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

This is a most common sin today and little thought of by those guilty of it or by society in general.

1. This commandment forbids men and women who are not married acting as if they were. You may not realise it but marriage is almost abandoned within our society. There are some 65% of couples living as man and wife who are NOT married. This God condemns. “Marriage is honourable,” Hebrews 13:4. That verse concludes with the solemn warning: “Adulterers God will judge.”

2. The degree to which this commandment is ignored is a measure of the rebellion within a nation. When men and women defy this law they show the depths to which they have sunk. Such a sin as this carried great shame with it in the very recent past. It no longer carries such shame and that is because all awareness of God and His holy truth have disappeared from before the eyes of most people! It is the prominent mark of today’s apostasy! Even the new King and Queen are guilty of this sin as well as other members of the royal household! Whereas God conducted the first marriage - Adam and Eve and Christ endorsed marriage by his attendance at the wedding in Cana, John 2:1-2.

3. Where such a union exists there can be no teaching of the children born to fear God. That means that the children have little opportunity of hearing the gospel and getting saved! All that surrounds them is contrary to the truth of God. They are brought up in an atmosphere of rebellion with nothing but the example of forgetting and defying of God.

4. What a blessed privilege to be brought up as was Timothy. “But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus,” 2 Timothy 3:14-15.

Note that having ‘learned’ the Bible, we must ‘continue’ in the things learned and it is thus that we will be made “wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

5. One final point, the importance of marriage is seen in that such is the relationship between Christ and His people. Believers make up the ‘Bride of Christ’. Eph 5:25-33. The union of a man and a woman in matrimony is a picture of the eternal, loving union between Christ and His people.