Don’t you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never!
-I Corinthians 6:15, NLT
Christians seem especially shy in assigning blame to a cheater for destroying his or her marriage.
Many seem to believe or operate under the belief that if the marriage was not perfectly healthy, then the cheater is only partially responsible for killing it.
I disagree.
This belief is unjust and flies in the face of common sense when we approach any other crime or moral failure.
Let me explain via an analogy:
Say a person enters a hospital and decides to start stabbing a patient in the oncology ward. This patient dies from the horrific knife wounds sustained from this individual. He bleeds to death.
-Is the knife wielder less a murderer if the patient he stabbed had a terminal cancer diagnosis?
-Do we blame the cancer for being partially responsible for the patient’s death when she succumbed to knife the wounds to the heart?
A marriage may be sick, but a cheater stabs the marriage in the proverbial heart by committing adultery. Survival is unlikely.
Adultery is soul rape. A cheater violates the soul of the faithful spouse by forcing a third party into their union as this verse from I Corinthians 6 illustrates.
It is a violent violation as any faithful spouse can attest.
Just as it is ridiculous to require perfect health in the stabbing situation, it is ridiculous to require perfect marriage health before being willing to assign full blame to the one who “stabbed” the marriage to death via adultery.
That is not to say the marriage was perfectly healthy before the adultery. The health of the marriage is really beside the point when infidelity has taken place.
Infidelity strikes at the core of the marriage–i.e. the vow ensuring security and safety of both parties.
So what if the marriage was diseased prior to the adulterous “assault”?! The marriage health status does not make the cheater any less responsible for “stabbing” it to death.
Only a unwise and unjust judge would listen to such a defense of a knife-wielding murderer.
Similarly, only an unwise pastor or Christian counselor would bother listening to such a pathetic “defense” from a cheater invoking the prior marital health status.
*A version of this post ran previously.
