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CONNIE: Are you having “relationship trouble?” Maybe you should try some emotional crazy glue! But before you do, be sure to read the warnings on the label—the Ten Commandments label, that is.

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko, and we welcome you to what I believe is one of the most important programs in our current series on the Ten Commandments. We’re going to be talking today about the Seventh Commandment. “You shall not commit adultery.” It establishes a crucial rule for society, and when it’s ignored or treated lightly, things start to fall apart fast.

CONNIE: And are you suggesting that the Seventh Commandment can help us glue things back together again?

LONNIE: In a sense, yes, but what I’m really drawing on is an article that appeared in a church paper recently that called sexual relationships God’s crazy glue, designed to hold families together. The Seventh Commandment isn’t the glue. It’s more like the tiny print on a tube of crazy glue that warns you not to get it on your fingers.
CONNIE: That’s a really sticky situation when you do that, isn’t it.

LONNIE: The glue is intended to be used in certain places, but not in others. And the Seventh Commandment makes the same point about sexual relationships, which are intended to cement a marriage together. But if they’re allowed to spill over into the wrong places, well, they only cause pain.

CONNIE: You spoke with Pastor Mike Tucker of our sister ministry Faith for Today about that recently, didn’t you?

LONNIE: I did. And he shared a story that makes this very point in a powerful way.

CONNIE: Let’s listen in.

LONNIE: Mike Tucker, of Faith for Today television program, welcome to the broadcast today!

MIKE: Thank you Lonnie! It is a pleasure to be here with you.

LONNIE: Mike you are on our sister ministry with Faith for Today and we called you in particular, because you are also a pastor there in Arlington Texas, and you do family counseling, you and your wife Gail. You are very active in that area, reaching out to couples whose lives run amok. Pretty amazing stories have come out of your particular experience.

MIKE: Yes that’s right! It is pretty amazing to see how God can intervene in our lives, even when we violate the commandments…

LONNIE: The 7th Commandment in particular is one that is so sticky and often ends up with lives on the rocks.
MIKE: Absolutely!

LONNIE: Share a couple of things that have happened in your experience.

MIKE: The thing about this commandment is, it is designed to protect our relationships. It’s not designed to destroy our fun, but to protect us. We have seen the devastating effects of this commandment and the lives and relationships of people. I had a couple come to me for counseling because he had an extra-marital affair at work and she was just devastated by her husband’s infidelity. We worked so hard to get her to a point where she was able to forgive him, because he wanted desperately to salvage the relationship. Eventually after much struggle and working through the steps of forgiveness, she forgave her husband and moved on with the relationship. But he would not accept it; basically he had chosen not to forgive himself, so he was not open to the relationship. So the focus then became to get him to forgive himself for what he had done and that just was a painful ordeal. He just felt that he didn’t deserve her forgiveness, which is not really the point. We don’t deserve forgiveness; it’s something that is given to us as a sort of grace. So eventually he worked his way through this and he forgave himself and the marriage was saved. The amazing thing is that about a week after I had finished with them, I got another call from a couple who had gone through something similar. The woman had had an affair at work and they came into my office and as they began to talk to me, I realized that she was the other woman from the first couple. Now I live in the Dallas metro-plex and there are 3 or 4 million people in this area. Thousands of counselors, but those two stumbled into my office. I don’t think that was an accident, I think that God guided them their. So we worked and worked getting her husband to forgive her, but of course my confidentiality, I couldn’t share with them that I knew the story. As I listened I heard it from a different perspective, but I knew this couples story. Eventually, we came to an impasse, because he simply was not willing to forgive and I just point blank asked him, what is it that keeps you from forgiving her? He said, you know, if I just knew that the other man had gone through as much pain and suffering and torment as I have, I think than I could forgive her. So I got up and went into the office and asked the first couple if I could violate confidentiality and they gave me that permission and I came back in and sat down. I said, alright! Let me review this one more time. I said well I’ve got news for you brother! I said, I just got off the phone with the other man, that couple had been in my office and I worked for weeks with them and I watched as he went through agony. He went through weeks of shear agony! First to get his wife to forgive him and second to just try and forgive himself. That was the worst part! He hated him self so much for what he had done, that he found it almost impossible to forgive himself, but we worked through it and now he has forgiven himself. I can tell you without any doubt that he has had as much pain as you have had. With that the man’s mouth just fell open, he couldn’t believe it. So now I said what is it that keeps you from forgiving your wife? A moment of silence fell afterwards, then finally with tears in his eyes, he said nothing. I have to forgive her don’t I? I said, yes! We worked through the steps of forgiveness and that marriage was saved. You know Lonnie, as I think about those two stories; I recognize the tremendous pain that a violation of this commandment can create for us. The disruption and broken hearts…It’s incredible! But they are also living testimony that God can heal even when we have violated that wonderful commandment. That He can take those relationships and heal them and make them like new.

LONNIE: Marvelous! Mike Tucker, thank you so much for being with us here today!

CONNIE: Wow! That was an incredible story Mike shared—and it really illustrates what you were saying earlier, Lonnie, about sexual relationships in the wrong context causing pain.

LONNIE: It brings home the point that the Seventh Commandment was put there for a reason. Something I think we all need to be reminded of from time to time, especially living in the world as it is today, where we’re constantly bombarded with stories about celebrity bed-hopping.

CONNIE: Unfortunately there are a lot of broken relationships out there that need mending, and a lot of broken hearts. But God has a solution to that problem, and He’s the Healer of Broken Hearts!

“Healer of Broken Hearts”, Heritage Singers, from Heritage Country CD.

CONNIE: Amen! Jesus is the healer of broken hearts.

LONNIE: You know, Connie, whenever we set foot in this territory where we’re dealing with family relationships, it can be a bit of a minefield. I know in my own counseling experience as a pastor—well, there often just aren’t any simple solutions. The crazy glue has gotten spilled all over the place, and it’s hard to separate the pieces that shouldn’t be together, and harder yet to put broken relationships back together again. And it’s because of that kind of thing that we put together a little book here a few years ago called Sex: The Myth and the Magic. It takes a really honest look at a topic we don’t often discuss publicly and reveals God’s plans for good relationships.

CONNIE: Friend, we’d like to send you a copy of the book Sex: The Myth and the Magic, and we only ask that you include a donation of $5.00 or more when you request it. We’ll have full details about how you can get a copy in a few minutes, but right now, let me just share our toll-free request number: 1-800-872-0055. You can call anytime to request your copy.

LONNIE: That’s right, and I know you’ll find the book helpful—frank at times—but a necessary antidote to many of the negative images of sexuality that pervade the media these days.

CONNIE: Right now though, it’s time for you to share today’s message Lonnie, “Stuck on You.”

Stuck on You!

If you enjoy reading the Bible, particularly the stories in the Old Testament, as much as I do, you’ve probably noticed that there’s more written about King Solomon than just about anyone else except his father David. Solomon’s story is told in 1 Kings, and again in 2 Chronicles. In addition we have the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which are largely collections of his sayings. And then of course the Song of Solomon!

In his heyday, Solomon was regarded as the wisest of men. Concerning the time when he was most prosperous and most widely respected, 1 Kings 4:30-31 tells us: “Thus Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the men of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all men . . . and his fame was in all the surrounding nations” (NKJV).

But even wise men sometimes make foolish mistakes, don’t they? In the Jerusalem Bible, Solomon’s story is broken up into four sections: Section 1, “Solomon the Sage,” Section 2, “Solomon the Builder,” Section 3, “Solomon the Trader,” and then Section 4, “Solomon’s Decline.”

What led to his decline? The answer is closely related to the commandment we are looking at today.

Section 4 of the story of Solomon begins like this: “But King Solomon loved many foreign women, as well as the daughter of Pharaoh: women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites — from the nations of whom the Lord had said to the children of Israel, ‘You shall not intermarry with them, nor they with you. Surely they will turn away your hearts after their gods.’ Solomon clung to these in love” (1 Kings 11:1-2, NKJV).

The Bible goes on to tell us that Solomon had a total of 1,000 bed partners—700 wives and 300 concubines. I suppose in those days it wasn’t considered adultery for a king to have so many wives and concubines. But still, the Bible is clear. Doing so led to Solomon’s downfall.

You know, friend, if you take a careful look at the life of Solomon and the history of Israel after his death, it becomes plain that the failings of this great man had a lot to do with the subsequent troubles of his country. When he died, the nation split in two, largely because of the way he had taxed and enslaved his people support his extravagant lifestyle.
But the problem didn’t start with Solomon—oh, no.

You’ve got to remember that he didn’t grow up in an idyllic “nuclear family.” Not by a long shot.

Remember, Solomon’s mother was Bathsheba. The story of Daddy David’s wandering eyes and philandering ways must have kept tongues wagging around the marketplace in Jerusalem for years.

Not exactly the best sort of a story to have in your background.

But there’s more. Solomon was David’s eleventh son. His younger brother, the product of David’s adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, had died shortly after birth. But Solomon had plenty of half-brothers. By the time Solomon came along, David already had nine surviving sons, who were the products of liaisons with at least six different women! His first six sons were born to six different women in Hebron, and then 2 Samuel 5:13 tells us “David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem, after he had come from Hebron” NKJV)!

Wow! Solomon’s Daddy David may have turned out to be “a man after God’s own heart” in the long run, but one gets the impression that in his youthful days his heart was easily swayed in any number of directions. Modern psychologists would no doubt point to the dysfunction in his birth family as a key reason why Solomon took up collecting wives in the same way some people collect old Coca-Cola bottles.

The woman-collecting instincts of the fathers are often passed on to the sons.

The multi-mother household Solomon grew up in was full of strife, even to the point of rape, incest, and murder. His half brother Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar, and in vengeance another half-brother, Absalom, murdered Amnon. Later Absalom tried to steal his father’s kingdom.

You would think that a wise man would be able to learn from his father’s mistakes and avoid falling into the same pitfalls.

But it’s not easy.

In a widely-circulated Psychology Today article about the aftermath of infidelity, marriage counselor Frank Pittman points out that the propensity for bed-hopping is often passed from father to son. Young philanderers, Pittman writes “have gotten the idea that their masculinity is their most valuable attribute and it requires them to protect themselves from coming under female control. These guys may consider themselves quite principled and honorable, and they may follow the rules to the letter in their dealings with other men. But in their world women have no rights.”

Despite his wisdom, Solomon couldn’t seem to find a way to escape the pattern he had seen at home. He never seems to have been able to form the kind of solid, committed relationship with one wife that the Seventh Commandment calls for. And his family and his kingdom suffered for it.

In his book Losing Moses on the Freeway, Chris Hedges tells the story of H. R. Vargas, a young father trying to cope with the second-generation effects of adultery. Having been born out of wedlock himself, and raised in foster homes, he struggles to be a proper father to his own son. Hedges tells it this way: “Vargas . . . wears the broken commandment like a heavy chain around his neck. He says it has devastated his life.

“ ‘When you commit adultery, you break a promise’ [Vargas] says. ‘not only to the woman you had an affair with, but maybe most important to the children born from the affair.’ ”

When his relationship with a girlfriend produced a son, Vargas was simply carrying on a family tradition it seems, but it was a wake-up call for him. “ ‘It was scary,’ he says. ‘I looked at my son and knew I did not know how to be a father. No one had been there to teach me. I did not know how to love. I only knew what I had seen on soap operas. I did not understand love. It is still new to me.’ ” . . .

“ ‘I need to break down the patterns I had before,’ he says. ‘I need love. I am like a small child that makes a lot of mistakes. . . . I have no experience with this. I never had a father. No one wanted me for a son.’ ”

Friend, I share these stories with you, one from 3000 years ago in the Bible and another from the day after yesterday, to make two points.

1. Human nature and human needs haven’t changed much since the time the Bible was written.

2. There is something fundamentally necessary about the Seventh Commandment.

The decision to ignore this Commandment, or to play fast and loose with its requirements cannot be taken lightly. It may make good fodder for comedians’ stand-up routines. It may play well on afternoon soap operas and Sunday-night tales of spousal desperation.

But the real-life consequences of ignoring or evading this commandment’s requirements are never funny.

That’s because adultery involves more than bonding. It also involves cutting and tearing. In an article in the Adventist Review, Allan R. Handysides describes the marriage relationship and sexual intercourse as “The Glue of Heaven.” “Sex is a glue.” He writes. “An emotional crazy glue.”

Have you ever accidentally glued your fingers together with crazy glue? If so, you probably didn’t get them apart without some cutting and tearing of skin. There’s pain involved when bonds like that are broken.

May I be frank with you for a moment about how I understand God’s plan for His children? About the natural drives and instincts He built into us in Eden?

We all know that these drives, built around the desire to mate and produce offspring, are powerful. We’ve all witnessed friends going “crazy with love” at the outset of a new relationship. (Most of us have experienced it personally, too, we just didn’t realize how crazily we were behaving at the time!) We expect a man to almost take leave of his senses when he’s swept off his feet by a wonderful young maiden, and vice versa.

And there’s a good reason for that.

What man in his right mind would commit himself to spending the next 25 or 30 years changing diapers, then separating squabbling children, being the meal ticket for a tribe of often-ungrateful offspring, helping with homework, and paying for college tuition? In all honesty, a man or woman would have to be at least slightly crazy to take on all the challenges of married life.

That’s the point of what Dr. Handysides calls the “emotional crazy glue” that a sexual relationship brings to marriage. It’s the thing that draws us into a lasting relationship. And it’s an extremely important factor in solidifying that relationship.

God put that drive, put that glue, into our systems.

And then He put a warning label on the package in the form of the Seventh Commandment. It warns us against treating relationships lightly.

This commandment flies in the face of almost all the cues we get from society today. It stands up and says to the beautiful people of Hollywood, “You are not doing right by yourselves, by your children, or by your public. The pain you experience as you hop from bed to bed in search of perfect love is the pain of glued-together fingers being ripped apart.”

But the commandment speaks to me as well. And you, friend. It’s not just for the rich and famous.

It speaks to me when things are not sailing along swimmingly in my own marriage, and I’m tempted to think that if I’d just married someone else, things would have been better.

It speaks to you, friend, when the thought crosses your mind that your marriage is growing stale and you need some new excitement to make life worth living.

And it speaks to every married couple, young and old, who have let the early excitement die away into boredom. It cries out: You don’t need a new relationship. No. You need to renew the relationship you already have!

You can do it by letting the grace of God minister to you, and through you, in your marriage. Perhaps there are some hard feelings from long ago that have built a barrier where there should be a bond. Let the grace of God minister in your life and pour the healing salve of forgiveness on the wounds.

Maybe life has gotten so busy that there just isn’t time to be close and intimate with your spouse anymore. Perhaps it’s time to reprioritize your time. To go back and reconsider the Fourth Commandment and set aside that special day for rest, worship, and revitalization of your relationship. You can do it with God’s help.

The Seventh Commandment is often scorned. It’s regarded as a burden, a kill-joy rule that takes the fun out of life. But if you’ve been tempted to think about it that way, think again.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery”—it’s just 2 words in the original Hebrew. Two words intended to bring us greater joy, by protecting us from the trap that ruined Solomon’s life. Two words spoken to help us build the kind of close, lasting relationships that God intended when He first introduced Eve to Adam in Eden.

Make those words a part of your life, won’t you? Even if they haven’t been in the past. And do remember, even if your relationships have gotten mixed up and the crazy glue spilled, God is right there with you, right now, to help you put things back together right.

“Right Here, Right Now”, Emily Felts Jones, from Comforted CD.