Widespread Acceptance of Adultery – a Death Knell to Marriage

Satan is attacking marriage in three ways in our day: He attacks through rampant hedonism, through widespread acceptance of adultery, and through easy divorce laws. I want to look now at our culture’s destructive acceptance of adultery as simply human nature and to be expected.

We previously made the case that sex (oxytocin as the chemical carrier) acts as a glue to cement our marriages together. But with adultery, that glue isn’t sticky any more. Like tape that is used over and over, it loses its stickiness. Likewise, we lose the ability to cleave to our wives the more often we fall in and out of love. Now in our society, one third of married men and women claim to have had at least one affair. Two thirds of men and half of the women wish they could spend more time making love (bad term for having casual sex), but not with their current lover. So the stickiness of marriage is certainly diminished.

But, the world encourages that kind of immorality. It actually expects that kind of behavior. They claim it adds a little spice to life. Read the columns that the worldly “experts” write, and you can see their encouragement of adultery. Dagmar O’Connor, Director of Sexual Therapy at St. Luke’s- Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City, gave these “helpful suggestions” to improve your sex life in marriage:

“When you pass a bedroom window with the blinds drawn, try to picture the sexual scene a couple might be playing.” “Try mentally undressing people you see around you.” “Imagine other couples making love.” “Some couples enjoy flirting at parties.”

How can adding someone else into the midst of your marital intimacy, even if in fantasy, help strengthen the bond of cleaving? How does any of this fit with what Jesus said in Matthew 5:27-28, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” How can adultery in any way fit into a God-designed and God-honoring marriage?

Now here is another question: If a little adultery is good for marriage, why are there so many broken hearts and divorces caused by adultery? It is because even though our glands can convince our minds that an open marriage is good, we can’t convince our hearts. They still get broken.

How much better to listen to God. God takes sexual sin seriously, and God condemns all sexual intercourse outside of marriage. More than that, in the Old Testament, any illicit sexual activity involving married persons demanded the death penalty. Read Leviticus 20:1-14 to see this. That’s serious. And God’s law demanded that fornicators marry. Plus, two of the Ten Commandments relate to the sanctity of marriage. The Seventh Commandment found in Exodus 20:14 states: “You shall not commit adultery.” Plus, the tenth Command found in Exodus 20:17 states: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.” Not only is the act of adultery condemned, but even the intent is forbidden. For a married person even to want another, to desire another, was terrible. And it is a death knell to marriage.

Adultery is a great destroyer of marriage. Any married person who even flirts around the edges of adultery is creating great damage to his marriage. A man is commanded to leave his mother and father and cle