No, I am certainly not looking for an excuse to commit adultery - but I am rather baffled by such assertions as, for example,
Romans 7:1-3 which seems to nail the definition - and yet King David does that very thing. He is even told he would have been given more (wives).
And King Solomon - he is never rebuked for marrying multiple wives (though he is condemned for marrying foreign wives).
I am glad you are seeking to understand what God is doing, and has done. Grace is the essence of love and life. God gave Adam and Eve paradise. It was his intention that we all live in paradise. That gift of paradise was the beginning of His love and grace. However, He knew that by giving mankind a freedom of choice, that the possibility existed to reject Him. That is why Christ was crucified from the foundation of the Earth. The plan of salvation was prepared before salvation was needed.
Romans 5 explains to us that God gave grace to all mankind up until the time of Moses, nevertheless everyone still died. The law of God is his own character and integrity. Love fulfills the law. The love of God for all mankind is the source of his grace. The law of Moses was never meant to be a means of righteousness but a means to magnify sin so mankind would understand their lack of righteousness. Even though the love of God is the source of grace, the holiness of God is his source of righteousness. That span of time before Moses, in the mind of God, was already fulfilled by the Messiah's sacrifice to come which would fulfill his holiness. And for all who believed the promise of the Messiah, they received the blessing above the grace.
So when the Mosaic dispensation was given, those under it never received the blessing of salvation unless they believed in the promise of the Messiah to come, of which both David and Solomon believed. But believing the promise to come did not bring regeneration, only a temporary experience of the Holy Spirit. Thus they remained with hardened hearts. By comparison a fallen man is like a dog. You can not expect a dog to have intelligent discourse like a man. They are dogs. This is kind of like how God views the unregenerate. The polygamy of David and Solomon is the behavior of dogs, so to speak.
Even today in the regeneration, our new birth is limited to our human spirits being transformed. Our souls and bodies are still fallen, so their remains a type of hardness that is easily influenced by demons and the world system. When we are in the fullness of God's glory with the glorified bodies we get after Christ returns, then our total being will be holiness.
So can you explain
1 Kings 15:5? That David committed adultery every time he took his next wife isn't mentioned...only his causing of Uriah's death is considered a sin.
As I understand the story, David did not rely on the grace of God to carry him through his adultery which would have been given him when he repented. Instead he relied on the arm of his own flesh to cover up the adultery.
When David numbered the people of his kingdom his pride was his motivation and another leaning on the arm of his flesh. Knowing how many men could fight for him was a reliance again on the arm of the flesh instead of relying on God. Remember with Gideon, God had to remove all the soldiers down to 300 men so the credit of victory would clearly be God's and not the size of the army. Nonetheless when David was rebuked, He knew the mercy of God and let God decided which of the three punishments he would receive.
Grace is always given to us for repentance, not to continue in sin. But repentance is often a process that needs to be gone through to bring a man to the point where the resolve to repent is strong enough to be maintained. This is why we forgive 70 times 7. This is an acknowledgment of the repentance process. We are living beings that can not be handled like machines. We are the garden of God and we are treated like a garden by God as he works to grow the fruit in us that he desires.
