by Standerinfamilycourt
Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.
Therefore everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.
– Matthew 10:28-33
Since the rise to power of homofascism started to rivet the faith community’s attention to the excesses of the Sexual Revolution in earnest about ten years ago, it quickly became an article of faith that some other way had to be found to articulate existential truth to the larger society and policymakers than the out-of-fashion Bible. Statisticians pointed to the year-over-year increases in the measured ranks of the “nones” (people surveyed to have no religious preference or affiliation) and hastily concluded that they were rejecting the Spirit-breathed content of scripture rather than the easily-observed rampant sexual hypocrisy in the mega-church down the street. We were cautioned that if we threw our pearls before swine (i.e. the LGBTQxyz political machine), they would be merely trampled under foot and would turn on us. Turn indeed they did! Here is an example of the swift rebuke that ensued from the “swine”….
The very influential national Catholic voices among us (for which we remain so grateful to God) touted “natural law” as the way to crack this nut without offending non-religious and cross-religious sensibilities. However, to some of us, “natural law”, as it tends to be applied, sounds like a much watered-down version of God’s law–designed to protectively fence off from moral reform (repentance) the heterosexual root of our “homosexual” sin problem. One uniformly overlooked element of “natural law” so-applied seems to be chronic, however: the inconvenient fact that no disease of the body has ever been healed by treating only the symptoms.
– Why is this secularized “natural law” ideal so tempting to Christian and Jewish social conservatives?
After 50 years of the unchallenged reign of unilateral (so-called “no-fault”) divorce laws throughout the land, some 60% of adults are now living day-to-day in “marriages” that Jesus habitually called adulterous because a legally-estranged spouse is still living. As displayed above, even malicious, casual bible “scholars” know this. Don’t bother to bore them with our evangelical “biblical exceptions”, which they see right through! Since picking up our cross and following Christ tends to be economically costly as well as morally costly, the adulterously-wed among us tend to also be the very deepest pockets in the land. How can we afford to do battle against such urgent, existential threats to society as transgenderism, unsafe public restrooms, wedding industry artists bankrupted and hauled off to jail, pornographic indoctrination classes in our schools, on and on, without lots of financial and political support gathered as rapidly as we can humanly gather them? And how can we gather sufficient funds or political support if we dare call adulterers adulterers?
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, 6 and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete. – 2 Corinthians 10:3-6
- Concern for children in “blended” families
Many promoters of the fenced-off “natural law” approach to legal and church reforms have legitimate concerns for children born into remarriages following a civil-only divorce, even if they agree, in principle at least, that these are the children of adultery according to what Jesus taught. “All children have an innate right to be raised by both their natural parents in an intact home”, they assert, and policies that thwart this amount to child abuse in their estimation. This makes it somehow “acceptable” for the wholeness of grandparent marriages to be subordinated in reaching for only limited legal reforms, even while our society is predominated by fragmented family units, and Bill-of-Rights protections designed as a human rights measure for all original marriages which have been trampled in “family” court for five decades will continue to be trampled. The Catholic voices for “natural law” are frequently joined by the Calvinistic evangelical voices (Billy Graham, John Piper and others) whose oft-cited banality is “you can’t unscramble the eggs”.
Never mind their utter lack of concern, at the time the legal machinery was installed to civilly “unscramble” the COVENANT eggs of the original marriages that God’s hand joined, and never mind any concern for the legitimate children of those marriages. Never mind that these same church voices remain shamefully silent today while courageous Christian lawmakers in two states are presently travailing to uninstall that legal machinery. Never mind that Jesus pointedly said that it is the original eggs which cannot be unscrambled – as all of the Pandora’s Box of ever more-horrifying societal symptoms empties itself in Divine demonstration and testimony of. ( 
SIFC is very grateful for the recent breakthrough article by Catholic author Leila Miller – a very good read that begins to acknowledge what the Lord wants us to see about this.) Further details on why SIFC believes Calvinists are so prone to joining Catholics in this flawed view will be addressed below. For now, let’s touch on two more overlooked and overplayed facets of the misplaced concern for the “Ishmael babies”, valuable human beings and Image-bearers created by the moral carnage and dislocations of the Sexual Revolution, which hinder us in fully obeying God in this matter.
(1) there have been studies of the ill effects of remarriage after divorce on children of divorce, but there have not yet been any studies on the effect of reconciling original holy matrimony unions on the children born in the interim into legalized adultery, in eventually failed “remarriages” that followed man’s divorce, but preceded the covenant reconciliation. There is, however, lots of anecdotal evidence of excellent outcomes on these particular children. This segment specifically needs to be studied in order for these less specific overall studies to be complete and valid enough to support durable public policy. This will never happen so long as legal remarriages are deemed morally equivalent (or staying in them morally superior) to holy matrimony the way Christ defined it in Matthew 19:4-6.
Many studies have shown that each subsequent “remarriage” is statistically much more likely to also end in divorce than the previous one, covenant reconciliations being the stable exception, due to the lifelong inseverability of the sarx mia (one-flesh) state created by God’s hand. This too, is an indispensable element of “natural law”, according to Jesus and according to whole-bible witness entailed in all of the pagan and mixed-marriage couples whose unions God defended as indissoluble, but is completely lost if the biblical argument is discarded.
(2) the Bible tells us in very clear terms that the sin of remarriage adultery is intergenerational. Hence, living on in an adulterous remarriage does even worse generational and emulation harm to the children of that “marriage” than does physically separating and legally severing it. While there is limited hope from some studies that a few in the next generation are learning from the “sins of the fathers”, we are quite literally jeopardizing the future marriages of all children when we allow this malignancy to be cemented as a societal norm. (There is no “natural law” or secularized way to share this kind of a vital truth.)
- One societal objection seems a lot easier to overcome than two Unfortunately, even among the faithful there are vastly different sexual ethics, most of which also deviate from the teachings of Christ while claiming to be following Him. As a result, instead of merely needing to build a bridge to the “nones” and atheists in order to do effective battle with the homosexualists, we need to hold together a shaky coalition that includes Jews, Muslims, Mormons, those who believe their church can “annul” marriage, and those who call themselves evangelicals but don’t believe that holy matrimony is indissoluble for life. In other words, in order to reach those who say there is no God and no binding moral standard, it is necessary to keep two kinds of religious polygamists onboard: concurrent and consecutive, plus a third type that thinks ecclesiastical paper (extrabiblically) takes people out of the second category of polygamy. No wonder the urge is so strong to leave “religion” out of it! But leaving God (as He actually is, not as we’ve reinvented Him) out of it, leaves all supernatural power out of it. As scripture predicts, “they hold to a form of godliness, but deny its power.”
- They hope it will better unify allies in Christ who hold differing faith confessions
This sounds similar to the previous argument, but actually delves one level deeper. Keeping it secular seems so much easier when it comes to presenting a united front to agnostics than the hard work of sorting through issues like sola scriptura vs “tradition”, annulment vs. universal indissolubility, hell versus purgatory, and the Calvinist doctrine of “once saved, always saved (OSAS)” versus the disciples’ doctrine of “once saved, guard your heart“. Two things can be validly said about this issue: (1) the 1st century church willingly suffered gross persecution rather than leave God out of it, and they brought moral reform such as the world had never before seen, and (2) the diverse elements of the marriage permanence community squabble daily among each other on these matters, yet God still holds this shaky coalition together for His greater purpose, such that we learn from each other. We even do so online, right in front of the agnostics and seekers. He can handle it, and because of His hand in this, so can they! The famous Australian evangelist Ray Comfort speaks of leading people to Christ (getting saved) in these terms: “people need to know what they need to ‘get saved’ from, before they will weigh and accept this as a need in their own hearts.” He likens it to going through a commercial airline cabin handing out parachutes and urgently instructing the passengers to put them on. If they put the parachute on in their cramped seats, it’s going to be profoundly uncomfortable. They’re not going to do it unless they’re told the plane, with certainty, is out of fuel and is about to crash before it can land .….Which brings us back around to the strange bedfellows of Catholics and Calvinists, and why those are the voices we tend to hear most concerning “natural law” arguments against the Sexual Revolution. Both tend to believe that hell is for is not for their faithful, regardless of life choices or how people choose to die. Neither defines “faithful” in terms of bottom-line obedience to Christ. The Catholics believe God has a “holding tank” for the departed to “earn” one more chance. The Calvinists believe the worst that disobedience, and even dying while in a God-mocking lifestyle, can result in eternally is “loss of rewards” once “saved” (a single transaction)…as long as unrepentant homosexuality wasn’t practiced. To be fair to both, neither has allowed the Sexual Revolution to officially degrade their doctrine, such as it stood in the 1970’s, while most other denominations felt license to completely revise theirs based on a vote of their pastors and leadership. The Southern Baptists, in fact, took solid steps to shore up their family-related doctrine in 2000, even if actual practice would never quite match up. This unchanged doctrine perhaps has motivated both groups to continue to insist on a voice in the Sexual Revolution, albeit a mostly hypocritical voice in both cases. Discourse about breaking God’s “natural law design” goes absolutely nowhere out in the world if the best and only reason we can give for why that’s bad is the consequences on the kids. People using sex like a drug, and people who think this life is all there is are not going to care about the kids, even if they claim a born-again experience. They’re just not going to. God has to be part of the discussion so that we can tell the truth about heaven and hell, even if that offends some evangelicals. There’s no shortage, after all, of evangelicals who have signed on to the Sexual Revolution themselves, as we all know. God’s commandments and eternal consequences for disobeying them have to be part of the conversation so that we’re defining terms like “love”, “mercy”, “grace” and “compassion” in terms of eternity, and not just in terms of temporal comfort and feelings. God has to be part of the conversation so that we’re not misunderstood!
- Illusion that policymakers will respond more favorably to a strictly secular argument
Only one thing to say here, now that we’re several years in: how’s that been working out for us? “standerinfamilycourt” respectfully believes what the Apostle Paul tried to warn us about in Romans 1 (which is not exclusively about homosexual practice so much as it is about idolatry, self-worship and misuse of our bodies, in various forms)….
For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (
SIFC : Folks, the “impurity” Paul is talking about at this stage is the corruption, by whatever human mechanism, of heterosexual marriage as an institution, that is, any deviation from #1M1W4L which Christ laid out and commanded.)
For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them. Respectfully, you cannot prattle on about “natural law” to people who have depraved minds, even though they know the ordinance of God. You have to find a way by the power of the Holy Spirit to put the fear of God in them! You have to have resolve in reminding them that God will not be mocked, never lies, and that He keeps His promises. You also cannot pretend that “natural law” does not follow the full creation ordinance, which Jesus made clear marriage indissolubility except by physical death was just as much a part of as were the complementarian roles of male and female. God did not take a slab of ribs out of Adam, but only one rib. Adam’s reference to “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones” has a meaning that legal paper cannot ever change, and that’s a supernatural function of the hand of God. That fact cannot be explained to people with any number of secular arguments, yet it is at the core of why the Sexual Revolution has caused society to degenerate. God progressively gave them over because they refused to repent despite His ramping up the consequences. It is foolish to expect God to lift His escalation of our chastening, especially all the manifestations of virulent homosexualism, which He allowed for a reason, without our actual repentance all the way back to the #1M1W4L standard. When we speak to the worldly only of “natural law”, we have to keep in mind that “natural law”, as people generally understand it, has always included polygamy somewhere in the world. You can’t speak out against today’s polyamory, therefore, without raising God’s full creation ordinance standard. You can’t separate the author from the contents of His book! Expecting to claim “natural law” in order to hold onto a system of consecutive polygamy while denouncing and abolishing the array of sodomous practices and ideology (thereby rescuing our threatened religious liberty) will never be permitted by the God of the bible, Who is sovereign over all of it. Abolishing consecutive polygamy requires unabashed references to God and His moral standard, as well as to the full consequences of not seeking to reinforce His standard of holiness in our law and in our societal mores. Defeating the Sexual Revolutionaries requires His supernatural intervention because of the profound spiritual warfare involved, and we must entreat Him for that intervention as purified vessels, giving Him all the glory and honor when He accomplishes it for us. Being public about these truths costs potential book sales and probably won’t put “standerinfamilycourt” at the top of the list of speakers to invite to the next traditional family conference of any size and financial consequence. In the big picture, that really only matters with regard to fundraising for the 501c4 being contemplated to fill the enormous gap left by the Christian legal defense ministries who won’t touch constitutional and religious freedom appeals of state unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws against the deep pockets of the state AG’s, profiteering bar associations, Lambda Defense, HRC and the ACLU, should one or more of these challenges ever succeed in the lower courts. However, whenever Jesus wanted to get something big done, He provided a fish or two, and on one such occasion, it was even a fish with a gold coin in its mouth. And He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were unable to catch Him in a saying in the presence of the people; and being amazed at His answer, they became silent.
– Luke 20:25-26
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