Beyond Adultery: The Thought Police?

Mat 5:27 You have heard that it was said by the ancients, You shall not commit adultery:
Mat 5:28 But I say to you, That whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.

We now progress to the second worst crime in Christ's list of commandments that he wants to fill in. How can we be sure that he didn't think much of adultery? Because it is the sin that he mentions most in the Gospels. He describes his generation (and all generations) as "adulterous" when he wants to criticize it. Here and later in Matthew, it is placed second, after murder, in his listing of sins, but in both Mark and Luke, it is placed first when he lists sins.

Why did he consider adultery, such a common things, as so evil? I think we only have to look at the previous section on murder to get a good idea. There, Christ puts good relationships among our fellow humans on a higher plane than worship. What is the most important relationship in our life? Our relationship with our spouses. If we cannot be true to the person closest to us, what can we be true to? For Christ, our keeping our marriage vows is the most important test of our character and, to a large degree, a key to bringing the dominion of heaven.

But how can we hurt our spouses by our thoughts? Even if we do look at others with lust, who is harmed since no one can know it except for ourselves and God?

The point is clearly that we must put our spiritual needs above our physical needs. This was, after all, the first temptation of Christ, and, after accepting our earthly mission, the first lesson that Christ's words teach us. We think of materialism as a very contemporary idea, but Christ realized the humans can too easily discount the reality of our spirit because our physical existence is so much more tangible. However, Christ clearly saw that our spiritual condition was more important. It is the content of our character that matters, not only to God, but to the quality of our life. This is the lesson of the Beatitudes themselves, which describe our spiritual journey through life and beyond.

Part of the reason why Christ believes that our inner, private thoughts are so important is because they shape our physical reality. Christ has laid our a plan by which everything becomes completed and perfect, where the world moves from the earthly to the heavenly, the temporal to the eternal. For Christ, the connection between what we think today, what we do tomorrow, and what happens to us the day after that was as tangible as anything in the material world.

When I suggested that this means that Christ believed in the "thought police" in this title of this post, I was being provocative. Just the opposite is true. Christ thought we should keep morality out of the hands of the state. Human judgment and justice is inherently flawed. Instead, the challenge is to police ourselves, and that starts with controlling our own thoughts.

On a personal note, recently I have begun to think about the value of prayer as a form of developing self-control. Scientific studies show that prayer is effective in ways that indicate a supernatural dimension, but I think prayer also has a psychological dimension where we can use prayer to program ourselves. By choosing to ask for God's help in certain areas, we are changing our character, which changes our behavior.