Category Archives: Discipleship

citizenship, Discipleship, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

Standers, Are We “Reluctantly Divorced”…Or Immorally Abandoned Under Force of Law?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

“For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he..”
– Proverbs 23:7

“standerinfamilycourt” has devoted the past nearly 5 years connecting the community of covenant marriage standers with other communities of Christians and social conservatives who are committed to peeling back the Sexual Revolution and reforming U.S. “family laws” in an example to the rest of the Western world.  Some of these allies are in differing faith traditions, and some of those individuals have a huge leg up on the stander community in terms of their national influence and basic ability to be heard politically.   Others are in “remarriages”, and some are in both situations.  This effort to find common ground for the common good has been met with “mixed reviews” on all sides at various times.   That’s OK with SIFC, who can handle it if some effectiveness is gained, and authentic covenant standers thereby gain a voice in the reform process they would not otherwise have.   Our brand of Christian discipleship has been pasted and smeared as a “cult” for long enough!  As for our reluctant (and sometimes embarrassed) allies, we hope Jesus’ voice comes through a bit clearer than if we were not visible in their lives and in their sense of mission.

For this reason, SIFC travelled to Lake Charles, Louisiana at the end of April to participate in the Ruth Institute’s “Summit for Survivors of the Sexual Revolution”.     You can read more about that terrific event  in this earlier blog post.   About a year or so prior to that, a post by “Ruth’s” founder,  Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, struck this “reluctant divorcee” as (well)… trivializing…and misrepresenting God’s truth.    She had referred to standers as the “reluctantly divorced” in some new pamphlets she was calling attention to at the time.     The Ruth Institute’s work and publications are important, both as the only significant, consistent national voice for repeal of unilateral divorce laws, but also as a well-published, well-respected social science organization, having this past year added an academic statistician to their staff.   Both terms. “reluctantly” and “divorced”, reflect offensively to many of those who, first of all, don’t believe we are “divorced” in God’s eyes, because our wayward and estranged spouse is still alive (Romans 7:2-3; 1 Corinthians 7:39; Matthew 19:8),  and even if they weren’t alive, with full biblical justification, we would regard ourselves as widowed, not divorced.     Dr. Morse graciously asked at that time, what alternative label would be more acceptable to the covenant marriage stander community, so SIFC asked some standers in a social media private group for their input.   It proved to be a tough exercise to come up with something crisp and concise that was adequately reflective of the conscience violation experienced as a result of man’s laws being in direct opposition to God’s laws on marriage.   There was no male input volunteered at the time, but about five ladies offered input.    The common theme was “forcibly divorced against our conscience”.     The majority of standers did not seem to object to the “divorced” label, however, as much as they objected to the “reluctantly” label.    At least one of these ladies, if not two, had also been forced through an “annulment” by the Roman Catholic Church so that their “ex-spouse” could marry the adulteresses (who had coveted their husbands and broken up their homes) and take communion in that church.    The inquiry results were messaged back to Dr. Morse late in 2017.

Those who truly believe Christ’s words, “from the beginning it was never so!”  don’t believe that man’s various contrivances to disobey God and create distance or sundering, or legal attempts to sever the supernatural one-flesh (Greek: sarx mia) entity are actually real.     Those attempts constitute the heinous presumption to speak for God, the superior party in an unconditional covenant with the one-flesh entity which His hand has created between true husband and wife.   Although the Ruth Institute is a Catholic organization that retains some doctrine around marriage indissolubility, the Roman Catholic Church holds to a watered-down official version that allows for “annulments” , sometimes years or decades later, wherein they claim that some impediment not known at the time of the wedding caused God not to join or covenant with that union.   Many a spouse is “reluctantly” exposed to an even worse set of church papers making the false and presumptuous claim that God didn’t join their marriage for reason “x”–after all the persecution, larceny and perjury they endured in “family court”.     To such a stander, what’s being described as “reluctance” feels more like gang rape and moral conscience violation!     “Reluctance” is a response to something you didn’t want but eventually acquiesced to, (as one male stander put it).  One cannot conscionably say such a thing about gang rape without inevitably slandering and demoralizing the victim in the process.   In Dr. Morse’s case, we know the injury is not intentional, but is due to an “out-of-synch” frame of reference arising from personal theology and personal marital history.     As she publicly acknowledged at the Summit, she first learned of our movement and its general contours through SIFC less than 5 years ago.

#RuthSummit 2019 was all about giving a voice to those victimized by the social and political “narrative” of the Sexual Revolution.     As SIFC found out, however, there are limits to that voice in public if printed materials are in the inventory of said nonprofit, which are(unwittingly and unfortunately) bolstering one of the key tenets of that narrative.    In response to a post of one of the videos where an adult child of divorce (neither of whose parents, she reports, were actually “reluctant”) gave her testimony at the April Summit, under a banner that read “Reluctantly Divorced Panel”,  SIFC again commented about the offensiveness and inaccuracy of this label to some of those being referred to by it:

“I’m thankful for Dr. Morse and all her efforts, but feel the term ‘reluctantly divorced’ seriously trivializes Christian standers. Standers stand in the first place because they believe Jesus when He said, “from the beginning it [man’s divorce] was not so!”
Most standers, by essence, don’t consider themselves “divorced” in God’s eyes, but rather immorally abandoned by both the law and their spouse.

I guess you could call *forcibly and morally violated* “reluctant”, but it’s kind of like saying someone was “reluctantly raped”. Would you say that to a rape victim? I sure wouldn’t!

Happy to have been in the room for Christy’s riveting testimony, and it made me so thankful that my husband and I raised our children to adulthood before the troubles started.”

This was not said on her page nor the Ruth Institute page, but on activist Jeff Morgan’s personal wall, without any idea that Dr. Morse would take it as a personal, hostile “swipe”, especially after our earlier exchange on the topic.    The PM that arrived the next day was unsettling, (in part: )

“…could you do me the kindness of not picking a fight with me in public? criminey. You’ve made your point privately…I’ve agreed with you in many ways. I cannot go back and retract all that material. Plz. I’m under enough pressure as it is. ” 

It occurred to “standerinfamilycourt” that perhaps this public statement could reasonably be faulted for not legitimately speaking for all covenant marriage standers, or a sufficiently large swath of them to have merited the comment.    That hadn’t been objectively tested, to be honest.  The comment was based on the open-ended input of the prior small group of ladies.  Out of a group page membership of 300-some, only those who agreed probably volunteered input, after all.    So….it was back to the polls to validate whether SIFC should have just let it go for the sake of feelings and friendship.

This time a formal poll with choices was set up on four different standers pages,  most of them open pages this time, including one UK page.     This has yielded some very interesting observations, and has this time had good input from male standers.  The following, from the most active set of responses was typical of the input from the other pages where the poll ran….

As everyone can see, a slight majority did say “No Big Deal”.    The second most frequent response was that quite a few were unaware of the issue at all.   Upward of a third of standers responding overall reflected a strong negative response to being labeled a “reluctant divorcee”, and one registered a mild negative response.      Those who responded that they were unaware of the label (who does that?) were invited to go back and make an additional selection.    So far, none have, so the implication is that this unaware group also did not feel that strongly about it, perhaps half of all covenant marriage standers who are standing for the marriage of their youth.    Those who also gave verbal comments about what they’d prefer as a label echoed the responses of a year ago,  responding a bit more negatively to the “reluctant” part (feeling that “forcibly” better reflected the conscience violation they suffered), than the “divorced” part of the label.   Those who felt “trivialized” or “demeaned” tended to object to both parts of the label.    Most of the really negative responses came from men, which is understandable, because they’ve been stripped of their God-assigned (and accountable) role toward their own flesh and blood (including – scripturally – their estranged and possibly “remarried” wife), while having done nothing objectively wrong to deserve this outcome.   One of the men commented:

“ I don’t like ‘reluctant’ It’s like we went along with it even though we didn’t want to.

I prefer Unwillingly Divorced.”

His comments drew 4 “likes”, out of a total of 13 responders in that group post.

Overall,  among the 4 group posts, there were 25 unique responses, breaking down as follows, by degree of perceived offensiveness:

Who Does That?  – 24%  (6 responses)
No Big Deal – 28%  (7 responses)
Mildly Annoyed – 4%  (1 response)
Demeaned  – 20%   (5 responses)
Trivialized   – 24%  (6 responses)

Due to varying beliefs, the covenant marriage standers are far from a monolithic group of saints.  Several interesting preliminary observations can be drawn from these results.   First, it appears that nearly 75% of this community is aware of and integrated with the activities and communications of external groups who are engaged in various aspects of “family law” and moral cultural reform, a very gratifying result, following almost 5 years of this blogger’s labors  behind the keyboard and in conferences.    Indeed, many in this community watched the #RuthSummit simulcast in April and several others have reported watching the videos.    Secondly, the ones who responded “No Big Deal” tended to be the ones who believe that scriptures like 1 Corinthians 7:11 make reconciliation with a repenting wayward spouse completely optional according to preference, should the opportunity present, rather than morally imperative per scriptures like Matthew 18:23-35, 2 Corinthians 5:18 (and others).    So long as they remain celibate until their prodigal spouse’s physical death, “they’re good with God”, in their own estimation.   For them, the sense of conscience violation from having a paper “dissolution” forced upon them is much fainter, even if their sense of personal injury remains very great indeed.  Thirdly, while close to 50% overall posted some degree of a negative response to the “reluctant divorcee” label, they were almost all men.  They are the ones who feel the most responsibility for their blocked role as the undershepherd of the family sheep assigned by God to their personal care, and they are the ongoing forgivers in the group.   It is interesting that all four of the respondents on the UK group page actually live in North America, where the process timelines for unilateral family-shredding are counted in days or months rather than the 5 years the process currently takes in the UK.     The sample responses, to the best of SIFC’s knowledge were all from evangelicals, with no currently practicing or nominal Catholics, and a small number of former Catholics responding.

One may rightly ask, “Is 25 a representative sample size with respect to all covenant marriage standers?”    We need to first clarify what a covenant marriage stander is, for those who don’t regularly follow this blog.    A covenant marriage, per scripture, is the marriage of our youth or its widowed replacement, without regard to any religious test, where there is no prior estranged spouse still living:  a never-married or widowed man with a never-married or widowed woman.    A covenant stander is someone who has  been declared “divorced” under the laws of men, but who is remaining celibate in obedience to Christ, even after their spouse “remarries” under the laws of men.    As shown above in the results, the actual motives for remaining celibate until widowed or reconciled can and do vary considerably, which impacts whether the term “reluctant divorcee” causes them injury and offense.  To answer our question about sample size, we need to first estimate how many of these there are in the online world.    An imperfect but reasonable way to gauge that is to estimate that covenant marriage standers have historically run about 10% of all religious standers, including those who “stand” for the subsequent “remarriage” of their personal preference, or for the most recent of them.    The largest marriage permanence ministries do not tend to filter out people who are standing for “remarriages”,  preferring a “wheat and tares” approach to running their ministries.   These typically have about 20,000 followers at any given time.

Based on these assumptions, a reasonable estimate of the total number of English-speaking covenant standers is around 2,000 globally, give or take.   The U.S. divorce lawyers tell us that of the slightly less than 1,000,000 U.S. civil divorces occurring each year, about 5% of them or 50,000 couples per year eventually reconcile.    As mentioned, there are significantly more noncovenant standers, hence noncovenant reconciliations of varying durations just in the U.S., and this is true regardless of the durability of the reconciliation.    It is somewhat possible that there are up to 5,000 covenant marriage standers just in the U.S.,  as an upper bound, which would include (and perhaps be dominated by) practicing Catholics who may still believe in some mitigating, extrabiblical doctrines such as “nullity” and “purgatory” which, in turn, would be directly relevant to their feelings about the severity of conscience violation.   Based on our estimate of the covenant marriage stander population, we only received a tenth of the responses (at best) we really needed for the results to be reasonably representative of all covenant marriage standers who are online, so we can’t claim these results as being scientific, only indicative of the justification to say something about the injuriousness of the “reluctant divorcee” label.  That indicated reliable sample size actually coincides with the typical size of most such group page (overlapping) memberships of covenant standers, so close to 100% group participation would be required to get there with scientific assurance.   Some of those groups do have a fair number of practicing Catholics in their membership who may not believe that dying while in a non-widowed “remarriage” necessarily sends everyone to hell, so may be less motivated to respond to the poll, or would respond “No Big Deal” if they did respond.   By no means were Catholics deliberately excluded.  The poll will be kept open indefinitely, and this post updated if results change as more responses are gathered.   This initial sample was gathered over about 36 hours’ time.    SIFC did not run this poll on Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional due to the large number of very “loyal” trolls and non-standers who follow our community page.

With all the statistical boredom out of the way about the impact of the reluctant divorcee label on the covenant stander community, adding to the trauma of at least hundreds of people who are praying for their spouse’s complete repentance and removal from legalized subsequent unions that could send them to hell as rebels against the kingdom of God,  “standerinfamilycourt” will now share the response given privately to Dr. Morse:

“I honestly didn’t think about your printed materials inventory.   I was just hoping to raise some awareness.   I do realize there’s also some theological differences probably involved as well in this situation.  I didn’t do it maliciously, or with any intent to discredit you, only a strong sense that standers are being misrepresented in direct proportion to our belief of scripture.

“I’m sorry you were offended, Dr. Morse, but some of us have been suffering dignity blows on top of gaping wounds for a long time.  I hope you’ll give some thought to the point itself.  I must sing your praises in public in at least a 10:1 ratio. 

“Most sincere longtime standers do not believe human authorities have any say from God over marriage, and that He has never recognized divorce for anyone.  To hear a national figure repeatedly affirm the immoral civil law as “truth” and its impact as “mild and recoverable” is hurtful. And most of us wish others could see the magnitude of the religious human rights violation being forcibly “divorced” (that is, immorally abandoned with legal sanction) represents.  The ugly reality is we were the guinea pigs for everything happening now to everyone else on the religious rights front, but almost everyone remains clueless about that.  It’s like the famous Niemoller quote, but an extra line could be appended: 

‘…then they came for me…(but still nobody cared about the Jews…”)  …except God who is dealing with the whole nation accordingly and will not be appeased.’  

“This Equality Act…which we might get to dodge for another 2 or 6 years if there’s no national repentance, is literally going to be Congress doing to all other Christian consciences what was done to us by our state legislatures.  Time is getting short and we’re all under pressure.  I hope my sense of urgency at raising awareness can ultimately be forgiven.   Who knows how much longer biblical, pro-family voices will have a non-criminalized voice?   FB just shut down my advertising account today after almost 5 successful years, for submitting ads on a weekly basis that ‘violate their policies’ (many of which they approved and ran anyway, taking the money).”    [End of response]

The Ruth Institute certainly has no lack of pressure, engaged as it is with dividing time between longterm non-political activities aimed at chipping away at the root disease culturally, and a flurry of other activities managing and reporting the plethora of festering symptoms, including the significant fallout in the Roman Catholic Church, from which the bulk of that pressure currently emanates.    They manage to do a superb job with what they have to work with.  “standerinfamilycourt”, on the other hand, is lock-focused on going straight after the root disease politically and culturally, and feels most acutely the pressure from the ticking clock of history repeating itself, while ministering in the background to many of its most overlooked and discounted wound victims.    There isn’t going to be perfect congruence of efforts, but that needn’t prevent an effective working alliance nor should feedback feel threatening to either effort.   It is effective and necessary for “Ruth” to retain and build the support of Roman Catholic leadership, while finding some way to work effectively with the sola scriptura crowd that sustains the covenant marriage movement.

One of the featured speakers at #RuthSummit was Leila Miller, author of the book “Primal Loss” which gathered a lot of data about adult children of divorce who feel marginalized for cultural and political reasons to fit the false narratives that “children are resilient” and “parents deserve to be happy in their love life”.
Her 70 responses were heavily weighted toward trauma, hence she gained an influential platform through the Ruth Institute and Catholic media to speak out for them.     The trauma of covenant marriage standers from false labels and politically-correct assumptions is just as real, but that trauma doesn’t fit very well the counter-narrative that all children deserve to grow up in a home with both biological parents, no matter what.    That “no matter what” invalidly excludes concerns about the prior conflicting rights of covenant children and grandchildren at whose expense such an ideal necessarily comes, and with scripture-based beliefs about heaven and hell which may conflict with Roman Catholic beliefs or doctrines, or may even conflict with the dominant,  politically “safe” evangelical view of those things.   The very least someone pursuing an effective, engaged coalition can do is listen to this kind of inconvenient feedback without taking offense or presuming malicious intent.

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce

 

Church Discipline, Discipleship, Divorce, family law, Lost culture, marriage, Marriage Restoration, morality, Spiritual Warfare

Do Not Be Deceived, God Is Not Mocked – Deuteronomy 24 Revisited

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by Standerinfamilycourt

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

– Jeremiah 23: 11, 13-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“standerinfamilycourt” commented on the facebook post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Discipleship, Lost culture, morality, Prayer, Spiritual Warfare

Purgatory: Yea or Nay?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

“Because Christ also suffered on account of sins once for all, the righteous on behalf of the unrighteous that He might bring us to God; having been put to death, to be sure, in flesh but having been made alive in spirit; in which he also went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who formerly were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, while the Ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls were brought safely through the water.   This is an antitype of baptism that now saves us also…”

1 Peter 3:18-21 (per Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken” – 2013)

Among the strongest allies of the covenant marriage “stander” community, especially in our efforts to change both immoral laws and Christian culture is the Christ-following Roman Catholic community, with its outspoken journalists, authors and ministry leaders who have a national following.   One such ally is Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of The Ruth Institute.    Dr. Morse recently observed (and we would tend to agree), that the common ground found by Catholic and Protestant members of the movement to expose and roll back the Sexual Revolution, as well as restore the institution of holy matrimony back to God’s definition, often causes us to have more in common with each other than with the churches we hail from.

There are some “agree to disagree” doctrinal differences that do crop up regularly, however.    The validity of Roman Catholic “annulment” tribunals is one constant example.    Recently, Dr. Morse triggered a bit of new debate when she made a video urging the Catholic supporters of The Ruth Institute to pray for the dead.   If there was an occasion or triggering event that sparked this concern that prayers be offered for the dead, Dr. Morse only mentioned it in the second video (but, in fact there was – keep reading).    Wisely, Dr. Morse first made a video addressing the non-Catholic supporters and explaining the basis for doctrine concerning “purgatory”,  anticipating that some Ruth fans who are not Catholic might think she “flipped out” (as she put it) when we saw the video post on Facebook urging “Ruth’s” Catholic friends to do so.   She graciously asked that comments from those who take biblical exception to this practice and doctrine limit their remarks to the explanatory post which she also posted to Ruth’s Facebook page.   Fair enough.

“standerinfamilycourt” addressed this comment to Dr. Morse (no response so far):

“Dr. Morse, I’d say most evangelicals have been taught in their churches about the concept of purgatory, mainly due to the exodus of so many Catholics during the ’70’s, ’80’s and ’90’s into our churches. I don’t mean so much to argue but to pose a couple of questions, if that’s OK. I will honor your request to do it here and not on the other post.

First, it’s pretty widespread evangelical knowledge that the main scriptural authority seems to be the book of 2 Maccabbees, chapter 12 in the Apocrypha, a passage that reads as follows in the DRA version, and would have been written by a pre-Christ author:

“…39 And the day following Judas came with his company, to take away the bodies of them that were slain, and to bury them with their kinsmen, in the sepulchres of their fathers.

40 And they found under the coats of the slain some of the donaries of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbiddeth to the Jews: so that all plainly saw, that for this cause they were slain.

41 Then they all blessed the just judgment of the Lord, who had discovered the things that were hidden.

42 And so betaking themselves to prayers, they besought him, that the sin which had been committed might be forgotten. But the most valiant Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves from sin, forasmuch as they saw before their eyes what had happened, because of the sins of those that were slain.

43 And making a gathering, he sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection,

44 (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead,)

45 And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness, had great grace laid up for them.

46 It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins….”

“Is there any NT scripture you’re aware of that supports this?

“I ask for a pointed reason, actually. I have found that one of the best ways in the evangelical church to come against popular scripture abuse that seems to justify the abominably unscriptural practice of “remarriage” after man’s “divorce” is for “standers” to volunteer to teach a neutral class in the church on bible text history and handling, along with a technique called hermeneutics –principled interpretation of scripture through a neutral, disciplined process. (It’s along the lines of “catch me a fish and I eat today, but teach me to fish and I eat from now on.”)   It’s not nearly as controversial as telling an ordained pastor straight-on that he is relying on a mistranslation of the Greek for a particularly crucial key word in a verse (very common), or that a bible committee in the 1880’s didn’t choose the soundest manuscript family to translate, or deliberately chose to leave off a phrase they didn’t like. This also gives an opportunity to unoffensively talk about to what extent OT scriptures can be relied upon today. After all, we probably don’t go to hell today for wearing mixed textiles or eating shellfish or failing to stone our children for disobedience.

“Done well, a good number of people come to a correct understanding of scripture concerning sexual ethics on their own, and in the process develop the courage of conviction to stand up against false teaching from the local pulpit or in media ministries (especially when and if they come under conviction to leave their adulterous remarriage and return to their God-joined spouse — an act requiring much intestinal fortitude against persecution in most evangelical churches). Ditto for coming to a supportable, correctly-balanced understanding of grace and eternal security. OSAS (once saved, always saved) is a horrendous heresy that seems to be sending millions to hell in willful, rebellious sin.

“standerinfamilycourt” writes all blogs taking issue with misuse of sexual ethics scriptures in this format – thoroughly demonstrating how each of the 5 basic principles: Content, Context, Culture, Comparison and Consultation apply to that scripture – so that others learn this discipline. (In a church class, to keep the learning neutral, I’d simply ask everyone to bring to class a scripture that seems to contradict other scriptures, and has been bothering them.)

“So far, I’m unaware of such a NT scripture supporting the doctrine of purgatory, but there’s always much to learn.”

Actually, there is a New Testament scripture that some theorize as supporting the concept of purgatory that’s worth drilling into with the same tried-and-true principles of hermeneutics, and it’s the
1 Peter 3 scripture in the opening of this post.   SIFC believes it is more respectful of our many Catholic readers to take this step before tossing out several other scriptures that come to mind to contradict the purgatory concept.   Other Protestant commenters on the Ruth facebook post did so that day, and SIFC suggested a few as a follow-up.    We won’t get into a debate here about whether or not the Apocrypha should have been canonized.   It is an historical fact that it was not canonized.   Presumably, the forebears of today’s Catholic church leaders had an adequate say in the decisions of that 3rd century council who decided.     There is evidence that some books in the Apocrypha were regarded by the Apostles and next generation church fathers as Holy Spirit-inspired, notably, The Shepherd of Hermas.    However, the Maccabees books are primarily an historical account of how a colony of unregenerated Jews conducted combat, and reflects the thoughts of unregenerated souls.    Which is why SIFC asked Dr. Morse for corroborating NT scripture.

A few days later, “standerinfamilycourt”,  having not yet listened to the second video, caught up with the sad news that the husband of Moira Greyland Peat had suddenly had a fatal heart attack on Memorial Day.    Moira was one of the riveting speakers at the Ruth Institute Survivors Summit one month earlier.   She and her husband were also Catholic.    Apparently, for whatever reason, there may have been doubts that Mr. Peat was sufficiently following Christ to arrive in the kingdom of God without additional prayers for his soul.   All of this was evidently on Dr. Morse’s mind and heart when she made the two videos on May 30.

On June 7, another Catholic husband passed into eternity, this time, the estranged prodigal of a (formerly Catholic) stander  – one who experienced the double heartbreak of having the church “annul” her parents’ marriage after many years, and then hers, in both cases to accommodate the legitimization of an adulterous relationship within that church.    This prodigal had been on his way home in recent weeks preceding this, in a “false start”, torn between his true wife and the faux replacement who was now chasing other men, and had left him.    He never made it all the way home due to a fatal drug overdose.     This bereaved stander now has to suffer the worst agony of any Christian, knowing that their prodigal spouse died in his or her unrepentant sin (possibly even taking his own life), and also knowing that the Apostle was clear when he said, “Do not be deceived.   No adulterer has any inheritance in the kingdom of God.”    While it might once have seemed comforting to his covenant widow to hold out a hope that she can pray her deceased husband into the kingdom, she is a woman of the word of God, and knows quite firmly the only option given by scripture is to walk him in on this side of heaven.    The promising chance to do that was suddenly taken from her after many years waiting on the Lord for it.    Saddest of all, there’s some chance that satan used this unbiblical doctrine to deceive him into possibly accelerating his own death rather than persevering through the moral pain he was experiencing.

Oh, dear readers who have prodigals running from the Lord anywhere in your families:  satan wishes to sift them like wheat and won’t let their darkened, deceived hearts turn back to the light easily.    He will often get them to turn their own rage and shame on themselves when their house built on the sand starts crumbling, as it inevitably will.    This requires spiritual warfare of the highest order to thwart, usually long distance under no-contact conditions, and often before there is the remotest sign the prodigal was thinking of their true home once in a while.  This requires a spirit-filled Christ-follower praying a wall of fire around the very life and mind of their wayward prodigal, binding the spirit of suicide and binding the enemy of their prodigal’s soul, in the name of Jesus Christ.    SIFC has attended only one Catholic funeral and cannot recall whether purgatory was mentioned in that mass many years ago.    If it is mentioned at this one, it will be painful for this former Catholic who has lost enough already to the ravages of extrabiblical theology.

Is it at all possible that a “holding zone” was a pre-Christ provision to allow OT souls an opportunity to surrender to Christ?

There are many practices in the Judaism of the Old Testament that Christ’s arrival and ministry abrogated and did away with.    The natural reason is that He was born to become the Way, the Truth and the Life…the more excellent way.   Pre-Christ Jews earned their way into heaven by observing the Torah and especially by making the burnt offering sacrifices on a daily basis as atonement for their sins.    Those sacrifices were done away with by historical events shortly after Christ’s death and resurrection.    He was now the sacrifice already poured out, and no man comes to the Father except through Him.    That entails faith in His death as our atonement, wiping the slate clean up to that point, and thereafter walking with a heart of obedience to His commandments and repentance when we fail.  It seems clear that Christ did not ever intend to leave us with an “Option B”, much less an “Option B” that others could effect for us.   In Christ, we don’t have to be perfect in our life choices, but we do have to behave like a people grateful for His atoning death which justifies us.   We have to seek lifelong sanctification, and actively repent when we wander astray.    Ultimate salvation is a process, with accepting our justification as the starting point, and our admission to the marriage supper of the Lamb its consummation point, another fact that casts the idea of a purgatory into considerable doubt, scripturally.   Either we were moving toward that banquet with our heart and feet, or we were moving in the opposite direction at the point of our physical death.

The scripture in 1 Peter 3 points to Christ’s concern for a people who perished in the great flood before either the Abrahamic or Mosaic covenants were made by God.   Their souls were being held somewhere because they did indeed form a congregation of souls whom Peter tells us Christ was able to address before ascending into heaven. The context seems fairly clear that these were the only souls for whom there was not a system of sin atonement provided, because their lives and deaths pre-dated those things.   There was no question that their lives were sinful, for they all perished in the flood who were still alive at the time Noah sealed up the door of the ark, and the book of Genesis states that God regretted having made mankind because they were so evil.   The reliable translation quoted above states that Jesus made a “proclamation” to these pre-flood souls who had perished, while several other popular contemporary English versions say that He “preached” to them (perhaps even imagining an “altar call”).   It’s hard to say what the proclamation was, or whether it was a redemptive proclamation at all, since scripture doesn’t say.    We do know that none of the Apostles nor the early church fathers ever urged Christ-followers to pray for the dead, or otherwise held out hope for salvation after one becomes worm food without having lived in Christ.

The words of the Apostle, Paul:

“But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.  For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.   For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.  Therefore comfort one another with these words.”
– 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
– Romans 8:1

If the dead in Christ will rise when the Bridegroom returns for His church, what will happen to the dead who weren’t in Christ?   What about those (fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, the covetous,  drunkards, revilers, swindlers who did not repent in this life)  we’re told by Paul will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
–  Galatians 5:19-21

The following is what the book of Revelation has to say about what happens to the dead who are not risen with Christ, raptured alive and admitted to the marriage supper of the Lamb:  

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand.   And he laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years;  and he threw him into the abyss, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he would not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were completed; after these things he must be released for a short time.

Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their forehead and on their hand; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.   The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection.   Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years.

Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them.  And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds.   And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire.  And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
– Revelation, chapter 20

When the dead are prayed for in the Roman Catholic Church, is the request for Jesus to write their names in the Lamb’s book, just in case they are in “purgatory”?     There’s at least some scriptural evidence that everyone’s name is written in the book of life when they are born, and removed if they do not die in Christ:

“He who overcomes will thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels.”   – Revelation 3:5

“standerinfamilycourt” also recommends a close read of 1 Corinthians 15, from verse 12 through to the end of the chapter for further deep insight into these things.   There is one more worthwhile point-out to highlight in this passage, however.  It’s Paul’s discussion of being “baptized for the dead” (verse 29):

“Otherwise, what will those do who are baptized for the dead?  If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they baptized for them?”    

This sounds an awful lot like praying for the dead, does it not?   This appears to be something (in context) that only a few Corinthians were actually practicing.     Paul appears to have neither condoned nor condemned it, but used it to make a point of irony in addressing the larger Corinthian heresy afoot:  the belief that the dead are not raised at all.   Dr. Pickering (mentioned above) theorizes this passage to the contrary, in his bible commentary as follows:

“to be ‘dead’, they were once alive, and will be judged on the basis of what they did while they were alive;  once dead their account is closed.   So here Paul is presumably referring to those who are replacing the dead in the ranks of believers by being baptized.   If there is no resurrection, what is the point of doing so, especially if all you’re going to get is persecution?”
(page 376, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken”)

The practice is mentioned nowhere else in the New Testament, nor in early church writings.    The supreme irony of that Corinthian practice is what baptism actually represents:  it is a symbolic burial, marking the death of the old, unregenerated self and the emergence of the regenerated new person in Christ, to Dr. Pickering’s point.    Faith traditions that sprinkle rather than immerse may lose the significance of this, but the Corinthians most likely were immersers, after the still-fresh tradition of Jesus and John the Baptizer originating in the Jordan River.    This Corinthian superstition created a proxy burial for the “benefit” of those already interred.    One good theory is that this was being done for known believers who, for one reason or another, did not get baptized while alive.    It doesn’t appear that Paul was very upset with the practice, because he was never shy about calling out and rebuking true spiritual hazards.   It seems certain that if they were doing it in order to posthumously “save” the unregenerated, or the believing backsliders, Paul certainly would have called it out, as part of his consistent “do not be deceived” messaging.

Good faith, sincere Christians remain divided today about whether baptism is necessary for justification.  “standerinfamilycourt” falls somewhere in the middle on this.    Those who put their trust in Christ but didn’t get baptized for whatever still-obedient reason before dying are justified in Him, because this (by itself) is not enough to remove their name from the Lamb’s book of life.    However,  obedience is necessary to remain on the larger sanctification path that eventually arrives at the marriage supper, and since we are commanded to be baptized, willful refusal to be baptized creates additional obedience problems, and hinders ministry.   SIFC was sprinkled as an infant, and for many years thought that plus my later conversion sufficed, until the Holy Spirit convicted me at age 52 or so to be immersed as an adult disciple, decades after surrendering my life to Christ.    The Apostles never commanded parents to baptize their babies.    They commanded those old enough to surrender their lives to Christ to repent and be baptized.

Who’s in the first resurrection, of those dead who don’t rise with the Rapture, then?    Could some of the prayed-for dead be in this group, instead of in the universally-condemned second resurrection?    Most likely, this first group will be those who die during the millennial reign of Christ, whose names are found in the aforesaid book.

And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,  so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.    –  Hebrews 9:27

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Prayer, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Top 10 Ways Fathers Would Be Helped If “No-Fault” Divorce Laws Were Reformed

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by Standerinfamilycourt

Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), SO THAT IT MAY BE WELL WITH YOU, and that you may live long on the earth.   – Ephesians 6:2-3

A few weeks ago, SIFC wrote about the potential impact of badly-needed divorce reform on the nation’s mothers.   In many ways, that was a hard piece to write, because women consistently file over two-thirds of the unilateral “no-fault” petitions that shred their own families, year in and year out.   They always have a heart-tugging excuse, usually involving some degree of what they perceive to be abuse, from which the children “must be shielded at all costs” (including the violent destruction of the family).   When they take up with another man shortly thereafter (as though that behavior wasn’t even more abusive of the children), it’s only “coincidental” and “he’s who God really had for me”.

Writing that piece felt a bit like saying, “Outlawing your unilateral rebellion against God (and your husband), will benefit you by saving you from God’s wrath.”  In many cases, that’s the actual truth.    On the other hand, when speaking of fathers who give “family courts” permission to shred their own families, such men would be a much smaller proportion of the petitions that have historically been filed.  This law has always been a militant feminist contrivance, and a vehicle for social Marxism, rather than for freedom and human thriving (which, incidentally, God specifically set men in charge of, not women).

Dr. Stephen Baskerville stated quite profoundly that the ultimate goal of the Leftist “social engineers” is to sever fathers from their families.   In fact, according to Dr. Baskerville (@ 7:23-8:33), the only legitimate reason for government to presume to regulate God’s holy ordinance is to preserve its original purpose – to firmly glue fathers to their families for life.

We explained in that earlier piece what a desirable reform in the law would look like, and we repeat it here:

From a constitutional standpoint, allowing for the restoration of our right of religious conscience and free religious exercise under the 1st Amendment, and allowing for 14th Amendment due process and equal protection with regard to parental and property rights, our suggested reforms are:

(1) All petitions that are not mutual filings would require evidence-based proof of serious, objective harm to the marriage or to the offended spouse.     For example, “emotional abuse” would be professionally defined in the statutes in terms of specific behaviors, with professionally documented admissible evidence legally defined

(2) All divisions of property and child custody / welfare arrangements that are not agreed as part of a mutual petition would be determined based on objective evidence of marital fault being the key consideration, with a view to leaving the non-offending party and the children as whole as possible in comparison with pre-divorce conditions.

In many ways, the benefits to fathers from these reforms, are made obvious just by looking at what “family courts” routinely do to fathers, and imagining those things being undone.   Totalitarian family policies are never good for anyone, but on average, fathers as a group have been hit with the most severe overall human suffering resulting from them.

Benefit #10 –  Men would no longer need for fear that marriage will wreck their life and literally criminalize what used to be universally-expected fatherly and husbandly behavior in civilized societies.
We all owe our first loyalties to the eternal kingdom of God, and not to the civil laws of men when they directly conflict with God’s law.   St. Augustine expressed this in his writings, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also evoked this 5th century thought in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he wrote:

“One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’  The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’

“Now, what is the difference between the two?  How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law… “

State policies designed to do anything but encourage national repentance and sustainably raise future citizens...(namely, to instead try to fiscally “manage” the whirlwind consequences of legalized immorality) have degenerated to the point where lawyers deliberately whip up hostility between troubled spouses for their own future profit (which lies not in their reconciliation) , and where states act against taxpayers’ best overall interests in order to secure Federal Title IV-D funds from the men they slanderously label as “deadbeat dads” (although some women have also been finding themselves in this horrific nightmare, as well.)

Benefit #9 –  Dads could serve their country overseas when duty calls, with reasonable assurance there will be a family to come back to, instead of coming back to a perjurous “protective order”.
As unbelievable (and despicable) as it sounds, “family law” attorneys have been known to attend continuing legal education (CLE) classes – such as by this Texas Assistant D.A. – to learn how to abuse the domestic violence protective order system, and to coach their clients on how to gain leverage for their divorce petition settlement (children, property, etc.) through allegations centered around actual or fabricated  post-traumatic-shock syndrome (PTSD).   Tragically, this is routinely used against veterans whose spouse got tired of their deployments in the service of our country and found someone else.   In many states, the wronged spouse has no option to bring a counter petition where adultery (fault) is actually with the petitioning spouse, because that state’s law only provides for “no-fault” grounds, and because it (separately) bars all consideration of marital fault in either child custody or property division orders.   Many states have also repealed or gutted their “alienation of affections” civil cause of action against spouse-poachers in recent years.

Benefit #8 –  Dads would have more authority and influence to prevent  a third party from endangering their children, and would no longer need a court’s permission to do so.
One of the most egregious human rights crimes against families (after the Title IV-D organized crime racket, of course) is banning marital fault as the key consideration in child custody decisions.
We can thank the Sexual Revolution, of course, for outlawing moral judgments on adults in the best interest of the character development of the children.    We can also thank the Sexual Revolution, therefore, for the high level of emotional damage to two generations of children (and counting).

If mom unilaterally divorces dad because he doesn’t make enough money to suit her,  won’t lose his beer gut, or whatever, and plans to shack up with whoever enticed her away, it should be a no-brainer that all other factors being equal, dad should get the kids, and mom should get supervised visits because of her immoral lifestyle.  
That’s the way it used to work, and there was nothing wrong with it.   The kids came first.     Unfortunately, as it stands, dad is even not allowed to tell the court about mom’s contributing adultery in the most evil of the states.   He’s barely allowed to tell the court that the new boyfriend is endangering the children, (and that’s if he’s lucky enough that mom didn’t invent some abuse charges and slap him with a restraining order so that he can’t even gain awareness of what’s going on with his kids.)   No, instead of the authority GOD gave him, he has to go through CPS — who stands to make the state a little money by selling the kids off to strangers called “foster parents”, bypassing dad altogether if he doesn’t happen to have 6-figures in cash to go to court with after he brings forward an abuse or neglect complaint.    When human governments come between a worthy father and his children, God will judge them severely!   In fact, that’s precisely why the analogous slave trade was such an existential threat to the viability of the United States (and other involved countries) to continue as sovereign nations.

Benefit #7 –  Dads would no longer be financing their estranged wife’s illicit subsequent household.
When mom gets custody of the kids in a unilateral forced divorce, dad gets to empty his wallet, regardless of his own fitness as a parent. The court applies a formula to determine how much he pays, and generally it can (and often does) go up, but if his circumstances like health or employment take a hit, there’s no guarantee in a lot of states that the amount will ever go down until the last child is 18. If he doesn’t pay up, the state often can come after any licenses (including professional licenses) that he holds, can publish his name in the paper as a “deadbeat”, and can even jail him for a period of time. If dad holds all or most of the family retirement funds, a “QDRO” (qualified domestic relations order – in a system that bars consideration of marital fault, a.k.a. – “license to steal”) is drawn up to give a good chunk of it to mom (again, without regard to consideration marital fault in a most states),  and if dad was lucky enough to have vested traditional pension benefits, he ludicrously winds up paying mom by the month some day to live in her ongoing immorality.   Responsible Christian husbands sorrowfully dread that this is potentially paying their wife by the month, by court order for life to die in her ongoing immoral state, and thereby have no inheritance in the kingdom of God.   This is the exact opposite of the responsibility God assigned to authentic covenant husbands, and a man might prayerfully consider declining to cooperate with pension QDRO’s and enduring the humanly lawful consequences of civil disobedience, as suggested by St. Augustine and MLK, Jr.

Folks, what the state has actually done here, in banning moral judgments against the petitioner, is facilitate and incentivize spouse-poaching!    (That which is financially rewarded in public policy, you tend to get a lot of, but who wants to live in that kind of a society?)

Benefit #6 –  Dads who save for their children’s education, will have better assurance that this is where the funds will actually go.
For countless corrupt attorneys, obtaining the initial divorce decree tends to function as the “loss leader”,  knowing that the real paycheck for them comes for the next several years following that that “dissolution” when the conflict over the children may continue until the last one reaches age 18.     It is not uncommon for the non-custodial parent to complain that they’ve spent $200,000 or more just to secure the right to see their child enough to carry out their rightful parental role following a forced divorce.   Where does this money come from?  Typically it comes from retirement assets and college savings plans that were supposed to benefit the children.   Instead, the funds must be diverted to attorney fees and court costs. 

Benefit #5- Dad’s wife will no longer be incentivized by “family court”,  nor rewarded for, filing a divorce petition against their innocent husbands.
Texas Family Law Foundation’s chief lobbyist recently testified before the (liberally-skewed) Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee, that requiring mutual consent to access “no-fault” grounds, as HB 922 (2019) and HB93 (2017) would have done, deprives the petitioner of their leverage.  So far so good, since one would have to be brain-dead not to realize allowing the petitioner a little less “leverage” is not quite the evil thing Mr. Bresnan painted it to be.    Where he drifted off into outright falsehood is claiming that non-consensual “no fault” grounds of today’s status-quo in Texas “provides a level playing field”.    We’re frankly not so sure Mr. Bresnan’s nose was finished growing, two weeks later!   Yes, the leverage will shift as a result of requiring mutual consent for “no-fault” grounds.   The U.S. and state constitutions demand that it shift, because what we have now is anything but a level playing field.    But despite the special interest bellowing and subterfuge, it won’t shift nearly enough until “living apart” grounds that accrue in Texas three years later, to the benefit of the abandoner and forced upon the innocent spouse when the latter were neither consulted about the separation nor were they remotely supportive of it.   (There was no 2017 nor 2019 bill addressing back-door “no-fault” grounds via willful abandonment.)

Benefit #4 – Dad’s covenant family will have a much better chance of surviving the apostasy of the family pastor.
Not only is contemporary “family law” a wildly lucrative business model that its beneficiaries feel must be protected at all costs, so is the operation of some local churches – sadly.    Churches don’t tend to become mega-churches by being too choosy who they take money or volunteer efforts from, or how much sin they take onboard right along with the sinner(s).   If that means ignoring or obfuscating God’s word concerning the no-excuses indissolubility of original holy matrimony, or concerning the ongoing adulterous nature of all remarriage while an estranged original spouse is still living, or concerning the clear biblical qualifications for pastors and deacons, so be it!    (After all, we don’t want to be “Pharisees”, do we?)    In fact, most seminaries today teach future pastors an apostate gospel when it comes to divorce and remarriage, and most contemporary English bible translations have been crafted to back that apostate gospel up accordingly.   Indeed, Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox together created an origin point for that false gospel, which was relatively easy to do when the masses were illiterate and bibles were too expensive for most people who could read at the time.    Hence, most pastors today reject what Jesus made clear in the original texts, that humans have no power from God to “dissolve” holy matrimony, and there are no “biblical exceptions” to this.  Such pastors have blinded eyes when it comes to seeing how their performing an adulterous wedding over mom and her new boyfriend (likely, another living woman’s legally-estranged husband) absolutely crushes the souls of the covenant children of the real marriage(s).

Dr. Ryan Anderson, co-author of  “What is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense” (2012) famously said, “the law is a teacher”.   This was not exactly original, he borrowed this observation from St. Paul, but logically extended the application of that scripture from the Apostle’s original thought:

“Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.  But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.”  – Galatians 3:24-25

Dr. Anderson argues that even an immoral law takes on an air of pseudo-righteousness when it has police power and court decrees behind it, because we are usually raised to respect civil authority…(indeed, some Christians go so far as to apply Romans 13 to blatantly immoral civil laws.)   This legality in the eyes of men gives pastors a lot of “cover” over time to forget souls and give people what their flesh wants, especially if carnal believers are now in the majority and what they want has been temporally legal for a long time.  True disciples who challenge them  based on God’s word can then be pasted as “dividers of the brethren” and treated roughly.    This actually happened to a 15-year old girl from Canada who visited a Missouri apostate church full of divorced and remarried folk, and spoke up while there about one such couple, according to the account of her marriage permanence pastor, Phil Schlamp (see sermon 5, @ 33.50).   Something similar, but much more severe happened to a covenant wife when a megachurch in Florida colluded with her prodigal husband to stage an “incident” on their premises and had her falsely arrested for “battery” a few years ago when she simply quoted scripture in the pastor’s office challenging the church for installing this adulterous man as a deacon and agreeing to his adulterous wedding to a harlotrous woman in that church.    “What about my husband’ soul?” she asked this hireling.   Although Jesus would firmly disagree, he responded:  “There’s no such thing as an adulterous marriage.”   This prodigal husband tragically died of cancer, still in his sinful union and without Christ, a handful of years later.

The closer man’s laws can be brought to reflect God’s laws, the better it is for avoiding corruption in both families and pastors.

Benefit #3 –  Dads will be far less  likely suffer alienation from their children if they themselves lead a morally upright life, rather than having  routine “family court” abuses remain entirely out of their control, as it is now.
Even with the most moral civil laws that can be drawn up, there’s no stopping mom from leaving if that’s what she wants to do.   At best, there’s only economic deterrence from doing so, and moral protection of the children from normalized exposure to her adulterous or sodomous partner.   Under current law, when mom leaves, the kids are going to be exposed to her immoral life choices regardless of who gets custody.    It behooves dads to realize that heavy-handed government was never delegated any authority from God over a man’s children that would exceed his own authority over them.   The best interests of the child is meaningless drivel in a pagan courtroom, with judges driven by illicit Federal subsidies to break up families, and by enforcing coercive sexual autonomy in favor of selfish people.    However, if despite the profoundly immoral environment, dad lives before his children a godly example, and continues to teach them right and wrong from the bible, he is occupying the territory God assigned exclusively to him.   God will “have his back” in it, and will move mountains in his behalf.    Just remember, if you don’t want your son running after another woman should his future wife divorce him, don’t do so yourself.

Benefit #2 – Dads will have a restored legal basis for discharging the higher duty God has charged them with, as the spiritual head of the (biblical, covenant) wife and the covenant children (a basic Bill of Rights protection:  the free exercise of religion).
There is an Old Testament story that is very sad, because it demonstrates how seriously God takes a father’s assignment from Him, and doesn’t take excuses for shirking this responsibility based on the surrounding environment.   We read in 1 Samuel 2 about the priest, Eli who had two grown sons who were also priests in the temple of the Lord, but abused their priesthood by being sexually immoral and misusing the animal sacrifices brought by the people.   The two sons are described as “worthless men who did not know the Lord and the custom of the priests with the people.”   And why was that, if their father was a judge, and a priest of God who lived with them?
Scripture doesn’t elaborate any further, but clearly the implication is that their father had not very faithfully carried out his responsibility to train them.  In fact, the implication in the next chapter is that Eli did a better job of training Samuel, who was sent to the temple as a boy to serve there.   Scripture tells as that Eli sharply rebuked his sons as adults, but by then it was too late to change either their behavior or their ultimate fate in posterity.    Another man of God came to Eli with God’s pronouncement of judgment on the house of Eli:   “Why do you kick at My sacrifice and at My offering which I have commanded in My dwelling, and honor your sons above Me, by making yourselves fat with the choicest of every offering of My people Israel?’  Therefore the Lord God of Israel declares, ‘I did indeed say that your house and the house of your father should walk before Me forever’; but now the Lord declares, ‘Far be it from Me—for those who honor Me I will honor, and those who despise Me will be lightly esteemed.   Behold, the days are coming when I will break your strength and the strength of your father’s house so that there will not be an old man in your house…all the increase of your house will die in the prime of life….This will be the sign to you which will come concerning your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas: on the same day both of them will die.” 
The story picks again up in chapter 4  when the adult Samuel is now in charge (rather than either son), Eli is now 98 years old, and Israel is in the process of being defeated in battle by the Philistines.   Both “priestly” sons died in battle after the Ark of the Covenant was misused then captured by the enemy.    A man came to inform old Eli…“When he mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell off the seat backward beside the gate, and  his neck was broken and he died, for he was old and heavy….”    The Lord held Eli responsible for failing to teach his sons properly as boys, and wasn’t taking any excuses.  Today, under the Messianic covenant, every household is a mini-church and every father of that home a priest.   Today the cutting off of manhood is taking a very different form, but the overall effect is the same.    Blessed is the man who asks the Lord to do battle for him to make a way through and around our immoral family laws, so that he can carry out this priestly and fatherly duty, despite the outward circumstances.

Benefit #1 – Dads will have a reduced risk of falling into the sin of remarriage adultery and forfeiting their own soul by dying in that immoral state.
For those who don’t follow our blog on a regular basis, we make no apologies for regularly talking about heaven and hell here.   It’s truly regrettable that we have to do so, because God really gave that job to His shepherds, most of whom have not only rejected the responsibility, but also rejected an enormous body of biblical truth-telling in order to appease the Sexual Revolution and keep warm buns with full wallets in their pews.    We make no apologies for not leaving God out of the “no-fault” reform debate, nor out of the more general “culture wars”.   We don’t think, due to the demonic nature of this fight, that the war can possibly be won any other way.    You won’t hear much about “natural law” around here.   Instead, you’ll hear about God’s law!

It became culturally uncouth to speak of hell sometime back in the 1960’s, especially in churches, as if eternal moral consequences for persisting in wicked life choices were suddenly declared passe’ from On-High.    The Apostles clearly did not hold this attitude, nor did most of the 1st through 4th century church fathers, even when speaking of the born-again.

Circa 100 A.D., the Bishop of Antioch said this in his Epistle to the Ephesians,

“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

No, this wicked idea that “remarriage” while an original spouse is still alive could ever be accepted by God as holy matrimony was an unfortunate time-bomb, a product of 16th century Reformation humanism (as was “replacement theology”, against which the Apostle Paul also warned).    Eventually, this heresy removed inhibitions against enacting immoral family and reproductive laws in western nations, and deceived the lawmakers who today uphold these laws into having the audacity to call themselves “Christians”.   This was also the reason why some conservative denominations made the eternally fatal choice in the 1970’s to revise their once-biblical doctrine to accommodate the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, instead of standing strong against them anywhere close to the way they stood against gay “marriage”.

Jesus preached a 3-part definition of adultery, and part 3 actually precludes any notion of “biblical exceptions” we hear so much about:

(1) to lust in one’s heart after someone other than our living spouse (Matt. 5:27-28)
(2) to divorce a spouse in order to remarry (Mark 10:11-12)
(3) to marry any divorced person (and by corollary, to marry someone after being involuntarily divorced – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b; Luke 16:18b)

In Matthew 5:27-32 Jesus tell us that adultery doesn’t just occur extramaritally, but it occurs just as much inside of the “remarriages” of seemingly respectable church-going people, and by His reference to cutting off of our hands and gouging out our eyes rather than taking the first step toward this abomination, He alludes to this conduct leading to hell as the (unrepentant) destination.   Later on, He directly and graphically says so in Luke 16:18-31.

While it’s not strictly necessary for pastors and lawmakers to visualize their sheep (and constituents) in the hell-flames to get the former onboard with moral divorce reforms in civil law, it sure doesn’t hurt. Pastors who do see this connection usually don’t perform the kinds of weddings that directly drive the demand for “no-fault” divorces. If lawmakers could see their adulterously remarried constituents in the resulting hell-flames as a repeal bill is before them, and if they knew that what the martyred Ignatius had to say was a certainty concerning the corrupters of families, it wouldn’t matter whether they were liberal or conservative, they would vote for the repeal of marriage “dissolution” laws altogether. Getting the state “out of the marriage business” would include getting the state out of the divorce business to the same extent!

Nine of these benefits to fathers (and future fathers) are temporal but extend to the 1000th generation, according to God’s word. The #1 benefit to fathers of biblically-moral family laws, however, is eternal.

Happy Father’s Day to those who can celebrate today with their children.  Joyous Fathers Day to those whose messy circumstances lead them to find extra comfort in the Lord, and greater dependence upon Him.

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,
And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.
– Proverbs 13:22

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!  

 

Discipleship, Divorce, Lost culture, marriage, Marriage Restoration, morality, Prayer, Spiritual Warfare

Remain Chaste or Be Reconciled: Two Co-Equal “Options” Per The Apostle?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

“And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

To the woman He said,
“I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you.”
– Genesis 3:15-16

But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband (but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
– 1 Corinthians 7:10-11

Jack and Jill were joined in inseverable holy matrimony many years ago.   Upon valid, witnessed vows, God’s hand created a one-flesh new entity, with which He then unconditionally covenanted as the superior party.   Jack and Jill had no children in the brief time before their estrangement, and after a time, Jill began to feel emotionally-abused by Jack.    Jill reasoned that this was because she must have married Jack “outside God’s will” and satan, more than happy to oblige, whispered to her: “if you stay, this is going to turn physical”.
(The Evil One’s very name, it should be noted, literally means “accuser of men”.)    She availed herself of man’s unilateral no-fault divorce laws, after the fashion of the majority of women in our culture.    Not long thereafter, she “married” Jim, thinking she could now have a Christ-centered marriage.    The hireling pastor involved was no obstacle to the second wedding.   Domestically, Jim was better able to manage Jill’s emotions than Jack, and children were born into this adulterous union.   Several more years passed.

One day Jill encountered serious covenant marriage standers online who pointed out the mountain of truth in God’s word that “remarriage” to another while her original husband lives is adultery, not just on the wedding night, but every night thereafter.   At first, Jill quite naturally resisted, but nevertheless she took some time to study the word of God for herself with an open heart to obey, to do whatever was necessary to follow Christ completely, and eventually the Holy Spirit persuades her to get out of this adulterous-but-happy second marriage.  She was able to eventually persuade Jim, which enabled a mutual consent petition and voluntary shared parenting arrangements.

Meanwhile, Jack has come to a very different place spiritually than when his bride was last willing to live with him.    He, too, has been absorbing God’s word, is relieved that Jill is no longer living in papered-over adultery, and it appears he hopes for reconciliation.      He is gentle in his efforts to woo Jill back, and hopefully, much is happening in prayer that the rest of us don’t see except in his manner.     If Jack became entangled during the years of estrangement, he too has become disentangled.  We don’t really know yet, and only God knows, whether Jack is ready spiritually to resume and sustain their union, non-covenant children in tow, under the same roof, but his heart appears open to growing his own discipleship.   He has publicly apologized to Jill and expressed regret for the emotional pain he caused her in their marriage.    All of this puts Jack and Jill light years ahead of most estranged Christian couples on the path to the kingdom of God, and is truly a cause for rejoicing even though reconciliation doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.

Enter the blind guide:  Joe means well, but like all of us shepherdless sheep, is no less vulnerable to being controlled by emotions and scars.   Joe runs a local “house church” and a very large standers’ ministry.   Joe has been legally estranged from his covenant wife for a couple of decades, and would probably prefer not to be reconciled, for a variety of reasons.    He frankly wouldn’t have time for her if she did get out of her adulterous “remarriage”, and he routinely refers to her as his “ex”, neither cringing  nor voicing objections when countless other professing “Christians” do the same.   Brother Joe has undergone the further pain of being emotionally alienated by the actions of his wayward wife from his (now-grown) children and sadly hasn’t seen any of them, much less his grandchildren, in many years.    Joe now leads a vibrant “single” life which includes freedom, travel, financial autonomy, mission trips and several ministries.   He reasons that this is in keeping with much of the rest of what the Apostle Paul advocated in the 7th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians about kingdom of God fruitfulness from forsaking marriage altogether, if one is “not bound” to a wife.     He considers himself “single” rather than part of an unsevered one-flesh entity.    Joe devoted a recorded group teaching delivered to the rest of the large stander community about this issue, saying that verse 11,  gives estranged covenant spouses two “options”.   Says Joe, they are not required by scripture to reconcile.    It says right there in that verse, they can “remain unmarried”  – or -they can reconcile.

Is Joe right?   Or is he really just a Christ-robed “MGTOW*” ?
(*rightly-disgruntled “men going their own way”)

We’ll get the technical part of this discussion over with early, so that we can return to a robust discussion of submitted discipleship as a true follower of Christ.   One more thing needs to be said first:  every disciple needs a certain amount of judgment-free space to “work out their own salvation with fear and trembling” once they do have the accurate scriptural facts–and unless there’s some strong indication that the brother or sister is acting in willful hypocrisy while knowing and rejecting the truth, they are entitled to the presumption of good faith in pursuit of God’s will and His truth.    Jill and Joe have much in common in many ways, and one of those ways is they are both in this particular good-faith “boat”.     Satan’s “no-fault” attack on marriage, and its horrible consequences in the church  has been a “doozie” from which it’s not been easy to recover, most of us would agree.

It should by now be no surprise to regular followers of “7 Times Around the Jericho Wall” blog to hear “standerinfamilycourt” remind that the answer to rightly dividing scriptures like 1 Corinthians 7:11 boils down to not taking any shortcuts in applying the 5 basic principles of sound hermeneutics:  Content, Context, Culture, Comparison, and Consultation.    We have gone into great depth in previous blogs about applying the study technique, so this post will be a “cliff notes” revisit.   Despite anyone’s praying, fasting and seeking the Lord for their personal answer, after which they will “feel lead to…”,  SIFC is going to posit that someone who takes 1 Corinthians 7:11 as “two co-equal options” (remain chaste, be reconciled) has stopped superficially at Content, and didn’t really dig very deeply into that one.


(scripture4all.org  Greek Interlinear Text Tool.  Please click to enlarge.)

A couple of quick point-outs about the content of this scripture:

(1) it speaks of involuntary estrangement (choresthetai – literally, to “put distance between”, as the literal furrows in a plowed field), and is not a recognition of any validity for legal “dissolution” of the marriage.   Neither does it validate the reciprocation of that estrangement, which would be incompatible with Christ’s concept of one-flesh (sarx mia), and would excuse both spouses from their 1 Cor. 11:3 roles in the kingdom of God, with which the involuntary estrangement is interfering.    Most importantly, it prescribes a disciple’s gracious response to a circumstance that remains beyond their control.

(2) we must not overlook the importance of Paul beginning this instruction with utter clarity about Whose instruction (commandment) this is: “But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife not leave her husband“.   (Some translations insert “should” here, but neither the text nor the parsing gives them any support for implying such permissiveness.)

(3) Nowhere in all of 1 Corinthians 7 does Paul ever address “divorced” people, or ever recognize man’s divorce as having any validity whatsoever.   He speaks of illicit legal proceedings in 1 Corinthian 6, but ceases to speak of it there.    Elsewhere, Paul tells us in no uncertain terms that God’s “divorce” is always spelled “D-E-A-T-H”.    If that were not so, Paul would be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

(With points 2 and 3 above, we have segued into the Context principle, which SIFC could take much further, but instead refers our readers to prior blogs.)   We simply say that the advocates of co-equal “options” in 1 Corinthians 7 really can’t go here, and don’t dare go here without corrupting or conflating who Paul was addressing in each section of this epistle.    When he speaks of the “unmarried” “being free of concern for a spouse” hindering them from the kingdom of God, he is not speaking of “dedetai”  but of “dedoulotai”.
Scripture consistency demands the understanding that the estranged covenant spouse is nevertheless “married”, in Paul’s parlance (and Christ’s).

We must remember that Paul got his instructions for marriage from spending three years of direct time with the resurrected Jesus, as he tell us in Galatians 1:

“But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went away to Arabia, and returned once more to Damascus.  Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas (Peter)…”

When Paul says, “not I but the Lord”, this is a much stronger statement than if he’d merely been taught by the rest of the Apostles after his conversion, both by the amount of instruction time involved (equal to time spent by Christ with His disciples) and by the force with which he says it.    Any woman who leaves her husband permanently is in sin.   If she leaves him even temporarily for any reason short of physical safety, she is in sin.  She is actually rebelling against God’s sentence in Genesis 3:16, and its NT echo in 1 Corinthians 11:3.   This is as true of Jill as it is of Joe’s wife.    It is true even after she gets out of a faux “marriage” that, for however many years, has been masquerading as her true marriage.   Will this particular state of sin keep her out of heaven, or just reduce her rewards?  SIFC humbly submits that this depends on her heart being of the same hardness as the “unmerciful servant” of Matthew 18:23-35, and would strongly recommend gambling on the eternally safe side of that gamble (more about that below).

But who else is in sin?   Early church father Hermes tells us in a writing called “The Shepherd of Hermas”, of which there is documentary evidence that the Apostle’s disciples attributed the weight of scripture (in other words, conviction of Holy Spirit inspiration):

Mandate 4
1[29]:1 “I charge thee, “saith he, “to keep purity, and let not a thought enter into thy heart concerning another’s wife, or concerning fornication, or concerning any such like evil deeds; for in so doing thou commitest a great sin. But remember thine own wife always, and thou shalt never go wrong.
1[29]:2 For should this desire enter into thine heart, thou wilt go wrong, and should any other as evil as this, thou commitest sin. For this desire in a servant of God is a great sin; and if any man doeth this evil deed, he worketh out death for himself.
1[29]:3 Look to it therefore. Abstain from this desire; for, where holiness dwelleth, there lawlessness ought not to enter into the heart of a righteous man.”
1[29]:4 I say to him, “Sir, permit me to ask thee a few more questions” “Say on,” saith he. “Sir,” say I, “if a man who has a wife that is faithful in the Lord detect her in adultery, doth the husband sin in living with her?”
1[29]:5 “So long as he is ignorant,” saith he, “he sinneth not; but if the husband know of her sin, and the wife repent not, but continue in her fornication, and her husband live with her, he makes himself responsible for her sin and an accomplice in her adultery.”
1[29]:6 “What then, Sir,” say I, “shall the husband do, if the wife continue in this case?” “Let him divorce(*) her,” saith he, “and let the husband abide alone: but if after divorcing (*) his wife he shall marry another, he likewise committeth adultery.”
1[29]:7 “If then, Sir,” say I, “after the wife is divorced (*), she repent and desire to return to her own husband, shall she not be received?”
1[29]:8 “Certainly,” saith he, “if the husband receiveth her not, he sinneth and bringeth great sin upon himself; nay, one who hath sinned and repented must be received, yet not often; for there is but one repentance for the servants of God. For the sake of her repentance therefore the husband ought not to marry. This is the manner of acting enjoined on husband and wife.
1[29]:9 Not only,” saith he, “is it adultery, if a man pollute his flesh, but whosoever doeth things like unto the heathen committeth adultery. If therefore in such deeds as these likewise a man continue and repent not, keep away from him, and live not with him. Otherwise, thou also art a partaker of his sin.
1[29]:10 For this cause ye were enjoined to remain single, whether husband or wife; for in such cases repentance is possible.

[   SIFC:  (*) This translation of The Shepherd uses the words “put away” (or, send away) instead of “divorce”, and here is the original Greek text –

where the word “apoluo” was used (literally meaning: “from-loose”) which most of the early church fathers considered a separation only from “bed and board”- not necessarily a legal dissolution, though Hermes’ writing indeed indicates that Roman law, similar to today’s “condonation” provisions in some U.S. states, may have immorally required this in order to legally exonerate the husband from presumptions of “complicity”.]    This distinction is important because it helps establish that the disciples’ disciples such as Hermes only recognized legal divorce as a man-made contrivance, and (like Jesus) didn’t really hold that it dissolved the actual union.   

 Note, however, that Hermes specifically charged one-flesh spouses with the duty of care over each other’s souls, and so portrays the Holy Spirit as commanding reconciliation consistent with no-excuses indissolubility, so far as it depends upon us.      This would be consistent with the sharp warning Jesus gave in Matthew 18:23-35, also with 2 Corinthians 5:18 and Romans 12:17-19, as well as with 1 Corinthians 7:2-3.    Some who can’t presently bring themselves to obey in this area will try to call this idea that reconciliation is mandatory, “legalism”.   “standerinfamilycourt” appreciates Leonard Ravenhill’s take on legalism, and would suggest taking great care before obedience to an apparent heaven-or-hell commandment is dismissed by a Christ-follower as “legalism”, even though many contemporary “Christians” do so almost reflexively.

“standerinfamilycourt”  personally admits accepting this commandment reluctantly, since a returned spouse in this instance means one who is likely to come back to a financially and emotionally stable household with shattered health and finances, not to even mention a mountain of debt trailing behind as one more evidence of God’s merciful attempt to change their “free will”.    (The Prodigal Son came back home with the stench of hog manure on him and still was draped with his father’s best robe before finding a bathtub.)  Cherished activities and ministries may have to be given up with little or no notice to others.   Oh that Paul had left us with two equally moral options, of which we could “opt” to fulfill the easier of the two!  But a repenting spouse who dies in his or her sins because we refused to lay down our lives the way Jesus did, is infinitely and eternally worse for us, as the prodigal’s “other half”.    Let such a thing as allowing a prodigal to die in their sin be God’s decision, never SIFC’s!

With this last bit of discussion, we’ve just applied three more principles of sound hermeneutics to 1 Corinthians 7:11 – remain chaste or be reconciled:  Culture, Comparison and Consultation.

As readers might imagine, there is a real Jill and a real Jack in the online marriage permanence community.   One of them appears to be earnestly seeking to reconcile and the other has been making some powerful YouTube videos that have raised some of these questions about reconciliation.    The reconciliation-seeker goes so far as to comment about their intentions on their one-flesh’s YouTube posts, apologizing for what happened.   May God protect this pair from satan’s interference until His full will is done.    Both spouses may be “newbies” when it comes to all the implications of the indissolubility of holy matrimony.   At least one of the spouses makes clear that they need additional time and space to process all that repentance entails, and SIFC would agree they deserve it, so long as their true heart is to obey.    The reluctant spouse is also considering the feelings of the children born into the noncovenant “marriage”, perhaps very wisely, though obedience to Christ usually resolves such matters in due time.   Certainly it is prudent for the reluctant spouse to not act in a way that would mislead the children to believe that getting out of the noncovenant union with their other parent was being done for reasons the world (and worldly church) would regard as “adulterous”.      That spouse has asserted the voice of the Holy Spirit in “not being told to reconcile”.    It is not wrong to aspire to be Spirit-led, but we should remember that the person of the Holy Spirit never leads in contradiction to scripture, even where scripture’s application has been obscured by contemporary culture.    (To round out the discussion, SIFC also notes the previous posts addressing some Anabaptist sects who (for other reasons) falsely teach that reconciliation with the spouse of our youth after repenting of an adulterous noncovenant “marriage” is actually “sinful”.)

In Dr. Eggerson’s classic Christian book,  “Love and Respect”, he echoes the marriage instructions of Peter and Paul  in commanding the husband to love his wife, but commanding the wife to respect her husband.    A husband who effectively “writes off” the soul of his prodigal wife (and sometimes their children) after “remarriage”, by treating the instructions to remain chaste or be reconciled as “either / or” options at his own choosing,  does not love her the way Hosea loved Gomer, nor the way Paul describes in Ephesians 5.     As a result, he is directly contributing to her disrespect and continued prodigal state, and probably her perception of him as a “hypocrite”, since he’s wearing Christ as a large badge, but not modeling Christ toward her very well.    The wife who refuses a repenting husband his God-assigned role of her “head”, does not respect him, and by extension, does not respect Christ in him or over him.   In time, her one-flesh husband will revert to a lack of sacrificial love.

About the gamble, mentioned above, between “loss of rewards” and loss of eternal soul.    Will street ministry, group teaching calls, YouTube videos on marriage permanence make up for letting our one-flesh spouse’s soul go uncared for as a result of exercising this “option”?

 According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each man must be careful how he builds on it.For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.
– 1 Corinthians 3:10-16

We can’t take our ministry materials through this fire and expect them to survive, obviously.    We can only take the souls we influenced correctly by those materials through the fire.    SIFC would suggest that if we guess wrong here, by virtue of having produced those materials, there won’t be any souls to present.   If Christ’s warnings elsewhere concerning heaven-or-hell issues, like authentic forgiveness, and discipleship through imitating Him by laying down our lives are true without exceptions, there won’t even be a pass at that fire that tests our works.

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.’

For these strong reasons, it is wrong, selfish and rebellious against the kingdom of God to treat 1 Corinthians 7:11 as presenting two equally-acceptable “stand-alone” options, rather than as dependent commandments (“A”, if not “B”).   It should be clear from all of Paul’s other instructions that he wrote this instruction with a preference for “both / and” (not “either / or”).    After all, reversing the logic and supposing that Jill had left Jack for the “abuse” of having come to Christ, and Jack had remarried, would simply reconciling with Jill absolve Jack from the need to confess his adulterous, noncovenant union as sin and forsake it forever?    Of course not!

Wherefore I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. For to this end also I wrote, so that I might put you to the test, whether you are obedient in all things. But one whom you forgive anything, I forgive also; for indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ, so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes.
– 2 Corinthians 2:8-11

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

 

Church Discipline, Discipleship, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

Miami Megachurch Had Covenant Wife Literally Arrested for “Standing”

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by Standerinfamilycourt

“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” – Matt. 5:11-12

The covenant marriage “stander” community has its leaders who organize weekly conference calls where testimonies and other encouragements are offered to those who are believing God to pull their prodigal spouse out of an adulterous state-sanctioned (perhaps, even church-“sanctified”) but God-forbidden “remarriage”, thereby restoring justified, regenerated souls to the kingdom of God once the sin is confessed as sin, and renounced by the penitent prodigal spouse.   This, of course, is the only “biblical grounds for (man’s) divorce” that has ever existed, from the beginning.    In all such cases, the biblical ground is based on the fact that God has never created a one-flesh (Greek: sarx mia) entity due to the undissolved prior covenant and unlawful nature of the union.    This is why Jesus consistently and repeatedly calls such legalized unions where there is a living, estranged true spouse adultery — not so much for moral reasons, but actually for metaphysical reasons, and because a holy God cannot and will not ever covenant with sin.  The word of God is crystal clear that only physical death, not man’s paper, dissolves original God-joined holy matrimony unions between a widowed or never-married man and a widowed or never-married woman.

These online groups are so vital to this marriage permanence community because standers, and those who do exit their papered-over adulterous “marriages” in Spirit-led repentance, can often find themselves subject to intense persecution, some of the most vicious of which is at the hands of other so-called “Christians”, and inexcusably, sometimes by churches that have some scurrilous reason to aid and abet an adulterous legalized union.  Such was the riveting testimony of Tracy Jordan in a recent conference call – link to the May, 2019 audio replay is here.   Listening to the audio is strongly encouraged for readers who have the time, as there are details and drama of the story not highlighted in this post.

Tracy relates on the call that she was five years into her first covenant marriage when her husband began a pattern of infidelity, and that there had been a generational legacy of divorce in her birth family.   She married her husband in 2000 after several years of cohabiting, and was happy that he would be the sole-provider and she a homemaker after the biblical model.   She was concerned about the curse of the family legacy of fragmentation, and hoped that this marriage would be until death.    When her husband asked her for a divorce after a few years of standing for her adultery-embattled marriage, she refused to sign the papers, and started going to church on her own.    She then found out that her husband had applied to become a deacon in a Miami megachurch at the same time he was in the process of unilaterally divorcing her, under Florida’s family-hostile “no-fault” law, in order to continue and cover up his ongoing adultery with a member of that church.

Tracy made an appointment with the leadership of the church who had made her estranged husband a deacon, Tracy following the biblical model for addressing sin in the body of Christ, and Paul’s guidelines concerning the qualifications for church leadership.    She was not allowed to see the head pastor, but was granted an appointment with an assistant pastor.     When she arrived at the church for the appointment, she found her husband and his adulteress in the assistant pastor’s office, and as she was soon about to violently find out, they had, perhaps without the head pastor’s knowledge, pre-arranged for a police squad car to pull up out front of the church.   Also in the office were two church security goons, at the ready.    Tracy pleaded scripture to the assembled group, warning of the sin of this church in facilitating the planned adulterous nuptials between this pair, quoting Mark 10:11-12 and Romans 7:2-3.   She says she was then seized by church security and bodily thrown to the ground outside.   The waiting police then arrested her, charging her with “simple battery” because she had tried to push the church security guards away, telling them, “don’t touch me!”    Not only was the assistant pastor guilty of collusion with the adulterous pair and the police, but the police were guilty of collusion in being eyewitnesses to the unprovoked assault by the security guards, in basically “reversing the charges”.

Tracy writes this in a  Sept 2016 post:

“I commend you once again sister Henry.. (addressing an author and leader in the marriage permanence community who left an adulterous remarriage of 17 years, Sharon L. Fitzhenry)… for your stand and dedication on this critical issue of marriage, divorce and remarriage. I was arrested a couple of years ago in church here in Miami, because my husband divorced me and married another woman in the church.

“I confronted the Leadership with Matthew 19:9, during a bible study lesson and there was a uproar in the congregation with me being arressted.   I would have done the same thing over again, because it wasn’t like I was John the Baptist, going to be beheaded!  I was with my husband for 19 years before he divorced me. I tried to fight for my husband’s soul, because I didn’t commit adultery, and I knew what state that would put him in.    A lost state! he had no biblical right to divorce me.  The church, cosigned, condoned and contributed to adultery. After the drama was over, I moved forward with my children, unfortunately two years later, my husband developed lung cancer and died. He died in his sins!

“God took one Rib! not spare Ribs! No man should divorce his wife, because she gained two pounds or burned the chicken last night!  My husband was a deacon of the church! I warn those that teach this damnable Doctrine, because many souls will be lost because of it. Marriage is a Covenant, not a Contract!
It’s until her last breath or yours!

“I didn’t make the rules, I just follow them.  A pastor told me that there was no such thing as an adulterous marriage.  Once you remarry, the second time, God honors that marriage. That’s not what the Bible teaches! As far as divorce and reconciliation to your first marriage partner, we find in Jeremiah 3:8, that God divorced faithless Israel and gave her a certificate of divorce and sent her away, because of her adulteries, but God reconciled himself back to Israel, once she repented! The story of Hosea and Gomer, depicts God’s undying love for Israel. Hosea was God! God was married to Israel! As husband’s and wives, we need to love like that. We need to forgive like that. We need to drag the hurts we have been harboring against each other in our hearts to the cross of Christ- it’s where we lay our burdens of guilt and shame. Only in him will we find true forgiveness. When we fully forgive each other , our minds will be released from the bondage of resentment that has been building a wall between us, and we shall be free to grow in our relationship with each other as husband and wife in holy matrimony!”

Covenant marriage standers bear many sorrows, but the loss of their one-flesh’s eternal soul to death before repentance (with the full complicity of a harlot church) has to be the very worst of these.   Every stander living under the crushing burden of an unreconciled marriage and family dreads this occurrence beyond anything else.   Many have this burden lifted by the return of their prodigal home to the Lord and to the home in this life, sometimes after decades of running away from Him.   A tragic few do not.   Tracy’s husband died in his adulterous remarriage only a few years after entering it.

Tracy relates on the conference call that she was eventually exonerated and acquitted of the criminal complaint after a trial that went on for eight months, and which depleted her financial resources.    This is the all-too-common lot for an innocent spouse who dares to seek any kind of justice for what modern “family laws” routinely inflict on them by giving preference to the offending spouse, and subjugating the fundamental rights of the non-offending spouse.  
In too many such cases, the innocent spouse is punished by both civil and criminal laws, though they’ve done nothing morally wrong.   Tracy relates that she was ultimately unsuccessful in recovering civil damages for the false arrest because one of the officers subsequently went to prison for an unrelated matter.    She eventually received an apology from the head pastor of this church that conspired to have her arrested.

Tracy is now married to a biblically-eligible man, but at an unthinkable, staggering eternal loss, following the untimely, unrepentant death of her first husband.    Today Tracy is a grandmother, and she works as a volunteer in a shelter for abused women in Florida.

And indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.
– 2 Timothy 3:12

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | “Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Church Discipline, citizenship, Discipleship, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Substantive Due Process

Top 10 Ways Mothers Would Be Helped If “No-Fault” Divorce Laws Were Reformed

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constitution-burningReaganby Standerinfamilycourt

Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), SO THAT IT MAY BE WELL WITH YOU, and that you may live long on the earth.   – Ephesians 6:2-3

Mother’s Day 2018 has come and gone, and it’s now Mother’s Day 2019.   In sharp contrast with Mother’s Day 1968, here are a few miserable facts:

  • Over 40% of children are born into fatherless homes outside of civil wedlock, and in some races this is as high as 70%
  • Over two-thirds of the unilateral divorce petitions are filed by WOMEN, yet most of these same women never recover financially and may easily retire impoverished
  •  Some 80% of those filed petitions are non-mutual – that is, opposed by an innocent spouse who has not objectively done anything to harm the filing spouse or the marriage
  • Taxpayers, including divorcees, foot a bill for well over $100 billion per year in state and Federal costs arising from the social expense of state-accelerated family breakdown

What would beneficial reform look like?   From a constitutional standpoint, allowing for the restoration of our right of religious conscience and free religious exercise under the 1st Amendment, and allowing for 14th Amendment equal protection with regard to parental and property rights, our suggested reforms are:

(1) All petitions that are not mutual filings would require evidence-based proof of serious, objective harm to the marriage or to the offended spouse.     For example, “emotional abuse” would be professionally defined in the statutes in terms of specific behaviors, with professionally documented admissible evidence legally defined

(2) All divisions of property and child custody / welfare arrangements that are not agreed as part of a mutual petition would be determined based on objective evidence of marital fault being the key consideration, with a view to leaving the non-offending party and the children as whole as possible in comparison with pre-divorce conditions

(Yes, we readily concede that this would be creating substantial economic disincentives to dissolution of the marriage, and we make no apologies.   The present system actively rewards the one seeking the divorce and actively punishes the innocent spouse who dares resist in any way.)

So what are the specific benefits to families and society (hence, to mothers) from these reforms?

Benefit #10 –  They’d be more prone to have marriage as a realistic and durable option in their life.
We hear this from the cohabiting young adults all the time, including households with kids but unmarried parents: “what’s the point of getting married?”   Despite the social do-gooders who cheerlead with shallow slogans like “put a ring on it”, the kids sense the government power-grab that unilateral “no-fault” divorce imposes on their lives and pocketbooks, and many of them have been saying “no thanks” for several years now.    Even if they’re not old enough to remember a time when the marriage contract was binding (absent some provable serious fault), they know the current civil contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, especially when they see 50 and 60-year olds who have been successfully married for decades suddenly unable to stay out of the jaws of the “family court” machinery.

Benefit #9 – Their kids and life companions would be less likely to commit suicide.
This is not to say that in the halcyon days when the marriage contract was reasonably binding, there weren’t murders and suicides of wives.   All one has to do is watch the old “Twilight Zone”, “Perry Mason” and “Alfred Hitchcock” episodes from the early-1960’s to know that this was an issue which probably justified some measured reform of divorce laws to allow for mutual consent  “no-fault” grounds — and arms-length property and child settlements.  But, certainly not the travesty we wound up with: unilaterally-asserted “irreconcilable differences” grounds, where the innocent was assumed guilty by the courts upon the allegation of one spouse, and no evidence to the contrary would be tolerated or heard or appealed, and where the guilty party was rewarded while the innocent party was smeared and robbed by the court (and sometimes even jailed).

The apologists for this robbery of fundamental rights from the entire class of innocent spouses claim it’s “justified” because the suicide rate in wives reportedly dropped by 20% following unilateral divorce enactment.   But who’s to say that this improvement would not have comparably happened as a result of mutual-consent “no-fault”?
In the meantime, spousal murders have not abated, while estranged husband and young adult child suicides, and accidental deaths due to drug addictions, have skyrocketed.   Mother’s Day is not such a happy day for some mothers for this horrible reason, even though they extracted their personal sexual and financial autonomy under the civil law.   For other mothers, it’s not such a happy day because their husband decided to trade them in, and as a consequence they find themselves alienated from their children (perhaps even losing one to suicide or worse), even though they were the responsible parent who did nothing wrong.

Benefit #8 –  Their kids would be less likely to become gender-confused and gender-dysphoric.
Speaking of high suicide and addiction rates, and looking back 50 years, we had this amazing phenomenon of rapidly increasing numbers of LGBTQ(xyz)-ers suddenly being “born this way” — when markedly fewer of them were “born this way” back in the days when it just so happened the civil marriage contract was legally enforceable.   Ditto concerning the amazing inverse correlation between the demand for “marriage” among homosexuals and the legal enforceability of the marriage contract (while we’re at it).

Some moms opt for lesbian relationships themselves after being rejected by a husband, thinking this relationship will be more stable than her marriage was.   Those relationships are actually shown to be more volatile than male homosexual relationships (which tend to be more promiscuous, and to survive longterm only on that basis).    In any event, the bad outcomes greatly compound when mom is setting that kind of example for her children.

Benefit #7 –  Their kids would be less likely to be killed at school or (even worse) become the shooter.
Sadly, we’ve come to have so many school shooting incidents in the past 20 years that they no longer shock us the way they used to.   In 2013, CNN compiled a fairly exhaustive list of all such reported  incidents, and has kept it updated since.   Only three such incidents occurred between 1927 and 1970, according to the list, and only one of those involved a minor as the perpetrator.   However, from 1974 to present, CNN reports  such incidents, most of them involving minors, and since the late 1980’s it’s consistently been 2 or 3 per year, most of them carried out by a “son of divorce”.    In his 2013 article, “Sons of Divorce School Shooters”, W. Bradford Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia writes,

“From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.”

This makes for dozens of mothers, on both sides of the gun, for whom each Mother’s Day is unimaginably painful.

Benefit #6 – Reproductive abuses, from profiteering abortionists to abominable surrogacy, would stop victimizing so many of them.
“standerinfamilycourt” was shocked and outraged to see the U.S. listed in an article, Surrogacy by Country, by the organization, Families Through Surrogacy, where this practice is legal (but expensive).   What most countries have in common where both surrogacy and abortion are legal (the latter often government-funded) is that they also have unilateral divorce-on-demand, and by extension, removal of fathers’ rights and responsibilities because he’s often been forcibly severed from his marriage and family.   Where there are strong natural fathers favored by society and the legal structure, there is less room and demand for commercialized reproductive abuses that exploit and traumatize women — and commoditize children.

Hungary, in particular (not on the above surrogacy list), has recently decided to bank on this relationship between easy divorce and negative population implications, implementing conservative national family policies to avoid having to resort to open borders to resolve its demographic issues (to the angst of its feminists).   If conservative family policies work there, they’ll probably work in other western countries and the U.S.   Hungary only has “no-fault” divorce available by mutual consent, according to websites by Hungarian family law attorneys.   Abortion is legal in Hungary, but it’s broadly reported as being very difficult to access, and its constitution states that “life begins at conception”.  Look for God’s blessings to be on Hungary as a nation.

Benefit #5 – The national debt would begin to decline, improving the national security of mothers and their children.
The national debt clock shows that the U.S. is over $22 trillion dollars in debt as of this writing.  In a study released in 2008 by the Institute for American Values (which was 7 years pre-Obergefell and badly need to be updated),  the combined state and Federal annual taxpayer cost of family fragmentation due to unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws was $122 billion per year.   Compounded by the Treasury’s borrowing cost over those years since enactment, unilateral “no-fault” divorce could easily account for at least one-third of the total.   

Benefit #4 – In-home child abuse would decline at the hands of the mothers’ boyfriends so their children could grow up safely again.
Forcibly removing the rights and authority of natural fathers (in some cases, mothers) from the lives of their children has come at a very high moral and safety cost to those children.    W. Bradford Wilcox (cited above) writes in a 2011 article for Public Discourse,

“This latest study confirms what a mounting body of social science has been telling us for some time now. The science tells us that children are not only more likely to thrive but are also more likely to simply survive when they are raised in an intact home headed by their married parents, rather than in a home headed by a cohabiting couple. For instance, a 2005 study of fatal child abuse in Missouri found that children living with their mother’s boyfriends were more than 45 times more likely to be killed than were children living with their married mother and father.

“Cohabitation is also associated with other non-fatal pathologies among children. A 2002 study from the Urban Institute found that 15.7 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds in cohabiting families experienced serious emotional problems (e.g., depression, feelings of inferiority, etc.), compared to just 3.5 percent of children in families headed by married biological or adoptive parents. A 2008 study of more than 12,000 adolescents from across the United States found that teenagers living in a cohabiting household were 116 percent more likely to smoke marijuana, compared to teens living in an intact, married family. And so it goes.”

Benefit #3 – Family and national wealth would markedly improve, leaving fewer of them poor in old age
Wedlock (emphasis on the “lock”) creates wealth and staves off poverty, many studies have shown.    Yet, close to 70% of the unilateral divorce petitions are filed by women, who don’t realize until too late, they are cutting off their nose to spite their face.
If, on the other hand, they had to prove fault, and if they bore the cost of their own fault, they wouldn’t so readily fall prey to the deception of feminist ideologies.  All too often they find themselves in unanticipated poverty after buying into the empty feminist promises and discarding their spouse, after which, they come to think the only way out is to throw another woman into poverty by seducing her husband onto the legalized-adultery-merry-go-round.

In terms of national wealth, this is a hand-of-God matter.   Deuteronomy 28 tells us (vicariously, since this was spoken to His most-favored nation):

“Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the Lord your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.   All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the Lord your God:

“Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country.

“Blessed shall be the offspring of your body and the produce of your ground and the offspring of your beasts, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.

“Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.

“Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.

“The Lord shall cause your enemies who rise up against you to be defeated before you; they will come out against you one way and will flee before you seven ways.   The Lord will command the blessing upon you in your barns and in all that you put your hand to, and He will bless you in the land which the Lord your God gives you.   The Lord will establish you as a holy people to Himself, as He swore to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways.   So all the peoples of the earth will see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they will be afraid of you.The Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground, in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give you. The Lord will open for you His good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.The Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you only will be above, and you will not be underneath, if you listen to the commandments of the Lord your God, which I charge you today, to observe them carefully,and do not turn aside from any of the words which I command you today, to the right or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.”

The Apostle John channels the words of Jesus in Revelation 2 to confirm this Deuteronomy 28 warning as still being true in the last days among the Gentile church:

But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols.   I gave her time to repent, and she does not want to repent of her immorality.  Behold, I will throw her on a bed of sickness, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of her deeds.  And I will kill her children with pestilence, and all the churches will know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts; and I will give to each one of you according to your deeds.

Sexual autonomy is a contemporary “other god” that is served by immoral family laws.    Notice that both blessings and curses passively overtake a nation according to the national choices made by clergy and government.   Reading on in Deuteronomy 28, the opposite curse to each blessing is recited by Moses, except the curses far outnumber the blessings, showing that His protective hand over a nation holds back far more curses, which flood us when He removes it after many prophetic warnings go unheeded.   Most of us would agree that God has allowed most of these poverty-from-disobedience consequences to fall on the U.S. and other western countries in increasing intensity as the Sexual Revolution has become increasingly entrenched in our culture, unopposed by the church.

Jesus was very clear about God’s commandment, which if we truly obeyed as a nation, there would be no humanist legal provision for divorce:

“…What therefore God has joined together, let no [hu]man separate…Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. ”

 

Benefit #2  –  Their pastors would quit lying to mothers (and fathers) about biblical instruction concerning remarriage
It is a documented fact that commercially-published bible text has been “evolving” since at least the late 1800’s, that seminary faculties have been increasingly overrun with sexual liberals since the post-World War II period, and that academic freedoms have been increasingly on the wane in the last 10 years with regard to conservative biblical scholars.  We now have free online bible study tools that enable just about anybody to conclusively demonstrate the liberal violations of Revelation 22:19.  Back in the 1970’s, pastors in several denominations went on record as demanding that the church stop teaching that remarriage is adultery in every case where an estranged spouse is still living (even though that’s quite accurately what both Jesus and Paul taught), demanding the removal of denominational rules that would disfellowship them for performing weddings Jesus would call continuously adulterous.   There were also demands for pastors in such an adulterous “marriage” themselves to no longer be denied ordination credentials, even though that’s the standard that the Apostle Paul himself implemented in the churches he established.

It’s also a well-documented fact (per the minutes of denominational conferences) that the chief cause for this was primarily economic – i.e., the fear of loss of church membership as legalized adultery supplanted holy matrimony going forward.   But it was also emotional and reputational now, as falsified bibles (and pastors themselves commonly living in ongoing legalized sexual sin) emboldened a lot of church women to bully their own pastors if they didn’t take a liberal stance and shrug off God’s word to the contrary.    If it’s true that the cause of doctrinal unfaithfulness was the pursuit of unrighteous mammon, the effect will eventually reverse to the extent the civil laws comport again with biblical morality concerning marriage.   (Luke 16, from beginning to end, needs to be read as an integrated unit, rather than a random cluster of miscellaneous sayings of Jesus.)

Benefit #1 –  Fewer mothers (and their adulterous partners) would die on the broad road that leads to hell
It became culturally uncouth to speak of hell sometime back in the 1960’s, especially in churches, as if eternal moral consequences for persisting in wicked life choices were suddenly declared passe’ from On-High.    The Apostles clearly did not hold this attitude, nor did most of the 1st through 4th century church fathers, even when speaking of the born-again.

Circa 100 A.D., the Bishop of Antioch said this in his Epistle to the Ephesians,

“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 

No, this wicked idea that “remarriage” while an original spouse was still alive could ever be accepted by God as holy matrimony was an unfortunate time-bomb, a product of 16th century Reformation humanism (as was “replacement theology”, against which the Apostle Paul also warned).    Eventually, this heresy removed inhibitions against enacting immoral family and reproductive laws in western nations, and deceived the lawmakers who today uphold these laws into having the audacity to call themselves “Christians”.   This was also the reason why some conservative denominations made the eternally fatal choice in the 1970’s to revise their once-biblical doctrine to accommodate the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, instead of standing strong against them anywhere close to the way they stood against gay “marriage”.

Jesus preached a 3-part definition of adultery, and part 3 actually precludes any notion of “biblical exceptions” we hear so much about:

(1) to lust in one’s heart after someone other than our living spouse (Matt. 5:27-28)
(2) to divorce a spouse in order to remarry (Mark 10:11-12)
(3) to marry any divorced person (and by corollary, to marry someone after being involuntarily divorced – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b; Luke 16:18b)

In Matthew 5:27-32 Jesus tell us that adultery doesn’t just occur extramaritally, but it occurs just as much inside of the “remarriages” of seemingly respectable church-going people, and by His reference to cutting off of our hands and gouging out our eyes rather than taking the first step toward this abomination, He alludes to this conduct leading to hell as the (unrepentant) destination.   Later on, He directly and graphically says so in Luke 16:18-31.


Picture credit:  Sharon Henry

While it’s not strictly necessary for pastors and lawmakers to visualize their sheep (and constituents) in the hell-flames to get the former onboard with moral divorce reforms in civil law, it sure doesn’t hurt.   Pastors who do see this connection usually don’t perform the kinds of weddings that directly drive the demand for “no-fault” divorces.   If lawmakers could see their adulterously remarried constituents in the resulting hell-flames as a repeal bill is before them, and if they knew that what the martyred Ignatius had to say was a certainty concerning the corrupters of families, it wouldn’t matter whether they were liberal or conservative, they would vote for the repeal of marriage “dissolution” laws altogether.   Getting the state “out of the marriage business” would include getting the state out of the divorce business to the same extent!

Nine of these benefits to mothers (and future mothers) are temporal but extend to the 1000th generation, according to God’s word.   The #1 benefit to mothers, however, is eternal.

Happy Mother’s Day to those who can celebrate today.   Joyous Mothers Day to those whose messy circumstances lead them to find extra comfort in the Lord.

Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge.   – Hebrews 13:4

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!  

Discipleship, Divorce, Lost culture

Pet “Parenting” Trend: How Has “No-Fault” Divorce Contributed?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

“I’m gonna buy me a dog…Why?  ‘Cause I need a friend now….”  
The Monkees (1966)

Culture seems to have made a subtle shift in the past 20 years or so.   Many of us no longer own pets, we parent them.   We wear “dog mom” sweatshirts.    We no longer build them a dog house or cat tree and relegate them to the back yard with their water bowl and Alpo.   Instead, we spend a fortune on their advanced training so that they’re better behaved in the house than our kids were.   We no longer settle for the standard spay or neuter job:  concerned about their heart health, their bones and their cancer prospects, we’d rather they keep their hormones, so we search a wide radius around our homes for a wholistic vet who will do a vasectomy or an ovary-sparing spay on our fur kids, to the disgruntlement of our regular vet.   We buy them health insurance.  We’re thrilled to find out that there are ways to feed them where they might live 20 years or more, if they don’t meet with some mishap we can’t control.    We dress them up in costumes and take them with us to social events.    Some of us turn down invitations when we can’t bring them along.   We join Facebook groups on all sorts of “pet parenting” advice.   We buy them health insurance (courtesy of our employers, even).   Heck, some of us even sign them up for pet sports!   In fact, a couple of years ago, somebody dreamed up a new kind of “Mother’s Day”, observed the day before the actual one.   (It will be interesting to see if they do the same for “dog dads” in June.)

SIFC will say right up front that hopefully this post won’t offend the many abandoned spouses who are honestly struggling just to feed their kids, in a different season of life, after unilateral “no-fault” divorce was selfishly forced on them.    May you never arrive here because the Lord has brought your prodigal spouse home repentant, and born again or recommitted, to Himself and to you, both.    You are blessed to have your human children still in the house, as chaotic and difficult as that is making your days right now.   Perhaps the information here will be helpful to a not-so-fortunate friend or two.   One statistic from 2017 sets the average percentage of 1-person households in the U.S. at about 30%.

“standerinfamilycourt” adopted an eight year old brother and sister pair from a dachshund rescue eleven years ago, in a process that took 6 weeks and required the formal interviews of two other human family members, plus a “home study”.

Blessedly, they were already superbly trained, and came with the full vet records, meticulously kept since their puppyhood by their deceased former owner.    At the time, the half-serious, half-joke was, “it’s either these two or an illicit affair.”    None of us enjoys coming home night after night to a dark, empty house when the human kids have long since flown the nest, and the spouse prefers to “identify” as a kid again.   I strongly suspect that much of the pet parenting not only happens because of the forced-divorce trend, but because so much of that trend is “gray divorce” after decades of successful marriage and child-launching, and also because of the trend of Christian spouses to stand for their ransacked marriages and stay out of subsequent, biblically-unlawful human relationships which no amount of man’s paper can legitimize before God.  It can get a bit scary in these circumstances to read all the “helpful” articles that inform us about what our ordeal is allegedly doing to our health and life span.

Since cycling was the thing to do in SIFC’s town, a framed nylon kiddie carrier was purchased to hitch to the back wheel of the bike, and a little “license plate” on the back read:  WENR-WGN.     Not expecting to see fur kids inside, half the fun was cracking people up as we passed.    There is some counterbalancing information about pet ownership and human health, by the way.

The “doggers” helped me sleep better and wake up better….and socialize better as an introverted person, as I expected would be the case when I spotted them online and applied to the dachshund rescue.    Even so, this first pair led a pretty “old-school life” most of their time with me:  high end normal pet food, conventional vet,  insurance purchased only after a really close, expensive call, and doggy day care for the survivor of the pair, since I was really worried he’d go downhill after losing his sister and I was not yet retired from work.       I started to put on weight again several months before the passing of the second one, because he could no longer do the walks at age 17 and I was concerned about leaving him for long.    I took a year off from “pet parenting” while I waited on the next pair,  and since I was by then retired, I decided on actual infant pups this time.    Within a month of bringing the little hellions home last year, all the weight magically fell off of me.

It turns out, that in circumstances of chaste estrangement, caring for and having the company of a pet is one of the best things someone otherwise living alone can do for both our physical and emotional health.     Time will tell if the benefit goes so far as to substantially replace the benefit God intended of living with our spouse, til death do us part.   We can’t control much in our own lives, but we can create a happy world for our furry family members.    They make messes, but they don’t try to tell us we’re messing up their lives by not “moving on”.    The grandkids can’t get enough of them, which means we get to see our children’s offspring once in a while.

SIFC’s former state even changed its divorce laws last year in a trailblazing way to make sure “family law” attorneys wring out fees attributable to the fur babies wherever possible (since fees from fighting over human children is a market sector that was obviously maturing for them, as younger people have responded to immoral “family laws”, both by having fewer children and by not getting married at all).

There’s a pretty good chance unilateral forced divorce has led to “pet parenting” on the part of the discontented folks doing the divorcing as well.     We can only hope their pooches (as well as their illicit partners) fart and snore!   And chew up their shoes – or worse.


“Lifestyle” pharmaceuticals gone
to the dogs 

 

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.
– Psalm 68:6

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall  |   Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Church Discipline, citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Discipleship, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

Death of a (Postmodernism) Sales(person): The Sad Passing of Rachel Held Evans

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by Standerinfamilycourt

And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,  so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.  – Hebrews 9:27-28

On Wednesday, May 1, 2019,  divorce law reformers were again in front of the Texas House of Representatives, testifying in an effort to get the repeal of unilateral  (non-consensual) “no-fault” grounds to advance from that committee, a bill identical to the one that had been voted out of the same committee two years before, whereupon that bill died a mysterious death before it could be brought to the floor of the full house for a vote, and before the legislature adjourned for two years.  This time, related bills under discussion, HB922 and HB926 occupied about an hour of the late evening 3-hour session for testimony, while one bill seeking to protect wedding officiants from (homosexualist) liability by allowing them to recuse themselves, where conscience before God would be violated, (HB2109) preceded this debate and took more than 90 minutes of that time.   During the discussion of the supposedly “homophobic” recusal bill, one recently-elected millennial lawmaker from a district north of Austin responded to the testimony of Cecilia Wood, a family law attorney of 32 years, there to testify in support of HB922 eliminating non-consensual “no-fault” grounds for divorce, but also a supporter of the right to recuse from officiating weddings based on religious conscience, as follows (@ 8:30):

Rep. Talarico:  “Two comments and a question:  of course, allusion to the civil war (sic) important, but there was also a right side to that war and a wrong side to that war.  Second, you mentioned Christians staying home.  There are many Christians on this dias, including me who don’t hold discriminatory beliefs….”

“Woke” social justice writers like Ms. Held are largely responsible for the extrabiblical notions of young Mr. Talarico and too many of his generation:

(1) Belief that one can be a follower of Christ without embracing and obeying His teachings on morality and sexual ethics, as plainly described in the bible – both on a homosexual and heterosexual basis.

(2) The belief that biblically-immoral sexual behavior choices can constitute an “immutable” identity which can then be parlayed into valid comparisons with the civil rights movement of the 1860’s and 1960’s that were based on race, biological sex and religion, i.e. “a right side to that war and a wrong side to that war…”  to pass prudent moral selectivity off as “discrimination”.   (It should be noted, however, that homosexualism is quickly becoming a sect of the larger secular humanist de facto state-religion of the United States ruling political class.)

(3) The asserted moral superiority of “social justice” Christianity over a holiness-based discipleship that better comports with the full teachings of Christ, the apostles and the early church fathers, especially in the area of sexual ethics.    The fact remains that this humanist pseudo-religion is the very antithesis of actual Christian discipleship in every respect.

(4) That false analogies (in general) are excusable for the greater “good”.

To this last point, a woman’s purported “right” to disobey Christ (such as by divorcing her husband in a pagan civil court) is obscenely compared with  Martha’s sister, Mary choosing to sit at the feet of Jesus and learn from Him, in the RHE illustration we’ve opened this post with.

While this testimony was occurring in Austin, TX, another kind of eternal tragedy was occurring in Tennessee in the Evans household, a covenant holy matrimony union of 16 years, with two children.


Dan and Rachel Evans wedding, 2003

The news site, AL.com wrote on April 19:  “During treatment for an infection, Rachel began exhibiting unexpected symptoms. Doctors found that her brain was experiencing constant seizures. She is currently in the ICU. She is in a medically induced coma while the doctors work to determine the cause and solution…”     By May 1, her condition was deteriorating due to brain-swelling after she failed to come out of the coma.   As reported by  CNN:  “…Over the next 10 days and transfers between three facilities, Evans was comatose.  Doctors began weaning Evans off coma medication Tuesday, but she did not return to an alert state during this process…Thursday [the coincidental date of the committee vote in Texas], Evans had ‘sudden and extreme’ changes in her vitals. A medical team found “extensive swelling of her brain” and took emergency action”.

That emergency action was unavailing, and she died on Saturday, May 4.   Out of respect for the Evans family and their grieving process, we will be publishing this blog a day or two after her funeral.

This is the sort of dias-sitting “Christians” that Rep. Talarico was referring to in his hearing remarks were, no doubt, influenced in great measure by the evangelical darling of CNN, the Huffington Post, and a host of other liberal publications, secular and evangelical.  SIFC has a grown, married daughter four years older than Mrs. Evans, who also started adopting RHE’s views around the time her writings gained prominence on CNN, and quoting similar homosexuality-sympathizing  “Christian” writers such as Jen Hatmaker.    This tragedy hits very close to home for that reason.   It’s normal for young adults who have been raised in Christian homes to go through a season of questioning, but in these evil last days, it can be eternally fatal to purchase a home there (and turn it into a real estate office, as RHE did, with the backing of crooked investors).    Hopefully, SIFC’s daughter is “just renting”, and moves to a home with a Rock foundation in time.

Mrs. Evans joined Soros-funded Baptist feminists (Karen Swallow-Prior, Beth Moore and an acclaimed homosexual journalist) in the leftist smearing of Rev. Paige Patterson, resulting in his removal from his leadership posts in the Southern Baptist Convention last year because of his fully biblical anti-divorce views which rejected the morally rabid  “abuse” doctrines of this evangelical feminist cult.   She was quoted by Baptist News Global at the time: “Patterson’s comments need a swift and thorough rebuke from the SBC and all Christians of good faith.”    At least indirectly,  Mrs. Evans was the epitome of the “rent-an-evangelical” cadre that Soros operatives openly bragged about recruiting.

SBC leader under fire for comments about divorce, abuse

The following was typical of her views on man’s divorce, finding purported legal “dissolution” a necessary “right choice” to prevent the exploitation of women, and imagining the true protection of women under the biblical leadership of her husband “legalistic”….rather than the metaphysical impossibility Jesus taught that divorce of an original holy matrimony union actually is.    In effect,  RHE was a popular writer because she excused hardness of heart, telling her fans what they wanted to hear – at a time when nearly 70% of unilateral “no-fault” divorce petitions are filed by women, and almost nobody takes provable abuse through the criminal justice system, as the bible would instead direct.

“…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!”   –  Jesus, Matt. 18:7-8

Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.   – Romans 1:32

“standerinfamilycourt” would vigorously challenge the late Mrs. Evans’ assertion about the “purpose of Jesus’ words on marriage”.   Rather than protecting women from “exploitation by the system”,  those words were to protect society as a whole from self-absorbed individualism, and keep fathers firmly in authority over the generations of their families, per God’s design.

Challenging the authority of scripture on such a matter, and then (apparently) dying unrepentant is very eternally costly, at least according to one early church bishop who was martyred early in the 2nd century….

Meeting this fate while still very young illustrates the extreme danger of achieving broad influence and acclaim which is built on a foundation of sand.   It’s a mercy that God sometimes removes high-impact siren voices from our midst.   When He must do so while they are so young, it’s a strong sign of how many they were leading astray, and of His foreknowledge of whether they would ever repent.    Apparently, Mrs. Evans knew John Stonestreet of the Colson Center (Breakpoint.org) very well because they were from the same town in Tennessee, and (while he can’t quite bring himself to vocalize it), he is wondering if she ever repented before she passed into eternity last week.   We can only hope so.

We are bracing for the howl we’re going to get from the antinomians out there, as we did when remarriage adulteress Joey Feek passed away young and unrepentant in her “marriage” to another woman’s legally-estranged husband.    That blog post elicited comments from hundreds of people for days.    We didn’t write that piece to be “mean” to the divorced-and-remarried, nor will we apologize for reminding people that all of the apostles warned repeatedly about the possibility of wandering away from the faith, as directly evidenced by the levels of repentance, and spirit of obedience to Christ’s commandments, in the life under discussion.  If those who would take offense insist on doing so based on extrabiblical denominational dogma, their souls are in their own hands.   If the past is any indication, some will read this and insist that SIFC has “judged” and personally consigned these erring souls to hell, as if feeling deputized by God to do so.    This is irrational (to be as kind as possible in expressing it).    What SIFC has done is tell the audience what God’s word and early church fathers clearly said about similar situations.

“standerinfamilycourt”, as Mrs. Evans did, feels called to the role of a teacher of God’s word on the family, approaching it with a holy fear of God, and ever-mindful of the stern warning from Christ’s brother, James, about the eternal impact on the audience….

“Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment. “

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

 

 

citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

#RuthSummit 2019 – How Did It Go?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

For by wise counsel you will wage your own war,
And in a multitude of counselors there is safety.
– Proverbs  24:6

As soon as the speaker list was released, this blogger knew that this conference was simply not to be missed, come hell or high water (SIFC literally experienced a little of both before arriving there, but that’s a story for another day).    “Standerinfamilycourt” has always had the greatest respect and admiration for its sponsor, The Ruth Institute.   Many of the scheduled speakers have long been personal heroes (and heroines).   The trip to Lake Charles is easily 15 hours each way by car, but that was no obstacle.    This will by no means be a post about “buyer’s remorse”.   There is no question that some very important connections were made at the Summit, and much cross-awareness “landed” for the participants, SIFC included.

And, there’s no question that what transpired in that venue absolutely fulfilled the objectives for the gathering that the Ruth Institute promised in the promotional information…

“Discover why the Church has been right all along about marriage, family, and sexual morality!
Stories from:
  • Children of Divorce
  • Abandoned Spouses
  • Children of Same-Sex Parents
  • Refugees from the Gay Lifestyle
Learn what it’s costing: in child trauma, clergy sex abuse scandals, runaway government power, and more.”

 

But…a day after returning, some of us were still feeling the effects of a few unmet hopes, including the action-oriented hope that it would be considerably more “shirt-sleeves” and interactive in its format, at least for the sessions involving “activist” panels.    Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse was careful to explain to participants that The Ruth Institute is not a lobbying organization (according to IRS rules for 501c3 and 501c4 educational organizations, TRI being the former).    However, the distinction seems to be more philosophical than strictly legal in how “Ruth” defines her mission and organizes the organization’s engagement with issues and social change.   For example, according to the website:

“In the summer of 2013, the Supreme Court’s decisions in the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases signaled a new level of governmental commitment to the Sexual Revolution. Dr. Morse and the team at the Ruth Institute concluded that the opponents of natural marriage hold a commanding position on the legal and political fronts.  At that time, the Ruth Institute made a strategic decision to enter into the cultural and social fray in a new way.

“With Ruth’s renewed focus on the social and cultural arenas (as opposed to the political and legal arenas)…”

Tidy strategy, this is: hoping to drive culture change in order to ultimately reform the vicious “teacher” that this law has become —except that, all the signs of the times ( for example, 70 years elapsed since Israel’s re-establishment as a nation, the emergence in Europe of mandatory RFID chipping of corporate employees,  Russia’s renewed aggression, Trump’s  move of  the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple)  ….seem to point to the Lord returning and rapturing away His church long before such a strategy might ever come to fruition, after which, the bible tell us the influence of the Holy Spirit will be removed from society remaining on earth, and the Antichrist will have a brief reign that will make all of this moral concern seem wildly irrelevant anyway.    Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the U.S. has already been “given over”, as described in Romans 1 because heterosexual moral reform has been rejected, especially in the church, long before the Windsor / Perry / Obergefell decisions of 2013-2015.    Those of us who are impatient about the timeline of family law reform are impatient mostly because the souls of loved ones remain in serious jeopardy in the meantime.    Some of us want the drag queen fired as “teacher” yesterday, and a morally worthy role model hired in “her” place  for the sake of our kids and grandkids.  No society in all of recorded history has survived more than 3 or 4 generations in the utterly bankrupt moral climate we have now, almost all of it driven by nefarious family laws and institutional acquiescence to them.

What’s largely forgotten in that 2013 strategic thought process at TRI is the need to change not one, but two grossly sinful cultures that sprang from the Sexual Revolution, the sodomy-as-“marriage” culture, and the sequential-polygamy-as-“marriage” culture (still seen by most in Christendom as what TRI refers to above as “natural marriage”).   As our friend, Pastor Jack Shannon pointed out in his 2017 book, Contra Mundum Swagger, those heavily invested in the second culture (relying on either RCC “annulment” or evangelical hypergrace) tend to see the first culture as befalling them from out of nowhere, and by no fault (pun not intended) of their own, seeing it fatalistically as a “test” or “cross to bear” rather than as an immediate call to individual and collective repentance.     It was not lawful for Herod to have Herodias, his (living) BROTHER’S wife, and a man of God gave up his own saved life to warn their souls.  It is no more lawful today for a few of these repeal movement leaders to have their current mates, while SIFC has not shrunk back from warning them in various ways (and is probably not on the short list of suitable conference speakers for that reason alone).

The Lord may not continue to forbear for two or three more decades for culture to change, under a strategy of incremental influence, in order “ease into” legal reforms.   It might be different if we were not citizens of a constitutional republic that His extreme favor gave us in the first place, and which we are now basically squandering  when we fear reprisal, or fear suffering persecution and loss of comforts – steep costs that the early church joyfully bore in order to introduce the world to true Christian morality, though they had little or no formal voice to the Graeco-Roman government systems at all.
For anyone, with both a representative vote and a state of living estranged from their true, God-joined spouse, to compare a reticent approach toward contemporary government engagement with the example set by the early church is just not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Wrote Anglican church historian Kenneth E. Kirk in the 1940’s:

“What is more astounding than the mere fact that the early Church taught and practiced the complete indissolubility of marriage for so long, is the fact that the Church chose to take its stand against the strong contemporary lax social and legal attitudes toward divorce which prevailed so universally all about them. The Church, today, feels that it is on the horns of a dilemma, because so many divorcees are coming to her for help and encouragement. Shall she accommodate the Scriptures to the apparent need of the unfortunate divorcees, or shall she uphold the Biblical standard of the indissolubility of marriage for any cause while faithfully discharging her duty to such distressed individuals?  Every church of today which considers the lowering of its divorce standards should remember that the early Church stood true to the Biblical doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage in a world that was pagan and strongly opposed to the moral and marriage standards of the New Testament. Not only did the Church maintain her stand on the indissolubility in the early centuries, she changed the attitude and standards of the whole world toward it. Even today the whole Church of Christ and the entire western world is still reaping the rich benefits of that heritage.   Shall the Christian Church of today be less courageous and faithful than the Church of the early centuries of the Christian era? Does she not under God have the same spiritual resources?

“There were other grievous social evils in the early Christian centuries. Slavery enveloped the Roman Empire of that age, yet the Christians did not set themselves to change the thinking of the masses against it, but they did set themselves to change the thinking of the masses toward marriage and divorce. Why did they not attack slavery with the same vehemence? The reason was that the Apostles had not received a “thus saith the Lord” from Christ respecting it. They had, however, received such in the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. No sect or school of philosophy is known to have influenced the early Church in this teaching. From whence, then, did she get the teaching? Certainly she received it from the teaching of the Gospels and from the teaching of the Apostles, who had earlier conveyed the same orally (as well as in writing) to the leaders of the early Church who succeeded them.”

(Marriage and Divorce. 2nd ed. London, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.,1948)

For the action-oriented participants (who would like to stay God’s hand in the timing of His finalized judgment), important collaboration items had to be relegated to the conference breaks, such as asking Fr. / Dr. Sullins how one might get important outdated research refreshed, or undertake a child-outcome study for a sociological group that has never been addressed before (children of biblical standers being segregated out from those of generic and incomparable “single parents” because the former are likely skewing that measure by their growing numbers and superior child outcomes from walking out biblical principles in the home).

Perhaps there’s no avoiding the fact that panelists addressing the hydra-headed issue of what’s being done to reform unilateral no-fault divorce laws (and resulting injustices) would have a more difficult time being brief enough to allow feedback and interaction afterwards in a uniform allotted time slot, which was 30 minutes total.    This seemed to be less of a problem with the personal testimony panels where there was ample time for some follow-up, in most cases.    As it turned out, there was no time for such in the “activist” panel led by Matthew Johnston, Jeff Morgan and Christopher Brennan  (~47 minutes into this link).  The personal testimonies, while significant and powerful, mostly represent the symptoms of the disease, while the “activist panel” (in effect) represents a proposal for the surgical approach to excising the disease that is causing the cascade of symptoms.     Yes, this does involve a process for influencing policy and legislation to some extent, but the IRS has given 501(c)3’s a little bit of leeway for potential indirect involvement in this:

501(c)(3) organizations ARE allowed to take part in small amounts of political lobbying. There are two ways to determine how much nonprofits can legally lobby: 1) Insubstantial Part Test and, 2) Expenditure Test. In the first option, an organization’s lobbying activities cannot constitute a substantial part of the organization’s total activities and expenditures in any tax year. This option is somewhat vague, as it does not define “lobbying activities,” “substantial amount,” or how that amount will be calculated. The second option is somewhat clearer. The Expenditure Test defines permissible lobbying activities and measures an 501(c)(3)’s lobbying activities only by the amount of money spent on lobbying activities.

Surely, providing an annual venue for meaningful strategy development, and possible nonprofit mentoring (or incubation) for an allied-but-separate non-profit that could take a more activist role which complements TRI’s core strategic mission would not get TRI into any difficulty with the IRS, nor divert significant resources from “Ruth’s” preferred core activities.   The fact that TRI awarded an “Activist” recognition this year is a good demonstration of that point.   Quite often, when a problem seems complex and intractable, effective solutions are “both / and” rather than “either / or”,  meaning that involved organizations can certainly specialize where they feel their strengths are, while maintaining supportive ties with other organizations whose strengths may be complementary but not duplicative.

Perhaps some time allowance is necessary for “ice-breaking” when diverse allied interests and players (who started out not knowing each other very well) begin coming together for the first time, but the road home from this conference felt as though an untamed “adhocracy” will continue to be aimed in 2019-20 at the political realm, rather than a purposeful coordination of collaborating efforts based on experiences shared, and consensus-finding.   This seemed like a sad waste of the rare and valuable face-to-face time we were afforded in Lake Charles.   Hopefully, some of this occurred at the smaller dinners that were organized for the invited speakers outside the formal agenda.    From SIFC’s seat, it appeared that some panelists were not in consensus with each other about specifics of the way forward.    When the other side plays dirty (as we know they do), one option indeed is to wait until conditions are more favorable before ever engaging, another is to peck away randomly which isn’t likely to be very successful, and the third way is to go after them with a solid, coordinated and well-vetted battle plan that takes into account a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) that is updated at least annually.    One possible solution for the next conference might be some breakout time by interest area.

We all tend to come to these events with a few individualized sub-agendas, in addition to the main agenda items.    SIFC is the first to admit that what will be gleaned from this year’s Summit participation and deemed most valuable is steps to meaningful reform that will come sooner rather than later, and divert that many more precious souls from hell (at least, on account of dying while in a sinful subsequent union).   Another sub-agenda, for somebody else, might be gleaning whatever will most quickly lessen parental alienation or reduce onerous child support payments.   Some standers in the room might prefer for divorce to remain cheap, easy and certain so that their prodigal spouse has an easier path to repentance some day.   Some individuals will be looking to make or continue a livelihood from the reform effort.   These things will, of course, cause some differences in preferred approach and timeline to reform.     Possibly, a sub-agenda for the Summit sponsors is to be inclusive of non-Catholics while not doing anything that might unnecessarily alienate the material support of RCC hierarchy for the organization’s efforts and vision.   Can a mutually-supportable action path be found through all these sub-agendas?   Possibly, but not if insufficient interactive discussion time is allotted among key stakeholders in the program agenda!    This is the first major conference in recent memory attended by SIFC  where some sort of general participant evaluation feedback was not requested.

It did not take long for word to get out among the covenant marriage stander community of this #RuthSummit, and of the livestream video resources that Family Research Council staffers so generously provided.  “Standerinfamilycourt” awoke to an email from a male leader in the movement Tuesday morning, sharing that another abandoned, standing husband had emailed most of the faithful pastors in the movement, and several other standers.   This young husband who originated the email chain had been texting me on Friday, eager to get to the livestreaming links before the opening dinner got underway.    All of this is truly a blessing to that large community, who has (admittedly) mixed views on the actual repeal of unilateral, no-fault divorce laws and the biblically-appropriate level government engagement by Christ-followers.

“Standerinfamilycourt” would like to wrap up this post by giving a hearty “thumbs-up” to a few points in the long list of positives from #RuthSummit 2019 over this past weekend:

1.) Auspicious, God-orchestrated timing:  As we sat at dinner Friday night, while Texas activist Jeff Morgan was receiving TRI’s award as “Activist of the Year”,  SIFC received a text on the cell phone:    Both HB922 and HB926 had been scheduled for their committee hearings on only 2 business days’ notice.    SIFC is “sure” there was no mal-intent with this timing, which is “done all the time”, we hear.    Little did House committee chairman Harold Dutton know that his maneuver increased the joy of the evening, as the veritable who’s who of activists in were in the same room to receive the news while gathered over dinner.   This would include Dr. Morse, Leila Miller, Matthew Johnston, Chris Brennan, blogger Kristi Davis, Dr. Stephen Baskerville, and new repeal enthusiast Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon.     Just picture the phones ringing off the hook in Austin all day today and tomorrow, and the prayers going up for some of these folks who will be there in Austin testifying tomorrow at 10:30 local time.
The timing actually helped increase the chances that if both bills fail against the very long odds of getting to the House floor for a timely vote, there will at least be solid backing for simultaneously introducing them in both chambers (with needed improvements) in 2021, next legislative session.   The Lord works in mysterious ways. – praise Him!

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.
– Gen. 50:20

Dear Readers, here is the list of committee members and their contact information.

ACTION REQUEST: Would you consider being a part of history-making and giving each of these committee members a timely call, asking them to support both bills? You do not necessarily have to be from Texas to weigh in, but if you are from Texas, and either you or somebody you know from Texas has a restored marriage after a Texas “no-fault” divorce, this will be very important information to leave with the staffer when you call, in order to deliver a strong message that “insupportability” is nothing more than a subjective legal fiction on which no law depriving citizens of their parental or property rights should be based in a constitutional republic.

A key tidbit about Mr. Dutton, the committee chairman:  he went through a messy divorce in the 1990’s.   Among other traumas from his own divorce, he experienced the horror of having his wife’s live-in boyfriend physically abuse his sons without being able to do anything about it, like many other young men who are subjected to forced divorce. If the situation is that he did not actually initiate his divorce (almost a 70% chance), this could provide something to widen his perspective a bit.

The current legislative session in Texas adjourns for two years at the end of May.    If you are interested in watching tomorrow’s proceedings live tomorrow, Wednesday, May 1, try this link (no promises they will actually have it on camera, but there’s a chance).   Alternatively, it’s likely Jeff Morgan will be videoing capturing the testimony for upload to you his youtube channel as he did two years ago.

UPDATE:  Testimony on the bill to repeal one spouse’s subjective and unsubstantiated declaration of  “insupportability” as a ground for divorce in Texas was heard on May 2, 2019.   On May 3, the bill failed to achieve the necessary votes in the Democrat-dominated Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee to move on to the Calendar Committee, despite having done so two years earlier, and despite dozens of covenant marriage standers calling these committee members’ offices in support of HB 922.   It will now have to be introduced again into the 87th legislative session in 2021.

2.) Wonderful connections with another strong group of Catholic standers was forged:  We already have solid connections with Catholic standers through Bai MacFarlane’s wonderful ministry, Mary’s Advocates.    SIFC learned at the Summit that Covenant Keepers has been working closely with a well-established group of Louisiana standers who have formed a weekly group locally called “Hosea’s Hope” (no apparent online presence).    These standers shared another tidbit of good news:  it appears that Covenant Keepers has worked recently to cleanse its local group leadership of adulterously remarried leaders, which would be an update on our earlier reporting, if confirmed.

3. )  The value that covenant marriage standers bring to the effort to save biblical marriage was publicly recognized at the Summit.   Dr. Morse asked all the standers in the room to “stand” right after the panel on marital abandonment spoke.   We were able then to identify each other, perhaps half a dozen people.    Hard copies of this recent blog post , “7 Important Contributions Covenant Standers Are Making Toward the Repeal of Forced Divorce” were brought to the conference for handouts, and Dr. Morse very graciously gave us impromptu table space in the venue.   She told the invited stander speakers, “when the history is written that this ship got turned around, y’all are going to be mentioned…”     This was said in front of some of the most important Christian scholars we have today by one of the most important Christian scholars we have today, and it went out over the Family Research Council media machine.    It was a mighty proud moment for standers everywhere.    Dr. Baskerville gets a lot of feedback from the (justifiably) angry MGTOW crowd (“men going their own way”).    It must have been refreshing to hear for once about grace-filled men and women going GOD’s way under the same profoundly unjust circumstances.

4.) Dr. Baskerville hit yet another one “out of the ballpark” (opening wide the eyes of some very influential people).    These were the exact words of a stunned Dr.  Gagnon on his Facebook wall after hearing Stephen Baskerville’s riveting 40-minute address:

“Dr. Stephen Baskerville, professor of government at Patrick Henry College, hitting his critique of “No Fault Divorce” out of the ballpark. It is one of the most anti-constitutional measures imaginable, incentivizing family break ups, rejecting basic standards of justice, and giving the state unlimited tyranny…”

Most serious standers who follow our pages were not surprised by this at all, since it is quite customary for the blunt Dr. B to hit things out of the ballpark every time the mic is on.   That said, there is a famous moment in the movie, “Amazing Grace” where MP William Wilberforce has conspired with the head of the Tories to take one well-heeled set on a party-barge tour of the harbor, complete with powdered wigs, wine, hors-d’oeuvres, and a string quartet.   SIFC could go on to describe the proceedings, but it would be more fun to just let the readers watch it instead, while emphasizing that in no way are any Summit leaders or participants being compared with the insensitive lot in the movie, but the “turning point” feel of that moment is still quite similar indeed.   Picture Dr. Baskerville on the bridge of the sailing vessel that carried the slaves – not hard, is it?

5.) The language of the thought leaders in the room appeared to be slowly changing for the better (and root causation finally being acknowledged out loud).     Dr. Gagnon also gave an excellent address Saturday afternoon.   Although it was (by title) about homosexualist twisting of the scripture, he had a lot to say about holy matrimony.  Across several of the speakers, we started hearing a bit less about the looser “standard” of “permanence”, and considerably more about the far more demanding state of indissolubility that Christ laid out.   Desirably, we also started to hear a lot about the one-flesh state, notably at ~ 11:55 in Dr. Gagnon’s address, when he says this about the one-flesh state (echoing Paul in Ephesians 5):  “…so whatever you do to your spouse, if it’s a negative thing, it’s a self-inflicted wound.”   And again, at ~ 21:30, and at ~40:00 where Dr. G comes oh-so-close to appropriately recognizing the instantaneous, supernatural, metaphysical nature of the God-joining that is the very Creational basis for indissolubility, and for “remarriage” while an original spouse still lives, constituting papered-over adultery 100% of the time.    It’s not the repeated physical uniting that creates the one-flesh state, according to Jesus in Matthew 19:6,8 and Paul in Ephesians 5:31, it’s God’s actual hand in the wedding itself that permanently does so.   If this were properly acknowledged, the witness against homosexual “marriage” (and practice) would become so much more powerful than any attempts to “rank” soul-corroding sexual sin.

At ~ 18:00: “When Jesus talked about marriage in Matthew 19 as being indissoluble, permanent, lifelong…a vision largely lost by the church, which is the beginning of our problems.   We would never be at this place on the issue of homosexuality and transgenderism if we hadn’t already lost the battle on the longevity and permanence of marriage…if we had not caved on those issues, we would not have come to this extreme point, and we are at an extreme point now.”  
(SIFC must still respectfully disagree with any attempt articulated between 22:00 and 40:00  to claim that one sexual sin is “worse” than another, when Paul said this in 1 Cor. 6:18-20,  about heterosexual defilement of the temple of the Holy Spirit, and warned at least twice, “do not be deceived” :  both receive the same eternal outcome if unrepented, we’ve lived to see that both equally undermine the biblical family, hence entire societies, sending the unrepentant to hell in both cases.  SIFC believes such a philosophy is a large part of the reason we “lost the battle on the longevity and permanence of marriage”, as Dr. Gagnon had earlier put it.)

We believe it’s the patient, continued voice of the scholar-standers who are respectfully challenging the comfortable presumptions of the more conventional and acclaimed scholars and bringing about this necessary evolution in the latter.

6.)  There also seemed to be a “lessons-learned” readiness to jettison the unhelpful idea of 5 years ago, that the sexuality debates can leave God out and prevail.   The best indication of this maturation, of course, is the theme for the Summit: “Why the Church’s Teaching Was Right All Along” (that is, “right all along” if you ignore the 12th century fabrication of “annulment” doctrine under Pope Innocent III, and you also ignore Luther’s humanistic 16th century innovations.)   The absurdity of this notion should have been obvious on its face in 2013:   “we battle not against flesh and blood, but powers and principalities and dark forces in the heavenly realm.”

7.) Satan so feared the impact of the #RuthSummit livestreaming result that he felt compelled to harass the Family Research Council technicians on both days.    Thankfully, the Holy Spirit was invited in both days in prayers to open and close the sessions.  Organizing this kind of an event around a controversial topic that brings together people of different faiths, but the same biblical truth, is never as easy as it looks.   This one came off very well, and was an endless encouragement to thousands of covenant marriage standers around the world who were not able to attend, but wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

We are looking forward to next year already!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!