QQ70-71. What is the seventh commandment and what is required by it?

A (70). The seventh commandment is, Thou shalt not commit adultery.

A (71). The seventh commandment requireth the preservation of our own and our neighbor’s chastity, in heart, speech, and behaviour.

The seventh command itself is Exodus 20:14.

Heidelberg Q.108 is helpful here in answering the question of what the seventh commandment teaches us, namely:

“That all unchastity is accursed of God; and that we should therefore loathe it from the heart, and live chastely and modestly whether in holy wedlock or single life.”

Our outline will be: 1. Upholding the Image of God in Marriage; 2. Preserving Chastity Before (or Beyond) Marriage; 3. Preserving Chastity Within Marriage

Upholding the Image of God in Marriage

Again we must go back to Genesis 1 and 2 to view the law of God through the lens of His original design. And when we speak of the relationship between God’s design and the moral law, we are immediately in the realm of natural law because here we are given the clear reason in the thing itself. God makes man and woman and the institution that they form and their specific sexuality all in a way that is immutable and good. So let’s view that from the simplest aspects to the more complex.

First, God made men and women different. And it will follow from this that God makes every single person distinctly male or female: “male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). He didn’t find them to be—like two sides of an unminted coin, and merely call them “male and female” like one would arbitrarily call two ends, “left and right” or “top and bottom,” that otherwise had nothing distinct about them. One significant clue to what we mean by natural law here comes from Paul’s argument to the Corinthians about proper attire in worship:

“Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering” (1 Cor. 11:14-15).

By “nature” we do not simply mean that men and women are biologically different. They are indeed biologically different—that’s an aspect of that nature. But that biology bears the stamp of a higher nature. And as virtually every psychological study shows, year after year, men and women think very differently, process reality differently, tend to answer to very different calls and for very different reasons. And all of this God calls “very good” (Gen. 1:31).

Marriage is about more than attraction and desire, but it is not less. For all of our insane culture-driven talk, the fact of the matter is that God made men to want to be the spouse to a woman, and that means an irreducibly feminine nature, body and soul. And whether anyone thinks it’s “toxic” or not, God made women to want to be the spouse to a man, and that means an irreducibly masculine nature, body and soul. These opposite desires are as designed by God as objective natures every bit as much as God designed the objects that draw the desires. Clearly then there are many distortions of the desires, and some falling much further from the pure design than others.

So it is a natural law argument Paul against homosexuality, where he says,

“God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another” (Rom. 1:26-27).

Jude 7 echoes this thought about the men of Sodom who “pursued unnatural desire.”

Not only does God make marriage in its essence, and make every person either male and female. But it will follow from this that God is the ultimate Maker of every single marriage. Jesus put it in this way to the disciples:

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Mat. 19:4-5) 

Notice first that Jesus reaches back into Genesis 2:25, to reaffirm that this is from the beginning. A second thing to notice is that He makes God, not Moses, the ultimate Maker and marriage and the ultimate Speaker at its institution: “He who created them … said.” Jesus is saying that this creation institution is the ground of all marriages. It follows from this that our vows are ultimately to Him.

God’s design brings blessing. This is one of those things in life that our sinful nature can despise because of its “simplicity.” Note first the language of blessing on their natures and ordinance: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Gen. 1:28). A most obvious blessing is children: “a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Ps. 127:3). But even those blessings obey this law of nature. John Murray explains that,

“We cannot think of the duty of procreation in abstraction from marriage. And we cannot think of marriage apart from the dignity and privilege of the procreative acts and processes which are bound up with it.”1 

Now I’ll have more to say about the many deviations from this, and their discontents, next time, Lord willing. For now I only bring it up to set us on the right path for this seventh commandment, because all severing of the root of this flowering of love and God’s sexual design, or any attempt to replant that flower in foreign soil, will result in a mutant and dead thing. No blessing that one would naturally expect can be expected. You will reproduce no God-glorifying images. It will end in misery.

Preserving Chastity Before (or Beyond) Marriage

At the end of the day, Discussions over whether “dating” is permissible, or the differences between “courting” and “dating,” can all be an exercise in missing the point. Whatever labels one uses and whatever other details may differ, at the end of the day, the relationship one is in with that member of the opposite sex is either: (1) brother-sister in Christ only, (2) husband-wife in the making, or else (3) mere sex object being used and discarded. Those are your choices and there are no other.

We need to say first that unchastity is cursed by God. Anything that goes against the blessing of the design naturally brings its opposite: the curse. The divine curse is first of all a judicial sentence, so we otherwise translate this “God condemns all unchastity.” That is, he sentences it, he calls it what it is: not just wicked but guilty, not just indecent but worthy of death, not just damaging to your future relationship, but a terrible blight and treason against the whole kingdom and God of love. 

“Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Heb. 13:4).

Adultery and authority (i.e. the seventh and fifth commandments) are related in obvious ways, as in, children will be hurt by the fallout of adultery. But what is further from our minds is the concept of honor in that fifth commandment that the author of Hebrews echoes here. Let marriage be held in HONOR AMONG ALL. Sure, there are ways to make an idol of marriage, and American culture and Evangelical culture, had long specialized in all of that. But let us never swing the pendulum and fail to echo the glory of marriage for God’s purposes.

This commandment applies equally to married and single. Remember, the answer to Heidelberg Q.108 said, WHETHER IN HOLY WEDLOCK OR SINGLE LIFE. Now how is that the case? The seventh commandment is a lot like the fourth, in the preparation stage. Just like six days are part of the command to “keeping” that seventh, so in a similar way is (1) one’s purity while single, and (2) one’s thought life while married with idle time, are these a constant “keeping” of the marriage bed undefiled.

Some of how I address counseling questions by young singles can flesh out some of this point. The first question is usually about dating in general, by which the person asking has in their mind some “alone time” relationship with the other, preferably away from the local church community they are in. They don’t know they’re asking all that, until I start asking my annoying diagnostic questions. But it starts to come out with their own questions that aim toward: “Well, how are we supposed to test whether or not we’re compatible with each other?” My answer: “Compatible for what? A weekend in Vegas? That’s not real life. I thought we were talking about real life.”

What you need to do to genuinely test compatibility with someone is to be in scenarios more like actual marriage, but all the hardest ones that aren’t on your radar screen right now. How do they relate to their family? How does he talk to his mother? How does she take criticism? How they work and react to adversity? And how they relate to God in the church context? Are you already talking about eternal things? Is that not a big part of what generated the interest to begin with? But beyond that, one cannot do any better than to have the church community one is in be the ones offering the majority of the feedback even on those questions. The Bible has plenty to say to young people on this, but it is usually dismissed as too simple; and then you realize when you were older that the real problem is that you were too busy being an animal to do the supposedly simple. If something is so “simple,” why can’t you do it? So we are told, “Flee also youthful lusts” (2 Tim. 2:22, KJV); “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22, KJV).

To live chastely is to live with sexual purity in thought, word, and deed and beyond! What do I mean by that “beyond”? If we remember, all of the commandments had that negative “Do not,” but also the very comprehensive “Do!” So it is here. And the words of Westminster Larger Catechism will help us here: 

“The duties required in the seventh commandment are, chastity in body, mind, affections, words, and behavior; and the preservation of it in ourselves and others; watchfulness over the eyes and all the senses; temperance, keeping of chaste company, modesty in apparel; marriage by those that have not the gift of continency, conjugal love, and cohabitation; diligent labor in all our callings; shunning all occasions of uncleanness, and resisting temptations thereunto.”2

To keep this guard is truly to guard two persons—oneself and one’s future (or present) spouse. 

Preserving Chastity Within Marriage

Paul’s instructions to husbands and wives in marriage is aimed to prevent what the law forbids by doing what the law requires:

“But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Cor. 7:2-5). 

Virtually anything that can be talked about in the specifics belongs to marriage counseling. Naturally, if the subject is what is “required” by the commandment, then anything that tends to preserve the most healthy relations between the husband and wife belongs to this duty. This also implies preventative measures. In order not to do what is forbidden, our positive duty would include, for example, developing a mature view of the roles of the man as husband-father, and the woman as wife-mother. Our failure to do that will breed resentment and bitterness, even if we are unaware of that going into marriage. It would include not spending excessive time away (not only geographically, but emotionally), which is the situation Paul is addressing in that 1 Corinthians 7 passage. It would include not being so naive as to cultivate inappropriate relations with members of the opposite sex at the workplace or anywhere else that may occur (including online nowadays). 

A word about the place of modesty here. To live modestly is to not assert oneself—whether is sensuality or in any other exhibition of the self. So this is a more general concept than chastity, but modesty comes to the aid of chastity where not only clothing or makeup, but volume and attention to speech, stays on the straight path. A lot of people think modesty in this area is about purposefully looking bad or talking down oneself. Not at all! Modesty is clothing oneself in those fruit of the Spirit like gentleness and self-control in one’s air or appearance. And modesty includes modest talk: that is, speaking in ways that guard improper hearing of anything that would take us off the path of purity. As Paul says,

“But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving” (Eph. 5:3-4).

Romans 14 is never brought into the modesty discussion, but it should. One of the truths urged there by Paul is that “it is good not to … do anything that causes your brother to stumble” (v. 21). It is fashionable to push back against the excesses of “modesty culture” by the woman (or someone on behalf of the woman) saying: “If that guy has a problem with his eyes, he needs to gouge out his eyes!” It is true that the man needs to operate on the man and not deflect his own sins. However, do we talk this way about alcohol or about course speech or about harmful error? Not at all. 

APPLICATION

Use 1. EVANGELICAL USE. One more appeal to that answer from Heidelberg Q108 here. It said about unchastity that WE SHOULD THEREFORE LOATHE IT FROM THE HEART. And so we must ask ourselves whether we truly hate the slightest unfaithfulness from the heart. We saw from the Ephesians 5 text about the honoring Christ as the church when it comes to sexual immorality: “But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints” (Eph. 5:2). But of course, what does this mean but as individuals? 

And the slightest compromise of pure devotion to your spouse—whether present or future—is an act of loathing for spouse and yourself and your children. But you will either loath one or the other: either your sexual impurity or your loved ones.

Use 2. CIVIL USE. We saw that ordained authority is for authoring God’s story, long in the land. Dishonor shortens life in the land. Likewise with sexual sin. After Moses had chronicled the many kinds of sexual perversions among the peoples of Canaan, that God was driving out, he says:

“Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you” (Lev. 18:24-26).

Notice he says two things as if twin pillars: I AM DRIVING OUT the sexually deviant and THE LAND VOMITS OUT the sexually deviant. Which is it? It sounds like both. Want to make a dent in culture? Want to be a rebel and swim against the tide and make noise? Get married. Have children. Teach them the fear of the LORD. And get started and don’t look back. 

Conversely, do you want to see a people group be displaced on the land they currently stand on? Just practice and celebrate sexual deviancy. Those men won’t reproduce, and men from other culture’s will, and will move in to that literal same space to do it. Why do you think the Great Reset has to include the Great Replacement? In other words, why are those at the World Economic Forum, who give the marching orders to Western “leaders,” also the ones funding the millions of migrants pouring over the borders of southern Europe and the southern United States? And why aren’t those populations called “homophobic” or “transphobic” when the Hispanic populations coming across our south (being largely Roman Catholic) practice heterosexuality and have lots of kids, and Muslims populations coming into Europe (also having lots of kids) believe in the death penalty for homosexuals, and mean to enforce that once they institute Sharia law? Why aren’t they targeted for campaigns warning about homophobia and transphobia? Why aren’t their children targeted for genital mutilation? Well it’s very obvious to any honest observer—You are being sexually depopulated, or sexually exterminated. The WEF is carrying out to perfection a military occupation and conquest that doesn’t require firing a single bullet. 

Use 3. DIRECTIVE USE. What to do to war against lust? Two main things: (1) Make idle time extinct; (2) Starve out the all the supply lines of that sin. Paul tackles both in a verse that was instrumental in Augustine’s conversion to the faith. You read about this in the Confessions, but let me just read it:

“But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:14).

In this short sentence is the putting on of the New and putting off the Old. 

First, PUT ON. To “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” means to be with him, to study him, to admire him, and to take up his cause, to press into his kingdom, so that nothing else would occupy your time because you would lose interest. This is what the Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers called “the expulsive power of a new affection.” 

Second, PUT OFF. If we can catch it, there’s even a military strategy here in the words MAKE NO PROVISION. In warfare, when laying siege to a city, the most powerful thing one can do is to choke out all supply lines into the city. No food gets in. No auxiliary forces or weaponry gets in. You starve them to surrender. No provisions. Lust is that enemy within. The sin nature does not go away, but the sources of its strength can be cut off. So what feeds it from outside? Things like the internet and its images. Certain acquaintances always spewing out perverse speech. Remember that WLC wording: “diligent labor in all our callings; shunning all occasions of uncleanness.” Same idea. There is a militant crowding out effect in both feeding that superior pleasure and starving out the idle-time breeding ground of lust.

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1. Murray, Principles of Conduct, 45.

2. Westminster Larger Catechism, Q.138