Wife Stealing

I ended yesterday saying I would say a word about wife stealing. Wife stealing is a particular form of adultery, there being other forms of adultery. The theme of wife stealing comes up rather often, especially in the first half of the book of Genesis. I think this rather common theme has its origin in the Fall, and, as I see it, whatever happened at the Fall is repeated throughout history. The die was cast at the Fall, and all the problems we have today and all the problems people have had throughout history, have their source and origin in the Fall. If we clearly understand the Fall, we can more clearly understand ourselves, others and history, not to mention all that Jesus did and how He heals us today. Jesus is the precise antidote to our precise problems.

When the man and the woman disobey the singular prohibition from God and trust in the wisdom of the serpent and have sexual relations in order to have a child, they forsake God and cling to the evil one. It is a form of spiritual adultery. This theme is repeated many times throughout Scripture with the image of Israel playing the harlot after other gods. From the man and the woman's perspective, they were unfaithful to their true spouse, God, and are adulterers. From the serpent's perspective, he is a wife stealer. Man was made to be the spouse of God, but satan enters the picture and entices him away from God. The serpent deceives the man and woman into trusting him and his wisdom, and so he captures the heart of the spouse of God and takes her away with himself.

The primal spouse-stealer is satan. The end result of the Fall is that God has lost His bride. The rest of salvation history is God's work to get her back, to redeem her from her oppressive, murderous master. God goes so far as to die for us in order to win us back to Himself. Satan's goal is to keep us united to himself, cut off from God, and without hope of eternal life with God in heaven; he simply wants to destroy us. God wants us to be fully alive and happy with Him and all the angels and saints without end.

I will save giving examples of spouse-stealing for now; the point I want to make about it beyond what I have already written is that spouse-stealing as adultery is tantamount to murder. I believe that much of the Bible is written in a parallel format known as chiasm; the most important points of a chiasm are located in the middle or heart. The format is something like: A, B, C, D, E, E', D', C', B', A', with E and E' being the heart of the argument. What is at the heart of the Ten Commandments, position five and six? They are not to murder and not to commit adultery. They are the heart of the Ten Commandments, and represent exactly what was most wrong with the Fall: our first parents committed adultery in relation to God, and they, in a real sense, murdered the human race.

In many respects, murder and adultery were basically the same thing in the mind of the Jews, and rightly so. The laws of the Old Testament consider the two sins as being very similar receiving the same sort of punishment. To a certain extent, they are two sides of the same coin. And this mentality toward these two deadly sins is precisely the same as the Ten Commandments themselves since they are in the fifth and sixth position. Adultery and murder go hand in hand (a good example from the Bible is, of course, the story of David and Bathsheba), and so today these two sins have been running rampant and virtually unchecked. This is remarkably so when considering fornication as a form of adultery and abortion as the murder of the unborn. We are a society of fornicators, adulterers, and murderers (even if we ourselves have not had an abortion, so many have participated in this grave sin by supporting and defending it as a so-called right).

I'll continue these thoughts another time.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.