The Ten Commandments

You Shall Not Commit Adultery

The seventh commandment guards the covenant of marriage and the gift of faithful love: Thou shalt not commit adultery. It protects the union of husband and wife, in which two become one flesh, and with it the trust, the children, and the homes that rest upon that bond. More than a rule about bodies, it is a call to faithfulness, and a picture of the faithfulness God keeps toward His own people.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery.”Exodus 20:14

What it meant to Israel

Marriage was given by God at the beginning, before any nation or law: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Adultery was the tearing apart of that one flesh, a betrayal of the deepest human covenant, and Israel treated it with the utmost gravity, for on the faithfulness of husbands and wives rested the security of children and the stability of the whole community.

But the commandment carried a meaning larger than any household. Again and again the prophets described God’s covenant with Israel as a marriage, with God as the faithful husband and His people as the bride. Israel’s idolatry was called adultery, a breaking of faith with the God who had wed them to Himself. So the seventh commandment guarded not only human marriage but stood as a living emblem of the faithfulness God asks and the faithfulness God keeps.

Because marriage carried this weight, its betrayal was never treated as a private affair. Adultery tore the fabric that held households and generations together, and Israel was taught to see it as a wound to the whole community, not to the couple alone. The seriousness of the command matched the seriousness of the covenant it guarded, for on faithful marriages rested the safety of children, the passing on of faith, and the stability of the people of God.

What it forbids and what it requires

The commandment forbids adultery and, with it, every violation of the marriage covenant and every corruption of God’s good gift of sexuality outside the union of husband and wife. It names the betrayal of a spouse as a grave wound, not a private matter, for it breaks a bond God Himself joined.

Positively, it requires faithfulness, purity, and the honouring of marriage. What God asks is not a grudging avoidance of sin but a wholehearted keeping of covenant, a love that is loyal in thought as well as deed. It calls the married to cherish and be faithful to one another, and the unmarried to a chastity that honours their future and their neighbour. Behind the command lies a vision of love as steadfast and self-giving, mirroring the God who does not stray.

How Jesus deepened it

As with murder, Jesus went to the heart. Ye have heard that it was said, 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. He taught that faithfulness is not merely a matter of the body but of the eyes and the imagination, and that the lust which uses another person in the mind has already broken the command.

He spoke of it with startling seriousness, urging that we deal ruthlessly with whatever leads us into sin. And He raised the honour of marriage, teaching that what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. In doing so He set the standard higher than any of us can reach on our own, and made clear that purity is finally a matter of a transformed heart, not merely a disciplined body.

How we fall short, and are met by grace

By this measure the seventh commandment convicts nearly everyone. We live in a world that trades in lust, and few hearts are wholly clean of it. Whether in broken marriages, in secret indulgence, or in the wandering of the imagination, we have all fallen short of the faithful love this command requires.

Yet no sin here is beyond grace. When they brought Jesus a woman taken in adultery, He did not excuse the sin, but He would not condemn her either: Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. He offers the same to us, a mercy that both forgives the past and frees us from it. The gospel is not that God overlooks unfaithfulness, but that Christ bore its judgment, so that even those who have failed most deeply here can be washed, restored, and made pure.

How to live it today

To keep the seventh commandment is to pursue faithfulness in a faithless age, in the heart as much as the body. For the married, it means guarding the marriage covenant with tenderness and loyalty, refusing not only affairs but the small betrayals of neglect and contempt, and keeping the eyes and the heart at home. For the unmarried, it means a purity that honours God and neighbour and refuses to use another person for one’s own desire.

In an age of endless images, it means guarding the imagination, refusing the counterfeit intimacy that trains the heart in lust and leaves it unable to love. Above all it means seeing every person, not as an object of desire, but as one made in God’s image and worthy of honour. Faithful love is learned, day by day, in the small choices to cherish rather than to use.

It is worth saying that faithfulness is not first restraint but delight, the glad choosing of one person again and again. The married keep this command best not by grimly resisting temptation but by cherishing the covenant they have, tending it with attention and affection so that the counterfeit loses its pull. And all of us keep it by learning to see people as souls to be honoured rather than bodies to be used, a way of seeing that only grace can teach and that heals far more than it forbids. And when we do fail here, the road home is not despair but repentance, for the God who guards this covenant is quick to forgive the penitent and to restore what sin has broken.