by Standerinfamilycourt
And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.
– Malachi 2:15
We periodically rerun the book series by the late Assemblies of God pastor and bible college president Milton T. Wells on our Facebook page, because until the mid-2000’s no book came closer to the undiluted truth of God concerning man’s “divorce” and adulterous remarriage. John Piper’s books are roughly equivalent to Wells’ book, but they don’t teach (nor does Dr. Piper actually practice) disciplined hermeneutics necessary to overcome all the damage that’s been done to our contemporary English language bible translations. Rev. Wells’ deeper concern for a better hermeneutical grasp is probably due to the fact that he was an Arminian who believed that the “born again” (those sealed with the indwelling Holy Spirit) can still walk away from the faith and wind up in hell, rather than a Calvinist who believes all eternal losses for the born-again Christian are limited to “loss of rewards”.
Yet the fact remains that both Wells and Piper came to the same unsupported conclusion, that despite “remarriage” being adultery by the rigorous case they each made, and despite Paul’s multiple warnings that unrepented adulterers have no inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, both concluded the “remarried” must not leave their continuously-adulterous civil-only union to put their covenant family back together, or (failing that) to obey Paul in remaining celibate until that true spouse has passed away. Both men presented impeccable, or near-impeccable cases for why these subsequent unions are not actual marriages in God’s eyes, yet neither shepherd managed to follow the case they made to its unavoidable conclusion concerning true repentance and restitution. More than one previous post has dissected Piper’s faulty (and sometimes spuriously dishonest) assumptions about this, so we won’t repeat what was said earlier. We will focus here on what Rev. Wells had to say (with the denomination’s General Superintendent literally looking directly over the author’s shoulder as the latter wrote the Foreword to Wells’ book).
From pages 48 through 51 (Chapter VII) of the original text….
“Many a spouse of an unscriptural union is in deep distress when he (or she) learns through the reading of the Scripture that he (or she) is party to an unscriptural union. A letter written to C. Morse Ward, speaker on Revivaltime, a gospel broadcast of the Assemblies of God, is typical. It follows, in part, as it appeared in The Gospel Gleaners:
Dear Brother Ward,
I have lived in sin and rebellion against God, but now I want to live wholly for Christ no matter what the cost. I have three living husbands, and a voice keeps telling me I should leave the husband to whom I am now married. He says that he does not know what he would do were I to leave him. Am I responsible for this man’s soul? I am restless and constantly haunted that I am living in adultery. I have four married children and I want to be a better testimony to them. My present husband has given me a beautiful home, and we have all the money we need, but how can I enjoy it?
Mrs.____.
A portion of C. Morse Ward’s answer follows: At the well of Samaria Jesus met a woman who had a similar problem. It is interesting to read that story in the Gospel of John, chapter 4. She had had five husbands and Jesus said of her present companion, ”He whom thou now hast is not thy husband.” There is no direct statement that Jesus sent her back to any one of the five.
( 
SIFC: We dealt hermeneutically with the above popular heresy of C. Morse Ward in this post, “What About That Samaritan Woman?”)
“Sin tangles our lives to such an extent that although forgiveness can be obtained, certain things can never be straightened out. Paul could never bring back to life the Christians he had slain as Saul, the persecutor. Much of the havoc he wrought in his rage against Christ (Acts 8:3) he could never undo. He simply lived by this rule: “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:13,14. It seems to me that there are certain things that you are powerless to undo. “
( SIFC: Since living on, unrepentant, in a state of ongoing sin necessarily takes a person in the opposite direction of sanctification needed to reach the marriage supper of the Lamb, we have valid cause to question how one can reasonably expect to “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”, while continuing to covet and retain the purloined spouse of another living person with whom God did not make you sarx mia, but instead, you made yourself hen soma. The idea that we “can’t undo” a human fiction is (well) fictional. David righteously recovered his God-joined covenant wife Michal from Paltiel, though he also had non-covenant wives (some of them widows) with whom he was only hen soma. John the Baptizer told Herod in no uncertain terms “it is not lawful for you to have YOUR BROTHER’s wife” after there was no question from historical accounts that he had “married” her under Jewish law. Comparing the sinful past ACTS of taking the life of the saints, with the ongoing sin of continuing on with driving a stolen car, or spending from a stolen wallet, or continuing to sleep with the God-joined spouse of another living person is comparing apples to oranges, and is dishonest at best. )
It is true that you have your present husband to consider. Do you want to leave him a divorced man? Would he then be clear to marry again?
( SIFC: Here’s where building on a right, hermeneutical foundation as laid out by Jesus in Matthew 19:6,8 is crucial to getting the answers to these questions right. The foremost consideration with both our covenant and any non-covenant “spouse” is whether they would or could die in a continuous state of sin that will keep them out of heaven, according to what clear scripture says — ignored by “Brother Ward” here, if we don’t take the right action to fully repent. How can we legitimately say we “love” someone or anyone if we don’t care about where they will spend their eternity? Will this guy be left “a divorced man”? Not likely, unless he already was one civilly before entering the “marriage”.
Yes, he’ll be civilly divorced as a result of the required act of repentance, but we have to look at what Jesus said about the validity of the union to begin with, and we have to look at where Jesus said “divorce” comes from…and doesn’t come from. “Brother Ward” is once again conveniently ignoring crystal-clear scriptures: “He said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not [ever] been this way. ‘” If this “husband” has a living, estranged wife, exiting the false “marriage” frees him to redeem the generational sin of what he’s done and put his covenant family back together with the one he never actually ceased to be married to. Can this released “husband” remarry? That obviously depends on whether he, too, has a living, estranged true spouse of his youth. He may remarry her, or if there is no “her” he may marry for the FIRST time.)
You won’t solve one question by creating a dozen new ones. Entering a sort of Protestant cloister is not the answer to your problem. The answer to your problem is in the words of Jesus to another woman, ”Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” 27
( SIFC: An essential part, we would respectfully submit, to “go and sin no more” is this: “Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.” – 1 Corinthians 6;18-20. In light of what Christ said about becoming a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of God in identical circumstances (Matthew 19:12), it’s hard to square “Brother Ward’s” out-of-context advice with the bulk of in-context scripture.
(C. M. Ward: “Letter Column,” Gospel Gleaners, September 2, 1956, Springfield, Missouri, Gospel Publishing House.)
“Some conservative teachers of the doctrine of divorce find in I Cor.7:10,11,17 and 20 permission by the Apostle Paul for converted spouses of adulterous unions, contracted before they were regenerated, to remain together. They base their conviction on the Scriptures and reasons which follow. The Apostle said. “And unto the married I command . . . Let not the wife depart from her husband” (I Cor. 7: 10). These teachers reason that this statement has reference to both valid and adulterous marriages, since it is assumed that there must have been many converts in the Corinthian Church who had been married the second time before they were both born of the Spirit, and whose first mates were still living when they entered the Church.
( SIFC: Such “conservative teachers of the doctrine of divorce” to whom Rev. Wells refers, still are not applying principled hermeneutics, but he fails to blow the “h”-whistle on them here, whereas some contemporary pastors have done so in recent years. We previously dealt with this popular 1 Corinthians 7 faux pas in this blog post, and again in this one. Following through on what Jesus repeatedly said about the invalidity of subsequent “marriages” while our original spouse still lives, and what Paul repeatedly said about the only thing that “dissolves” our original marriage, it is a stretch to envision anyone who is not either widowed or never-married being “called” while in anything but our original God-joined union, plus a possible tacked-on, papered-over immoral relationship.)
Was not Corinth a city notorious for its licentiousness? It is believed by these teachers that the Apostle was referring to Christian spouses of adulterous unions in I Cor. 7: 17, and 20. “Only, let each member go on living in the same condition which the Lord originally allotted to him, and in which he was when he heard God’s call” (I Cor. 7: 17, A. S. Way’s translation). “In whatever condition of life each one heard God’s call, in that let him remain” (I Cor.7:20, A. S. Way).
( SIFC: Remember when we spoke earlier of the General Superintendent literally looking over author Wells’ shoulder? Watch below for how our intrepid author — whom you can almost see holding his nose as he types away, navigates the “pickle” he has pulled out of the canning jar… On the “plus” side, this isn’t a dedicated chapter, but is mercifully buried in the Appendix. How ironic that a hermeneutically-meticulous shepherd is forced to relax the disciplined hermeneutics which his denominational superiors felt free to ignore with their bone-headed, politically correct insertions!)
Ralph M. Riggs, the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God (1956) presents the status of those described thus: When the Passover blood was applied to the door posts and lintels of the Jewish home in Egypt. Jehovah said, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). A new life begins at Calvary. Jesus’ cleanses the past and accepts us as we are when we come to Him. “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife” (I Corinthians7, 20, 27), “This is good for the present distress,” Paul said concerning their problems then. The same can be said of our similar problem now. Art thou bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Let the status quo prevail. The past is under the Blood. Start life anew as a new creature in Christ Jesus. To this agree the experiences of many forgiven Blood-bought souls and the witness of the blessed Holy Spirit…
( SIFC: Above is the last thing the author said – through others – of what the individual Christian should do who, for whatever reason, is in an adulterous “remarriage” to someone else’s God-joined spouse — and not even Wells’ own words or thoughts, but quoting the words and thoughts of those who outranked him in the denomination, before he himself moves on to tackle the “safer” subject of adulterously remarried church leaders and their role in the church…. until Wells finally says this to wrap up, in his own words:)
“God indeed genuinely saves the souls of men and women of unions disapproved by Christ who sin in ignorance during their unregenerate state, but when Christian professors continue deliberately to walk in darkness, they cannot claim I John 1:7. “But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. ”
( SIFC: Rev. Wells would have surely been aghast, had he lived long enough to witness the development of homosexual “marriage” in civilly-legal form. Might he have taken a bit different position than the above, had the Lord had a chance to make His own LGBT counterpoint to this spurious argument before Rev. Wells graduated to heaven? We dealt more fully with this popular “last resort” heresy, after all the other “exceptions” and human excuses fail rigorous scriptural examination, in our earlier post, “But Mr. (or Mrs.) New Creation Hasn’t Passed Away”.)
The passages discussed above (I Cor.7:10, 17, 20, and I Tim.3:2) may give evidence that God tolerates the continuation of an unscriptural marital relationship entered into before conversion, but they do not indicate that, by them, God validates such a union as acceptable and approved by Himself any more than He approved of Israel’s having a king, although He tolerated it. See a fuller treatment of
I Cor.7:10,17,20 in the Appendix on pages 108 through 112 and I Tim 3:2 on page162. The texts will there be viewed in the light of their context.”
( SIFC: Rev. Wells suggests above, apparently without a lot of personal conviction that marked all that he had to say in the body of his book, that the last-mentioned scriptures “may” provide evidence that God “tolerates” departures from Christ’s commandment to allow living on in a union God did not join, and then he gratuitously splits hairs between God’s “acceptance” and His “tolerance”. This, of course, flies completely in the face of Jesus’ message in the sermon on the mount, where Jesus declared such days to be over, and kingdom of God standards to be in full effect henceforth. There is no objective biblical evidence that Paul recognized man’s divorce as dissolving holy matrimony in anything he said in 1 Corinthians 7, or that he ever addressed “divorced” people anywhere in that chapter. )
In conclusion, even if such “toleration” were true in the 1st century church, how could such possibly still be valid, 18 centuries later, especially after history tells us the saints of the first four centuries of the church had eradicated divorce and remarriage so completely that, as Rev. Wells himself quotes historian Kenneth E. Kirk in documenting, that this New Testament morality controlled the church and general culture for 15 of those centuries, despite the fact that the concept was completely new to the world up to that point?
“What is more astounding than the mere fact that the early Church taught and practiced the complete indissolubility of marriage for so long, is the fact that the Church chose to take its stand against the strong contemporary lax social and legal attitudes toward divorce which prevailed so universally all about them. The Church, today, feels that it is on the horns of a dilemma, because so many divorcees are coming to her for help and encouragement. Shall she accommodate the Scriptures to the apparent need of the unfortunate divorcees, or shall she uphold the Biblical standard of the indissolubility of marriage for any cause while faithfully discharging her duty to such distressed individuals? Every church of today which considers the lowering of its divorce standards should remember that the early Church stood true to the Biblical doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage in a world that was pagan and strongly opposed to the moral and marriage standards of the New Testament. Not only did the Church maintain her stand on the indissolubility in the early centuries, she changed the attitude and standards of the whole world toward it. Even today the whole Church of Christ and the entire western world is still reaping the rich benefits of that heritage. Shall the Christian Church of today be less courageous and faithful than the Church of the early centuries of the Christian era? Does she not under God have the same spiritual resources?
“There were other grievous social evils in the early Christian centuries. Slavery enveloped the Roman Empire of that age, yet the Christians did not set themselves to change the thinking of the masses against it, but they did set themselves to change the thinking of the masses toward marriage and divorce. Why did they not attack slavery with the same vehemence? The reason was that the Apostles had not received a “thus saith the Lord” from Christ respecting it. They had, however, received such in the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. No sect or school of philosophy is known to have influenced the early Church in this teaching. From whence, then, did she get the teaching? Certainly she received it from the teaching of the Gospels and from the teaching of the Apostles, who had earlier conveyed the same orally (as well as in writing) to the leaders of the early Church who succeeded them.”
No, such accommodation is strictly carnal man’s idea, and indulging it inevitably leads precisely to a place Rev. Wells also did not live long enough to witness: pollster George Barna famously documenting in 2000 that a full 90% of the evangelical respondents he surveyed admitting two things, as a matter of fact:
(1) their last “remarriage” occurred after, not before, they considered themselves “born again”
(2) at least one divorce had also taken place at their own initiation or mutual consent since their salvation experience.
If indissolubility was in reality a part-time, circumstantial “ideal”, without heaven or hell consequences for living in willful disobedience, it would hardly have been worth Rev. Wells’ studious efforts to write this book in the first place! The concept of indissolubility (as contrasted with the ideal of “permanence”) demands its unavoidable conclusion with regard to what repentance from an unlawful union entails, especially in light of what Jesus said in Matthew 5:30-31, and said again in Luke 16:18-31.
The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe. – Proverbs 29:25
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. – Romans 6:1-4
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