THE SIN OF ADULTERY
We have here, in the letter, a piece of legislation altogether obsolete, because adapted to an age and to ideas utterly foreign to our own; yet, in the spirit, we have, as part of the moral law of God which changeth not, the unspeakable abhorrence in which the sin of adultery is held with him, and the great displeasure with which he regards the mere suspicion of it. For this ordeal was not merely or primarily to punish guilt or to restore domestic peace but to remove sin and passion from before the eyes of God. Consider, therefore—
I. THAT GOD RESERVED HIS MOST AWFUL VISITATION OF OLD TIMES FOR SUCH ADULTERY AS HAD SUCCESSFULLY ESCAPED HUMAN OBSERVATION. So there is no sin which more surely destroys a nation or a class by kindling the wrath of God against it than adultery. So the Jews in the time of the later prophets (Jeremiah 5:8; Hosea 4:2), and m the time of our Lord (John 8:7; the Talmud, as above); so the upper classes in France before the Revolution; so perhaps our own today.
II. THAT GOD DID NOT APPOINT DIVORCE AS A REMEDY AGAINST CONJUGAL UNFAITHFULNESS. For it is no remedy against the sin, but only against some of its painful consequences. The glosses and traditions of the Jewish lawyers made divorce easy and common, because they no longer believed in the righteousness of God or in the hatefulness of sin, as sin.
III. That nothing is more abhorrent from the will of God concerning us THAN THAT FIERCE JEALOUSY AND CRUEL SUSPICION SHOULD INVADE FAMILIES, and poison the purest source of human happiness. Both, therefore, sin greatly—the wife who gives the least ground for suspicion by levity or carelessness of conduct, the husband who nurses a spirit of jealousy, and does not try to bring it to the test of facts.
IV. That the sin of adultery was PUNISHED UNDER THE LAW WITH MISERABLE DEATH, WHEREAS CHRIST REFUSED TO AWARD ANY SECULAR PUNISHMENT TO IT (John 8:11). And this is
V. THAT THIS SPECIAL AND AWFUL PROVISION WAS MADE ONLY AGAINST THE SIN OF THE WIFE, because it is from her sin that jealousy and its consequent crimes do as a fact arise in rude communities. But under the more perfect law of Christ there is no difference made between the same sin in men and women, but rather the sin of the man is denounced because it is more lightly accounted by the world (Matthew 5:28; 1 Thessalonians 4:6, "in the matter").
HOMILIES BY D. YOUNG