Thesis 36- We must be faithful to our spouses in thought, word and deed.
One of the great evils of decline in the broader culture is the effect it can have in the Christian culture. As the broader culture becomes more and more morally slipshod, immorality is defined downward. Christians tend to be comfortable if we can manage to stay ahead of the world’s curve. Sadly, when it comes to marital fidelity, it seems we are not even doing that. Evangelical Christians, or so the scuttlebutt goes, are virtually just as likely as their unbelieving counterparts to commit adultery.
Our infidelity, in one sense, is much worse than the infidelity of the infidel. In both cases, of course, families are torn asunder. In both cases the lives of children are turned upside down. But in the case of professing Christians, we add to that that we are lying to the watching world about who Jesus is, and who the church is called to be. That is, when a man is unfaithful to his wife he says that Jesus is unfaithful to the church. When a wife is unfaithful to her husband, she says that the church is free to be unfaithful to Christ. This follows from Paul’s connection of the husband and wife and Jesus and the church in Ephesians 5.
These lies are no small things. It is, after all, one thing to lie about how big the fish that got away was. But it is entirely another thing to lie about Jesus and His bride. We ought to be modeling for the world what fidelity looks like. We of all people ought to understand this call. Jesus, after all, was faithful, even to death on the cross.
We fail here, in the end, because we are worldly. While the world walks into marriage seeing it as something temporary, and we walk into it thinking it designed for permanence, what we have in common is how we view the purpose of marriage. We both, believers and unbelievers alike, walk down the aisle believing that marriage exists for the sake of our own happiness. When our marriages no longer provide the level of happiness we believe is our due, our eyes, our hearts and our bodies begin to wander. We begin to look for excuses to escape our marriages. We walk into adultery step by step.
We will not improve here corporately until we recognize and repent for this scandal. God will not forgive us until we show forth a broken and contrite spirit. The solution is not more marriage retreats. The solution isn’t more careful premarital counseling. The solution is not a repeal of no-fault divorce laws. Those may be good things. But we will change only when we see that we are one flesh with our spouses, that infidelity is a failure to be faithful to ourselves, that hurting our spouse only hurts us. We will change only when we remember that God gave us our spouses as a gift, not a burden. We will change only when we recognize that physical adultery isn’t a new sin, but is merely the end of the road we begin traveling when we look at another with lust, whether that other is a pin-up girl, or the hero in a romance novel, or that nice person at work. May God have mercy on our marriages.