Who is an Adulterer?
The Exceeding Sinfulness of Sin • Sermon • Submitted
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Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Introduction:
Introduction:
Obviously, our Lord is talking about sin.
And this is really the topic of Christs’ message from verses 21-48.
This is a message on the Divine definition of sin.
But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
Sometime back the New York Times ran the following article: “The thief was sure that the church was a safe hideout. Just inside he spied a rope up to the garret. Up he climbed only to hear the church bell ringing his whereabouts. A Mexico City man snatched a woman’s purse and ran into a doorway to hide. It turned out to be the doorway of the police station where he was questioned and later identified by his victim. Shoplifting in a department store in Rochester, New York, a man picked up an alarm clock and headed for the nearest exit. The clock concealed under his coat went off before he could get out of the store and brought the detectives running. A Canadian who had a custom built radio stolen from his automobile advertised in the local paper for a custom built radio. The first person to contact him about the advertisement was the thief. A Glasgow pickpocket got a 60-day prison term after trying his luck on an excursion boat carrying 20 police officers and their wives. Police in Palo Alto seized a suspect as he stood in a post office admiring his wanted poster.”
Be sure your sins will find you out.
And in Matthew 5, Christ is unmasking the hypocrisy of the day, they are caught, they are trapped, they are unmasked, they are revealed.
They were revealed for the sinful people that they were.
And what our Lord is doing is giving, in this passage, a clear picture of who they are.
What they had tried to conceal with religion, Christ strips away as very false.
As we have been studying Matthew over these past several weeks, we have seen that one of the things that men try to do is to invent religions of human achievement.
Men attempt to create their own righteousness based on their own standards.
They try to invent systems that justify themselves, and that is precisely what Judaism did at the time of Christ.
They had substituted their own system for the the truth of God’s reveled Word.
And their system was a system of external rules, a system of external ritual, a system of behavior with no thought for attitude, motive, or the heart.
That is, again, why Christ said:
For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
And so Christ, in verses 21-48, of the Sermon on the Mount destroys their self-righteous system by tearing down their supposed holiness and revealing the fact that in their hearts they were wretched, vile, evil sinners and the heart is the issue with God.
No matter how religious a person may claim to be, or even look on the outside, the fact is the reality of that holiness in what is in the heart.
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
That is the righteousness My kingdom demands.
And obviously they could not keep it, therein lies the frustration, there is no remedy for their sin situation.
Now, let me remind you that when Christ began this sermon, He began it by talking about the blessed people, from verses 3-12.
But in order for someone to know that blessedness, and by the way this is a good format for presenting the Gospel, you start with the promise of blessedness.
But in order for someone to know that blessedness, you must know the proper definition of sin, because sin stands in the way of blessing.
And sin has to be dealt with and removed.
Let me just say in general before we look at the passage itself that we learn from this that it is essential to deal with sin.
You cannot preach Christ, you cannot present the Gospel unless you deal with sin, unless you give a definition of sin because that is the barrier, that is the issue.
And if we do not properly understand sin, we will not understand anything else that God does.
Let me give you three illustrations of that.
First, if you do not understand the truth about sin you can never understand the truth about salvation.
And this is the area that is missing in so may pulpits today around the world today.
Our young people are missing this.
People need to be taken back to Genesis and shown the ugliness of sin and how a holy God deals with sin.
In the book of Genesis, after God created all and places man and woman in the garden and not long after that this creature from the dirt defied the Holy God.
And God dealt with and judged that sin.
God does not, will not, and cannot overlook the sin of man.
It is rebellion against the holiness of God, and people need to understand that God will judge it.
Because, now mark this, if we do not understand what God really thinks about sin, we will never take out sin seriously.
God will judge.
You cannot understand the meaning of salvation, if you do not understand the meaning of sin.
You see the Pharisees and the scribes has such a superficial view of sin that they were able to accommodate it with superficial view of salvation.
They saw sin as simply a matter of what we do; therefore salvation was a matter of what we do as well.
So in their minimal definition of sin they were left with minimal requirement for salvation, which they assumed they could accomplish.
So, unless one understands the depths of sin, then you will never understand the absolute need of grace and mercy.
Low view of sin equals a low view of salvation.
This is where we need to get back to the Scriptures and understand our Total Depravity.
In other words, there is not a part of us that has not been affected by the ugliness, and the vileness of sin.
We are sinner, God haters from over molecule of our bodies, which is why we need Grace.
And Totally Depraved sinners cannot do anything to please God.
Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
Because once you begin to believe that there is some good in people, inherently, than you open the door for the possibility that they can do enough good to earn salvation.
How can someone not believe in works salvation and not believe in total depravity, such is an consistent impossibility.
Second, unless you understand the truth about sin you will never understand the right approach to proclamation.
And this of great concern to me, but if you do not understand the depths of sin then you do not know how to proclaim the Gospel.
What you have in our Christian culture is people running around saying come to Jesus, get born again.
They are filled with self-centered appeals, emotional appeals, and all kinds of superficial approaches to evangelism.
And I really feel that behind all of that is the failure to grapple with the reality of the heinousness of sin.
Because if you truly understood the power of sin, then you would know that it is not enough to tell someone, “well, why don’t you just accept Jesus and He will make your life happy.”
It isn’t enough to say to someone wouldn’t you like to go to heaven, be happy, and have peace and joy?
Just sign your name on the dotted line and say you believe in Jesus and pray this little prayers, and “bam” you are a believer.
People need to understand the power that sin has and how it stains men’s hearts.
If we really understood the power that it has on people’s lives, that it is so powerful that it sends people to eternal hell.
If we understood those things then our evangelism would be more directed at the damning character of sin, first of all, before it comes to the point of inviting them to make a decision.
They must understand the problem.
That is why, biblically, speaking evangelism always begins by presenting the law before grace.
You must preach law, you must preach judgment, you must preach condemnation.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
Paul starts out condemning.
Chapter 2, condemns again.
Chapter3, condemns again, so that every mouth is stopped.
And only after that does he begin to speak about how the righteousness of Christ is available to you.
So, there must be preaching of the Divine standard.
There must be preaching of the holy law.
There must be preaching of that which God says is right, and then, and only then, can there be the message of how we come to know the relationship that makes righteousness possible.
I believe that evangelism must confront people with the holiness of God.
It must reveal his standards of inner heart righteousness.
I believe that our evangelism must focus on mans inability to meet God’s standard, and we must make men desperate like Christ wanted to make the Pharisees, the scribes, and the multitudes desperate and fearful to stand in the presence of God having only their righteousness.
Here is a third thought:
Unless we understand the truth about sin we can never really understand salvation, we can never understand proclamation, and we can never really understand sanctification.
Unless we understand the meaning of sin we do not known what it is to be made holy in Christ.
We will never really understand the magnanimity of the change.
You will never understand what God has made you in Christ unless you know what you were.
You will find it impossible to thank Him and praise Him for the glory of the transformation unless you know what it involved.
And the lack of understanding about sin has caused us to suffer with superficial evangelism, and it has caused us to suffer from very, very shallow concepts of holiness and sanctification.
Usually it goes like this: we think that we are holy because of the things that we do or do not do.
So, we do not go to certain places, we do not say certain things, we do not do the things the world does.
And we feel because we do not say or do certain things or do not go to certain places, that we are alright.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
Because God is always concerned not so much with what we do and what we say and where we go, though He is concerned with that, but He’s more concerned with what’s behind it, what we think in our minds and hearts.
And that is what the Lord is forcing men to so as He preaches this sermon, forcing men to look at the inside.
Holiness, mark this, for God is always a matter of the heart.
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.
So that is where the Divine evaluation takes place.
And Jesus said, Are ye also yet without understanding?
You have not figured it out, you do not know God’s standard yet?
You do not know where the real problem is?
Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?
But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.
In other words, it is not what you take in that defiles you it what comes up and goes out.
For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:
Listen, before you ever murder you think it in your heart.
Before you commit adultery, you think it in your heart.
Before you fornicated you think in your heart.
Before you steal, you think it in your heart.
It is the heart that spews out the garbage the defiles man.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
And so it is not the external, our Lord is saying, it is the heart.
And unless He unbares the heart, He rips off the facade of the super-religious who would glorify themselves as if they stand absolved, and shows them that the only thing that He is concerned about is the heart.
Let us see how He gets His point across with the illustration of adultery starting in verse 27.
I. The Deed (vs. 27)
I. The Deed (vs. 27)
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
And, of course, when Jesus said that “by them of old,” He meant, not the law of Moses, but the way that the Rabbis interpreted the law.
Now that is the deed, that is what God’s law said.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
In the book of Deuteronomy where you have the deutero nomos, the second law, it is repeated.
Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Listen, now mark this, it is very clear and the Bible leaves absolutely no question about this particular sin.
The deed is condemned, it is an evil deed.
If mine heart have been deceived by a woman, or if I have laid wait at my neighbour’s door;
Then let my wife grind unto another, and let others bow down upon her.
For this is an heinous crime; yea, it is an iniquity to be punished by the judges.
For it is a fire that consumeth to destruction, and would root out all mine increase.
It is a heinous crime to commit adultery, it is a vile, evil, wretched manifestation of a vile heart.
And the Bible is so clear about it Exodus 18, Leviticus 18, and Leviticus 20, where the penalty could be death.
The deed is condemned by God.
Now, they were right about that, that is what the law said; they got that part right.
All we are saying is that they did not go far enough.
Now, let’s talk about the word itself.
The word adultery is a very simple word.
It is the word “μοιχεύω” and the root means “unlawful intercourse with the spouse of someone else.”
That is basically the technical meaning, a physical, sexual relationship with somebody else’s spouse.
And I believe the spirit of it extends farther to include any kind of illicit sexual behavior.
Then sin of adultery is a sin for the unwise.
Witness David, and the results.
Witness Schechem who defiled Dinah and was later slaughtered.
Witness Absalom who defiled others in the sexual sin and would end up being hanged in a tree.
This is a sin for the unwise.
The Bible says you cannot take fire in your bosom.
Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.
The NT reiterates, with finality and firmness, this prohibition.
First Corinthians condemns it.
2 Peter condemns it.
Revelation condemns it.
The end of the book of Revelation says that fornicators and adulterers will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Remember the woman that was taken in adultery in John 8?
They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
And in all of that exchange Jesus did not once deny the fact that the law prohibited these actions.
Because they were exactly right as to what the law said.
If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel.
The law said, if you catch them doing that, you stone them.
So, they were right, they saw the deed just as God saw it.
The law of God was very clear .
And things have not changed.
Sexual immorality today, in any day, is just as vile, just as heinous, just as evil as it was then.
And I do not care if you are engaged, if your going together, if you believe that you love each other, I do not care.
If it is outside the bonds of monogamous marriage, that act of a sexual relationship is a heinous crime.
So, we see the Deed and they were exactly right on what God said about the deed.
II. The Desire (vs. 28)
II. The Desire (vs. 28)
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Christ said, even though the words about adultery are what God said, it does not go far enough.
The Lord forces the self-righteous to the fact that they are not holy.
The Pharisees are saying we do not do that, we do not commit that sin.
And Jesus drives them right down into their hearts.
If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me:
God is always examining the sins of the heart.
It is the internal that breaks the relationship.
And so Jesus said that I am concerned about what is going on one the inside.
Notice these terms.
“But I,” and it is emphatic.
“ἐγώ” and the pronoun is there because He is saying, I am the new authority, you had your authority to the rabbinic tradition.
You have had that, but I am a new authority.
In fact, he said it in such a way that when He was finished with the sermon, they were shocked that he spoke with such authority.
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Notice “whosoever looketh,” is “πᾶς ὁ βλέπων” and it is a present participle, anyone who is in the process of continuing to look.
Now, watch this!
It is not the inadvertent, accidental glance, that is not what our Lord is talking about.
It is the purposeful, repeated, lustful looking.
It is not the involuntary glance, it is that which is purposeful.
Now watch this, this is an interesting thing about this verse.
“Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her.”
But notice that He does not say that “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her.”
No, He does not say that.
He says, …”he hath commited adultery with her ALREADY in his heart.”
Why?
Because it is the vile adulterous heart that results in the wanton look.
Mark this, the sin has already happened in the heart, the adultery is conceived and therefore the look is prompted.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
That’s why you may find in this life that someone passes into your gaze involuntary and appears as a temptation from Satan, or maybe even trying to attract attention. And a involuntary glance means you just resist and turn away. But when you latch on and you cultivate and you pursue the desire, it’s because your lustful, adulterous heart has been seeking an object, and you fulfill the fantasy that’s already there in your heart.
Notice the word “lust.”
It is the word “ἐπιθυμέω” and is the infinitive of purpose.
The idea is that when you look at a woman for the purpose of lusting....
In other words is is not an involuntary glance, it is a purposeful one.
The heart is filled with adultery, wanting to find an object to which to attach the fantasy.
It is when you go and look for the the woman to lust after, it is when you go to see that movie because you know that you will see images that will satisfy your lusts.
When you seek the object, it is purposeful.
So the idea, now mark this, that Christ has here, emphatically, I say to you that whoever continues looking on a woman for the purpose of lusting gives evidence already of committing adultery in his heart.
The continued look is the manifestation of the vile heart.
So what Jesus is saying is that it is a heart problem.
Again, the Lord is not talking about a glance.
What He is saying is that by the continued glance, you are showing that there is already adultery in your heart.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
“He who experiences at a first glance this desire, and then instead of turning away and withdrawing from sin continues to look in order to retain and increase the desire commits the sin.”
It is when it is pandered.
In 2 Samuel 11 David is walking on the roof of his house as he looks over and sees Bath-Sheba innocently enough bathing herself.
She probably never dreamed that she would be seen from the Kings porch and the king never dreamed that he would see her.
But instead of turning away and going back to where he should be, he continued to look and look and look until the adultery that was already in heart brought fourth the ultimate end of the sexual act and murder.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
Somebody has said, sow a thought and reap an act, sow an act and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a character, sow a character and reap a destiny. And it all starts when you sow a thought.
The Bible says to the pure all things are pure.
The lustful heart will look at anything and make it impure.
That is because his heart is defiled.
That is why there is pornography, that is why there are dirty books, dirty movies, and TV shows.
That is why we have all of those things because the heart of man is so evil and man finds things to pander his adulterous heart.
Jesus said that if you have ever done that, you know the depths of man’s sin, and you know that only a transformation of the inside can make a difference.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
Arthur Pink writing years ago said, “By clear and necessary implication Christ here also forbade the using of any other of our senses and members to stir up lust. If lustful looking is so grievous a sin then those who dress and expose themselves with desires to be looked at and lusted after as Jezebel who painted her face, tried her head and looked out of the window are not less but perhaps more guilty. In this matter it is not only too often the case that men sin but women tempt them so to do, how great then must be the guilt of the great majority of the modern misses who deliberately seek to arouse the sexual passions of our young men. And how much greater still is the guilt of most of their mothers for allowing them to become lascivious temptresses.”
The man is not absolved from the lustful thinking, but the intent of the woman matters as well.
There are women, and the Bible talks about them in Proverbs 6 and Proverbs 7, that dress, act, and flirt with the intent on destroying homes and men.
And the point is that the women are just as culpable as the man in that case.
You see, it works both ways.
A man should not have adulterous thoughts about any woman, but a woman should not dress in such a way that would cause a man to pander his thoughts because of her.
If you are a believer, you have a new heart, but the flesh sure does raise it ugly head.
Job said, in Job 31.
I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?
The covenant was a covenant not to look.
If my step hath turned out of the way, and mine heart walked after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands;
Then let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out.
In other words, if I break the covenant with my eyes, let me starve.
Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken thou me in thy way.
The heart has to be dealt with, that is the thrust of it.
III. The Deliverance (vs. 29-30)
III. The Deliverance (vs. 29-30)
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Now, did Christ actually mean to pluck out your eye or severe right hand to deliver yourself from the adultery in your heart.
Do people with only one eye lust?
You better believe it.
If you plucked out your right eye and you had a lustful heart your left eye would go wild making up time for your lost right eye.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
If you got rid of your right hand and you had a, an adulterous heart your left hand would be busier than the other two tryin’ to make up for it. The point is, Jesus is not saying that there is a physical remedy for a heart problem; that would undermine the whole point.
Here is the point; to the Jews in Christs’ time, the right eye or the right arm, right leg where symbols of the best facility that a man had, the right was always symbolic of the better of the two.
And he is simply saying, there is nothing to precious to eliminate from your life if it is going to cause your heart to be pandered in its adulterous desires.
If it means getting rid of your most precious possession then get rid of it.
Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!
Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
Nothing is to precious if it affects your eternal destiny.
Sin must be dealt with radically.
But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.
Jesus calls for immediate action.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
He diagnoses the problem and says, pluck it out, cut it off, eliminate it, whatever it is in your life, whatever it is. Whatever it is that feeds that heart of lust, whatever it is that feeds that adulterous thought, get rid of it.
Notice the word “offend” in verse 29 and 30.
It is the word “σκανδαλίζω” and it is used as a trap.
He says, whatever that thing is, even if it is the most precious thing to you, and it traps you and feeds your adulterous heart, get rid of it.
Whatever is in your life that causes these vile, evil thoughts, get rid of them.
Conclusion:
Conclusion:
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
Now there’s a, a kind of a subtlety in this whole thing. Let me ask you this, could these scribes and Pharisees get rid of these problems, could they? The fact of the matter is they couldn’t. Jesus again is giving them an impossible standard—a frustration that’s gonna make them say, we tried and we can’t. The Lord has said, boy you’re better off to have no eye and no arm than to go into hell, you ought to say with the lizard, better my tail than my life. And they’re gonna say, but we can’t, we, we can’t, we don’t know how to get this deliverance. And so they’re going to come to the desperation of saying, we must have somebody do it for us, we must have a new heart and a new life, and that is precisely what the Lord offers. A heart in every thought renewed and filled with love divine, perfect and right and pure and good, a copy Lord of Thine. And so the Lord forces them to see that they need a new nature.
John MacArthur Sermon Archive Who Is an Adulterer? Part 2
Beloved, if Jesus Christ has come into your life you have that new nature, you have that new heart. And you don’t need to follow the pandering of your own lust; you can know victory over that. I thank God for that. You can make as Job did a covenant with your eyes. As Colossians 3 says, “You can kill the members of your body in this world.” You can know victory. But a man without Jesus Christ and a woman without Jesus Christ is a constant victim of this. Oh how grateful we should be that what the Lord has given us is a resource for victory. I thank God that He’s given me a new heart. He’s given you who know Him a new heart, so that we don’t need to have a constant losing battle. We never need to lose if we appropriate the resources that are there.
