by Standerinfamilycourt

On Tuesday, April 28, 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court will enter their chamber for perhaps the most pivotal day in the nation’s modern history.   It will be a day when we will either decide nationally to yield to God’s law or continue to rebel against it, and quite possibly find ourselves running out of opportunities to repent and restore our nation.    “Standerinfamilycourt” is so grateful to have had the opportunity to kneel and pray with 10,000 other believers in front of the Supreme Court building on March 26, 2013, the last time marriage redefinition / defense-of-marriage arguments were heard.   The Lord could have delivered us in 2013 and spared us of the national catastrophe of having the very separation-of-powers so basic to upholding our Constitution totally break down due to our national thirst for ever-increasing immorality and universal sexual license.

Putting it bluntly, marriage redefinition was established in the U.S.  with the stroke of Ronald Reagan’s pen on September 5, 1969.     Instead of speaking out, marching, fasting and praying as we’ve done against the sodomization of marriage, the Church got comfortable with the resulting system of consecutive polygamy.   That tragically, through the removal of God’s hand of divine favor and protection,  put an end to the days wherein state, local and Federal governments could balance their budgets, protect national borders, elect national leadership that was both competent and virtuous at the same time, win wars, assimilate its immigrants or accomplish much of anything else that used to mark us as a nation under God.    We totally forgot that an offended God was watching (and was being overly patient with us).

The enactment of unilateral divorce and legalized adultery also contributed to the destruction of another great empire, the Roman Empire, and it occurred within two generations of enactment.    Why should we expect that God would be more patient with us than He was with the Byzantine-Rome co-emperors?

In the 16th century, Martin Luther and several other key figures of the Reformation set in motion the circumstances we find ourselves in today.    We love to say in the evangelical church, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s”.   We love to assert that God defines and owns marriage.   In 2009, the Manhattan Declaration was offered up for the signatures of well over half a million signers, also boldly saying this.    SIFC was among the first 100,000 signers, and proudly so.    Yet, many evangelicals celebrate that Martin Luther and his cohort deliberately yielded the legal ownership of “that which belongs to God” over to civil government.    Ironically, today’s leading voices in the evangelical church  are highly reluctant to take it back, even though civil government has proven to be such a poor steward of the sacred trust called holy matrimony.   It seems the Church, which has grown so corrupt in the last 45 years since enactment of unilateral divorce,  is also nowhere near ready in its unrepentant state to resume stewardship or accountability, because doing so will demand that they deal with the immoral dissolution of what Jesus said was indissoluble, and also with the righteous dissolution of that which Jesus unequivocally said was ongoing adultery (Luke 16:18).

Taking marriage back from the state, for example, by clergy refusing to sign off on state marriage certificates, will ultimately mean they will have to also accept accountability for dealing with the God-forbidden dissolution of original marriage, which in reality is the only authentic form of holy matrimony, according to the teaching of Jesus.    There’s no question that any legalization of homosexual “marriage” is only going to hasten the decline in heterosexual demand for civil marriage already designed by civil libertarians as part and parcel of the enactment of unilateral divorce.   The civil “piece of paper” is substantially-devalued versus 1969, save for tax benefits, and is further losing value with each iteration of social engineering.

As we all know, Martin Luther and his cohort took unscriptural issue with those highly unpalatable teachings of Jesus Christ, thanks to some very poor application of hermeneutics (the disciplined, scholarly rules of biblical interpretation that accompanies the assistance of the Holy Spirit).    As a result, the Protestant church, with the exception of the Anabaptist tradition,  was founded on a doctrine of marital heresy.   As Jesus states in Rev. 2: 20, they “tolerate that woman, Jezebel“!

Martin Luther, and most other Protestant church leaders, are or were adherents of what author Milton T. Wells, a former president of the Eastern Bible Institute in the 1950’s, called the “Five Word School” of liberal divorce theology, which arbitrarily chooses to center their divorce and remarriage rationalizing doctrine around a misinterpretation of Matthew 19:9, instead of the much clearer passage,  Luke 16:18 which already is consistent with the vast body of additional scripture on the matter.   Today, this heresy is broadly considered “orthodox” across the Protestant Church despite its open contradiction of the vast body of scripture that speaks to the contrary, including the accounts of two probable eyewitnesses of Christ’s actual teaching, Luke (who traveled and ministered with Paul), and Mark (who became Peter’s right-hand man).

In 1957, when Dr. Wells first authored this book, “Does Divorce Dissolve Marriage?”  he complained of a civil divorce rate that was approaching 25% some 12 years ahead of the enactment of unilateral divorce in the first of the fifty states.   He lamented that the divorce rate in the church was approaching the divorce rate outside of the church.    He made some eerily prophetic additional statements that page fans are going to have to read the installments to discover.     Dr. Wells finished his race and was promoted to heaven in 1975, never conceiving that even the front end of God’s definition of marriage (Matt. 19:4) would be hanging in the balance 40 years after his death, as he grieved over the relentless attacks on the back end (Matt. 19:6) that inspired his disciplined, scholarly examination of the hermeneutics of Protestant doctrine on the indissolubility of original marriage, and the utter illegitimacy in God’s eyes of remarriage while an estranged covenant spouse is still living.

Anyone can find an out-of-print book that has passed into the public domain that agrees with their particular stance on a topic.   Why choose this one?    It happens that this blogger’s pastor is big on hermeneutics, and getting the flock to dig deeply into scripture; to emulate the “Bereans” of Acts 17.    His sermon series on this is called “Killing the Sacred Cows (of scripture)”, but his student would dub this particular application of what she’s learned, “Sacrificing the Prize Bull” (pun fully intended).    Indeed, today the average disciple without a theology degree, who craves the truth, has access to amazing online bible study tools such as interlinear language translation guides and cultural references.  The silver lining of our challenging age is that the day is drawing to a rapid close when scriptural heresies can continue to propagate because the layperson can’t know any better! This blogger had just discovered those tools when another pastor friend pointed her to this book.    By the time the reader is two chapters in, it becomes obvious that this book is a scholarly, disciplined hermeneutic treasure.   Even if it were not, it would be well worth reading just for the rich church history within.

This book is excellent but not perfect.   Dr. Wells is visionary in recognizing the irrevocability of the biblical one-flesh relationship, that it is exclusively and supernaturally formed by God in joining husband and wife of youth or widowhood, and that it is entirely absent from unscriptural remarriage because it accompanies sexual union (rather than arising from it).   He is every bit as clear and unequivocal as Jesus was that physical death alone dissolves “that which GOD has joined”, not civil divorce, not adultery, not abandonment, and not subsequent civil marriage, nor children born into an adulterous union.    He rigorously proves it in a way that would equip a lay person to go confidently toe-to-toe with an errant theologian.   He expertly dispatches the other two of the trio of abused scriptures, Deut. 24:1-4 and 1 Cor. 7:15, that make up the evangelical Asherah Pole of “sanctified” serial polygamy.

In my view, his book has a couple of serious flaws that nevertheless don’t take anything away from the importance of his work.    I believe these flaws are largely in context with the time in which Dr. Wells lived and worked, but not entirely.    Dr. Wells has counterparts today who reach substantially the same scriptural conclusions, such as Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon of the Pittsburg Theological Seminary, and Dr. John Piper, recently retired senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, MN, and founder of the ministry DesiringGod.     Like Drs. Gagnon and Piper, who freely assert in their writings the scriptural truth that remarriage while an estranged covenant spouse is still living creates a state of  ongoing adultery in the eyes of God, Dr. Wells stops short of advocating that such unions be civilly dissolved in order for repentance to be completed by full reconciliation with the wronged covenant spouse, and restoration of the covenant marriage for the sake of the generations of that family, and for the sake of witness to everyone around them.    Unlike Drs. Gagnon and Piper, Dr. Wells is quite forceful in stating with sound scriptural evidence that adulterous civil remarriages imperil real souls and that repentance from that state demands more than heart-felt sorrow and fidelity to the biblically-adulterous relationship.    Even so, Dr. Wells comes off as such a lover of eternal souls that had he lived long enough to see the obvious double-standard that would arise with the adoption of sodomous civil “marriage” that sometimes claims spouses and children from covenant marriages, or had he lived long enough to witness the spectacle of heterosexual spouses being enabled to cheaply and unilaterally dissolve a succession of marriages without just cause and without economic consequence,  one gets the sense that he would have taken a much stronger position.    (There is subtle evidence in the text that there was some measure of disagreement between himself and the Assemblies of God General Superintendant who wrote the Foreword to his book.)

Dr. Wells also didn’t live long enough to see the birth and explosive growth of the covenant marriage standers’ movement in response to the ravages of unilateral divorce, which increasingly can  hit after decades of successful Christian marriage.    There is a very high marriage restoration rate with this group, which necessitates, by the hand of God, exactly what these reticent pastors are so loath to see, the dissolution of adulterous unions as a first step of true repentance, and divine arrangements that generally are not toxic to the children involved within the family of God.    This development is very similar to the ex-gay move of God (and is treated by the current wayward church in similar fashion as the LGBT community treats the latter).    They are arguing with God Himself. 

Dr. Wells’ scholarly work is vitally, important, as is Dr. Gagnon’s more recent rebuttal of Dr. David Instone-Brewer (a classic contemporary member of the disingenuous “Five-Word School”).     Until the Church is able to broadly grasp the hard truth that remarriage adultery is defiance of Jesus Christ that dooms real souls to the risk of hearing (along with the legion of pastors who perform such ceremonies): “you are a goat, not a sheep: depart from me, I never knew you”, we have little chance of the church getting politically behind the repeal of unilateral divorce, as it should do.   As it stands now, the Assemblies of God has archived this book of truth, while heinously revising their official position paper to reflect the unscriptural teaching of the “Five-Word School”, and requiring their pastors to perform adulterous remarriages where the denomination policy used to disfellowship pastors just 42 years ago who did so.

Introduction:   “DOES DIVORCE DISSOLVE MARRIAGE” by Rev. / Dr.  Milton T. Wells.

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall  |  Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!