When Jesus told a crowd that if their eye caused them to sin they should cut it out I can’t imagine what they thought. I know what I thought when I read it: is Jesus for real? Is sin really so serious that self-mutilation is in order? The answers to these questions are both yes and no. That is to say that Jesus is for real, and yet I don’t think he is actually calling for self-mutilation. But Jesus’ point is that sin is very serious, and he takes it very serious. We of course don’t take it so serious. We have a tendency to mitigate the immorality of our sin. We speak of it in terms of character defects, or flaws, or mistakes. This is what we have done with defining the sin of “lust,” but Jesus speaks very plainly to us about it and his definition is a lot less mild.
A particular passage helps us wrestle with the reality of this sin. In Matthew 5:27-30 Jesus says:
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
Here Jesus contrasts the cultural definition of lust with God’s. In the terms of its Jewish interpreters you could look at a woman and entertain inappropriate thoughts about here, so long as you did not act on such fantasies. It was an old school sort of “look but don’t touch” mentality. Lust as so many in our culture think of it today is purely an innocent desire or daydream about another. But Jesus qualifies it in a whole different category: adultery.
Jesus words seem rather strange, don’t they. Jesus says thinking sexual thoughts, entertaining them, and fantasizing about the exposed body of another person, is the equivalent to sleeping with them out of the bonds of marriage. Where does this equivalence come from, though? There is no act transpiring in the lustful thoughts, there is no actual sexual intercourse going on. In what way, then, can we say that it is adultery. It helps if we understand adultery as more than just sleeping with someone who isn’t your spouse. Adultery is in essence stealing something that doesn’t belong to you. It is taking another person’s spouse. The love found within the confines, or what should be found, of the marriage covenant is violated like a thief who broke into a home and stole what was most precious to you. Lust is simply a mental thievery. It may not have yet played out on the real plane of life, but it is still stealing. It is imagining yourself with or witnessing things that do not belong to you, it is an expansion of the seventh commandment to the 10th: thou shall not covet. D.A. Carson writes:
This is not a prohibition of the normal attraction which exists between men and women, but of the deep-seated lust which consumes and devours, which in imagination attacks and rapes, which mentally contemplates and commits adultery. (Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, 46)
Jesus is harsh in his language here, we can’t soften the blow. In God’s economy lust is adultery!
Because lust is at the heart of so much sexual sin it is important that we understand what it really is. No matter how we speak of it, or how our culture justifies or softens its immorality, God takes it very seriously. So seriously in fact, that Jesus essentially says if you can’t control your lust it’s better to be blind (cutting off your hand is probably because of lust’s connection to thievery). Defining lust God’s way may help us fight it more seriously. If adutlery has any imorrality left in our culture than Christians need to recognize how serious that makes lust. Lus is adultery!
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