by Standerinfamilycourt
Ye adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity against God? – James 4:4
Occasionally, “standerinfamilycourt” is forced to ban someone from our pages who is a persistent troll, who vehemently disagrees with our message, and who has as little respect for the purposeful decorum and mission of Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional and this blog page as they have respect for God’s word, rightly divided. When such a person is an unchurched heathen or self-professed atheist, it’s sad enough, but when it’s someone steeped in contemporary “churchianity” who is in dire circumstances, and has been through the typical rough times that everyone who has suffered the larceny and indignity of being betrayed and involuntarily divorced has suffered, it’s downright heartbreaking. However, from the beginnings back in 2014, the planning for these pages involved a strict “troll policy”, knowing that our message…
(1) would be tremendously unpopular with pew-sitter and pagan alike, and
(2) nevertheless, still needed the dignity to reach and persuade powerful people in the church, media, and government with scriptural truth which has not been manipulated by rogue bible publishers for well over 100 years.
Our pages were deliberately not set up as group forums, and consequently are not the place to debate theology. There are hundreds of other places to do that. Our page has the deliberately-planned mission and purpose which will not “morph” for as long as it takes to accomplish that mission and purpose, or to silence us altogether. We do our very best to put the rightly-divided word of God out there as it appears in the original manuscript texts, after rigorously applying a full range of sound hermeneutical principles, as all worthy books by others on this topic do, and as all heretical books on this topic deliberately omit. That’s the way it’s always been on our pages, and we bend for no one who can’t present solid proof according to hermeneutical principles and original texts that we’re materially wrong. So far in a little over five years, no one has done so. Instead, the usual challenge is thick with ad hominem, and appeals to what hireling celebrity pastors have to say.
A recently-banned individual is physically suffering from a debilitating degenerative disease, whose covenant wife abandoned him because of it, and divorced him to adulterously “marry” another. This man is an extreme example of what compromised church leadership often leaves pages like ours contending with. He works at Walmart and became a drain on the household income and self-indulgent lifestyle that many in our culture feel entitled to. Having been cruelly abandoned for greener pastures, he now desires to “marry” a female caretaker and feels there surely is an “exception” to Christ’s “unreasonable” moral code for people like him. When he failed to secure “standerinfamilycourt’s” assent for this based on circumstances and a “God” who would never be that “unfair”, he next set his jaw on arguing his legalistic interpretation of Christ’s remarriage prohibition by strict application of gender, which he presumes provides him his “out”. Obviously, he could go to almost any hireling pastor and get a hearty pat on the back for both his theory and his “plan”, most likely dubbing it as “God’s ‘provision”. SIFC, however, told him in no uncertain terms he would lose his soul if he indulges this plan of his, and that he needed to take counsel that he was no bible scholar. This led to public charges of “arrogance” and “judging” directed at us, and he was issued the standard “troll warning”.
Having no appetite to invest time and posting space in a balanced, hermeneutical debate on rightly-dividing Matt. 7: 1-3, he was cut off when he ignored the troll warning. People who follow our pages regularly get a balanced view on the topic of “judging” people inside and outside the church, as well as a chance to frequently observe the cultural havoc that antinomianism has wreaked in the church ever since the Reformation.
Standing firm for biblical moral absolutes in a wicked, selfish evangelical culture absolutely guarantees the perception of “arrogance” on SIFC’s part. Long have we been accused by so-called “Christians” of “driving” people (potential converts, they mean) away. These people who say this are shameless emotional bullies, and SIFC will not be shamed (or bullied) in the name of Jesus. Long have we been accused of having no empathy or “compassion” for people’s human weaknesses, even after we point out that, according to scripture, this life is a “mist or vapor” and that eternity is forever. As this individual vigorously attempted to do, we are regularly accused of personally “condemning people to hell” – a superpower we repeatedly assure people God did not grant us. Pointing to the fact that Jesus’ words in Luke 16:18-31 also “condemned people to hell” who pursued non-widowed remarriage (and their “best life now”) did no good whatsoever. In their mind, the Sovereign Creator of heaven and earth has no righteous authority to set moral absolutes for the building of holy character, nor for the good of society as a whole. All humanists believe this, which is why humanism is always completely incompatible with true discipleship. Speaking of hell, this person tellingly likened obeying Christ in this area of sexual ethics to being “condemned” to living the rest of his natural life “in hell”, completely oblivious to the volumes that such an attitude speaks of the person’s actual relationship with Jesus, who apparently isn’t enough for him. Another male commenter on our page (bless him!) attempted in vain to point out this latter observation to the wounded gentleman — who had repeatedly pressed the same lines of argument on other recent posts without violating the troll policy.
So, what is this gender-based eisegesis, and has it been contagious? In a certain sense, it’s not really that new. The Judaizers who try to justify and promote both consecutive and concurrent polygamy have a very similar legalistic argument, actually — and not too coincidentally, they are typically professing Christian men who have been badly burnt by a faultless unilateral divorce they got no say in (join the club, gentlemen). Their pores absolutely ooze resentment while they claim to have “forgiven” their “ex” wives like the Good Book tells us to. In this particular manifestation, our now-banned outraged troll posited the following (after previously exhausting several other arguments on other threads that were just as silly and unfounded)….
“my ‘ex’ divorced me, I didn’t divorce her. In Matthew, it doesn’t talk about the wife divorcing her husband. It says only if the husband divorces his wife and marries another woman is anybody committing adultery. I’m not marrying a divorced woman and I didn’t do the divorcing, so how can I be guilty of adultery if I remarry? If you’re going to throw out one thing Jesus said, you might as well throw all of it out.”
Besides an allegedly “selective” hermeneutic, SIFC was literally accused by this chap of having a log in the eye, but the irony of the above statement is rich, is it not? Our determined critic doesn’t mind throwing out every bit of what Jesus (more importantly and centrally) said in Matthew 19:6,8 about man’s divorce not only being immoral, but also metaphysically impossible. Our amorous friend was determined to hyperfocus on the what, because he didn’t dare attend to the why of what Jesus actually made an undeniably consistent pattern of saying, in elaboration to His indissolubility proclamation. Grab a snatch of God’s word a la carte and completely ignore all context involved. Ignore also what all of the apostles and earliest church fathers unanimously echoed in their writings. Not very originally, our troll friend threw nearly every conventional argument out there that all determined remarriage adulterers invariably do (not “the unpardonable sin”, Jesus “allowed” divorce and remarriage for “sexual immorality”, etc. etc.), before tossing this one last salvo out there. If there was a touch of originality to this final argument of his, it was in the transparent feeble-mindedness of it, so we hope it doesn’t sprout legs and journey destructively through the marriage permanence community the way several other feeble-minded heresies have nevertheless done.
Moses did indeed deliver his regulations in a gender-specific fashion, but that doesn’t mean Jesus also did, even if one of His scribes chose a writing style that spoke to a patriarchally-oriented Hebrew culture to whom he was recounting the same incident as Mark related to a Gentile audience that included both sexes equally. Jesus issued the most famous sermon in history in order to abrogate most of the sayings of Moses with a higher moral law than “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth”…. “it is written….but I say unto you….MOSES allowed…but I say unto you….”
Another of Jesus’ scribes and one of his apostles both took pains to point out where the resurrection of Christ deliberately put men and women on equal footing when it comes to obeying Him from an authentic and sincerely grateful place in our hearts, not merely following a mechanical legality to the letter while finding a loophole for the unpalatable core principle involved. “If I can’t get out of responsibility for my marriage even when my wife is unfaithful”, the disciples reasoned, “it’s better never to marry at all…” As we see in scripture, several of them later changed their accustomed humanistic bias about this matter, and grew spiritually into teaching the same no-excuses unisex indissolubility that Jesus taught.
And He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her; and if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery.”
– Mark 10:11-12
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
– Galatians 3:28
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!