated in what our Lord says in verse 28 where He says that anybody who looks on any woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. And the woman He speaks of here He doesn't say whether she's married or not, it's so broad that anybody who lusts after any woman has committed adultery in his heart.
The Bible speaks pointedly to the devastation caused by the sin of sexual adultery or fornication. Look at king David and the results. Look at Shechem who defiled Dinah and was later slaughtered. Witness Absalom who defiled others in sexual sins and wound up being hanged in a tree. Fornicators and adulterers God will judge (Hebrews 13:4).
The New Testament reiterates with finality and firmness this prohibition. 1 Corinthians chapter 6 condemns it. Second Peter chapter 2 condemns it. Revelation chapter 2 condemns it. The end of the Book of Revelation says that fornicators and adulterers won't even enter into God's kingdom.
Listen to what Jesus says, "Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her." Now listen to this, He doesn't say, commits adultery, no He doesn't say that. He says, "Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart." Why? Because it is the adulterous heart that results in the wanton look, do you see?
The sin has already happened in the heart, the adultery is conceived and thus the look is prompted. That's why you may find in this life that someone passes into your gaze involuntary and appears as a temptation from Satan, or maybe even trying to attract attention. But an involuntary glance means you just resist and turn away.
But when you latch on and you cultivate and you pursue the desire, it's because your lustful, adulterous heart has been seeking an object, and you fulfill the fantasy that's already there in your heart.
It's when you're looking for the woman to lust after, when you go to the movie theater because you know when you get there you will see what you desire in your heart to see, that which will meet your lust. It's when you go seek the different channels on the television to find the thing that panders your lust.
So it would read this way, emphatically I say to you that whoever continues looking on a woman for the purpose of lusting gives evidence of already committing adultery in his heart. The continued look is the manifestation of the vile heart. The Greek verb tense here is an accomplished lusting, you've already done it.
Let me just add this, temptation to illicit sexual desire or fantasy is not sin. Satan may tempt you; Satan may draw something in to tempt you. The sin comes in what you do with it. If you entertain the temptation, if you maintain the temptation, if you indulge in those evil thoughts, then it becomes sin.
The Bible says, to the pure all things are pure, but to the one whose heart is defiled, he'll defile everything. He'll look at something beautiful and make it something ugly. That's because his heart is defiled. That's why there's pornography.
Our Lord here is talking about a man lusting after a woman in His illustration but this also applies the other way when women lust after men. Both are wrong, and it is wrong to create lust by the way you dress. Job said in Job 31:1, "I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?" You know what his covenant was? Not to look.
Then Jesus goes a step further, how you do get out of this situation? Jesus says. "If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perishes, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perishes, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”
Now when you first read that you might say, well that does not make any sense. If He's saying the issue is the heart, what's He saying pluck out the eye for? The point is, Jesus is not saying that there is a physical remedy for a spiritual problem; that would undermine the whole point.
This is what He is saying, to a Jew the right eye, the right arm and the right leg were symbols of the best that a man had, and the right was always symbolic of the better of the two. So He is saying, there is nothing too precious to eliminate from your life if it's going to cause your heart to be pandered. If it means getting rid of your most precious possession then get rid of it.
What our Lord is saying is that nothing is too precious if it affects you going to heaven or not. Sin must be dealt with radically. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:27, "I disciple my body to bring it into subjection." And so Jesus calls for immediate action. He diagnoses the problem and says, pluck it out, cut it off, and eliminate whatever it is in your life.
If you go to a theater and you watch something that tempts you, get out. If you have the same problem with your television, get rid of the TV. If you've got magazine lying around with pictures like that, throw them in the trash.
Jesus is not really talking about the physical. He knows that cutting off your right hand and plucking out your right eye isn't going to change an adulterous heart. But what He is saying is take the most precious thing you have, your right arm, your right eye if need be and get rid of it if it brings you to sin and stands in the way of holiness.
Some people misunderstood this. There were men who wished to free themselves from the problem of lust and so they did strange things to their bodies. Some of them used to go into the Egyptian desert and they'd decide they'd live all alone and they'd think about nothing but God.
The most famous man to do that was a man named Saint Anthony. He decided he'd go out to get rid of this feeling of lust that he had in his heart. He lived like a hermit, he fasted, he would go days and days keeping himself awake to punish himself, as a righteous act. He would torture his body.
For 35 years he said he had a non stop battle with temptation. And this is what he wrote in his biography: first of all the devil tried to lead him away from discipline whispering to him to the remembrance of wealth, cares for his sister, claims of kindred, love of money, love of glory, and other relaxations of life, and last of all Satan tempted him in the area of virtue.
And the point of the story is this: you can be all alone in the Egyptian desert and still not have anything going on in your heart to change the problem. If Anthony had really taken the resources available from God to have a changed repentant heart he wouldn't have needed to leave town.
Let me ask you this, could these scribes and Pharisees get rid of these problems? The fact of the matter is they couldn't by themselves. Jesus again is giving them an impossible standard-- a frustration that's going to make them say, we tried and we can't.
Our repeated sins as Christians may lead us to conclude that we are basically unholy, as opposed to righteous in Christ. This makes us think that we must simply work harder. But that breeds discouragement and lowering of God’s standards.
God’s message to Christians is not “you are not yet holy, work on it until you get there,” but “you are holy, be what you already are in Christ.” This truth gives us confidence, passion and true understanding of sin. Knowing that our Father sees us as holy in His Son, we are encouraged to make real spiritual progress.
Sanctification means that we recognize that we are a new creation and then we need to cleanse ourselves from that sin that makes us dirty every day (1 John 1:8-10). Yet God does not seperate us from the world we live in because He has a purpose in calling us, and our new vocation is to live in this world as if the future kingdom is already here.
Beloved, if Jesus Christ has come into your heart you have that new nature, you have that new heart. And you don't need to follow the pandering of your own lust; you can know victory over that. Thank God for that. Let us pray.