by Standerinfamilycourt

For both prophet and priest are polluted;
Even in My house I have found their wickedness,” declares the Lord.
…Moreover, among the prophets of Samaria I saw an offensive thing:
They prophesied by Baal and led My people Israel astray.
 “Also among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing:
The committing of adultery and walking in falsehood;
And they strengthen the hands of evildoers,
So that no one has turned back from his wickedness.
All of them have become to Me like Sodom,
And her inhabitants like Gomorrah.

– Jeremiah 23: 11, 13-14

“standerinfamilycourt” should have been absolutely elated and jumping for joy when a leading Christian activist for repeal of unilateral, “no-fault” divorce in Texas recently posted these two YouTube videos of marriage permanence sermons delivered in the past few days in a large Dallas-area megachurch.    Not only did this pastor muster the courage to deliver the “u-haul sermon”  without the usual fawning apologies for stepping on congregational toes, but he….

– delivered this in a very engaging, winsome way….
– based it on the sermon on the mount, with mostly correct, accurate insights in at least the first video about the purpose and effects of TSOM…
– effectively set aside all the usual cultural excuses (except one) for Christians living contrary to what Christ clearly taught…
– acknowledged, albeit a bit hollowly,  that the one-flesh entity is created only by God’s hand….
– actually vocalized the term “serial monogamy” in a denouncing tone…
– admitted that denominations, pastors and churches had sold out due to cowardice on this topic, both politically and in church…and
– admitted that God’s laws cannot be escaped simply by ignoring them.

It was clear that some combination of marriage permanence authors, covenant marriage standers, and our friend, the activist were having a meaningful influence on this pastor, and perhaps on others like him.    But… since SIFC’s focus is on the souls involved, and then on legal reforms needed to redeem our nation (in that order), no rejoicing was actually possible.    The activist is in a second “marriage” while the wife of his youth, who divorced him and “remarried” first, still lives.    His second “wife” is actually another man’s estranged one-flesh wife.    Both shepherd and sheep here labor under the delusion of a “safe harbor” presumed to be found in Deuteronomy 24:1-4, and the (hireling) shepherd made another video in 2015 stating that the only conditions under which he will officiate a wedding over someone with a living, estranged spouse is when said spouse has “remarried” first under the immoral civil laws of men.    Says he (applaudably), he’s motivated and convicted by the need to steer clear of hindering family reconciliation, but (shamefully), when man’s paper has covered over an immoral relationship, reconciliation is thereafter and forevermore deemed “impossible”, apparently finding at long last something too hard for God.

It’s obvious, of course, why such a pastor’s position would be immensely attractive to somebody who now is in the “remarried” position our activist friend finds himself in, and who may have arrived there 95% innocently (5% was the Holy Spirit putting a check in his spirit that went unheeded), and who might conceivably make a very different decision today based on what he’s learned since.    Such teaching is also irresistible to a Christian who has an unadmitted and unconfronted forgiveness problem because the treatment they got in the divorce process was so ugly, and the ongoing damages so deep.   Boy, if we can find a basis to believe that God made an exception for us and replicated that one-flesh entity between #2 and us, because by “remarriage”, #1 severed the prior supernatural one-flesh entity, what a relief!

Tellingly, there is no early church writing that shows those leaders interpreting Deuteronomy 24 as preventing covenant family wholeness after a spouse has returned from taking up legal residence in the “Far Country”.     Those true shepherds didn’t preach “permanence”, instead they preached indissolubility.    “Permanence” has the potential to cement in an immoral legalized relationship and keep us out of heaven.   Indissolubility cements in holiness and automatically invalidates that subsequent relationship in every case.

Deuteronomy 24 seems to make man’s divorce “real”, notwithstanding what Jesus said directly to the contrary in  Matthew 19:8, and seems to forbid our ever reconciling, all in one!    Or does it?     What does the bible actually say about that?

There is a strong reason SIFC led off the early 2016 “debunk” series with Deuteronomy 24 as the second blog in the series, immediately after hermeneutically laying the scriptural foundation found in Matthew 19:6 for the no-excuses life-long indissolubility of holy matrimony.    The “marital unfaithfulness”  exception clause arguments that had, for 100 years or so, manipulated Christ’s teaching in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 were wearing thin and were causing a portrayal of Christ as contradicting Himself – which is to be expected when there’s pre-1800’s concordance evidence still lying around showing that the Greek word “porneia” never has accurately translated into a post-marital sin.   Arguments from 1 Corinthians 7 around abandonment or “abuse” even more rapidly wear thin when Paul is portrayed within the very same bible chapter as contradicting himself.    The sheer genius of satan in elevating the Deuteronomy 24 argument as the new “go-to” strawman argument is, that this one is far more challenging to de-bunk.    Attempts to do so are subject to criticism that if Moses said it, how can it not be God-breathed?    How could Christ contradict Moses (though He very clearly did!) if He came to “fulfill the law” ?   Successfully debunking Deuteronomy 24 marriage heresies also requires a firm reliance on two doctrines (the true nature of one-flesh, and the true nature of the holy matrimony covenant),  that Christ preached, but no pastor today (well, no more than 7 or 8 pastors today) dare preach!   Our 2016 post covered all that, and more.

Upon further reflection since writing that original post, a few additional hermeneutic problems with Deuteronomy 24 have come to light that weren’t addressed in the earlier post, and SIFC has conferred with a couple of other gifted, Spirit-led scholars who contributed some good further insights.    An update at this time seems quite warranted to bring these new items forward, though every word of the old post remains just as valid as when they were penned three years ago.

Pastor Todd Wagner of Watermark Church treats Deuteronomy 24 as creating an all-time prohibition against returning to a covenant marriage after one of the spouses (evidently, without regard to which one) has remarried.   He justifies this by citing the desirability of “outlawing serial monogamy”, parroting  as he does all the conventional liberal commentators.   The implication in this sermon is of the wife remarrying, but “standerinfamilycourt” is willing to bet the farm that he actually applies it on a unisex basis in determining which subsequent weddings he’s willing to officiate over people whose true spouse is still living.    Is this valid, based on the face content and context of the Torah scripture?    Is it valid to extrapolate a Mosaic regulation which Christ actually abrogated in Matthew 5, to New Covenant practice?    If we must extrapolate and extend this Mosaic regulation, why then is eating shellfish OK today, along with not stoning our disobedient children to death?

Deuteronomy 24:1-4 is isolated from the rest of the marriage regulatory commandments Moses delivered in Deuteronomy 22, in a chapter that deals the rest of the time with non-marriage topics.    This fact alone should be treated with a certain level of care and deference in attempting to apply it broadly.   While the regulation in Deuteronomy 22 was fairly comprehensive and was broadly applicable, the instruction in Deuteronomy 24 is a conditional set of nested “if” statements aimed at narrowly regulating an evil practice.  That means, “if” the first condition (“when…”) is not met, there is no need to apply the second “if” condition, nor the subsequent ones.   Ditto for the third condition, if the 2nd one is not met, and so on.    With each iteration, the hermeneutically-responsible scope of application becomes narrower and narrower.    Unfortunately for our “remarried” activist friend, this means his situation will fall out of the logic at some point, and in fact, it does so in an early round.     Unfortunately for this pastor he admires, it should be obvious that Deuteronomy 24 cannot be applied on a unisex basis.   It is gender-specific for a purposeful reason, and that reason is not, as he suggests, prohibiting all covenant reconciliations, for all time.    It behooves us to look into what that purposeful reason for the regulation actually was, and keep investigating until the results square with all that Jesus (and His Apostle) clearly said to the contrary later on.

“standerinfamilycourt” commented on the facebook post:

When pastors “truth engineer”, it’s called EISEGESIS.   In the first 7 or 8 minutes of this — which are excellent to a point, we start seeing the eisegesis creep in when this pastor substitutes “intention” for “commandment” and when he focuses on this life going well, instead of eternal consequences of dying in a sinful relationship. If his theory were correct, there would have been no reason for Malachi, chapter 2, nor Ezra, chapters 9 and 10.   Furthermore, if this man’s theory were correct, the U.S. church and nation would not be under such harsh, advanced judgment from the Lord, whereby the salt (Matt. 5:13) has lost its savor (and we’re on the brink of losing our Bill of Rights and national sovereignty) — no longer good for anything except being trampled under foot.  The last several minutes of this video are a sophisticated, full-throated abuse of Deut. 24:1-4 which has several issues hermeneutically.

We know that Matt. 19:6 and 8 were not mere “intentions” because the imperative mood was consistently used, and because Jesus had just gone into the metaphysical reason (Greek: sarx mia, sunezeuxen) why there is no paper “divorce” even possible, hence no release from the ongoing adultery Christ repeatedly spoke of that always results [“EVERYONE who marries one who has been put away enters into a state of ongoing adultery” – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b; Luke 16:18-31].   As a result, people are still being deceived (even if the standards are a bit tighter these days in a few churches), and God IS still being mocked.  One can never walk by the Spirit while coveting and retaining some other living person’s God-joined spouse, and while forever rejecting one’s own God-joined spouse, and while bearing false witness about who our God-joined spouse is.   Genesis 15:8-17 illustrates the true nature of this unconditional covenant of holy matrimony, because it shows that the inferior (human) party can only violate that covenant, but can never break or dissolve it by any act short of physical death.

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

Until pastors realize that divorce causes people to die in legalized adultery and permanent irreconciliation with their God-joined spouse, and that dying this way always sends them to hell, churches will never be adequately onboard with the repeal of unilateral divorce laws sufficiently to prevail in repealing them in all 50 U.S. states.

I wish this pastor, who clearly means well, could meet Pastor Ray McMahon, or Pastor Stephen Wilcox, or Pastor Casey Whitaker, or Pastor Gino Jennings, or Pastor Phil Schlamp, or Dr. Joseph Webb.

Final thought: so long as pastors still continue to tickle ears by framing their messages humanistically, they are going to continue to miss the mark. Humanism has always been 100% incompatible with authentic discipleship — which is why we’re hearing about the evils of “divorce” far more than we’re hearing about the evils of “remarriage” and why dying in this sin is not being connected (unconscionably) with its eternal consequences the way Jesus connected them, and the way Paul connected them. Such things can only be preached theistically.

Some of the “truth engineering” going on with pastors who have run clean out of other arguments (directly due to increased awareness of lay disciples around sound principles of hermeneutics) for not urging people out of their covetous, legalized immoral relationships is the anti-Christ myth that once there’s paper around an immoral relationship, it is “sinful” to restore the covenant family. This saves a lot of embarrassment and public admission of wrongdoing when a hireling shepherd has defied Christ and performed an adulterous wedding. God still knows whom He has and HASN’T joined into the sarx mia entity, and with whom He is the superior party in an unconditional covenant (see Gen. 15:8-17). This popular heresy is the evangelical counterpart to the RCC’s God-mocking vehicle of “annulment”.

Further comments left on the YouTube videos (6/21/2019):

He’s on the right track (sort of) by appealing to the sermon on the mount… Piper is 98% truth, 2% heresy. This guy might be 99% truth, 1% heresy, but the standard in the kingdom of God is 0% heresy, because we’ve been given the indwelling Holy Spirit so that we would not mock God without internal misery from doing so.

The last several minutes are a sophisticated, full-throated abuse of Deut. 24:1-4 which has several issues hermeneutically: its conditionality (nested if’s), its murky scope, clearer NT scriptures from the mouth of Jesus that directly contradict, its gender application, the extrapolation of the “land” from Israel (for a specific, temporary OT purpose) to the U.S.A. — to name just a few of the hermeneutical issues.

If Jesus wanted Deut. 24 to be His standard for marriage “permanence” under the Messianic Covenant, He would never have bypassed that scripture and headed straight for Genesis 2:21 when He discussed it in Matt. 19.

 To this pastor’s credit, he alludes to the commandment nature @~2:30 when he says “…tariff engineering might allow you to escape the government’s ire, but truth engineering does not allow you to escape the Lord’s ‘intent’..”   He purports to tell us why, without ever getting to the true reason why: the consequences are eternal, Jesus tells us twice in no uncertain terms, not just temporal.   An “inescapable intent” is by its very nature a commandment , with an eternal consequence for disobeying and never truly repenting.

“The best way to interpret scripture is with scripture” is true enough, but this can and does still lead to error and humanistic bias, if all of the other hermeneutic principles (content, culture, context, and consultation) are ignored. Accuracy in this hermeneutical endeavor requires an accurate starting point to which all other scripture must be compared. Obviously this must begin with the words of Jesus, and it should provide the “why” not just a “what”. Then, after that, it must be 100% in line with everything else Jesus said (He was never schizophrenic – if He said something, there was a serious, eternal reason for it) not only on the topic, but on related heaven-or-hell topics like unforgiveness, irreconciliation, returning evil for evil, the externally-imposed requirement for a disciple to live as a eunuch, etc. In my opinion, the only thing Jesus said about the permanence of marriage that meets ALL of these conditions is… Matthew 19:6, 8

“So they are no longer [ never again , by the verb tense] two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no [hu]man separate [literally, put distance between]…Because of your hardness of heart MOSES permitted you to divorce [send away] your wives; but from the beginning it has not [ ever – by the verb tense] been this way.”

This is in the imperative voice and is therefore a commandment, not merely an “ideal” or “intention”.   It was on this basis that John the Baptizer told Herod “it is not lawful for your to have your brother’s wife.” Had he said, “God is really disappointed with you that you divorced your wife and married your brother’s ‘ex’, so try to stay faithful to her, OK?” he most likely would not have lost his head.

This, of course, is profoundly unpopular in Christendom because it significantly raises the moral standard from “permanence” (which makes all civilly-legal heterosexual marriages theoretically interchangeable morally – “love the one you’re with” ) …to absolute, no-excuses indissolubility . Further, it paints figures like Luther and Calvin as the moral heretics they actually were. It shines an intense light on the immoral living arrangements of many pastors, not to even mention the current POTUS and VPOTUS.

This pastor has said in a previous video that he officiates “weddings” over the legally-estranged-already-married.   He rationalizes (presumably based on gross eisegesis around Deuteronomy 24:1-4) that reconciliation is “impossible” in those cases.   Not only does this fallacy contradict Christ on several of those closely-related heaven-or-hell topics, empirical cases of believers putting their covenant families back together after a series of adulterous remarriages, even where the faux, paper “spouses” are still alive
( #somuch4irreconcilabledifferences on Facebook)… show that God engineers these reconciliations quite miraculously.   Why? Because He is not willing that any should perish, but everyone come to the knowledge of the truth!  Why?  Because He Himself is the superior party in the unconditional holy matrimony covenant — and out of 267 unconditional covenants mentioned in the bible from Genesis to Revelation, no theologian has ever been able to show a single instance where God failed to uphold the covenant or where He entered into a competing one.

That’s precisely what Malachi, chapter 2 is about. When that OT “pastor” divorced his wife and “married” another woman, it clearly broke fellowship with God until renouncement and repentance took place, but it did not break the original covenant itself:

“…I stand as a witness between you and the wife of your youth … she IS (not “was”) the companion of your marriage covenant…”

Make no mistake, pastors who defy God by performing weddings over the already-married-for-life, and who refuse to apologize for misusing the Lord’s name to perform a vain act , and who refuse to counsel these people to sever these papered-over immoral relationships so that they can recover their inheritance in the kingdom of God, will share in the coming judgment because they acted as a hireling (John 10:12-13; Ezekiel 34; Jeremiah 23: 11-14) instead of His faithful shepherd.

“Thou dost not take up the name of Jehovah thy God for a vain thing, for Jehovah acquitteth not him who taketh up His name for a vain thing.”    – Exodus 20:7, Young’s Literal Translation

99% truth, 1% heresy results in all heresy, in its eternal effect.

To close out the gender / unisex application issues with Deuteronomy 24, let’s go ahead and apply it to the immorally-abandoned activist who gave up on his own wife after a brief time, and “married” another man’s abandoned wife, justifying it by the same passage:

CONDITION 1:
“When a man hath taken a wife, and married her,

CONDITION 2:
and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement*, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.“

(* Houston pastor, Timothy Sparks has written a paper disputing the translation accuracy of the purported commandment, “let him write” in several translations, showing instead that the manuscript reflects more accurately as “and he writes” – a simple condition or observation by Moses only.)

Nevertheless, “standerinfamilycourt’s” understanding of the facts is that this gentleman did NONE of these things.  His one-flesh covenant wife, in fact, did all of them.  Hence, the next set of “ifs” in this narrow regulation does not apply.    He cannot, therefore, use Deuteronomy 24 to justify remaining in a “marriage” to another living man’s estranged wife which Jesus repeatedly called adulterous.     In fact, neither could he have used Deuteronomy 24 to justify entering the “remarriage” in the first place, because this conditional Mosaic regulation clearly does not discuss “remarriage” by the innocent male party.    What Jesus actually said in Matthew 19:6 and 12 is objectively more relevant to this man’s situation, where he was legally but immorally abandoned, than anything Moses said beyond Genesis 2:21-24.

So, under these circumstances, assuming a Mosaic regulation can be extrapolated to non-Hebrew disciples in 21st century U.S.A., is our activist prohibited from reconciling with his repenting, wayward covenant wife?    David didn’t think so when he recovered the wife of his youth,  Michal from Paltiel, to whom she was subsequently given, after David did not put her out of his house – no “defilement” there.   Hermes of Philopoulos , the 1st century author of the Shepherd of Hermas also didn’t think so (2nd book, Fourth Commandment on Putting One’s Wife Away For Adultery), even when the innocent husband “put away” the guilty wife.    The previous blog went into detail about how Christ’s delivery of the sermon on the mount abrogated and cancelled those various and sundry Mosaic regulations, to leave us with only the 10 Commandments, condensed down into just two.    But there’s a more obvious set of questions to ask when applying Deuteronomy 24 today:

“What ‘land’ was being defiled if a put-away wife was reconciled to her original husband after taking another husband?”

“What did the ‘defilement’ specifically consist of, and why was it considered ‘defilement’ in the first place?”

Scripture is quite specific about which land is within the scope of this narrow Mosaic regulation:   “thou shalt not cause the land to sin, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.”

Was the land of the United States of America, or the United Kingdom, or Canada, or Australia or Slovenia given to its citizens or their forebears by God, as an inheritance?     No!   There may have been God’s assistance in settling or conquering it,  and there may have further been an Israel-related purpose, in turn, for that, but nobody could argue that there was anything like the Abrahamic Covenant involved!     No, this instruction was specific to Israel!

So how about what the “defilement” was?    That actually circles back to why Deuteronomy 24 applied specifically to the genders as specified, and all of that points back to fulfillment of the prophecies and geneology around Jesus’ birth.     Of course, a man could not be involuntarily put out of his family or his house under the Hebrew legal system.    Women were routinely put out, though Jesus unequivocally declares that from the beginning this was never lawful in the kingdom of God.    Women only had two professions available for their survival, if they had no grown sons to support them:  wife or prostitute.    The law of stoning made the bill of divorcement a survival necessity, as evidence she wasn’t committing adultery in the legal sense, even if she was still committing adultery in both professions in the moral sense.    Her parents typically didn’t live that long, and even if they did, returning to their house would have involved return of the bride price that was paid.    If she became another man’s wife then returned to her original husband, there was potential for the tribal blood lines to get crossed as children were born.   None of this necessarily means that the one-flesh entity created at her first wedding was actually severed, nor does it mean that God created a new one-flesh entity with the second husband, who for that matter, could have been a concurrent polygamist under the culture of the times.

This would have impacted Christ’s blood lines, potentially.     There were longstanding prophecies about that, which further necessitated this Mosaic concession to the pre-Christ depravity of men that their rabbinic tradition wrongly allowed and facilitated (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).     Christ then arrived on the scene incarnate,  the risk of “defilement” ended thereby, and the Mosaic Covenant was officially replaced with the Messianic Covenant (as also laid down in prophecy).    It was now okay for Him to abrogate this Mosaic regulation along with all of the others, to clear the way for the higher moral standards of the Messianic Covenant which would now apply to both Jews and Gentiles.    As He said in Matthew 5:17,  He was thereby fulfilling the law, not prematurely setting it aside, nor “overriding Moses”,  as many of the remarriage apologists love to incorrectly argue.

So, is this pastor’s practice of officiating the weddings of divorced people whose spouses are still living, just because they’ve “married” others already, ever defensible biblically?  Is it ever not misusing the Lord’s name to perform a vain act?   Again, the answer must be:   no!     The nested “if’s” cannot be applied to the benefit of our activist’s guilty covenant wife, nor can they be applied to his #2, the innocent wife who was involuntarily put away, to prevent her from reconciling with the repenting husband or her youth….

The claim that adulterous intervening “remarriage” precludes and overrides the commandment to forgive and reconcile fails on all counts.   

Pastors who sincerely want to bring about a church culture of reformation and repentance must unlearn their politically safe and “aesthetically-pleasing” concept of “permanence” (which they also seek to apply to legalized unions that Jesus clearly, repeatedly and consistently called ongoing adultery while making no exceptions)…and learn the morally-stricter concept of indissolubility which Christ actually taught in that sermon on the mount.   It will be exceedingly messy, and look horrible as the repentance process is taking place (so did the God-commanded sending away of almost 150 unlawful wives of priests with their children, in Ezra’s time), but it is only at this point that the Bridegroom will stop being openly mocked by His bride, the church.  It is only at this point that His bride will cease being deceived, and at the same time, persecuted for standing up (without personal moral authority to do so) for “biblical morals” in others outside the church.   It is only at this point that God’s protective hand will return, and the days of His escalating chastisement will be at an end.   Perhaps it will be at this point, if it comes soon enough, that God’s hand will suddenly peel back and overthrow the immoral civil laws that have heavily yoked us for 50 years in the United States.

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot.   So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth…..He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.    – Revelation 3:15, 22

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