Jesus is Challenging
Southeast Christian Church Jesus explains that adultery encompasses much more than these listeners initially thought. It's about what you look at. It's about what you do with your mind. It's about how you think about someone. Jesus says, if you look at someone lustfully, you're breaking the commandment, because what you're doing in that moment is you are treating someone else's sexuality as a commodity. You're treating it as something that exists to be consumed by you, something that is there simply to satisfy your desires and meet your appetites.
And here's why this matters. Jesus isn't simply quoting the commandment from the Old Testament, and he's not saying you're breaking some arbitrary rule from thousands of years ago. Jesus is saying, “When you look at someone lustfully, you're actually contradicting how God has designed things to work.”
We tend to think that sex is primarily about self-fulfillment or self-expression. But in the Bible, sex is primarily about self-giving. It's a means of fusing two people together at the very deepest level in mutual self-giving. That is what it is meant to be doing within a marriage.
Sex was created by God to be a way of giving yourself exclusively, permanently, and fully to another person. It was designed in the Bible to involve the whole aspect of who we are, the totality of ourselves to be given to someone else. If we're giving ourselves in that way to this other person, we're not giving ourselves in that way to anybody else. The kind of bond this creates is not designed to be broken without severe pain.
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