Laws Concerning Sexual Immorality
13 “If any man takes a wife and goes in to her and then hates her 14 and accuses her of misconduct and brings a bad name upon her, saying, ‘I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her evidence of virginity,’ 15 then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate. 16 And the father of the young woman shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man to marry, and he hates her; 17 and behold, he has accused her of misconduct, saying, “I did not find in your daughter evidence of virginity.” And yet this is the evidence of my daughter’s virginity.’ And they shall spread the cloak before the elders of the city. 18 Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him, 19 and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name upon a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife. He may not divorce her all his days. 20 But if the thing is true, that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, 21 then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father’s house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
22 “If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel.
23 “If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, 24 then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
This is a longer passage than usual but it is needed to catch a pattern. There are many laws in the book of Deuteronomy. Many are centered around food. Much are regarding worship practices and procedures. The majority of the laws in the book are about interpersonal relationships. God is concerned about how we treat one another. (It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, that there are almost 50 verses in the New Testament with the phrase one another.). In the above passages we read about how we are to care for others regarding sexual immorality. For those of this age who that state that God is not concerned about what you do in your bedroom, the above passage teaches us that such a thought is not true. We, personally, might not be concerned about it, but God is. Here He instructs Moses write almost an entire chapter on this subject. In the above passages we read about sexual relationship with a man and his new wife regarding his truthfulness and her faithfulness (vss 13-21). In the above text we have a paragraph about adultery (vs 22). In the next paragraph we have instructions of what to do in the case of a rape where the victim is also held responsible for not crying for help even though it was available (vss 23-24). The last paragraph, above, is about rape in the open field where there would be no help available to the victim, no matter if she screamed out, or not (vss 23-24). The entire point of all these instruction is stated multiple times: So you shall purge the evil from your midst. God is concerned about evil in the midst of the nation that may not be dealt with properly. In each of the above cases a stoning or hanging took place. God issue commands for capital punishment for sexual immorality because He feared that such activities would lead to unholy practices. If it was not dealt with judicially it would lead them astray. And in fact, as we read later the prophets of Israel, we will see that the one of the downfalls of the nation was their unchecked and unbridled sexual promiscuity. Today we are so casual with sexual immorality. We even bring it into our homes via many channels of entertainment in movie form. The world continues to normalize what God has condemned. We not only don’t discipline it from our midst, we invite it into our minds. God wanted the nation of Israel to purge the evil from their midst. They did not and lost their nation. What course are we on for our families, our church, our country. Pornography is one of the main challenges of today’s church. We are certainly not purging it from our midst.
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