Adultery has become almost the rule rather than the exception, it seems. Paul Gebhard, head of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, which was founded by the late Alfred Kinsey, estimates that 60 per cent of married men and 35 to 40 per cent of married women have extramarital affairs. Both figures are up 10 per cent from the Kinsey reports of two decades ago. (Gebhard was commenting on Morton Hunt’s new book The Affair, which is abridged in the current issue of Ladies’ Home Journal.)
Those who accept the biblical teaching against adultery are a decreasing proportion of the population. Christians have to face up to their minority status and cease counting on society to reinforce divine standards. Young Christians in particular need to be prepared for the taunting and ridicule they may face when others learn of their “old-fashioned”—two thousand and more years old—views on sexual morality.
Sex, like life itself, is a gift of God. Like life, however, it is to be conducted within certain limits. Failure to observe these limits entails consequences. To exceed life’s boundaries brings death. The results of adultery are not so immediately apparent or pervasive. Nevertheless, the death or at least the degeneration of marriage is brought on or hastened by adultery.
Increasingly, men seem to consider God’s prohibitions against adultery and other sexual deviations as relative matters that society is free to adjust when convenient. God did not prohibit adultery, however, simply because of some arbitrary whim or because adultery was harmful to Hebrew tribal life. He who gave us sex in the first place knows the bounds in which its fullest enjoyment can be realized.
