The Battle of the Second, Sixth, and Eighth Commandments
When the Church protects adultery and punishes truth, it forgets whom it serves.
When I decided to tell my story, I was prepared for judgment. What I wasn’t prepared for was how selective that judgment would be.
Nearly every detractor to my story, whether directly or indirectly, has rushed to invoke the Eighth Commandment:
“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
The cautionary interpretation is always the same: be careful. Don't gossip. Don't harm your neighbor’s reputation. Even when that neighbor is the one who broke a marriage vow, shattered trust, and deceived an entire church community.
Not once has a Lutheran detractor quoted the Sixth Commandment to me:
“You shall not commit adultery.”
Not in personal messages. Not in public discourse. Even the voicemails left by Erik’s wife reflected this inversion. She spoke of the danger to Erik’s soul—presumably meaning the spiritual weight of adultery. Yet when she spoke of me, she shifted the gravity: it wasn’t adultery she named as my sin, but allegedly lying about Erik. In her framework, what he did endangered his soul. What I was being accused of (lying) “endangered my salvation.”
Out of respect for the privacy of all involved, I have chosen not to share the actual recording of the voicemail. However, I believe it is important to share the substance of what was said because it illustrates a broader pattern of spiritual confusion that the Church must be willing to confront.
Even when confronted with adultery, deception, and broken vows, many of those around me showed greater concern for maintaining appearances than for acknowledging the sin itself. But the hypocrisy runs deeper than that.
They pointed their finger at me and accused me of lying, when in fact I was telling the truth.
They labeled me the seducer when in reality, it was Erik who pursued, initiated, and used deception to preserve his power. I was not innocent, but I was not the one leading.
They argued that I had no right to tell this story because of Erik’s public position, while denying my right to dignity, honesty, and justice as a human being, a wife, and a member of the Body of Christ.
In this inversion, truth becomes the threat and deception becomes the shield. The telling of the story is treated as a greater sin than the actions that made the story necessary to tell.
The math is clear: those who rushed to defend appearances were more concerned with preserving an image of righteousness than confronting actual wrongdoing. And in doing so, they were not upholding the commandments at all. They were betraying them.
Martin Luther himself warned of a temptation far more dangerous than ordinary human failings: the temptation to use religious language to shield sin and deflect truth. In his Large Catechism, Luther discusses the Second Commandment ("You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God") and later the Eighth Commandment ("You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor").
Concerning the Second Commandment, Luther writes:
"God’s name is abused when it is used to support falsehood or wrong of any kind."
He warns that religious communities often invoke God’s name to make lies seem righteous, thus entangling God's name in human deceit, which is a sin he viewed as especially grievous.
Luther’s concern was not abstract. He saw that religious communities are often eager to invoke God's name to justify themselves—and to preserve an appearance of righteousness—even while casually lying, covering up wrongdoing, or protecting reputations at the expense of truth. The deeper danger, he warned, was not the mere act of sin itself, but the way people would entangle God’s name in their deceit.
According to Luther, this kind of spiritual cover-up is even more grievous than ordinary sins because it corrupts not only human relationships but the very witness of the Church. When people hide public sins behind the shield of religious respectability, they not only betray the injured parties, they also betray Christ Himself.
Applied to today’s silence: when people misapply the Eighth Commandment—warning against gossip or false witness—to silence someone telling the truth about real adultery and real deception, they are doing exactly what Luther condemned. They are misusing the name of God to obscure sin instead of revealing it. They are not defending the Eighth Commandment. They are violating both the Eighth and the Second Commandments at once.
And the consequence is devastating: those who try to bring wrongdoing to light are treated as the threat. Institutions protect their own. Public sins are hidden under pious words. Victims are spiritually gaslit, isolated, and blamed.
As Luther plainly wrote:
"Where the sin is public, the rebuke also must be public, that everyone may learn to guard against it."
Yet in the case of my story (and too many others like it), the Sixth Commandment (“You shall not commit adultery”) is treated as a private embarrassment, too messy to name. Meanwhile, the Eighth Commandment is wielded as a public weapon to silence the ones who dare to tell the truth.
This is not righteousness. It is precisely the spiritual corruption Luther warned against, and it leaves the Church weaker, more brittle, and less capable of bearing true witness to the world.
Any church that shields sin while punishing truth has not upheld either the Sixth or the Eighth Commandment. In that failure, it betrays not only Scripture but the very Christ it claims to follow.
All of that said, even when the Church falters, Christ does not change. Even when people break their promises, He remains faithful. Even when sin leaves wounds that seem too deep to heal, His mercy reaches deeper still.
Through the prophet Isaiah, the Lord says:
"Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." (Isaiah 1:18)
God does not turn away from the brokenness we create. He calls us back to Himself, offering a cleansing we cannot earn and a love we cannot lose. We are not left to fix ourselves. We are not asked to carry the burden alone.
As the First Commandment reminds us:
"You shall have no other gods before Me." (Exodus 20:3)
Our hope is not in ourselves. Our hope is not in institutions. Our hope is not in the approval of men. Our hope is, and has always been, in Christ alone.
There is hope for the broken. There is hope for the weary. There is hope for anyone who is honest about their need.
As the psalmist prayed:
"Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." (Psalm 51:7)
That prayer is still heard today.
That cleansing is still offered.
Christ is still enough.
Not because we are faithful.
Not because the Church always gets it right.
But because He remains faithful, steady, and true.