The Steps of Adultery

January 19, 2009

Today's reading: Genesis 37-38 and Proverbs 6

Since today’s readings both dealt with the subject of adultery, I suppose it would be easy to make it the subject matter of today’s devotional. This is assuming that you can call this a devotional.

Do I really need to tell you that adultery is bad, and that you should avoid it? Come on, that’s like going to auto-shop class and having the instructor showing you where the engine is on a car.

We all know this! Here’s something else we already know. Do you honestly think that an adulterer is born in the space of a day? That one day they receive an offer for sex from a pretty woman, and they throw their marital commitment out the window?

Even though that’s what it looks like with Judah, I’m certain that his adultery was just the capstone of a pyramid of sins. He probably had a wandering eye from even before he was married, and never dealt with it. Considering what he did to Joseph in the previous chapter, he probably was quite good at keeping secrets.

Proverbs 6:26 says that a prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread. I’m not certain why that metaphor is used, but if it’s anything like the bread in my house, it is gone before we realize it. In other words, an adulterous affair will remove all that a married man has built.

You know what is really funny are the two verses after it. “Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned?” “Can a man walk on hot coals without his feet being scorched?”

I remember reading those verses and answer both questions with “yes”. After all, if your clothes are made of asbestos, you could easily put fire on your lap without getting burned. As far as the man walking on hot coals without burning your feet, I recently saw an episode of Mythbusters that showed walking on hot coals is quite doable. Even before I saw the episode, I know about the potential of fire-walking.

Of course, the answer to both questions is “no”, but I just had to bring up the exception to those rules, didn’t I? In the same manner, an adulterer learns to rationalize his behavior.

Remember last week, when I happened to mention that I was in Vegas. I remember I talked with a woman who represented a company. I felt like we were getting along, and when I got back to my hotel, I began to understand how adultery works. All I would need to do was ask this woman for a deeper relationship. Not sex right off the bat, but it would eventually lead to that. In other words, I could do it, and supposedly, no one would ever know. “What happens in Vegas…”

The trick to avoiding adultery is to avoid step A before it goes to step B. The best way to do that is to not rationalize certain behaviors that are easy to live with before you do something that you can’t live with.