If you want to uphold sexual faithfulness, combat marital affairs, and build godly families in our day, start with the little things. Work hard at what you’ve been called to do, in all your callings: employee, husband, father, wife, mother. In doing so, you’ll have no time (or energy, even!) to wander from that one who shares your marriage certificate with you. Work hard. Go home. Share a drink. Enjoy a laugh. After all, it’s the little things that get you. And it’s the little things that keep you.

Anyone who might still hold to the classical liberal perspective that the God of the Old Testament was this angry, vengeful, “bad-hair-day” deity that frankly hated everyone and everything ,while the New Testament Jesus was a veritable hippie, spouting free love and holding forth no judgment of any kind, has obviously not read (or has read and does not believe!) texts like Matthew 5. Most of us can get through the day without actually ending someone else’s life or fornicating with someone-not-our-spouse. But who can stop anger or lust dead in their tracts? Jesus tightens the heart screws and makes clear that those inner thoughts are legitimate violations of God’s Law. Whew. Jesus isn’t loosey-goosey. He makes the truth of God’s holiness an even heavier matter in applying it to how we should live.

It’s this type of Christlike exposition, driving toward true, heart-focused, practical application, that the Westminster theologians sought to emulate when tying together all the texts that spoke to particular laws, applying it from and toward every direction they could biblically. As they brought together the positive Scriptural duties of the Seventh Commandment, in the Larger Catechism’s Question 138, many are plain: chastity in body, mind, affections, [and] words; watchfulness over the eyes and all the senses; modesty in apparel; living and loving together. Yes. Check. We understand these things. The “sins forbidden,” found under the Larger Catechism’s Question 139 seem almost more obvious! And, it should be noted, yet again, how helpful the Larger and Shorter Catechisms are in how they divide each command positively and negatively. Begin separated, in such a way, helps us to better process how to honor God proactively and avoid sin definitely in accord with each of the “Ten Words.”

However, tucked away, almost unnoticeably, toward the end of Answer 138 is a phrase that, if our mind’s eye is weary from the list, might be missed altogether, if we are not careful. The overlooking of this phrase could be a massive detriment to one’s soul if he does not heed it carefully. And, like Christ, it ratchets down the importance of the “little things,” for, in the end, they are not that little. Lest my words be seen as hyperbole, we should let our eyes focus on an introductory statement to one of the most infamous sins of all human history. In fact, it was so overwhelmingly sinful that one can point to how all Ten Commandments were violated in the story we know as “David and Bathsheba.”

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