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Adultery and Porn: The Sin Your Spouse Doesn’t Know About
You retired four years ago. Your spouse goes to bed around ten, and you say you’ll be up in a while. The house is quiet, the phone is in your hand, and you already know what you are going to look at, because you have done it a hundred times. Or you are someone else, and it is 1994, and you are at a three-day school in Sacramento with somebody at the hotel bar from another agency. It happened once. You drove home, kissed your spouse in the driveway, and you have not said a word about it in thirty years.
By Jesus’ definition, both of those people committed adultery, and both of them can be completely forgiven today. This study is written for the women who served as much as the men, because women get caught in porn too.
Many readers of this study live with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it bears directly on this sin. The diagnostic list of PTSD symptoms includes reckless or self-destructive behavior, which can cover compulsive porn use and affairs, and studies of veterans have found that people with PTSD develop compulsive porn use and have affairs at higher rates than people without it. The behavior numbs. For a few minutes the memories go quiet, and then they return and the next round takes more. If that describes you, the trauma is part of why this sin took hold, and treating the trauma is part of getting free of it. In Week 15 of this series I wrote that prayer and trauma therapy together brought me through my own dark stretch, and the same applies here. The PTSD explains part of how you got here. You still made the choices, Scripture still calls it sin, and grace still covers it.
Most of these sins started in the downtime of the career: the months between deployments, the graveyard shift, the days off between twenty-four hour shifts, and the hotel room four hundred miles from the family. For a lot of retired veterans and first responders they found a new home in the empty hours after the job ended.
How David Fell
2 Samuel 11 opens with a detail most readers skip. “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem” (2 Samuel 11:1). It was campaign season, the army was in the field at Rabbah a little over forty miles east across the Jordan, and the commander stayed home.
The next verse tells you what he was doing with the time. “It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful” (2 Samuel 11:2). He was getting up off the couch late in the day with nothing to do and none of his men around him. In verse 3 he sent someone to find out who she was and learned she was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of his own soldiers, who was at Rabbah fighting for him. Verse 4 finishes it: “So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.”
Every step in that passage was a decision David could have reversed. He could have gone back downstairs after he saw her, and he could have dropped it when he heard her husband’s name. James describes the same sequence from the inside: “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14-15). For David the death was literal. He had Uriah killed to cover the pregnancy.
Most of us can name the place where our version of that started. Retirement deserves its own mention, because it is the most unstructured time most of us have had since childhood. There is no shift, no chain of command, and nobody expecting you anywhere at 0600, and the phone in your pocket pulls up anything you want in two seconds.
What Jesus Says About the Eyes
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). Plenty of people have told themselves porn is not cheating because nobody got touched. Jesus put what happens on the screen in the same verse as the affair. He was speaking to men in that passage, and James wrote “each person,” so the principle applies the same way to a woman.
Job gives the practical answer. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). Job settled the question before he was in the situation. Rules of engagement work the same way. They get written in the briefing, when heads are clear, so that in the moment you are executing a decision you already made. Decide tonight what you will not look at tomorrow, and say that decision out loud to God in prayer.
What to Do If You Are Still In It
Paul does not leave room for negotiation. “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Joseph is the example. Potiphar’s wife pursued him day after day, and when she finally grabbed him, “she caught him by his garment, saying, ‘Lie with me.’ But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house” (Genesis 39:12). He did not stop to explain himself. She lied about him afterward and he went to prison, and he ran anyway.
Running looks like four concrete things this week.
End the affair today. If you are in one now, end it in a single message. Do not agree to a final meeting or a coffee to talk it through, because a final meeting is where a lot of affairs start back up.
Install accountability software. Put it on every phone, tablet, and computer you own and set it to report to someone you trust. Men report to a man, and women report to a woman. Covenant Eyes is one option and there are others.
Move the chargers. The phone charger and the computer come out of the bedroom and the home office and go where the family walks through. Charging the phone in the kitchen overnight removes the easiest hour of temptation in the day.
Tell one person by name. A man tells a man and a woman tells a woman, and it happens this week. The reason is in the section on what you owe your spouse.
Such Were Some of You
A few verses before the command to flee, Paul delivers the worst news and the best news in one paragraph. “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). Paul was writing to a church with former adulterers sitting in it, and he told them they were washed.
David’s story shows how fast that happens. About a year after the rooftop, Nathan the prophet confronted him, and David said, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Nathan answered immediately: “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die” (2 Samuel 12:13). The consequences stayed. The child died, and trouble followed David’s house for the rest of his life. God still put the sin away the moment David owned it.
If you have decided this is the one sin God will not cover, read or watch Week 4 of this series, “I Could Never Be Forgiven.”
What You Owe Your Spouse
The hardest question in this study is whether you have to tell your spouse. I looked for a verse that commands you to confess your sin to your spouse. It is not in the Bible, so this study will not claim it is.
Scripture requires confession to God and confession to another believer. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). The person you named this week is that second confession.
Scripture also draws two hard lines. The first is that you do not lie when your spouse asks you directly. “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25). The second is that if an affair put your spouse’s health at risk, your spouse has to know and both of you get tested for sexually transmitted infections. “For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Corinthians 7:4). Your spouse’s body is part of this, and hiding a health risk takes away a decision that belongs to both of you.
Past those two lines, take the question of telling your spouse to your pastor or a Christian counselor and give them the specifics. An affair from 1994, a porn habit you quit ten years ago, and a porn habit that is still running are different situations, and faithful Christian counselors do not all answer them the same way. Someone who knows the facts can help you weigh them. Keeping quiet is also a decision, and it deserves the same counsel as telling. Nobody should settle it alone at two in the morning in either direction.
If you do tell, tell it once and tell all of it, with that pastor or counselor in the room. When the truth comes out in pieces over six months, your spouse has to live through the discovery again every time. Week 9 of this series, “When You Brought the Job Home,” covered the damage the career did to the family, and some readers are carrying both.
This Week
This is the last study in the sixteen-week series, and the Bible studies continue after it. Here is the work for the next seven days. Charge your phone in the kitchen tonight. Install accountability software on every device by Friday. Name one person and tell them before Sunday. If you are carrying something from years ago, call your pastor and schedule the appointment.
“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Corinthians 16:13).
That is why men really need to be in a men's Bible study group. To hold each other accountable, pray for each other, to help each other. Men, if you are not in a men's group, please do it today!!! Find a true Biblical based men's group. One that teaches the whole council of the Word!!
Thanks Kieth very needed topic these days, I was just talking to my oldest son about this last night.
Other fathers out there if you do not talk to your sons (especially) you will be doing a disservice to them. This sin will sink it's hooks into them. Show them you are a man and lead as the father. They may still make mistakes but they will remember what you said.