An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach,not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money.He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity (but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?),and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil.And he must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. – 1 Timothy 3:2-7
J D Hall of Pulpit and Pen broke a tragic revelation* last week, which the rest of the media quickly grabbed up in their own headlines. Satan had brought down yet another high-profile evangelical pastor, using head-slander against his own one-flesh wife and the allure of another man’s wife. Satan had successfully attacked not just one, but two covenant families– and a church congregation in the process.
(*Small silver lining:J D Hall “gets it” when it comes to the perverse relationship between “family courts” and the evangelical churches, and doesn’t mind using his microphone to enlighten his evangelical listeners. Don’t miss the excellent listening between 8:38 and 10:08 minutes into the linked Pulpit & Pen podcast, January 12, 2018 about the dissipated moral authority of the church which prefaces the description of Hall’s phone conversations with Locke.)
The social media report last week was, that outspoken (some would say, angry-spirited) neo-conservative Pastor Greg Locke had accused his wife of 20 years of being mentally-ill, had filed for divorce and had sent her away on a bus without their two natural and two adopted children, who will be in the joint custody of himself and his mother. Further, he had recently installed his wife Melissa’s “best friend” as an administrative assistant at Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee (suburb of populous and affluent Nashville) which Locke founded in 2006, and Locke was allegedly dating this woman who had also filed a recent divorce petition against her own husband.
(from the church website staff page, 1/17/2018)
If this scenario is beginning to sound like deja vu to the readers, there’s good reason it does. The Locke cult-following (some even within the circle of covenant marriage standers) were indignant, unable to believe it could possibly be true, and were chiding the re-posted reports as “shameful gossip”. Meanwhile, many standers who have been down this infidelity road with their own spouse were finding it hard to overlook all of the telltale signs in this sorry story, and the familiar narcissism in Locke’s video statement from January 11, (which Locke has apparently had the common sense to take down in the days since he posted it). Evidently, the podcast link in the first paragraph above is the only place to get back to at least the Pulpit & Pen audio of the video that was taken down this week from Locke’s public figure facebook page, the relevant portion starting at approx. 17:30 minutes.
Locke, of course, fancied that “damage-control” was possible (and probably necessary) with his 1 million+ facebook following, so he posted this now-removed video to his wall late last Thursday, implying that his wife (not he) had filed the divorce, while giving various conflicting time frames for her departure. He blamed his “haters” and in a tearful plea, insisted “I’m not an adulterer.” Not even in his heart, apparently. He said his church was “fully aware” of his relationship with the other woman (we suppose so, since they had “agreed” to put her on staff), and said the church was “walking beside him” in his “brokenness” (as opposed to taking the biblical step of asking Locke to step away from ministry for the season needed to attend to his family). According to the podcast audio recounting Hall’s very recent phone interview with Locke, Pulpit & Pen challenged Locke’s statement that the divorce was final, as Locke strongly implied in the video. It is very disturbing indeed that Locke tearfully concluded the now-removed video as follows (approximately 26:30):
“I told them [his GVBC congregation], ‘I’ve gotta move forward with MY kids, and with MY life’….and people are, like, are you going to reconcile, are you going to work on it? Do you understand if you’ve ever been divorced, that divorce is the finality of what you’ve been working on. It’s not the beginning and the cause of it.” – Locke, January 11, 2018
He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. – Matthew 19:8
A wife is bound as long as her husband lives; but if her husband is dead, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. – 1 Cor. 7:39
Approximately 23:25 into the Pulpit & Pen podcast, there is discussion of the counsel Greg Locke said (to J D Hall and Locke’s facebook audience) that he had sought from Charles Stanley’s ministry in Atlanta, GA. Stanley’s wife Anna (deceased since 2014) obtained a civil divorce from Charles in 2000 after 42 years of marriage, and about seven years of legal separation. Unlike Greg Locke, Stanley is accountable to a church board, and Stanley’s church board voted that he not step down so long as Stanley remains unmarried (per the biblical instruction in 1 Cor. 7:11). To-date, there has been no evidence at all that Stanley has not done so. Presumably, he has also honored the Lord by remaining celibate.
In other words, unlike Greg Locke, Charles Stanley is a covenant marriage “stander”, and unlike Greg Locke, Charles Stanley is now eligible to remarry if the Lord should so lead. “Standerinfamilycourt” takes exception, in this age of unilateral divorce, to the notion that a celibate, standing pastor whose children are grown and gone, raised orderly, should step down. (SIFC has full respect for those who reasonably disagree on the basis that such a pastor failed to properly care for his wife according to Ephesian 5.) In our humble opinion, at any rate, the board of First Baptist Church in Atlanta seems to have handled Mrs. Stanley’s prodigal departure in a way the Apostle Paul would have approved.
By contrast, Locke’s Global Vision Bible Church is independent, and similar to the Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) denominational background Locke first pastored in before founding his present church, there appears to be no church board to be accountable to, according to our search of the church’s website. Any comparison Locke makes of himself with Charles Stanley is totally spurious, therefore. According to accounts that various church members gave to J D Hall, Locke issued an ultimatum one autumn 2017 Sunday to his congregation (last 15 minutes of the link) after Melissa’s departure, and he has no intention of stepping back or stepping down, despite the fact that his young family is not well-governed as the qualification scripture for pastors (1 Timothy 3:2-7) requires. If he “marries” the adulteress Tai McGee to keep his position, he will no longer be “the husband of one wife”. All of the above is the classic scenario of how so many legalized adulterers come to replace chaste, biblically-qualified pastors behind our evangelical pulpits in the harlot church. Is there any wonder why God’s judgment is falling so heavily on His church?
Another pastor, Stephen Anderson, of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, AZ (another Independent Fundamental Baptist church, denominational membership, about 8 million) is a marriage permanence pastor who has done videos criticizing fallen, high-profile pastors who refuse to repent from their adultery and also refuse to step down from ministry, most notably Kent Hovind, whose adulterous remarriage in early 2016 to divorcee Mary Trocco is already in divorce proceedings (mercifully). In this video, Anderson echoes what Hall said about pastor qualifications, and the need for Locke to step down.
Anderson had been critical of Locke in an early 2016 video for a reason we don’t concur with, namely Locke’s backing away from the extreme Calvinist doctrine, “once saved, always saved” in Global Vision’s doctrine statement. Our position on the nature of justification and sanctification can be read here, and also here. Anderson goes so far as to question whether Locke has had a genuine born-again experience, due to this theology difference and Locke’s public persona, which we probably should not be judging until Mr. Locke has had an opportunity to “finish the race”, though we know the evangelical church in general is full of false converts. The theological criticism and Anderson’s questioning of the social media / political route Locke took to gather his following all arose before there were indications of marriage problems between the Lockes. Although we disagree with that aspect of Anderson’s criticism, his biblical observations about putting away Melissa, taking up with another man’s wife, and the condition of Locke’s family calling for him to step away from ministry at this time are all spot-on, echoing J D Hall.
In looking at accounts of Locke’s upbringing, divorce and adulterous remarriage is an unresolved generational issue in his family, and the trademark angry spirit with which Locke tears into liberals and the gay community, he apparently came by as a result of the divorce and remarriage-related family strife in his young years. Locke’s mother “divorced” his father after her true husband was sent to prison, and “married” another man when Locke was only five years old. Understandably, this usurper and his “step-son” did not get along. Before his conversion experience outside the family, Locke had various brushes with the law. But nobody ever went back and taught Locke that his mother’s soul was endangered because she was living in ongoing adultery, or that this “stepfather” was an immoral fixture in his childhood home. Perhaps if this had occurred, it would have helped dissipate some of the anger and self-focus that it’s clear he carried over into his “ministry”. The wicked example of unrebuked remarriage adultery is almost always self-perpetuating in the next generation. Whatever “standing” Locke felt like he had done for his own allegedly difficult marriage,
“divorce is the finality of what you’ve been working on. It’s not the beginning and the cause of it.”
…before looking around to replace his wife and “move forward” with “HIS” kids and “HIS” life, is likely to have been done out of a legalistic spirit, if the holy concepts of supernatural inseverable one-flesh (sarx mia) and unconditional covenant have never been biblically explained to him. This kind of an upbringing which normalizes Christ-defined immorality even in church also tends to lead to narcissism, feeling “owed” by God, out of the sharp sense of deprivation that years spent in an immoral home can foster in the heart of a kid who wasn’t properly discipled after coming to faith. Somebody in that family needs to draw the kingdom line with the devil!
A visit to the website of Global Vision Bible Church describe an element of the church’s “DNA” as “Loud where God is loud and silent where God is silent.” What an ironic statement for the (reputed) LGBT(xyz) community’s “worst nightmare”! Jesus didn’t feel the need to say much of anything for that which was no threat to the Jews or Gentiles of the 1st century, but repeatedly forbid and warned against precisely what Locke is in the process of doing now, and for which he is apparently receiving no discipline, or even rebuke, at all from the other leadership of that church.
It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst.
For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present.In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus,I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, SO THAT HIS SPIRIT MAY BE SAVED in the day of the Lord Jesus.
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough?Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed.Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people;I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—NOT TO EVEN EAT WITH SUCH A ONE.For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. – 1 Corinthians 5
Who remembers the Ashley Madison scandal from 2015 that rocked more than 400 U.S. evangelical pastors exposed in that scandal– for who they are, when they think no one is watching? From the mouth of one who’s so “important” that he doesn’t feel it matters who is watching:
SIFC (1/30/2018) – Sorry folks, it seems Locke has taken this video down as well since publication of this blog post. It was priceless, as one can just imagine.
Even if Locke is not yet sleeping with this woman until he can obtain the sham civil and church paperwork (doubtful, since his judgment is already so clouded), are there any obvious and recorded signs of this man being areviler? Or covetous? As King David was sent a prophet named Nathan a year or more after his illicit wedding to Bathsheba, to tell him “you are the man!” he was not allowed by God to use his empire and an unlawful “marriage” to cover up his sin, neither will Greg Locke.
Since Locke independently established his non-denominational church, it is likely he personally wrote the Statement of Beliefs for that church, with only limited input or external ratification. These are brief, and they read as follows:
“WHAT WE BELIEVE (GLOBAL VISION BIBLE CHURCH):
We believe the Bible is the perfect Word of God. It is without error from beginning to end. The Bible is our sole Authority for faith and practice. (2 Tim 3:13-17)
We believe that salvation is provided by Jesus Christ and Him alone. It is through his death, burial and resurrection that men are saved from sin. It is the blood of Jesus that cleanses us from all sin. Works and religion cannot save in anyway. The Gospel is the power of God unto Salvation. Furthermore, we believe that Christ died for all men and upon the conviction of the Holy Spirit, the REPENTANCE OF THE HEART and the confession of the mouth men are Born-Again of God’s Spirit. (Rom 1:16, 1 Cor 15:1-4, Eph 2:8-9)
We believe in the eternal salvation of all believers. Once a person trusts in Christ, they are forever kept by the power of God and CAN NEVER BE LOST. Salvation is truly everlasting life. However, those who have trusted Christ are His and will obey Him and His Word. We do not believe a person can live any way they so desire and be saved. The Bible DOGMATICALLY DECLARES that a person will be a new creature in Christ. (2 Cor 5:17, Jn 10:27-30)
We believe in the Bible doctrine of the Trinity. We believe in one God, co-existing in three persons: The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is the father who planned our salvation, his Son Jesus who provided our forgiveness and the Spirit of God who SEALS OUR STATEbefore God. Furthermore, at the moment of SALVATION we receive all of God’s Spirit. We do not get more of God, rather we must surrender more of ourselves to him on a daily basis. (1 Jn 5:7)
We believe that the local New Testament Church is God’s ordained institution. It is through individual bodies of believers that the Great Commission is carried on throughout the world. (Acts 2:41-47, Matt 28:18-20)” “Standerinfamilycourt” has highlighted some phrases in three of these GVBC tenets that could be contributing to Greg Locke’s spiritual confusion, and therefore, could be specifically leading him down the wrong path. The joke, in places like Tennessee, is that if you’re an evangelical, you’re going to be a Baptist (therefore, a Calvinist) — it’s just a matter of which of the 57 varieties of Baptist (Southern, Freewill, Regular, Fundamental, etc., etc.) one chooses. Hence, we have an Independent Fundamental Baptist taking to YouTube to rebuke an nondemoninational independent Baptist over the degree of toxic Calvinism practiced (i.e. who has the worst “salvation by works” doctrine in the other’s eyes). (1) “Repentance of the heart” is not repentance at all unless the feet are doing a physical U-turn at the same time. People in this mindset confuse “salvation” with either sanctification or justification, and dismissively label obedience to Christ’s commandments “salvation by works” or “legalism”. New Testament scripture makes it clear that we can fall away, even with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, if we persistently and habitually choose not to obey the commandments of Christ. We are warned in the book of Hebrews that this process hardens a believer’s heart, and that there is a point of no-return once the Holy Spirit becomes so grieved and quenched that He cannot do His convicting work in us any longer. Toxic Calvinists will claim that this constitutes, “not being born again to begin with” (as Anderson does toward Locke). Anderson may legitimately do so only if he can conclusively demonstrate that the wandering soul in question was never indwelt with the Holy Spirit. This is a tall order for we humans who lack omniscience. If we know a person well and we are Spirit-filled, we only know the point at which the Holy Spirit did indwell someone else, from the degree of transformation in their life and consistent heart attitudes thereafter for a long season. We have no way of knowing conclusively that He did not indwell someone specific at some point, unless perhaps it’s one of our functional gifts. Unfortunately, the first person someone with the spirit of adultery (a self-worshipper) lies to is himself or herself, and equally unfortunately, “repentance in the heart” can be premediated in Calvinist environments because of the “once-saved, always saved” (OSAS) heresy. This is mocking God, which Paul repeatedly warns cannot be done without eternal consequences if not genuinely (and physically) repented. (2) “Dogmatically declares” (that a person will be a new creation in Christ) pretends that our free will “goes away” and will no longer be exercised. God has endless ways to persuade us from our free will before it destroys our eternity, but unfortunately, He doesn’t ever override it. We indeed are a new creation in Christ from the moment we are indwelt with the Holy Spirit, but it’s an error to claim we will never backslide. We should know this instinctively from the experience of the believers who surround us. The fact that we are no longer able to be controlled by sin does not mean for a moment that we are prevented from willfully resubmitting ourselves to that control at a later point. Someone deceived with a spirit of adultery who genuinely believes he and his intended adultery partner are born again very commonly reasons that,“since I am doing this, and God is ‘blessing’ it, it must be His will, otherwise the Holy Spirit (Who is, in reality, both grieved and quenched) would not allow it. I must have not been doing God’s will in my marriage, since that wasn’t so blessed.”One can just imagine how tempting this reasoning is if Greg’s characterization of Melissa being mentally ill is true. If there’s a way to lay down one’s cross that men will allow other men to get away with, it becomes very hard to resist. The IBF denomination Locke formerly belonged to teaches strongly against divorce and remarriage, but does so legalistically, with the Calvinistic spectre of “not being born again to begin with” hanging over a prodigal’s head. Contrast this legalistic obedience with what the Church Father, Origen said: “If we love this neighbor, we are fulfilling the entire law and all the commandments by his love.
“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to all who believe.
” It is absolutely impossible for one who loves Christ with his whole heart and with all his inner being to do anything displeasing to Christ.
“For the one who loves him not only does not commit murder, which is prohibited by the law, but he does not become angrywith his brother because he whom he loves takes delight in this.
“And not only does he not commit adultery, but he does not look at a woman in order to desire her. But instead he says to him, “My soul desires and faints for the living God. ”When would one who loves Christ, who has even abandoned everything he owns to follow Christ, think about stealing [someone else’s one-flesh]?
“On what occasion does the one who loves Christ bear false testimony, when he knows that the one he loves was betrayed by false testimony? “He who loves Christ inevitably loves his neighbor [including his one-flesh] as well. For a disciple is marked as belonging to Christ by this proof alone, if he loves his neighbors. For it is certain that he who does not love his neighbor does not know Christ.
–Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.
Someone who believes that “salvation” cannot be lost, regardless of whether they make choices that evade their ongoing sanctification (obtaining the wedding garments and the oiled lamp needed for admission to the future marriage supper), can easily rationalize that God will “grade them on a curve”, come Judgment Day, and in fact, they will only have their “rewards” reduced (1 Cor 3:11-15). Hence, for the same reason, they don’t feel it’s necessary to exclude legalized adulterers from their pews and church coffers, they feel “their right to be happy” in this life is worth the gamble they’ve taken with the Most High. (3) The Spirit of God “Seals our state” and Holy Spirit indwells upon “salvation“. Examined closely, these two statements are mutually exclusive due to timing factors. The Holy Spirit indwells, as a deposit (not a guarantee, as one unfortunate translation renders it) upon our justification. Our salvation is not complete and conferred until we arrive and are admitted to the marriage supper of the Lamb. SeeHow Good is the Pledge of Being Sealed? for the detailed hermeneutic support for this doctrine correction. The effect of this error on a Greg Locke-style prodigal is a combination of the two deceits discussed in (1) and (2). The reference in (2) that “We do not believe a person can live any way they so desire and be saved” (limited to drinking, smoking, dipping, chewing, dancing, fist-fighting, sodomizing, tongues-speaking, cussing, sleeping with someone else’s wife without the proper paperwork) most likely refers to someone who “was never saved to begin with”. Greg Locke has a searchable sermon file, as many Baptist pastors do, on SermonAudio. Using the search terms, “marriage”“divorce”, or “remarriage”, SIFC was unable to bring up any sermons at all on those topics, despite GVBC having been in existence for ten years. This could be because M D R (marriage, divorce and remarriage) is a deliberately silent topic in his church, which is not at all unusual. Nor is that necessarily a bad thing if the pastor does not believe in the no-excuses indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony. Greg Locke is no Stephen Anderson.
Before wrapping up, a quick look at Tennessee divorce law indicates that, based on the longest of the many conflicting time frames Locke mentioned in the now-deleted facebook video, the very soonest this “dissolution” can be final is July, 2018, based on a combination of no-fault and 1 year desertion grounds, unless there is a mutual petition, in which case, the parents must still attend a parenting class before anything can be finalized, since there are minors in the home. Other grounds require a trial and evidence, if contested, and that can take considerable time to get docketed. Divorce petitions are public records, so the filing date is searchable in their county, and the petitioner can be known. Locke insisted in the video that he didn’t file, and perhaps that’s true, but it’s also a matter of public record. Melissa could have filed on either no-fault or adultery or banning from the home grounds, if it’s true that Greg didn’t file. He stated that Melissa was sent, and is living out of state, so any divorce proceeding will entail delays and continuances, especially where children are involved. The timing, therefore could not have been sufficient for a finalized decree, as Locke implied to the contrary, and Hall astutely disputed last week. We all know that there are no “ex” wives in the kingdom of God, only ex-adultery partners, so Locke was lying to himself and to God by deliberately calling Melissa his “ex” wife. There is still time for the compassionate to pray for this family.
No-Fault:
(1) irreconcilable differences if: [a] there has been no denial of this ground; [b] the spouses submit a properly signed marital dissolution agreement (see below under Simplified or Special Divorce Procedures); or [c] this grounds for divorce is combined with a general fault-based grounds or (2) living separate and apart without cohabitation for 2 years when there are no minor children. Fault:
(1) impotence; (2) adultery; (3) conviction of a felony and imprisonment; (4) alcoholism and/or drug addiction; (5) wife is pregnant by another at the time of marriage without husband’s knowledge; (6) willful desertion for 1 year; (7) bigamy; (8) endangering the life of the spouse; (9) conviction of an infamous crime; (10) refusing to move to Tennessee with a spouse and willfully absenting oneself from a new residence for 2 years; (11) cruel and inhuman treatment or unsafe and improper marital conduct; (12) indignities that make the spouse’s life intolerable; and (13) abandonment, neglect, or banning the spouse from the home.
If the court feels as though there is a possible chance of reconciliation, it will postpone any trial or hearing date and request the parties to attend mediation or counseling. In cases involving minor children, the court requires the parents to attend a parenting education class prior to the divorce being finalized.
Pastor Locke, you have the Other Woman’s children and four of your own, plus your entire congregation watching you turn your back on the Lord’s commandment. The word of God says that we are a “kingdom of priests”, and God does not continue in fellowship with treacherous and violent priests.
“This is another thing you do: you cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and with groaning, because He no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. Yet you say, ‘For what reason?’ Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.But not one has done so who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did that one do while he was seeking a godly offspring. Take heed then to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously against the wife of your youth.” – Malachi 2:13-15
UPDATE 1/21/2018:Pulpit & Pen continues to be contacted by members of Locke’s church and by family members of the parties involved, so they have continued to report on the situation. They pulled the public record of the divorce filing, dated November 13, 2017, Melissa as Plaintiff. They also reportedly located Melissa living in a women’s protective shelter. The earliest an uncontested divorce can be final in the eyes of the State of Tennessee based on the filing date is mid-February, so Locke was clearly being untruthful in his January 11 video where he claimed to the public to be already “divorced”. In the eyes of God, Greg and Melissa Locke, and this Tai McGee and her rightful husband, will be married until one of each couple passes out of this life, and hence, it would have been so much better for everyone concerned if Melissa had taken her complaint to Criminal Court, instead of “family court”.
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
I’m Living in an Ongoing State of Legalized Adultery with Somebody Else’s Spouse. Can I Get Away With It?
We have been responding to the 3-part blog series by David Servant called, “I’m Divorced and Remarried. Am I Living in Adultery?” This appears to be the final installment.
The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes and examines him. – Proverbs 18:17
We responded to Points 1 through 6 of remarriage apologist David Servant’s very comprehensive scripture-denial-and-obfuscation campaign in Part 3A, our earlier blog post, and with his Parts 1 and 2, in our corresponding Part 1 and Part 2. We noted that Points 1 through 5 in his Part 3 were items of repackaged redundancy that did not raise any substantive new arguments that we had not previously discredited in our two earlier responses. However, Points 6, 7 and 8 do raise some new arguments that we will focus on in this post.
#6 of 8 – David Servant’s Rebuke of The Prophet Ezra for “Breaking Up Families”
In the Old Testament book of Ezra, there is a story in chapters 9 and 10 about 113 Jewish men who had married foreign wives, a transgression of the Mosaic Law. Under either conviction or ecclesiastical pressure, those men divorced their foreign wives. This shows that the proper response to a marriage that is displeasing to God is to divorce. Thus, all those who are divorced and remarried should also divorce, as their adulterous marriages are displeasing to God.
SIFC: Ah yes, the wizard of manipulative semantics is back at it again….“either under conviction or ‘ecclesiastical pressure’ “……”the proper response to a ‘marriage’ that is ‘displeasing’ to God is to ‘divorce’ “. (At least he got the last part right.) We have been pointing out throughout our response to David Servant’s misguid(ing) blog series why God does not participate in all (civilly-legal) “marriages”, nor does He consider them morally-interchangeable, nor does He operate on the ridiculous idea that current possession is nine-tenths of the law. If the 7th and 8th commandments aren’t evidence enough of this, then there probably is no persuading David Servant, sad to say. God defines the marriages He participates in through the mouth of Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6, and vividly describes His supernatural role at each wedding for a biblically-lawful marriage:
And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his FATHER and MOTHER and be joined to his wife, andthe two shall become one flesh’?So they are no longer [by the verb tense, “never again” ] two, but one flesh. What therefore GOD has JOINED TOGETHER, let NO [HUMAN] separate.”
By this passage, we explicitly know that two types of civilly-legal “marriages” in our western culture are non-marriages (and not merely that they are “displeasing”) in God’s eyes:
(1) Where a living spousehas been left, instead of one’s father and mother
(2) Where the genders are the same
By this passage, we explicitly know why these are non-marriages, either ongoing (1) adultery, or (2) sodomy:
(1) God has declined to do the joining, AND
(2) The parties remain two throughout their sodomous or adulterous papered-over union, sometimes “one-body”, but never one-flesh, AND
(3) The prior one-flesh entity remains intact regardless, AND
(4) Man has no power or authority to sever the prior, biblically-lawful union, because Jesus tells us God never delegated this to men, reserving that power only to Himself.
In part 3A, we explained at length that the God-yoking Jesus described was called sunexuezenin the Greek. This is a supernatural instantaneous event that creates an inseverable one-flesh entity for as long as both spouses remain alive. That is, man can neither create nor sever it, even if physical separation takes place under man’s law, or lawless abandonment occurs. Jesus goes on to say in verse 8 that God never delegated that power or authority to any man (including Moses), and it is consequentially illegitimate for any civil government to usurp such authority from God. Where there is no sunexuezen, there is no holy matrimony, and the relationship is consequentially an illicit cohabiting conjugal relationship. It is, as Jesus repeatedly stated, ongoing immorality, be it homosexual or heterosexual. In the case of the 113 immoral households purged under Ezra’s prophetic leadership, the adultery of taking a foreign wife was first against God who forbid it and did not create sunexuezen between the “spouses”. In some cases there was an additional layer of adultery — against the God-joined Jewish wife of the husband’s youth who was still living. To call these immoral households “families” is a slap in God’s face.
Bringing this concept back to the contemporary unlawful marriages, it is far more material in the eyes of God that the sinful relations immediately cease, physical separation takes place, that reconciliation occurs with the rightful covenant family members, and somewhat less material that one’s legal life be cleaned up from a civil system (so-called “family courts”) to which God never delegated any authority in the first place to create or dissolve holy matrimony. Hence, “divorce” isn’t really the central issue in authentic repentance which restores one’s forfeited inheritance in the kingdom of God, despite Servant’s sarcastic characterization. The central issue is as follows:
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
Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation,namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.
– 2 Corinthians 5:18-19
This separation naturally entails providing morally and financially for any non-covenant children of the union, regardless of the legal status, and we can also see this element playing out in the Ezra account, chapter 10:
Now therefore, make confession to the Lord God of your fathers and do His will; and separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives.” Then all the assembly replied with a loud voice, “That’s right! As you have said, so it is our duty to do.But there are many people; it is the rainy season and we are not able to stand in the open. Nor can the task be done in one or two days, for we have transgressed greatly in this matter.Let our leaders represent the whole assembly and let all those in our cities who have married foreign wives come at appointed times, together with the elders and judges of each city, until the fierce anger of our God on account of this matter is turned away from us.”
The marriages with foreign wives were non-marriages for the same core metaphysical reason that legalized adultery and sodomy-as-“marriage” are non-marriages. God did not participate to create an inseverable one-flesh entity (sarx mia), so there was no holy matrimony, only immoral cohabitation that had been legalized in the eyes of men only. It should be noted from history (without opening a new, spurious “silence of scripture” claim, since history and rabbinical accounts both attest to this) that many of these foreign wives were concubines under an entrenched system of concurrent polygamy in Hebrew society under Mosaic law. In those cases, the sarx mia /sunexuezen union was only with the original lawful Jewish wife, and the carnal-only hen soma union was with all others, as is the case today with the biblically-lawful covenant wife, and however many rivals her one-flesh husband may attempt to legalize. We also know from the book of Malachi that sequential polygamy was also present in Israel at the time, where God-joined wives were being “put away” to “marry” a foreign wife.
Was this purge done under conviction, or was it done under “ecclesiastical pressure” as Servant fancies ? Verses 1 – 4 of the text make it pretty clear that the conviction was certainly there. We don’t even see the prophet of God making a speech, but we see the conviction falling more or less spontaneously on the people as a result of Ezra’s concerted time of prayer and vicarious confession. We see that they came of their own volition from a distance to where Ezra was (verse 10:1) when the conviction fell. (We see David Servant writing a 3-part blog series to show them the error of following an obvious cult leader. ) We see no dissent until much later in the process of carrying the command of the Lord out, but only on the part of two men, which all by itself is utterly amazing, considering the nature of the command of the Lord. This can hardly be described as “ecclesiastical pressure”, nor can it be reasonably described as anything but a supernaturally-orchestrated event. As with some of our western countries today, it was also an event on which the future rule of the nation depended, before God’s harsher judgment was to land there. We have to look to historical accounts for what happened next, since the Holy Spirit provided no Ezra, chapter 11 to explicitly tell us.
Servant: “While there is no doubt that 113 Jewish men transgressed the Mosaic Law by marrying foreign wives, there is no place in the book of Ezra where it is recorded that God instructed or expected them to divorce their foreign wives….Again, nothing in the book of Ezra indicates that God initiated or approved of the proposal.”
SIFC: Servant is perhaps emboldened to make this next ridiculous “argument from silence” because we aren’t told in the book of Ezra what happened afterward, but we are told in historical accounts that this purging was necessary before the Lord would clear the way for pure, clean hands to rebuild the temple. We’re told earlier in scripture that God had reached a tipping point with the complicity of church leadership in institutionalizing their immorality with which they had not only become complicit, but the priesthood had themselves become partakers. Some of that scriptural documentation comes in other books, such as Malachi and Nehemiah near the conclusion of the 70 years exile, and in the major prophets ahead of Nebuchadnezzar’s raid. These two post-exile prophets were both contemporaries of Ezra the prophet, and twenty years later, Malachi’s message remarkably echoed Ezra’s, as these Jews slid from their purged concurrent polygamy practices into the sequential polygamy that Jesus eventually confronted 400 years after the Lord sent Israel no more prophets until John the Baptist.
We should also pay attention to the fact that Ezra had the Lord’s anointing to lead the second group of released exiles back from Babylon to Jerusalem for the purpose of rebuilding the temple.
For Servant to suggest (without evidence) that Ezra cooked up some sort of “cult action” apart from the Lord’s instruction, then argue for that unsupported speculation out of alleged scripture silence, as if just anyone can be canonized in scripture as an authorized prophet of the Lord, seems just a bit over the top. If anything, Malachi’s parallel message gives divine confirmation to Ezra’s authority and Spirit-led intercession, nay, his vicarious confession on behalf of the people he was leading spiritually. As for “nothing” within Ezra indicating that God initiated or approved of the repentance from forbidden and immoral-but-legalized relationships, how’s “…let all those in our cities who have married foreign wives come at appointed times, together with the elders and judges of each city, until the fierce anger of our God on account of this matter is turned away from us” ?
At the point of participation in institutionalized immorality, His shepherds had traded away all of their moral authority required to carry out their ecclesiastical responsibilities prior to the exile. At the earlier point where they had become merely complicit, they lost the supernatural involvement of God in carrying out their ecclesiastical responsibilities. Precisely the same thing happens to denominations and individual churches whose doctrine is changed to accommodate institutionalized serial (or concurrent) polygamy: the Holy Spirit departs the sanctuary, and is quenched and grieved in the individuals occupying the defiled sanctuary. The temple rebuilders of our day will be the literal husband of one wife, and not “one at a time”.
Servant: Additionally, there is good reason to think that, even though the 113 Jewish men had transgressed the Mosaic Law by marrying foreign wives, God did not expect those men to then divorce them.
Why? Because God expected the people of Israel to keep their covenant vows, even when those vows went against His revealed will. A case in point is Israel’s covenant with the people of Gibeon, wicked Amorites whom God wanted Israel to annihilate during the conquest of Canaan led by Joshua….And so we have to wonder why God would not want 113 men in Israel who made vows to foreign women to keep their vows, even though it was not his will for them to make those vows in the first place.
SIFC: This vow business is an inference, but in this particular instance, not actually a valid one. This is due to the intrinsic violation of the prior inseverable one-flesh entity created between the true spouses (in at least some of the concurrently polygamous cases involved in the Ezra purge) and due, in all cases, to the inviolable prior covenant of all believers to have no other gods before the Lord.
Rather strangely, in Servant’s estimation, the vows made before God with the spouse of our youth (by which He says in Malachi 2:13-14, He stands as a witness–to the point of withdrawing fellowship with the violator when they are repudiated)…are only a “sexual contract” which Servant then claims is annullable with a piece of man’s paper. Yet the conflicting subsequent vow to forever repudiate the divinely-favored vow at the very cost of hell, must be “kept to his own (eternal) hurt“. It’s akin to the silly claim that only covenant eggs can be “unscrambled”, but not adulterous “eggs”. The Divine joke is on Servant (and his fellow serial polygamy apologists) that the hand of the Lord who is the lover of our souls, Whose love is big enough to unscramble those rancid, adulterated non-covenant eggs does it all the time, and puts true one-flesh partners back together, after sometimes decades of man’s “divorce”, — often on both sides of the illicit union. That’s because, not only was it not His will for them to make those second vows, it was the destruction of their souls to make them. “Do not be deceived, no adulterer has any inheritance in the kingdom of God.” The Gibeonite analogy is false here, because there were no God-joined one-flesh relationships repudiated in that vow with the pagans.
Servant: The servant of God, guided by his integrity, “swears to his own hurt and does not change” (Ps 15:4). And did not God hold those 113 men accountable for the suffering they caused the women whom they divorced, as well as their common children “to whom the kingdom belongs” (something which Jesus incidentally proclaimed within seconds of one His Four D&R Statements; see Matt. 19:14).
SIFC: If the servant of God is indeed guided by his integrity, that integrity will lead him back to his one-flesh mate and their covenant generations. Otherwise, he is not a servant of God at all, but only a dime-a-dozen hypocrite, a tare among the wheat. If he “swore to his own hurt”, then why do not his original vows preclude and take precedence over any subsequent vows?
Did God hold those 113 men accountable for the suffering they caused the women whom they wrongfully “married” and the resulting children? Perhaps, so, at least until they offered the required atonement sacrifice at the temple altar that afternoon. Even so, God would have held those men far more accountable had they dug in their heels and refused to repent of those immoral relationships, continuing on in them. He would have held them far more accountable for the whoredom and idolatry they were clinging to, which competed with their holiness and with their worship of the living God with their bodies.
Noncovenant children are not the only children involved in a good many of these pseudo-marriages. Also watching the adulterous charade, and being forced sometimes to witness the blasphemous “wedding” ceremonies by a “pastor” they thought they could trust, are the covenant children and grandchildren of the true holy matrimony union(s). It is only the latter about whom God directed these rebuking words through the mouth of the prophet Malachi:
Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife OF YOUR YOUTH, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she IS [not, “was”]your companion and your wife by covenant.But not one has done so who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did that one do while he was seeking a GODLY OFFSPRING? Take heed then to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously against the wife OF YOUR YOUTH. – Malachi 2:14-15
When mass-immorality is normalized both in civil law and in the church, and that immorality is a clear heaven-or-hell matter, it gives rise to an emulation risk in the next generations until society either repents en masse, or entirely collapses within three or four generations. God is concerned with the evil ongoing practices of the larger society, not just the individual cases. We need to beware, lest the rise of militant Islamism become our “Persia” and rabid homofascism become our “Assyria” in chastening for our sequential polygamy practices.
Servant referenced the milder of two passages carrying the same warning:
“But Jesus said, “Let the children alone, and do not hinder them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” – Matthew 19:14
Another passage in Matthew which Servant is by inference alluding to goes like this:
“And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me;6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
“Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes!” – Matthew 18:4-7
Servant’s hands are far from clean with regard to the duty he owes as a former pastor and as a current teacher, to both the covenant and the noncovenant children, yet he is pointing his accusing finger at the repenting prodigal parents seeking to obey the Lord. Remember, it takes pure, clean hands to rebuild the temple. He may stop his braying against “divorce” of adulterous unions the moment he ceases to perform or attend adulterous “weddings”, which directly drive the evangelical demand for more “divorce”. If pastors obeyed the Lord and refused to solemnize these abominations in the holy fear of God, as they consistently did only 60 years ago, Servant would have very little to publicly squirm about, and his personal taxes would be a lot lower, as a bonus. Financing the Sexual Revolution is very, very costly.
A child from an adulterous civil-only union is by far better off having a repenting parent sit down with them and show them in the word of God that what they (the parent) have done will cost souls in that family, and warn those children not to emulate what they’ve (unfortunately) witnessed, drawing the line that the sin needs to stop in the parents’ generation. In many cases, the covenant spouse is rises to the occasion upon reconciliation to absorb the non-covenant child into the covenant household, and in other cases, the children watch the sole repented parent walk out the word of God celibately for the rest of their lives while praying for the soul of lost parent if the latter is in an adulterous subsequent union. This is far better than pretending that societally-normalized sin isn’t sending millions to hell, contrary to the clear word of God that it is doing so.
Servant: Beyond those things, the fundamental reason why God forbade the Israelite men from marrying foreign wives, namely, the great risk posed by those pagan women of turning the hearts of their Israelite husbands from devotion to the Lord, has absolutely no application to modern Christians married to Christians, even when one of them at one time was previously married and divorced.
SIFC: Everyone should realize by now that Servant’s last assertion is outrageously untrue in the ending thought. All willful, unrepented sin turns and hardens a man’s heart from serving God. Not all idolatry is directed toward a stick of wood. Indeed, the apostle James calls the friends of the world system “adulterers and adulteresses” (figuratively and literally – verse 4:4 – Antioch manuscripts), and says that this creates enmity with God. Under the New Covenant, obedience is to flow from the heart, and not from external regulations. The bulk of evangelicals today take this to mean that obedience need not flow at all. What they don’t realize is that if obedience is not flowing, or there’s a cordoned-off area, it means the heart is hardened because the inward “god” is one’s self. This applies to Christians married to Christians, and it equally applies to Christians married to pagans, Jews, Muslims, etc. But we must defined “married” the Matthew 19:4-6 way, with no politically-correct terms substituted to include non-marriages. If someone remains in a non-marriage after having the false teaching they grew up with authoritatively corrected by the word of God, they have a hardened heart and are involved in idolatry no less than were the guilty under Ezra’s leadership. There’s even more bad news about hardened hearts, according to the book of Hebrews: they cause born-again people to fall away eventually.
Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God.But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.14 For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end,15 while it is said,
“Today if you hear His voice, Do not HARDEN YOUR HEARTS, aswhen they provoked Me.” – Hebrews 3:12-14
Therefore, since it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly had good news preached to them failed to enter BECAUSE OF DISOBEDIENCE,He again fixes a certain day, “Today,” saying through David after so long a time just as has been said before,
“Today if you hear His voice, Do not HARDEN YOUR HEARTS”
Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that NO ONE WILL FALL THROUGH FOLLOWING THE SAME EXAMPLE OF DISOBEDIENCE.For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. – Hebrews 4: 6, 7, 11-13
Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled..
– Hebrews 12:14-15
Non-forgivers and those who insist on an imaginary “exception clause” to disobey the Lord and take their own ongoing revenge against the exclusive“bone-of-their-bones and flesh-of-their-flesh”(Genesis 2:23) are at the very highest risk of hell, because their illicit action is irrefutable evidence of a hard heart from the beginning,
a heart which has no intention of forgiving unless God changes that heart. Jesus bluntly stated that all such people are headed for hell unless they repent. Their own considerable sins will not be forgiven.
Mr. Servant may claim that the purge of idolatrous, unlawful “marriages” described in the book of Ezra, “has absolutely no application to modern Christians ‘married’ to Christians, even when one of them at one time was previously married and divorced….” when he can demonstrate that Jesus had multiple churches as His bride, and that God removed a slab of ribs from Adam’s side in case he’d need one or more reserve brides. Both events, had they occurred, would have proven these husbands as idolatrous self-worshippers who had the Lord’s “approval” for that heart condition.
Servant: Paul’s prohibition for Christians to divorce unbelieving spouses, we have to question how anyone could advocate that some Christians should divorce their Christian (or non-Christian) spouses because of a story of 113 Israelite men divorcing pagan spouses.
SIFC: This is false logic. It does not follow that a commandment not to do “x” invalidates a separate commandment not to live on in a state of “y” . We also have to watch the definition here of “spouse”, since according to Jesus, the spouse is the one immorally-but-legally abandoned, and their counterfeit replacement is an ongoing adultery partner for as long as the spouse lives. There is quite a difference, obviously, between civilly-legal and biblically lawful.
#7 of 8 – Servant’s Attempt to Recharacterize The Herod Incident
“John the Baptist reprimanded Herod Antipas for his marriage to his half-brother’s wife, Herodias, calling him to divorce her. This serves as an example for all the Christians who are in adulterous marriages, who also should divorce.
Answer: This claim is built on several assumptions, one of which is the assumption, again, that Christian couples in which one or both were previously married are considered by God to be in “adulterous marriages” or “still married to their original spouses in God’s eyes,” which I have already shown is not the case if we consider all of Scripture.
SIFC: Servant has “shown” nothing of the kind. Jesus said what He meant and meant what He said in Matthew 19:6 and 8, and in Matthew 5:32b, as well as Matthew 19:9b-KJV and finally, Luke 16:18b. It’s that simple.
Servant: But let’s consider the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias. First, it’s worth noting that Herodias was named after her grandfather, Herod the Great, who also happened to be Herod Antipas’ father. That not only explains why their names are so similar, but also tells us they were related. Herodias was Herod Antipas’ niece. Theirs was an incestuous marriage.
Both had previously been married, Herod Antipas to a woman named Phasaelis, daughter of King Aretas IV of Nabatea, and Herodias to Herod Antipas’ half-brother, Philip. But when Herod Antipas was once visiting Rome and staying with Philip, he and Herodias fell in love, or perhaps it might be better said that they fell in lust. They agreed to marry once Herod Antipas had divorced Phasaelis. When Phasaelis learned of their plans, she journeyed back home to her father, King Aretas IV, who subsequently declared war against Herod. Herod lost that war. But the main point is, in order to marry each other, Herodias divorced Philip and Herod Antipas divorced Phasaelis. It was a classic case of obvious adultery under the guise of marriage.
SIFC: Indeed it was a classic case of adultery under the guise of “marriage”, blood ties notwithstanding. Servant is owed great credit here for finally venturing into the history books to pull out what scripture is silent about, for example, the facts about Herod’s one-flesh covenant wife whom he “divorced” (or so he thought). Contrast this attention to factual detail with Dr. John Piper’s lazy coyness in a blog he wrote last year with the same purpose in mind. Piper was just full of speculations, including questioning whether Herod had actually “married” Herodias, or maybe JTB was merely rebuking him for messing around with her. Servant does a good job here — until he gets lazy, too…
Servant: And did John actually call on Herod and Herodias to divorce as a remedy for their sin? If he did, Scripture doesn’t say, and so we should not make that assumption. We could just as rightly claim that John was calling for Herod and Herodias to be stoned, as that is what the Law of Moses prescribed for adulterers, and clearly, that is what they were guilty of.
SIFC: Pray tell, how was a jailed prophet ever going to hope to get a king stoned for adultery? History tells us the Romans had banned stoning since about 6 B.C. That’s why “divorce” was such a big, hairy deal to the Pharisees in the first place. John was willing to put his life on the line precisely because he knew that neither Herod nor Herodias were ready to meet their Maker in their current unregenerated state. Why in the world would he be hoping for their stoning? He had no reason to speak just to condemn them, despite what guilty parties always seem to think. He was seeking their repentance. And, of course, when one has no authoritative support for one’s point, there’s always the trusty “argument from silence”, which we see whipped back out by Servant. Indeed, according to Servant’s normal argument (apparently now abandoned), he suddenly holds that Herod and Herodias, now “married”, were still guilty of adultery. (Apparently, it’s only after Jesus went to the cross that adultery by legalized adulterers was “over with” on the wedding night and thereafter).
Servant: But let us imagine that John was actually calling them to divorce. If he was holding them to the standards of the Mosaic Law regarding divorce and remarriage, neither would be permitted to return to their former spouse (according to Deut. 24:1-4). But both would be free to remarry anyone else, with the exception that Herodias would not be permitted to marry a priest (fairly unlikely). So what, exactly, would be the point of Herod Antipas and Herodias divorcing? Why would John call them to divorce if they could not return to their former spouses but could marry just about anyone else? What would be the point? And are we to imagine that John was calling Herod and Herodias to divorce and remain celibate until their original spouses died, the alleged new law of Christ?….no warrant to claim that John’s condemnation of Herod and Herodias’ marriage has any application to us other than the fact that it has always been wrong for anyone to divorce their spouse in order to marry someone else.
SIFC: Another invalid assumption of Servant’s is that Deut. 24:1-4 “prevented” the respective reconciliations, Herodias with Phillip, and Herod with Phasaelis. We’ve shown where Deut. 24:1-4 most likely did not address actual or alleged capital infidelities until Moses’ bones had returned to the dust. Instead, this narrow regulation dealt with defiling conditions that prevented marriage which were of a non-capital nature and were discovered during the betrothal period. These things made a betrothed wife unsuitable for the consummation of the marriage both before the ketubah was agreed, and after termination of the ketubah. Furthermore, the Mosaic age had ceased, and the Messianic age had commenced with the start of John’s ministry in the wilderness,
Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying,“Repent, for THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND.”For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said,
“The voice of onecrying in the wilderness, ‘Make ready the way of the Lord, Make His paths straight!’”
– Matthew 3:1-3
At that point, Herod and Herodias were no more under that old Mosaic regulation than any contemporary person is today hindered from putting their covenant family back together and keeping their violated, but unsevered holy matrimony vows. Furthermore, both covenant marriages remained fully intact, or John would have had no basis for his rebuke. He did not say to Herod, “it is unlawful for you to have your brother’s ‘ex’ wife”. He said, “it is unlawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”
#8 of 8 – Servant’s Overboard Attempt to Make the Relevance of Hebrew Betrothal Custom Just Go Away
The “exception clauses” in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 should not be interpreted as allowing for divorce if a man discovers that his wife has committed adultery. Rather, Jesus was speaking of the discovery, during the betrothal phase, of illicit sex during or before the betrothal phase. And for that offense it was lawful to break off one’s engagement. And this is the same thing Paul was writing about in 1 Cor. 7:27-28, another scripture that is mistakenly applied to married persons when it actually only applies to betrothed persons. So your claim that God allows divorce under certain circumstances, which thus makes allowance for remarriage in some cases, is wrong. Only death can dissolve a marriage. Thus there is no divorced person who is legitimately divorced, and there is no remarried person who is legitimately remarried. So all remarried people should divorce their current spouse to either return to their original spouse or live celibate lives until their original spouse is dead.
Answer: If one holds to the supposition that marriage is dissoluble only by death and not by legitimate divorce, then the “exception clauses” in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 (“except for immorality”), as well as Paul’s allowance for divorced people to remarry in 1 Cor. 7:27-28, are problematic. So we should not be surprised that Divine Divorce proponents and their conservative counterparts have come up with explanations that attempt to harmonize those problematic passages with their views. I addressed the “Betrothal View” in two footnotes in my first article, as it seems so obviously far-fetched that it isn’t worthy of actual discussion. However, the Betrothal View seems to be a cardinal doctrine of Divine Divorce proponents, so I will address it.
SIFC: Servant’s treatment of this aspect of humanist ideology versus the unchanging truth of God is nothing short of moronic, not to even mention anti-Christ. But we’ve already been there — at length. However, since he’s willing to “indulge” the disciples….
Servant: To put it bluntly, the Betrothal View makes Jesus look stupid.
Note that, in Jesus’ conversation with the Pharisees recorded in Matthew 19:3-12, the Pharisee’s initial and follow-up questions, Jesus’ initial and second reply, as well as the scriptures referenced in their conversation (Gen. 2:24, Deut. 24:1-4), all refer only to married people and the lawfulness of divorce between them. The topic remains consistent throughout the conversation. But then, according to the Betrothal View, Jesus allegedly ends the conversation with a statement about lawful divorce that has absolutely no application to married people, but only to engaged people! And that makes Jesus look stupid. It also makes those who make Jesus look stupid look desperate to defend their doctrine. They are forcing a meaning that reflects their bias into a passage of Scripture.
SIFC: We literally seem to see Servant’s mind doing backflips here (that “alternate reality” again, evidently) and hoping the rest of us will join him in his mental gymnastics. Some of us just can’t keep up (a mercy) and prefer the straightforward, spinless word of God as it appears in the literal language and original texts. There is no “legitimate divorce” except for the civil exit from a hellbound union with someone else’s God-joined spouse.
There is no objective and conclusive evidence that Deuteronomy 24 applies exclusively (or even at all) to consummated marriages, except possibly for the phrase that is rendered “sends her out of his house” (which could have occurred right after the wedding night). The passage appears almost like an afterthought of Moses, given the comprehensive coverage of Mosaic marriage regulation in Deuteronomy 22. We just don’t know. What we do conclusively know, however, is that the standard of Deuteronomy 24 does not meet the standards of morality necessary to enter the kingdom of God, any more than Deuteronomy 22 does. We know that when the Pharisees confronted Jesus about divorce, He bypassed any discussion of those regulations quite deliberately and took us back to the Garden to make this point: He has ushered in a New Kingdom where the one-flesh, God-joined entity (sarx mia) will no longer be allowed to be dishonored by the contrivances of men, just as the baton has passed from Moses to Joshua (whose name is a precursor of Jesus) to Jesus, where it forever rests. We also know that the unequivocal statement that Jesus made about man’s divorce is that God was having none of it. “Mosesallowed (and that’s not a compliment, by the way)...BUT I SAY UNTO YOU…”
It is well-established in scripture and history that once a ketubah contract was agreed and accepted, the betrothed bride had all the legal rights of a consummated bride, and hence she was called a “wife” for typically a year before she became his one-flesh. It took a legal act to dissolve (set aside) the ketubah for due cause. This was called “cutting off” כִּרי ֻתת (kerithuth) in the Hebrew, and because their culture doesn’t directly translate into ours, the bible translators called this “divorce”. It is true that when stoning was banned, post-Moses, by the Babylonian and then the Roman conquerors of Israel, rabbinic practice expanded the interpretation of the law to cover the loss of marriage termination by death permitted by Moses in Deuteronomy 22, and it was this situation that Jesus, in a practical sense, was speaking into when He was challenged by the Pharisees. Jesus could have taken them on a long and rambling history lesson with all these legalistic twists and turns, but He was a concise communicator who focused like a laser on the heart-condition. There was no point in affirming Mosaic regulation that He had come for the express purpose of abrogating in order to establish the higher rule of the kingdom of God. Deuteronomy 22 and 24 were both as moot at the time of that conversation with King Jesus as was prohibiting consumption of pork and shellfish, or stoning our disobedient children.
Genesis 2:21-24 (key verses 21 though 23 not being particularly tasteful to Pharisee Servant, it seems) and Exodus 20: 3 through 17 were all that remained of Mosaic law, boiled down into just two commandments: “you shall love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul and strength,” and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” All that said, today’s Pharisees, the legalized adultery proponents, would do well to take the Hebrew betrothal model very seriously, even though its New Testament application to holy matrimony has become moot: kiddushin is God’s model for the truthful middle ground between Calvinism and Arminianism. It is the model for our justification, sanctification, and ultimate future consummation as a citizen of the kingdom of God.
Servant: In the other instance where we find the “exception clause,” in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Betrothal View makes Jesus look equally, if not more, stupid.
In that instance, Jesus first references the Pharisees’ twisted teaching, which they derived from Deut. 24:1-4, saying: “It was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away, let him give a certificate of divorce’” (Matt. 5:31). So the topic is “married men divorcing their wives.” But in the next sentence that completes everything Jesus has to say on the subject, Betrothal View proponents have Him strangely correcting the Pharisaic viewpoint with a declaration that has no application at all to married men, but only to betrothed men. They have Jesus saying, “It was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away, let him give a certificate of divorce.’ But I say, whoever breaks off his betrothal, except for immorality, makes his former fiancée commit adultery, and whoever marries her commits adultery.” Jesus appears to be an idiot.
SIFC: Servant makes an astute observation that the Pharisees’ teaching was “twisted”, but we have no lack of contemporary Pharisees in the evangelical church who share the same carnal mindset. These Pharisees flatly refuse to see the obvious: Jesus was agreeing with neither Hillel nor Shammai, because God’s holy ordinance has always, since the Garden, been inseverable and indissoluble, endued with God’s participation and bound by the holy attributes of His character. As God’s symbol for the relationship of Christ with His church, also for the handing down of the Ten Commandments to His people, and for the Godhead itself, how could God’s chosen symbol be severable or dissoluble? Blasphemy!
Since Servant is struggling so to understand Matthew 5:27-32, we will break it down for him:
Jesus was speaking of an innocent betrothed or consummated wife (in this context, the distinction is moot since the wife is hypothetically innocent in either case) who is innocent of (Hebrew: zanah, Greek: porneia). Both words, along with “fornication” connote commercial prostitution, which by culture was a premarital offense to the Hebrews, literally “playing the whore”. (We defy Mr. Servant to produce a pre-1900 concordance that renders these terms as the generic “sexual immorality” which we see today in the liberalized concordance editions and liberal translations.) Jesus kept this sin distinct from His reference to adultery at the end of the verse because it is clearly not the same sin.
Jesus was here saying to his Jewish male audience that if a man sends away (literally, “from-looses”) his contracted or his consummated bride who was not guiltyof selling her wares, then if she commits the adultery of marrying someone else while he lives (because sarx mia is inseverable and the unconditional holy matrimony covenant is indissoluble), her damnation for it is on his head as well as hers. If she is guilty of selling her wares, then her damnation for marrying another while he lives is only on her head because she engaged in the sin of adulterating their indissoluble covenant on her own volition. We know the covenant is indissoluble because any man who marries her also commits ongoing adultery, according to Jesus. Sometimes Pharisees need a picture drawn for them, and the one below seems to do nicely for that purpose, starting at 5 minutes in. Bottom line: Jesus was not discussing any “exception clause” at all in Matthew 5:32, much less one that allows a spouse to take their own revenge for adultery (or for any other offense).
We also need to note here that nobody asked Jesus a question in this first instance of discussion of the no-excuses indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony. He broached this topic Himself and introduced His divine view as He was introducing the kingdom of God, and as part of a longer declaration of the points in the Mosaic law He was hereby abrogating: raising the moral standard on, to include the heart motivation. As we soon see, this triggers all of the subsequent challenges from the Pharisees–which still continue to this day by those who stubbornly refuse to accept the moral absolute or its eternal consequences for disobeying.
Servant: But it gets worse. Betrothal View proponents always point out that the “exception clauses” found in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 include two Greek words, porneia and moicheo, respectively translated “fornication” and “adultery” in the King James Version. Matthew 19:9 reads, “Whoever divorces his wife, except for porneia, and marries another woman commits moicheo.” Betrothal View proponents claim that, because Jesus used two different words, He was making a distinction between the sexual sin committed by the immoral woman and the sexual sin committed by the man who divorces and marries another. The immoral woman did not commit moicheo, but rather porneia, so her sin was not adultery, but fornication, a sin that can only be committed by an unmarried person. Thus Jesus must have been speaking of pre-marital illicit sex discovered during the betrothal phase.
SIFC: We demonstrated above that Servant is inferring an “exception” in Matthew 5:32 that simply doesn’t exist. We know this, both straightforwardly, and because Jesus conclusively eliminated ALL possible “exceptions” when He said rather concisely,
Where does one draw the line on “exceptions”? Any reading of Luther’s writings or of the Westminster Confession of Faith makes it pretty clear that carnal humans have a very hard time of drawing this line anywhere on exceptions when it comes to sexual autonomy. Jesus was far too wise not to slam the door shut on all exceptions. In Matthew 19:6 and 8, He made indissolubility about divine metaphysics to which there can be no exception. Far from Servant’s blasphemous claim that Jesus was “endorsing” man’s contrived “dissolution” of holy matrimony, what actually came out of Jesus’ mouth repeatedly is precisely the opposite of an endorsement. But there’s more bad news for Mr. Servant: Jesus repeated at least twice more that everyone who married a divorced person is entering into an ongoing state of adultery, including at the end of Matthew 19:9 (suppressed by liberal bible translators in most contemporary English translations). Servant’s only response to this is to dishonestly pervert the verb tense Jesus is well-documented as using, in a silly and unsupportable attempt to claim this is a “one-time act” on the adulterous wedding night.
It’s not just us wild-eyed “cultists” who hold to the view that porneia and moicheia used in the same passage mean that the broader context must be used to define porneia, it is the view of many respected scholars who agree. As did 100% of the writers and editors of concordances published prior to 1850.
We need to concede here that not all “DDD-er’s” (Servant’s label for what he sees as our “cult”) agree on every aspect of the betrothal view. Some fail to understand that although contemporary engagement can indeed be broken without a subsequent marriage being adultery in God’s eyes, the similarity with the now-defunct Hebrew tradition of kiddushin ends right there. Some have a false foot in the Hebrew Roots camp, and would mistakenly carry Deuteronomy 24 into our Messianic times. Some are (rightly) appalled at the idea that a bride today could be “divorced” the day after her wedding night, because she did not disclose her non-virgin status to her contemporary husband before the wedding, so they (or rather, satan) use this to discredit the highly supportable betrothal understanding altogether. Some wrongly buy the establishment “churchianity” view that Deuteronomy 24 is dealing with sexual sin, rather than a non-capital cause for breaking a ketubah contract with a perfectly chaste bride. a nonsexual defilement such as consanguinity or ceremonial uncleanness that could not be remedied, in that day, after marriage. All of these distorted views, in SIFC’s educated opinion, spring from the common failure of Christ-followers to check Torah Observance at the door of Matthew 5:1, and the accompanying failure to discard the claim ticket thereto. It is appropriate to be knowledgeable about the Hebrew heritage in New Testament hermeneutics, but it is inappropriate to overlay a disciple’s life with it in Messianic times, as Paul exhaustively pointed out in his epistles.
Servant accuses the truth-tellers of “making Jesus look stupid”. More accurately, this “biblical exception” theory of the remarriage apologists makes Jesus look schizophrenic, while Servant’s sloppy hermeneutics, circular reasoning, and denial of the plan meaning of God’s word throughout his three redundant screeds make himself look intellectually and spiritually dishonest.
Servant: Finally, the Betrothal View makes Jesus contradict the Law of Moses….
SIFC: Yes indeed, He does. Not only that, but even the most casual reading of all of Matthew 5 makes it clear that this is exactly what He announced that He was doing, and He was making NO apologies for it. No apologies are owed by the Son of God, even for changing the rules, whether they be the original Mosaic core or the extensive rabbinic expansions and extensions that He spent much of His ministry denouncing. Servant would make Moses his idol instead of Jesus his Lord.
Servant:
….which allowed for a man to divorce his wife for sexual immorality regardless of when the immorality was committed or discovered. As I have already pointed out, the “indecency” of Deut. 24:1-4 is discovered by a man regarding a woman to whom he was married, which results in him divorcing her. The Mosaic Law also speaks of a man who, upon taking a wife and consummating his marriage, discovers that she is not a virgin as she had represented herself (Deut. 22:13-21). The penalty for her “playing the harlot in her father’s house” was death by stoning. There can be no denial that the “betrothal view” makes Jesus contradict the Mosaic Law, as the “betrothal view” makes no allowance for divorce after marriage, but only for breaking off an engagement. Again, Jesus would never contradict Himself, and thus He would never contradict the Law of Moses.
SIFC: Correct initial facts that are no longer relevant to following Christ. Incorrect conclusion, as we’ve amply shown.
Servant: Betrothal View proponents similarly grasp at straws regarding Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 7:27-28:
Are you bound to a wife? [That is, are you married?] Do not seek to be released. [That is, don’t pursue a divorce, just as I have previously told you above in 7:10-13.] Are you released from a wife? [That is, are you divorced (or possibly widowed)?]. Do not seek a wife [That is, don’t seek to be remarried.] But if you marry, you have not sinned; [That is, if you remarry, you are not sinning, regardless of whether you are divorced or widowed] and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. [That is, the same is true for virgin women, and this special instruction addressed to virgin women confirms that the previous statement, “But if you marry, you have not sinned” does indeed apply to men who have been previously married and divorced.] Yet such will have trouble in this life, and I am trying to spare you (1 Cor. 7:27-28).
Betrothal View proponents claim this passage is applicable only to currently- or previously-betrothed virgins, rather than currently- or previously-married people, claiming that context supports such a view because Paul addresses virgins beginning in 7:25. Here is how they interpret 1 Cor. 7:27-28…
SIFC: “Betrothal view proponents” are far from the only folks to rightly divide which audience Paul is addressing in each of the sections of 1 Cor. 7. Even Calvinist pastors are capable of this, as well as many authoritative scholars. A third grader could do it, so we’re puzzled that Servant continues to struggle with who Paul is speaking to. It appears that the only one “grasping at straws” is Mr. Servant, and only because he insists on redefining terms like “wife”, and “married” and “loosed” to suit his personal bias, and to disparage Christ’s viewpoint.
Servant: This re-write by itself should be enough for any honest person to reject it.
SIFC: What “rewrite”? Any honest person takes Christ at His own word in the first place.
Servant: It raises so many questions that expose its dubiousness, including:
(1) How many engaged men could there possibly have been in the Corinthian church who needed to be advised to not “seek to be released” from their engagement because that is something they were actually considering?
SIFC: There surely were young Hebrew men in the Corinthian church, and in the larger society outside the church, including the the local synagogue. Some were surely under a ketubah contract when converted, or the church leaders would not have asked Paul about this, and he would have had no need to address the “virgins” in these terms. The number of them is irrelevant except as a rhetorical swipe.
Servant: (2) And where is mention of the fact that if they were to break their engagement for any reason besides the discovery of their fiancée’s immorality and ultimately marry another, they would be guilty of adultery, as is claimed by the Betrothal View interpretation of Matt. 5:32 and 19:9?
SIFC: The Servant trademark “argument from silence” again.
We have shown that ketubah betrothal contracts were terminated for any number of reasons, not just unchastity, and that the promised bride was routinely called a “wife” up to the time of termination (not unlike an adulteress who “marries” the spouse of another living woman), by color of man’s law. Someone following Christ, and therefore obeying the spirit of what Paul had to say in the whole of 1 Corinthians 7, should have no confusion about the instructions for estranged true spouses. Servant’s confusion lies in his faulty premise that man’s divorce was deemed “legitimate” or effectual. This is circular reasoning.
Servant:
(3) How many previously-engaged men who had been “released” from an engagement could there possibly have been in the Corinthian church, and how many of those would have needed to be advised to not seek to be re-engaged again because that was something they were considering?
SIFC: How “troubling” indeed! See above.
Servant: (4) And again, where is the warning that, if they broke off their previous engagement for any reason besides the discovery of their fiancée’s immorality, they would be committing adultery should they ever remarry any other woman, as is claimed by the Betrothal View interpretation of Matt. 5:32 and 19:9?
SIFC: Faulty premise, self-created confusion. All terminated ketubah contracts, for whatever reason, left all parties free to marry someone else because there was not yet an inseverable one-flesh entity created by the hand of God.
(5) Why did Paul tell these previously-engaged men they would not be sinning if they were to marry when in fact Jesus said they could well have been sinning, committing adultery, if the previous engagement breakup was illegitimate, as is claimed by the Betrothal View interpretation of Matt. 5:32 and 19:9?
SIFC: Faulty premise, self-created confusion. There was never any “illegitimate” reason to terminate a ketubah contract. All terminated ketubah contracts, for whatever reason, left all parties free to marry someone else because there was not yet an inseverable one-flesh entity created by the hand of God.
Wrapping this up, we don’t expect to convert any of Servant’s hellbound followers over to Christ’s view. The Holy Spirit must do that in all cases. People who are in illicit sexual relationships have no judgment or discernment until the Lord makes them sufficiently miserable. Hopefully, Servant’s writings look so ridiculous on the surface, from accusing a prophet of God of “breaking up families” to to his outright denial that Jesus said what everyone can see He plainly did say, that no standers or repented prodigals who live for Christ will be attracted to Servant’s siren song for legalized adultery. May the merciful Lord keep all unrepented prodigals who are still in the Far Country, who are one-flesh with celibate standing spouses, far, far away from this wolf who would chain them in the pigpen of legalized adultery or would take a role in landing them there. Ideally, David Servant will some day surrender to the authority and lordship of Jesus Christ, and publicly repent of his rebellion and many blasphemies, escaping the millstone already around his neck and recovering his own inheritance in the kingdom of God. Servant claims on the banner of his web page to be “Discipling the Body of Christ”, but it’s clear that he’s doing the opposite with the adulterously remarried and their “spouses”.
Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment. – James 3:1
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.” – Matthew 10:34-36
Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way. – Luke 6:26
Some of us have a bad habit of mirroring our self-image after the perceptions and expressed feelings of others. Hopefully this unhealthy tendency diminishes under the power and control of the Holy Spirit as we acquire the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). But keeping our self-concept firmly rooted in Christ doesn’t happen automatically. We have to take a deep breath and be intentional about it. “Standerinfamilycourt” has some dear longtime church friends who happen to be legalized adulterers, by Christ’s definition. Well over 30 years ago, the wife civilly divorced her God-joined, one-flesh husband for some infraction, and probably a very serious one. Already a mother of young covenant children, this lady “married” a more faithful gentlemen, and at some point thereafter, they got saved together. They are the perfect argument for the evangelical crowd which cites 2 Corinthians 5:17, the “proof-text” that none of what Jesus repeatedly said about marrying another while the spouse of one’s youth is still alive “should apply” to them because it all happened before they were born-again. This couple is gracious, generous, hospitable in every way, and they both serve the church until they drop from exhaustion. They were among the first to make us feel welcome in our new Assembly of God church after we moved from a distant state almost 20 years ago due job relocation. When SIFC’s spouse (who was also very close to them) later went prodigal, they were the couple that made sure there was at least a birthday lunch that didn’t pass in lonely isolation.
In those earlier days, SIFC was aware that their “marriage” was adultery, biblically-speaking, but was sincerely wrestling with a couple of issues that delayed any warning to them:
(1) whether those who die in legalized adultery always forfeit their inheritance in the kingdom of God (that is, go to hell despite all their goodness otherwise).
(2) whether an infinite God deals with such anomalies on an individual, case-by-case basis, knowing the hearts involved, and being more lenient with those whose pastors, under whom they were in submission, have innocently misled them.
Issue #1 was definitively resolved through some events that occurred within the past 3 years, after this couple had moved away. Face it, would we not all behave very differently if we knew that notmissing heaven due to clinging to a biblically-illicit relationship, (the opposite certainty) was even a possibility? We might not remarry ourselves, out of a continued desire to love and obey Jesus, but we would at least have the relief that our prodigal spouse and our dear friends would not be risking hell if we didn’t do our best to speak up, I believe. There would be no compelling reason to offend them with this (admittedly) harsh truth under those circumstances. We could “live and let live”, and people would have a much-improved opinion of us. We could then afford to be much gentler in our modes of influence. We could attend a retreat and let heresy and misinformation float through the room while we “chill”.
Indeed, if millions of people weren’t actually going to hell for dying in the ongoing state of legalized adultery, if there really were no justifiable scriptural connection between #LukeSixteenEighteen and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, then the constitutional offense which unilateral divorce represents to Christ-followers would be much lighter (at least with regard to the violation of our right to free religious exercise), and we could conscionably “chill” with regard to working for full repeal, in order to go along with the many who are trying to mitigate the 14th amendment violations of property and parental rights by working for various tweaks to the existing laws, which they see as more “doable” than full repeal. (But, I digress.)
The timely, definitive resolution of Issue #1 in SIFC’s personal experience made Issue #2 absolutely moot in one fell swoop. SIFC’s very public “ministry” was launched as a result, though it was not originally planned that way. Issue #2 became even more moot as awareness grew of the free online deep bible study resources available to any sincere Christ-follower wanting the truth and wanting to obey, also with the growth in vocality of the Marriage Permanence movement leaders and members, including several solid pastors with very well-done online sermons. As deplorably difficult as this matter is, it’s becoming increasingly impossible for anyone in the church to honestly claim they’ve not been warned, unless they live under a rock. This trend is quite likely to continue, orchestrated by God.
One day the wife of this couple (a facebook friend) broke into an online conversation SIFC was having with another gentleman on the topic of the need for adulterously “married” partners to sever those unions. She gave a very emotional plea around all that she had experienced in suffering under her true marriage with the unsaved husband of her youth, then the Lord “bringing her” a godly husband who got saved alongside her. A very dicey exchange followed, along the lines of SIFC’s then-recent discoveries described above, also how our denomination had officially moved from a biblical to an unholy and unbiblical MDR doctrine in 1973 (another recent discovery). My dear friend was told that the pain of this is entirely the fault of the evangelical pastors who decided they knew more than Jesus and Paul about what was right in God’s sight, and that I came to be conclusively convinced with the confirmation of reliable authorities of its heaven-or-hell nature. My friend’s Catholic upbringing, which she felt redeemed out of, did not help the conversation much, suffice it to say.
At the end of the conversation, we “agreed to disagree”, and I was amazed that she did not “unfriend” me. Nor did she “unfollow” me, apparently. Some time passed, during which I was also exposed to my own relatives, among whom there are also a fair number of the adulterously “married”, and at some point last year, this lady started occasionally posting these nondescript “swipes” on her wall, addressed to who-knows, similar to this:
“If becoming ‘religious’ has made you more judgmental, rude, harsh, a backbiter, you need to check if you are worshipping God or your ego.”
Obviously, there is no way to deliver a message that half or more of the “marriages” in the church are no more than papered-over adultery-according to Jesus, that would not come off as harsh to most people. John the Baptist certainly found this out in no uncertain terms.
I decided to just let the snipes and swipes go by without a response of any sort, but did notice they tended to come after a particularly outspoken day with others on repenting from legalized adultery. On two of these occasions, there had been a reference to 1 Corinthians 5 in the hours that preceded, and the instruction “not to even eat with such” (in hopes that they will repent and the souls will be rescued, as Paul hoped in the situation he was addressing.) Yup, that would probably do it! I realized that the combination of this sister continuing to follow “standerinfamilycourt” while avoiding any further direct confrontation beyond that first long ago challenge on my wall probably had at least a small element of conviction in it (and probably no small amount of frustration that SIFC was not “healing” out of the “cult” phase — with past-due apologies tendered…)
I began to ask myself if, the core message having been dutifully delivered to her, it might be best at this time to quietly “unfriend” her to spare her the emotional turmoil of my very public ministry until the Holy Spirit could finish the job of convicting. Before doing this, I sought the advice of fellow standers in a non-public forum. Some suggested tweaks to privacy settings I wasn’t aware of, and others pointed to the conviction that is likely building insider her. One particularly insightful comment went like this:
” I think what most of these friends think … is that “we” are the ones sending them to hell for remarriage.. when we know that power is not within us but God…”
Now this is some food for thought: how might they think what they think about this? Do they want us to just “shut up” ? I’m sure they do! Do we speak such a thing as consignment to hell “into being”, in their estimation or fears, as the Lord does? Do they think we “pray them” into hell (or that we would even remotely want to)? How could the judgment of hell (or of its prospect, at least) be coming from anywhere but the One with divine authority to do it?
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. – Matthew 10:28
There is the fateful scene in the book of Acts, with Ananias and Sapphira, where Peter says: “Why is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out as well.” (The pair had sold land and misrepresented the proceeds from it which they had pledged to the community of believers.) Those speaking out the truth in marriage permanence are speaking scripture, but aren’t coming even close to taking this kind of authority in Jesus’ name as Peter did. It will never be deemed “loving” in most people’s eyes to tell someone that their “marriage” is adultery and their soul is on the line. But it is even more unloving not to tell them, even if in today’s warped culture, pointing out immoral behavior is deemed a “worse” sin than committing the immorality in the first place. This is because the guilty conscience cannot be rational, and cannot see that a godly rebuke, though it’s coming out of the mouth of a human, is ultimately from God. David saw this, for example, did not protest to Nathan that the prophet’s ego was talking and that he was a backbiter. How could he when the moral rebuke of murdering a covenant husband in order to legalize and conceal his own adultery was to his face? In the instance of an offended, furtive follower of a public ministry that rebukes the culture of the harlot church and the anti-Christ actions of its leaders (usually by name), it’s most accurately the taking of offense just because “the shoe fits”. There’s another word for this: fruitless conviction.
The wicked flee when no one is pursuing, But the righteous are bold as a lion. – Proverbs 28:1
If anything constitutes “backbiting”, it’s putting a “corrective” message on one’s wall that has no “To” line. This friend is not normally a wicked person, and her predicament is largely due to the faithlessness of the shepherds she followed in subconscious preference to following what’s actually in her bible. Even for “standerinfamilycourt” who loves both of these legalized adulterers of 30+ years deeply and personally, it going to be the saddest of days when conviction does finally and properly land, and they realize they must separate in order to see each other again in heaven. They spent those decades doing what they sincerely thought was godly and right, in devotion to both Him and each other. If any unlawful couple caused SIFC to wrestle with the Lord about #LukeSixteenEighteen, it’s this couple.
We tend to make an assumption in the contemporary church that Jesus, Paul and the apostles were consistently meek when addressing all issues, and that they only got “rough” with the Pharisees. This leads to the belief that anger or directness is never appropriate or “godly” in dealing with a deadly spiritual cancer — one, in fact, that is infested with demons. A recent article, Read The Gospels To Discover The Jesus Nobody Likes To Talk About by Glen T. Stanton in the Federalist states it this way:
“Two truths about Jesus seem to be at odds with the modern Christian understanding and presentation of God’s son. First, the God-man, unbound by time, held a decidedly ancient and unenlightened view of the world by contemporary standards. Second, he did hurt others’ feelings and didn’t apologize for it—and not just those of the religious fat cats of the day. Along with the tender Lamb of God, we find a lion as well. We must admit to and accept all of this if we want to know the whole divine person of Christ.”
Very typically, the other person like this in many of our lives is our own prodigal spouse, someone who does not need any enticement to think and speak negatively about their true one-flesh covenant mate in order to self-justify keeping the counterfeit. If that person was ever born-again, the Holy Spirit is pursuing them relentlessly, day by day, hour by hour, and doing so from within. It’s easy for the blame for that to fall on the praying covenant marriage stander who has not taken off their wedding ring even though their spouse may have put on a false one. If the covenant spouse also takes an unrelenting public stand against institutionalized adultery, meaning to change both law and culture, it escalates from there. Prodigals are half-right about the blame for their discomfort. We are instruments or agents of what they dread, but we are not the Divine Orchestrator.
For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death.– 2 Corinthians 7:10
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
I’m Living in an Ongoing State of Legalized Adultery with Somebody Else’s Spouse. Can I Get Away With It?
We have been responding to the 3-part blog series by David Servant called, “I’m Divorced and Remarried. Am I Living in Adultery?” This appears to be the final installment.
The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes and examines him. – Proverbs 18:17
It seems that Part 3 continues David Servant’s parade of slander and emotion, conflation of issues, convenient redefinition of terms, and paucity of consistent hermeneutic principles, while making a very shallow pretense at the latter for the sake of appearances. And then there’s the ad-hominem again, a telltale sign of a leaking and empty truth bucket. All reliable writings, books and blogs, going back to at least 1957 on this topic rigorously apply hermeneutical principles in a comprehensive and disciplined way that accounts for all five minimum elements: Content, Context, Culture, Comparison and Consultation. See our blog series, “Stop Abusing Scripture: Debunk Series”for a fuller discussion and application of these principles to the most commonly abused scriptures in the MDR Christian culture wars.
Heretical arguments invariably fail in at least two of these five principles, most commonly: some combination of Context, Comparison and Consultation. When these highly critical pieces of examination are omitted, it’s usually because the author either doesn’t know what he or she is doing, or because the author knows that doing so will immediately expose their theory as insupportable. We pointed out in our Part 2 rebuttal that David Servant even went so far as to deride the rigorous application of the Context principle, complaining about those who would take care to rightly-divide the verb tenses Jesus used in some of His more controversial teachings, and he went even further, to claim that it’s “unnecessary” to validate the translation of the Greek words in a given passage. Pardon us!
For those who have read Part 1 and Part 2 of our rebuttals to David Servant’s earlier installments, this response will seem pretty repetitive due to Servant’s redundant and circular claims. Points 1 through 5 raise no new substantive issues, and we will mostly be referring back to the earlier rebuttal points, while hoping to have the luxury of being a bit briefer in addressing these repackaged “points”. (How well satan knows that if a lie is repeated frequently enough, there are some who will begin to accept it as “true”.)
We defer Servant’s Points 6, 7 and 8 to our Part 3B rebuttal, to follow, because we cannot effectively address these in this same blog post without the length becoming more than most readers will be attentive to. These last three points we’ll deal with next time do raise some arguments that he did not raise in his Parts 1 and 2.
The Part 3 blog links to a Mennonite lady’s testimony, where Servant inaccurately charges that she was influenced by a slick “cult” to abandon her adulterous remarriage, while she clearly testifies that she was led by the Holy Spirit over a course of four years after her regeneration, and she came to conviction purely as a result of deeply studying a book that is ALIVE . Servant’s ploy, as usual, is emotionalism without examining the facts, including what came out of this lady’s own mouth. Oh the emotional punch of the melodrama of appealing to a vivid Hollywood kidnapping scene! Did Servant bother to contact and interview her before he publicly slandered her?
(Yes, this repenter’s Mennonite church probably was of some influence in her decision to exit the legalized adultery she was living in. Some churches actually do still succeed in discipling their members, believe it or not. However, such people don’t tend to make these radical repentance decisions impulsively, and they usually do not make them primarily under anyone else’s influence.) Repenting prodigals with watching family members study to show themselves approved, as we are all commanded to do, but apparently this is unlike Mr. Servant’s practices, judging from the shallowness and redundancy of the eight arguments he offers below, and the canned liberal bible commentary that he passes off as more “authoritative” than the straightforward words that actually crossed the lips of Jesus and of Paul on a repeated basis. The perennial serpent’s question has always been, “Did God REALLY say?”
Servant charges: “Those people [SIFC: those of us who believe that God-joined covenant holy matrimony is always indissoluble except by death] are not your friends, as you will soon discover if you tell them you have changed your mind about Divine Divorce. They will ostracize you, as all cults do as a means of controlling their members. They will also tell you that you are going to hell. But God is for you. Your life, and perhaps even your marriage, can be restored to what He intended, because His mercy and grace are more than sufficient to restore all that Satan, through Divine Divorce Doctrine, has stolen from you. God is good, and His mercies are new every morning.”
SIFC: The usual understanding of what constitutes a “cult” necessarily hinges on who Jesus is to the “cult members” and how closely they adhere to His authority. If the authentic Jesus is your cult leader, then that’s a good thing, and Servant’s cheap slur becomes quite the compliment. Below, in contrast, we will see David Servant’s “Jesus” painted as some sort of Mosaic rubber-stamper who is so schizophrenic that He then turned right around and delivered the sermon on the mount.
God is “for us”, indeed, but not for our immoral relationships that will keep us out of the kingdom of God. Both “mercy” and “grace” are effectively the opposite if they are only based on temporal comforts, instead of eternal destinies.
Servant has an extremely poor conception of how a person comes to conviction and repentance from a life of coveting, stealing and committing adultery with the God-joined spouse of another living person. We “cultists” seem to be given tremendous credit that is solely owed to the indwelling Holy Spirit, and we simply cannot accept what’s not due us! We’re there to answer the hard questions, sure, and point them in the direction of the necessary scholarship, and to pray for them. We “control” nobody during any phase of the process. Most such repentance occurs long before such a person seeks to join our support community, in the majority of cases. The concept David Servant seems to be consistently tone-deaf on is that the real Jesus expects obedience to come from each disciple’s heart, not from any external factors. On the flip side, those who are unilaterally “divorced” by a prodigal spouse and choose to stand celibate until God removes the satan-dispatched rival (1 Cor. 7:11), do tend to join the support communities early in the process, and often (speaking of “control” and “ostracism”), because that no-brainer decision to obey to God’s clear, explicit instruction causes them to be treated like pariahs in their own church, by the threatened who are living immoral lives, and in too many tragic cases, doing so from behind the pulpit.
All that said, there’s no doubt the man Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 5 felt pretty “ostracized” and “controlled” when he was put out of the church, and turned over to satan in the hopes that his soul might be ultimately saved. What a controlling thing to say, that “a little leaven leavens the whole lump”! Some “friend” Paul was! He was so “cultish” that he urged the whole church “not to even eat with such”. After all, what this man was doing was most likely legal under Greek civil law. Yet Paul knew that the “mercies that are new every morning” never extended to continuing, unrepented sin under the higher kingdom of God standards, or there would have been no need to turn the man over to satan through excommunication, as he did.
As for telling people they are going to hell, let’s please make that, “if they do not repent.” Thanks to the blood of Jesus, nobody goes to hell for the act of legalizing an immoral relationship. They go to hell for continuing in it until they die. That’s because a jealous God will allow no idols to compete with Him for worship. Found a mere nine verses below Luke 16:18 is this cry from the pit of hell as described by the mouth of Jesus:
“And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, that you send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—in order that he may warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment. – Luke 16:27-28
If Jesus didn’t think it was a “stretch” to link His no-excuses prohibition against taking another spouse (while being inseverably joined in the state of sarx mia to an estranged covenant partner who has not died) to HIs own vivid description of what happens to all who live as if this world is all there is, why are supposedly God-fearing evangelicals surprised or offended to hear 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19-21 and Hebrews 13:4 linked to Luke 16:18 ? For that matter, why is Servant offended at this? Why are they not instead grateful for the existential warning? The carnal and spiritually-immature soul will claim that this, too, is “controlling” behavior. As we saw, Paul did not hesitate to warn of hell as a consequence of violating the holy matrimony covenant, but as we also saw, he did not preclude the possibility of physical repentance in the form of terminating the relationship, as the escape from hell. If one is going to be part of a “cult”, let our “cult” be the “Christ-followers” after our Cult Leader, and not the “Erasmeans” or the “Lutherites”, or the “Moseans” — all of whom carnally reject Christ’s moral absolutes . The original 1st century saints were all judged to be “cult members” for unanimously obeying Him in their own time, so it is a badge of honor to have that charge levelled at the covenant marriage indissolubility community by a self-proven church wolf.
A final reminder before we dive into a detailed examination of all eight of Servant’s objections to obeying the straightforward commandment of Christ: all civil divorce is man-contrived (Matthew 19:8), and cannot, therefore, be called “divine” in any sense of the word. God’s “divorce” is always spelled D-E-A-T-H. He does not dabble in man’s moral fictions, not even on a part-time basis. (If we must have a label in our support of those disciples who are forsaking immoral relationships, go ahead and call us “fundamentalists”, David.)
#1 of 8 Servant’s Arguments Against No-Excuses Indissolubitly of God-joined Holy Matrimony
“They confuse God’s original ideal—a world without divorce and remarriage—with reality, which is a world that is full of both.”
SIFC: Our sovereign God is not some feckless wimp who has only “ideals”, “designs”, “bests”, “intentions” and so forth. This milquetoast platitude has always been a figment of a liberal bible commentator’s imagination. He is the Creator, Ruler and Judge of all the Universe, and He deals in COMMANDMENTS. He requires holiness, without which He says none of us will see Him. His accommodation to the frailty of mankind was Jesus. He need make no further accommodation or allowances for those who find their excuses not to obey Jesus, including all those like David Servant, who stare wistfully back at Moses, and long for the glory days of concurrent and serial polygamy for the far more reasonable price of a daily ritual animal sacrifice. To them, sacrifice is better than obedience, but unfortunately for them, that’s an option which is no longer the Divine Offer.
Refraining from murdering, raping, stealing, bearing false witness and coveting thy neighbor’s wife can all be said to be “ideals”, too. But they’re also COMMANDMENTS. Just because these things are a “reality” doesn’t make it right for immoral governments to sanction them, and even worse, for God’s shepherds to appease and defend those immoral laws. We surely don’t say, with regard to legal abortion or gay marriage or assisted suicide, that the church is confusing “God’s original ideal“, a world without abortion and gay marriage, with “reality, which is a world full of both“. No, we take a holy stand based on the higher authority of God word!
God has repeatedly, in fact, shown that He is deadly-jealous of His sacred symbols, and arguably, the state of holy matrimony is the very first such symbol, one that weaves through virtually every book of the bible. If men died instantly just for touching the Ark of the Covenant, how much more is His wrath over nations and societies who have so little fear of Him that they misrepresent the Bridegroom as a serial polygamist, and who substitute illicit legalized relationships for fellowship with Him? Is it any wonder, then that our western nations where church leadership are complicit with sequential polygamy are all overrun with the Assyria of rabid homofascism, and Persia of militant Islamism?
Servant:
“To them, there have been no actual divorces, only fantasy divorces. And since there have been no actual divorces, neither have there been any actual remarriages either, but only fantasy remarriages. To a large degree, wedding ceremonies, vows, marriage certificates, witnesses, court records, name changes, and long-standing human relationships and interaction don’t exist in this alternate reality. Millions of people are not actually married to people whom they think they are married to, people whom they live with and interact with every day as a husband or wife, often for decades and until death. Conversely, millions of people are actually married to people whom they think they are not married to, people whom they sometimes haven’t seen for decades and who live hundreds of miles away. On top of this, millions of people have children whom they think are legitimate, but who are actually illegitimate children, the offspring of adultery.”
SIFC: To true citizens of the kingdom of God, the actual “alternate reality” is the one painted by the 16th century Reformers on a wave of “Christianized” humanism. Humanism and discipleship have never been compatible with one another, because to take up one’s cross and follow Him is the very antithesis of the self-worship on which humanism is founded. These “Reformers” were just hypocritical enough to also look wistfully back at Moses, the more lenient “sheriff” when it came to sexual license, while illegitimately claiming the “grace” of the New Covenant, as if they could have it both ways. It was Luther who, frustrated with the lack of access to sanctioned divorce through the church, took what belonged exclusively to God and handed it over to Caesar. The same character flaw in Luther also manifested itself in his penchant for anti-Semitism and Replacement Theology. Luther’s “Jesus” replaces His bride if she doesn’t toe the mark! (He’d rather have stoned her, but “defective” governments tend to frown on this.)
Among the choicer of Luther’s recorded remarks:
“You may ask: What is to become of the other [the guilty party] if he too is perhaps unable to lead a chaste life? Answer: It was for this reason that God commanded in the law [Deut. 22:22–24] that adulterers be stoned, that they might not have to face this question. The temporal sword and government should therefore still put adulterers to death, for whoever commits adultery has in fact himself already departed and is considered as one dead. Therefore, the other [the innocent party] may remarry just as though his spouse had died, if it is his intention to insist on his rights and not show mercy to the guilty party. Where the government is negligent and lax, however, and fails to inflict the death penalty, the adulterer may betake himself to a far country and there remarry if he is unable to remain continent. But it would be better to put him to death, lest a bad example be set. Some may find fault with this solution and contend that thereby license and opportunity is afforded all wicked husbands and wives to desert their spouses and remarry in a foreign country. Answer: Can I help it? The blame rests with the government. Why do they not put adulterers to death? Then I would not need to give such advice. Between two evils one is always the lesser, in this case allowing the adulterer to remarry in a distant land in order to avoid fornication. And I think he would be safer also in the sight of God, because he has been allowed to live and yet is unable to remain continent. If others also, however, following this example desert their spouses, let them go. They have no excuse such as the adulterer has, for they are neither driven nor compelled. God and their own conscience will catch up to them in due time. Who can prevent all wickedness?” Luther, Martin: Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan (Hrsg.) ; Oswald, Hilton C. (Hrsg.) ; Lehmann, Helmut T. (Hrsg.): Luther’s Works, Vol. 45 : The Christian in Society II. Philadelphia : Fortress Press, 1999, c1962 (Luther’s Works 45), S. 45:III33
The kingdom of God has always been an “alternative reality” to those preferring to dwell outside of that Kingdom. They choose to dwell outside because a kingdom is a place where the King is OBEYED.
THY kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. – Matthew 6:10
Servant parrots the humanism of Luther, not the holiness of Jesus. The two are not even remotely compatible. Humanism argues that all humans are entitled to a sexual relationship at all times because this is the only way (externally) to manage the flesh. Following Christ demands that the flesh be crucified from within and that obedience come from an idol-free heart, and if obedience incurs suffering and character development, we are in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses. (For a fairly comprehensive collection the profoundly unscriptural quotes of the “Reformers” on divorce and remarriage, see pages 21-25 of the scholarly paper by Daniel R. Jennings, “The History Of Christian Thought Upon Marriage, Divorce & Remarriage”.)
Anyone who purports to fear God should take Matthew 19:6 and 8 as explicitly denying men any authority whatsoever to create, regulate or “dissolve” an unconditional covenant in which He tells us He remains a participant, in fact, one of the parties thereto. It is appalling, really, that Servant does not grasp this. (More about God’s unconditional covenants is below, when Servant gets to that point in his arguments. ) For now, let’s just note that in verse 6, when Jesus said “let no man separate“, the Greek texts reveal that He did not use the words “andra” nor “aner” here, as He could have if He were merely counseling a man, or the husband of what he “shouldn’t” do. He instead used the word anthrópos, in effect saying, “let no HUMAN put distance between [ chōrizetō] ” what God has supernaturally joined. (Let no human, including Moses who was, after all, a human, have any jurisdiction over what I claim as belonging to ME exclusively.) Servant: That smiling Christian couple driving with their four children on their way to “that other church”…they aren’t what they seem to be. They think they are going to heaven because they believe in Jesus and live their faith every day, but actually they are going to hell because they haven’t divorced each other.
SIFC: That smiling Christian couple does not “believe in Jesus“, no matter how full is their evangelical mini-van, unless they practice studying His word, which couldn’t be more plain, even with the pervasive bible translation fraud that has been taking place over the past several decades, that their household is unlawfully-founded. They will see quite clearly that man’s law cannot override God’s law, as these “smiling Christian families” are all very quick to see is the case with homosexuals. Even the most perverse and heathen CNN reporter saw this from just one night of reading the Gideon bible in the Kentucky hotel drawer when serial polygamist Kim Davis went to jail.
Sad to say, it’s been consistently shown through reputable polling surveys that said couple rarely reads their bible for themselves, much less studies it deeply, nor toils to resolve any apparent conflicts which inevitably result from contemporary translation-tampering. Instead, they rely on the “priestly class” to feed them (and preferably, to feed their flesh), as though they were themselves illiterate. Servant glibly terms it as “going to hell because they haven’t ‘divorced‘ ” If they read their bibles, they would plainly see that only death dissolves holy matrimony, and therefore, they are headed to hell with someone else’s spouse unless they cease and desist from breaking the 1st, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th commandments on a daily basis. Servant derides the biblical form of repentance from this (or any other sin) in his sarcasm, and treats them as though God’s messengers are their “judges”.
Servant: May I first submit that something is indissoluble if it cannot be “dissolved, loosened, or disconnected.” The phrase “one flesh” carries no connotation of indissolubility. In fact, just the opposite is true. Husbands and wives are only “one flesh” during sexual intercourse. Only for a small part of their married lives are they “one flesh.”
SIFC: Servant is here conflating physical separation. that is, immoral abandonment (the chōrizetō that Jesus forbid by any human authority, the rebellion of which is certainly possible, as Servant points out) — with dissolutionof an unconditional covenant to which God Himself is and remains a party. This man cannot do, for as long as God is God. The priest in Malachi 2 made the same false assumption that Servant makes here — and he found himself cut off from fellowship with God as a direct consequence of it. In rebuking this priest who had “divorced” the woman God joined him to, declaring that covenant “dissolved” to “marry” another — without that God-joining (synezeuxen), God tells him : “she IS (not “was”) the wife of your marriage covenant.” Man says it’s legal, but God calls it an abomination that separates such people from Him until such time as there is repentance and restitution. Servant also confuses “sarx mia” with “hen soma” with his claim that that one-flesh relationship is only present during sexual intercourse. We dealt in detail with this fallacy in Part 1, and we do so again immediately below.
Servant: God’s statement regarding husbands and wives becoming one flesh speaks of divinely-intended exclusivity of sex within marriage, not the indissolubility of marriage itself. Paul wrote that the man who joins himself to a prostitute, something forbidden by God, becomes “one flesh” with her (1 Cor. 6:16). Obviously, there is nothing indissoluble about the relationship of a man and a prostitute. In fact, all such relationships should be dissolved immediately.
SIFC: We have above established the untruth of this first sentence statement of Servant’s. As in Part 1, we have shown conclusively that the supernaturally-created sarx mia one-flesh state differs from the hen soma (one body) man-joined counterfeit described by Paul in 1 Cor. 6:16, which he also contrasts with sarx mia at the end of that verse, before Paul goes on to speak only of sarx mia in Ephesians 5:31. Where there is no synezeuxen, there can be no sarx mia. By process of elimination, where there is no sarx mia, the joining is merely hen soma. There certainly is nothing indissoluble about hen soma, the relationship of a man with a prostitute, or for that matter, with anyone other than the God-joined living spouse of his youth. As Servant himself correctly states, “In fact, all such relationships should be dissolved immediately.” We couldn’t agree more, and this has been our point all along. People are often surprised to find out that both Jesus and Paul used an entirely different vocabulary set for indissoluble holy matrimony, and another set of term for all other forms of illicit sexual union. With regard to joining, the main difference again is verb tense — but it is a vey important difference because it describes duration, continuity, durability and the like.
For Servant to neglect making this distinction, and thus to use unlike terms interchangeably, is either ill-informed or willful. We won’t presume to judge which, but will say here that Servant violates the hermeneutical principle of Content on its most basic level.
Properly understood, the above makes hen soma a sub-element of sarx mia, but the converse is never true.The latter exists as soon as valid, eligible vows are exchanged in front of witnesses, andsynezeuxenoccurs exclusively by God’s hand. In the case of holy matrimony, hen soma occurs , depending on whether or not there was fornication between the (biblically-eligible) pair ahead of the wedding, but at the latest, it becomes an element of the created sarx mia on the wedding night. Some recent science paints a graphic, practical picture of what hen soma (one body) looks like in isolation. Research has found that the DNA from a man’s sperm stays in a woman’s body indefinitely, even if it was a one-night stand or a rape. The spiritual DNA that God puts there in a separate process also remains with the woman and the man until one of them physically dies.
Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. – 1 Cor. 6:18
Servant:
And just because Jesus said, “What God has joined together, let no man separate,” that does not prove that separation is impossible. Rather, it proves that separation is possible, otherwise there would be no need for a warning against it.
God also said, “Do not commit adultery.” That certainly does not prove that adultery is impossible. Rather, the prohibition against adultery proves it is possible, albeit inappropriate.
SIFC: This is a purely semantic (and entirely irrelevant) point. Jesus was not just stating a metaphysical fact, nor an assumedly unattainable “ideal”, He was issuing a COMMANDMENT, by which all men will be eternally judged.
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter…Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’
Hence, making a flippant statement like “adultery is proven possible [by Jesus forbidding the civil legalization of it] , abeit ‘inappropriate’ ” comes off before the throne of heaven, and the intellect of the reader, as disrespectful of God’s word, and incredibly off-topic.
Servant: “Divorced people are not married people, and this could not be more clear from God’s words in Deut. 24:1-4. There it speaks of a married woman whose husband divorced her, giving her a certificate of divorce. She was then unmarried. But she remarried, gaining a new husband, to whom she was a wife. But he subsequently divorced her. She was again unmarried. She was forbidden by law to remarry her first husband. But as a divorced, unmarried woman, she was free to remarry anyone else.
“Obviously, Jesus, the author of the Law of Moses, did not believe that divorced people are still married in God’s eyes to their former spouses.”
SIFC: Could we please allow Jesus to speak for Himself concerning what He thinks (since He actually did- repeatedly)? [ Civilly] “Divorced” people are not “married” people, according to Servant, on account of an obscure Mosaic regulation which narrowly dealt with non-capital reasons to break a Hebrew betrothal contract (consanguinity, bleeding disease, leprosy, captive war concubine, etc.). What Servant claims here is “true” only if one is wistfully looking back to Moses out of utter contempt for the new “sheriff”, Jesus. We really like what Brother Elliot Nesch had to say about this in the weekly stander’s conference call recording as he applied Romans 7:4 to this nutty heresy of neo-Judaism or Hebrew Roots or Torah Observance (take your pick):
Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.
Brother Nesch quipped: “this widowed bride is diminishing her new Husband while slaving to please a dead husband”.
We also like what Brother Paul had to say about it: Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you.And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the WHOLE Law.– Galatians 5:2-3
Those who want to go back to the lawless pretense that man can dissolve God-joined holy matrimony, under Moses’ system of sin-management, and to forbid inseverable one-flesh partners to reconcile even though willful, ongoing unforgiveness also robs people of their inheritance in the kingdom of God (Matthew 18:23-35), might need to consider offering up a ram on the altar every day (as if that remained possible), or at the very least, stoning their disobedient children to death.
Since nobody in the body of Christ can ever again be impacted by a human ketubah, there is no part of Deuteronomy 24 that has any relevance or application today in the body of Christ. There is some understandable confusion about this due to the post-Moses, pre-Jesus expansion by rabbinical tradition to cover capital offenses, against which the instructions given in Deuteronomy 22 could no longer be carried out due to foreign occupiers, including Persia and Rome, both imposing a legal ban on stoning. We’ll get into that a bit deeper below.
We dealt at length in Part 1 with the false assertions of serial and concurrent polygamy apologists which are based on elevating Torah Observance over the New Covenant. Here we will ask Mr. Servant for New Testament evidence that God ever delegated to humans any authority to create, regulate or “dissolve” holy matrimony. After all, we have presented the direct evidence from the mouth of Jesus that He did not….”from the beginning.” All Servant can cite is Mosaic regulation that Christ explicitly abrogated at the start of His public ministry… “you have heard it said / it is written……BUT I SAY UNTO YOU….”
Nowhere does scripture tell us that Jesus was the “author of the law of Moses”, nor does it tell us that Jesus had no authority to abrogate the law of Moses with a higher law as He saw fit, and as in fact, the sermon on the mount shows several instances where the Mosaic standard was not good enough for the standards of the kingdom of God, where He did just that.
#2 of 8 – Servant’s Attack On The Plain Meaning of Romans 7:2-3 and 1 Corinthians 7:39 (Pseudo-hermeneutics profusely in evidence here.)
So then, if while her husband is living she is joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress’ (Rom. 7:2-3).
Servant:
(Sarcastically) So clearly, only death can end the marriage relationship, and anyone who marries another person while his former spouse is still alive is living in an adulterous relationship, just as Paul taught.”
Answer: Only if we ignore content and context could we come to such a conclusion.
First, the content: Note that the example Paul uses is that of a “married woman” (Greek: hupandros gune) not a divorced woman. Of course, if a married woman is “joined to another man,” she would be an adulteress.
SIFC: First of all, we would vigorously argue with the characterization, “former” spouse who is still alive. There’s no such thing as an “ex” in the kingdom of God, unless it’s an ex-adultery partner (legalized or otherwise). The correct statement is “…anyone who marries another person while his (or her) estranged covenant spouse is still alive is living in an adulterous relationship.”
Secondly, there’s a semantic #fail on Servant’s “content” claim. Yes, we are speaking of a “married” woman – she’s married for life, and in God’s eyes, it is only to the one He joined her to, not the counterfeit replacement on a piece of overreaching paper. The only sense in which she is therefore “divorced” is the man-fabricated civil sense. Untwisting Servant’s contorted logic here, as a consequence of getting back to the correct, biblical definition of terms, the “adulteress” argument is not because she’s joined to some random man, but because she has joined in pseudo-marriage / civil-only union to somebody who is only her “spouse” on paper, since the one-flesh entity is still intact with her true husband, because God declines to participate in #2.
Servant: A divorced woman, however, is not a married woman, but an unmarried woman. Paul, a former Pharisee who was well-versed in the Law of Moses and who appealed to the Law in this very passage in order to make his point (7:1), knew that a divorced woman was not “married to her former husband in God’s eyes” under the Law of Moses. In fact, Paul knew that the Mosaic Law forbade her to remarry her former husband if her second husband divorced her or died (Deut. 24:1-4). So there is absolutely no way he could have thought God viewed the divorced and remarried woman as still married to her original husband.
SIFC: Term-twisting again. A civilly-divorced woman is still a married woman in God’s eyes so long as the husband of her youth remains alive. While it may be very true that Paul was aware of the Mosaic view of this, scripture tells us that he hung out with Jesus for three years in the Arabian wilderness following his conversion (Galatians 1:16-17). He knew that the Mosaic era was now passe and the higher standards of the Messianic age were now in full effect. He for sure knew that the kingdom of God is a place where the King is OBEYED. He was not about to be staring wistfully back at Moses, as if he were in rebellion against Christ. Servant’s theory, which is (shamelessly) based on elevating Moses over Jesus, simply doesn’t hang together. Jesus said what He said, and He straightforwardly meant what He said. Paul always aligned with Jesus and not with Moses.
(Now let’s see if Servant myopically misses the part of the scripture below that severs us from the law of Moses in Rom. 7:4….note: the bold font below is his emphasis.)
Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter (Rom. 7:1-5).
Servant:
“Obviously, Paul was not teaching about the sole lawful means of dissolving a marriage. That was not his topic. Rather, he was simply using an illustration from marriage to teach how Jewish believers in Christ are no longer bound to the Law of Moses since they have died in Christ.
To claim that Paul’s words in Romans 7:1-5 are teaching about the sole means of dissolving a marriage would be like claiming that his quotation of the old covenant law, “You shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing” in 1 Cor. 9:9 and 1 Tim. 5:18 was written to teach the Corinthians and Timothy about animal husbandry.
SIFC: Mr. Servant is here trying to have it both ways. Yes, Paul was using the marriage / widowhood analogy to demonstrate to us that Jews and Gentiles alike are not bound to the Law of Moses. But he’d have us believe that the analogy Paul used was not a valid one, if he’s then going to claim that death isn’t in fact the only way that an unconditional covenant in which God Himself is one of the participants can be dissolved. The whole point of both contexts is that death is the only way the Mosaic Covenant dissolved, and death is the only way the covenant of holy matrimony dissolves — due to God’s direct participation in both. Speaking of “animal husbandry” and scripture context, Matthew 5:32 is clearly about an INNOCENT woman not being turned into an adulteress by the heinous action of her husband, not about allowing a man to divorce his wife for adultery. See Part 3B for further clarity on this.
Servant:
“A similar passage that is twisted by Divine Divorce proponents to prove that marriage can only be dissolved by death is 1 Cor. 7:39: “A wife is bound as long as her husband lives; but if her husband is dead, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord.” Honest interpreters, however, will admit that one sentence is not the sum total of all that Paul, or the Bible, teaches in regard to the subject of marriage or its dissolution.”
Clearly, Paul was not saying that only death dissolves a marriage, as seconds earlier he made it clear that a believer married to an unbeliever who wants to divorce is “not under bondage” in such cases and should let the unbeliever leave (1 Cor. 7:15). It would seem odd to claim that, in such cases, the deserted believer is still married to the deserter until death.
SIFC: Honest interpretation, on the contrary, would point out that Paul’s instruction and testimony on the immorality and invalidity of remarriage while the spouse of our youth is alive is consistent throughout the Apostle’s writings, and more importantly, consistent with Christ’s view, while departing from Moses’ view, throughout. Servant is fabricating confusion out of his own cognitive dissonance. His argument is the classic redefinition of terms engaged in by liberal commentators for decades. His pseudo-hermeneutics come into play here as he misuses the term “under bondage” found in verse 15. We covered that at length in Part 1, and separately in our 2015 “Stop Abusing Scripture” series. What Servant humanistically paints as “odd” is precisely what Jesus was directly speaking of in Matthew 19:12, that is, becoming a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of God — one (but far from the only one) of those places in life where His disciples are called to take up their cross and follow Him instead of their flesh. As Paul goes on to state in verses 11 and 16, we are to leave open the possibility of return and reconciliation with our one-flesh who is at this point not only prodigal to us, but prodigal to God Himself, and who therefore remains in danger of hell if he does not make a U-turn in the road. The very worst thing a true spouse can possibly do is join the prodigal in their own leaky boat by replicating his or her adulterous sin in their own life. Carnal Christian society will “buy” the cheap, legalized veneer these days, but Jehovah Berith never will.
Servant:
Moreover, Paul also allowed for those “released from a wife” to remarry (1 Cor. 7:27-28), which indicates again that Paul believed divorce dissolves marriage. On top of that, as I have already said, Jesus’ statement that “Whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery” (Mat. 5:32) indicates that whoever divorces his wife for immorality and remarries does not commit adultery. Clearly, Jesus believed that legitimate divorce annuls a marriage, thus again proving that death alone is not the only thing that can annul a marriage.
At most, 1 Cor. 7:39 is a simple instruction for married women to remain faithful to their vows and to help widows understand that they are free to remarry.
SIFC: It should be abundantly clear by now that Paul “believed” no such thing! In the Corinthian church, which did include some converted Jews, there were two ways a man could be “released from a wife“, neither of which encompassed those who immorally abandoned their one-flesh living wife under pretext of a legal system that violated God’s law. An unmarried man could possibly be released from a ketubah betrothal contract, which was an agreement where under Jewish law and tradition, the betrothed woman had all of the legal standing of a consummated wife, and was referred to as such.
The other sort man of man “released from a wife” in the Corinthian church was a widower. It is inconsistent with the vast body of conflicting scripture for Servant to make the outrageous claim that a one-flesh, legally estranged husband is “released from” a still-living wife. Furthermore, Servant’s denial of the plain, straightforward meaning of verse 39 has no reasonable basis, for the same reason that his denial of the plain meaning of Romans 7:2-3 has no supportable basis: circular reasoning. This is discussed in greater detail in our “Stop Abusing Scripture” series, this particular installment dealing with the evangelical rape of 1 Corinthians 7, and another installment with the rape of Matthew 19:9 and 5:32 to attempt to “justify” what Christ unambiguously and repeatedly forbid. We all individually choose to obey Him or we find excuses not to, but in Servant’s case, he is deceiving others into holding onto those excuses (while forfeiting their inheritance in the kingdom of God), in a manner that shows unusual contempt for the authority of Christ and His word.
#3 of 8 – Servant’s Off-Base Denial That Legalized Sequential Polygamy Is Equivalently Immoral to Legalized Sodomy As “Marriage”
Servant: If a married homosexual couple became believers in Jesus, we would tell them to “divorce,” even if they shared adopted or surrogate children, because theirs is a sexually immoral relationship. So likewise, we should tell couples in adulterous marriages that they, too, should divorce, even if they have children, as theirs is a sexually immoral relationship.
Answer: This is an invalid comparison, because all homosexuality is always wrong whereas, indisputably, not all marriage is wrong.
SIFC: What makes this a directly valid comparison is the absence of unconditional covenant (along with the corresponding absence God’s participation in it), the complete absence of God’s act of creating synezeuxen, supernatural God-yoking between them, hence no sarx mia. This participation of God in either type of union is, by definition and by His holy character, impossible. The one type of illicit union left their one-flesh partner instead of their father and mother, and the other type is male and male, or female and female, not male and female. Neither type qualifies under God’s unchanging definition of holy matrimony, even if an apostate “pastor” participates. Such a “shepherd” is misusing the holy name of the Lord to perform a vain act — breaking the 3rd and 9th commandments himself. Both types of unions are explicitly listed twice by Paul, who pointedly says, “do not be deceived”, as costing the unrepentant participants in these unions their inheritance in the kingdom of God. (Note also the slick substitution of terms by Servant: referring to “marriage” instead of non-widowed “remarriage” as if the two were morally equivalent.)
Servant: Jesus did not say that he who divorces and remarries “lives in an adulterous marriage,” or “lives in a continual state of adultery,” or “commits adultery every time he/she has sex,” or “is still married to his/her former spouse in God’s eyes,” and it is obvious, as I explained in my previous two articles, that Jesus did not intend for His words to be so interpreted. Moreover, none of the New Testament authors interpreted His words in any of those ways.
SIFC: Servant will continue to preposterously claim that Jesus didn’t straightforwardly say what He indeed said:
“…and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.”
“…and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.
“…and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery.”
” And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.”
Servant first rejects the notion that Greek verb tenses are crucial to rightly dividing what Jesus was saying, i.e. that this is an ongoing state of sin, and not a one-time act as he would prefer. When that utterly fails, as we shall see below, he hypothesizes based on one “conservative scholar’s” pure speculation about what it would mean “if” Jesus used a different verb tense, despite the fact that none of the scholars provide any evidence that He actually used that alternative verb tense, and they unanimously provide abundant evidence that He very consistently used the present-indicative verb tense. This way Servant appears to be conversant in hermeneutics, pretentiously so, but is deliberately blathering to distract from the inconvenient truth, while parroting someone who is admittedly not a linguistic scholar, and appears to be more liberal than “conservative” — but, all things are relative to their reference point, in this case, Christ. It is very common to prefer to compare men with men, instead of with Christ.
Here’s what we authoritatively cited (as do all credible scholars) in the Part 2 rebuttal:
Without exception, every time Jesus says that “marrying” another person while our God-joined one-flesh partner lives is entering into a state of ongoing adultery, He used the present-indicative verb tense / mood, According to the source ntgreek.org,
“The present tense usually denotes continuous kind of action. It shows ‘action in progress’ or ‘a state of persistence.’ When used in the indicative mood, the present tense denotes action taking place or going on in the present time. “
The very fact that Servant is forced into this discussion of Greek verb tense should alone prove that none of the rest of his theory claiming holy matrimony is dissoluble by acts of men is supportable, when both Jesus and Paul plainly and repeatedly stated that it was not, as did Mark, Peter’s scribe.
Servant:
Just from a purely legal aspect, to claim that a marriage covenant is still binding after an act of adultery is like claiming that any other mutual promise is still in force after one party fails to keep their part of the contract.
And if I enter a mutual covenant with a member of the opposite sex that includes, among other things, exclusive sexual relations for life, and I later have sex with someone other than my spouse, I have no right to expect my spouse to honor her side of the covenant. She did not say in her vows, “For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, in sexual faithfulness and adultery…”
SIFC: Servant confuses contract with unconditional covenant here, while he himself describes a conditional covenant, which holy matrimony clearly is not. It’s a good thing for Servant that Jehovah Berith does not confuse these! The Bridegroom in his salvation covenant with us holds Himself to it for as long as we live. Only when we fail to show up at the Marriage Supper, because we preferred the world system (including its evangelical chapter), does the covenant break, and only because we physically died in our own rebellion. By getting all legal about it, David Servant is showing himself to be a legalist, rather than appreciating the glory and unimpeachable character of the Bridegroom.
As for appealing to the wedding vows, we all know that the groom vows unconditionally and the bride vows unconditionally, so long as they both shall live, not “I’ll do X only if you do Y, and if you don’t do Y the deal is ‘effectively’ dissolved“. What part of “for better or worse” does sexual infidelity not fit into, since Mr. Servant brought the matter up?
Servant: Divine Divorce proponents sometimes appeal to Greek verb tenses to make the claim that Jesus’ words, “commits adultery” indicate He was referring to continual acts of adultery every time the remarried couple has sex. Again, above and in my previous articles, I showed why such a view cannot possibly be correct…..J. Carl Laney…’it is also possible that the present tense, “commits adultery,” may be used in an aoristic sense expressing the idea of a present fact without reference to progress. The aoristic present sets forth an event as now occurring. So interpreted, the adultery would involve one punctiliar action at the time of remarriage.’
SIFC: This was dealt with in Part 2 and above, where Servant obstinately denies that Jesus said what he said (also denies that Jesus meant what He said). Bottom line: Laney’s assertion is mere speculation and in any event, he has provided no credible evidence that Jesus was using the aorist tense for the word “commits” to counter the unanimous evidence of other scholars that He was using the present-indicative tense, according to all the reliable Greek interlinear text tools, including scripture4all.org and biblehub.com. There is zero evidence that this is a “punctiliar action” and a mountain of evidence, not the least of which is context and scriptural consistency, that it is an ongoing state of sin. Once again, the very fact that Servant finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to find a defense for the obvious wrongness of adulterous nuptials –as he is intrinsically admitting–using Greek verb tense hypotheticals (to establish a suggestion that this admitted sin – presumably including theft, coveting and false witness – “only” occurs on the wedding night) indicates there is a YUGE problem with his theory – pun fully intended.
Servant: “What grace means is that a divorced and remarried couple need not break up. Although entering their marriage wrongfully, they should remain in that marital state in which they find themselves (1 Cor 7:17-24).
SIFC: No, sir, that’s hypergrace. What grace means is that, so long as the legalized adulterers draw breath, they have an opportunity to sever their unlawful union, make restitution to their real spouse(s) and famil(ies), and receive cleansing forgiveness. If they truly are regenerated, and not a false convert who came to Jesus on conditional terms or false representation of what saving faith entails, grace is the Holy Spirit who indwells them and leads them to purity by inward conviction. As stated earlier, everybody to entered into holy matrimony with the spouse of their youth is “called” as married-for-life to that person, even if they are simultaneously in a legalized illicit relationship, whether heterosexual or homosexual, childless or otherwise. Only the biblically-lawful estranged relationship survives regeneration. We previously pointed out Servant’s invalid-context usage of this (1 Cor 7:17-24).scripture he abuses to claim otherwise.
#4 of 8 – David Servant’s Rejection Of Our Intellectual Rebuke: Arguing From Silence
Servant: You point out that there are no instructions—by either Jesus or the apostles who authored the New Testament epistles—for those who have been divorced and remarried to divorce again, nor are there any examples of anyone doing such a thing. But that is an argument from silence. Conversely, neither are there any instructions—by either Jesus or the apostles who authored the New Testament epistles—for those who have been divorced and remarried to remain married. So the opposite of your view can also be made from an argument of silence.
“The burden of proof lies with Divine Divorce proponents, as it is quite reasonable to think that, if God requires all divorced and remarried people to divorce again as a requirement to “escape an adulterous marriage” and thus “escape hell” (as Divine Divorce proponents claim), there would be lots of information about that in the New Testament, as it would be a matter of great concern to both God and humanity….And if God does not require divorced and remarried people to divorce again as a requirement for salvation”
SIFC: The plain fact is that the justificationpurchased for us with the price of His blood is a betrothal of sorts. We were not good enough for this Bridegroom, yet He bound Himself to us in a ketubah contract. He paid our bride-price for us with His blood. We promised to show up at the future Marriage Supper, wearing our wedding garments, and having our lamps filled with oil (our ongoing sanctification) so that our salvation can be consummated there. We promised to keep ourselves pure of other gods, which will invariably lead us to walk in the opposite direction of that holy venue. That ketubah He left in our hands is unconditionally binding on our Bridegroom, but we remain free to break it by choosing those other gods over Him, by not showing up at the heavenly banquet hall because we preferred the comforts of our temporal abode, because this life appeared more attractive to us than what we were promised in eternal life.
It doesn’t matter one bit what the “majority of Christianity” believes…it only matters what GOD SAYS. People who have stood celibate for their God-joined covenant spouse and authentic holy matrimony union will not be faced with any divine “burden of proof” on this topic whatsoever. Neither will anyone who stood on conviction and God’s word to terminate a covetous and immoral relationship with the spouse of another living person, while praying for that person to reconcile and forgive their own one-flesh, have to bear any “burden of proof.” They are the obedient ones who said “Lord, Lord” and did what He said.
Instead, it will be the ones standing before the Great White Throne who are being asked, “Why do you call me, Lord, Lord… but refused to do what I commanded?” who will bear the burden of proof. Perhaps they will try to hide behind their pastoral wolf who said it was OK. They will then be asked whether they could read, and how many bibles and computers were in their illicit homes. The “burden of proof” is going to be on the false shepherds, as well. who misused the name of the Lord to perform the vain act of “joining” the already-joined to an adulterous partner, and then who hindered them from repenting by twisting His word to avoid the mass scandal that such a wave of repentance represents to their “ministry”.
In Part 1, we said this about the “argument from silence” (…that legalized adulterers are not “told” to leave their ongoing state of sin), after we listed and linked several dozen OT and NT scriptures, in contrast to the four that Servant claims we “exclusively” rely on, which support the no-excuses, no-exceptions indissolubility of covenant holy matrimony:
“The second reason the exhaustive list of related scriptures is important is to dispute the typical false claims of ‘scripture silence’ such as David Servant (and many others) have alleged….David Servant makes much of claiming that neither Jesus, nor any of the Apostles ever told anyone to divorce a “second” time who was living in sin with someone else’s God-joined spouse. This is not entirely true. John the Baptist called out Herod and Herodias, both of whom had divorced their God-joined spouses to “marry” each other, saying to Herod, “it is not lawful for you to have your brother Phillip’s wife.” (Mark 6; Matthew 14)….Then there’s the episode of church discipline being applied in 1 Corinthians 5 at Paul’s command to the man who had taken his father wife (probably his stepmother, following either the divorce or death of the father). The scripture does not state that he “married” her, but there are three immoral possibilities: (1) the father was dead and they were cohabiting in fornication, or (2) the father had civilly divorced her and the son had civilly married her, or (3) the father had separated or divorced her, and they were cohabiting in adultery. Since the man was still in the church body whom Paul had to rebuke, (1) and (3) seem less likely than (2). What we do know is that Paul felt strongly enough that the son’s soul was on the line unless the church excommunicated him (“turned him over to satan that his soul may be saved”). Please read the full section in Part 1 for further details.
We also dealt much earlier with other enemies of covenant restoration per Luke 16:18 and 1 Cor. 7:11 who claim “scripture silence”, in our blog What About That Samaritan Woman?.
Some courses of action connected with repentance are contextual, and the window of context matters greatly in that regard. With regard to repentance from remarriage adultery, the window of context is really the entire bible. There was no explicit command to the tax-collector Zaccheus to return four-fold what he had extorted from the citizenry in his covetousness, which he carried out lawfully (according to some historical accounts of the Roman law and practice), but he did as the Holy Spirit led him to do, and Jesus responded to this “salvation-by-works”: “Today salvation has come to this house.” The bible makes clear that repentance entails far more than “confession” while remaining in a state of sin. It is heart-change that results in abhorrence, repudiation and cessation of the sin. There seems to be more than plenty to fill the claimed “silence” to “he who has ears to hear“.
#5 of 8 – Servant’s Denial of the Unanimity and Relevance of Early Church Father’s Teaching Which Was in Agreement with Christ and the Apostles
Argument None of the church fathers who wrote after the apostolic age agree with [ David Servant, and others who deny that holy matrimony is indissoluble until death.]
Answer: It is certainly true that the church fathers wrote at times about the subject of divorce and remarriage, and they of course quoted Jesus’ words about illegitimate divorce and remarriage being adultery. I have never claimed that they did not. Some forbade remarriage under any circumstances, erring on the side of caution in my humble opinion. But to date, no one has been able to show me where any early church father instructed divorced and remarried people to divorce again, or for that matter instructed anyone to divorce period, prior to something Jerome wrote in 394 AD counseling one remarried woman. So is someone who lived 360 years after Christ the ultimate authority? Jerome also defended the idea that Mary remained a virgin perpetually. Is that biblical?
SIFC: We’ve seen ample evidence so far that Mr. Servant’s opinion is just about as “humble” as it is informed. We’ve already discredited his arguments from silence at length. Servant is owed no evidence that these ante-Nicene leaders expected adulterous couples to separate and true spouses to reconcile. It matters not a whit to the Great White Throne what he personally chooses or declines to believe. He will be held accountable for his actions corrupting (true, not “blended”) families.
Do not be in error my brethren. Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If, then, those who do this as respects mere human families have suffered death, how much more will this be the case with anyone who corrupts by wicked doctrine the faith of God, for which Jesus Christ was crucified! Such a one becoming defiled in this way shall go away into everlasting fire and so shall everyone that harkens unto him. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, Epistle To The Ephesians, 105 A.D.
We do concede that some of the bishops and martyrs of the early churches differed slightly on whether “divorce / putting away” (whatever form that actually took, which may not necessarily have been civil proceedings, and depending on the actual Greek term used in the original writings) was permissible, but all were unanimous that “divorce / putting away” dissolved nothing, and hence they were unanimous that non-widowed remarriage was indeed adultery, which they unanimously did not consider to be a “punctiliar one-time act.” (And, true to form, Mr. Servant can’t seem to restrain himself from ad hominem when the fact-bearers interfere with his carnal humanism, in this case, even besmirching the long-dead saints and martyrs who lived nearest the apostolic age. )
The indisputable historical fact is that the early church was so unanimous in their practice of this conviction of indissolubility that they accomplished in just a few centuries (arguably, only four) a culture-change so sweeping and durable for fifteen centuries following, that the world has never again seen the likes of until unilateral divorce was enacted in the United States in the 1970’s. Even the most heretical elements of the Reformation only rocked it on a delayed basis until after this apostate modern development which the church failed to morally or politically resist.
Quoting bible historian Kenneth E. Kirk, and author Milton T. Wells:
“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 faithfullydischarging 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 [mid-20th century] 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.”
SIFC: “Standerinfamilycourt” also has a “humble” opinion, and that is that this massive social change which introduced and sustained lifelong monogamy for the first time in history could not have been accomplished by ante-Nicene pastors who refused to excommunicate their adulterers, but instead performed faux nuptials over them. Nor was it accomplished by 1st to 4th century shepherds who filled their pews with adulterers by not requiring them to sever those illicit unions, or by allowing them to continue in immoral abandonment of their true families based on the deceitful rationalization that their pre-conversion covenant commitments (things that were clearly not “sin”) were “washed clean” along with their actual fully-repented sin. The astounding societal result shows these leaders were mindful of Christ’s words in Matthew 5,
You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.
Near the end of our Part 2 response, we quickly listed a sampling of key quotes of the ante-Nicene church fathers concerning the lifelong indissolubility of holy matrimony, without the citations. Given the length of our Part 3 response, we now link the readers to an excellent recording where, starting at about 13 minutes in, Pastor Stephen Wilcox cites these with full literary references.
Servant: One of the most amusing things is to hear people quote certain church fathers in order to support their particular theological beliefs, and then listen to their response when I ask them if there is anything those same church fathers wrote with which they disagree…
SIFC: One does not need to be an expert on all exhaustive positions of every church father to reliably quote them, provided they know and honestly convey the context of the quote they are relying on. Nor did these early leaders have to be perfectly on target on every issue, as long as they align with what Jesus and the Apostles said on the topic at-hand. Peter was rebuked in scripture by Paul — do we therefore discount everything Peter wrote? Paul rejected one of the Apostles who wrote a gospel – do we therefore summarily discount all of what Paul wrote? Moses was also shown to be fallible on numerous occasions, yet Mr. Servant is utterly livid that even one word from Moses be abrogated by Jesus Christ.
This concludes our discussion of David Servant’s points 1 through 5 of Part 3 of his article series, “I’m Divorced and Remarried. Am I Living in Adultery?” As promised, we will wrap up with his points 6 through 8 in the next blog post. Here, however we’ll address head-on David Servant’s greatest fear: that today’s trickle of repenting Emilys will become an embarrassing flood. He has good reason to fear this because of the widespread apostasy of the evangelical church in creating a mass class of improperly-discipled people whom the Lord loves and does not want in hell. If this is a move of God, and we strongly suspect that it is, Servant can write his questionable articles until Jesus comes back, but he cannot stop the move of the Holy Spirit in orchestrating this flood, however bad it looks to the carnally-minded. Ditto for Piper, MacArthur and anyone else on the long list of Christian celebrities who got that way by pandering to legalized adulterers and hindering authentic repentance from this sin. This holy wave will be clearly distinguishable from increased last days evil, due to the celibacy and reconciliation that will accompany it. Blaming and demonizing the truth-tellers is pointless as well, because we only lay out the facts and encourage people toward sound avenues of self-study, leaving the rest up to the Holy Spirit.
Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. – Ephesians 5:11
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Lets Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
“…preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction.For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires,and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. “
– 2 Timothy 4:2-4
I’m Living in an Ongoing State of Legalized Adultery with Somebody Else’s Spouse. Can I Get Away With It?
We continue with our response to Part 2 of a three-part blog series written by David Servant which denies that all non-widowed remarriage is, as Jesus repeatedly stated it was, an ongoing state of adultery which needs to be renounced to gain or recover one’s inheritance in the kingdom of God. Our response to Part 1 of this series can be read on this link. We find ourselves rejoicing that this post is only about half the length of installment 1, especially when we see that the first couple of paragraphs amount to nothing but demonizing ad hominem and substanceless sarcasm.
Our serial polygamy apologist makes this statement, after crowing for bit about how many folks have lined up to be told what their itching ears long to hear,
“There is, of course, a diversity of opinion within the body of Christ regarding divorce and remarriage, but Divine Divorce Proponents (or the “Marriage Permanence Community” as they refer to themselves) are definitely on the fringes.”
Indeed, due to the carnality of so-called “Christians” and the torrent of false conversions in the body of Christ, there is quite a diversity of opinion, but there remains only one redeemed path to the kingdom of God. I defy Mr. Servant to name one Old or New Testament saint who wasn’t “on the fringes”, as indicated by their jailings, beatings, beheadings, crucifixions, etc. There should not be this “diversity of opinion” nor any pridefulness in it. Servant’s boasting is not good. Pastors should encourage Christ-following, not self-worship. Jesus said, once the salt has lost its savor, it is good for nothing except to be trampled under foot.
The Comforter of the Covetous continues,
“The narrow way is apparently much narrower than most of us have ever imagined. And hundreds of thousands of professing Christian married couples are going to be very surprised when God casts them into hell for keeping their marriage vows…”
David, you’re not paying attention! The reason there’s an issue in the first place is that at least one of those “maligned” parties isn’tkeeping their marriage vows to their true spouse, and in a lot of cases, its both of them. It doesn’t matter what they “profess” if they ignore God’s word and mock the blood of Jesus with the conduct their very lives. And yes, because only a faithful handful of the saints are telling them the truth (and those don’t tend to run multi-million dollar mega media ministries), these people are going to be VERY surprised when they find themselves in hell as Paul warns (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19-21; Hebrews 13:4), and as Jesus warns (Matt. 5:27-32 and Luke 16:18-31). Hellbound, unless they repent, for that matter, are their false shepherds who knew what God’s word plainly says, but still discounted it, and who made humanistic excuses while they went right on misusing the Lord’s name to perform vain acts, namely, solemnizing adulterous weddings. And yes, Jesus made it very clear that the teeming millions would be on the broad path leading to destruction, while only a few would find (or even be attracted to) the narrow path. Following blind guides almost guarantees this, unless here and there, the Holy Spirit convicts a person to listen to the dissenting minority voice long enough to be persuaded to do their own research. The narrow way has at no time in history been any narrower than God’s word, and specifically no narrower than the words of Christ and Paul explicitly state.
As before, it’s necessary to cut through a whole bunch of myopic, self-serving Servant rhetoric. Which isn’t difficult at all….
“During conversations with Divine Divorce Proponents, I’ve actually wondered if I’m on Candid Camera. The conversations seem unreal. I can hardly believe I’m having a discussion with professing Christians who advocate that hundreds of thousands of Christian couples should divorce. Here is what one of them recently wrote in response to my claim that God hates divorce (as God Himself said in Mal. 2:16):
‘God does not hate the divorce that is a repentance of adultery. God loves repentance. The angels rejoice. By not being on the right side, you are labelling what God loves (repentance), as what God hates, you make yourself an enemy of the cross. Christianity calls for self denial and loving the truth even when it hurts. There are many who have a ticket to hell because they have remarried into adultery. Their destiny will only change if the adultery by remarriage comes to an end. Abandoning such adultery is an act of repentance, which God loves, not hates.’
“So, they claim, God sometimes loves it when Christians divorce and families are divided. In fact, the angels rejoice when Christians—who have been previously divorced—divorce again. Those who don’t agree with this view are “enemies of the cross.” One zealous Divine Divorce Proponent believes that great revival would come to America if all the Christians who have been previously married and divorced would divorce again.
“Divine Divorce Proponents actually believe that a person could be a believing, born-again, self-sacrificing, devoted, fruitful, unashamed follower of Jesus in every sense, even one who spends decades as a missionary to a remote region in an impoverished nation, but if that person dies in the state of being married a second time while his or her original spouse is still alive, that person will be cast into hell. Stranger still, if their original spouse dies one second before they die, they will go to heaven, as the death of their former spouse will release them from their “adulterous marriage.” If you are a divorced and remarried Christian, you not only need Jesus’ death to inherit eternal life. You also need the death of your original spouse at least one second before you die.”
As discussed in the previous blog, Servant rejects the authority and most especially, the application, of what Jesus stated in Matthew 19:6 and 8:
“So they are no longer [never again – by the present-indicative verb tense] two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let NO MAN separate…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 – by the perfect indicative verb tense] been this way.”
We shouldn’t take Christ’s words so literally, Servant says. After all, He said a thing or two that were clearly hyperbolic, that He didn’t actually mean to be applied, especially to our own lives. That reduces what sounds like a commandment to any reasonable person, to merely a “design”, an “ideal”, a “purpose”, or “God’s best” – a target that it’s OK to miss, in other words. It’s easy to see how someone who denies that Jesus meant that a one-flesh (sarx mia, as contrasted with the hen soma referred to in 1 Cor. 6:16) entity, never again to be seen by God as two, is supernaturally created by God’s hand as an essential element of holy matrimony….would therefore find it that much easier to also deny the three separate times Jesus flatly stated that any third party “marrying” the God-joined spouse of another living person under immoral civil laws, was REALLY entering into a state of ongoing adultery. It would explain why Servant would presume to think that God can be removed from that original unconditional covenant, and not only that, but why a holy God would turn right around and participate in a second purported covenant that by its very nature repudiates the first one.
Our guess is that David Servant rails against other non-marriages that are civilly legal, but does not cry in his (root) beer when those purported “spouses” legally and physically sever when coming to Christ, and as a consequence of repentence, those “families” are broken up. You see, there’s repentance and there’s repentance. Socially acceptable “Christian” sin isn’t supposed to be covered under 1 Cor. 6: 9-10, we hear. We must make a distinction between adultery and adultery-lite, the purported “one-time act”, Servant tells us. Heck, most contemporary English bible translations these days don’t even list adultery in Galatians 5:19-21 (even though the original manuscripts did), so the legalized variety “can’t” be all that soul-destroying. “Christian” sin is different from unchurched sin, apparently, especially when legalized adulterers volunteer on every church project they can, and they give profusely out of their gratitude for the “grace” they’ve received. Our guess is that a lesbian pair, if admitted as such to a grace-filled church, would give and serve even more than the heterosexuals, and the children of that “family” would suffer just as much initial emotional pain if their parents repented of the illicit union it is built upon.
We pointed out last time that divorce is an entirely manmade construct that is not only immoral, but equally impossible.…unless you reject outright what Christ said in Matthew 19:5-6, and 8 (the straightforward meaning of which Servant has stated in this blog series that he does indeed reject). Servant insists that divorce is a provision from God for “hard-heartedness”, and claims that Jesus endorsed it for “sexual immorality”. The preponderance of hard, objective biblical and historical evidence shows otherwise.
Hence, contrary to the emotional appeal above, the God-joined couple is only “divorced” in men’s eyes, and the subsequent faux couple is only “married” in men’s eyes. Jesus would have no other basis for stating on three separate occasions, “EVERYONE who marries one who has been put away enters into an ongoing state of adultery.” Paul would have no other basis for stating at least twice in his epistles, “So then, if while her husband is living she is joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress though she is joined to another man.”On the testimony of two witnesses, a fact is established. Servant’s alibis cannot hold together based on scripture, so he has no choice but to twist scripture and appeal to emotions. He behaves just like the legalized sodomy advocates in the harlot church do.
We demonstrated in the last rebuttal that the context of Malachi 2 is such that the cherry-picked verse 2:16, “God hates divorce” cannot be applied to the same sort of adulterous remarriage it is actually rebuking. It would have been better if the spokesperson for marriage indissolubility whom he is taking to task had taken the time to point this out (and perhaps they did, but this part wasn’t quoted), nonetheless, it seems that anyone who runs a ministry, writes books, does recordings, and presumes to teach others, would at least do an honest enough reading of Malachi 2 to discern this for himself. It’s not that hard.
“One zealous Divine Divorce Proponent believes that great revival would come to America if all the Christians who have been previously married and divorced would divorce again.” This assertion sounds a bit misquoted. Rather than mass repentance bringing on true revival, the enormous fear of today’s false shepherds is that the evangelical excesses of the past 50 years will be exposed and undone as a result of true revival, and the present trickle of repenting prodigals severing themselves from their adulterous unions will become a flood. God’s mercy is such that it would have to be this way, but one who does not believe that this sin is sending millions to hell would never see it that way. That fear, we would argue, is the core motivation behind this blog series we are rebutting. The fact is, that no matter how many blogs are written on either side of the issue, revival is in God’s hands, and no human force will stop what Servant fears. A man whose record is clean (or repented) and whose confidence is in the Lord does not fear such purifying moves of God.
“Divine Divorce Proponents actually believe that a person could be a believing, born-again, self-sacrificing, devoted, fruitful, unashamed follower of Jesus in every sense, even one who spends decades as a missionary to a remote region in an impoverished nation, but if that person dies in the state of being married a second time while his or her original spouse is still alive, that person will be cast into hell.”
On the contrary, we scurrilous “DDD-ers” actually believe that such a person (“believing, born-again, self-sacrificing, devoted, fruitful, unashamed follower of Jesus in every sense”), when confronted with God’s true and plain word on this for the spin-less first time, has a heart to study it deeply for themselves, and has a heart for the eternal souls of everyone around them, including the faux spouse and watching family members. We also point out that some people who spend decades on the mission field are not necessarily disciples of Christ. Some words of Jesus quickly come to mind here (probably “hyperbole” which can therefore be safely ignored):
Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter.Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’
Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them, I will show you whom he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly, is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great.” (Matthew 7:21-23; Luke 6:46-50)
The kingdom of God is a place where the King is OBEYED.
SERVANT: “If you are a divorced and remarried Christian, you not only need Jesus’ death to inherit eternal life. You also need the death of your original spouse at least one second before you die.”
This little sarcastic dart almost does not merit acknowledgment because it shows so little fear of God. However, there is a substantive misconception to be addressed for the benefit of the readers. People occasionally contact our pages saying their original covenant spouse has died while they were in their remarriage. They still don’t have peace, and they want to be right with God. We always ask them if they’ve fully confessed their remarriage as being the ongoing state of sin that it is, and a misrepresentation of Christ’s role as the Bridegroom before a watching world. Quite often, they have even more to confess, even as church-goers, such as adulterous cohabitation before they legalized. This confession must come from a chastened heart, which is not possible if they have believed a false shepherd who tells them the things that Servant tells them, especially the prevalent falsehood that Christ’s blood “covers” unrepented, ongoing sin. It is the Holy Spirit who leads them to our pages if they are indeed born again, and they will say something like, “well, I’m seeing that it was wrong, but no, I haven’t been on my face before God.” It’s important to understand that only sin confessed as sin, and then repudiated and ceased is forgiven. Furthermore, they are only coming to realize at that point that entering into a marriage Jesus called adulterous represents a decision to live in permanent unforgiveness and irreconciliation toward their sole and exclusive one-flesh. Jesus made it plain that living in a state of ongoing unforgiveness sends a person to hell just as surely as living in a state of papered-over legalized adultery. This, too, must be confessed and renounced even if it only comes after the death of that one-flesh, whom their own sinful attitude and example may have caused to die in legalized adultery. Jesus said that the man who divorces his wife after consummation of the marriage (that is, all Gentile believers who do not practice kiddushin, Jewish betrothal) and marries another causes her to commit adultery. Furthermore, they are not sarx mia with their current legal spouse until God makes them so, but only hen soma until then. We advise that this requires new vows, and perhaps even a short separation for the sake of the watching children, as the previous (second) vow to repudiate the prior covenant vow with God and their true spouse was never valid in God’s sight. One cannot validly vow to enter into and remain in a state of sin that will send them and others to hell if fulfilled. Servant is here shamefully trivializing the process of repentance and restitution, and the facetious little anecdote he offered up next, suggesting murder as the perfect solution, couldn’t possibly indict him more as a mocker of God. Woe to him if he does not repent on his face!
“Naturally, the churches and denominations that embrace Divine Divorce Doctrine do not admit into their membership anyone who has been previously divorced and remarried. Such folks who do seek membership are told that they must separate/divorce until their original spouse is dead. Obviously understanding what an awkward and dangerous thing it is to demand that people divorce to qualify for membership, it is interesting to read the attempts by Divine Divorce Churches to soften their official doctrinal positions. For example, the doctrinal positon of the Southeastern Mennonite Conference reads, “While the final decision to separate from an adulterous relationship [marriage] would be voluntary, God requires it for reconciliation to Him.” Translation: “Although it may seem that we require divorced and remarried people to separate in order to join us, in order to avoid lawsuits from people whom our new members divorce, here is our disclaimer: We don’t force anyone to separate; we only inform them that they will go to hell if they don’t.”
Given the full discussion above, it should be amply obvious why it is sinful for any church to take an adulterously-wed couple in as a couple, and just as sinful to perform such weddings to the desecration of their sanctuary and egregious breach of the third commandment. Kudos to the handful of churches who love the Lord more than they love the filthy lucre that causes most churches to throw souls under the bus Whited sepulchers, Jesus called them, full of dead men’s bones! What does Mr. Servant do when Adam and Steve show up on his doorstep flashing their wedding rings? Do they do as one church in the Nashville area does, and onboard the mortal sin right along with the sinners? Or does he deem the homosexual souls more precious and worthy of being told the truth than the heterosexual souls? The latter would be our guess, based on what he’s professed in this debate. While reasonable precautions should be taken against lawsuits that would lead to bad stewardship of resources, at the end of the day, ministries of God must not cower in fear of man’s lawsuits where eternal souls are on the line! It is our hope that these Mennonite churches are not taking in legalized adulterers or legalized sodomites until they have fully repented. Upholding the no-excuses sanctity of authentic holy matrimony typically isn’t a denomination thing. There are liberal and conservative wings to denominations like the Mennonites and the Church of Christ. There are individual Baptist, Congregational, Word of God churches and individual churches in other denominations, a small but growing number, whose God-fearing pastor “goes rogue” in the eyes of the Pharasaical denominational establishment to be fully loyal to Spirit of God in this matter, taking the flak as necessary. We’d love to have a comprehensive directory of them to hand out to longsuffering covenant marriage standers and repenting prodigals who find themselves without a church due to their courageous walks. By contrast, we have megachurches bursting at the seams with people who were persuaded by the hucksters that they could come to Christ on their own terms.
Servant staggers off next into the very typical “look who agrees with me” argument. He cites a 1990 book, Divorce and Remarriage: Four Christian Views. Did Jesus have four different views on this (or any) topic? Believe it or not, there are still Spirit-led seminarians and scholars who publicly remind us of the uncompromised biblical view, even if it sometimes costs them their job. Dr. Gordon Wenham, the late Dr. Leslie McFall, Dr. Wibur Pickering, Drs. John K Tarwater and David W. Jones, Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, to name just a few. Come Judgment Day, the only valid question is, “who agrees with Jesus?” The surest way to detect a counterfeit anything is to hold it up to the genuine article.
Servant trudges on: “As you might imagine, Divine Divorce Doctrine is attractive to professing Christians who want out of their current, subsequent marriages. If they’ve been previously married and divorced, Divine Divorce Doctrine gives them the justification they need to, once again, break their marriage vows. Obviously, breaking one’s marriage vows makes one a liar, and one would think that Divine Divorce Proponents would be just as concerned that Scripture warns that all liars will end up in “the lake that burns with fire and brimstone” (Rev. 21:6) as they are that Scripture warns that no adulterer will inherit God’s kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9-10)
“Obviously, if after a “divine divorce,” a Divine Divorce Proponent were to remarry yet another time prior to the death of his original spouse, that would indicate that he no longer believes his doctrine (or perhaps really didn’t believe it in the first place, but only utilized it to escape his previous marriage).
As we clarified in the first rebuttal, the only “divine divorce” (a purifying severance and sending away, rather than a trip through “family court”) is recorded in Ezra, chapters 9 and 10. Believers are expressly forbidden by 1 Corinthians 6:1-8 from availing themselves of family court to “dissolve” a covenant marriage, which union actually constitutes a mini-church, whether or not there’s an unsaved spouse. All divorce is manmade and cannot be termed as “divine” under any circumstances. However, if immoral manmade laws got us into sin, it may be practical to use immoral manmade laws to get us out of sin, provided we are not availing ourselves of the unconstitutional aspects of those laws by forcing a petition on a counterfeit spouse we should not have “married”, rather than prayerful mutual consent and agreed petition, with permanent separation in the meantime.
There might be some limited, occasional truth to this charge of Servant’s that some might abuse the one-flesh and covenant principles to terminate an adulterous “marriage” on false pretenses, but the freedom thereby obtained comes at a very steep price — celibacy, or reconciliation with their true spouse, which may be many years in the future. Even so, it’s far better for both souls that they are out of it, and God can always bring the motives into alignment later, in the rare instance where that’s needed. While not personally in this repented-prodigal situation, “standerinfamilycourt” has met dozens of saints who have divorced out of adulterous unions in obedience to Christ. To date, and to the best of our knowledge, all but one or two have remained celibate for many years or decades, and even the ones who would be in a position to remarry with no fault biblically, because they have never been part of a one-flesh (sarx mia) entity, are still in no hurry to do so. These saints abhor the thought of even the appearance of immorality and the example it would seem to set. One such lady (and probably the one quoted above by Servant), after publishing her testimony, has lived for several years in near-poverty while devoting her life to the sort of high quality scholarship needed to be an effective conscience to the pastors and seminarians who are beginning to come to conviction on this matter. To the best of our knowledge, even the few repenters who have married righteously for the first time have only married a never-married person or a widowed one.
We have already addressed the sticky topic of “breaking wedding vows”, and would reiterate that an adulterer’s wedding vows are no more valid than a sodomite’s, which if fulfilled, will constitute a ticket to hell. One the other hand, God has this to say to the one who would repudiate valid, eligible vows, civil laws notwithstanding:
When you make a vow to God, do not be late in paying it; for He takes no delight in fools. Pay what you vow!It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay.Do not let your speech cause you to sin and do not say in the presence of the messenger of God that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry on account of your voice and destroy the work of your hands?– Ecclesiastes 5:4-6
Empty, false vows yank God’s chain, and repudiated first vows are wholly unacceptable in His sight.
Anyone who is already breaking the 1st, 7th, 8th and 10th commandments (self-worshipping idolatry, adultery, theft and coveting) is surely breaking the 9th (false witness) by representing that the God-joined one-flesh spouse of another living person is their own. This is precisely why a mere 60 years ago, no God-fearing shepherd would have performed such a wedding, and why Paul states twice that nobody in this sinful state is fit for a pulpit or for church leadership, in addition to forfeiting their inheritance in the kingdom of God.
Servant: “Interestingly, I was introduced to Divine Divorce Doctrine through a Facebook debate regarding a formerly-faithful Divine Divorce Proponent who recently remarried and is now being shunned by the faithful. I suspect their ranks are full of defectors who come to terms with the post-divorce discovery that God has not given them a gift of celibacy and that Paul’s words, “it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9) contain some relevancy.”
So, this last remark indicates that Servant has only heard of our community within the last three months, and is shooting from the hip without much worthy study, which requires some considerable time and digging due to the suppression of unfavorable early church history, translation fraud and fraudulent commentary in most contemporary English bible versions, failure of pastors to teach their congregations the sound principles of hermeneutics, and other severe moral compromises in both the evangelical and Roman Catholic churches. Someone who comes out of remarriage adultery based on the conviction of its immorality and eternal destination typically takes at least a year to study the topic before taking life-altering action, which is only prudent and God-honoring.
“Standerinfamilycourt” has firsthand knowledge of the prodigal and apostate to whom Servant is referring in this remark about a defector “coming to terms” with his presumed right to sexual autonomy despite the fact that he is not widowed or eligible to “marry” the wife of another man who is still living . The covenant marriage community is grieved that satan persuaded him to sell off his inheritance in the kingdom of God for his bowl of pottage, crushing the faith of his bewildered adolescent children. He is a relatively young man whose covenant wife (whom he now appears to be slandering as “unsaved”, rather than backslidden) unilaterally divorced him to adulterously remarry. He did not divorce from her willingly, and as I understand it, he stood for about four years before caving to the flesh and very recently “marrying” another man’s estranged wife. He found his excuse in the deceitful rationalization that God does not join pagan and mixed-faith marriages, despite numerous OT and NT instances to the contrary, even though he has falsified the underlying facts about the soul-condition of his true one-flesh (unless she actually got saved first). There are some other things to be observed over a period of time about this man. He continues to be a highly legalistic person, chastising the saints for things that are clearly not heaven-or-hell matters, like celebrating Christmas and (the women) for not wearing a head covering, which can’t be a very beckoning-home thing for his true prodigal wife. While he was for a season a very articulate spokesman for the indissolubility of covenant holy matrimony, and had thousands of followers, he still never seemed to express any public anguish for the soul of his one-flesh wife or for her eternal destination, which should be the main motivation for standing celibate for one’s covenant marriage for as long as restoration requires. Such a brittle faith was sure to crumble under pressure, especially in a relatively recent convert. This kind of thing will happen from time to time, and naturally, the godless finger points there instead of toward the dozens of others for each individual falling away, who have stood celibate for decades under the right heart motives. Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices with the truth.
Celibacy is never an innate “gift” to someone who remains part of an inseverable one-flesh entity, wrongfully estranged. That said, God equips us to our kingdom assignment if our heart remains right. But inasmuch as Servant is again bastardizing scripture to prop up the false Lutheran claim to sexual entitlement, it’s time to shine the floodlight once more on Servant’s sloppy hermeneutics in citing 1 Corinthians 7:9 as justification for the unwidowed “divorced” (that is, the physically and legally estranged) to be controlled by their flesh instead of walking in compassion for their true one-flesh estranged spouse, in obedience to Christ.
Any responsible reading of 1 Corinthians 7 takes note of the fact that Paul runs through a sequence of instructions for various marital status groups in the church. Irresponsible readings hijack the instructions intended for one group and try to suture it onto a group whom Paul was not addressing at that point. Responsible bible scholars point out that there is a symmetry that holds throughout 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul rhythmically addresses the male and then the female in each group, as follows:
– All parties: verses 1-2. The reference to “own”is crucial here,
–Intact holy matrimony according to Matthew 19:4-6: verses 3-6
– Widowers and widows – verses 7 – 9. Note that “unmarried” does not refer to anyone legally estranged here. There was no Greek word for widowed male, so the word “unmarried” (here appearing in plural male form) was the closest word of translation to English for “widower”. Paul clearly did not believe that man’s divorce dissolved holy matrimony, but only death does. It is unconscionable that most contemporary commentators omit mention of this fact, nevertheless, many clergy have discerned it.
– Distressed, intact holy matrimony, especially due to unequal yoking (but not limited to that distress) – verses 10 and 11
– Estranged holy matrimony (which would include today’s “divorced” but not the illicitly “remarried”) – verses 12-16
– Betrothed, never-marrieds, referring to the Jewish custom of kiddushin, contracted betrothal where a bride-price has been paid and legal status of wife already conferred on the unconsummated bride –verses 25 – 28
Note that there are no verses addressing anyone as though they have a permanently severed marriage, other than widowed people. Paul regarded the “divorced” as still married, translation issues notwithstanding. Even when he refers to the estranged wife “remaining unmarried”, he uses the term agamois, which literally means “without a wedding” in the Greek. Since fornication was also banned, the best translation is “remain celibate or be reconciled to her husband.”
The rhythm pauses here for verses 17-24 while Paul addresses all, but discusses vocations and religious trappings applying to all groups in the same contexts as cited in the verses above. For example, a married (intact or estranged) or widowed slave or Jew are called to remain in the state they are called, but this does not mean that they are to remain in an immoral state that prevailed when they were called. A prostitute, pimp or pornographer is not to remain in that state just because they were called while in it. Neither is a serial polygamist (unforgiver and covetous person), nor a “married” sodomite to remain in those states. Note that the only two instances where Paul is giving explicit permission to remarry is to widows and widowers, and to marry for the first time to (and among) the virgins (never married), not the civilly-divorced whose true marriages are undissolved by death. In particular, verse 15 refers to being free to follow Christ – dedoulotai (root word: douloo), a condition that existed both before and after any estrangement from the departure of a one-flesh spouse, not “free to remarry” (not at all mentioned) presumed just because the marriage bond dedotai (root word: deo) is imagined to be severed before death. Servant would interpret verse 7:8-9 in a way that distorts both content and context, and in a way that is inconsistent with other clear scripture on the same topic, and finally he would interpret this verse in a manner that conflicts with the unanimous practice and teaching of the early church fathers. Sloppy, biased hermeneutics here.
Servant next reiterates his highly inaccurate claims about the foundations of the biblical marriage “doctrine” (God’s word rightly divided). Sound hermeneutics rest on Comparison and Consultation as two of the five essential principles of rightly dividing God’s word. Hence, Servant’s narrow list of just four purported scriptures he claims this “doctrine” is “proof-texted”, and by his NIV-regurgitated commentary on them (whose publisher Zondervan is also the proud publisher of the Queen James Bible, we note, a firm which sees fit to keep the NIV “culturally relevant” every few years), Servant gives the truth of God a very short shrift. This was covered in detail in Part 1 of our rebuttal. Sound hermeneutics relate OT scriptures to their NT counterparts, also to culture and historical events that give scripture its context, to Pauline epistles, and prophetic illustrations that relate back to what Jesus said. Observations and analysis are made on word usage patterns, comparing where words were and were not used, and analyzing on that basis whether contemporary translations are as accurate as they should be. In general, we find they are not, and we would argue that the only reasonably reliable contemporary English NT translation on the market today is The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken, by Dr. Wilbur Pickering, first released in 2013. The rest of Servant’s commentary flows from his rejection of the clear statements of Jesus and Paul that original holy matrimony is indissoluble by any act of men other than death, and that everyone who purports to “marry” a civilly-divorced person enters into an ongoing state of adultery. There is no reasonable response to this emotional manipulation except to say, “bunk”, and he’d better pay attention to the warned eternal outcomes of his theories.
Next, Servant claims that Moses set a standard that Jesus “endorsed”. This is a clear distortion of the sermon on the mount. Mosaic law was fine so long as animal sacrifices could be offered up on a daily basis as the means of atonement, and obedience to God’s commandments could be deferred on that basis, rather than coming from a heart of obedience. Clearly, this was not a moral standard worthy of the kingdom of God in several matters we see illustrated in Matthew 5 and 6. Under the New Covenant where every truly regenerated person is indwelt with the Holy Spirit, a Person who is God, it should be clear that we’re done with Moses as our likeable, lenient “sheriff”. I do not intend to get into a major debate here over the additional misguided tomes that Servant has written on this Moses topic – Proverbs 10:19. We either obey God from the heart under the power of the Holy Spirit, or we hide behind Moses as our excuse not to. This should eliminate any speculation over some sort of New Covenant “allowance” being made for the hardness of our hearts. All hard hearts fall outside the kingdom of God, including those that would take their own revenge instead of forgiving. It’s pretty clear where Servant is coming down. All the true Christ-follower needs to know here, is that when Jesus was challenged on the indissolubility of holy matrimony, He chose to talk about the best part of Moses’ authorship, Genesis 2:21-24. He purposefully elected to contrast a higher moral law that was “from the beginning” to Deuteronomy 24:1-4 the obscure regulation that had been so often hijacked and misapplied by the unrighteous–to the destruction of many souls, and this hijacking wickedness continues today. Once again, a key principle of biblical worksmanship is to interpret unclear scripture passages in a way that shows consistency with the clearest ones, and most especially those straight from the mouth of Jesus. We don’t know for sure what the “indecency” of Deuteronomy 24 was, but we have several strong clues that point away from post-marital issues, and toward a condition that existed both before and after the nuptials. Therefore it is invalid to use Deuteronomy 24 as an excuse not to forgive and reconcile with our true one-flesh, and release the counterfeit spouse to do the same. As stated in Romans 7: 1-3, we died to that Old Covenant (our “ex”, now deceased), and we are to please and obey our new Bridegroom now.
In case anyone missed the importance of rightly dividing the usage of verb tenses, we have this case-in-point:
“Thus, if the adultery that Jesus said is committed by some divorce and remarriage is to be understood as literal, physical adultery, it can only occur a single time when the second marriage is consummated.”
Without exception, every time Jesus says that “marrying” another person while our God-joined one-flesh partner lives is entering into a state of ongoing adultery, He used the present-indicative verb tense / mood, According to the source ntgreek.org,
“The present tense usually denotes continuous kind of action. It shows ‘action in progress’ or ‘a state of persistence.’ When used in the indicative mood, the present tense denotes action taking place or going on in the present time. “
There is no scholarly support whatsoever for the popular evangelical notion that this is a “one-time act”, since in not one single instance of His discussion is the word “commits” captured by the apostle-author in the aortist verb tense. In fact, logically, if this were the case, Jesus was blathering and wasting His holy breath on the thrice-repeated warning, was He not? If there was no eternal consequence for this sin of “marrying” someone else’s spouse, as Servant and many other contemporary cowards suggest without supportable basis, why would Jesus imply that there was? Why even talk about an infraction that is past, futile and not actionable?
Servant appears to foresee this scholarly shortcoming:
“Once we’ve arrived at a harmonious, coherent interpretation of how our unchanging, gracious and loving God views and has always viewed divorce and remarriage, there is much less of a need to engage in hair-splitting debates over Greek nuances, historical suppositions, technical analyses of similar texts, and strained theories about the indissolubility of marriage.”
In other words, “Bah, hermeneutics, schmermeneutics! Let’s revert back to humanistic reasoning and emotions.” This is a man who knows that his work has no integrity, rather than a man with limited knowledge of the principles.
Servant goes on to conclude this installment by making the usual hypergrace claims that “it’s all good”, and that this scripture warning from the book of Hebrews (like the ones on hard-heartedness which leads to falling away) has no application:
“For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?For we know Him who said, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.’ And again, “The Lord will judge His people.”It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Hebrews 10:26-29
Christian political commentator David French recently wrote an article asking Can America Survive as a Post-Christian Nation? He’s recognizing that due to the flood of false converts who populate, and even lead, many of our churches, much of the problem actually warms the pews with their posteriors every week. Far from following the model of church discipline Paul outlined in 1 Corinthians 5, people were allowed to think they can come to Christ on their own terms: “Come as you are, stay as you came”, and shepherds grew fat, Ezekiel 34-style as a result. As French observes:
“Some would argue that American Christian culture is being replaced by a separate, feel-good faith called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — a vague belief that while God exists, he’s not particularly involved in human affairs and mainly wants people to be nice and happy. It’s a common moral code that applies to the conduct of one’s personal affairs; it is utterly inadequate, however, when it comes to addressing real human conflict and substantial cultural clashes. It provides no systematic moral worldview, and it ultimately leaves judgment of right and wrong to the individual conscience. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Millennial culture is that the failure to be “nice” is often met with the most brutal of reprisals. It’s okay — mandatory, even — to be cruel to the cruel and intolerant of the intolerant.”
Servant has been shown to be a blasphemer of God (and has also been shown to come very close to blaspheming even the Holy Spirit, calling the inspired, straightforward, spinless word of God a “doctrine of demons”) in his zeal to keep adulterous unions together and have true spouses remain unreconciled and unforgiving – a goal that satan himself shares with Servant. This has a major heaven-or-hell consequence for many that this wolf is denying. He has shown himself to be an exceedingly sloppy workman with God’s word in several instances, and at the end even claims that concern for this lack of integrity with God’s word is of no consequence. Woe to anyone addicted to his ear-tickling!
Servant suggests in one of his three videos that the idea of holy matrimony being unconditionally indissoluble, and violations of this moral absolute being a hell-bound offense if not repented, is “entirely new doctrine” and was “never practiced before in the church”. He then points to the Mennonites (discussed above) who have always practiced it. Until 1973, the Assemblies of God operated by by-laws adopted at the denomination’s inception that forbid its pastors from performing any marriage where either party had a living, estranged spouse, and forbid its associated churches from employing a remarried pastor, or one who had married a divorced woman. Even the Anglican Church refused to perform weddings involving divorced people until 2002, notwithstanding the heretical, humanistic elements of the Westminster Confession that would have allowed it. Servant links us to a “friend” of his who apparently runs a website on early church history, then makes the hollow claim that this friend knows of no instance where marriage indissolubility was practiced in the early church discipline. This “friend” has apparently missed all of these writings from letters and commentaries by bishops of 1st through 4th century churches, while not providing a single example of a church father who recognized remarriage as holy matrimony:
Justin Martyr (151 AD) “Whosoever marries a woman who has been divorced from another husband commits adultery. According to our Teacher, they are sinners who contract a second marriage.”
Tertullian (200 AD) “Again He [Jesus] said, ‘They shall be two in one flesh’. . . not three or four.”
Origen (248 AD) “Just as a woman is an adulteress, even though she seems to be married to a man, while a former husband yet lives, so also the man who seems to marry who has been divorced does not marry her, but, according to the declaration of our Savior, he commits adultery with her.”
Basil the Great (375 AD) “A man who marries another man’s wife who has been taken away from him will be charged with adultery.“
Jerome (390 AD) “If she left him on account of his crimes, he is still her husband and she may not take another. . . . a second may not be taken while the first one lives.”
St Augustine (419 AD) “A woman begins to be the wife of no later husband unless she has ceased to be the wife of a former one. She will cease to be the wife of a former one, however, if that husband should die, not if he commits adultery.”
We mention this very briefly here in anticipation that Servant’s third blog (not yet published) might make this false claim, since it’s in the second video. If so, we will provide more thorough links, sources and examples of these important facts of early church history in that rebuttal.
For every mocker is an abomination to the Lord, and his communication is with the simple. – Proverbs 3:32
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book. – Revelation 22:18-19
This will be a response to Part 1 of a three-part blog series written by David Servant which denies that all non-widowed remarriage is, as Jesus repeatedly stated it was, an ongoing state of adultery which needs to be renounced to gain or recover one’s inheritance in the kingdom of God. Indeed, why use a blog title that asks a rhetorical question, when the answer is repeatedly obvious to all on the most basic surface of God’s word? Nonplussed, David Servant, a non-profit founder, former pastor and book author from Pittsburgh, PA, takes serious umbrage at all opposition to the popular notion that remarriage adultery is the only sin under the sun where cessation and renouncement was (allegedly) “not required” by Jesus or the Apostles. Be forewarned that this will be a lengthy read, if only because the original blog we are rebutting is also quite a lengthy tome (over 40 pages in the print queue).
As the Proverb says, “When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable, But he who restrains his lips is wise.”
To maintain readability in this post, we must be selective in what we address and leave the Holy Spirit to correct in the heart of the readers whatever else grieves Him. Hopefully in so doing, we can meaningfully respond to a 40+ pager in considerably fewer pages than that.
Although according to his biography, Servant is not personally involved in this soul-rotting sin of coveting and retaining the God-joined spouse of another living person, it has become quite common in the past 50 years since enactment of unilateral divorce, for pastors like him to have performed many such adulterous ceremonies, which are indefensible scripturally. It is also not uncommon in the past decade or two, for such “blended families” to now dominate churches, financially and in every other practical way, since they are no longer burdened with the difficult situations that cause those they deserted to have struggle with day-to-day survival while endeavoring to remain chaste and pure in obedience to God. Like “standerinfamilycourt”, David runs a Facebook community page (called Discipling the Body of Christ) in addition to his own wall under his name, which appears not to be a nom-de-plume.
( SIFC Note:As of the date of this blog post, only Parts 1 and 2 of this series have been published by the author, along with some related videos. Possibly, Part 3 will be out in mid-January. He has separately stated that a book on this topic is due out in January, 2018. Servant appears to make at least some of his books available for download on this ministry site, and has third parties reselling them on Amazon.)
David begins the first post, November 15, 2017, I’m Divorced and Remarried – Am I Living in Adultery? (Part 1)with an emotional appeal that is more typical of the liberal pagan enemies of the no-excuses sanctity of marriage, quite similar to appeals of those who advocate for preserving and defending sodomous civil-only unions where children have been obtained:
“Imagine this:John is an unregenerate drug-user who, during a weekend fling in Las Vegas, falls for a flirtatious bartender named Lisa and marries her at the Little Neon Chapel. Their marriage lasts one week.
“Fast forward to 20 years later. John is a completely different man. He’s been born again and drug-free for 16 years, and he has been married for 15 of them to a devoted Christian woman named Karen. They have 4 beautiful children, ages 5 through 14, whom Karen homeschools, primarily because they want to make sure that their children are raised in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4).
“At work, John is befriended by a Christian man who invites him to a daily lunch hour Bible study, and John, hungry for God’s Word and fellowship with other believers, begins to attend. He is very impressed with the depth of biblical knowledge possessed by those who attend. Their influence over him grows.
“Fast forward six months. One evening, after their children are all in bed, John sits at the kitchen table across from Karen and tearfully tells her that he has filed for a divorce. He explains that he doesn’t want to divorce her—because he loves her and their children dearly—but he has learned that theirs is an “adulterous marriage,” all due to the fact that he was once married to a Las Vegas bartender for a week. John explains that, in God’s eyes, he is still married to Lisa, and until Lisa dies, his marriage with her (Karen) is adulterous….John quotes Luke 16:18, where Jesus said, “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery. “That is us,” John says. He also quotes 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, which declares that no adulterers will inherit God’s kingdom. Karen tearfully argues with him for hours into the night, but to no avail….” [End of appeal]
Liberals just love to argue the extreme case, illogically claiming that Assertion X, fitted to that extreme case, should therefore be the rule (never mind that God says Assertion X is an abomination). Enemies of God’s undiluted word are addicted to emotional arguments because they have no way of rigorously disputing the objective facts. Such is also the case with “Christian” humanists and situational ethicists who pose as God’s shepherds, while they do as Jesus sharply rebuked in their earlier counterparts in Luke 16… And He said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts; for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.”
Such shepherds fear men more than they fear God, even if they themselves are not personally caught up in the abomination of remarriage adultery. But let’s take a closer, more objective look at the straw-man example suggested by Servant: percentage-wise, just how many divorced and remarried people actually have a drunken, drug-laced quickie Vegas wedding in the family history? Aren’t the majority of adulterous remarriages among evangelicals (more realistically) sad arrangements where there are children from a combination of perhaps three or more legitimate and unlawful marriages, euphemistically called a “blended family” ? Is the number of children at all relevant to what Jesus had to say about it? Does God care more about the needs of, and obligations toward, the children born of an unlawful marriage than He does the needs of and obligations toward the covenant spouse and covenant children with whom God-sanctioned faith was broken? Malachi, chapter 2 is explicitly clear on this question. The book of Ezra, chapters 9 and 10, should also point to a clear answer to these questions. Four hundred years before Jesus arrived on the scene, God did not hesitate to command that nearly 120 unlawful unions contracted by priests just like the one described in Malachi 2, civilly legal but biblically unlawful unions which He did not join, be renounced and purged. God commanded that the adulterous and concurrently polygamous concubines be sent away with all of the non-covenant children, as a condition of restoring the sovereignty of Israel as a nation, starting with the rebuilding of the temple by men with clean hands.
Indeed, for every rare instance of a brief Vegas nuptial gone predictably awry, there have developed at least ten cases in the world of our profoundly immoral family laws (and morally lax, complicit churches who routinely admit the sin into their sanctuaries, right along with the two sinners)– of a 3 or 4-decade covenant union being squashed by a “family court” because some spouse-poacher couldn’t resist raiding that family’s godly wealth, unfettered as they are by a civil legal system that refuses even to consider clear marital fault in dividing the spoils. In fact, so-called “gray divorce” is statistically the only growing category of civil marriage “dissolution” precisely because the savvier younger set is “just saying no” to inviting civil government into their homes under such terms and conditions, even if it means living in fornication or non-legalized adultery.
A George Barna survey done in the year 2000 had a full 90% of the evangelical respondents 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.
In the interest of full disclosure, SIFC blogged several months ago about a real-life recent convert who married a such a man as David Servant hypothetically describes. In that instance, we advised this woman that her situation is quite “borderline” because in that situation, there was a swift civil annulment before a home was ever formed, and because consent to form a home and to enter into a lifelong commitment was very much in question. We could not, therefore, tell this lady what to do when she asked about separating from this Christian man who became her first husband, while she became his second wife. All we could do was relate to her what Jesus told us in Matthew 19:4-6 actually constitutes holy matrimony based on Genesis 2:21-24, namely eligibility, vows, witnesses and consent in the form of leaving and cleaving. All elements must be present before God creates the supernatural one-flesh entity. We told her that based on our understanding of the facts as she described them, it seemed doubtful that the God who looks into the hearts of the bride and groom would have supernaturally, instantaneously and inseverably created (Greek: sarx mia) the one-flesh entity with which He then unconditionally covenants so long as both spouses remain alive. Even so, how does it possibly follow that this narrow and quite rare circumstance should be extrapolated to all situations where a true marriage and man’s divorce took place before one or both parties surrendered to Christ, and for whatever reason, Jesus’ and Pauls’ straightforward commandment not to take the spouse of another was ignored by both the parties and their pastor?
Hypothetical John, meanwhile, if taught the biblical truth about how God creates the supernatural, lifelong inseverable one-flesh entity upon valid vows, should be able in his regenerated state to examine his own heart and determine whether this occurred between himself and the barmaid based on his firsthand knowledge of their mutual intent and consent (and her eligibility to vow). But he doesn’t have a chance of doing so if all he’s ever taught is the evangelical heresy that all “marriages” are morally interchangeable and current possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Mr. Servant continues: “This kind of doctrine not only can potentially destroy devoted Christian families like John and Karen’s, but it opens the door dangerously wide—for certain Christian couples who are struggling in their marriages—with a convenient justification to divorce. It can turn a treacherous sin—divorce between two Christians—into a holy obligation. It makes divorce, something that God hates (Mal. 2:16) into something that, in some cases, pleases Him. It forces those who do not have the gift of celibacy to pretend that they do. And it creates a lower, “unclean” class among those who have been cleansed of their sins by Jesus’ sacrifice, a class consisting of those who have previously been married and divorced.”
There are, of course, several problems with the above statement.
(1) The “doctrine” came directly (and repeatedly) from Jesus Christ beginning with the sermon on the mount, and was repeatedly confirmed by the Apostle Paul, as well as by all of the early church fathers for the next 400 years after Jesus ascended, following His resurrection. (We will provide historical examples in our rebuttal of the next blog in the series.)
(2) Truly devoted Christian partners care most whether they and their “spouse” will spend eternity in hell. For that matter, they care whether their children, who are likely to emulate their parents some day, will also spend their eternity in hell. There is a reason Paul repeatedly warned, “Do not be deceived…” when he twice warned that no adulterer has any inheritance in the kingdom of God. If Paul also turns out to be the writer of the book of Hebrews, the same warning appears in chapter 13, verse 4. One has every right to question whether a person who would choose to continue in a lifestyle of disobedience in which the 1st, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th commandments are broken every single day, is actually a Christ-follower at all, despite the sullied label of “Christian”.
(3) Servant’s crass appeal to Malachi 2:16 is completely misplaced when taken in reference to anyone, Christian or otherwise, who has coveted and retained the exclusive God-joined spouse of another living person in defiance of Christ’s commandment forbidding it. The tell-tale sign of this is the willful disregard of what precedes verse 16, therefore ignoring the vital context of the entire chapter, which boils down to God’s sharp rebuke of a man who has abused the immoral laws of men to “divorce” the wife of his youth so that he could unlawfully “marry” another. God doesn’t buy it! He says that fellowship is indefinitely suspended between Him and this priest(hood). He calls the true but rejected wife “the companion of your marriage covenant” (which still stands, regardless of the “get” – certificate of man’s divorce -the woman who remains “bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh” was handed under the wicked hijacking of Mosaic regulation). Further, the Lord says, “she IS (not ‘was’) the companion of your marriage covenant” Hence, it is hermeneutically unfaithful to apply verse 16 to a counterfeit spouse with whom no inseverable one-flesh entity ever existed by God’s hand, and who may likewise have been inseverably joined by God’s hand previously to a true living spouse on the other side. The concubine IS the society-destroying problem; she cannot possibly be the “victim” who merited God’s protection which was reserved for the true wife; the wife of the priest’s youth.
(4) The direct appeal to the flesh near the end of Mr. Servant’s argument is so blasphemous it’s almost humorous. It slaps Jesus Christ in the face for all that He said in Matthew 19:12:
For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it.
Jesus was not at all saying that those who find themselves estranged for whatever reason from their God-joined one-flesh partner who remains alive, have this “super-discipleship option” (should they be so inclined, as Mr. Servant might presume). What Jesus is actually saying is that “he who is not able to accept this” forfeits the kingdom of heaven! Jesus warned us to count the cost of following Him (Luke 14:28), warning us to enter by the narrow gate that few find, and to avoid the broad path that everyone wants to take instead, the one that leads to destruction (Matthew 7:13-14). He warned us that if we love anything or anyone more than we love Him, we cannot be His disciple(Luke 14:26). This false shepherd, on the other hand, parrots the foul advice of Martin Luther, that men are at all times entitled to a sexual relationship in order to allay worse debauchery. This, quite simply, is idolatry and self-worship. It neglects the underlying heart problem in order to appease the raw flesh.
(5) As for the next slander, “it creates a lower, “unclean” class among those who have been cleansed of their sins by Jesus’ sacrifice, a class consisting of those who have previously been married and divorced…“, we suggest that Mr. Servant take His complaint up directly with Jesus, for we have merely quoted Him, verbatim. Another blog of ours deals with the popular false claim that Jesus’ sacrifice “cleansed” the “sin” of an unwanted holy matrimony covenant occurring prior to “salvation”. The inconvenient truth for Mr. Servant is that God defended mixed and heathen (true) marriages as equally indissoluble for life in numerous examples in both the Old and New Testament.
That said, we’d like to ask Mr. Servant what exactly justifies his presumption that faithfulness to and (if necessary) chastity in honor of our original holy matrimony vows constitutes “second class citizenship”?Do we say the spouse whose one-flesh mate is serving in overseas in the military is a “second class citizen” because of the season of celibacy imposed on them? Or whose spouse is in prison? Or to the spouse of the cancer or Alzheimer patient, that they are “second-class citizens” due to a possibly permanent season of celibacy that the Lord commands? Don’t we instead admire them for this kind of fidelity and invoke church discipline on them when fidelity is lacking in those circumstances ?
From Servant’s charge of “unfair second class citizenship” arising from the commandment to take up our cross, deny ourselves and follow Christ, Mr. Servant moves on to a commentary-parroting account of the classic battle between Hillel and Shammai, while he chides the marriage permanence community for not buying into the popular contemporary commentators’ oft-cited claim that Shammai won that contest, “in Christ’s estimation”. Like them, he seems a bit oblivious to the implications of what both Matthew and Mark tell us next:
In the house the disciples began questioning Him about this again. …The disciples *said to Him, “If the relationship of the man with his wife is like this, it is better not to marry.” [ Mark 10:10; Matthew 19:10-11]
Following Mr. Servant’s reasoning for a moment, the disciples were, therefore, absolutely livid and aghast that they could only divorce their wives for adultery, an infraction that rarely occurred on the part of the wife in a consummated marriage, and when it did occur, the Mosaic remedy was stoning, not divorce (Deut. 22). We’re to believe those disciples were left incredulous and flabbergasted that Jesus had just had the audacity to say they could not divorce their wives for burning the pita or inadvertently showing their ankles. (They then went on, as copious historical accounts repeatedly tell us, to disciple their own converts during the decades that followed, that all remarriage was adultery regardless of what triggered man’s divorce.) The unbiased contextual fact is that Jesus disagreed with both Hillel and Shammai, according to Matthew 19:6 and 8, and left the disciples livid and aghast instead because Jesus said these two things which Mr. Servant conveniently ignores:
(1) “MOSES allowed you to divorce your wives….. but from the beginning, it was not (ever) so.” Matthew 19:8
(2) “Therefore, what God has joined, let NO HUMAN put asunder.” Matthew 19:6
In other words, the disciples were left livid and aghast enough to momentarily consider swearing off marriage altogether, because Jesus has just said that divorce of the wife of one’s youth was not only merely immoral, He was clearly saying that man’s attempt to “dissolve” God-joined holy matrimony is, and always has been, impossible. He was clarifying that all such attempts have always, in all cases, been a manmade contrivance that God never provided for from the beginning. To claim that all “marriages” are morally interchangeable with original holy matrimony while a true spouse lives, is to slanderously claim that God also “joined” the unlawful union, being untrue not only to the covenant spouse but to His own holy character, and personally covenanting with what Jesus clearly and repeatedly called adultery. It is a very good thing indeed for David Servant and his ilk, therefore, that Jesus made a point of saying this about blasphemy against God:
“Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come. ” – Matthew 12:31-32
Speaking of the unpardonable sin, we observe that this false shepherd skates very perilously close at another point in his screed to committing blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to satan, as described in Matthew 12 ), in slandering the call to obedience to God’s clear, Spirit-inspired word as a “doctrine of demons”:
“I have no hesitation labeling the Divine Divorce Doctrine a “doctrine of demons,” the kind of which Paul warned would arise in the last days (1 Tim. 4:1). It is interesting that Paul specifically mentioned that those last-days demonic doctrines would be marked by “men who forbid (or hinder, as the Greek verb koluo is often translated) marriage” (1 Tim. 4:3). Again, Divine Divorce Proponents want millions of married Christian couples to break their vows and divorce. My advice is that you run for your life from anyone who is promoting this dangerous and destructive twisting of the Word of God.”
Serious bible scholars don’t make the shameless pretense Servant has just made that Paul wasn’t referring to the asceticism heresy (Augustine, Thomas and others) of the 1st-4th century church that also continued into the Roman Catholic Church. Legalizing one’s adultery, on the other hand, is not “marriage” any more than legalizing one’s sodomy is “marriage”, and it’s grievously required God to allow the persecutions from the rise of homofascism to get the attention of a stiff-necked church to make His point. The remainder of this rebuttal will make clear that the only one “twisting” the Word of God is Servant and his ilk. Woe to him, and may God be merciful to allow repentance from blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in light of what he thinks he knows but does not.
Let not many become teachers, for they will incur a harsher judgment.
The only reason millions of “Christian” homes find themselves in this predicament is because men like Servant have exercised a seared conscience in the decades since 50-state enactment of unilateral divorce, which they did nothing meaningful to even resist. To lay responsibility for the abominable consequences of their own self-interested actions on the truth-tellers in the body of Christ is truly heinous.
Much of the rest of Servant’s defense of remaining in an adulterous civil-only union that God’s hand cannot join rests on two main arguments that amount to human speculation, with no further substantive swipes at hermeneutical principles or applications thereof, yet accusing the truth-tellers of hermeneutical “sins”. We will address both of these two remaining arguments of his shortly, but at this juncture, it would be good to review Elliot Nesch’s excellent work where he categorizes all of the arguments, devices and excuses of those who seek to discredit the no-exceptions indissolubility of holy matrimony.
Nesch breaks down all of the evangelical objections to the biblical doctrine taught by Jesus and Paul, that only physical death dissolves holy matrimony (the supernatural God-joining of a never-married or widowed man with a never-married or widowed woman, according to Matthew 19:4-6) into four categories:
(1) Redefinition of terms
(2) Ad hominem slurs
(3) Scriptural silence (what Jesus, Paul or whoever did not explicitly say)
(4) Hermeneutic / hyperbole arguments
(The audio link above is well worth taking the time to listen to. The segment with Elliot’s discussion begins at approximately 9:30 minutes.)
God’s so-called contemporary “shepherds” will all go after true disciples on one or more of these bases which are all fallacious, and all do shameless battle with the clear commandment of Christ, as well as with the very authority of His word. David Servant has lowered himself to resorting to all of them in his Part 1 blog, including the ad hominem.
Take, for example, the redefinition of terms, as Mr. Servant posits:
Notice that Jesus endorsed the Mosaic concession, “except for immorality.” Thus, immorality is a legitimate reason to divorce, and understandably so.[1] A marriage covenant is consummated by sexual union.[2] The adulterer, by his sexual union with another, breaks his marriage covenant. In that respect, adultery effectuates a divorce. The person who divorces his adulterous spouse only formalizes the divorce that has already occurred by the adultery. (Again, however, Scripture teaches clearly elsewhere that confrontation and mercy predicated upon repentance is the best route.)
As with his earlier quote, this statement is riddled with flaws of fact and logic. Servant is here referring to Christ’s words in Matthew 19:9, which were likely spoken originally in Aramaic, recorded by the Apostle in Hebrew, and later re-translated by the early church into Greek. A friend of this page has seen the Hebrew text which is held in archives in Jerusalem. The Greek text, available online with its literal translation, shows the following:
μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ except for unchastity / whoredom / commercial prostitution (according to all concordances written before 1850)
The root form of πορνείᾳ, “porne” means “to sell off”. In the Hebrew culture it would have been almost unheard of for a consummated wife whose husband was living with her to be involved in commercial prostitution, notwithstanding Gomer, who was involved in it both before and after the prophet Hosea married her on the Lord’s command. The penalty for this under Mosaic law is, after all, swift and sure stoning, not man’s divorce! Similarly, Jerome used the Latin term “fornication” when he later did his translation from the Greek. Also similarly, the root word is “fornix“, which were the Roman colonnade columns under which prostitutes entertained their clients. It is no accident, therefore, that earlier lexicons didn’t generalize the term porneia. It is also no accident that the post-WWII lexicons started to generalize it, as the divorce rate started to rise in the church. Those earlier lexicons were being far more faithful to the history and context of the Matthew 5 and 19 texts than are the shoddy counterparts we’re left with today.
Liberal bible translation societies started generalizing and substituting terms in the mid 20th century because the more focused term discouraged divorce. While there is certainly scholarly dissent, and there are examples of other bible passages where derivations of the term porneia does refer to a range of sexual infractions and immoral practices, there remains a good-sized cadre of reliable scholars who object to contextually construing “porneia” to include adultery “moicheia” in any passage where the two words appear together. After all, why would the One who declared, “no more eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth”, who further declared “And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart..” suddenly reverse course, exclusively in the case of two one-flesh partners and prescribe more adultery as the sanctioned remedy for adultery? Is Jesus really that capricious, or is this another slanderous blasphemy of the Son’s character?
Our friend who has viewed the Hebrew text of Matthew likewise confirms that the word Jesus used corresponds to “z’nut” from the Hebrew root “zanah” which also meant “playing the whore” outside of marriage. (See our 2015 blog “The Great Granddaddy of Them All” for further links, and elaboration on this topic. )
Beyond that, Mr. Servant contends that Jesus “endorsed” the Mosaic concession regulating man’s practice of financial and spiritual abandonment of their families based on a unilateral piece of paper. This claim does not logically follow at all from the preponderance of everything else Jesus unequivocally said on the topic, as should be obvious by now. Servant suggests that it is sacrilege to infer that Jesus would not have been on the same page with Moses in all matters. This is far from a novel argument, and it is just as far from a supportable assumption. In fact, it’s another purely emotional and manipulative argument designed to distract from and devalue some of the harder teachings of Jesus that we don’t like, in our culture of institutionalized serial polygamy. We know that Moses was a very flawed man (as we all are). Even his wife Zipporah couldn’t resist rebuking him on one occasion when she had to intervene to protect her husband from God’s wrath:
Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the Lord met him[Moses] and sought to put him to death.Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and threw it at Moses’ feet, and she said, “You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me.” So He let him [Moses]alone. At that time she said, “You are a bridegroom of blood”—because of the circumcision. – Exodus 4:24-26
We also recall the reason Moses was not permitted by God to lead His people into the promised land. Moses occasionally responded to situations in the flesh instead of in the Spirit of God. In fact, before Jesus ascended, and Pentecost followed, the Holy Spirit did not continuously indwell God’s servants, but He fell upon them at specific times. At other times, He seemed to be absent, for example:
So Moses took the rod from before the Lord, just as He had commanded him; and Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly before the rock. And he said to them, “Listen now, you rebels; shall we bring forth water for you out of this rock?” Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod; and water came forth abundantly, and the congregation and their beasts drank.But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you have not believed Me, to treat Me as holy in the sight of the sons of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them.”Those were the waters of Meribah, because the sons of Israel contended with the Lord, and He proved Himself holy among them. – Numbers 20:9-13
Having discredited the unsupportable notions that Moses was infallible and that Jesus had no authority or cause to ever differ with him, we also point out that numerous other instances of Mosaic teaching were directly abrogated by Jesus in the sermon on the mount in favor of His higher law which would now be obeyed, by those authentically redeemed, from the heart and would eliminate the option of daily ritual animal sacrifices as an available path to Kingdom citizenship. Each instance where Jesus stated “you have heard it said…..BUT I SAY UNTO YOU..” is a specific example of Jesus countermanding Moses because the moral standard was not high enough for the kingdom of God, on additional matters ranging from swearing oaths to taking our own revenge in lieu of forgiving transgressions against us. It’s also quite true that rabbinic traditions had GREATLY expanded the ideas that were attributed to “Moses” in the centuries after the man’s bones were returned to the dust of the earth. The expansion of the Deuteronomy 24 provision to legally end a marriage contract (“ketubah”) for a non-capital offense that would have been a defilement existing both before and after consummation of the marriage — to the list of Deuteronomy 22 capital offenses is a prime example of this trend over the centuries that unfolded between Moses and Jesus, as various conquerors deprived the Jews of their ability to carry out stoning. The post-Moses “mission-creep” of rabbinic regulations had gotten so bad that Jesus replaced the 613 ceremonial regulations with just two commandments that distilled and retained the 10 Commandments:
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’This is the great and foremost commandment.The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” – Matthew 22:36-40
Since Servant’s claim above that Jesus was not directly abrogating Mosaic regulations is not at all supportable, neither is his further extrapolation: “Thus, ‘immorality’ is a legitimate reason to divorce, and understandably so.” This vague and invalidly-substituted term “immorality” is meaningless because it is not specific enough in light of Christ’s assertion in Matt. 19:8, later confirmed by Paul in Rom. 7:2-3 and 1 Cor.7:39, that God-joined holy matrimony is indissoluble except by death. Hence, subsequent remarriage is always adultery, according to Jesus, following man’s divorce for a very straightforward reason: the parties of the first part are nonetheless still married. David Servant dismisses this truth as though man’s law trumps God’s law, thereby denying what Christ repeatedly either stated outright on numerous occasions, or He inferred on numerous other occasions.
But Servant’s statement above directly contradicts Jesus and / or Paul in some other profound ways:
“A marriage covenant is consummated by sexual union. The adulterer, by his sexual union with another, breaks his marriage covenant. In that respect, adultery effectuates a divorce. The person who divorces his adulterous spouse only formalizes the divorce that has already occurred by the adultery.”
While it’s true that sexual union consummates the marriage covenant, it’s also true that an eligible (never-married or widowed) bride and groom are just as inseverably joined, and the unconditional, indissoluble covenant is already in existence before the couple has departed the ceremony venue, according to Christ’s words in Matthew 19:4-6. Sex does not do any of this, according to Jesus, because becoming one-flesh (sarx mia) in the sense that Jesus spoke of it is an instantaneous, supernatural act of God, not a gradual, natural process of men. We know this because the language both Jesus and Paul consistently used when referring to holy matrimony joining is completely different than the language Paul used in speaking of merely carnal joining, for example, in 1 Corinthians 6:16 (where the term is hen soma, even though sarx mia is mentioned by Paul for comparison purposes at the end of the verse). Unlike with hen soma, Jesus says that a new entity is formed in that wedding ceremony moment….
“So they are no longer two [note: by the perfect-indicative active verb tense – “no longer” should be rendered “never again”], but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
Hence a new entity is formed which becomes the inferior party to the unconditional covenant, and the covenant is formed indissolubly because God is the divine superior party in that covenant. The state of holy matrimony is, in all cases, indissoluble for life precisely because God has never once gone back on an unconditional covenant in which He is a participant, and man can do nothing at all (short of physically dying) to remove God from it. Prior to these latter “Days of Noah”, this didn’t used to be rocket science. Even civil judges and legislators once used to respect this, out of the holy fear of God.
( SIFC Note:It was to the above set of concepts that this blogger expected David Servant to apply his coined-label “Divine Divorce Doctrine”–as opposed to applying it to the concept of full, physical repentance from remarriage adultery, as he has done However, had he applied his moniker to this core foundational principle, it would have been an absolutely ludicrous contradiction in terms, since we’ve just proven that the only instance in which man’s divorce is “divine” is when it’s part of a repenting prodigal spouse’s restoration and restitution plan where only a faux marriage existed on man’s paper alongside the God-joined one, no different than a sodomous civil-only union. Servant is better off simply calling it “Divine Indissolubility Doctrine”, in our view. )
From this point in David Servant’s quote, the extrapolation from false, unsupported premises goes absolutely off the rails:
“The adulterer, by his sexual union with another, breaks his marriage covenant. In that respect, adultery effectuates a divorce. The person who divorces his adulterous spouse only formalizes the divorce that has already occurred by the adultery.”
This is hardly an original thought (much less a truthful one), but not because it originated with either Jesus or any of the Apostles. Its originator was the smarmy 16th century Catholic homosexual humanist who did so much to corrupt the character of Martin Luther, namely, one Desiderius Erasmus.
What did Jesus say “effectuates” man’s divorce? Nothing, since “from the beginning it was not ever so”. What motivates it? Man’s hard-heartedness (Matthew 19:8). Men like Servant tend to make the eternally-mistaken presumption that this hard-heartedness is some sort of ongoing “concession” (or that it demands such a concession), but Jesus said “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The writer of Hebrews repeatedly warned that all such hard-heartedness causes disciples to fall away and, if not repented of, miss their entrance into the kingdom. What did Paul say “breaks” (or ends) holy matrimony? Death alone. This is most consistent with the totality of what Jesus said, and it is also quite consistent with original Mosaic law concerning the necessity of stoning.
As pastors often do, Servant feels the need to toss in a quick patronizing word for anyone who might, perchance, be naturally inclined to obey God from the heart (rather than callously assume up front that he – Servant – will be forced to “rubber stamp” everyone’s abomination). He concludes: “(Again, however, Scripture teaches clearly elsewhere that confrontation and mercy predicated upon repentance is the best route.)” Well, sir, which is it? Did you not just insist that the practice of adultery is “effective dissolution” of the marriage? Do couples then need to remarry each other to repent of fornication with each other as a result of one partner’s infidelity creating a de facto “dissolution”, as though God’s joining-glue is somehow just a little defective, and not at all as represented by His Son?
Speaking of remarriage, in his assessment of the “foundation” of true disciples’ opposition to serial polygamy, he makes this random statement:
“They also disagree on whether or not there is ever a legitimate reason to divorce, that is, a reason that would allow a person who initiated a divorce to remarry.”
We’ll set aside the first assertion because it is silly on the surface. There is no disagreement among the saints that man’s divorce doesn’t dissolve anything, and God’s divorce is spelled D-E-A-T-H. Hence, there can’t be any “disagreement” in our community about whether there is ever a “legitimate” reason to do something that has absolutely no effect in God’s courthouse in the first place. What Servant is doing is conflating two entirely separate issues, the humanistic fiction of “dissolution”, and the atrocity of consecutively polygamous unlawful union. While there’s no denying that the pretense of marriage “dissolution” would have far less motive were it not for the lustful desire to enter into an immoral state under the fraudulent appearance of “decency”, the two are quite separate sins, the first an act of sin, and the latter an ongoing state of sin.
Servant next takes dead-aim at the supernatural, inseverable sarx mia entity, conflating it with its transitory man-joined counterfeit, hen soma: The usual argument is that a married couple are declared to be “one flesh” (Gen.2:24), and are therefore bound to one another unconditionally for life. However, this certainly burdens the phrase “one flesh” with more baggage than it will bear, since a tryst with a prostitute constitutes a “one flesh” relationship, according to Paul (1 Cor. 6:16), yet not necessarily a permanently binding one.
Apples and oranges, David!
Servant also gets into a very elaborate redefinition of terms when he moves on to discussing Paul’s varying instructions in 1 Corinthians 7 to various subsets of his audience in that church. I believe Servant’s later blog installment might get into this a bit more, so we’ll only grab one example point here to illustrate:
Servant postulates, of the Apostle Paul:
“Then, in a statement that summarizes much of his earlier advice for Christians to “remain in the state in which they were called” (see 1 Cor. 7:18-24), he advises the man who is married, “bound to a wife,” not to seek a divorce. Similarly, the man who is already divorced, “released from a wife,” should not seek a wife (“in view of the present distress”). However, Paul says, the already-divorced man, the one “released from a wife,” does not sin if he marries. And it is indisputable that he is speaking specifically to already-divorced men, because Paul continues in the same sentence saying, “and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned.” Clearly, from reading 1 Corinthians 7, Paul did not believe that the marriage covenant was indissoluble. Just as marriage is annulled by death and (often) adultery, it is also annulled by divorce. Paul did not believe Jesus’ words in the Four D&R Passages should be interpreted, “Whoever divorces and remarries lives in a continuous state of adultery that can only be remedied by yet another divorce.”
The redefinition of terms here is that everyone who is “called” while God-joined to a lifelong one-flesh spouse, with whom God Himself is in unconditional covenant, is “called” while bound to that spouse — even if they are simultaneously “called” while in papered-over adultery with another person. That is the state in which they are called. “Wife” is clearly being redefined in this proposal, from someone a man is joined to in sarx mia until death, to his concubine to whom he has immorally joined himself in hen soma. That said, someone called while a single prostitute isn’t to remain in that state, are they? Why then, should Servant speculate that anyone called in a state of serial polygamy remain in that state? This is no trivial point, given the inexcusably sloppy hermeneutics of applying a passage that refers contextually to vocation (slave) and religious trappings (circumcision) to the supernaturally-created state of holy matrimony (or its counterfeit), while claiming this “proves” that Paul did not consider holy matrimony indissoluble – verses 7:11, and 39, in the same passage, notwithstanding. Servant claims this passage is speaking to the divorced and remarried (both states being purely fictional before God), but the fallacy here ought to be obvious to all. The rest of Servant’s remarks again directly contradict a vast amount of instruction that came directly out of the mouths of Jesus and Paul, not to even mention the practice of generations of early church leaders who followed, as documented in their historical commentaries, letters and other writings. We dealt in great hermeneutical detail with other common abuses of 1 Corinthians 7 in two earlier blogs, the one most relevant to Servant’s comments can be read here.
This concludes the lengthy discussion of the tactic of redefinition of terms, and we now move on to address the remaining two highly predictable tactics Servant launches to water down Christ’s commandment in his Part 1, namely speculative claims about the silence of scripture, and misplaced red-herring discussions of “hyperbole”. We will also continue to point out where and how application of rigorous hermeneutical principles was given the short shrift or ducked altogether.
Servant makes the shallow and false claim that faithful Christ-followers base their convictions of the lifelong indissolubility of original holy matrimony on just four scripture passages in the synoptic gospels, namely,
Matthew 19:3-9
Mark 10:1-12
Matthew 5:32
Luke 16:18
More accurately, the exhaustive list of evidence of the universal indissolubility of original holy matrimony is as follows, since the role of Jesus Christ the Bridegroom and His one inseverable bride, the church, is woven through almost every book of the bible:
Why is this much broader list important? Two reasons, really.
First, the saints on the narrow path who do not carnally dismiss Christ’s commandments, and who believe both Jesus and Paul that obeying these commandments is a heaven-or-hell matter, are very careful to validate crucial details like Greek verb tenses and analyze word usages, also to apply other hermeneutical points of rigor that would not be possible unless one of the five essential principles is not neglected, namely, comparison with all related scriptures on a given subject so that a comprehensive unity of scriptural content is established. Indeed, David has falsely levelled this charge of omission against our community, and has done so out of his own ignorance and cowardly bias. After all, our community is not just a bunch of self-righteous busybodies who don’t have anything better to do than go around aimlessly pointing our fingers at people who have been ear-tickled into remarriage adultery by this generation of unfaithful shepherds who think nothing of misusing the name of the Lord to perform a vain act that NEVER would have been allowed to desecrate God’s sanctuary only 60 or so years ago. Indeed, pre-1970’s doctrine in many Protestant denominations forbid it for sound biblical reasons, from the denomination’s inception. Curiously, the Anglican church which was birthed expressly for the legitimization of serial polygamy, was the last to officially cave in this regard, in 2002.
Most of us either have an estranged prodigal spouse who is in severe danger of forfeiting his or her soul for their lustful faux “marriage” (while our children watch and might possibly follow them in emulation), or we have come to the conviction of truth and exited our unlawful unions. A few have blessedly restored holy matrimony unions after an intervening adulterous home was dissolved, often after many years and the birth of non-covenant children. Except for this latter group, most live celibate lives until the Lord brings redemption. Far too many of us wind up receiving the “left foot of Christian fellowship” by our threatened churches, and pastors who are afraid of their sin in performing these “weddings” being exposed to the congregation. Some of us were pastors fired by churches who would rather have an adulterously-re-wed shepherd than one who refuses, after being divorced by a prodigal wife, to live in the adultery of marrying another. An encouraging few are convicted pastors with intact, lifelong covenant marriages and intact congregations across a growing variety of denominations. We’d better know whereof we speak as we advocate for a very inconvenient and embarrassing ignored truth, and do so with as much studious rigor as we can possibly muster and communicate.
The second reason the exhaustive list of related scriptures is important is to dispute the typical false claims of “scripture silence” such as David Servant (and many others) have alleged. Our serial polygamy apologist asks:
“I ask: Where is this Divine Divorce Doctrine found outside of the Four D&R Passages? Surely if Jesus expected every divorced and remarried person to divorce again as a requirement for salvation—no small thing—He would have said so, and especially during those times He was talking about the very subject of divorce and remarriage to crowds that were full of divorced and remarried people.”
Our answer: “divine” divorce is found only one place in scripture, Ezra, chapters 9 and 10. However, all divorce and / or “putting away” is strictly man-made, not God-ordained, so we have to be very careful how we throw around the term “divorce”, which meant different things over time in different cultures. The actual idea to render unto Caesar what previously belonged exclusively to God was Martin Luther’s, and he would not have done so except for the clamor for fig leaf “cover” to financially and spiritually abandon one-flesh partners and children with an air of “respectability” that the church quite rightly refused to grant out of care for eternal souls. The civil legal contests as we know them, therefore, date back only to the 16th century, and only in Europe do they go back even that far. Ancient societies had unilateral self-issued paper, including Hebrew and Graeco-Roman societies that later collapsed morally, and this was the evil that Christ came rebuking when He said, “from the beginning, it was not ever so.” In the case of unlawful foreign (typically, concurrently polygamous) wives described in the book of Ezra, there was a sending away with material provision, which constituted repentance from the immoral relationships. God commanded this, and He did so because He had created no sarx mia in any of those instances. Those children were born of satan’s carnal counterfeit, hen soma. This is the identical situation to remarriage adultery and sodomous unions today, but due to the illegitimate and immoral jurisdiction of the civil state, civil dissolution is necessary to end the legal obligations so that the covenant moral vows and obligations can be fulfilled before God. Ideally, this eventually leads to the obeying of 1 Corinthians 7:2, on both sides of the former illicit relationship, now repented:
But because of immoralities, each man is to have [possess – echetO G2192] his own [heautou G1438] wife, and each woman is to have [possess – echetO G2192] her own[idion G2398] husband.
This was never a legal concept, but a metaphysical one, according to Jesus. Speaking of scriptural silence, Jesus never spoke of the necessity of civil sanction or documents of state regulation when He described the first wedding as the model for 1st century holy matrimony, and neither did the other Apostles. It was clear from Christ’s description “from the beginning” that God alone did the joining (or declined to, due to prior joining). Correct understanding hopefully leads to obeying some closely related commandments:
…to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own [idiois G2398] husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored. (Titus 2-5)
For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality;that each of you know how to possess [ktasthai G2932] his own [heautou G1438] vessel [skeuos G463] in sanctification and honor,not in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God; (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5)
Christ-followers are not to possess (covet and retain) someone else’s one-flesh lifelong partner, but only their own. According to Paul, they are to release what does not belong to them back to the only one to whom God’s hand joined them, and they are not to forsake, abandon or live in unforgiving estrangement from their own one-flesh mate.
David Servant makes much of claiming that neither Jesus, nor any of the Apostles ever told anyone to divorce a “second” time who was living in sin with someone else’s God-joined spouse. This is not entirely true. John the Baptist called out Herod and Herodias, both of whom had divorced their God-joined spouses to “marry” each other, saying to Herod, “it is not lawful for you to have your brother Phillip’s wife.” (Mark 6; Matthew 14). The bible tells us that John, like Jesus, was filled with the Holy Spirit from the womb, and Jesus lauded him, calling him the greatest of the prophets born of women, and connecting him with the kingdom of God which the violent take by force. John knew that unless this civilly-legal but Kingdom-unlawful union was renounced and ceased, the destination for this pair would be hell. He, John, was ready to meet his Maker, but they clearly weren’t. Jesus discussed this in the presence of His disciples, two of whom recorded it in the gospels.
Then there’s the episode of church discipline being applied in 1 Corinthians 5 at Paul’s command to the man who had taken his father wife (probably his stepmother, following either the divorce or death of the father). The scripture does not state that he “married” her, but there are three immoral possibilities: (1) the father was dead and they were cohabiting in fornication, or (2) the father had civilly divorced her and the son had civilly married her, or (3) the father had separated or divorced her, and they were cohabiting in adultery. Since the man was still in the church body whom Paul had to rebuke, (1) and (3) seem less likely than (2). What we do know is that Paul felt strongly enough that the son’s soul was on the line unless the church excommunicated him (“turned him over to satan that his soul may be saved”). While everyone wants to claim that the issue is incest here, since it’s not his biological mother involved, there’s no basis for calling it incest unless an intact one-flesh relationship still existed between the living father and the father’s wife. It appears that we have an overt church discipline situation being carried out on an instance of divorce and remarriage, and if the relationship was not renounced, another pair of legalized adulterers was headed for hell.
It also stands to reason that if neither Jesus nor Paul considered holy matrimony dissoluble as they both directly state more than once, the second “marriage” would not be valid to begin with, nor would the first “divorce”. There was no elaborate civil court system to purport to “dissolve” any marriage until the apostate aspects of the Reformation took shape in the 16th century, so severance of an invalid, unlawful union in the 1st century would simply consist of separating and returning to one’s true spouse. This was also true in Ezra’s time. Further, Jesus was quite clear that living in a state of permanent unforgiveness toward anyone, much less one’s God-joined one-flesh mate was equally a heaven or hell matter (Matt. 18:23-35; Matt. 6;15). Paul was equally clear that only death dissolved what God has joined (Romans 7:2-3; 1 Cor. 7:39) and that Christ-followers are charged with a ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-19). Our sealing with the Holy Spirit should mean that we come to conviction of all of this by His say-so, based on a changed heart and Spirit-led scripture illumination.
Servant argues (falsely):
“Furthermore, there is no evidence any of Jesus’ apostles ever interpreted His words about divorce and remarriage to be a requirement for divorced and remarried couples to legally or functionally divorce. Their initial reaction to His statement to the Pharisees in Matthew 19 revealed they only thought that, in light of Jesus’ endorsement of one-wife-for-life, it might be best if people never married. They did not come to the conclusion that divorced and remarried people needed to divorce again. In fact, it is much more likely that they were wondering if Jesus was advocating the stoning of all divorced and remarried people, since that is what the Mosaic Law prescribed for adulterers.”
The great flaw in any “silence of scripture” argument is that it can always be turned around on the debater. For example, where does scripture ever mention anyone who is divorced and remarried in the churches after Christ’s ascension? Where does it explicitly mention any civilly-orchestrated divorces in that 1st century era taking place? Estrangement is discussed simply as “departing”, and the commandment was to leave the door open to reconciliation, which of necessity precluded remarriage. There is no account of any of the Apostles or their disciples ever performing an adulterous wedding after the mention of Herod and Herodias. Regardless of whether scripture was “silent” on this, it is clear that the historians of the era were far from silent. As just one example, two of the early church fathers who were direct disciples of the Apostle John (Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, and Justin Martyr) both wrote extensively of the invalidity of remarriage while one’s original spouse remained alive. Over the next 300 years, there’s good reason to believe from the extensive writings of church leaders across the region of Christendom who followed them, that there was no remarriage in the early church at all, based on the unanimous statement condemning it and requoting Jesus and Paul in the very context that Servant so hotly disputes. This biblical faithfulness didn’t just spontaneously happen — it was carried as a firm and universal conviction out of the house where the disciples had questioned Jesus, who spoke of becoming a spiritual “eunuch” for the sake of the kingdom of God.
Whereas stoning was not lawful under the Roman occupation since slightly before Christ’s birth, Servant’s baseless claim that the disciples were preoccupied with stoning as a horrible remedy to terminate all the legalized adultery is misinformed and ill-studied on the author’s part. The better explanation is that they realized Jesus was invalidating the scope expansion of Mosaic regulation under rabbinic tradition which had compensated for the Roman (and earlier Persian) frustration of the hard-hearted ability to dispose of unwanted “ribs”, as though God had taken a whole slab of them out of Adam.
Servant goes on to insist: “Nothing can be found in the New Testament epistles that supports the idea that those who are divorced and remarried are “still married to their original spouse in God’s eyes” or that they are “continually living in an adulterous relationship of which they must repent by divorce.”
Apparently the direct, unequivocal words of Jesus, repeated on three separate occasions, constitute part of the alleged “nothing” of which this blind guide speaks. It should be obvious to most that just because something is asserted, does not automatically make it true, but it seems that this gentleman who is attempting to pass himself off as a scholar either doesn’t understand Koine Greek verb tenses, or finds them inconvenient to his argument. He is not alone in this omission. None other than Dr. John MacArthur gets caught doing it all the time! Expert linguists point out that every time there is a synoptic gospel account of Jesus speaking of divorce and remarriage as “committing adultery”, including the three separate times He spoke of an otherwise innocent man “marrying” any divorced woman (Matthew 5:32b, 19:9b, Luke 16;18b) He consistently did two things:
(1) Used the all-inclusive term ὃς ἐὰν (hos ean) or Πᾶς ὁ (pas ho) –meaning, whoever, whosoever, EVERYONE, in various translations, with no exceptions. The term used in John 3:16 is likewise Πᾶς ὁ.
(2) Without exception, was recorded in the present-indicative verb tense / mood on each occasion. According to the source www.ntgreek.org, the effect of the author or translator selecting this verb tense while capturing the words of Jesus is: “The present tense usually denotes continuous kind of action. It shows ‘action in progress’ or ‘a state of persistence.‘ When used in the indicative mood, the present tense denotes action taking place or going on in the present time. “
In light of this, there are two things that are logically impossible:
(1) That someone can be in ongoing adultery against a “severed” spouse to whom they are no longer married in the eyes of Christ (and therefore God).
(2) That a subsequent “husband” can be in adultery by reason of marrying a still-married woman, but the woman is not in adultery (due to some claimed “exception”) when she marries the man–a “half-adulterous” marriage, in other words.
We herewith rest our case concerning Servant’s allegation that there is “no evidence that supports the idea that those who are divorced and remarried are “still married to their original spouse in God’s eyes” or that they are “continually living in an adulterous relationship “, since we have proven bothdirectly from the scripture passages.
What remains, however, is Servant’s last “silence of scripture” assertion….“of which they must repent by divorce.” Actually, scripture requires that they must repent by cessation and renunciation of the illicit relationship without addressing the civil legalities that came about later in society as a fabrication of men. However, since the civil state has no delegated biblical authority over the creation, regulation or dissolution of holy matrimony, the only purpose of civil divorce in such an instance to clean up their legal life and make restitution as best they can to everyone around them that they’ve harmed by their idolatry and lustful choice to disobey God’s word. Technically, there’s nothing to dissolve in the kingdom of God, but like the thief who must stop stealing and return what he’s stolen, or the prostitute who must find another profession, or the murderer who must stop murdering, or the sodomite who must terminate that immoral and unlawful relationship, the adulterers must stop committing adultery and set a decent example of obeying God in front of everyone watching. Sometimes to prove this from scripture we must exert ourselves a bit in the instruction of the Holy Spirit (the Teacher), and make a holy linkage between a couple of unlinked scriptures in the spirit of holy fear and obedience. After all, nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus or any of the Apostles explicitly insist than anyone must cease using pornography or cease buying lottery tickets, either. For example, linking to Matthew 5:32b; 19:9b and Luke 16:18b the following admonitions from the Apostles cannot be shown to be inappropriate in light of the final outcome of dying in this state of sin, unrepentant:
“For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all. For He who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not commit murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.” James 2:10-11
“For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?For we know Him who said, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.’ And again, “The Lord will judge His people.”It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Hebrews 10:26-29
We move on to briefly discuss the final tactic of the enemies of God’s truth, misplaced claims of “hyperbole”. In this case, Servant refers to hyperbole, but also terms this, “reasons to limit literality”. It is the classic serpent’s question, “Psssst….did God really say?’
Servant claims, a bit ludicrously: “….students of Jesus also know that, when they endeavor to interpret His words, they should not only consider context, but the fact that Jesus indisputably did not intend that all of His words should always be taken in their most literal sense. For example, everyone agrees that Jesus does not really intend that we pluck out our eyes or cut off our hands if they “cause us to stumble,” or even that our physical eyes or hands can actually “cause” us to stumble.” Yet that is what Jesus said in Matthew 5:29-30 ” (Very good, David – we don’t literally act on Christ’s hyperbolic statements. But that does not mean that we project this understanding to all other serious commandments in a way that makes obedience to them optional, as he soon goes on to suggest.)
Neither does it mean that we can shrug off the important points He was making with His hyperbolic statement, including:
(1) Hell is real, and purportedly “saved” people to do go there
(2) The lust of our eyes and the covetousness of our hands make us prone to addicting acts, which then leads to entrapment in states of sin that can send us to hell
(3) Preemptive action tends to work a lot better with less pain than corrective action
(4) Sometimes extremely drastic action is needed to avoid God giving us over, due to wicked hearts and deceitful rationalization (may not be the severance of a limb, but it just might be the severance of an immoral relationship that the bible makes clear is unlawful.)
(5) Matt. 5:32b, marrying a divorced woman creates a state of adultery that will send a man to hell if he does not flee.
Servant continues his rhetorical derailment: “No one claims that Jesus expects some men to literally castrate themselves for the sake of God’s kingdom, but within a few seconds of one of the Four D&R Passages, Jesus said “there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:12).”
Um, Paul said something about wishing Judaizers would castrate themselves because they wanted to circumcise Gentile converts, but it is quite clear that Jesus never said anything, hyperbolic or otherwise, about anybody castrating themselves. He did say in Matthew 19:12 that involuntarily-estranged spouses who voluntarily submit to their season of celibacy rather than violate their holy matrimony vows and defile their one-flesh union are advancing the kingdom of God. Under today’s unilateral divorce laws, we have many who should be doing this, and relatively few true disciples who actually are obeying Him in it. Servant apparently regards this obedient containing of our vessels as “castration”. (The eye and hand reference was hyperbole, by the way, but the eunuch reference is not at all hyperbole in its usage, but rather a very straightforward analogy, with Servant still managing to see it as “hyperbole” with his jaded, humanistic eye.)
The next suggestion is interesting, indeed: “None of us think Jesus actually wants us literally to “hate father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters” (Luke 14:26) if we hope to be one of His disciples.” Apparently our author friend acts like he has never encountered the Hebrew idiom before, whereby “hate” needs to be interpreted as “not love x more than we love Jesus”. That doesn’t change the truth that if we DO choose to love an “x” (including this life) more than we love Jesus, that’s called idolatry, and idolaters indeed cannot be His disciples. Servant would shamelessly suggest, just as Lucifer the serpent would, that this creates justification to not feel bound to obey Christ’s clear moral teachings and commandments. The Serpent’s question is: “Did God REALLY say??” The gospel according to Servant is that when Jesus is speaking of adultery, we are not to take it as a literal damning sin if there is a piece of civil or church paper claiming it’s OK, because He might not have “literally” meant it.
Perhaps when all a supposed bible scholar can say is, “perhaps”: “perhaps” this, and “perhaps” that, he is speculating and doesn’t have anything authoritative to say at all. Perhaps, if he made an honest attempt to comprehensively apply all of the core principles of sound hermeneutics, including Context, Context, Culture, Comparison and Consultation, instead of mentioning one or two of them in shallow passing (and misapplication) he would be instantly exposed as someone contradicting Jesus, just because he rejects His authority to define moral absolutes, but is who is perfectly willing to offer up the lip service. (Perhaps.)
There is one small point on which SIFC and Servant are in agreement, even though there is no such thing as a “Christian” who is “married” to someone else’s God-joined spouse. One can be a Christ-follower or one can be an ongoing adulterer, but one cannot be both at the same time. There is no such thing as a “Christian” marriage to the spouse of another living person (much less “millions” of them, no matter how “heartless” this truth is painted as being.) It is a sure pathway to hell, just as Jesus and Paul repeatedly warned it was. That said, the moniker that the integrity-of-the-biblical-family movement (a.k.a. “Marriage Permanence”) has taken on is indeed a bit imprecise. As Servant puts it,
The tragic irony of the Divine Divorce Doctrine is that its adherents often identity themselves as promoters of “marriage permanence,” yet they are helping to destroy Christian marriages, and if they had their way, millions of married Christian couples would divorce as they repented of their “adulterous marriages.” It seems bizarre to identify yourself as being an advocate for “marriage permanence” when you hope to convince millions of married Christians to break their vows and divorce.
SIFC agrees wholeheartedly with the first sentence above and has made this same argument many times to peers and leaders in the narrow-path movement. Every covenant usurper hopes their purloined “marriage” will be permanent — unless, of course, jobs are lost, flowers are no longer purchased, somebody gets fat or “comes out” as gay. The civil divorce rates are substantially higher for legalized adultery than holy matrimony, and mercifully so, in light of what the bible repeatedly states are the eternal consequences of dying in that state. The alternative term this page advocates in place of “marriage permanence” eliminates all ambiguity — marriage indissolubility. But I return to the point that “marriage” has to be properly defined according to both of the non-negotiable elements of Matthew 19:4-6 according to Christ, one of which is lifelong indissolubility, and the other is complementarity. We will defer discussion of the issue of “vow-breaking” to the next rebuttal of Part 2, since the topic is germane there.
Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it. – Matthew 7:12-14
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.
– 2 Timothy 2:15
For the second time this year, our Facebook page has been messaged concerning a false teaching that has been circulating in a branch of the Mennonite community. In the first instance, a never-married woman had married a Christian man, but appeared to have grown disenchanted with him. Since this man had been very briefly married after eloping on a lark to Vegas prior to that, and the prior civil marriage was civilly-annulled after a matter of days, wife #2 wanted our affirmation of her thoughts to leave this man and remain alone in her contemplated repentance from what she saw as remarriage adultery. She cited Anabaptist materials she had been reading.
We told her it’s not that simple in her borderline situation, where there had been strong indications there was not really mutual consent between this prior pair to leave, cleave and form a home. Hence, there was legitimate question whether an all-knowing God had joined this prior pair into a one-flesh (Greek: sarx mia) entity with which He would then covenant unconditionally. Understandably, she received differing views from equally-committed. solid leaders in the marriage permanence community about whether or not her husband’s prior annulled nuptials in “Sin City – what happens here stays here” constituted holy matrimony. Most cases are pretty cut-and-dried, but this is one of the rare situations that remain questionable, given the circumstances. Ultimately, blessedly, this extrabiblical Anabaptist dogma, though briefly considered by the confused lady, didn’t influence a bad decision on her part. The Holy Spirit ultimately convicted her to stay with her (likely) one-flesh covenant husband whose prior civil “marriage” just didn’t quite come together in Christ, but her own mutually-consenting, leaving-and-cleaving subsequent union entailed valid vows, sobriety, and Christian witnesses. Praise be to God!
In the second instance, a lady told us she had repented and divorced out of a clearly adulterous first marriage with a man divorced from a covenant wife, after she became aware of the true biblical teaching. She went on to marry a never-married Christian man and she mentions they have six children together, but she correctly acknowledged that this circumstance shouldn’t be the deciding factor. She told us that a man in her Christian community is saying this covenant marriage is “unlawful” and she should leave it, which is why she PM’d our page, asking about an article by a different Mennonite or Brethren author raising similar arguments as the first article we rebutted earlier in the year.
Let’s take this second article’s more detailed claims point-by-point to test whether the major premise of this Anabaptist dogma is true, i.e., that someone repenting in fear of God from an adulterous remarriage is equally bound to both (or all) prior spouses, and may not return to any of them, but must remain single and celibate for the remainder of their days, rather than pursue reconciliation with their exclusive God-joined one-flesh partner (with whom God is still uniquely covenanting, per Mal. 2:14).
First however, let’s talk about what constitutes a heresy, because this one might fall a tad short of that, hence we are choosing to call it an error. A heresy has often been defined as an unbiblical or extrabiblical belief or tenet that is so profoundly severe and misleading that if embraced and observed, it will send an otherwise saved person to hell. That seems like a good working definition to “standerinfamilycourt”. The “exception clause”, “Pauline privilege” and “annulment” doctrines, as well as “once-saved-always-saved (“OSAS“) are all clear-cut heresies that can and do send millions to hell from out of our church pews. Observance of this Anabaptist tenet is similar to asceticism in the early church. If embraced and observed, it hinders our walk with the Lord and might lead to the embrace of more serious heresies, but it is unlikely to send adherents to hell, in and of itself. This one likely causes great tragedy in covenant families, because to an emotionally-ravaged victim of the Sexual Revolution who doubts the way forward, this one feels “safe” to adopt. However, satan is still stealing from this person!May the Holy Spirit intervene, convict and correct, so that he doesn’t get away with it! Others may disagree with this category, and that’s fine.
This author begins by asserting:
“Many Mennonites would not tell her [the hypothetical, contemporary “Samaritan woman” who shows up at church] to marry the last partner and go on living with him. They have a different solution. Their answer is that this woman should reunite with her first husband. “The one whom thou first hadst”, they would say, “He is thy husband.”
This logic is based on the following line of thought. The first idea is that only the first marriage was a marriage. When this woman and her first husband divorced, God did not recognize that divorce. These two were still married. When she found a second man, and went through the ritual of marriage, it was no marriage. God only recognized a second relationship as adultery. All subsequent marriages are only adultery. There is nothing to any of the divorcesor remarriages. Therefore, if a person desires to be in God’s will, he will seek to return to the first marriage.
But what would Jesus say? “
SIFC: The author is here referring to the conservative Mennonites, but this author himself represents another sect within the Anabaptists, we note. We don’t have to speculate what Jesus would say, because we know what He clearly did say, as well as what Paul said, corroborating Jesus and elaborating on what He said on the matter. We also have the unanimous writings of the early church fathers whom the apostles discipled over the next 400 years after both Jesus and Paul were gone. All of it vindicates those “many Mennonites” this author is disparaging for their absolutely correct view that the God-joined, one-flesh covenant spouse of our youth is the only spouse God recognizes, as long as both shall live. Homosexuals “marry” these days, too. That does not make their unions holy matrimony. Only the exclusive one-flesh state joined by God under valid vows makes the union holy matrimony. Only rebellious man “joins” subsequent unions, and the result in all such cases is satan’s counterfeit, (Greek: hen soma).
So what did Jesus actually say?
And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, andthe two shall become one flesh”?So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate….He *said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. “
SIFC: The man leaves his FATHER and MOTHER, not a prior living spouse (to whom he would still be inseverably joined, actually). God took only one rib out of Adam for a reason. The one-flesh (Greek: sarx mia) entity is exclusive and supernatural. It is created only by God’s hand upon valid vows, ahead of the physical consummation. It can only be severed by God’s hand (through physical death alone). To say otherwise is to slander God’s actions and character, to directly contradict His messengers such as Paul and such as Jesus Himself, and to deny what He has clearly revealed about Himself in the whole of scripture. It is to suggest that Jesus the Bridegroom would take and keep more than one church as His bride.
The author continues….
“Let us examine again the words of Jesus and the woman at the well in their conversation related to her marriage situation. Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither. The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly. (John 4:16-18)
“Jesus’ teaching is simple. In essence He said, “You have had five husbands, now you have none. “Jesus did not tell her that her first marriage partner was her husband. He did not investigate who her first partner was who had never been married. He did not inquire who she was married to last. He did not say “This is thy husband.” Rather, after addressing the situation of having had multiple marriages and now living outside marriage, he agreed, “Thou hast well said, I have no husband.” His answer clarifies that the way to holiness in a multiple marriage arrangement is to live without a spouse.”
SIFC: We have previously debunked the abuse of the Samaritan woman narrative because it is also a favorite rationalization of the remarriage apologists who find it hard to resist the fact that contemporary translations appear to render all five men as valid “husbands”, nor can they resist the urge to embellish where John is quite sparing with the details. (This is called speculation.) It should be pretty clear from the context that the indwelling Holy Spirit is not going to allow this woman to continue “shacking up”, but neither is she free to marry the man, since the chances are so high of a surviving covenant husband with whom she is still joined. The conventional argument goes that the account “doesn’t say” that Jesus ordered her to leave her live-in boyfriend. That’s neither here nor there. Immoral relationships always constitute the idolatry of self-worship, so we know that particular relationship she was currently in had to go, with or without civil paper.
Beyond that, we don’t know if her first husband was still alive, maybe so, maybe not. If he was not, that broke the one-flesh binding relationship, but even if he was deceased, we don’t know whether she entered into an adulterous remarriage under Mosaic regulations before or after he died. The argument that Jesus didn’t interrogate her for the circumstances is irrelevant. She was born again, and then sat at His feet, where she no doubt subsequently heard Him teach the one-flesh and unconditional covenant principles. Like all of us, the indwelling Holy Spirit led her to the truth, including the truth about the ministry of reconciliation which, since Jesus commanded, “what God has joined, let no man put asunder” should obviously begin with her one-flesh mate.She would have learned about the requirement to forgive, and the requirement to leave her offering on the altar and first go be reconciled with her brother. She had no husband under man’s law, but we just don’t know whether she still had one under God’s law. We’re just not told, and we have to live with that, without further speculation either way.
“But, and if she does leave, let her remain (Greek: agamos – without a new wedding) or else be reconciled to her husband.” – 1 Cor. 7:11
Pretty straightforward, actually.
Author:
“How do people ever get to the point where they think a divorced and remarried person should go back to the first companion?”
SIFC: This is also straightforward. See Paul’s clear instruction above.
“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate….”
Jesus was here not only saying that man’s divorce is immoral, He was also saying it isimpossible in the case of those whom God has supernaturally, instantaneously joined as one flesh. This is consistent with Paul asserting that only death severs that bond, not any other act of men.
“.. from the beginning it has not been this way. ”
There is no Creation account of God establishing a provision for man’s divorce. That was never any part of His metaphysical plan, despite the prevalence of wishful belief to the contrary. Jesus should know, since He was one of the witnesses at the wedding of Adam and Eve. He was there.
This author continues from here with a mostly semantic argument that is the heart of his false belief that all “marriages” are morally interchangeable:
“This conclusion is reached after a person has begun to believe a few half-truths and to build conclusions on them.
“The first half truth is that “God never recognizes divorce.” Once when an individual endeavored to support this he was simply asked, “In what passage do you find that taught?” After thinking a while he had to admit it isn’t taught any where in the Old or New Testaments.”
SIFC: See above. We have just explained precisely where it’s “directly taught”, specifically, Matthew 19:6 and 8. It is also indirectly taught every time Jesus called remarriage ongoing adultery — a sin that is obviously committed by people who are still married. However, because the concept of “divorce” (purported “dissolution” of holy matrimony and purported “severance”, by other than death, of the one-flesh state) is entirely man-contrived, it cannot be true that God NEVER recognizes it. If the “marriage” was never valid to begin with, due to the undissolved union with an estranged one-flesh spouse, or perhaps due to its sodomous basis given recent changes in man’s law, the civil divorce only has its effect for that reason and to that extent. Otherwise, with a God-joined union, man’s divorce has NO kingdom of God effect.
“It is true that God hates divorce, read Malachi 2:16 for this teaching. But every where (sic) a person was divorced, the Bible calls it divorce or putting away, and if a new relationship was established it is always called a marriage.
SIFC: A common error is to ignore the clear and obvious context of Malachi 2 so that it can then be claimed that God hates all divorce, and therefore God’s rebuke in this chapter applies to “all” legal marriages. That idea gets a bit problematic when man’s law of marriage no longer reflects any aspect of God’s definition of holy matrimony, and when church leadership long ago showed themselves unwilling to demand church-state alignment as a condition under which they would continue to act as an agent of the state in signing the civil marriage licenses. There is also a contextual leap from the ancient Hebrew concept of “putting away” (immoral abandonment), to the modern adversarial litigation we have today, which is designed to abuse the power of the state to repudiate obligations, confiscate assets and wither parental rights, and so forth, participation in which is a direct violation of 1 Cor. 6:1-8.
Before one can glibly say something like what the author has said about semantically calling both lawful and unlawful unions “marriage”, and biblically immoral (or biblically moral) severance of those unions “divorce”, it is necessary to examine the original texts, as well as the context behind the text, before accepting the English translation at face value. There are literally dozens of Greek and Hebrew words that get translated “divorce” in English. The same God who is claimed to “hate” all divorce still commanded in the book of Ezra that more than 140 unlawful unions with foreign “wives” (who could very well have been mostly polygamous concubines), along with all the children from those “marriages” be “put away”. In those unlawful cases, even though there were children, there was no union technically to “dissolve” and nothing but fornication or adultery to sever. In the case of a biblically lawful marriage, “dissolution” is biblically impossible, and severance of the one-flesh state is accomplished only by death.
Just because a new relationship is established, it does not follow that God supernaturally joins it as described by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6. The “wives” in Ezra are an example of this, mostly because the widespread practice of concurrent polygamy meant that most of these men were already God-joined to the wife of their youth, hence they could not be joined as sarx mia by the hand of God to a second wife, foreign or not. If there’s no sarx mia, there’s no unconditional covenant with God participating, and therefore no holy matrimony. If there’s no holy matrimony, but a living original wife, the subsequent relationship is adultery, and remaining in that relationship is sinful. Continuing to reject one’s holy matrimony union by ongoing abandonment is equally sinful. God called it treachery and violence, warning that a lack of repentance would corrupt a man’s generations. It was not the man-contrived paper He was rebuking as treachery and violence, it was the actual immoral abandonment.
Even the most casual reading of Malachi 2 shows on its face that God’s rebuke is to the priestly class who were putting away the wife of their youth, in order to enter into an unlawful union with a pagan woman under the guise of “remarriage”. The fact that God expressly says “I stand as a witness between you and the wife of your youth…” shows that He did not accept this subsequent arrangement as a lawful marriage. Nor did He consider the original marriage bond dissolved by either the illicit “get” or the formation of that other relationship. It goes without saying that since the priest remained one-flesh (sarx mia) with the wife of his youth, a bond absolutely unsevered by man’s paper, God did not join that second union, which was only (hen soma) which is no better than the case with the common prostitute Paul speaks of in 1 Cor. 6:16.
God goes on to expressly refer to the cast-off one-flesh wife (post-that legal divorce) as “the companion of your marriage covenant“, saying she IS (not “was“) so. The Hebrew text for Malachi 2:16 shows that the “putting away” that God hates is actually the spiritual, moral and financial abandonment of one’s literal “rib”, of which there is just one, bone-of-his-bones-and-flesh-of-his-flesh, along with the offspring from that union. Saying that God hates “putting way” (Hebrew: shalach) does not necessitate the view that God considers the union “severed” or “dissolved” by the “get”, otherwise He would not be “standing as a witness”, nor demanding repentance of this faithless husband before fellowship with Him can be restored. What form does that repentance necessarily take if the moral offense is abandonment of the wife of his youth only?
“Some maintain that Jesus taught the second marriage is not a marriage but is only adultery. But they are the ones who put the “only” in the thought, Jesus never did. Jesus said when a divorced person marries again he committeth adultery. But he never said, He only commits adultery. Think about what Jesus was saying in the context. Jesus was speaking to persons who believed adultery was wrong because the seventh commandment says so. What they wereconfused with was “What is adultery?” They had come to believe there were various legitimate ways to put away one’s companion and remarry.”
SIFC: Jesus did indeed not teach that marrying another while having a living, estranged spouse is “only” adultery, because that would be drastically understating the severity of the sin. In addition to adultery, this sin also reflects idolatry (self-worship), bearing false witness, theft and covetousness, not to even mention the ongoing state of unforgiveness of one’s exclusive one-flesh companion. Instead of saying that non-widowed remarriage was “only” adultery, what He actually said was that this was ongoingadultery. In each account of His saying this, the Greek text records that He consistently used the present-indicative verb tense, reflecting a continuous, ongoing state of sin, and not just an act of sin. It seems apparent the only rogue insertion of the word “only” is by this author!
It doesn’t really matter to the context of the passage what His carnal, deluded audience had “come to believe”. Jesus was there to set them straight, and was declaring a new order with heaven-or-hell consequences. He was hereby raising the moral bar, the religious leaders didn’t like it but were nevertheless subject to it, and that is the full context of the passage.
“When Jesus dealt with the subject of remarriage after divorce, he pronounced a clear “This is adultery” to these people. Obviously He intended they realize divorcing and remarrying could never be acceptable in God’s eyes, all who did so were turned toward judgement. But Jesus never said it was only adultery and not a marriage. Every place the scripture records a person being joined to another after divorce he is said to be married. Read Mark 6, especially verse 17, and Romans 7:1-3, for some illustrations of this.”
SIFC: This is repetition of the same semantic argument, where we dealt just above with the author’s insertion of “only”, but pointed out that Jesus said something much stronger than that it was “only” adultery. The further claim that Jesus “never said it was not a marriage” is completely nonsensical. A continuously sinful state of adultery is mutually exclusive of the state of holy matrimony. If Jesus declared something to be red, one cannot very well argue that it could possibly be blue, just because Jesus didn’t explicitly say it wasn’t blue. The author is trying to have it both ways, claiming that a serially polygamous union can be adultery and “marriage” at the same time. He needs it to be both ways to say (truthfully) in the first instance that the unlawful union needs to be separated from (because it is adultery), and then prop up his false claim that the lawful true marriage must not be reconciled ( because he claims the adultery also a “marriage” which is then presumed morally equivalent to the holy matrimony union). He can’t have it both ways!
Furthermore, the Greek language used by Jesus and Paul for God-joining and carnal, illicit joining was entirely different in every respect.
If someone is already joined by God as part of a one-flesh entity, of which Jesus said they will never again be two (Matt. 19:6), that person is not available for God to join them to another until death severs the existing entity. This is precisely why Paul echoed the same in the Romans 7 passage this author cites, and repeats the assertion in 1 Cor. 7:39.
Mark 6:17 refers to the unlawful serial polygamy between Herod, whose real wife was the daughter of King Aretas of Petra (whom the historian Josephus states that he divorced), and Herodias whose living exclusive one-flesh was Phillip. The claim is that because the passage says that Herod “married” Herodias, the “marriage” was binding as such in God’s eyes. Had the Apostle Mark been recording some point about the legalized nuptials between a pair of homosexuals, what alternative word would he have used to the word “marry”? If Herod had instead “married” a sister or a natural daughter, under wicked civil laws that permitted such, would the semantic word for this have changed? It should be painfully obvious in this day and age that not all “marriage” is holy matrimony, nor is it morally equivalent to holy matrimony.
“So we see that God does recognize divorce, it just is never lawful. And God recognizes a remarriage, but it is an unlawful, or an adulterous marriage.
Therefore, since the second marriage is a marriage, and since the second marriage is not lawful, the only conclusion to this problem is “Thou hast well said I have no husband.” If we say this we agree perfectly with our Lord as he gently prodded the woman toward a life of fulfillment in Himself alone.”
SIFC: God does indeed recognize divorce–as a purely man-made contrivance that becomes a necessary step of repentance from another man-made contrivance called “remarriage”. What God does not recognize is “dissolution” of an unconditional covenant in which He is an unconditional participant for as long as both original spouses live. Jesus said in Matthew 19:6, 8 that divorce of holy matrimony is not only immoral, it’s impossible, because only death dissolves that covenant. But holy matrimony only exists where God has created the one-flesh entity and has become a party to the unconditional covenant. How can a holy God even be accused of covenanting with adultery? Malachi 2:13-14 makes it abundantly clear that He does not!
Once the claim is discredited that what Jesus called adultery is in fact, “marriage” for kingdom of God purposes, it becomes no longer necessary to make the additional false claim that an estranged, rejected wife “has no husband” if she is not actually widowed. Lying is never a solution to any inconvenient dilemma, especially one actually created by the cowardice of clergy. In fact, Rev. 21:8 says that it could land us in the lake of fire if we make speaking falsehood our practice. The life of fulfillment in Him alone applies to all of us regardless of our marital status, and regardless of the intactness of our true marriage.
Besides, Jesus was also speaking to a people who believed they could never return to their first companion. Read Deuteronomy 24:1-4 and Jeremiah 3:1 for this Old Testament teaching. Going back to the first partner wasn’t even in their thinking.
SIFC: The abuse of these two scriptures to support various marriage heresies has been addressed with hermeneutical rigor in our “Stop Abusing Scripture” series. This author has not made much of a consistent attempt to justify his viewpoint hermeneutically, which always leads to sloppy, unsupportable conclusions. Once again, why is it relevant what Christ’s audience erroneously believed if the fact was that Jesus had come to usher in a much higher moral order than what had evolved under layered-on abuses of Mosaic law? Does it matter what was in their thinking, when Christ’s mission was to change their thinking and give them the mind of Christ? Their thinking was “eye-for-an-eye, and tooth-for-a-tooth”, but Jesus was there to change their thinking to leaving vengeance to the Lord. Their thinking was that living in a state of irreconciliation was “just the way it is”, but Jesus said not to even try to worship or offer sacrifice, but to mend the relationship first.
Churches who do not accept Jesus’ teaching on the matter, or are confused on the issue face a perplexing situation. Let us try to follow their line of thinking and see what confusion it begets. We will approach each case as if we believe what they teach. This is very complex so we shall use names that fit in the alphabet with the letter they start with. Lets start down alphabet line with a name like Danny.
Danny is presently remarried to Evelyn. His first wife was named Carrie. Now if Carrie was married before, then according to this teaching, Danny should stay with Evelyn. But if Carrie was not married before, then Danny should break up with Evelyn and seek to be remarried to Carrie. Follow the logic? Simple, right? Only the first marriage is valid according to this thinking.
Let’s take it one step farther. Let’s say Carrie was married before to Ben. Ah, then Carrie and Danny’s marriage was not a marriage. But wait a minute, we didn’t check things out far enough. Ben was married before too. He had married Alice for one month, and divorced to marry Carrie. Now his marriage to Carrie is not legitimate, then Carrie’s marriage to Danny was legitimate so Danny’s marriage to Evelyn is not! And of course if Alice was married before to Zachary, then the whole cart is upset again!
SIFC: Oh what a tangled web we weave! Very well done, Bro. Ebersole! You have described precisely the right approach: identify the one-flesh joining between the first combination of never-married and widowed spouses, who therefore are not inseverably-joined to someone else still living. A famous avoidance tactic of anyone who wants to substitute their own theory for the authoritative and unpopular truth, is to argue to the extreme or exaggerated case. Godless liberals do this all the time to promote the perceived “necessity” of corrupt things like abortion and unilateral divorce. Christ-followers should never sink to this level. They should have far more fear of God, and faith in Him than to resort to this kind of emotional manipulation. Do we not check title on the houses, cars and recreation vehicles we buy? Why to do we do that? Because there’s an outside chance the person selling those items to us is not authorized to do so, and perhaps has even stolen them. We know the law in most places will then make us give them back, and if we didn’t, we’d be breaking the 9th and 10th commandments. Why is the choice of our life partner with whom we hope for an indissoluble covenant, until death do us part, less worthy of this care and prudence in obedience to Christ?
The ultimate source of our human arguments against the clear word of God is actually satan. Who of us truly wants to align with satan? Yes, getting out of adulterous remarriages that never should have desecrated the sanctuary of God in the first place (considering who had full control of that, after all?) is messy, disruptive and makes the church “look bad”. Indeed, it should! It’s not like these commandments were “sprung” on unsuspecting pastors who must now muddle through all this complexity, in order to “seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly before God” — least of all, Anabaptists. Whom was it who deliberately chose to fear men more than God?
This page has many people contact us with complex situations and seeking answers. This is a great honor and not a burden, but it’s also not a light responsibility to be faithful to God’s word in those answers. If those answers aren’t faithful to rightly-divided scripture, teachers are held to a stricter judgment, James warns. In practice, however, rarely is the complexity of such a situation more than a couple of layers deep. As mentioned above, one situation was borderline due to the length of a civilly-annulled union where it was clear there was no intent for a lifelong union with either partner, and cohabitation was taking place both before and a few days after the faux ceremony. It was not borderline due to any chain of previous faux nuptials.
In the extreme hypothetical example given, one can start at the bottom and work backwards (we’ll keep this skill in mind in case we do get a complex inquiry some day). Alice was made one-flesh with Zachary by the hand of God, regardless of overturned apple carts. They should have obeyed 1 Cor. 6:1-8 rather than go before a pagan judge for a piece of worthless paper. Carrie needs to pray to reconcile and return to her one-flesh, unless he’s dead. If he is dead, she is free to remarry a widow or a never-married person, but not someone else’s estranged spouse. (A person is never-married only if God has never made them one-flesh with an eligible person who is still living.) Ditto for Ben. If it’s truly necessary to draw a picture in order not to defile one’s vessel and misrepresent the Bridegroom before a watching world, then do it! Danny and Evelyn can then enjoy their supernatural one-flesh holy matrimony joining in peace and with a clear conscience, raising any non-covenant children with a biblically-explained righteous example. That does frequently happen because God would rather restore families than send people to hell, and as with all sacrificial obedience to Christ’s hard commandments, it tends to work out a lot better for the next generation than, “do as I say, not as I do.”
This Zachary-Alice-Ben-Carrie-Danny-Evelyn picture is painted from pastor’s perspective with his own “inconvenience” in mind, but what of the responsibility of those contemplating marriage with someone? Is it really that inconvenient to ask a couple of questions first? Questions like, is your “ex” still alive? Yes? Was she married to anyone else before? No? Then have you considered that God wants the two of you to reconcile?” That’s called soul-care! Do you love them enough to also love their eternal soul? After all, since this is a metaphysical matter to which there are no “exceptions”, it is then not necessary to ask a “divorced” prospective spouse things like, did your “ex” commit adultery, abuse you, marry you while you were unsaved, (etc. etc.) ?
“Do you see what we have? We have a situation where the validity of a marriage is determined by whether two persons in an entirely different situation happened to marry or whether they committed fornication over an extended period of time. We have a situation where that means more than the fact that Danny made marriage vows to keep himself only unto both Carrie and to Evelyn.”
SIFC: We dealt at length with invalid vows in the first posting on this erroneous teaching, as well as in our rebuttals of Dr. John Piper’s similar views (i.e., that all vows are equally binding), but would here like to share verbatim what we told the lady who approached us with this Anabaptist article and with the torment of having a Mennonite person tell her that her biblically-valid current marriage was adulterous and must be exited just because this was her second civil husband, without the necessary “inconvenient” inquiry into the facts:
However, if Jesus repeatedly called some of the “marriages” He mentioned ONGOING adultery, how can they possibly be holy matrimony at the same time? God only took one rib out of Adam, not two, nor three, nor four.
Would Jesus not say to the gays today “anyone who divorces his one-flesh opposite-sex covenant wife and marries his sodomy partner commits ongoing sodomy, and everyone who marries a divorced man for this purpose commits ongoing sodomy” ?? Jesus would have little choice semantically but to call legalized sodomy a (civil-only) “marriage”, but does that make that civil-only union holy matrimony, as both of these authors argue in the heterosexual case? Are those vows to break the first valid vow really also valid, whether adulterous or sodomous? In other words, would God hold us to vows that dishonor our previous, valid binding holy matrimony vows, and at the same time, to our vows to remain in something that God’s law also says will send us to hell if we die in that state?
Wasn’t part of your vows in both cases to actually live with that person? If you go on living with another woman’s husband, you are interfering with their binding covenant, and with their God-ordained reconciliation. If you don’t go on living with the only man who made a valid and binding vow to you, are you not sinning by making it impossible to fulfill his vow to you?
Consider the unlawful marriages that were purged (with their children) at the Lord’s demand in Ezra, chapter 10. Presumably second vows were made there, too, but that doesn’t mean that they were valid or binding in His sight. In most cases, those were polygamous vows that intrinsically dishonored their concurrent holy matrimony vows. You vowed to your first “husband” to do something that God’s word is clear will send you to hell. That is not a valid vow. Your first “husband’s vow to you was also not a valid vow because he was vowing to not keep his original covenant vow, as well as vowing to do something that the bible says will send him to hell if unrepented. A God of justice and integrity just doesn’t operate that way. Only your second vow was a holy matrimony vow, and it is the only one to which you are morally bound.
Please pray and ask the Holy Spirit if I’m right about that. It’s what the Holy Spirit has shown me. OK?
“standerinfamilycourt”
(Note that the last sentence does not reflect any uncertainty about the response we gave concerning the obligation of vows before God, but an understanding that each person we counsel needs to “own” their own major life-and-eternity-altering decisions, and they must be owned on the heart conviction level, not just the “head’ level. In this case, the lady still had significant doubt about the issue of vows that our explanation of the nature of one-flesh, of God-joining and of unconditional covenant where God is a participant could not dispel. In addition, there is always a soul-tie formed from an illicit sexual relationship that must usually be cast out at some point. We recognize that she needs the space to work though all of this before she will be at peace and not be prey to compelling heresies. We also would tell any unbeliever who comes to us for this kind of counsel to establish a firm saving relationship with Jesus first, and then we can talk about deeper, costlier matters of following Christ.)
Human reasoning substituted for God’s word is called “humanism”, no matter how much it tries to cross-dress as “discipleship”. Failure of His shepherds to be faithful to His commandments hardly makes the resulting layers of iniquity “His fault” (or fault attributable to His commandments), as this humanistic reasoning behind the hypothetical situation implies above. It certainly doesn’t merit an extrabiblical “solution” that contradicts the instruction of Christ and the Apostles, most notably, Hermes (A.D. 100).
If scripture didn’t clearly tell us twice that is a heaven-or-hell issue, this author might have a point in his hypothetical. But it is a heaven-or-hell issue, so obedience to it is not debatable, and blame for the manmade complexity of human immorality it is not shiftable from men back to God.
It appears from the false instructions he is advocating (to come out of all the unions, whether God-joined or not), shows that at least this author fears hell and also agrees with true followers of Christ that this is a heaven-or-hell matter. He also shows he further agrees that hell is a place where disobedient “Christians” can still end up. That’s certainly head-and-shoulders above the level of enlightenment among remarriage apologists in the harlot church as a whole, but it’s still erroneous for another reason. Ongoing unforgiveness and lack of moral responsibility for the generations of one’s covenant family can also be a heaven-or-hell issue. Hindrance of the same in the covenant family of one’s faux spouse (in this case, by setting a false example) is likewise sinful and harmful to the covenant generations of that other family. Anyone who has come out of the bondage of a faux marriage should be encouraging that former civil-only spouse to reconcile with their one-flesh partner so far as it depends on them.
Overall, this erroneous teaching is a clever example of satan resurrecting an old trick (namely, asceticism) and tweaking it a bit to see if the church will fall for it again. After all, the last time he trotted it out in the early middle ages, after failing to get it by Paul (see 1 Cor. 7, and don’t overlook the admonition that we are to keep our ownspouse), the natural overreaction and backlash to asceticism enabled the pollution of the Reformation with two heresies that have proven very effective in destroying the biblical family and progressively corrupting civil laws ever since (creating the vicious circle the author describes in his last point) : the false belief that born-again people cannot harden their hearts and fall away from their inheritance in the kingdom of God, paired with the equally false belief that God-joined holy matrimony is “dissoluble” by acts of men based on “permissions” and “exceptions” rather than accepting the metaphysical reality that Jesus painted in Matthew 19:6 and 8. This metaphysical reality makes subsequent marriages not resulting from widowed circumstances notever interchangeable with God-joined holy matrimony.
“In conclusion, how would you answer the woman in Bluffton? Are you willing to gently lead her to the only source for fulfillment in life, and tell her what Jesus said, “Thou hast no husband”? This answer is the only answer the Scriptures provide in order to give a person hope of eternal life.”
SIFC: The woman in Bluffton should absolutely be shown how she’s been substituting all these serial relationships for a true relationship with Jesus Christ, and that no relationship is ever going to succeed until this matter is put in order. Since her one-flesh is still alive, however, to tell her that “she has no husband” just because Jesus said this to the Samaritan woman at the well would be an inexcusable falsehood. It’s entirely possible that it was literally true in her case, or it might be that this woman was thinking that her 4th “get” (Hebrew bill of divorcement) “dissolved” something that had substance to be dissolved in the first place, or actually both circumstances simultaneously. Jesus was perfectly willing to do the work to deal with complex, inconvenient situations, and walk people through them toward righteousness. We, however, have no business telling anyone anything that conflicts the facts or with God’s true word. God’s word is crystal clear that only physical death dissolves holy matrimony and everything else connected with subsequent unions where a one-flesh, God-joined spouse remains alive is adultery. Adultery and holy matrimony are mutually-exclusive and cannot both exist in the same relationship. For the sake of our souls and our partners’ souls, we always flee adultery. We do not flee the responsibility of reconciliation of our covenant family. It is wrong to attempt to superimpose an element of Hebrew culture over this situation as this author has done in an effort to make his extrabiblical prescription “fit”.
This woman should be advised to exit her adulterous relationship, not commit the further idolatry of “marrying” this man, and not enter another adulterous relationship for as long as she lives. If her actual husband dies before reconciling with her, she is then free to marry a never-married man (as clarified above) or a widower. Until then, she should encourage her “exes” to do likewise, and she should pray for the repentance and reconciliation of her one-flesh back to God and then back to her. She may endure a long season of celibacy, and may die celibate and unreconciled. If so, she has still been a purposeful lighthouse as she raised this non-covenant child. If she is blessed with covenant reconciliation, she has been a purposeful lighthouse and redeemed the soul of her one-flesh. This is the only answer that gives her (and everyone around her in this web of relationships) hope of eternal life.
At the time the first lady contacted “standerinfamilycourt”, yet another lady appeared to be reading these materials and embracing them, in this instance while in the process of coming out of an adulterous remarriage, and suffering backlash from some of her children for it. This erroneous teaching appears comforting while under that kind of horrific emotional turmoil, and while knowing that not every one-flesh covenant relationship is restored on this earth. If someone becomes a covenant marriage stander who has themselves committed the sin of divorcing their one-flesh and “marrying” another, even though they’ve repented, somehow there is considerable doubt in their heart that God is capable of that big of a miracle of forgiveness and healing in the heart of their spouse. However, since forgiveness is a heaven-or-hell issue in and of itself (Matthew 18:23-35). that is akin to saying that God willed our spouse to not inherit the kingdom of God. We regularly share miraculous accounts of Almighty God moving mountains to mend a covenant family, sometimes after decades of man’s divorce. If this Anabaptist theory is correct, then those covenant reconciliations that only the hand of the Lord could have brought about are a “sin” against all subsequent adulterous “spouses”. Quite clearly, that cannot be the case.
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. – 2 Peter 3:9
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go; I will counsel you with My eye upon you. Do not be as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, Whose trappings include bit and bridle to hold them in check, Otherwise they will not come near to you. Many are the sorrows of the wicked, But he who trusts in the Lord, lovingkindness shall surround him. – Psalms 32:8-10
Is the following reasoning not true in the carnal estimation of our contemporary “me”-vangelical culture?
“Legalism“ is the unpopular belief that man’s divorce and remarriage while an estranged spouse remains alive is immoral. (Malachi 2:16)
“Fundamentalism“ is the far more unpopular conviction that man’s divorce and remarriage while an estranged spouse remains alive is impossible. (Matthew 19:8)
Anyone who has an unconditional love relationship with Jesus Christ, and who continues to be led by the power of the Holy Spirit, instantly sees the self-righteous fault in both of the above presumptions. Those whose love of Jesus is merely conditional will eventually wear down and will go their own way, espousing both fallacious attitudes. Are such people lost forever? Mercifully, no, provided they live long enough to fully surrender to His rule and unconditionally repent. If their conversion was false, they will have a much more uphill battle to true faith from apostasy, because the Holy Spirit only indwells those who truly did die to self when they once embraced Christ. Both the false convert and the backslider are equally lost at this point. If their initial conversion was the real thing, His indwelling Holy Spirit, now grieved and quenched, will make them miserable on a daily basis until they forsake all of their self-worshipping ways, including faux spouses. Either way, God’s faithful chastisement can be counted on, despite external appearances.
Actual legalism can be observed in such people long before the outright apostasy manifests in their actions and choices. This legalism can also ripen into actual fundamentalism if it continues to grow in the heart of such a person, and this can be readily observed externally in visible elements such as the mode of dress adopted over time. Their lack of unconditional love for Jesus often either results in a reverted desire to become indistinguishable from the surrounding lost culture in all their ways, or it can swing to the other extreme of a loss of desire to be both salty and attractive in the culture, instead becoming a walking caricature.
There was a marriage permanence retreat in Ohio Amish country recently, coincidentally timed in the aftermath of one such highly visible fall from grace of a stander who was very prominent on social media. This retreat drew several leaders of our movement, and discussion of that overshadowing incident seemed to be everywhere in that gathering, despite a great move of the Holy Spirit that weekend. The hosts for that annual recurring event are gracious people of Amish heritage who sensed that their former community did not uniformly consist of true Christ-followers. Many had come out of those Amish communities (typically, being “shunned” in the process) in order to more fully follow Christ without the legalism or fundamentalism that it becomes so easy to hide behind as a substitute for that love relationship with Him. For the most part, this coming out did not fundamentally change their mode of dress or their characteristic reverence for holy matrimony. It did not change their wonderful ethic of ministering to others. They formed churches around similar values, but with Jesus firmly at the center. Here they made traveling to participate in this retreat affordable for standers of limited resources by putting us up in their homes, where they soaked our families in prayer. Non-standers in the community spent hours preparing and serving the meals so that standers could focus on the retreat sessions. Former prodigals and their standers from within that community were wonderfully transparent with us about their journey, and some of the waiting standers themselves are also from that community. This was a truly refreshing time for emotionally-battered covenant spouses who bear the tremendous burden for souls in their own family members. Legalism and fundamentalism have little to do with our outer circumstances, and everything to do with whom or what is sitting on the throne of our individual hearts.
It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. – Galatians 5:1
They fail to “keep their powder dry” for the relatively few actual heaven-or-hell issues. They use harsh language and subjective name-calling that should only be reserved for backsliding issues that harden hearts and pose a true danger of falling away, or leading others away. If such a person is a covenant marriage stander, they structure their home in a way that is so drastically different from the best of what the home their prodigal once shared with them brings to remembrance, that returning and reconciling looks increasingly unattractive to their true one-flesh, especially in comparison with the material rewards that our culture (and church) heap on legalized adulterers. As time goes on, the floundering stander become less and less Christ-like, less ready to go the distance with a suddenly-returned prodigal, and perhaps even eventually repelling their own children from faith as they come into adulthood. At this point in the progressive hardening of their heart, they become actual fundamentalists. This earned label, “fundamentalist”, is no longer a badge of honor for them, but a badge of dishonor.
Sadly, such people may have tens of thousands of social media followers when they finally, publicly fall away from heart-driven obedience to Jesus, potentially taking many with them into apostasy. Ironically, these people lose (or never actually had) the only valid motive for standing, aside from loving obedience to Jesus….deep care and burden for the eternal soul of their prodigal spouse and children.
Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.– James 3:1
Those of us who love Jesus, without any reservations or conditions, will learn from witnessing this fall…in an edifying way that sharply contrasts with those who follow them into apostasy. “But for the grace of God, there go I. “
The heresy adopted in any particular case that becomes the deceitful rationalization for “marrying” another’s spouse must be uniquely creative, because if it is not highly subtle, the appearance that their own personal standards of holiness have not slidden cannot be maintained, and outright rebellion against God’s word must then be admitted. A good rule is that any rationale for “remarrying” while having a living, estranged spouse which departs from the unchangeable principle in Matthew 19:6, 8 is automatically a heresy which results in what Jesus repeatedly called adultery. However, there are clever ways to attack this foundational truth, and satan will not hesitate to use them. The current popular heresy is that what Jesus said in Matthew 19:6,8 “does not apply to unbelievers”, claiming that “God does not join” those marriages into an inseverable one-flesh entity if one of the spouses was an “unbeliever” at the time of their vows. Ironically, there is a mountain of biblical evidence against this claim in dozens of Old and New Testament couples who illustrate God’s recognition of their state of holy matrimony – without applying any religious test. Logically, this assertion would require intact one-flesh spouses to repeat their vows after they both come to Christ, in order to not be living in “adultery”. We see no illustration of such in all of scripture. Only lust and idolatry make this theory appear “valid” – we readily believe what feeds our flesh if Jesus isn’t everything to us; if He isn’t truly sufficient for us.
Those of us in the marriage permanence community who stand firm should not be surprised or discouraged by any of this. First of all, the battle is the Lord’s. Secondly, satan’s intensified rage that we’ve recently witnessed is a testament that light always overpowers darkness, and not the other way around. The very reason that Jesus likened us to “salt” in the first place is because salt is a preservative, of society, of our covenant families and the of the church. As nice as a lengthy vacation from Ephesians 6 might seem to most of us, satan is not going to take his ball or his bat and go home until Jesus comes back for the third time. We all know he is actually going to gain power for seven years after Jesus comes back for the second time. If we don’t learn this while dealing with various and sundry apostates in the movement today, including the high-profile ones, we can’t expect to learn it in time to be effective when our repenting prodigal suddenly returns home to our families.
Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock.And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock.– Matthew 7:24
Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.
For yet in a very little while, He who is coming will come, and will not delay. But My righteous one shall live by faith; And if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him. – Hebrews 10:35-38
www.standerinfamilycourt.com 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. – Genesis 2:21
To our post-1970’s divorce culture these words, spoken by Adam and penned by Moses, aren’t too controversial, so long as everyone agrees that the “become-one-flesh” part is a human, sexual, gradual, “natural law” process. That way, any number of “ribs” are perfectly interchangeable, even though the Lord saw fit to take only one rib out of the man. But living spouses aren’t morally interchangeable! Jesus didn’t agree at all that becoming one-flesh (sarx mia) was a gradual or even a primarily sexual process. He came along and said a whole bunch of things in one short, controversial passage, Matthew 19:5-6, that strongly suggested this process is not at all natural, gradual or interchangeable as the humanists would like, but supernatural, instantaneous, individually God-accomplished–ahead of and independently of the physical consummation.…and (therefore) inseverable.Then Paul followed along to confirm twice that only death severs this God-created one-flesh entity, going so far as to say in Ephesians 5…
He who loves his own wife loves himself;for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church,because we are members of His body.For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.
This topic has been urgently on SIFC’s heart over the past several weeks due to a trio of recent events. There is a Thursday night conference call arranged and hosted by one of the “standers” as part of his ongoing ministry to other covenant marriage standers where typically someone gives a detailed testimony, then the call is opened up to questions from others on the call. One recent Thursday, the featured speaker was a pastor with a congregation who teaches the biblical truth that man’s divorce does not dissolve holy matrimony, and that remarriage after man’s divorce is almost always adultery–other than the rare instance where the divorce was a repenting divorce and where only one of the partners has a living, estranged true spouse. On the same call was also a second marriage permanence pastor who joined in to the question period. SIFC took the opportunity to commend both pastors, but was concerned about all the crazy, heretical teachings out in the “marketplace of (evangelical) ideas” that compete with the biblical truth, even among the stander community, and asked,
“Praise God that both of you courageously preach the truthful ‘what’ of marriage permanence. But it’s one thing to speak of ‘permanence’ and quite another thing to more precisely speak of ‘indissolubility’. Do you ever have occasion to preach on the concept of one-flesh, or the ‘why’ behind Jesus calling remarriage adultery?”
There was a long moment of quiet as thoughts were gathered by the two preachers on the call. SIFC asked if they understood the question, and realized that this might actually not have occurred to either one of them before. They both said they understood, but SIFC clarified that the question was based on Matthew 19:6, and Jesus describing a supernatural, instantaneous process by the hand of God, and that the New Testament speaks in several other places about the implications of that truth — so, do they ever speak on that topic? Both preachers on the call said that they didn’t think their congregations could “handle” that kind of packaging, saying… “we try to bring the hard truths to our people as gently as we can, without running them off. There are people in our congregation who would be offended due to their loved ones being remarried.” (Therefore, due to the sensitivities involved, those congregations only get the “what”, but at least they get that much of the truth, which is better than the silence or false teaching that most congregations get.)
The second incident relates to a certain brother in the permanence movement who seems to be growing weary after a few years in his stand for the rebuilding of his covenant family, and he seems to be “re-evaluating”. He and others are currently embracing an extrabiblical theory, that God only joins two believers in this inseverable one-flesh state, therefore believers shouldn’t be “unequally-yoked” with unbelievers, and furthermore, God would never so “yoke” them. This seems to be the “heresy-du-jour”, such as satan brings along every few months, seeking whom he can devour, perhaps even supplanting, for now, the pair of wicked Judaizing heresies we were so fiercely wrestling with a few months ago. We standers live daily on the fierce front line of spiritual warfare, fighting with all our might for our families, and giving satan a major black eye every day. Our lives are filled with wearying conflicts with many others in our world, including other believers whom we love and respect. The emotional exhaustion makes any one of us a prime target at any time for falling into deception. This man knows his bible well, and the Good Book is chock full of historical examples in both the Old and New Testaments against this false notion, so we can only pray the emotions and urges he is suffering will subside, and this brother is refreshed in the Lord again soon. Until then, may our faithful Father place dense thornbushes in this brother’s path to keep him from walking out the deception.
(Update: this man has now apostasized and entered into an adulterous “marriage” with another man’s estranged covenant wife. Willful, unrepentant adulterers forfeit their inheritance in the kingdom of God, and, losing their freedom in Christ, they come under the dominion of satan.)
Most marriage heresies are quite easily discredited with a firm and steadfast understanding of the biblical one-flesh concept because most such heresies ignore or violate this truth, but in this instance, satan seems to be whispering (Pssst…did God really say?) against even this core truth, by falsely claiming that God only joins a certain few (believers only) into that instantaneous, supernatural inseverable entity.
Therefore, as this carnal reasoning goes, the battle-weary stander should be able to remarry after a valiant effort at standing, without Jesus calling it adultery if their unbelieving spouse civilly divorced them. By this same logic, however, most marriages that ever existed throughout all time in any culture have been mere fornication under civil-paper unions, including Mr. & Mrs. Potiphar, Ahab and Jezebel, Herod and the daughter of Aretas, Herodias and Philip, and Timothy’s parents. Under this logic, John the Baptist only laid down his head on the executioner’s block for the sin of “incest” (since supposedly God did not join either of the pagan unions involved), and Paul was urging believers to remain in a fornicating civil-only relationship in the hopes of evangelizing a spouse who wasn’t born again…
But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her.And a woman who has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away.For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.– 1 Corinthians 7:12-14
Sanctification without an authentic, supernatural one-flesh joining in place, and without God covenanting with that entity? Not likely!
The third incident happened to SIFC at a recent weekend retreat held by the womens’ ministry at a former church, where Day 2 of Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth’s “Revive 17” conference was being simulcast to remote audiences. This year’s theme was Titus 2, which begins….
But as for you, speak the things which are fitting for sound doctrine.Older men are to be temperate, dignified, sensible, sound in faith, in love, in perseverance. Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good,so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children,to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored.
Various segments of the excellent day-long presentation featured speakers who each addressed some aspect of verses 3 to 5 of Titus 2: Reverent behavior, Self-Control, Loving husbands well, Being a worker at home, Submission, and….Purity. Each segment was preceded by a clever skit to set the tone for the speaker. Just before the lunch break came the segment on Purity, and that skit unfolded thusly:
Two young married ladies were meeting up in a coffee shop at the request of one of them (Girl #1) in order to talk about her unhappiness with her covenant marriage, and the (married) man she had just met who, of course, was “wonderful in every way”, unlike the toad she was married to. Girl #2 listened attentively, then attempted to bring a reality-check into the situation by asking various questions. Girl #1 finally figured out that she was not going to get any approval for her plans to pursue an adulterous relationship, so she lit into Girl #2: “it’s all easy for you to say, since you’re married to Mr. Perfect-and-Wonderful. You think I don’t deserve to be happy just because I made a mistake in who I married.” A moment of heavy silence, then Girl #2 says “There’s something I have to tell you. Steve is my second husband. I committed adultery like you’re thinking about doing, and my first husband divorced me. It was only by the grace and the mercy of God, who brought Steve to me.” [END].
The conference participants were then called to prayer with their tablemates…while sitting right next to SIFC was the church secretary who had two years ago “married” a divorced man for the second time (her first had unfortunately passed away in his state of sin, but had been a loyal elder in the church.) SIFC prayed aloud for sound doctrine to land in the session, based on what Jesus taught in Matthew 5:27-32, so that everyone would be able to see that there are actually two practicing adulteresses in this skit, and not just one. This skit and prayer was then followed by a presentation by Dannah Gresh, where the main theme was that biblical purity is accomplished by the “grace and mercy” of God in our lives. When the lunch break was announced afterward, the two leaders of womens’ ministry called SIFC outside for a “sisterly admonition”, details of the severity of which will be spared here.
SIFC responded to these two women’s ministry leaders that charges of “legalism” are not valid when a heaven-or-hell issue, according to biblical instruction, makes clear that real souls are at-stake. Since Titus 2 begins with a call to “sound doctrine”, it was not “inappropriate” in an audience that included impressionable teenage girls (their own daughters, as a matter of fact), for Christ’s directly relevant teaching to bring the skit back into alignment with the scriptural truth. One of the two pleaded that the remarriage(s) in question were not adultery because the original marriage(s) and divorce(s) occurred before some of the parties got saved, so nobody’s going to hell due to “God’s grace”. It ended with “an agreement to disagree”, and was followed up two days later with a rebuking email to SIFC from the senior pastor of that church, who levelled a charge of “disrespect for leadership”, to which SIFC responded, in part:
“I am well aware of your close friendship with C___ and G___, and perhaps it was even you who performed their wedding (hope not), but if you really love them and want to share eternity with them, I urge you to study a lot more on this topic before you jump to the conclusion that I and a growing number of pastors (now found in quite a variety of denominations), are “wrong”. I deeply regret that I didn’t take the opportunity to speak with C___ before that wedding as I did have an opportunity, but at the time I was still honestly questioning whether “not inheriting the kingdom of God” was the same thing as going to hell….Remarriage adultery almost always takes people to hell in pairs, at a minimum, if not physically repented before death. There is an excellent book written in 2007 by Joe Fogel called “One Flesh” that I just gave away my last copy of to the board of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) in response to The Nashville Statement. I will be ordering more copies for the work I am now doing full time, and would like to bring you a copy when my supply is replenished. It does an excellent job of explaining the “why” behind all of this in an impeccably-scholarly manner. It needed to be of this high caliber because each of those board members is a PhD seminarian.” ( A brief “bible study” was also engaged on the oft-hijacked topic of The Unpardonable Sin in that email. These leaders all insisted they were “not going to debate” with this blogger. Both this pastor and Nancy D-W will be receiving a letter this week about the skit, with a complementary copy of Joe Fogel’s book. The letter to Nancy will be covered in a separate blog post. )
The readers can readily notice that the conflict in incidents 2 and 3 are both based on the same extrabiblical premise, namely, that our vows and resulting covenants “don’t count” if they happened before we got saved. “Standerinfamilycourt” dealt with that abusive notion in one of the blogs in the “Debunk Series” in 2015.
How did Jesus get around the “black hole” of excuses, exceptions and permissions when He had to take the same wildly unpopular stand in order to usher in the kingdom of God? Matthew 19 and Mark 10 both tell us….He deliberately skipped past Moses’ regulations designed to mitigate carnality (the conversation the Pharisees all hoped to have with Him) and went all the way back to the Creation to which He was personally a witness, and Moses was the historical author. That way, He could focus the conversation on the only thing relevant to the New Covenant — namely, the old one-flesh design “from the beginning” that Mosaic regulations had trampled under foot. Excuses, allowances and exceptions, after all, are only for those not willing to lose their life to follow Him. Those who claim that God “made an allowance” for man’s weakness or “hard-heartedness” are pagans and phonies. To them, anyone who preaches even the “what” is a “legalist”. Chances are, if anyone preaches the “why” to them, they will be slandered even more severely as a “fundamentalist”, but at least then the rebellious will choose their sin over following Christ with the full information on the table, as well as its accurate context. If even one of the already-perishing actually repents, the result would be well worth it.
Here are the top eleven additional reasons why anyone who wants anyone else to take #1M1W4Life to heart, must be educating people about the true, biblical nature of one-flesh as the indispensible “why” behind the “what”.
11. The culture war within Christ’s church is just as fierce and high-stakes as the outside culture war, and neither will be won otherwise.
There is a cognitive dissonance among evangelicals that makes them resistant to define adultery differently than the culture does. Even when they embrace Christ’s Matthew 5 definition, they only embrace the part about “mental adultery”, and they gloss right over the part about marrying the God-joined spouse of another found in verse 32, even though Jesus repeated it two more recorded times afterward. This can be seen in a response by a Moody Bible Institute representative to a recent letter by SIFC asking them to stop broadcast programming that promotes “blended families” as not being sinful, so that true disciples can conscionably donate to their godly ministries. Said that Programming Manager, “However I fail to see where the content in the programs you listed [ Family Life Blended and Focus on the Family] are sanctioning adultery.” This, despite our original letter citing several explicit scriptures stating that to marry a divorced person is adultery.
10. All marriage heresies (“annulment”, “Pauline Privilege”, “Matthean Exception”, elevated Torah observance) have the common characteristic of being mutually exclusive of what Jesus taught in Matthew 19:6.
(Self-explanatory: all are unauthorized and illegitimate human attempts to put asunder what God has inseverably joined and only death can separate.)
9. Permanence and indissolubility are not equivalent concepts.
Even an adulterous union can hope for “permanence”, but such a union lacks indissolubility because of the absence of the authentic, God-joined state and lack of divine covenant. Permanent adulterous unions by Christ’s definition lead to an eternity in hell (1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gal. 5:19-21; Gal. 6:7-8; Heb. 13:4; Rev. 21:8)
8. Even Jesus did not consider it enough to give “rules” without kingdom-based justifications.
He painted a very graphic picture in Matthew 18 of what will happen if we take justice into our own hands and refuse to forgive; In Matthew 5, He warned that fornication and adultery are so addictive as idols that we’re better off losing the means to commit them than wind up in hell for all eternity; again in Matthew 18, He warned that if children / grandchildren are abused and rejected because they’re in the way of our carnal desires, their angels will take up their case before Him and He will treat the transgression as if it was directed at Him. In that vein, pastors will have a very difficult time ceasing to perform adulterous weddings over the already-married-for-life unless the groundwork of teaching and preaching on one-flesh and indissolubility occurs beforehand. The “exceptions” must evaporate entirely, because every such “exception” endangers souls.
7. Correct one-flesh understanding knocks down barriers to genuine repentance and restitution needed for cleansing of sin.
God doesn’t just “hate divorce” in Malachi 2. He was actually saying He hated the economic and spiritual abandonment of the one-flesh spouse of our youth, and covenant children – literally, “putting away”, with or without civil sanction. We don’t actually need a “culture of marriage” in the church. Instead we need a culture of repentance, restitution and obedience. Unfortunately, wicked shepherds have spent five decades creating a situation that will entail some repenting divorces. That is not the fault of those convicted to repent, but instead the fault of those who twisted biblical doctrines to accommodate grievous, society-destroying sin.
6. Correct one-flesh understanding demonstrates just how immoral it was for the Reformers to cede authority over holy matrimony to the civil state.
The Roman Catholic Church falsely taught that only a wedding within that church and between two baptized members created a valid and indissoluble state of “sarx mia”, whereas Jesus taught that all valid vows between eligible couples (i.e., not already one-flesh with another living person) created inseverable “sarx mia”. This RCC distortion directly led to an overreaction by Luther and the other “Reformers” to misuse the state to create an aura of legitimacy over that which Jesus repeatedly called adultery by restoring access to manmade “divorce” as it was among the Hebrews before Jesus abrogated those Mosaic laws. No access to divorce is ever needed in a society unless the motive is to attempt to legitimize an immoral relationship through the illusion of “dissolution” and “remarriage”. This is the only wicked reason for the civil state to have power over families that God never delegated. There are other ways for the civil state to hold the adulterer responsible for his or her illegitimate offspring without claiming to “dissolve” his or her biblically valid state of holy matrimony. Adultery partners, on the other hand, don’t deserve state protection that shields them from the natural consequences of their sinfulness at the expense of the God-ordained covenant family. They need the consequences and censure in order to repent and redeem their soul, since they are never morally interchangeable with the living covenant spouse. Today the civil “marriage contract” reflects no part of the definition of biblical marriage that Jesus gave in Matthew 19:4-6 in any state in the U.S., and any pastor who signs a civil marriage license these days as an agent of the state is saying, in effect, “I (and possibly NOT God) have joined these two people for as long as they don’t grow weary of each other or lust after someone else, of the opposite or same gender, despite the words of God I falsely spoke over them.”
5. Failure to comprehend the divinely-created, inseverable one-flesh state robs believers of their anointed walk in the gifts of the holy spirit, and robs the church of all power among the pagans.
Jesus promised we would be sealed with the Person of the Holy Spirit as soon as our lives are surrendered to His lordship. When we backslide and choose to live immorally after that event, the Holy Spirit does not depart from us, but Paul tells us He is instead “grieved” and “quenched” when we do things like sleep with someone other than our God-joined one-flesh under a blanket of man’s paper and the false blessing of our church. Such a church, in turn, is deceived out of all moral authority against satan’s schemes and attacks. This has been recently played out in the religious freedom court wars over Christian wedding professionals being legally compelled to participate in sodomous “weddings” in an earlier blog post.
4. Failure to respect and uphold the divinely-created, inseverable one-flesh state robs the church of leadership opportunities in legislative efforts and judicial influence toward the overall good of society.
If the church deems all heterosexual marriages as morally interchangeable based on civil law, there is little incentive to conform civil law to God’s law, nor to stand up to those who claim it’s “wrong” for civil law to reflect God’s law, or for civil law to promote what’s good for eternal souls. This likely explains how “no-fault” repeal bills could have been before the legislatures of several states in recent years, and in two adjacent states in 2017, but barely elicited a yawn from the churches of those states. Failure to comprehend the insult to God, that violation of the one-flesh precept of God constitutes, can probably also explain why the only churches sending busloads of people to national marriage marches were the inner city and minority churches most adversely impacted economically by immoral family laws, and why issues like pot, gambling, and bathroom access take the highest priority with Christian family policy groups in various states, with endeavors to influence family laws getting little or no funding. To stand idly by while the nation’s family laws have been irrefutably shown to lead to the mistreatment and deprivation of innocent children instead of their “best interests”, leading to eventual derangement of our citizens in all sorts of manifestations, is a shirking of the Creation mandate of God for His people to take dominion and to rule righteously.
3. Failure to comprehend the divinely-created, inseverable one-flesh state creates an implied moral equivalence between heterosexual and homosexual unions, despite all “hot air” to the contrary.
Remarriage that Jesus repeatedly called adulterous (marrying any non-widowed divorced person) is immoral for precisely the same reason that homosexual “marriage” is immoral: there’s no God-joining, hence no one-flesh entity created, with which He has unconditionally covenanted. This would have been far less difficult to explain to the world if the church had not abandoned these principles in pursuit of unrighteous mammon, but as it stands, even the pagans know that serial polygamy is immoral rebellion against God, and that it is destroying society. Cynically, some actually hope it destroys marriage (and assessments of biblical morality) altogether. Indeed, the need to explain these principles to the homosexualist community probably would never have arisen at all, because the Almighty would not have needed to go to such extremes to gain the attention of His bride.
2. Failure to comprehend the divinely-created, inseverable one-flesh state causes church discipline to be carried out unjustly, and on the wrong members.
This point is very eloquently expressed by the testimony of a repented prodigal named Dave, who was shunned by the church for divorcing out of an immoral union with another man’s one-flesh wife:
DAVE: “They don’t teach about the one-flesh covenant marriage relationship, so, in their eyes, a person divorced from a legitimate marriage is in the same boat as a person divorced from an illegitimate marriage. So, can I ever marry again and not be living in sloppy-agape? Now follow my logic here: A marriage can’t be legitimate and illegitimate at the same time. If you divorce from a legitimate marriage and remarry anyone else you are committing adultery. But, if you divorce from an illegitimate marriage and marry a life-long single person, you are not committing adultery!”
( As with SIFC’s recent experience of being censured at the ladies’ retreat for speaking out against satan’s lies which profoundly marred a ministry event, we must aim to please God rather than men, and remain accountable to Him when our leadership refuses to be. God is never going to ask us how faithfully we followed our denomination’s doctrine. He is going to ask us how faithfully we purposed to obey Jesus with our life choices – and He’s already going to know the answer!)
He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord. – Proverbs 17:15
1. Failure to comprehend the divinely-created, inseverable one-flesh state causes severe disorder in the homes of believers, and missed opportunity for sanctification of unsaved family members.
If legitimate husbands and wives truly saw themselves as an inseverable one-flesh entity, each would realize that they cannot bring harm of any sort to their spouse without bringing the same degree of harm to themselves. We, of course, see Paul admonishing the men to this effect in Ephesians 5, but if it works that way for husbands, it’s equally true for wives. We see this validated in scriptures like Proverbs 12:4:
An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, But she who shames him is like rottenness in his bones.
For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.
This is, of course, not a guarantee of success against satan’s domination or control of a one-flesh spouse. After all, a sword is a weapon, but if it is not skillfully wielded, or if it’s laid down too soon, it might be used against its owner! We daresay that the brother mentioned in the second incident described at the start of this post, who grew weary enough of the Lord’s timetable for rebuilding his satan-ransacked covenant family that he turned a deaf ear to both Christ and Paul, will soon feel it in his own flesh and bones (and offspring) if he does not repent on his face before the Lord of his lust to marry another (and thereby compromise the very soul of another) – with whom he cannot ever be one-flesh.
“Standerinfamilycourt” concludes by challenging all of God’s shepherds to muster the most righteous courage you will ever need to muster, short of actual life-and-property persecution conditions (which obedience in this area might actually avert from God’s hand), and begin the process of gaining Spirit-led knowledge about the divine, supernatural one-flesh state, sarx mia, not to be confused with satan’s counterfeit, hen soma. Then preach it boldly, and let the chips fall where they may. The most likely result is that all of the false converts in your pews (who would not be there, had your MDR doctrine not been falsified to accommodate their sin) will indeed rush for the doors, but true disciples will soon replace them. Revival will then explosively follow, but it will appear to be moral chaos to those who don’t understand one-flesh, because a massive wave of repenting divorces and reconciliations will be an inevitable outcome, for the sake of many souls that now hang in the balance. Those who do understand these events because the groundwork was laid by a return to the faithful teaching of one-flesh will compare it to the purging described in Ezra, chapter 10 and realize that Christ’s bride will not be purified enough for admission to the wedding supper of the Lamb until these things inevitably come about.
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
Do not rob the poor because he is poor, Or crush the afflicted at the gate; For the Lord will plead their case And take the life of those who rob them. – Proverbs 22:22-23
Do not err, my brethren. Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. And if those that corrupt mere human families are condemned to death, how much more shall those suffer everlasting punishment who endeavor to corrupt the Church of Christ, for which the Lord Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, endured the cross, and submitted to death! Whosoever, ‘being waxen fat,’ and ‘become gross,’ sets at nought His doctrine, shall go into Hell. In like manner, every one that has received from God the power of distinguishing, and yet follows an unskillful shepherd, and receives a false opinion for the truth, shall be punished.” – St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Epistle To The Ephesians,” c. 105 A.D.
This blogger can still recall reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin to our children many years ago, while absolutely sobbing at the scene where two slave families were about to be cruelly pulled apart in a commercial transaction and sent to different plantations, with absolutely no respect for the God-joined holy one-flesh bond of matrimony between the two covenant husband and wife entities, and their God-ordained bond with their covenant children.
” ‘Mas’r aint to blame, Chloe, and he’ll take care of you and the poor’ … Here he turned to the rough trundle bed full of little woolly heads, and broke fairly down. He leaned over the back of the chair, and covered his face with his large hands. Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor: just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was a man, and you are but another man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life’s great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!
” ‘And now, ‘ said Eliza, as she stood the door, ‘I saw my husband only this afternoon, and I little knew then what was to come. They have pushed him to the very last standing place, and he told me, to-day, that he was going to run away. Do try, if you can, to get word to him. Tell him how I went, and why I went; and tell him I’m going to try and find Canada. You must give my love to him, and tell him, if I never see him again,’ — she turned away, and stood with her back to them for a moment, and then added, in a husky voice, ‘tell him to be as good as he can, and try and meet me in the kingdom of heaven.’ “
Centuries of this cruelty not only offended God, but had severe consequences on the nations involved, such that the regime eventually confronted God’s hand of long-awaited justice in abolishing that offense against humanity. More importantly, because of a small band of godly saints who were faithful and long-suffering to carry out their Holy Spirit assignments, retaining their resolve and their trust in Him in the face of overwhelming opposition, God’s more severe judgment on at least one nation (and probably two nations) was averted.
“Christian” accommodation of so-called “no-fault” unilateral divorce has taken Christ’s church in the western world into the deep pit of serial polygamy in just two generations. And what, exactly, do we mean by “serial polygamy” in this comparison? Quite simply, it is using man’s immoral civil laws to reject the spouse God joined us to, in order to “marry” another while the rejected spouse lives – something that Jesus called ongoing adulteryat least five separate times in canonized scripture. There are many excuses offered up for this, and there are even more numerous luminary “men of God” who will tell you it’s okay under “God’s grace” based on some man-contrived excuse. However, God repeatedly said, in Old Testament and in New Testament times. it is not okay, nor is it without horrible consequences for families, church and nation.
Those harsh, inevitable generational consequences don’t “sift” through the humanistic web of excuses in order to selectively apply themselves according to the Westminster Confession-sanctioned “exceptions”. Those consequences ultimately come from the hand of God, as thistles and thorns in the Garden; from the One who entertains none of the human excuses. He is the One whose hand individually creates each one-flesh union as an inseverable entity, Who then covenants unconditionally with that individual entity, then declares that they will never be two again in this life. This universal indissolubility of holy matrimony is why Jesus called all non-widowed remarriage adultery — the original parties are still married in God’s eyes, and anyone else subsequently posing as “married to” either of the two original covenant spouses are bearing false witness to the world while they are defiling their vessels. Pastors who perform “weddings” where there is an estranged, living spouse on either side are therefore violating the Third Commandment by misusing the name of the Lord to attribute to Him a vain act.
Though only one spouse wants out of the holy matrimony covenant of their youth, a scene similar to the slave sale in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is played out in “family courts” across the land on a daily basis, forcibly pulling covenant spouses from each other, and children from one of their parents (and it’s usually the most responsible and moral of the two, due to the perverse financial incentives involved), while attempting also to tear and sever the God-joined one-flesh entity created by His hand. Both spouses and their children are literally reduced to being treated as the chattel property of the prevailing legal regime, with an inexcusable motive to illicitly accrue profit to various parties who are external to the victimized families.
Near the start of SIFC’s post-decree journey through a constitutional appeals case, amidst outreach efforts to others in the marriage permanence movement, the establishment of social media pages to advocate for the full repeal of unilateral divorce and to urge profound moral reform in the church, there was also the very influential opportunity to read another book, Amazing Grace by author Eric Metaxas. This is the story of British Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, who became an unusually strong, spirit-led Christ-follower in the days shortly after being elected to the House of Commons. Thanks to the author’s vivid capture of the details of Wilberforce’s spiritual awakening, we see the arduous journey which followed to build a movement, in the name of the Lord, that ran counter to both the entrenched church and equally-entrenched legal system interests, and like today, this threatened some extremely powerful, wealthy economic interests in both institutions.
Metaxas makes it possible to see the strong parallels of the story of this journey to abolish the slave trade with the struggle we are currently in, to abolish all the church and legal system trappings, along with the special economic interests that are adverse to the kingdom of God, and adverse to the God-established “kingdom” and constitutional rights of covenant families. This book not only deeply inspired this blogger, but in a very real sense, it provided strong insight into the nature of the battle that lay ahead. This book is a really good read for everyone in the marriage permanence movement, and our blog post about it will hopefully be an interesting, thought-provoking introduction.
( SIFC note: At the present time, author Eric Metaxas adheres to his Eastern Orthodox upbringing which teaches that holy matrimony is dissoluble under some circumstances including adultery. He aligned strongly with Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and with the political forces of social conservatives who consider unilateral divorce to be an undesirable thing, but not necessarily the central moral issue of the day, nor an intrinsic religious freedom violation. He most likely would be surprised to read of his contribution to the marriage permanence movement through the book he has written. He is in a covenant marriage himself, by true biblical standards. )
There were many prevailing obstacles to justice in America and England in the late 18th century that are remarkably similar to roadblocks the “stander” community, and others who advocate the abolition of the vile practice of serial polygamy, must successfully confront today, and must skillfully navigate through. As with Wilberforce and the broad coalition he helped to form, skill wasn’t everything, because he “battled not against flesh and blood, but powers and principalities and dark forces in the spiritual realm“, just as the apostle Paul warned in Ephesians 6. God’s hand, and awaiting God’s timing were also necessary, so this abomination was very much “prayed down” and “fasted down”, while the visible events were unfolding by God’s hand in the circumstantial realm over a long period of time. The encouragement that SIFC would like to leave with readers is the historical evidence that evil, seemingly impossible “mountains” are indeed picked up and thrown into the sea by the hand of God, in response to the faithful prayers, and advocacy efforts of His saints; efforts taking many forms but working together in key ways orchestrated by Him.
So, what all was going on back then to misappropriate the word of God so as to prop up the immoral slave trade? How did it resemble the backdrop to today’s moral slide of the church and society so that it broadly institutionalized the sin of marrying another while having a living, estranged true spouse, following man’s divorce (that which Jesus clearly and consistently called ongoing adultery)? Let’s take a look:
Entrenched religious beliefs prevailed that had no true scriptural basis. England had been a mix of Druid and Catholic rituals for centuries before the Reformation, with Catholicism gaining the upper hand by medieval times. By the time Wilberforce came of age, it had been about 250 years since Henry VIII had established the Church of England, which retained many characteristics of the Roman Catholic church, despite key doctrinal differences, coming to be known as “High Church” because elaborate liturgy was retained from Roman Catholic liturgy, where the congregation was able to continue worshiping rather passively rather than pursue true discipleship. One of the key doctrinal differences between the Church of England and the Rome Church, of course, was the profound disagreement over marriage, both its indissolubility as a sacrament (or not) and the propriety of civil jurisdiction rather than church jurisdiction over it. Born, as the new Protestant doctrine was, out of a mix of the lusts of Henry and the humanism of Erasmus, in this particular instance, rightly-divided scripture was still on the side of the Catholics. However, it was the Anglicans who happened to be and remain in power by 1648 and beyond.
That said, adherence to Catholicism was still strong in Britain, including belief that priests can absolve sin without the actual cessation of that sin. Salvation is believed to be imparted by repeated communion rather than a taking up of one’s cross to follow Christ. Because of the belief that only nuptials between two baptized partners are to be considered “sacramental”, and hence indissoluble, it is likely that slave marriages were considered dissoluble as best benefitted the trade.
Meanwhile the Westminster Confession of Faith was drafted and ratified in the British Parliament in 1648 just a little more than 100 years after Henry formed the Church of England. Many aspects of the WCOF were an extrabiblical overreaction to various heresies of Roman Catholicism, while other aspects were appropriate responses to genuine errors in RCC doctrine or to abusive practices that arose in the 300 years just prior, resulting in biblically-supported truth mixed with biblically-unsupported heresy in the total doctrines of the WCOF.
For example, Chapter 3 affirms the Reformed doctrine of predestination: that God foreordained who would be among the elect (and therefore saved), while he passed by those who would be damned for their sins. The confession states that from eternity God did “freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass”.
By God’s decree, “some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death.”
As with the Catholics, this doctrine did not promote much soul-care for the Negro slaves, and is biblically unsupported, since there is a distinction between God’s fore-knowledge and fore-ordination.
The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance. – 2 Peter 3:9
Chapter 17 presents the doctrine of the “perseverance of the saints”, which holds that it is impossible for those effectually called to “fall away” from the state of grace or, in other words, lose their salvation. This doctrine, in effect, allowed for the powerful to oppress the helpless, without concern that God would ever hold them accountable, since Jesus was claimed to have died for their future sins. As has become the case today, it is popular “wisdom” to claim that people have no hope of living a holy life, so the purpose of grace is to attribute Christ’s righteousness to a passive worshiper who may continue on in their transgressions. In proper context, the term “perseverance of the saints” (referred to several times in the book of Revelation), actually means quite the opposite of what is declared in the WCOF. Scripture repeatedly shows that this perseverance means bearing up under persecution without becoming apostate in response. Just as the WCOF has the effect of deadening the conscience to proclaiming Christ’s standards for lifelong marital faithfulness as being “too high” to realistically attain in the 21st century, the Confession had the effect of deadening the conscience of those involved in the slave trade to the sanctity of all human families.
“Now the parable is this: the seed is the word of God.Those beside the road are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their heart, SO THAT THEY WILL NOT BELIEVE AND BE SAVED.Those on the rocky soil are those who, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no firm root; THEY BELIEVE FOR A LITTLE WHILE, AND IN TIME OF TEMPTATION THEY FALL AWAY.The seed which fell among the thorns, these are the ones who have heard, and as they go on their way they are choked with worries and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to maturity.But the seed in the good soil, these are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart, and hold it fast, and bear fruit with perseverance.” – Luke 8:11-15
Finally, the pivotal Chapter 24 covers Reformed teaching on marriage and divorce. Marriage is to be heterosexual and monogamous (if consecutively so). The purpose of marriage is to provide for the mutual help of husband and wife, the birth of legitimate children, the growth of the church, and preventing “uncleanness”, according to the confession. The confession discourages interfaith marriage with non-Christians, Roman Catholics, or “other idolaters”. In addition, godly persons should not be “unequally yoked” in marriage to “notoriously wicked” persons. Incestuous marriage, defined according to biblical guidelines, is also prohibited. (Heretical parts V and VI hold that the only grounds for divorce are “adultery or willful abandonment by a spouse.” ) Jesus and the prophet Malachi, however, heldthat men are delegated NO authority to dissolve an unconditional covenant to which God remains a party, nor to sever the one-flesh entity God’s hand created. Only physical death does that, according to the apostle, Paul. Hence, any discussion about “grounds” in the WCOF becomes utterly moot before the unchanging marriage law of God, and Henry, self-proclaimed as the first Head of the Church of England, is exposed as the wicked serial polygamist he actually was all along when measured against the biblical standard.
While great atrocities were involved in capturing slaves and transporting them across the ocean, after which they were often cruelly warehoused and their diseases masked until sold, it is clear that slave traders who forced apart one-flesh spouses, and “family court” judges who do so have much in common. This is true both morally, and in the consequences to society, as well as to the eventual fate of the whole nation due to the resulting corruption of the progeny of those impacted.
The 2007 film version of Amazing Grace opens with a narrative graphic which reads, “by the late 18th century over eleven million African men, women and children had been taken from Africa to be used as slaves in the West Indies and American colonies … The slave trade was considered acceptable by all but a few. Of these, even fewer were brave enough to speak against it.”
By comparison, between 1970 and 2015 (roughly one-tenth of the elapsed time since the commencement of that trade up to Wilberforce’s day), more than three times as many U.S. families had been forcibly “dissolved” in the “family courts” of the 50 states. Likewise, all but a few of the Christian citizens of these states considered this practice morally acceptable (and fully effectual in God’s eyes despite much scripture to the contrary). A small but increasing number of these few began to develop the courage of conviction to suffer the immense social and economic costs of speaking against it.
2. The church was profoundly corrupt and slowly dying. A church that is founded on heresy, expressly in order to facilitate (and propagate forward) sexual sin, as the Church of England indeed was, is doomed and dying from the outset, unless true revival comes along to rescue it. So is today’s “mega-church” established for much the same purpose, to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those living in open defiance of God’s laws which they disagree with, while having a cover of what in those days was called piety, and in our day would be called “evangelicalism”. In far too many of these mega-churches, “church discipline” is called out on the wrong party, such as the repenting prodigal who would leave an adulterous, legalized union to return to his or her covenant family, and far too many churches are led by men and women who are themselves living in legalized adultery with someone else’s God-joined, one-flesh partner rather than with their own. The scriptures forbiddingeven this are re-interpreted to “permit” the abomination of consecutive polygamy in the clergy, rendering any protest against LGBTQ(xyz) excesses, instantly hypocritical. Hence, the literal “husband of one [living] wife”, understood perfectly and consistently practiced by “less-sophisticated” saints for centuries, of late becomes “one-woman man” (until tomorrow, at least) in our contemporary bibles. God’s amazing sense of humor used adultery matchmaker Ashley Madison to debunk that notion a couple of years ago. How many of those “one woman man” pastors were removed as a result?
But as it turns out, revival did come and rescue the corrupt Church of England during Wilberforce’s life, and as it happened, God through various circumstances brought several key people into his life while he was still a boy. Though he was born and raised in the northern province of York, family hardship brought him to live by the age of ten with a wealthy, aristocratic aunt and uncle in Wimbledon, near London, who were close to George Whitefield and other figures of the first Great Awakening. Author Metaxas describes the conditions in the English church of Wilberforce’s young manhood thusly:
“One’s ‘spirituality’ was confined to one’s rented pew. One attended one’s church and one stood and one kneeled and one sat at the proper times and did what was required of one, but to scratch beneath this highly lacquered surface was to venture well beyond the pale and invite stares and whispers and certain banishment. Wilberforce was from the beginning as serious as he was charming and fun-loving, and his sensitive and intellectual nature was now, at Wimbledon, for the first time fed something far more satisfying than the niceties – the thin gruel and weak tea of High Church Anglicanism.”
So then, what historical forces reduced Christ’s English bride to such a debased state, some 200 years after the Reformation? Unfortunately, the sad answer seems to be — the Reformation itself. We’ve already visited the heretical elements of this church’s creed adopted in that same Parliament 100 years earlier than Wilberforce’s day, which formed a rotten foundation upon which those “rented pews” actually sat.
My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism.For if a man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and there also comes in a poor man in dirty clothes,and you pay special attention to the one who is wearing the fine clothes, and say, “You sit here in a good place,” and you say to the poor man, “You stand over there, or sit down by my footstool,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil motives?Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called? – James 2:1-7
While today’s spiritual deadness is clearly driven by the pursuit of sexual immorality that has gained the near-universal complicity of contemporary church leadership, the spiritual deadness of that day was driven by the bloody, mutual, church leader-led violence between Protestants and Catholics which had given Jesus a truly bad name, and had turned people off to religion altogether, creating this ritualistic veneer that was not allowed to go too deep. The violence, in turn, was driven by the clergy’s thirst for retaining (or gaining) power over the population, causing religious opponents on both sides to be martyred, and causing a series of wars between the “saints”. (In “standerinfamilycourt’s” happier days with evangelical friends and intact covenant family, the oft-played board game “Risk” was jokingly dubbed “Evangel” due to the conflict between Christ’s way of building the kingdom of God versus the counterfeit that had taken hold as an evil fruit of the Reformation where Protestants returned Catholic violence and persecution in-kind. ) Of course, all sinful departure from Christ’s methods, be it sexual or be it violent power-grabs “in the name of Jesus”, leads to a hardening of hearts, we are warned, and this leads to falling away (apostasy), notwithstanding Chapter 17 of the WCOF. Certainly, Christian-on-Christian violence must have had a devastating and dehumanizing effect on British society in Wilberforce’s day. Are there not “rented pews” today in the evangelical church? Is a fee not paid today by the legalized adulterers in the post-unilateral divorce world to occupy seats as an illicit pair or “blended family” that faithful 1 Corinthians 5 church governance would have otherwise denied them unless they severed those faux ties? Paul, after all, said “do not even eat with such….I have decided to turn [him / them] over to satan, that [his / their] soul(s) may be saved in the day of the Lord.”
Britain formally sat under a false state religion, as she still does today. By failing to maintain her sexual purity, hence her sovereign biblical family structure, America and other western nations today also sit under a state religion that is not formally acknowledged but is nevertheless very real in asserting its antichrist power over all of society. That state religion is secular humanism. And secular humanism just loves to play “dress up” these days in Baptist, Pentecostal and mainline “Christian” garb–and even Catholic frocks, of late, in the form of Chapter 8 of Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia.
3. A tiny (deemed) “cult” slowly became instrumental in moving the culture. The evangelical aunt and uncle who took Wilberforce in as a boy was (providentially) childless, which made the young man the sole heir to their homes and fortune when they “graduated to heaven”. This put great financial assets into his hands, as well as influential and powerful friends of godly character into his life. He was best friends from university days with William Pitt, his agnostic contemporary who eventually became Prime Minister. Wilberforce came to faith, and received Spirit-led discipleship as a young MP under the direct influence of Whitefield, the Wesleys, and ex-slave trader, the Rev. John Newton. All true disciples of Jesus come to understand that every scrap of time, treasure and talent that God pours into a life ultimately belongs to Him, loaned, as it were, for the purpose of building up the kingdom of God. As did the three biblical slaves with the varying number of “talents” given by their master, we will one day give an account for our stewardship of these resources. Instead of suppressing truth to those under our care for ill-gotten gain, and appeasing the ungodly resource-holders to build our own vast empire (without the slightest regard for these souls), we are expected to invest what we already have been given into helping deliver as many souls as possible safely into the doors of the great banquet hall where the wedding supper of the Lamb is to be held. Wilberforce understood this, as did the other Spirit-led instigators of the First Great Awakening and the abolition movement.
It wasn’t long before Wilberforce felt led to sell his inherited properties and use the proceeds to establish a highly visible home church community, known as the Clapham fellowship, on his friends’ adjoining properties, where true discipleship under the ministry of a community chaplain was fostered in the suburbs of London. It also wasn’t long before the entrenched interests were derisively labeling the community of believers Wilberforce led, a “cult”. Why was Wiberforce’s physical community of believers so influential ? “Standerinfamilycourt” believes it is because he established a very visible spiritual organism within that compound-based community, much like the 1st – 4th century church, where everyone could see the Christ-centered life walked out again. Some 300 years before the internet could make the same sort of thing visible online, and draw like-minded but geographically dispersed people together for conferences, this visibility from such a community was very important to influencing culture, by example.
(SIFC note:The tiny Spirit-led wing of the body of Christ in that day was dubbed “Methodism”, which was an ecclesiastical slur. We all know what eventually happened to “Methodism” in our day, following the Second Great Awakening, and what in our day has even happened to Pentecostalism, as it followed “Methodism” in becoming the “Church of Thyratira” in the late 20th century, who today labels the interfaith community of covenant marriage standers–which is largely virtual due to the commonplace shunning of outspoken members by conventional church bodies, having its own pastors and lay leaders therefore, a “cult”.)
4. The oppressed victims of the system were utterly dehumanized. In the book, pages 96-100 detailed the inhumane conditions in which hundreds of captured slaves were chained together and packed into the lower airless holds of a slave ship with inadequate sanitary provisions, little food and no potable water. These conditions culminated in the deplorable tale of the insurance fraud that was carried out on the high sea in 1781 aboard a Jamaica-bound slave ship named the Zong. It was routine for any human dying aboard a ship to be buried in the ocean, whether a slave or not. However, in this instance so many slaves were becoming ill that more than 100 live slaves were thrown overboard in order that insurance proceeds would replace the lost revenue from the slaves that had expired due to inhumane conditions. The public exposure from the foiling of that fraud in English court the next year turned out to be a small amount of good out of a massively tragic crime against humanity. A Cambridge protégé of Wilberforce’s, a young man named Thomas Clarkson, served as the “cub reporter” in documenting facts and evidence against the slave trade:
“He climbed aboard slave ships and measured the spaces allotted for the slaves; he purchased the ghastliest instruments of restraint and torture, from manacles and shackles to thumbscrews and branding irons. There was a device to pry open the mouths of slaves who refused to eat. ” (Page 116).
It is unfortunate that the opportunities to expose in great detail the atrocities that routinely go on in “family courts” across the land are few and extremely costly. Nevertheless, there are a few of us with either the financial means ortime and pro se determination to resist the system, allowing our case to go to trial for that very purpose. Most county courthouses will not allow non-lawyers to take cell phones past a security checkpoint, yet in trial we will use the time (sometimes days) sitting in court to take notes on other cases we may observe, and some of us will go to the expense of obtaining the electronic transcript from our own case. In the book, “Stolen Vows” by Judy Parejko (2001), the author chronicles the abuses she observed as a court-appointed mediator. Other authors such as Stephen Baskerville have written powerful books and articles exposing details of the corruption under which families are legally shredded. In two blog pieces we shared in 2014 from The Public Discourse, a mother relates how she was stripped of her children for the noxious purpose of awarding custody to her homosexual husband and his same-sex partner. Similarly, another article in the publication tracked the commonly-occurring instances of children being stripped from a blameless father who didn’t want the divorce and custody given to the mother whose live-in boyfriend committed violence and molestation of the children, in a cruel mockery of their “best interest”. The dehumanization is well-captured in this crass excerpt from an appellate opinion handed down in an early constitutional challenge of the “no-fault” law:
“The state’s inherent sovereign power includes the so called ‘police power’ right to interfere with vested property rights whenever reasonably necessary to the protection of the health, safety, morals, and general well being of the people. The constitutional question, on principle, therefore, would seem to be, not whether a vested right is impaired by a marital law change, but whether such a change reasonably could be believed to be sufficiently necessary to the public welfare as to justify the impairment.” Walton v Walton, California (1970-1972) 28 Cal. App.3d 108
5. Massive economic interests were also deeply entrenched. Although King George III was a devout Christian and had genuine concerns about the slave trade, the Crown had substantial revenue interests in the sugar plantations of the British West Indies, as did the Church of England herself. Powerful members of Parliament had personal revenue interests either in the plantations or in profits from the slave trade or related maritime industries. Port towns like Liverpool and Bristol were heavily dependent on the trade, much like some of the state capitol cities that would suffer economically today from a likely much-smaller government complex that would result from ceasing the societally-corrosive practice of forcing families apart without provable just cause. In addition to this, it should sound quite familiar that the atrocities, as soon as documentation of horrifying details began to be publicly exposed, would be propped up (as an argument against doing the right thing and abolishing them) by playing one jurisdiction off against a neighboring jurisdiction. It was argued that abolishing the slave trade in Britain would be a boon to the slave trade in France. Ignored was the fact that a powerful moral example would be advanced (with accompanying publicity) by repeal in one or two states to start, and that societal, as well as fiscal benefits– in the contemporary instance, would be reaped by the repenting jurisdiction(s). The difficult but successful solution for Wilberforce’s allies was to relentlessly work the issue in both Britain and France.
Similarly, the unilateral divorce industry amounts to more than $100 billion a year, directly benefitting members of the Bar, and a vast army of court mediators, social workers, mental health professionals, book-sellers, and even ministries. This financial boon for a few, at the expense of society as a whole, comes at a cost of $200+ billion a year in transferred social costs to all taxpayers, state and Federal. These well-heeled political interests virtually own the press and have the means to easily flood the media with emotional pleas for “abuse victims” whom, they moan, will be “trapped in abusive marriages” if they should ever be forced to prove with tangible evidence that their marriage is abusive. These misleading articles largely go unrebutted, due to entrenched interests even within the “faith, family and freedom” ministries and family policy councils in various states across the land. The vast majority of these ministries decline to become involved in the repeal of unilateral divorce or the defense of its religious free exercise victims, either in prioritization of funding or in their public media output, even when there is a repeal bill active in their state legislature. For example, the family policy group, Texas Values (affiliated with James Dobson’s organization, Family Policy Alliance) sent their president to testify before a 2017 legislative committee that they supported repeal, but not one written word was publicly released to refute the barrage of negative press against HB93 in that state. All of the financial resources instead went toward battling issues like transgender bathroom bills, remarkably seen as more of a threat than the laws that directly order the literal shredding of families. Although this reluctance to publicly advocate for the repeal of unilateral divorce laws may have varying factors based on the political climate and carefully-built political relationships in each state, the common issue seems to be a fear that large donors could be offended by marriage permanence efforts meaningfully impacting heterosexual family policy, as well as the false belief that there is likely not enough funding available through millions of small, passionate donors to offset such feared losses–despite the million or so new families decimated each year by forced divorce who would love to donate regularly to an organization showing true commitment to engaging their cause in a meaningful way.
Just imagine if the abolitionist movement had consisted of donation-based provincial councils tasked primarily with all the issues of managing the evil fallouts of the slave trade on society, who deemed abolition too unreachable a goal, so that they busied themselves with promoting legislation to increase the size of the slave berths aboard the ships, install more porta-potties, only allow slave traders to take people who didn’t have minor children in the hut, et cetera– and doing so while reporting in to a Church of England board (who at the end of the day was financially-invested in preserving the trade). If one can imagine this, our description seems quite analogous to the apparent relationship between some of these state FPC’s and Dobson’s Focus on the Family organization.
(SIFC note: As of the date of this writing, “standerinfamilycourt” has met two of the executive directors of state family policy councils face-to-face, and has hopes of meeting several more in the coming months and years to learn as much as possible about their constraints, to be of service where mutually beneficial, and to encourage them to diversify their donor base to include those in our movement, so that they can act more boldly in the marriage permanence realm.)
6. God put together quite a colorful and diversely-tasked team. When the Most High hears the cry of the afflicted and establishes His timeline for deliverance, everyone involved can count on divine appointments taking place. He started assembling the abolition team when its most visible “champion” was just a small boy. He began by tapping famous figures of the first Great Awakening in Britain, leading some slave traders to repentance and restitution, and surrounding those with born-again relatives in Wilberforce’s extended family. To these, He added Christian attorneys, writers, artisans, poets, former slaves and doctors. Wives of aristocrats opened their homes to bring these co-laborers together and make strategic introductions across an overseas network and even across social classes. Each of these called individuals providentially contributed their gifts to the overall effort, some prominently and some in the background. Much like some in the marriage permanence movement who today create striking memes that drive home a point in social media, even the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood was tapped into service to create the iconic badge-like image “Am I Not A Man and a Brother?” that found its way onto all sorts of popular items that were sold at the time.
In a very similar way, the Lord has been bringing together 21st century artists, writers, bible scholars, linguists, in-place and displaced pastors, seminary professors, legal students, researchers, meeting organizers, videographers, conservative thought leaders and lecturers, courthouse monitors, conference hosts, legislators, constitutional attorneys and family policy directors to carry out a diverse range of divine assignments, coordinated by the hand of God to one day topple the “Jericho Wall” of unilateral divorce. Many of these groups of the like-minded would not interact with or even be aware of other groups if He also didn’t divinely provide individuals to form a bridge between them, yet He’s using some individuals to facilitate that very necessary function as well. Instead of stately mansions where figures are invited and introductions are made, He is using technology and alternative media platforms to bring diverse co-laborers together.
7. Reeking, shameless hypocrisy was the order of the day in the established church. We have already described above, the profound moral decay in the Church of England, and the reasons behind it. Here we will focus on some of what it took to break through that in the famous scene from the movie that was based on the book. The majority of the power holders in the British Parliament were at least nominal members of the Church of England, while the handful of actual Christ followers who were influenced by the leadership of John Newton, the Wesley brothers, and George Whitefield formed house churches such as the community at Clapham, which also had some wealthy and influential members in addition to Wilberforce. They lived by godly example, using large amounts of their wealth for the public good, and maintaining sexual purity in their relationships, which really stood out in society, while they maintained warm friendships with the “lukewarm”, those who derisively called them “Methodists” and accused them of being a “cult”. At an opportune time, Wilberforce and his Clapham peers arranged the famous boat tour of the harbor, complete with stringed quartet, wine and appetizers and full ballroom regalia. This grand party was soon assaulted with the pungency of that which they would have much preferred to remain insulated from, as the party barge Reliant suddenly pulled up beside a slave ship called the Madagascar that evening. No longer could the British ruling class and their consorts feign ignorance of the dehumanization and shipboard death that was taking place, literally under their noses. This event, occurring in the middle of the 20-year abolition battle, required the development of quite a few well-networked allies of the cause in high and low rank in order to pull such a scene off.
Two events occurred in 2017 that could prove significant, and might be somewhat analogous to that unsavory boat party. Repeal bills to redefine “no-fault” divorce back to its originally-intended (or at least, publicly-advertised) contours were introduced in two southwest states. Partial repeal attempts had occurred in Michigan in 2006 and Iowa in 2013 but without much publicity that wasn’t rabidly oppositional. What made the 2017 effort a bit different is that instead of a family policy ministry sponsoring the bills, one was introduced by an actual constitutional attorney-turned-legislator, and he brought a parade of constitutional attorneys to the committee podium who testified to the constitutional violations that riddle current law, which suitably-framed the testimony of the family victims of unilateral divorce who also testified. This time, the hours of this testimony have been captured and posted to you-tube, through the efforts of local marriage permanence activists. This is a bit remarkable because the family-shredding industry has been accustomed to a thick shroud of darkness whenever their empire is threatened. Also remarkable is that every one of the churches in both states were so occupied with “rebuilding a culture of marriage” in their congregations, that none of them saw any worthwhile involvement in seeing that either bill to end the forced divorces of their members might come to an embarrassing Republican-dominated floor vote, letting them both die for this session.
Then in August, the Southern Baptist-allied Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood introduced The Nashville Statement, a manifesto taking dead aim at all the incarnations of homosexual practice, while odiferously looking the other way at prevalence of clergy-condoned (and clergy-practiced) serial polygamy that has destroyed the family structure in the evangelical church, hiding the destruction behind an adulterous thin veneer through which mass shootings, child-trafficking and transsexualism is all-too-prone to puncture. There have been earlier manifesto campaigns in recent years, but this one was quite ill-timed, driven primarily by visceral reaction to the bathroom bills, but while unresolved memories were still fresh before the American public of the infamous serial polygamist, Kim Davis’ tone-deaf declaration in 2015 that she would “lose her soul” if she dared insult the holiness of God by issuing marriage licenses to homosexuals. That had been an event which had suddenly reduced the Leftist press to quoting scripture on major network newscasts. Though the Who’s Who of the evangelical and Catholic worlds vigorously endorsed and signed the 2017 manifesto (which brazenly declared condoning homosexual practice as profoundly inconsistent with following Christ), the CBMW has received scathing and voluminous public criticism as well as negative press coverage from both the scornful Left and the God-fearing Right. (From this blogger, “standerinfamilycourt”, the celebrated and learned seminarians on the board of CBMW received a book called “One Flesh” by Joe Fogel, and a frank, admonishing letter.)
Meanwhile, in the Roman Catholic Church, which has been so historically important to all moral reform of family laws, the release of Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia was causing deep despair and bewilderment among Christ-following Catholics over the Pope’s bid to liberalize clergy practices toward remarriage adulterers in those congregations, by liberalizing even further the vile practice of “annulment” and to allow those civilly “married” to the covenant spouses of others to take communion — a direct affront to Paul’s admonition about receiving the body and blood of Christ in an unworthy manner, and of his further admonition that no unrepentant adulterer will inherit the kingdom of God. The hypocrisy involved with Amoris was the preposterous chorus of Vatican “assurance” that changing church “practice” was not tantamount to changing church “doctrine”. Since the only ministry with a national voice to publicly support the two unilateral divorce repeal bills was the Catholic-founded Ruth Institute, we can only hope that this unfortunate and significant turn of events cements the desire for close alliance with our like-minded “cult” of evangelicals in the marriage permanence movement.
8. Prayer and fasting was just as important as activism, if not more so. The great John Wesley wrote Wilberforce twice, the first time near the start of his abolition journey, and also a few days before Wesley passed away. Wesley wanted to be certain that Wilberforce understood that he battled not against flesh and blood, but powers and principalities; dark forces in the heavenly realm. He put Wilberforce on prophetic notice that there will be demonic opposition at every turn, but urged him to persevere. Much of the reason that abolition took as long as it did once the organized campaign was underway can be attributed to intervening events and demonic distractions, but still the battle was the Lord’s.
The current battle seems to boil down to an unrelenting conflict between the choice to surgically-excise the disease itself or manage the symptoms to reduce human suffering and impacts on society. There is a widespread assumption that the disease itself is inoperable, and an almost irresistable temptation to hold to a form of godliness but deny His power. These are strongholds which the Lord will use the fasters and the faithful prayers in our movement to pull down supernaturally.
9. Bringing (and keeping) a diverse coalition together was a key role that Wilberforce played as a leader in the movement. As described earlier, God Himself started the process of bringing the abolitionist movement figures together two or three decades ahead of Wilberforce signing on, but He appointed key individuals (including Wilberforce) to build it to “critical mass” and keep it together over the arduous period of time needed to sustain a successful effort. He seemed to provide a clear focal point to the various constituencies (which included Quakers, Anglicans, “Methodists”, just to use the diverse religious interests as an example) to what God wanted, and this took a lot of integrity, often very unpopular integrity. At the end of the day, Wilberforce had the humility to overcome his own discouragement at setbacks to pull it off without backing down. He had a thick skin, which is a quality almost as rare as focus and integrity, but indispensable because of the need to also manage the criticism or reluctance of insiders.
At the present time, if there is a Wilberforce-like individual to galvanize the factions and constituencies in the movement, it’s likely that this person is still developing and emerging. Those who presently have the insight to visualize how the like-minded groups can and should be working together are obscure and seem not well-placed at this time. There are bridges to build between the traditional Catholic leaders, who have a national voice but presently insufficient political power, and the small body of enlightened evangelicals in the movement who part company with the “reformed” evangelicals on the moral validity of non-widowed remarriage. There are traditional differences to manage over side issues like the authority of the Pope and the validity or morality of “annulment” versus the evangelical principle of sola scriptura where scripture plainly forbids both doctrines. Many of the national voices for divorce reform would prefer to focus on households with minor children, while setting aside the issue of ongoing 1st and 14th amendment violations against grandparent marriages which full repeal would rectify, and they have differences with those in the movement who consider divorce-remarriages immoral (as Jesus plainly did) due to valid, temporal concern for the children born of legalized adultery.
State legislators are emerging with a courageous vision for repeal, but perhaps are not yet well-enough connected with those who can lend them effective support, especially in the area of getting churches onboard with outright repeal efforts. Far too few churches of any type are involved on the state level, and a great many erroneously believe that God “instituted” or “provided for” divorce. The majority of “standers” and those who have repented of adulterous “marriages” are estranged from their churches, either by their own choice not to sit under deceived leadership, or because they’ve been formally or informally shunned for being perceived as a
“sower of disunity”. In response, many such individuals in the movement do not consider contemporary church structure (what they derisively call the “pulpit / pew hireling model”) to be biblically or morally valid.
Many in the movement also do not think political activity of any type is of God. State family policy groups tend to be underfunded and perhaps in need of diversifying their support. The politically-connected national voices are sympathetic to repeal, but constantly get distracted by the symptoms of the disease, particularly each new emerging horror from rabid, militant homosexualism. Other allied groups are the Parents’ Rights groups who want legal relief from these onerous laws, but aren’t necessarily in the repeal camp, and the divorced-and-remarried activists sympathetic to repeal efforts who are somehow finding the grace to work with the celibate “standers” who do not consider those subsequent civil-only unions biblically valid. We each need to faithfully keep doing our perceived, assigned roles and keep praying to God for the break-through that pulls all of it together effectively. Even a celibate, faithful stander who is not engaged in any other activity at all, except to serve others, makes a very loud statement to this culture, if they are consistent and are doing it out of a godly motivation.
10. It took decades of unrelenting effort and dedication to prevail. As witnessed by a quote from the book,
“The line between courageous faith and foolish idealism is, almost by definition, on angstrom wide. Wilberforce was quite right that a flame had been kindled and would not go out until it had done its work, but he had no idea that it would be twenty torturous years in the burning before its work was done. And if the ‘work’ in question was not the abolition of the slave trade but the abolition of slavery itself, the flame would continue burning for another forty-five years.” (Page 122)
…abolition of such a profoundly immoral institution was carried out on many battlefronts and required decades to bring about.
By comparison, the dastardly and covert political events that stripped U.S. families of their most basic fundamental rights to liberty, property, free religious exercise, free association, right to jury trial when civilly accused, both procedural and substantive due process, and equal protection under the law, occurred less than 50 years ago. The hope is that technology and God’s hand will accelerate the formidable process of overthrowing the regime, and that incremental reform efforts will fall by the wayside as time-wasters. In the past ten years, there have been full or partial repeal efforts in at least four states, including Michigan, Iowa, Texas and Oklahoma. The early efforts were abandoned, but hopefully the latter efforts will persist and gain support as various groups gain insight in how best to work together. Only God could pull off the task of full repeal in all 50 states, but that’s no excuse not to work toward it in faith, with our eyes firmly fixed on the Almighty. If a few states repeal, momentum can certainly be gained, but opposition can be expected to grow more fiercely as well. As with ending the slave trade, the renewed moral authority of a chastened and repented collective church is going to be crucial, and there are many tactical steps the organized church could take to hasten the political process. (This last topic will be covered in a future post.)
Recalling the wicked false analogy drawn by the LGBT movement to justify their immoral, totalitarian political aims by (invalidly) comparing their vision to the U.S. civil rights movement, “standerinfamilycourt” has made these parallels with much fear and trembling before the Lord, trusting that this particular analogy is utterly valid, and is actually like-for-like. May God’s will be done for our covenant families and for our morally-ravaged nation.
Your kingdom [must] come. Your will [must] be done on earth as it is in heaven. – Matthew 6:10
