Eph 961 12/21/88; 10/26/76; Rom 405 12/18/79
A. Definition and Description.
1. Adultery is the voluntary act of sexual intercourse of a married person with someone other than his or her lawful spouse. Adultery refers to sexual activity outside the divine institution of marriage.
2. Sex was designed by God to be an expression of love inside a marriage between a husband and wife. Sex was not designed just to propagate the human race.
3. Sex is overrated with regard to happiness. Sex doesn’t mean happiness. It is designed as an expression of category two love - love between a right man and right woman. It expresses the coalescence of soul and body. Sex isn’t love; it is a ritual. The divine institution of marriage defines the boundaries for sex.
4. Normal adultery is fornication with the opposite sex. Abnormal adultery is incest, homosexuality, bestiality, molestation of children, masturbation, etc. Gen 16:4.
5. All too often sex is a meaningless physical encounter. Abuse of sex can mean maladjustment to God, to the human race, and many other maladjustments in life.
B. Prohibitions of Adultery.
1. Ex 20:14; Deut 5:18; 1 Cor 6:18; Col 3:5; 1 Thes 4:3.
2. A married woman is the property of the man she marries. Adultery is a violation of freedom. Fornication refers to unmarried women.
3. The seventh commandment’s purpose is the protection of the freedom of right man and right woman. This protects divine institution #2, marriage, by the use of divine institution #1, volition.
4. Fornication is forbidden in 1 Cor 6:18. Fornication is sex between two people who are not married. Mentally you are to just pick yourself up and run away from fornication. Constant fornication leads to the inability to perform sexually.
5. All the mandates regarding sex apply to every dispensation because these mandates are a part of morality.
C. Mental adultery is prohibited, Matt 5:27-28.
1. Man gets an image in his right lobe and his emotion revolts. These combine to cause mental adultery. Don’t let such thoughts take root. Rebound and apply doctrine.
2. In overt adultery, the soul makes a decision and the body follows through. In mental adultery, only the volition or the soul is involved.
D. Abnormal sexual activity is prohibited.
1. Incest: Lev 18:6-17, 20:14; Deut 27:20,22; 1 Cor 5:1-7. The exception to this was the beginning of the human race and the repopulation of the earth after the flood.
2. Homosexuality: Lev 18:22, 20:13; its penalty was death. Rom 1:26-7 describes the destruction of a nation from this degeneracy.
3. Bestiality is forbidden: Lev 18:23, 20:15. Animal and man were both killed in punishment. Deut 27:21.
4. Pimping and prostitution are also forbidden, Lev 19:29; Deut 23:17.
5. Rape is forbidden and punishable by death, Deut 22:25-27.
6. Other forms of abnormal sex that are forbidden include necrophilia, pederasty, voyeurism.
E. Phallic reversionism (adultery) destroys the soul, Prov 6:32; Eph 4:18-9.
1. Sex is for those who have happiness in category 2 love. Sex isn’t a means of happiness.
2. Illegal sex is an expression of immoral degeneracy, Eph 4:19, “Who because they have become calloused, they have given themselves over to licentiousness, resulting in the practice of every kind of immorality with insatiable lust.”
3. Illegal sex is the function of reverse process reversionism. It is almost impossible to recover from reverse process reversionism. Rev 2:4, 14, 20.
F. Fornication and the frantic search for happiness are related, Eph 5:3.
1. Fornication shouldn’t even be mentioned as a means of happiness. Sex should be an expression of a pre-existing happiness.
2. Adultery carries certain laws of punishment, frustration, and certain forms of slavery. Once you commit adultery, you’ve stepped into a soul-type of slavery. This is a part of its punishment.
3. Adultery is one of the manifestations of both sublimation and emotional revolt of the soul (although you can commit adultery without emotional revolt).
4. This is taught in the use of the Greek noun PLEONEZIA in Eph 4:19 and 5:3. This word actually means a frantic search for happiness which leads to a form of slavery.
G. The Destructive Force of Promiscuity.
1. Since adultery is a form of slavery, it has a destructive effect on both the male and female body and soul. Part of it is the frustration, which causes some form of sublimation, only adding to one’s own destruction.
2. In 1 Cor 6:13-18 we have a normal desire for sex just as we do for food. But eating doesn’t make you happy, just as sex doesn’t make you happy. Sex expresses happiness; and the sex desire is normal. There is nothing wrong with desire, but sin comes in the abuse of the desire.
3. Fornication destroys the response design of the right man and the right woman. Rhythm is lost. The male becomes incapable of satisfying the right woman or becomes impotent. The female’s programmed sexual desire for her right man is destroyed. Therefore there is loss of orgastic pleasure and satisfaction as an expression of happiness. Problems develop such as nymphism, frigidity, perversion, distortion, lesbianism.
H. Adultery is a bonified basis for divorce, Matt 5:32 cf. 19:7-9; Lk 16:18.
1. Rapport between husband and wife is destroyed by adultery. Compatibility is lost. Deut 24:1-4.
2. Interim sex destroys both soul rapport and sexual response. Scar tissue on the soul of the one involved destroys any possibility of rapport and compatibility. 3. Matt 5:31-32, “And it has been said [Deut 24:1], `Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce’; but I say to you that every one who divorces his wife, except for the cause of fornication, makes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman [divorced because she committed adultery] commits adultery.”
4. Matt 19:7-9, “They [Pharisees] said to Him [Jesus], `Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate and divorce her?’ And He replied to them, `Because of your scar tissue of the soul, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been that way. In fact I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for adultery, and marries another commits adultery.”
5. Incompatibility, brutality, drunkenness, endangering the life of the spouse are all legal grounds for divorce, but they do not give the right of remarriage.
6. Divorce with the right of remarriage is related to adultery, desertion, and two other reasons (see the doctrine of divorce).
7. People who are losers in life are losers in marriage. People who are winners in life have the opportunity to be winners in marriage, though it doesn’t always work out. Losers are not people who fail, but people who do nothing about their failures.
8. Marital problems are symptoms of a disease in the spiritual life.
I. Adultery and fornication is often used in a spiritual sense to describe reversionism, apostasy and negative volition toward Bible doctrine, Jer 3:8-10; 16:23-43, 23:24-28; Rev 17:1-5; Heb 12:16.
J. The sanctification of category two love is marriage, 1 Thes 4:3-4; Heb 13:4.
1. 1 Thes 4:3-4, “For this is the will of God, namely your sanctification, that is that you abstain from fornication, that each one of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor.”
2. Heb 13:4, “Let marriage be held in honor among you, and the bed undefiled. For fornicators and adulterers God will judge.”
K. The glory of category two love is described in spiritual analogy to doctrine, 1 Cor 11:7; Eph 5:25-31. In 1 Cor 11, just as the edification complex completes the soul, so the right man completes the right woman. The right woman becomes his glory, just as the edification complex of the soul becomes the glory of the Lord. Eph 5 teaches the relationship between Christ and the church.
L. Biblical Application of Category Two Love to the Single Person.
1. Right man/right woman was designed by God in eternity past; therefore, an opposite number exists somewhere for you by divine design.
2. Exceptions are: the gift of celibacy; and the function under the law of supreme sacrifice designed by God for maximum concentration and production, as with Jeremiah and Paul. 1 Cor 9:5; Jer 16:2.
3. Every believer under the grace plan will eventually meet his right opposite number at the right time and in the right circumstances. Waiting on God is the economy of time.
4. There is no benefit in meeting your opposite number unless you have waited on the Lord in faithfulness to that principle. This means avoiding adultery while waiting and having a love affair with Bible doctrine. When a person comes to their right man or right woman with a lot of previous fornication, the capacity in the body is destroyed. Marriage can be an instant success, if all factors are just right. It’s nonsense that there has to be a period of one year or more; that depends on how much adjustment is necessary due to your scar tissue or emotional revolt or handicaps. Do not superimpose your own failures on the Word of God and try to make a doctrine out of it!
5. Therefore, your thought and life pattern and conduct must be based on knowing the doctrinal principle that there exists for you a right person designed by God; no other person will do. All others are no substitute, not even a cheap substitute.
6. Fornication is accepting a cheap substitute in order to gratify an emotional or biological passion or urge. It is part of the frantic search for happiness.
7. The antidote to temptation is found in spiritual growth. Spiritual growth rejects the concept of a frantic search for happiness through adultery. Divine viewpoint plus the faith-rest technique flees from fornication, 1 Cor 6:18.
8. Under phallic reversionism, fornication builds scar tissue on the soul while destroying the physical responses of the body in the field of sex. Fornication also becomes a part of the emotional revolt of the soul. Therefore, fornication becomes the enemy to the right man/right woman relationship. Therefore it is prohibited in strong terms, Eph 5:3.
9. Maximum doctrine in the soul plus abstinence from sex become the basis for maximum pleasure from sex in category 2 love. The daily function of GAP (grace apparatus for perception) translates the principle of doctrine into the pleasure and realities of happiness in life. The framework for capacity in sex is marriage.
10. Therefore, the preparation for life in the single or married realm is the persistent daily function of GAP to spiritual maturity. Supergrace status gives one the maximum capacity to express love in sex.
M. The principle of pseudo-love is found in Prov 5:1-23.
1. The woman on a wave of libido always puts forward a phoney front.
2. You are designed to perform best sexually with one woman.
3. You bind yourself to the idol called sex with each sexual encounter with a wrong woman.
N. The principle of the wrong woman is found in Prov 6:20-35.
1. Positive volition to doctrine will protect you from the sexual advances of the wrong woman.
2. Negative volition will not go unpunished.
O. The Difference Between Adultery and Fornication.
1. There is a difference between adultery and fornication. Therefore, distinction must be made.
2. Both adultery and fornication are sins. But adultery is also criminal activity, because adultery is stealing another man’s property.
3. Adultery can only be committed by a male, whereby one male steals the wife of another.
4. The object of adultery is always a married woman, never an unmarried woman (which is fornication).
5. Therefore, when a man takes another man’s wife, he seduces her, which is theft. So adultery is stealing and fornication. It is both a criminal function as well as sin.
6. Fornication can be illicit sex, normal or abnormal.
7. But adultery is much stronger than fornication, because it involves stealing another man’s wife, which is that man’s property. The woman is a slave and chattel to her husband. Therefore, she is her husband’s property. Therefore, stealing another man’s woman in fornication is a breakdown of the most basic principle of establishment.
8. Because adultery is not only a sin, it is listed under the category of criminal activity in Rom 13:9, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
9. Therefore, David not only committed adultery as a sin, but it was also criminal activity.
10. Adultery Fornication
Sin Sin
ź criminal activity - criminal activity
Committed by a man Committed by man or woman
Object: woman Object: man or woman
Married woman Unmarried woman
Stealing & fornication Fornication as illicit sex
Normal illicit sex Normal or abnormal illicit sex
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