by Standerinfamilycourt
Our family wasn’t big into celebration of Halloween, but in raising our kids, we tried to take them to the “harvest celebration” at our church. The next day, November 1 would be a remembrance of the persecuted church, perhaps reading from Foxe’s Book of Christian Martyrs. This year, it hardly seemed necessary to open that book because of being literally surrounded by modern-day martyrdom for the faith. I reflected back on the day about a year ago when I met up with my estranged prodigal husband in a coffee shop to talk about a court hearing I was unable to attend earlier that day, and I mentioned the martyring of some 50 Korean believers when government officials paraded them into a packed stadium, tied them to posts and opened machine gun fire on them. The remainder of 2013 brought nerve gas butchery in Syria, Boca Haram violence in Nigeria, ISIS beheadings, sometimes of little children in front of their Christian parents, sometimes of Western aid workers or reporters, and posted on the internet. It brought threatened hangings of pregnant women who would not renounce their Christian faith, and other atrocities. We kept hearing that more followers of Christ were martyred last year than in the first several hundred years of the church. People tend to be martyred when they stand against the authority of various “god substitutes” of the ruling class of the day.
Though nowhere near in this league, this past year brought personal persecution to bear on this stander too, as I told the family law judge from my perch on the witness stand that our 40-year covenant marriage, which His Honor was about to civilly dissolve to accommodate an adulterous relationship, was indissoluable in the eyes of the One Who truly held the sovereignty over it, and Who more importantly held the sovereignty over the soul of the deceived adulterer to whom I was permanently joined as one flesh. I was brutally punished by the court for my stand financially. I had quoted the words of Jesus that condemned all remarriage of divorced persons as adultery, and got pretty much the same reaction in that courtroom as did my Savior on that long ago day among the gathered crowd.
I was shaking my spiritual, fist in Jesus’ name, at a black-robed high priest of the Sexual Revolution, and such defiance of Baal was not to be tolerated! I must be made an example of lest my defiance spread.
As this November 1 date stands for Reformation Day, it in effect marks the divorce of Protestant believers from the Catholic Church. Quite rightfully, grace and the completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross replaced penance and salvation by works. However, quite wrongfully, an unholy alliance between Martin Luther and the Catholic humanist Erasmus, influenced by King Henry VIII’s adultery-birthed Church of England, replaced sound doctrine concerning the unconditional permanence of marriage with the new false doctrine of finding “biblical” grounds for divorce. Anything to distance the new church from its Catholic roots! Satan always has to make sure there’s a fissure in the foundation of any move of God!
The Catholic Church holds to the scriptural word of the Lord about divorce, but to allow for “permissible” remarriage, the RCC annuls the holy symbol of the relationship of Christ with His bride, the Church as though it never existed – the expunged bride of Christ, if you will. This is honoring the letter of what Jesus said, but not the spirit.
The Protestant Church ignores those words of Jesus altogether and twists three or four scriptures out of context to create a contorted scenario of “permissible” divorce. And she overlays that with a humanly extrapolated “permissible” remarriage basis with which the pastor can then “sanctify” a biblically adulterous union, entirely contrary to what Jesus said. This is invariably accompanied by heavy reference to a tenet not emphasized in scripture, but also originating with the humanistic philosophy of Erasmus, that of “free will”, which is touched on in that 1 Corinthians 7 passage which he distorted in his rogue commentary. This is then applied out of context by the evangelical remarriage apologists, while completely ignoring verses 11 and 39 of the very same chapter. Thusly, we now have fabricated “biblical” grounds to divorce and remarry if “abandoned by a non-Christian spouse”. What results is a deceitful rationalization to disobey God in a very central matter to the transformative power of the Church and to her ultimate ability to overcome persecution. It is the compulsive need to “update” denominational position statements as the prevailing popular culture changes, and to train its shepherds accordingly.
It is salt losing its savor.
Jesus told a very interesting parable that comes to mind as I reflect on this:
Parable of Two Sons – Matt. 21: 28-32
“But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, ‘Son, go work today in the vineyard.’ And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he regretted it and went. The man came to the second and said the same thing; and he answered, ‘I will, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They *said, “The first.” Jesus *said to them, “Truly I say to you that the tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him; but the tax collectors and prostitutes did believe him; and you, seeing this, did not even feel remorse afterward so as to believe him.
The other two abused scriptures used to rationalize divorce in order to spiritually accommodate adulterous remarriage are the related scriptures, Matthew 19:9 and Deuteronomy 24:1-4 (referred to in that Matthew 19 passage.) Jesus was confronted by a group of Pharisees seeking to entrap and condemn Him by a spiritual controversy. The Holy Spirit moved three disciples, Matthew, Mark and Luke to write about the same incident. Mark and Luke did so to a mixed-gender Gentile audience. Matthew, on the other hand, is the only disciple / apostle to address an all-male Hebrew audience – men who invariably stoned adulterous wives and a culture that denied any such marriage rights to women. Matthew was uniquely addressing an audience that included men who had remarried because they were now widowers. The evangelical church would claim that adultery is the other “biblical exception” that permits sanctified remarriage.
How does one reconcile Matthew 19:9 which appears to contain an “exception clause” to Luke 16:18, which is perfectly consistent with all the rest of scripture on marriage and divorce, and in which Jesus made it unmistakably plain that marrying a divorced person is adultery? This disciple believes it is in recognizing that the Gentile cultures condoned divorce and did not stone adulterous spouses. With this in mind, the Gentile Dr. Luke realized his audience needed blunt clarity, instead of the tongue-in-cheek dryness with which Jesus relished delivering this truth to His original Pharisee audience! The Pharisees, referring to Deuteronomy 24:3 asked Jesus, “why then did Moses command a husband to give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” Jesus redirected their twisted inference and their condemning question back to the eternal truth: “It was due to the hardness of your hearts that Moses permitted men to divorce their wife, but from the beginning it was not so!” He had already asserted in Matthew 19: 4-6 God’s timeless and complete definition of marriage reflecting both complementarity of the genders and unconditional permanence. The scripture says that this troubled his disciples who came to him afterward in private and said, “If this is the case between a man and his wife, it is better not to marry at all.” Jesus had just kicked over an idolized Asherah pole, one that was dear to the church of that day! Is it so different today?
And who was Asherah (or Ashtoreth)? She was a pagan goddess who, like Baal, was of the heritage of cultures like the Hittites whom God drove out before Israel. Different cultures in the region worshipped her variously as a consort of Yahweh, of Baal, of a god named Anu, and so forth – the embodiment of serial monogamy, if you will. Babies, including Hebrew babies, were sacrificed to Baal, representing the abomination of abortion of our day, a culture of utter disrespect for life and personhood in God’s image. Similarly, covenant marriages are commonly sacrificed to Asherah, consort of Baal, even in the evangelical church, as in Jesus’ day, reflecting a culture of utter disrespect for the very symbol of the Godhead, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Every marriage to the spouse of our youth, until death separates, is an indissoluable covenant union between husband, wife and Jesus Christ, the eternal Bridegroom. Each such covenant marriage uniquely creates a sanctified one-flesh entity that cannot be dismembered except violently, damaging both spouses until divinely healed. Asherah poles were also known as “high places”, phallic symbols in the cultures that worshipped her, and today’s divorce and adulterous remarriage culture, even within the church, is sexual idolatry. It is a devastating impurity in Christ’s bride who is commanded to be without spot or blemish. That “woman, Jezebel” whom Jesus refers to in Revelation 2, is in essence, Asherah. The reference to killing her children in that passage is, in my view at least, a prophetic reference to the widespread abortion of our day.
As history has shown us, both Catholic and Protestant purported followers of Christ have found various ways to cling to Asherah. John the Baptist, and then Jesus, paid with their very lives. Many of us have paid a heavy price for pointing this timeless truth out to secular and church authority. Many an ordained shepherd has shrunk back from biblical truth because they feared men more than they feared God. At least one evangelical denomination’s official position paper misrepresents God’s very character by falsely claiming that civil divorce removes Christ’s participation in that “old” covenant and establishes a “new” covenant in a marriage that Christ in fact has called adulterous.
Am I condemning those who with clean hands and in good faith relied on the misguidance of their denomination and their pastor in remarrying a divorced believer? No. Unless, like me, a disciple was warned otherwise by the Holy Spirit yet unlike me, still chose in their heart to disobey, I believe God pours out grace in His sovereignty, temporally blessing that second marriage beyond what the statistics say about their marginal chances of success. He alone knows hearts; who will be ultimately saved and what works we are called to in this life. In the godly marriage ministry I’ve supported for many years, God sometimes removes a non-covenant spouse through death or subsequent civil divorce and restores a covenant marriage after decades of civil divorce that was never His will.
All that said, such non-covenant marriages will never be the equivalent of covenant marriages, either morally or spiritually, because they do not have the same underlying foundation, and because Jesus, (without exception) called them adultery. They look good temporally, but they still come at the cost of forfeiting the kingdom of God unless they are terminated and acknowledged before God as adultery.
I am saying that the church today is paying with a heavy yoke for disobediently going AWOL in first allowing marriage to be redefined in the 1970’s from God’s definition. How long before denominational position papers are again “updated” to accommodate homosexual and polygamous “marriages”? And how does the Church only partially repent?
Standers of every faith tradition, on the other hand are a holy remnant in these last days. We are the Ezra’s of our day, fasting and praying to rebuild the church spotless again at great human cost, rebuild our ransacked marriages, and set an example that ultimately rebuilds the greatness of our nation under God, turning back His commenced and worsening judgment. First and foremost, our stand is motivated by a deep burden for the priceless redemption of the soul of our one-flesh covenant partner in the fearful shadow of 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 and Galatians 6:7. We are unpopular, especially when we speak out. When we do so in family law court, we are punished. When we do so in church, too often we risk cherished friendships. In our families, we as a group risk our reputations among family members where we tend to absorb blame and hostility for bucking the anti-biblical norms of our culture, sometimes at the perceived cost of another family member’s “happiness” – we continue to wear the covenant symbol of its eternity, our wedding ring, in defiance of the civil death certificate issued against our covenant marriage by an amoral county judge.
However, if because of this high emotional price we make the choice to fear man instead of continue to reverence God, we risk our holy anointing, our very saltiness. 
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!
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