From a recent facebook exchange about John MacArthur as a purported gospel “truth-teller” (versus the alleged “distorters” of the gospel), on the Pulpit & Pen facebook page post:
JAB: “I actually agree with you on the permanence of marriage, but how is disagreeing distorting the gospel?”
SML: “[SIFC], please answer Johnny Benson’s question. I am interested”.
SIFC: “Excellent question, Johnny. I have a male blogger friend who, upon learning the biblical truth and becoming convicted, removed himself from his biblically-adulterous “marriage” to another man’s discarded covenant wife several years ago, encouraging her to reconcile with her true husband. One of his blogs expresses this so much more eloquently than I ever could, but I can’t seem to find it right offhand, so we’ll have to make do with my attempt at it. You are right, this aspect of comparison to the gospel could fairly be construed as “opinion”. It is one of those truths that is Spirit-imparted, but I believe there is ample evidence that Jesus modeled this many times Himself. I think misappropriated Lutherism and Calvinism (“insurance policy Christianity”) tends to blind most of us to this pervasive truth, especially in our adultery-steeped church culture.
“I think the biggest clue that Matt. 19:4-6, 8 indissoluble holy matrimony is God’s first-created symbol for the gospel is the fact that Jesus was one of the two witnesses at history’s first wedding (the other was the serpent) where the very first mini- “church” is created, is repeatedly referred to as the Bridegroom throughout the OT and NT, ending with Rev. 22:17,20: “The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost….He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming quickly.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.” The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezra and Malachi all testified to this (ironically leading to some of the most egregious hermeneutic sins imaginable in our contemporary churchianity, but I digress)…all of them comparing covenant-breaking with idolatry. Jesus echoes this in His fiery rebuke of the Pharisees in Luke 16.
“Most people don’t know it (because they deliberately aren’t taught), but the comforting words with which Jesus opens the last supper would have been instantly recognized by the twelve, because they are the ancient, ceremonial words of the Hebrew betrothal ceremony, such as Joseph would have repeated in front of Mary’s family just before His conception….”In My Father’s house there are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you…I go away to prepare a place for you, so that where I am, you may be also….I will not drink of this cup again until I drink it anew in My Father’s house..” (and so forth). The bread symbolizes “sarx mia” (supernatural, instantaneous, inseverable one-flesh) and the wine symbolizes unconditional covenant. His very ministry began at a wedding, where He turned an ordinary element necessary to life* itself into a flow of unconditional covenant.
“When Jesus says, “I will never leave nor forsake you”, He is referring to all of this, and it is the primary reason He demands unconditional forgiveness of our neighbor as a condition of inheriting the kingdom of God. When Paul says in Galatians 4:22, “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman (Hagar) and one by the free woman (Sarah). But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise”, he is referring to the kingdom difference between a God-joined partner and a carnal-but-legal counterfeit.
“Piper also makes the case for holy matrimony reflecting the gospel (as contrasted with our post-modern redefinition of “marriage” to include legalized adultery and legalized sodomy) so very eloquently and accurately, but then he wrongly believes that dying in an ongoing state of covenant-breaking will only result in the “loss of rewards”, despite Paul’s repeated clear warnings to the contrary. He wrongly claims that full repentance from such is “repeat sin”.
In doing so, he morally equates God-joined unions with those that Jesus repeatedly and unequivocally called ongoing adultery, as if God’s hand would join someone to more than one living spouse or go back on His own unconditional covenant with the existing one-flesh entity He already created. I’ve not personally read Piper’s book, “This Momentary Marriage”, but my blogger friend has reviewed it: http://genesistwo24.blogspot.com/…/a-book-review-this…”
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If only this Facebook exchange had ended right there, but alas, nobody says to a “TULIP-merchant” something like , “[Piper] wrongly believes that dying in an ongoing state of [marital] covenant-breaking will only result in the “loss of rewards”, without getting the authenticity of one’s salvation questioned, do they? The conversation went on in that tedious vein for what seems like hours afterward, but the readers will here be spared. “Standerinfamilycourt’s” prayerful view of that errant dogma can be read here, for those interested. (Meanwhile, “SML” above went in a different direction of challenge: “are you really saying there is no divorce for cases of abuse and abandonment?” Yes, ma’am, but I didn’t write the bible.)
The point “JAB” pushed is nonetheless relevant because someone who views their “salvation” as a guaranteed, punch-card past transaction instead of an unconsummated ongoing betrothal is going to say something similar to what “JAB” refused, after all the above discussion, to budge from: “marriage is a picture of the relationship of Christ and His bride the church, but it’s not the gospel. That’s ‘idolizing’ marriage.” Salvation, for “JAB” and adherents, is strictly the transaction (which the right-minded more accurately call justification), but for him, “salvation” doesn’t seem to entail any of the details about becoming sealed with the indwelling Holy Spirit, or learning how to live with the Bridegroom in eternity, ahead of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. In other words, it’s a pared-down gospel that makes our sanctification seem “optional”, leading to the Calvinist’s (false) allegations of a “works-based” gospel if it is based in any way on obeying the commandments of Christ. Yes, we are indeed free of any requirement to follow the Law of Moses, but obeying Christ from the heart, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is worlds removed from that! We cannot equate the commandments of Christ with the defunct Law of Moses.
According to the referenced sermon by Dr. MacArthur, “false teachers”:
(1) hinder believers from obeying the truth by falsely claiming the authority of James, the head of the early church, and attacking Paul’s authority
(2) “obeying the truth” is to believe the gospel (circular argument, as presented by Dr. M, if it excludes obedience to Christ’s direct commandments in purported “legalism”)
(3) do not represent God (in “legalistic lies“)
(4) contaminate the church – “a little leaven…”
(5) will face judgment (SIFC: indeed!) because they are in it for money (SIFC: beginning at 38:25 the irony of this sermon really comes to a crescendo)
(6) persecute the true teachers (perhaps by calling them “graceless legalists” and “Pharisees”?)
The hypocritical application of what, on its face at least, is biblical truth is what most tickles carnal ears (contemporary “Nicolaitans”) these days. Biblical “grace” never focuses on the temporal while completely ignoring what the bible says about eternal outcomes. Refraining from disobeying Jesus by the act of “marrying” someone else while having a living, estranged spouse is not “legalism”, any more than refraining from sodomy, incest or concurrent polygamy is. Indeed, James, the head of the church officially required the converted Gentiles in Acts 15 to refrain from sexual immorality. Elsewhere, Paul tells us our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Refraining from, or physically repenting from, remarriage adultery is akin to refraining from touching the Ark of the Covenant — another of God’s most sacred symbols. No, there isn’t instant death any longer for violators, but only because of Christ’s resurrection, and because God is not eager to instantly dispatch people to hell while Jesus is advocating for their souls that they would fully repent. (“JAB” made a big deal that this was so they wouldn’t actually need to repent, other than from alleged “unbelief” in “grace”.)
By the Spirit of the Lord, there are a few Calvinists who “get” marriage permanence (Dr. “Mac” not being one of those). SIFC hangs out on pages like Pulpit & Pen because the page owners are outspoken critics of a wide variety of the worst enemies and abusers of the sanctity of marriage within the evangelical church today. At the same time, they seem to be boosters of the good doctor, despite his apostasy concerning marriage, and it’s not very clear why that’s the case at this point. Perhaps it was good to get a word in on the subject, because not just any marriage, nor the institution of marriage reflects the gospel, that is, the husband laying down his life, and the wife submitting to her husband under the Lordship of Christ, both parties forgiving each other as Christ forgives us, seventy times seven, and the preparation for heaven. How can much of what passes for “marriage” these days, either in law or in practice, possibly do any of that? No, it’s only God-joined, indissoluble unions that actually mirror the gospel. Neither can be counterfeited by caving to an evil contemporary culture.
Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.”It was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean; for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints.
Then he said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’” And he said to me, “These are true words of God.”Then I fell at his feet to worship him. But he *said to me, “Do not do that; I am a fellow servant of yours and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus; worship God. For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” – Revelation 19:6-10
(* Sorry, we couldn’t resist the well-timed jab by the satire page, Babylon Bee.)
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short. – Romans 12:12
For many of us who obey biblical instruction to stand for the wholeness of our families, to treat an involuntary or our own sinfully-initiated civil divorce as a chaste separation of the indissoluble, no matter how long it takes, no matter what pseudo-authority an immoral civil law system attempts to exert over us, no matter what we suffer at church as a consequence of this biblical obedience, we yet find ourselves in a very long journey that increases the number and sharpness of the rocky shoals we must now figure out how to navigate. As the journey lengthens, we often lose the support of others after a long season, based on circumstances we can’t control. We’re hard-pressed, even so, to point to a single hero of the bible who didn’t also experience this, but it seems really hard when it’s us; when it’s our kids inflicting some of the cultural persecution and suffering their own mortification over our convictions.
Along with the long road comes the intensifying spiritual warfare, because what we are daring to do is shake the very beams and timbers of the world’s oldest and most powerful satanic stronghold. We are generally a pretty strong lot, if our motives for doing this are what they should be. We can’t be “taken out” permanently by our own covetings and lusts, even if our foot might slip on occasion, and we can’t be shamed out of it, even by close friends or disgruntled family members, if our worst terror is that our prodigal spouse faces an eternity in hell if they die before repenting, or that our children and grandchildren might be deceived into emulating him or her some day. We bear up, some of us, through intense economic hardship, lonely illnesses, the slander and accusation of others in the body of Christ, whose own carnal choices make our contrasting choice seem threatening. When satan knows, after years and sometimes decades of trying, he can’t get to us any other way, he often doubles back around on efforts to get to us through our children. There are several forms this can take, and though “standerinfamilycourt” has blogged on this before by way of personal tales, this post will try to take a look at how this commonly develops, share some things that might be helpful to think about, and finally share some encouraging outcomes.
Catholic author, Leila Miller has written a highly-praised book called Primal Loss, in which she asks a set of questions to seventy adult children of divorce about their feelings and experiences, which she captures in the book. Most were accounts of parents who, for the most part, remarried and would never have considered standing for the indissolubility of the only marriage God recognized as such. The parents largely went along with the culture, and had no godly input to do otherwise. The kids mostly say their adult life has suffered in various ways.
These accounts captured in Primal Loss make a good contrast against which our own choice to obey God’s commandment throughout unwanted marital estrangement can be compared to the emotional impact on our adult children of our not doing so, for a little balance and perspective. The whole premise of Miller’s book was the grievous temporal emotional impact on the adult life of these casualties of the popular divorce culture, especially where society expected them not to contradict the conventional wisdom about their “resiliency”. Her premise is true enough: our culture deeply frowns on adult children of divorce speaking up about how the selfishness of man’s divorce has impacted them as adults, and this expectation is no different for children of standers from the perspective of virtually everyone around them, except us standers. One of the most repeated (and striking themes) as stated by many of the adult children in this book is how much they truly resent having to explain to their own children Nana and Papaw’s estrangement.
“standerinfamilycourt” has two adult children of the covenant marriage. Both were young adults when the marital issues first surfaced. Both were raised all their lives in an evangelical home, where they were not even allowed (by their prodigal parent) to spend the night in a home where there was a biblically-adulterous “marriage”, even if the offending couple was part of our church. Both are now happily married, attending church regularly with their young families, and teaching their own children marriage permanence. Both stood firmly, along with their respective spouses, with this covenant marriage stander for nearly a decade leading up to the unilateral civil divorce action, and for at least a couple of years until a prodigal husband legalized his adultery, almost a dozen years into their ordeal. SIFC is well aware that many standers have a very different personal situation with regard to their children’s ability or willingness to support their stand.
All this said, SIFC has been violently thrown out of the house of each of these adult children at least once in the past 3 or 4 years, for a reason directly related to pressures from the covenant marriage stand, and has been threatened with never seeing the grandchildren again if it continued, and if SIFC didn’t quit the “cult”.
What are some of these pressures that we wish we could spare our kids (and their kids), which inevitably result from the only choice we can righteously make before God?
(1) The adulterous prodigal and their new spouse are relentlessly pouring on the emotional pressure to validate their “marriage”. This is an all-consuming, driving force among those who know their relationship is invalid and immoral in God’s eyes. In fact, the more they knew this before they entered into pseudo-marriage, the more intense the effort becomes to gain acceptance. Cards, bribes, invitations and pleas will proliferate. Scripture will be twisted to call into question the kids’ “unwillingness to ‘forgive’ ” or their “failure to honor their mother and father”, or their “disrespect for the authority of civil government”. They will be pointedly reminded that their own current church would recognize this new “marriage” (too often true enough).
If those measures don’t succeed, the grandchildren will often be contacted behind the backs of their parents. The child’s conscientious spouse, who never asked for any of this ongoing conflict, will start to fear for their own marriage due to the household turmoil all this lobbying causes over an extended period of time. If not properly navigated, the adulterers eventually “win” from the simple grind of wearing down family members, and they know they can easily deflect the blame at the same time, preferably onto the stander. The problem is not their immoral betrayal of their own flesh and blood progeny, it’s that irksome covenant marriage stand, and an “ex”-spouse who is “deliberately prolonging the pain” for all, by “using the kids”, instead of “getting help” or “moving on”.
(2) The children were not raised with the idea of marriage indissolubility, and they support the adulterous union because that’s what peace with our culture dictates. It usually takes two firmly-convicted parents to raise up children who would fit into the first description discussed above. Given the apostasy of most churches and the widespread legalized immorality in most extended families and friends’ families, this stands to reason. Beyond this is the fact that many abandoned spouses come genuinely to Christ only as a consequence of the marital rupture, and did not raise their children with biblical marriage concepts. In this latter case, the kids come to associate the stander’s sudden “fundamentalism” with all the prevailing lies of the culture about following Christ.
This really puts the stander in a serious pressure-cooker, and can result in much greater actual isolation from children and grandchildren than the first group of circumstances. These standers often find themselves suffering in silence as their grandchildren are exposed to one or more normalized immoral relationships that they know imperil two generations of souls. They also suffer much humiliation in these circumstances. They suffer almost irresistible fear and a sense of helplessness to do anything about it, even to the extent of fearing to wear their wedding ring in front of the family. To them, I offer an encouragement from the recent film, “I Can Only Imagine: The Bart Millard Story”. Bart’s mother left her abusive covenant husband for good cause, and formed a series of immoral relationships soon after. Bart’s dad, long before he came to Christ toward the end of his life, never took off his wedding ring. He, too, was a stander even as a pagan. Even as a drunk, he was having one of the most important silent influences a man could have on his son’s future life.
(3) The adult children have their peers to appease (and you’re embarrassing them; putting them on the spot). They go to work, to dinner parties, they’re on facebook and at soccer practice and scouts. It’s sharply painful to them to be asked how their mom or dad is doing. Social media exposure makes this circumstance particularly painful for both the stander and the children who feel “trapped” between their parents, in front of their friends, no less. It’s not uncommon for adult children of standers to “unfriend” one or both parents because of this, particularly if there is any activism involved on the stander’s part, or bragadocious posts on the prodigal’s part – both circumstances being very common. They dread being asked by these friends if they (like us) think that they or their divorced-and-remarried parents / aunts / uncles / siblings are living in sin. Even the most faithful of born-again adult children may not be very comfortable with thinking about these matters in eternal, heaven-or-hell terms. Their focus tends to cling tightly to how people are made to feel in all of the swirling circumstances. This concern often extends to what they fear your grandchildren might let slip to their own young friends, because so many of those children’s parents are divorced and remarried, as SIFC’s daughter once protested.
(4) There’s a ninety-five percent chance they are not comfortable with talk of hell, nor of remarriage adultery sending people to hell, especially by the millions. The very thought that it could be true is even more terrifying to them. God bless the Francis Chans and David Pawsons of the evangelical world who are now setting the example that’s giving us permission once again to talk about hell, after a decades-long church taboo against it! In the meantime, we’ve been up to our eyebrows in toxic Calvinism and toxic Lutheranism, with extrabiblical statements like: “He died for our past, present and future sins”, or “God looks at our sins, no matter how bad, through the shed blood of His Son, and He has thrown them as far away as the east is from the west.” (Presumably, without any repentance required other than “in our hearts”). Our kids are tempted to presume that just because a couple came together in “remarriage”, and a sovereign God didn’t stop it, He must have “joined them”. Most contemporary evangelical pastors look right pastMatthew 19:4-6, 8 (and related passages) to presume that God “provided for” divorce, and that all civil marriages other than homosexual or incestuous ones are morally interchangeable. Against that backdrop, linking Luke 16:18 with 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 seems almost sacrilegious. However, we need to be mindful that Jesus and Paul each made that linkage twice.
Empathetically, can we blame an adult child for feeling intense alarm and strong denial at someone / anyone saying out loud that a parent they always thought was “saved”, who may have even baptized them, is now headed to hell just for choosing the same serial monogamy that everyone around them chooses?
Let’s face it, if we didn’t know there was a biblical hell-penalty for dying in unrepented remarriage adultery, we might still stand celibate out of our first love for Jesus, but we’d have far less company in doing so. Furthermore, we’d be unloving not to give our blessing to the remarriage of our born-again one-flesh partner, knowing that the “loss of rewards” the Calvinists like to say they will reap in eternity makes their happiness in this life all the more important to them. We’d be downright cruel to keep calling it adultery, even though Jesus repeatedly did. It would be harsh on our children and grandchildren not to do whatever we could to ease the intense stress they are already under, if there were no risk of hell for children and grandchildren who go along with the immoral culture and who someday emulate it. But the biblical fact is what it is, so we “soldier on”. Jesus never promised us bloodless spiritual warfare.
Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.– Matthew 10:34-36
Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.– Matthew 24:11-13
The Apostles instead promised us we’d be surrounded and outnumbered by desperately wicked people in the last days. There is no way a serious stand can impact our children and grandchildren for the good unless the taboo against talking frankly about hell is gone from us. If we give place to the taboo out of fear of man, satan wins.
(5) Their spouse isn’t onboard, including the spouse’s parents or siblings. Perhaps your child’s in-laws are living in the sin of remarriage adultery themselves, or some of their other children or other relatives are. Perhaps they are a clergy family in a church where adulterous weddings are routine (or denominationally mandated), and “blended” families are typically the most productive members of the congregation. Or perhaps your child married an unbeliever, either equally or unequally-yoked. Perhaps you are a serious threat to your son-in-law, or daughter-in-law, because they actually have a living, estranged spouse. Whatever the reason, expect your adult child to be impossibly-torn in such circumstances, and always make your own choices that protect the sanctity and irreplaceability of their marriage, unless that marriage is biblically-adulterous.
(6) You were once the prodigal, now repented and standing, but your kids still don’t trust you. I am talking here to the one who divorced a faithful, godly spouse to “marry” someone else you were attracted to, rather than stay and persevere through the issues in your God-joined marriage. The Lord has brought you back from the Far Country, given you godly sorrow over what you’ve done, but your kids are applauding your spouse’s new relationship(s) because they don’t want to see the other parent hurt again, and aren’t ready yet to buy in to your repentance. You don’t understand how they’re not persuaded by the years you’ve chastely waited for the Lord to put your family back together since the day of your genuine repentance. From their perspective, the years they thought they could count on their intact family before it got disrupted by your change of mind (and heart) still speak louder than anything that’s happening now. That’s a really hard place to be, but not beyond the Lord’s touch.
So, what do we DO as standers with all of this? To be honest, it seems easier to talk about what we don’t do, first. – However tempting, and however much legal or informal alienation has developed, we don’t “write them off”. This is especially crucial for men to understand, in their God-assigned role as the patriarch of the family.God did not let Eli off the hook when he sinfully abdicated his role as the moral shaper of his adult sons. Giving in to this abdication urge is an affront to God’s design for the family, even in the extreme situation of legal restraining orders, and even in the second generation. Whose authority trumps here, God’s or “Caesar’s”? Be bold, and ask God to bring the children / grandchildren to you, and to remove that restraining order, in Jesus’ holy name!
– Don’t lose sight of the fact that the baseline battle is for souls, not circumstances.
– Don’t forget that the battle is ultimately the Lord’s, but He still needs kingdom soldiers (in their full armor) to carry out spiritual warfare.
– Don’t be the “cobbler whose own kids (and grandkids) went without shoes”. (This is for the street preachers, etc. out there who think it’s OK to not expect wholeness for their covenant family, as long as they’re “doing something for the kingdom of God”.)
– Never lose sight that NO prodigal mate “divorces” ONLY their covenant spouse, they also “divorce” their entire covenant family, spiritually and practically, especially if they then enter into legalized adultery.
– Don’t be so presumptuous as to give GOD a time limit. His singular will IS for ALL your covenant family to be whole in this life and to make it to heaven. Yes, we know it doesn’t always happen that way, but Abraham wasn’t lauded in Romans 4 for comparing himself to others.
DO be so bold as to stare satan down after a discouraging incident with the kids. You’re a King’s kid, and it’s your birthright, as well as your calling to do so. Balance that with the other piece of advice given to “King’s kids” (Luke 6:35) by Jesus Himself. Imagine if God treated us like we treat Him, or if He was intimidated from coming after us in spiritual warfare out of His weariness or fearfulness!
DO ask the Lord for special Spirit-revelation about the specific people causing the conflict, and pray for a unique opportunity to be a blessing to them. Follow through when it turns up.
DO prayerfully ask the Lord to pour His peace over the conflicts your kids are experiencing, and a hedge of protection over their marriage, that they would feel His presence and instruction navigating these difficult conflicts.
DO accurately walk in your Kingdom marital status 24/7/365, shutting out all resulting intimidation as “noise”. Paul never once spoke of “divorced” people in 1 Corinthians 7, nor did he actually speak generically of “single” people (despite the bad translations). If Paul believed one single word of what Jesus told him, which led to his instructions in Romans 7:2-3 and 1 Cor. 7:11 or 39, why in the world would he? Paul spoke of the widowed and the never married (“virgins” – parthenos), and the married. When he spoke of the unmarried (agamois – / agamos: without a[nother] wedding), he was usually speaking of widowers like himself. To Paul, there were no “divorced” people, only legally estranged, married people.
DO pray about wearing your wedding ring and using your married name without apology. Yes, it’s probably going to threaten your counterfeit replacement and irk your one-flesh spouse. But who is it who is guilty of the covetousness, theft and falsehood? Certainly not you!
DO remember how loudly your celibate stand is already speaking to everyone around you. This is for when you’ve shared a deep, essential truth (such as ongoing adulterers going to hell without exception), and you feel the need to “lay low” until the kids or grandkids come to you again.
DO ask the Lord to raise up supernatural barriers to exposing your grandchildren to the legal-but-adulterous (and legal-but-sodomous) unions in their lives, the best of which would be firm conviction in their parents about how morally damaging the exposure is. Yes, SIFC’s prodigal was spot-on all those years ago, and the kids have never forgotten it (to his current chagrin).
DO use bible stories (open bible) to straightforwardly communicate unpopular truths to the grandkids in an age-appropriate way, and pray with them. This is not a guarantee that you won’t incur flak or passing wrath as consequence of doing so (including from your spouse when it gets back to them). It is best to do so as a response to a conversation the grandkids initiated, and it’s best to make this an occasional, infrequent occurrence rather than a constant one. You are NOT out of line, and your ARE under God’s covering. If your spouse reprimands you, treat it as another (rare) opportunity to emphasize souls, eternal destinations, and the impact of the example we set before our children and exposed grandchildren.
DO ask the Lord before fully taking onboard their perspectives about the “damage” you are “causing” their children, your grandchildren. In 2016, my daughter claimed that my reading the John 6 account of Herod, Herodias and John the Baptist to the two elementary-aged granddaughters caused the older one to “wail in despair” about her Papaw going to hell “if she didn’t pray for him”. I had led this granddaughter to the Lord two years earlier, and knew she was comfortable with prayer. If there had really been such a “damaging” reaction, it would have been far more likely come from the younger one. We had prayed together with our arms around each other that day, and they had come to me.
DO be purposeful about spiritual disciplines, including prayer in the Spirit, fasting, devotions, scripture memory. We don’t operate in this kind of realm apart from spiritual warfare, and we don’t “dabble” very safely in it, either. Do them enough that the odds are your kids and grandkids will frequently “catch you” at them.
DO understand “standing” to include standing firm (holding our ground, occupying our God-assigned space). Try a word search in biblegateway.com on the word “stand”, and see how consistently this concept is associated with the word “stand”. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and havingput on the breastplate of righteousness,and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace.
– Ephesians 6:13-15
Early on the morning of “Boxing Day”, December 26, four months ago, SIFC was thrown out of our daughter’s house and sent home early on an 11-hour northerly journey in hazardous weather as a result of answering a question her husband had asked the Christmas night before. The culprit? On the surface, it was radical feminism, but on the inside, it was the Holy Spirit challenging her ideologies that are in conflict with the kingdom of God, and which if not repented, are quite likely to seriously threaten her own marriage down the road. The question posed by her husband was not even directly on marriage, but it was on politics. In retrospect, after the explosion that occurred at her house in August, 2016, SIFC should have demurred from engaging, since both granddaughters, ages 7 and 9, were again in the room, and because the topic area, involving a Trump administration nomination, was highly likely to drift into marriage ethics, were I to give a frank, honest answer about this morally unsuitable nominee. (SIFC is only a lukewarm Trump fan for morality and character reasons, and these kids both detest him for defeating Hillary.) Unavoidably, the conversation did drift into marriage permanence and the immoral living conditions of the nominee, who was also not pro-life, as I recall. Because my views were “polluting” and “confusing” her daughters by opening them up politically to “abuse” in their mother’s estimation, it was urgent that I be out of their house forthwith, our daughter declared (to the utter shock and dismay of her husband). Day older, day wiser. It was I who had played into that demonic trap, for the Holy Spirit did attempt to warn me. I spent the drive home pleading the blood of Jesus over their marriage, after thanking them sincerely for including me in their Christmas.
There was never any apology (except from me for not having the discernment to tactfully change the subject from politics), but by early March, our daughter was texting me about the younger granddaughter’s April birthday party, and the older one’s starring role in the annual school musical, scheduled ten days after that birthday. It appears that I had correctly discerned the demonic nature of that December setup, and correctly responded to the harsh treatment that resulted. A week ago I returned from spending a week in their home, this time without conflict, even though our granddaughters were bringing me their bibles and asking for bible stories, and even though they again asked me about Papaw, wanting more prayer for him. I had stared satan down, had shouted to him on the way back that he cannot have any part of my covenant family, in Jesus’ name, and I didn’t have to worry about creating conflict by wearing my wedding rings because the whole extended family knows they never come off. After all that had happened, I got to be the one that was there for them, doing practical things to ease stresses currently in their home, that for once, I have nothing to do with contributing to. Strangely, the other set of grandparents, who live only an hour away, weren’t even there or in touch, as far as I know.
Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble at them, for the Lord your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you. – Deuteronomy 31:6
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
The wicked accept bribes in secret [well…obscurity, anyway] to pervert the course of justice. – Proverbs 17:23
A bribe is a charm in the sight of its owner; Wherever he turns, he prospers. – Proverbs 17:8
And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. – Exodus 23:8
“standerinfamilycourt” moved a couple of years ago, compelled by financial circumstances imposed by a “family law” court, to the neighboring state, where the cost of living is considerably less than the state of our now-sold marital residence. This state has a news organization that believes in sponsoring and televising political debates between judicial candidates, in this case, for a 10-year re-electable seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The politically-correct line about this office is that it is “non-partisan”. However, one did not need to watch much of this debate to quickly identify the “liberal” and the “conservative” candidates, as it were. The sad fact of our crumbling democracy and society is that many judicial decisions are made ideologically, regardless of the traditional lore, rhetoric and precedents to the contrary.
It also appears that in the last few years, the decisions are moving in the direction of becoming more ideological rather than less ideological. According to the public interest organization, Justice At Stake, from 2000-2009, fundraising by state Supreme Court candidates soared to $206.9 million, more than doubling the $83.3 million raised in the 1990s. Note that this measurement period ended just before SCOTUS handed down the landmark big money decision, Citizens United v FEC, which is discussed below. While this blog post is a fairly detailed discussion of the skunkworks in one particular state, it is likely that any of the 20+ states with elected judges and justices will have the same special interest obstructions to true constitutional justice for the average citizen, to the extent that the remedy sought would conflict with the special interests of the donor class inside and outside that state.
Being a firm believer (from hard experience) that these days, there cannot possibly be “too much” light shed on the judiciary and on the dubious process of electing its “public servants”, this voting citizen dutifully watched the entire hour of debate very attentively, and was quite grateful, if woefully disheartened, at the rare opportunity to do so. The dominant issue in this debate was, who all was buying the most influence, and from whom. Some may “take issue” with the notion of a political donation being compared with a bribe, and in fact, many donations do not function as bribes. The problem is with the concentration of those that are clearly so, in this climate of the past few years, where most of the integrity of the judiciary has been steadily evaporating to the point where most key decisions, especially those touching the Sexual Revolution are indeed ideological. We in the marriage permanence community need to also keep ever-mindful that some of the most key decisions are hidden, and not even required to be published or justified with a stated reason: quitenotably, whether or not to even hear an appeals case brought before the highest court in the state.
There have been calls for SCOTUS Justices to have their life appointments curtailed, and even for them to be elected rather than appointed, especially in the wake of corrosive and overbearing decisions like Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v Texas, Citizens United v FEC, Employment Board v. Smith, and Obergefell v Hodges. which legalized all of the following by high court ideological fiat:
– abortion
– sodomy
– money as “speech”
– countermanding the 1st Amendment fundamental protection of free religious exercise on the state and Federal levels, leading to the need for individual states to adopt RFRA’s, which directly resulted instate-by-state inequality of that Bill of Rights protection
– gay “marriage”
As frustrating as these ideological travesties of justice were (some of the very worst of them conservatively-decided, by the way), a better solution needs to be found that does not hamstring or sabotage the separation-of-powers our founders so wisely designed-in. My theory is that elected judicial candidates provide no advantage over appointed candidates, and may have effectively placed the latter for purchase by the highest bidder, especially in the wake of Citizens United, which declared inanimate greenbacks to be 1st Amendment-protected “free speech”. That’s right, since 2010 the “green stamps” in the corporate and PAC wallets have been deemed more worthy of 1st Amendment protections by the highest court in the land than human Respondents in a unilateral divorce lawsuit (since SCOTUS has a long history of refusing to hear constitutional challenges of unilateral divorce laws in the decades since their state-by-state enactment).
As noted earlier by the organization Justice At Stake, most states which have an elected, term-limited judiciary created this special-interest situation long before 2010, and to be transparent, the big donors to these elective offices didn’t have many limits that the Citizens case materially changed (at least in Wisconsin), as we shall see in the process of breaking down the donor-categories and amounts given to these two competing “non-partisan” candidates in the state of Wisconsin. As responsible citizens, however, we still need to be aware of the increasing potential for big money from in-state and out-of-state special interests to literally purchase a state judicial election, since the door has now swung wide open for them to do so:
As recently reported by Matthew Rothschild -Wisconsin Democracy Campaign Executive Director,
“Before [2015 legislative change], the most a candidate for the state supreme court could receive from all committees combined was $140,156. So the candidate could accept $140,156 from the Republican Party of Wisconsin, but then the candidate could not accept a single dime from any other committee.
“Now the sky is the limit. Political parties can now give unlimited amounts of money to candidates of their choice.
“To make matters worse, before the 2015 rewrite, the most that a rich individual could give to a political party was $10,000. Now a rich individual can give unlimited amounts of money to a political party.
“With both of these ceilings torn down, a billionaire could give $10 million to a political party, and that party could then turn around and spend that $10 million on the billionaire’s favorite candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
“This makes a mockery of the limits on direct donations to candidates for Wisconsin Supreme Court, which used to be $10,000 and now is $20,000 (itself a ridiculously high sum).”
So, whose bidding will the two opposing candidates be doing, once elected? For those who didn’t take time to watch the debate video linked above, here’s a brief synopsis (financial figures are from the site Wisconsin Democratic Campaign, a follow-the-money disclosure site, as reported through March 11, 2018):
“Non-partisan” Progressive – Rebecca Dallet*(please click to enlarge detail)
*Note: Dallet donated $200,000 to her own campaign, $35,000 more than her opponent’s entire fundraising result, to-date. These funds have been excluded from the analysis for a fairer comparison of supporters. Even so, her overall donated funds are more than twice her opponent’s. Close to $200,000 alone has come from the practicing or retired legal community, easily 50% of her outside fundraising, with the biggest firm donors in the personal injury, energy or corporate practice areas. Her other major special interest donor categories include commercial business interests in Real Estate, Banking and Non-Profits. All of the donations for Dallet in the “Political / Ideological” category were $500 or under, except for the Brico Fund – $5,000, which appears to be a feminist organization focused on girls, and more recently, environmental and “social justice” issues (excluding, of course, Bill of Rights protections of unilateral divorce Respondents and the right-to-life of pre-born citizens).
PAC contributions to or expended on behalf of Dallet appear to be immaterial, but tellingly there’s one special interest group who is spending significant money in her behalf based on a perceived need for her support:
Note: the first group listed has expended 40% more in favor of her opponent’s campaign. The second group has expended $116K and is the subject of heated controversy in the state, justifiably so.
Overall, about $32K or about 9% of Dallet’s fundraising came from out-of-state sources. Note:On April 3, 2018, Dallet did emerge as the successful candidate in the General Election.
“Non-partisan” Conservative – Michael Screnock (please click to enlarge detail)
Between 30 and 40% of Screnock’s coffers have been filled with donations from the active or retired legal community, but this is not as easy to gauge because Dallet’s retired donors were listed as such, example: “retired judge“, whereas Screnock’s retirees and public servant donors were not. His largest direct campaign donor was his father, who is a currently-practicing family law attorney in Wisconsin, contributing just under the $20K current legal limit established in 2015 by the legislature. A corporate law firm contributed another $15K.
Unlike the case with his liberal opponent, G.O.P. PAC contributions were significant and helped make “non-partisan” Screnock’s primary campaign financially competitive with Dallet’s mega-war chest. About $5K or about 3.5% of Screnock’s fundraising came from out-of-state sources, compared with Dallet’s 9%.
The current controversy involving SCOWI (and specifically, candidate Dallet) is over the toothless Justice recusal policy, given the large campaign donations by a PAC interested in the state redistricting / gerrymandering activities. As it stands, there is nothing except honor or integrity to compel a Justice to recuse themselves from a matter directly involving a campaign donor entity, even right after they have made a very large contribution. What if a serious challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s unilateral divorce law came before SCOWI, and some of the Justices had taken campaign donations from the American Bar Association? Or from the ACLU, or the Lambda Foundation? Wisconsin reportedly has the weakest recusal policy in the country, so this begs the question of why? If Justices recused themselves, as integrity truly demands, from cases involving the interests of large donors, would those campaign finance contributions continue to flow? One good way to find out is to reform the recusal rules.
Have we structurally landed in a place where only certain citizens are entitled to constitutional fundamental protections, regardless of the liberal or conservative makeup of the court, specifically, those who don’t oppose the fee-rich business-as-usual operation of the Sexual Revolution?
So, how much impact has the Citizens United decision actually had on judicial campaign funding in Wisconsin? Is there a reasonable way to measure? For example, can we get an idea by comparing the reported campaign finances of Justices first elected before 2010, and re-elected in 2010 or after?
For each of the three sitting Justices first elected prior to 2010, then re-elected after 2010, an analysis similar to those presented above on the candidates was done, but contrasting the earlier election funding and donors with the most recent funding and donors. This is also contrasted with the funding and donations for the 2009 last campaign of the only Justice who hasn’t stood for re-election since 2010 because her term isn’t up until next year. A summary of observations and trends is given based on the individual analysis, for each Justice examined. In all cases, the Justice’s personal funds donated to the campaign was removed and disregarded in the overall figures so that only external fundraising in considered in the analysis. Those self-contributed figures also tell an important story, but need to be examined separately.
Chief Justice Patience Drake Roggensack*, 2003/2013 (Conservative) Summary: 2013 fundraising was nearly six-fold versus 2003, or $688,000 versus $119,000. In 2013, just under $38,000 (under 2%) was raised from out-of-state sources, and did include business interests, compared with a little over $16,000 (13%) in 2003. Law firms and lobbyists (yes, I did indeed just say, lobbyists) accounted for 25% of fundraising in 2003, which was similar proportionally to 2013. The next largest 2003 donor category was Manufacturing at 17% but reduced in 2013 to only 8% of the total figures. After that, Banking, General Business, Construction, and Health Professionals each accounted for 10%-12% of fundraising in 2003 – and each of these reduced their share by roughly half of the 2003 totals (proportionally) in 2013 while actually donating 3 or 4 times as much in 2013 as in 2003. Donors categorized as Political / Ideological interests, primarily “school choice”, donated 13% of the total in 2003 versus only 3% of the total in 2013. Aside from the six-fold rise in campaign costs and fundraising, the other big trend in the post-Citizens United election was the dramatic increase, from 6% to 13%, in donations from the Retired/Homemakers / Non-Income Earners, only $6,000 in 2003 but $91,000 in 2013. In other judicial campaigns in the state, this group tends to be dominated by retired attorneys and their wives. The final observation is the emergence of eight new industries donating to the 2013 campaign that were not present in the 2003 campaign, none of which accounted for more than 3% each, including Agriculture, Defense, Education, Insurance, Institutional Health, Natural Resources, Real Estate, and Transportation. Finally, it should be noted that Justice Roggensack was the first Chief Justice selected by her peers on the court following a law change (2015) that allowed it, instead of the role falling to the most senior justice, prior to that year. Roggensack’s last re-election fell two years prior to her selection as Chief Justice. In perspective, her 2013 war chest almost twice that of first-time successful 2018 candidate Rebecca Dallet, and was more than four times greater than the unsuccessful 2018 candidate. Both women donated about $200,000 to their own most recent campaigns.
Justice Ann Walsh Bradley* 1985 / 2015 (Liberal) Summary:Again, we see a $600,000+ campaign for 2015, versus only a $29,000 campaign in 2005. Bradley donated none of her own funds to her 2015 campaign and only $500 to the earlier campaign. Out-of-state funds, mostly from retired attorneys and spouses amounted to $12,000 in 2015 and none in 2005. As was the case with the liberal 2018 candidate, Rebecca Dallet, law firms and retired attorneys made up approximately 50% of total outside donations in both the early and the more recent campaign. As we also saw with the 2013 Roggensack campaign, several industries significantly ramped up their contributions, as did the labor unions and other liberal political causes in 2015. Contributions by law firms seem to be escalating as an indirect effect of Citizens United in an effort to proportionally maintain their accustomed pre-2010 level of influence, with all the new special interests entering the campaign funding arena. Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler* 2007/2017 (Conservative)
Annette Zeigler’s initial SCOWI campaign costs apparently topped $1 million way back in 2007, and she contributed $840,000 to her own war chest, while raising over $500,000 from external donors. Since she only raised $360,000 for the 2017 reprise, without having to contribute any further personal funds, it appears she was able to carry quite a surplus over from the prior campaign. Still, her 2007 initial campaign was far more expensive than any of her peers to that point, and more expensive than any since. Unlike most of her judicial peers, practicing attorney firms did not dominate her fundraising (just 8% and 9%, respectively), but there’s a strong likelihood that the retired, out-of-state legal community made up for it, and may have brought the legal community’s stake to something more like 25% or more in both campaigns.
The other Justice (Rebecca) Bradley was first elected in 2016 on a $900,000 campaign of which (rather oddly) nearly $200,000 was raised from retired and non-income-earning citizens, and Justice Kelly was appointed to fill an unexpired term, so their campaigns were not studied. Dallet replaces a conservative retiring Justice Michael Gableman, elected in 2008, whose campaign was not studied, since Abrahamson’s 2009 campaign serves as the pre-Citizens United comparator. Overall, his 2008 campaign ran slightly more than $300,000 of which only about 15% was funded by lawyers and lobbyists. He contributed less than $1,600 to his own campaign, mostly in petty cash items of odd amounts.
JusticeShirley S. Abrahamson**, 1979/2009 (Liberal)
On the heels ofAnnette Ziegler’s $1 million + run in 2007, former Chief Justice Abrahamson raised nearly $1.3 million for her third (and by far, most expensive) re-election campaign in 2009, the year before the Citizens United decision was handed down by SCOTUS. Of this, Justice Abrahamson contributed nearly $100,000 of her own funds that year.Out of State contributions amounted to about $35,000, from mostly businesses and political interests. The term for this successful run expires next year, 2019. This data indicates that rather than Citizens United being the cause of the ramp-up in special interest funding of judicial campaigns, this democracy-toxic SCOTUS decision may have, in part at least, been actually driven by these conditions.
(please click to enlarge details)
From this, we clearly see that the trend toward domination by law firms (and legal industry retirees) of the overall campaign funding had its explosion prior to Citizens United, especially for “progressive” candidates. Could it have been that the landmark SCOTUS decision was a reactionary move on the part of the conservative Justices to this trend in Wisconsin and other major states? There was an abundance of twists, turns, reassignments and re-arguments in this case, including (or possibly accommodating) a very controversial reversal of process by the conservative majority to broaden the scope of their ruling from the narrow question originally brought before them, and profuse, circular, contorted reasoning to justify doing so in the final Kennedy majority opinion, which could hardly be in reference to anything but the impact on judicial elections and the separation of powers overall.
There is certainly plenty of evidence in Justice Stephens’ dissenting opinion that the impact on judicial elections was indeed debated among the Justices:
“ And it underscores that the consequences of today’s holding will not be limited to the legislative or executive context. The majority of the States select their judges through popular elections. At a time when concerns about the conduct of judicial elections have reached a fever pitch, see, e.g., O’Connor, Justice for Sale, Wall St. Journal, Nov. 15, 2007, p. A25; Brief for Justice at Stake et al. as Amici Curiae 2, the Court today unleashes the floodgates of corporate and union general treasury spending in these races. Perhaps “ Caperton motions” will catch some of the worst abuses. This will be small comfort to those States that, after today, may no longer have the ability to place modest limits on corporate electioneering even if they believe such limits to be critical to maintaining the integrity of their judicial systems. …”
Quoting former SCOTUS Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 2010 unofficial commentary (she left the court in 2006),
“[After Citizens United], we can anticipate labor unions’ trial lawyers might have the means to win one kind of an election, and that a tobacco company or other corporation might win in another election. If both sides open up their spending, mutually assured destruction is probably the most likely outcome. It would end both judicial impartiality and public perception of impartiality.”
Stepping back for a look at the “big picture”, it almost goes without saying that if massive special interest donations deliberately and intentionally (according to the SCOTUS majority) drive judicial elections, particularly dominated (as it apparently stands) from the practicing and retired legal community, calling these judgeships “nonpartisan” is a sham that borders on insulting the intelligence of the citizenry. Indeed, “standerinfamilycourt” is a very new resident of Wisconsin, yet was able to reliably tell whether each candidate was conservative or liberal just by looking at the donor list. Furthermore, the “donor class” forking over the big money didn’t exactly get where they are today by personal oblivion and recklessness with their money. If they didn’t firmly believe, despite the rhetoric and propaganda, that alljudges and justices these days “legislate from the bench”, and (even worse) uphold constitutionally-offensive legislation regardless of the merits of the case before them, they would keep their wallets and purses firmly zipped. Even more telling is the staggering amount of money successful individual judicial candidates contributed to their own campaigns, particularly re-election campaigns, sometimes amounting to almost three times the amount that their entire first campaign took in from all contributors. Who would do this if they didn’t realistically expect a serious financial return on those funds over the course of their 10 year term?
“I believe as a matter of law it cannot stand constitutional or structural scrutiny,”Justice Annette Ziegler said of the proposed rule. ,
“The petitioners here have asked us to do something that does not comport with the constitution as I view it.” As she views it: that is, through the fouled lens of her nearly $1 million 2007 investment in her own career, upon which it “isn’t constitutional” to deny her the maximum pecuniary returns that the market will bear. But Ziegler here goes a step further than even Anthony Kennedy, since the issue she so glibly applied Citizens United to is recusal: in so doing, is she not intrinsically saying that not only must the political bribes be protected as “speech”, but the eventual effectiveness of the quid-pro-quo (from her contributors) must also be guaranteed through her own actual speech? Is it rocket science to predict what would happen to the level of those donations if their degree of illicit influence was diluted? It is against this kind of backdrop that the arrogance of the court is unmistakable in the further comment by the conservative majority that the petition for reform was “disrespectful” of the foxes guarding the henhouse.
Solutions, Anyone?
As we’ve seen, there is no longer any such thing as a “non-partisan” judicial election (if there ever was), just as there is no such thing as a “no-fault” divorce. Both are political myths that the public swallows without much insight — until they and their family personally get burned. Those states who have such systems, or have partisan elections, including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas and Washington, have effectively waived the separation-of-powers check and balance, until they take action to adjust to Citizens United, and to any additional damage their legislatures may have done in response under the “guidance” that “money is speech”. Twenty four states were reported as of 2016 to have an appointment system for selecting judges and justices and / or retention elections. California, New York and Utah are among these. Justices should be appointed, according to Justice At Stake, at least at the top level, making it likely this would require some states to amend their constitutions. The fact that lower appellate court judges (who are required to hear all appeals), currently know that big money is going to dictate who’s on the state’s highest court, and it inevitably reduces their independence and objectivity as they would normally seek to avoid having their decisions overturned can now predict ahead of time where they will not be overturned, just by who campaign donors were. Ditto for trial judges further down the chain.
The policy think-tank, the Brennan Center contended in a 2010 white paper that the most effective national remedy for self-dealing, in a “money is speech” world, is public funding of judicial elections. Wisconsin seems to be a classic case study in why this recommendation actually resolved very little. That very year, Wisconsin enacted legislation doing just that. A 2011 paper by The Brennan Center extols the reduction in such contributions afforded by the availability of public funds that resulted from the reform, which provided $400,000 to candidates voluntarily availing themselves of those funds, touting the 2010 contest between incumbent Justice Prosser and challenger Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg. We’ve seen with several examples where actual partisan contributions in the seven-figure range in Wisconsin dwarfed that amount long before enactment of public financing. After enactment, the availability of these modest public funds indeed reduced partisan donations from the typical seven figures to the high six figures in most races that followed. It seems a bit more of a stretch to argue that this modest result changed too much, in the scheme of things. Citizens United, after all, guaranteed that the two systems must now coexist, and independent direct media spend by special interest groups favoring a candidate outside of campaign contributions can easily dwarf both categories.
Wisconsin media liberals have a different “fix” to tout, namely a sixteen year term with a one-term limit. “standerinfamilycourt” fails to see where this proposal addresses any of the underlying evils that result from the current scheme. Although sixteen years might reasonably occupy one half to one third of a jurist’s remaining career, will it improve his or her independence in a world where, even without re-election pressures, half of the funds that won the seat came from fellows in the legal profession? Unlikely.
Judicial corruption amounting to the breakdown of constitutional separation-of-powers impacts the integrity of the biblical family more severely by far, and with far more lasting national consequence, than arguably any other area of life or commerce. Unilateral family-shredding for profit is a sadly bi-partisan affair, since legal practitioners on both sides of the political aisle profit handsomely therefrom. Law firms dominate the election funding process only to a slightly greater degree for leftist jurists than for “conservative” jurists, and one does not need to favor a traditional family structure to still be deemed a “conservative”. Finally, unlike virtually every other kind of constitutional violation under the sun, no-fault marriage “dissolution” cases are effectively cordoned off from recourse to the Federal courts unless there are homosexuals involved.
Given that the checks and balances in our constitutional republic functioned fairly well for the 200 years before the moral breakdown of society rendered it substantially less able to raise unselfish citizens who are motivated by the long term public interest, national repentance before God, and according to His standards, is likely to be a necessary part of reforms that will ultimately succeed. When a nation persistently thumbs its nose at His commandments, He simply removes His hand of protection, and after many opportunities to repent, He finally gives them over to their own self-destructive ways.
The elders are gone from the city gate; the young men have stopped their music. Joy is gone from our hearts; our dancing has turned to mourning. The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned! – Lamentations 5:14-16
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!
Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.
– John 7:24
…and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell. – Matthew 5:22
Who are you to judge the [household] servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
….But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.For it is written,
“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me,
And every tongue shall give praise to God.”
So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God.
Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. – Rom 14:4, 11-13
Last week, a deeply-respected ministry leader in the marriage permanence movement reposted an earlier-year piece that showed a photo with various faceless members of the marriage permanence fellowship he had founded, whom he said had given up on God to restore their covenant marriages, and were “no longer standing” (whatever that means in practical terms), while blaming a range of other marriage ministries for the “confusion” that allegedly caused these folks to stray from purpose. In so doing, he lumped several ministries, good, bad and ugly, all together in one all-encompassing “heresy bucket”, and quite possibly complained prematurely about some redemption stories that were not yet fully written by the Author.
A comment to this gentleman’s post, challenging this ministry leader to provide example evidence of unbiblical public teaching and conduct for one of those denounced ministries was quickly deleted, and a late-night PM exchange, initiated by the ministry leader, ensued about the commenter’s alleged “disrespect” and “anger”. In his estimation, his own ministry audience wasn’t entitled to objective support for his position, and asking for it on his ministry wall was (in his estimation) “slander” of his integrity which constituted “accusing him of lying”. It is always tempting to put a time and means limit on God in our human impatience.
(Furthermore, we might all be eerily reminded of one other prevalent human authority that claims the right to press unsubstantiated charges and impose non-objective labels that require no evidence to establish–and where the slightest dissent or challenge causes immediate out-of-proportion backlash: namely, “family court.” )
SIFC has often blogged about the intense, wearying spiritual warfare that constantly dogs the covenant marriage movement.
At our best, satan finds himself unable to assail either our theology on the indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony, or our personal integrity in walking joyfully in its truth over the long term–and I do emphasize the latter. So, the next best thing, and the low-hanging fruit for the demons of hell, is to constantly introduce endless internal wedge-issues and jealousies that discredit the movement and make it appear to be a reactionary “cult”, majoring in the minors (with our own tendency to fully cooperate, sadly).
Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me,for whoever is not against us is for us.Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward. – Mark 9:38-41
The offending, deleted facebook comment which was deemed “slanderous, angry and disrespectful” in the estimation of this ministry leader went like this:
“Too broad a brushstroke, my brother. Some of these “ministries” are rightly associated with each other, and in some cases it is shameful slander to associate them. We should “judge” each of these solely by what they actually teach and by the personal example of their leaders.
“You say, ‘I have personally met [the founding couple of the ministry] and have exchanged numerous communications with [the restored, repented formerly prodigal husband, now deceased] before he passed, as well as various others at all levels in their organization over the past 15 years.’ …..
“But, in fact, this is saying nothing at all that is of discernment. You are not the only one who has met and corresponded with the [extended ministry family].
“I am asking you to please stop slandering Rejoice Marriage Ministries unless you can prove that they teach falsehood or prove they live ungodly lives. I am proud to be a monthly supporter, as I have been for over 10 years.”
Although this particular post (and others like them) have been repeatedly reposted, the virtuous leaders of the maligned marriage ministry have never, to the best of my knowledge, chosen to answer back or retaliate in any way — something which is very much to their credit. Instead, they forgive, overlook, and allow God Himself to defend them, just as most individual standers must do with respect to their prodigal spouse and the sinning allies of the prodigal in their extended family. Perhaps an argument can be made that SIFC should best follow their example (which is ultimately following Christ’s example), and this is not without biblical justification. Unfortunately, as described in an earlier recent blog,
“On the other hand, outright slander against a very effective and godly pioneering marriage restoration ministry was actively defended by the [separate] site owner when interjected by another commenter, interfering as she was with help SIFC was attempting to provide to a new [group page] member in the crisis of his wife leaving him. Nope, this site is clearly not safe for referrals from Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional as originally hoped. ”
….these unsubstantiated allegations are directly interfering with actual instances where opportunities to minister to real, hurting people, according to their core needs at that point, have suffered as a result of inflated egos and unfair biases. And this disappointing public conduct is well below the normally high character of some of the players involved.
In the humble opinion of “standerinfamilycourt”, it is most just and most helpful to look at some objective attributes of these ministries and recognize that each ministry falls along a continuum, in terms of faithfulness to the kingdom of God with regard to marriage permanence. In such a framework, we can put into perspective the really flawed ones that God nevertheless finds a way to use to His purposes, the ones in the middle that are biblically faithful but whose structure and kingdom strategies we might not personally find to our taste, and (finally) those we are most aligned with. Attempting, as the offending post did, to put them all in one bucket is divisive at best, and ineffective-to-slanderous at worst.
Some key marriage permanence ministry attributes, from SIFC’s perspective:
1- How consistently are their public teachings perfectly-aligned with God’s undiluted word, after applying rigorous hermeneutics?
2- Are any of their leadership, board members or featured public “restoration testimonies” objectively in a marriage that Jesus would call continuously-adulterous according to Luke 16:18?
3- Do they pre-screen members according to whether they are standing for the God-joined marriage of their youth, or (instead) have an estranged, living spouse somewhere in the picture?
4- If the latter, what is the evidence of their motive or objectives for not screening out people in who are in legalized adultery? Is the motive godly, on balance? (Note: this is closely tied to the first attribute.)
5- Do they teach that dying in an adulterous remarriage is a heaven-or-hell issue, either directly or indirectly? (Note: this is a reliable proxy for whether or not they counsel people out of their adulterous civil subsequent unions, but not necessarily a direct proxy for their beliefs.)
6- Do they believe in and teach the concept of inseverable, instantaneously-joined one-flesh, which can only be created and terminated by the hand of God?
7- Do they believe and teach indissoluble, unconditional covenant, including God’s participation in that individual covenant?
8- Do they explicitly understand that there is a massive difference between “marriage permanence” and “holy matrimony indissolubility” according to Matthew 19:8 ?
If we were to assess each ministry by assigning “kingdom faithfulness points” on a scale of 1 to 10, most faithful to least faithful, for each separate attribute suggested above, this continuum would emerge on an fairly objective basis that is far better than smearing “anyone who is not us”. We thereby avoid the stain of judging “another man’s” house-servant unjustly within the household of God. We give a more appropriate and measured weight to things that are more a matter of preference, rather than true doctrinal or practice issues. We also see more objectively the degree of difference between the least faithful “ministries” and the most faithful ones. A perfect score – most faithful – on this test is (8), and the worst possible – least faithful – score is (80).
There are some additional criteria crucial to marriage restoration ministry that are more difficult to assess and objectively measure for comparison purposes which have been excluded for this reason in the (8) criteria chosen above. The most important of these is the rate and extent they are leading those they attract, and to whom they minister, to saving faith in Jesus Christ. A ministry that decides as an operating principle to screen out those who are in estranged “marriages” Jesus called adulterous (but they are not ready yet to admit it) is quite likely excluding the religious unsaved to a large extent, given how pervasive divorce and remarriage is in the cultures of all western nations. Therefore, the testimonies of people who say they authentically came to the Lord as a result of their marriage crisis, and learned to stay in Him regardless of the marriage outcome, are important.
Catholic-based ministries have proven, in “standerinfamilycourt’s” opinion and experience, to be very effective at influencing the broad culture for marriage permanence. However, because by official doctrine, they weight the guidance of their human leadership as equal to or above the actual canonized word of God, it is not really an apples-to-apples comparison to rate them, under these eight criteria, against evangelical Christian marriage ministries who claim to hold themselves directly responsible for operating according to God’s written word alone. Hence, Mary’s Advocates, The Ruth Institute and National Organization for Marriage can probably be compared with one another using some of these guidelines, but they will be excluded here, since they are not part of the divisive controversy that keeps surfacing in the permanence of marriage community.
Here’s an example of scoring outcomes for ten evangelical ministries that in some way help people fight for what they perceive to be their marriage – with a brief description of each, their score, and the main factors influencing each score. Each of these received either a “10”, a “5” or a “1” on each of the 8 criteria, to keep things simple. Long-term consistency of practice, or official public statements in a given criteria resulted in either a “10” or a “1”, while observed minor inconsistencies in specific criteria resulted in a “5” being assigned. These are arranged in descending order by raw score, from most-to-least supportive of “marriages” called adulterous by Jesus, Paul, the other Apostles, and the early church fathers prior to the Nicene period:
Family Life Today (score: 80) – Founded by covenant couple Dennis & Barbara Rainey, this ministry holds to the traditional unbiblical Protestant “exceptions” for adultery and abandonment. It also employs Ron Deal, the infamous “blended family pastor” who is divorced, with a living true spouse, and remarried, who is prominently featured on most of their broadcasts and special events. Hence, they are misaligned with scripture in several crucial heaven-or-hell matters, and register negatively on all of the other biblical faithfulness criteria. Any claim on the part of this ministry to preserve “covenant” marriage is based in part on a faulty definition of what constitutes a covenant marriage.
Scale: this ministry’s facebook community page has about 450,000 followers.
Focus on the Family (score: 80) – James Dobson-founded evangelical and political organization with some leadership and board members in adulterous subsequent marriages following man’s divorce from their true spouse. Similar theology to Family Life, and they regularly feature the “blended family pastor” as a guest on their broadcasts. This broadcast ministry regularly glorifies adulterous remarriage and features theological guest interviews with suchenemies of covenant marriage indissolubility as Dr. John MacArthur, where extra-biblical “exceptions” to the indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony are emphasized above the bulk of what Jesus had to say to the contrary.
Scale: their facebook community page has 2.85 million followers.
N.A.M.E. (score: 80) – National Association for Marriage Enhance ment is a church-based network of marriage counselors founded by the late Dr. Leo and Molly Godzich, and currently run by Pastors Arnold and Gwen Tackett, who are professional counselors and hold credentials with the Assemblies of God. This organization holds large conferences, and established local church-based chapters. Their score reflects the errant theology of the 1973 Position Paper of the Assemblies of God on Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage, and the fact that N.A.M.E.’s 20th annual conference in 2015 featured — guess who? Ron Deal, the “blended family pastor”. Some of the “marriages” they attempt to save are adulterous remarriages, which hinders the reconciliation of the true covenant marriages that were displaced by the adulterous civil unions. There does not seem to be a central facebook presence for this ministry, only local chapters.
Covenant Keepers International (score: 70 ) – This is a very large international ministry with many local chapters with local leaders. Unlike N.A.M.E. it is not primarily church-based, nor focused on professional counseling. It was founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma by Marilyn Conrad, a stander whose husband passed away before there was an opportunity to reconcile. Current directors are Rex and Carolyn Johnson, a restored covenant couple. This ministry reportedly has some local leadership in marriages Jesus would call adulterous, and they do not screen such couples from their ministry, but this can vary by chapter location. Their statement of beliefs on marriage indicates belief in an “exception” for “sexual immorality”, hence their doctrine appears to have some serious gaps, and they do not believe in no-excuses indissolubility as part of their conviction on marriage permanence. CKI got 5 split points each for criteria 2 and 7, otherwise scoring was the same as for the three organizations listed above them. Standers involved locally with CKI give them high marks for focusing on basic discipleship, the priority of each person’s direct relationship with Jesus, and these particular standers would avoid an adulterously-remarried chapter leader. Scale: the central ministry does not seem to maintain a facebook page, allowing the local chapters to do so, with typically 100-200 followers each.
Desiring God (score: 55 ) – This ministry was established by Dr. John Piper and is an extension of Bethel Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Dr. Piper is faithful to the teaching of Christ concerning the indissolubility of the covenant marriage of our youth, but the Calvinist nature of this church prevents the full biblical belief that believers can fail to inherit the kingdom of God after professing Christ, even if they divorce, remarry, and die in that state. He and his associated pastors teach against remarriage after divorce, but if those things do occur, they teach that repentance from those subsequent unions is “repeat sin”, and that those second vows supercede the original vows. Based on these facts, criteria 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8 were rated at 5 points, reflecting assumptions that there would be some leadership and membership in adulterous unions in this large, Calvinistic ministry, and Piper’s teaching on the covenant nature of marriage is watered-down a bit from the true biblical standard, with basic doctrine skewed by their belief that rewards may be lost from remarriage, but not one’s entrance into the kingdom of heaven. Finally, there would be a belief in permanence, but not indissolubility, if second vows can be deemed to supercede original vows. Scale: This ministry’s facebook page currently has just under 1 million followers.
Rejoice Marriage Ministries (score: 25 ) – This is probably the oldest ministry dedicated to supporting those standing for their authentic covenant marriage aside from Covenant Keepers. It was established in the early ’90’s by restored couple, Rev. Bob and Charlyne Steinkamp. In the early days they say they interacted with Covenant Keepers which was also in its infancy and hadn’t yet expanded into geographic chapters. Unlike CKI, Rejoice has never done so, and in fact, for many years (notably, until a bit after former prodigal, Rev. Steinkamp passed away, and the adult children were added to the leadership of the ministry) they actively discouraged standers following their ministry to develop contact with one another. For this reason, the “levels of leadership” their determined ministry critic claims to have corresponded with, simply don’t exist. Since this critic refuses to disclose any details about that, it’s difficult to comment further. Nevertheless, this remains a very flat and closely-held leadership structure consisting of all born-again family members, all of which reflect God-joined, original covenant marriages. There is some paid office help and web administrators, some volunteer prayer warriors who have been with the ministry for many years. They publish and distribute a wealth of free and low cost books, audio and video content, prayer cards, bumper stickers, and the like, to support covenant marriage stands.
Rejoice does not have a fixed annual conference schedule. They take their ministry “on the road” for conferences periodically, as and when the Lord leads, and they conduct large monthly bible studies locally which are now live-streamed and recorded. They periodically hold large, international conference calls when they have covenant stander testimonies to share, but not on any fixed schedule. “Standerinfamilycourt” attended the December, 2010 funeral of Bob Steinkamp, has personally met the family members, and has been by the very modest longtime home of founder Charlyne. On a separate occasion, SIFC attended a 3-day road conference live and on-site.
As noted, Rejoice is followed by many who are estranged from remarriages and who prefer to stand for the wrong prodigal partner. This is a direct consequence of a longstanding ministry philosophy of not screening out those whom they might potentially lead to Christ for the first time. It is very important to note that SIFC has not, in more than 12 years, ever seen one instance of this ministry compromising, diluting or suppressing the word of God to attract or retain anyone. They strongly emphasize personal discipleship as the stander’s highest priority, and provide them significant aids to assist in this. While it is certainly possible for determined non-covenant standers to tune out the portions they don’t want to hear, SIFC’s suspicion is that over time, they either repent or depart. (We should note that the late Rev. Steinkamp’s pastoral credentials came from the Assemblies of God, and most likely before the 1973 man-voted doctrine change with which his writings make crystal-clear that he never agreed. In SIFC’s opinion, this still had the effect on him to be careful in his published writings to tell everyone in an adulterous remarriage to “seek the Lord” about what they should do personally, but in general terms he unequivocally called all such unions sinful and in need of termination.) Scale: this ministry’s facebook community page has about 19,000 followers.
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall (score: 17) – as we all know, this is “standerinfamilycourt’s” own outspoken ministry, started a little over three years ago. The original intent of the blog and facebook pages was to try and pull together a legal, constitutional “class” of disenfranchised Respondents in unilateral divorce cases to aid in a constitutional challenge to the Illinois “no-fault” law. The Lord, however, had a different vision and took these pages in the direction of pulling together various parts of the marriage permanence community who would not otherwise be aware of each other, so that they may work more effectively together as a voice of conscience to the clergy, to lawmakers, to national pro-family voices who routinely give the indissoluble side of “biblical marriage” the short shrift. There is significant ministry to individuals occurring behind the scenes, but not constantly. SIFC’s professional training and background is in financial and legal matters, not formal bible training. The Lord has provided in such a way that no donations are necessary at this time to sustain the ministry, but in the future, a taxable nonprofit (501c4) may be formed for the purpose of assisting lawmakers and constitutional challengers of unilateral divorce laws, as political opportunities come about by the Lord’s hand. (Or the Lord may again have a different vision, to which SIFC would definitely yield). People contacting our pages for deep ministry are typically referred with recommendations to other ministries, according to the person’s particular need, after receiving prayer here for their situation. As is the case with Rejoice discussed above, there is no practical vision or intent to screen out people estranged from adulterous remarriages, but neither is there the slightest compromise with the undiluted biblical truth about non-widowed remarriage in anything we publish. People who follow these two social media pages either get convicted and repent, or they “unlike” and “unfollow” us (possibly cyclically). It has been our consistent “run rate” over the three years of our existence to lose two “likes” for every five that we gain weekly, so we grow slowly but steadily. Our score consists of seven “1’s” in all of the criteria except #3, as it does not fit our operating model or ministry objectives to screen out anyone from participation and interaction with our ministry. Scale: our facebook community page has about 600 followers.
Restoration of the Family (score: 17 ) – this biblical ministry was started by another constitutional challenger of unilateral divorce laws, Judith Brumbaugh of Florida who is an older widow, and her low-key ministry has been in existence since the late 1980’s, supported by donations and sales of books. While there is occasional involvement in some family-related Florida political issues, the primary focus is discipleship materials and biblical teaching. As with Rejoice Marriage Ministries and 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall, there is no known pre-screening for interaction with the ministry (mailing list inclusion, etc.) There is here a strong emphasis on personal discipleship. Their scoring is identical to 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall on all eight of the criteria, and differs from Rejoice only in that they do consistently tell people to exit adulterous marriages as a direct heaven-or-hell matter. The founder of this page maintains only a personal wall on facebook rather than a public page, and does not classify herself as a “public figure”, so her ministry scale based on facebook’s count of followers is not available. She shows, however to have just under 500 “friends”.
Christian Principles Restored (score: 17 ) – This ministry was established by Dr. Joseph Webb, also of Florida. Dr. Webb is a seminary-trained, righteously-married pastor who came under conviction through a journey of self-study about the indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony. He has written several books, done interviews, and spoken at conferences and retreats. CPR’s scoring is identical to 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall and Restoration of the Family on all eight of the criteria, and differs from Rejoice only in that they, likewise, do consistently tell people to exit adulterous marriages as a direct heaven-or-hell matter. CPR’s pages show no evidence of pre-screening their participants so long as they are receptive to the strong truths coming out of their ministry. Scale: this ministry has a couple of infrequently-updated facebook pages with a following of under 200.
Theological Foundations / Spirit of Hosea (score: 8 )- Founded in the late 1990’s by Rev. Stephen Wilcox of New Brunswick, Canada, who has stood for his own covenant marriage for over 30 years, and became an ordained pastor during this time. His ministry encompasses a large fellowship of standers and people who have repented to exit the adulterous remarriages they became involved in, and includes the information pagecadz.netwhich carries testimonies of repentance from adulterous remarriages, a ministry web page marriagedivorce.com and a YouTube channel carrying his audio sermons. He has an outreach to other pastors to encourage them in adopting a fully-biblical view and practice around marriage indissolubility. In addition, he serves as the general online chaplain to the marriage permanence community, including the many who were pushed out of their churches, or who cannot find a church sufficiently supportive of marriage indissolubility that they feel comfortable in. Scale: this ministry runs facebook group pages to which members must be admitted by an administrator, rather than community pages open to everyone. The Theological Foundations facebook page has just over 100 members, and the Spirit of Hosea facebook page has just over 70 members, neither of which is indicative of the very high volume of traffic on the pages outside of facebook.
Please note the vast score gap between the five ministries most supportive of remarriage adultery and the five who are least supportive of continuing in (or attempting to restore) 2nd or subsequent “marriages” where there is one or more estranged spouses in the picture. Note, too, that the only ministry with a “perfect” score does deliberately screen out people from fellowship who are standing for the restoration of non-covenant marriages. The next cluster do not, to the best of our knowledge, do so but neither are there biblical gaps in their consistent teaching, either by error or omission, and they rely on this biblical integrity to naturally winnow out non-covenant standers over time, while getting the essential message across to more of those who need to hear it.
None of this cluster of five ministries has any leadership in such a non-covenant marriage. (Some have leaders who have repented and removed themselves from such.) The four ministries in the cluster with a score of 17 or less actively and consistently tell one and all that dying in such an arrangement is a heaven-or-hell matter, hence, everyone needs to exit those arrangements in all cases.
Rejoice falls in between the two clusters with a score of 25, but this is not due to error or biblical omission in their teaching. The main difference between their score and the cluster of 17’s is due to the fact that they don’t actually tell everyone to get out of their adulterous unions (while still regularly teaching with full biblical accuracy what constitutes remarriage adultery). Instead, they tell their readers and subscribers to seek the Lord about what to do. They also do not directly teach that dying in such a union costs people their souls in eternity. They do teach in general that remarriage adulterers forfeit their inheritance in the kingdom of God, but they don’t emphasize hell. Rejoice is materially more faithful in discouraging and opposing adulterous remarriage than Covenant Keepers because Rejoice has no leaders at all in non-covenant marriages, and would never allow such. On the other hand, none of Covenant Keepers’ founders and current central leaders are in non-covenant unions, but some of the regional leaders reportedly are. Rejoice, on the other hand, never features non-covenant restorations in any of their teachings or events, but Covenant Keepers reportedly does. Rejoice does regularly share audio and video testimonies of people who have penitently come out of adulterous remarriages and reconciled with their true spouse.
(Please click the graphic to enlarge in your browser.)
Sometimes, differences in ministries were actually put there by God Himself to accomplish a specific kingdom purpose. This is true even in the least faithful of them! This is due to cross-pollination, where a faithful ministry is provided an entry-point for conversation with the multitude of followers from something which that less-faithful ministry has published, and also through the mutual “friends” (policy-makers and national influencers among them) who are following both the pure and the popular corrupt ministries. This is true also because of what we call “critical mass” that comes with some of these ministries that tell people what they want to hear. While it is never appropriate to form a direct alliance with unfaithful ministries, it is appropriate for faithful ministries to speak into them opportunistically, as Jesus and the Apostles frequently did. That said, it is never appropriate to label a ministry as “unfaithful” unless they are specifically not faithful with their public handling of the word of God. If they are unfaithful in that way, then the clear evidence of it should be easy to produce. If they are not, then we are accountable to the kingdom of God for slandering them as if they were.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth.So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.Now he who plants and he who waters are one; but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor.
– 1 Corinthians 3:6-8
We might examine some of the persistent reasons why some in the stander community propagate the impression that Rejoice fosters adulterous remarriages, and promotes their “reconciliation”, given that their teaching is fully biblical on a consistent basis, and there is no remarriage adultery at all in their leadership. One key reason is that non-affiliated sites that are known to be run by site owners who have “married” the spouse of another living person (and are “standing” for that remarriage due to some unbiblical excuse or “exception”) extensively promote their materials. These sites, run by non-covenant standers, regularly redistribute Rejoice’s posts because they admire the ministry’s principles and methods. This, of course, is beyond the practical control of Rejoice Marriage Ministries. Two examples of such non-affiliated sites with owners either in or divorced from non-covenant “marriages” are Malachi 2:16 and RMM Fan Site (which looks quite deceptively like the authentic Rejoice site). They are attracted by Rejoice’s hopeful, positive salvation-and-discipling message, and the fact that non-covenant “marriages” have the (volume-based) appearance of reconciling much more frequently than God-joined unions, since this can happen over and over again in the counterfeit cases.
(Jesus, too, was accused of “apostasy” simply because the sinful followed Him, and because up to a certain point, He did not discourage them. The actual engagement point came for Christ’s sinful followers where He made clear that what He was teaching and commanding made the difference between heaven and hell, invoking a choice. Still today, many think they are following Him who consider obedience to be “optional” in this matter.)
But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” – Matthew 13:26-30
Another important reason for the erroneous perception that Rejoice Marriage Ministries promotes the reconciliation of non-covenant “marriages” comes from the tales of those standing for true covenant marriages who attend Rejoice live events and who wind up in a prayer circle next to someone who is “standing” for an adulterous remarriage. Since Rejoice intentionally does not have a policy to screen such people out from their ministry events, this does happen. It is natural (and certainly expected) for those who are standing for authentic Matt. 19:4-6 unions to feel queasy about “agreeing in prayer” for the restoration of a biblically adulterous relationship, but there are certainly reasonable alternatives to so praying, and these prayer circles do not necessarily translate into “support” for such unions, on the part of the ministry or anyone else, IF biblical teaching is never compromised in their publications and events, nor shied away from by that ministry in their one-on-one encounters.
Yet another reason Rejoice is lumped in with unbiblical ministries by some in the marriage permanence movement is that Rejoice strongly encourages all standers to remain accountable to others in flesh-and-blood, brick-and-mortar church bodies, however difficult and uncomfortable that might be (or might become) in a given situation. This runs directly counter to the wounded places that never healed in some individuals, and sometimes even, counter to the desire not to be accountable (on a long term basis) that is harbored in the true hearts of some in the movement, along with their deep desire to avoid the face-to-face conflict that always results from keeping up our responsibility to be salt and light in the world. While there certainly does come a valid time to “shake the dust off our feet”, many would prefer not to get their feet dusty in the first place. To these folks, it becomes very tempting to slam a ministry whose faithful teachings bring conviction about this particular matter, while it offends their own rigid ideology which even has a label in the movement: “pulpit-pew“. Indeed, one ministry that keeps fostering these accusations is a virtual / online church (and a very good one, at that), which is sustained by the donations of people in the marriage permanence community. By defending not only one but two potential “competitors” for those donations, it’s little wonder that this ministry leader subconsciously felt that SIFC had “attacked” his ministry with the brief and bland facebook comment that ended by disclosing longterm financial support for Rejoice. He of little faith!
Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am of Paul,” and “I of Apollos,” and “I of Cephas,” and “I of Christ.”Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? – 1 Corthinthians 1:12-13
“Standerinfamilycourt” can be humble enough to admit that the selection of different criteria, or perhaps disclosure of some privately-learned facts we are not privy to, might change this illustration and comparison, so we won’t presume to call it an analysis. No deep interviews were conducted to obtain confirmation of various surface observations made in the scoring. A few of the ministry leaders who have gone on record with their broad-brush criticism of Rejoice Marriage Ministries are from the same southern Florida region where the family ministry is based.
I do believe I have related everything these local critics have told me to-date that is verifiable. Rejoice, meanwhile, does not make a practice of having much public interaction with other marriage ministries, choosing not to use their donated resources in that thankless, bottomless manner. As a continuing donor, quite frankly, SIFC appreciates that. The point of this blog post is to offer some calm perspective and good reasons to stop the senseless carping, to encourage the refocus of everyone’s time and energy within the marriage permanence community to our own assigned role, since there’s plenty of work for everybody. Or we can just continue to play “cult” on some kingdom-inconsequential level, proving our worldly critics absolutely correct! Our choice.
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires,and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. – 2 Timothy 4:3-4
Who is Shane Willard? There is not much about this itinerant evangelist in the Christian press or other public sources, so we rely mostly on what he says about himself on his website, quoted verbatim here, that he “has been in full-time ministry for 20 years. He began working in full-time ministry as a youth pastor of a small church. Since that time, Shane has held multiple pastoral positions at various sized churches. Shane now ministers full time in America and internationally, particularly in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. With degrees in both clinical psychology and theology, Shane is known for being an informative, brilliant and humorous communicator. Shane is mentored by a pastor with rabbinical training, and teaches the context of the Scriptures from a Hebraic perspective. This perspective helps people to see God’s Word in a completely new way and leads them into a more intimate relationship with the Messiah, Jesus Christ.”
It appears from the flavor of his sermon content that this (unnamed) rabbinical “mentor” of Willard’s might possibly be a practitioner of kabbalah, the mystical Jewish-rooted gnostic heresy. Regardless of whatever else Shane Willard is, it is quite clear that he is an unabashed humanist, which shouldn’t be at all surprising to find in a trained and formerly-practicing clinical psychologist. It should also be noted that Shane Willard appears to be in a covenant marriage, and is apparently not motivated by being in an adulterous remarriage, despite his advocacy of it for others.
“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.” – C.S. Lewis
Willard’s current ministry seems to be primarily to evangelical churches in Australia and New Zealand, a few of which are Word of Faith churches. The Facebook page for Kabbalah Centre Australia has over 4,000 followers.
As Willard’s video message unfolds, it is also quite clear that his claims of expertise in the Greek texts are false, despite his assertion of a “theology degree” (no further elaboration offered or found to be researchable).
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ;until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming;but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ,from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
– Ephesians 4:11-14
The first kabbalist whiff of windy doctrine comes about 5 minutes in, when the straightforward, hell-linked warning of Christ, that “marrying” the estranged spouse of another living person is ongoing adultery, is hijacked by gnostic application of the Hebrew concept of (H:259) echad (אָחד), most likely in order to simply distract from the true narrative, and substitute a more humanistically-palatable one that is not, in fact, hermeneutically supportable. This is also the first clue that Willard-the-theologian is not doing his own scholarly work before accepting carte-blanche the input of his “rabbinic mentor”. Notice throughout the video the glaring lack of hermeneutical rigor (which this blog post will be filling in, as appropriate).
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. “– Deuteronomy 6:4-5
Willard asserts: “The first big idea (that you can’tread this passage without knowing) is…The concept of ‘echad’ in the ancient Jewish world was ‘unity within diversity’. To have like (sic) unity is one thing, like if something is one solution. but to have diverse elements coming together…that is unity. That is echad….The Wallabys played as one team tonight – that’s echad….Deuteronomy 6:4 was called the ‘shema’…the idea is that this God is this mysterious mixture of unity within diversity. He’s diverse yet He’s ‘one’ …And the concept is that all of us, all of creation is made in the image of God. Since God is ‘echad’ and we are made in the image of God, then we are ‘echad’. We are unity in diversity…The world itself is ‘echad’. Billions and billions of different parts, and if only one gets out of alignment, it affects the whole. If the ocean temperatures change too drastically, it creates incredible weather phenomenon way far away…it’s almost like the whole world has to be in someone else’s hands…that is ‘echad’…The idea is this: if God is ‘echad’, and we are made in the image of God, then ‘echad’ is the force that holds us all together. The concept is that you cannot come against the very force that holds the universe together and not expect to be torn apart yourself…so you can’t enter into things like gossip and slander and murder and hatred and judgment and calling someone a fool, and adultery and divorce. All of these things sabotage ‘echad’…But the overarching command…you can summarize the entire chapter 5 by saying this: order your life in cooperation with unity, and avoid things things in your life the sabotage unity, because wherever you enter into engaging in the sabotaging of unity you are simply going to tear yourself apart because ‘echad’ is the force that holds the universe together, you are a part of the universe, if you enter into an act that sabotages the force that holds the universe together, you yourself will be torn apart because you are not the exception to the rule…”
Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it? The problem is the consistency of application, given where Mr. Willard has this sermon going in the next several minutes, now that it has actually launched from a false opening premise. As the earlier link to authentic Hebrew scholar Jacob Prasch describes, kabbalah always mixes partial truth with a heretical vector leading away from Christ. Humans holding the universe together? We thought Jesus had that role. We were unaware, from scripture at least, that He shared this role with any human agents.
FACT CHECK: No part of Deuteronomy 6 refers to the horizontal relationship between humans. Furthermore, though the context of a few Old Testament passages will support the “unity” idea, the vast majority of the nearly 1,000 references to “echad” refer simply to the number, one, as most arguably it does in Deuteronomy 6:4.
The context of that entire chapter relates only to the vertical relationship between a human and their Sovereign God. Kabbalah, however, posits that God has some sort of dependency on how humans “relate” to each other (temporally, of course), on which the fate of the universe “depends”. Compare to how Jesus later adds the vertical relationship in the Matthew 22 exchange with the rich young ruler. Jesus does so, however, without denigrating God’s absolute sovereignty in any way. To elevate the horizontal relationship above the vertical one, in the way Willard suggests, is itself a form of idolatry. Unrepented idolators have no inheritance in the kingdom of God, and will be thrown into the lake of fire.
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’This is the great and foremost commandment.The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” – Matthew 22:36-40
Deuteronomy 6 is a reference, in fact, to the first four of the ten commandments: to have no other Gods before Him; to make no image that a man will worship in place of Him; not to misuse His holy name to attribute it to a vain act; and to honor the Lord by observing the Sabbath. Love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
The major commentators (Ellicotts, Bensons, Matthew Henry, Pulpit Commentary, etc.) appear unanimous that the only “oneness” supported by the context of Deuteronomy 6 supports the Trinity, but reflects that God is not many competing gods, instead He is the only true God, sovereign over all created things. He does not need the participation of any of those created things to achieve this. Using the separate fact that mankind is indeed made in His image, wrongly inserted into this context, creates a triangulation that subtly opens the door to the conflicting kabbalistic doctrine. Once the “shema” is hijacked in this way, kidnapping the sermon on the mount for temporally-focused, humanistic distortion purposes becomes a cake-walk, as we shall soon see.
So, if Deuteronomy 6:5 only alludes to the first four commandments, what about the final six commandments? In fact, those are the “horizontal” commandments governing how humans are to relate to each other. Hence, the sermon on the mount is not really an “echad” or a “unity” concept, but one of “do unto others (with an eternal, not only a temporal perspective) as you would have others do unto you.” In other words, it is the Golden Rule. The unity ultimately results from obeying the Golden Rule, but if the focus is eternal rather than merely temporal, a little “disunity” is going to be unavoidable in arriving there, given the sin nature that is in all of us.
Indeed, Willard’s “rabbinic mentor” might have more accurately advised him that the Wallabys actually played that night with (H:251) achdutאָח (“as brothers” Ps. 133:1; –אחדות) ., the more common Hebrew term for “unity”.
The next “big idea” Willard introduces, with reference to the sermon on the mount, is that Jesus wasn’t really referring to the place of eternal punishment, torment and separation from God when He spoke of hell in Matthew 5:29-30. He was merely speaking of the rubbish heap outside the city which can be likened to sabotaging the “echad” unity that we’re all universally “responsible” for. He argues at about 11 minutes in that Jesus didn’t use the Greek word “hades“, but rather “gehenna“.
Says Willard: “The word He used for ‘hell’ here is ‘gehenna’. Gehenna, not ‘hades’. This was not the hell after the grave. This was not, ‘Hey, take care of this, or I might torture you forever and ever’. Um, no….This was the town garbage dump. They called gehenna the place where the fire does not die and there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. The reason is because this was the town garbage dump and they had to keep the fire going all the time in order to keep the smell of the garbage out of the city. It was also the place where they buried people who couldn’t afford a tomb, so there was always families standing there weeping over their lost loved ones. It was also the place where stray animals would scavenge for food, so all the time in gehenna you would hear barking and biting and all this stuff from the stray animals… so when Jesus said, ‘Hey, beware of these things lest you get your whole self thrown into gehenna’, essentially what He’s saying is, ‘if you start rationalizing this kind of behavior, before you know it, your whole life will be on the garbage heap.’ “
While that is likely to be quite true in a temporal sense, Willard offers no support for his notion that there isn’t also an eternal consequence (“um, no”) for “sabotaging ‘echad‘ “. He references Matthew 18:9, the verse where Jesus repeats the warning that He gave in Matthew 5 to take drastic action as necessary to avoid hell.
This argument of Willard’s that “gehenna” doesn’t literally refer to hell is easily discredited by noting the other scriptures where Jesus referred to hell, including Matthew 10:28, Matthew 23:15, Mark 9:43, 45 and 47, and Luke 12:5. The other issue is that “sheol” is a Hebrew term, and while it’s possible there is an original Hebrew text of the gospel of Matthew still existing somewhere in the world that was translated into Greek after Matthew wrote it in Hebrew, most biblical scholars say this is unlikely. Even so, this only deals with the language in which Matthew recorded what he witnessed from Jesus, but we still don’t know conclusively whether Jesus was actually speaking to His Jewish audience in Hebrew or Aramaic. Hence, Willard’s expectation that the “real hell” be referred to in biblical text as “sheol” or “hades” seems ignorant, and even worse, seems to reflect an actual ignorance of those texts. The clear context in the overwhelming majority of the scriptures noted above is clearly the place of eternal punishment, not merely the symbolic “garbage dump”.
The scriptures where “hades” was actually used reflects that the apostles Luke and John were more likely to use that term, while Matthew and Mark most often used “gehenna”. The distinction between them is of no material consequence. It should be further noted that Luke, in chapter 16, used “hades” in linking one who dies in the sinful ongoing state of remarriage adultery to hell (Luke 16:18-31), in precisely the same context that Matthew earlier linked it to “gehenna” (Matthew 5:27-32) – namely, dying while “married” to the God-joined spouse of another living person. Willard’s theory also ignores much that Paul and the writer of Hebrews had to say on the topic (1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gal. 5:19-21; Hebrews 13:4) in reference to not inheriting the kingdom of God. It’s easy to recommend adulterous remarriage to people if you’re not in that situation yourself, and you don’t believe it will cost others their eternal souls, even though the bible makes that quite clear in numerous passages. This points up one of the key reasons why humanism is never compatible with following Christ: it is devoid of any concern whatsoever for eternal souls.
But (ironically) jump back and listen to what Willard says at 9:27…. “…later in the sermon on the mount, He goes on to say, retaliation and revenge and these sorts of things….” Willard stops short of citing the refusal to forgive, which is also mentioned in the sermon on the mount, as well as Matthew 18:23-35, where Jesus makes it clear that if we refuse to forgive anyone’s sin against us, our sins will not be forgiven. What is marrying someone else while our covenant spouse still lives, if it is not retaliation, revenge and refusing to forgive? (Apparently it’s only “sabotaging echad” and landing one’s life on the garbage heap — but wait, there’s more, since that’s not the picture Willard starts to paint a bit later in his message about remarriage).
By now, everyone is wondering how a remarriage apologist can be almost 15 minutes into an hour-long sermon and not yet done the customary butchering of the so-called “exception clause”. Not to worry, this is Willard’s third “big concept” from the sermon on the mount, and he does it with an unusual and expansive flair.
(Never mind that verse 5:32 is not even about a guilty partner, nor is the actual context about an “innocent” person who initiates a “divorce” remarrying, per se. It’s about the shared guilt of putting an innocent wife in a potential hellbound remarriage situation by divorcing her.)
Undaunted, however, Willard declares….“marital unfaithfulness; the word in Greek there is porneia…not moicheia. Sometimes it gets translated ‘adultery’ …that is not the Greek translation of what Jesus was saying here. The word they translate is ‘porneia’ which essentially was a broader term around ‘out of controlness’ ….the root word, porneia, which is where we get the word pornography from, is any time you use someone else’s skin as an object….Let me put it this way, it’s any time you treat your wife as a piece of property instead of a person filled with the dignity of God. This starts to bring some things into play. I’ve had many, many counseling situations because I was a counselor for years, and, um, one in particular, the man was horribly addicted to pornography. And the wife just could not take it one more day, and can you blame her? ”
SIFC : No I cannot blame her. But since Matthew 5:32 is neither about pornography nor about disgusted wives (who had no Mosaic provision to initiate divorce in any event – perhaps Willard’s “rabbinic mentor” neglected to fill him in on that), the passage to look to for guidance in that situation is 1 Corinthians 7:11.
“….and his big argument, instead of being repentant for this addiction that was destroying his family was, ‘she can’t leave me, because I’m not cheating’…when actually the word Jesus used was ‘porn’, so the idea was, you can’t make it too closed-off. It’s not adultery, it’s marital unfaithfulness. Which raises all kinds of questions about how marital unfaithfulness would have been taken in the 1st century….so, it can all be summarized in this statement: don’t.sabotage.echad.”
SIFC : In what way, sir? Indulging in an addiction….or taking our own revenge against the addict? Did you not say that both things were “sabotaging echad” ? Does that mean that there are offsetting (kabbalist) penalties, then?
In Daniel R. Jennings’ book, Except for Fornication, the scholarly author points out through photocopies, beginning on page 63, that all of the concordances and bible dictionaries that were written prior to the 20th century translated the Greek word “porneia” narrowly as either “whoredom”, “unchastity” or “fornication”, consistent with the root meaning of “porne“ which actually meant “to sell off“. Not one of them translated “porneia” broadly as “marital unfaithfulness”. That was done by a liberal 20th century translation committee run by humanists. Even the Latin term, “fornication” comes from the word “fornix” which were the Roman colonnade columns under which prostitutes carried on their trade.
The Received Texts (Antioch manuscripts) do not record Matthew 5:32 merely showing an act of unchastity / whoredom, but areport of an act of unchastity / whoredom:
[ “…gunaika autou parektos logou porneias….”]
This alone makes the context unable to support a translation of porneia that would be broad enough to encompass all contemporary forms of “marital unfaithfulness”. Such a “report” (logou) specifically relates to the betrothal period up to the wedding night when such unchastity would be discovered. Taken with the earlier context problem mentioned with regard to Matthew 5:32, i.e., that the passage is not even addressing any actually “guilty” wives, nor any “right” on the part of their dismissing husbands to remarry, Willard’s claims about broad “marital unfaithfulness” (at least based on this passage) are completely baseless. Willard later refers to post-marital “breaches of the ketubah”, the Hebrew betrothal contract, so he shows that he is not completely ignorant of the kiddushin custom, but doesn’t show himself to be thoroughly conversant on it, either, as we shall later see.
By now, everyone is no doubt also wondering where the customary exploitation of the red-herring dispute between Hillel and Shammai comes into Willard’s message. In due course, he sashays over to Matthew 19 as well for that obligatory ritual. However, “standerinfamilycourt” would like to make the observation that at no point in this message is the inseverable one-flesh metaphysical reality, described by Jesus in Matthew 19:5-6 and Matthew 19:8, ever discussed. Evidently, it’s of extreme urgency for we createdbeings to “help” God hold the whole universe together, but of little importance to cleave to the God-joined one-flesh entity He created with His own hand between us and the spouse of our youth, or to honor the exclusive, unconditional covenant to which He is a party with that one-flesh entity, which His word says twice that only death can dissolve.
At 23 minutes in, Willard does the traditional exploitation of the so-called “exception clause” and the substituted concept of “marital unfaithfulness”. He then claims that Jesus makes an “odd” statement: “and if any person marries a divorced woman, they cause her to commit adultery.” What’s so “odd” about that Mr. Willard? He doesn’t answer that question, but instead launches into the classic tactic of someone who is on very shaky biblical and moral ground in their defense of serial polygamy – ad hominem. Declares Mr. Willard: “now, that…statement…unfortunately, has been wielded in a highly inappropriate way like a sword to make people feel guilty. What do you say to a twenty-five year old girl that has went (sic) through the horror of divorce and she really desperately in her heart wants a family of her own? She dumbly got married at seventeen. He was gone by twenty, and now she’s ‘doomed forever’ – why? Because ‘Jesus’ said so. And who is telling her that? People who follow Jesus and are supposed to be spreading LOOOVE throughout the WOORLD…”
SIFC : What about emotional arguments that are wielded like a sword, sir, simply because you don’t have a biblical leg to stand on, and want to distract from that obvious fact in order to prop up your bald-faced humanism? We say to this unfortunate girl exactly what the second of the two most authoritative “sword-wielders” who ever lived have already told her in no uncertain terms:
A wife is bound as long as her husband lives; but if her husband is dead, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord….but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband….
Meanwhile, to you, Mr. Willard, we say that your concept of “love” is pretty distorted if it doesn’t take into account the poor girl’s eternity, and, that of her prodigal spouse who just might repent. Take up your argument with Jesus Christ! Perhaps a little “guilt-riddenness” and “shame-riddenness” will eventually keep this woman and her progeny out of hell if she takes your advice and disobeys the clear word of God not to enter into a subsequent union that both Jesus and Paul repeatedly called adulterous. (Oh, that’s right, obedience will only keep her out of the smoldering garbage heap that exists only in this life; we sword-wielding non-kabbalists forgot momentarily!)
But, here it comes…Willard goes on to claim that “well-meaning Christians don’t have first hand knowledge of the all-important debate that was going on in the 1st century between Hillel and Shammai…. to read this…” (e.g., Jesus’ very clear, thrice-repeated statement that everyone who marries one who has been put away enters into an ongoing state of adultery) “…without understanding that [pacing frantically across the platform] will lead well-meaning Christians, I’m sure, to wield [accompanying flourish of an arm-gesture] the sword of the Lord in a highly inappropriate way.”
Perhaps, sir, we “well-meaning Christians” have bothered to read the entire Matthew 19 passage, and from its full context while comparing with numerous other passages where Jesus said the same thing (whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery), and where He directly linked remarriage adultery with going to hell. Perhaps from doing so, we know pretty conclusively that based on Matthew 19:6 and 8 and 12, He was soundly disagreeing with both Hillel and Shammai. Perhaps the only “sword” anybody rightly wields is the same one Jesus and Paul already wielded, along with all of their disciples for the next 400 years to follow. Perhaps if Jesus wanted His law to vary by the endless humanistic “complexities” and “stories”, there would be an “exception clause” in Luke and Mark, and a considerably longer one in Matthew.
“What if there was infidelity and it just kept happening? “
“What if there was abussssse? ” (hisses Willard) “What if…he wrapped the phone cord….around her neccccck…because she bought the wrong kind of minttssss?” (hisses Willard)
SIFC : 1 Cor. 7:11, and the criminal justice system (assuming she survives all that, if she’s quick-thinking maybe she can take a selfie as evidence)
It gets more disrespectful of the word of God from there, so those interested can join the video at 26 minutes, and we’ll spare the rest of the social justice tirade. “What if, what if, what if…” What if, on that day, the only thing Jesus is interested in hearing about any of it is…“Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46)
At 29 minutes, Willard makes a very interesting claim. He says that under Mosaic law, a man had to go to the rabbi to secure a bill-of-divorcement (a “get”) with which to dismiss his wife. Most scholars talk about early history where the husband simply said “I divorce you” and put a bill-of-divorcement (ha git) in the repudiated wife’s hands that protected her from stoning should she remarry. If there was an express requirement to go to a rabbi for this, issuing from Moses, he was sufficiently detailed about such matters that most likely he would have so specified in Deuteronomy. We all can plainly see that Moses did not. It is possible that the rabbinic tradition might have embellished this point, as it did on many other things in the time between Moses and Christ, but outside of that undocumented possibility there is really no backing for Willard’s claim that in biblical times, rabbis issued the “gets”. There is some documentation for the custom of using of special scribes to prepare the “gets” under the dictation of the husband, but not rabbis.
Several minutes later(42:50), Willard makes an even more preposterous claim that Jesus, in His rabbinical role, was in the business of approving and dispensing bills-of-divorcement, ’cause that’s what rabbis do. That’s right, He who said “Moses allowed….but from the beginning it was not ever this way”, and “Therefore what GOD has joined, let no human put asunder” was allegedly in the business of signing the hard-hearted papers to put asunder. “Standerinfamilycourt” can think of few more blasphemous statements about Jesus than to liken Him to a “family court” judge!
Willard’s pattern of triangulation should be getting pretty obvious at this point, from Matthew 5, which does not quite make the point he hoped to make (since its context is not about anybody’s “right” to remarry at all, actually) to Matthew 19, which relies on abuse of Deuteronomy 24 to force a point that Matthew 19, in its own proper context, does not even make. Triangulation. also, from the unsupported suggestion that rabbis issued “gets” for use by husbands, to the criminally-insane claim that Jesus did so, and finally to the claim that wives could also go to the rabbi for her “get” (41:00) if the husband didn’t materially provide for her according to the terms of the betrothal contract…insisting (in Instone-Brewer fashion) that this, too, constituted “marital unfaithfulness” (36:00).
But, what to do with that messy assertion of Jesus that (according to Willard) “doesn’t make sense”, that everyone who marries a divorced person enters into an ongoing state of adultery? Simple, you claim with a straight face (32:00) that it’s only referring to the dismissed woman in Deuteronomy 24 whom Moses said couldn’t be taken again as a wife by her original husband. That’s the divorced woman a guy (more precisely, her God-joined one-flesh) can’t marry without committing adultery. Problem solved. That is, if you completely ignore Luke 16:18 and Mark 10:11-12. Which Willard indeed did
By this point in Willard’s message, all pretense at hermeneutics is dispensed with, and the floodgates of humanism swing wide open. Next we’re scolded: “The dignity of the person takes precedence over your moral rightness.” Several aggrieved parties in his Australian audience were comforted who have allegedly “eaten the judgment of the church” just for wanting to live as though this life is all there is. But it’s time to get back to “breaking echad” and the help that God needs from us to hold the universe together….
Careful to ensure that no marriage passage goes undistorted, we are informed at 47:50 concerning Malachi 2:13, where we learn: “Rabbis taught that divorce ‘floods the altar with tears’ “
Come again? This is another thing you do: you cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and with groaning, because He no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. Yet you say, ‘For what reason?’ Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.
(My bible seems to say it’s the divorced-and-adulterously-re-wed priest flooding the altar with tears because he’s found out he can’t keep both his legalized adulteress and fellowship with his God.)
This sermon on the sermon on the mount starts to wrap up at 48:50 where, predictably, we’re reminded (with Isaiah 50:1 and Jeremiah 3:8 as his witness): “You worship and you serve a ‘divorced God. God is divorced. In the book of Exodus, He married Israel. It was a marriage proposal.” Indeed, it was a marriage proposal, and God’s bride Israel was handed a ketubah, in the form of the Ten Commandments. That made the arrangement a betrothal, not a consummated wedding. The future wedding is described in Revelation 19. God is “divorced” at the moment from a betrothed bride who became defiled, not a consummated one. Fortunately, even Moses cannot prohibit the Almighty from taking her back to Himself after she is purified. Misuse by remarriage apologists of the spiritual adultery analogy God was making through the two prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, is addressed in this earlier post.
Back to Malachi 2: “Malachi 2:16 is a scripture that gets quoted so horribly… [we’d have to concur, since it’s typically applied to the opposite parties versus what the context specifies ] … “I hate divorce says the Lord God of Israel. Maybe He hates divorce because he was going through one…maybe…”
Or maybe what He hates is “shalach” — the immoral abandonment, “putting away”, of an inseverable one-flesh union His hand personally joined, for the illicit purpose of pursuing a legalized adulterous relationship that will never be anything but a legalized adulterous relationship, according to the word of God…maybe. Maybe He hates the eternal consequences of dying in that unrepentant state…maybe. Maybe it’s altogether blasphemous to suggest that God would be going through that kind of a “divorce”. In fact, when Malachi delivered that word, God was actually trying to put the nation of Israel back together, decades after the prophesies of both Jeremiah and Isaiah, following the exilic chastisement that was nearing its completion by Malachi’s time.
I wish we were finished rebutting Willard’s creativity, on that note, but alas….
“Somebody asked me once in a situation like this, ‘Shane what do you think about divorced and remarried preachers?’ And it was obvious in her tone…she didn’t like ’em. To which I said, ‘well, before you go disqualifying people from your stage, you might want to consider that that attitude disqualifies God Himself, because He’s divorced…and He remarried the Gentiles.”
Really?
I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel?“Lord, they have killed Your prophets, they have torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.”But what is the divine response to him? “I have kept for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal” …But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree,do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you….And they also, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again.For if you were cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these who are the natural branches be grafted into their own olive tree? – Romans 11:1-4, 17-18, 24
An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife….. He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity(but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?) – 1 Timothy 3:2, 4-5
SIFC: It certainly seems safe at this point to rule out the Apostle Paul as Mr. Willard’s undisclosed “rabbinic mentor”, does it not?
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!
All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify.Let no one seek his own good, but that of his neighbor.Eat anything that is sold in the meat market without asking questions for conscience’ sake; for the earth is the Lord’s, andall it contains.If one of the unbelievers invites you and you want to go, eat anything that is set before you without asking questions for conscience’ sake.But if anyone says to you, “This is meat sacrificed to idols,” do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for conscience’ sake;I mean not your own conscience, but the other man’s; for why is my freedom judged by another’s conscience?If I partake with thankfulness, why am I slandered concerning that for which I give thanks?
Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.Give no offense either to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God;just as I also please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit but the profit of the many, so that they may be saved. – 1 Corinthians 10:23-33
Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise,making the most of your time, because the days are evil.
– Ephesians 5:16-33
“Standerinfamilycourt” has never been one to belong to dozens of social media sites and pages, being extremely selective and purposeful about which ones merit THE LORD’S time which has been entrusted to advance the kingdom of God. This balance of time is certainly going to look different from disciple to disciple, depending on the particular assignment we’ve been given in these last days. The half-dozen sites SIFC has committed to membership in generally serve these main purposes, consistent with kingdom assignment:
(1) plug into high-quality scholarship of others so that 7 Times Around the Jericho WallandUnilateral Divorce Is Unconstitutionalcan be as reliable as possible in dividing God’s word (and on the flip side, promote respectful avoidance of misusing the word of God)
(2) provide a trustworthy connection point to refer opposite-sex individuals who contact our pages seeking to be ministered to deeply — which should be done by a same sex person who is spiritually mature.
(3) extend the reach and circulation of our posts so that the stander community is aware of, and connected with, other voices and communities who are our natural allies in the righteous, interdependent quest to abolish unilateral divorce and clean up the apostate churches to the extent possible.
(4) keep tabs on what satan is up to these days in opposing God’s kingdom. He loves to send in intruders and hang out on standers’ pages, too, while constantly shifting his ugly tactics.
Many covenant marriage standers will belong to an astounding number of sites and seem to be online “contending for the faith” all day and night. Knowing firsthand how addictive social media is, especially to isolated and often-alienated standers, one has to wonder how much time is being truly spent in intercession for the rebuilding of our torn up families, pleading with the throne of heaven for the soul of our estranged one-flesh partners, and praying protective hedges around our impacted loved ones, especially given satan’s particular rage against us. Not a few in the marriage permanence community, if they were completely honest with themselves and others, have seemingly given up expecting the Lord to restore their holy matrimony union (if they haven’t instead come out of an unholy matrimony union). Some, wrongly in my view, see Paul’s instructions in 1 Cor. 7:11, “remain unmarried [celibate] or be reconciled…”
as “either / or” instead of “both / and”, and this is reflected in how they spend their time and emotional energy. I pray that the Lord will greatly surprise these folks one day.
A well-run site for covenant marriage standers (and for others with hearts open to the truth of marriage indissolubility), will have ground rules that look something like this:
– this is not a dating site – name-calling, gossip, personal attacks and bad language will not be tolerated here – off-topic posts and those pushing divisive, controversial ideologies not essential to inheriting the kingdom of God will not be allowed in our space, nor will debate on them be permitted – promotional posts for unrelated ministries, products, etc. will be removed as spam
It is not typical at the present time for most pages which are geared to a doctrinally pure, continuously-maturing covenant marriage stander or repenting prodigal membership, to have more than a few hundred members or followers, nor rapid net growth (joiners far exceeding the unjoiners). Yet when one gives this reality some reflection, such small following is still equivalent to a small-to-medium-sized church congregation. Given the other reality that in a lot of cases, a particular site may become the church-surrogate for an unfortunate number of standers, the integrity and consistency with which the rules are applied takes on a sobering importance. Everyone in this marriage permanence community has recently had a front row seat for the sad spectacle of what happened under the cronyism, carnality and lack of accountability in Greg Locke’s brick-and-mortar church. Though virtual fellowship is not typically a matter of financial stewardship, the situation might not be too different in some of the stander sites in many other important respects, complete with defecting sheep who fall into carnality because the responsibility for discipling the members wasn’t quite what it should have been in some sites where the defectors were hanging out. When a standers’ site is growing at megachurch pace, it doesn’t hurt to take an objective look at what might be driving that aberrant pace and be a bit wary of failure to consistently apply the site’s own rules.
SIFC joined a fast-growing page recently that seemed to be well-run, at least as it appeared from the outside. Its owner is an organizer of weekly conference calls of very high quality, good attendance, and excellent guests. The live streaming of these calls had just become available on that site, with convenient playback. Despite misgivings some months earlier about the pushiness of the owner in posting the call notices on several restricted-topic sites and being rather obstinate about respecting those owners’ reasonable requests not to do so, SIFC began to join these conference calls on a fairly regular basis due to the quality of the speakers. Site membership had grown to about 1300 with a dozen or so new joiners weekly to site membership. At first it appeared this site would nicely meet all three of SIFC’s top desired purposes for joining, as described earlier, and for committing to being a contributing member of a helpful standers’ group. Some of the handful of soundly-based groups that had been fruitful a year or two ago had since gone fairly inactive, so the time seemed ripe.
After two or three weeks’ participation, SIFC has come away feeling as if comments in response to some of the posts had invited everyone there to a dinner party where, unknowingly, there had been served meat sacrificed to idols, which offended some guests of weaker faith. Let me explain.
At the time point of joining, there was quite the conversation ongoing on about a male stander who had fallen prey to a heretical remarriage apology page, but had simultaneously been a member of this particular group, from which he evidently pursued several female standers (as confessed by one of them) before selecting a another stander to “marry” while his covenant wife remains a living prodigal. To-date, two of our blog own posts have early-flagged and discussed the role of this man’s profuse legalistic ideologies which directly contributed to his moral fall, and (likely) to the ongoing depth of estrangement from his true wife.
Against this unfortunate backdrop, it was incredibly disheartening to see legalistic and dogmatic posts by one of the page’s moderators in the next two weeks on all of the following off-topic issues that drew contentious debate:
– the alleged”corruption” of attending a flesh-and-blood, brick-and-mortar church that has an appointed pastor or pastoral staff
– the alleged “pagan-ness” of Valentine’s Day celebrations
– the alleged “impropriety” of addressing anyone, great or small, by a title
This appeared to be the only type of post ever observed being made by this gentleman in that time frame. Not only were the moderator-poster’s extrabiblical biases being promoted, but anyone not practicing them was being overtly condemned. SIFC’s first appeal to observe the site’s own posted rules was made to the owner in a comment on the post. The site owner publicly commented that he agreed with the legalism complained of, and would therefore allow the posts to remain for the heated and unseemly discussion that ensued. SIFC challenged the moderator-poster on all three of the above distractions, a man whose “story” hadn’t been revealed in SIFC’s short sojourn on the site, but his faith background can likely be guessed from the ethnicity of his name and the apparent appeal to him of these particular dogmas. One of SIFC’s challenges was quickly deleted by somebody with access to do so, and SIFC received two PM’s from the site owner claiming that the dissenting comments constituted “name-calling”. (Apparently because SIFC used the “L-word” as a descriptor). In a display of spiritual maturity, this fellow removed himself for a morning from the page membership, then the next thing SIFC knew, the page was “no longer available”. Not only was I removed, but evidently also blocked from the page.
This site had all of the ground rules described above in place, and then some, as follows:
“This is NOT a dating site. There is ZERO tolerance for name calling, gossip, slander or profanity. If you do not answer questions, you will be ignored, and you and your posts may be deleted. Posts of false doctrines or false teachers will be deleted. This is not a debate forum. Keep posts focused on [marriage, adultery, divorce and remarriage].
DO NOT POST VIDEOS BY UNAPPROVED SPEAKERS. APPROVED SPEAKERS HAVE THEIR WEB SITES LISTED AND/OR ARE MODERATORS. VIDEOS SHOULD BE APPROVED PRIVATELY BY A MODERATOR PRIOR TO POSTING ON [site name]. (Examples: types of baptisms, tongues, women head coverings, dress or other topics that Christians have been divided on hundreds of years) Not a place to advertise your business. Violators and their posts will be deleted without warning.”
These were indeed enforced against infractions committed by non-cronies of the page owner, as SIFC observed on one occasion when a lady was admonished, not for a post but for a question she raised about a legalistic and divisive doctrine. On the other hand, outright slander against a very effective and godly pioneering marriage restoration ministry was actively defended by the site owner when interjected by another commenter, interfering as she was with help SIFC was attempting to provide to a new member in the crisis of his wife leaving him. Nope, this site is clearly not safe for referrals from Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional as originally hoped.
Reflecting on this incident in its aftermath, several thoughts come to the surface that (at least in SIFC’s estimation) if heeded will help keep the looney-tunes “cult” perception, not to mention actual stander defections from biblical morality, at bay so that the marriage permanence community as a whole will be taken seriously by people who can potentially help us make a difference for families, a goal I’m certain this site owner shares.
Many years ago, SIFC and spouse were trained in our charismatic, nondenominational church, which practiced a plurality of pastoral leadership as modeled by the 1st century church, into a 13-week course for house church leaders called “The Maturity in Christ Series”. We weren’t very chronologically mature at this time in the early ’80’s, but we then went on to teach this course together to new leaders a couple of times after that, while we co-led a house church with a seasoned couple who were both bible college grads. Without denominational leadership and sound doctrine, the atmosphere was ripe for every kind of lunacy to be tracked in from outside, and indeed, we observed much during this time that was successfully resisted by the framework that the leadership had proactively established and the careful grooming and monitoring of the lay leadership. On one occasion, there was an administration of (Matthew 18:15-17) public church discipline to a male house church leader who had become romantically involved with a troubled female in his charge. This man was put out of the church for refusing to terminate the immoral, extramarital relationship.
In those days, marriage permanence was preached from the pulpit of that church. Unlike the affluent Methodist church downtown, the number of remarried divorced pairs could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The typical dogmas and distractions that regularly surfaced were very similar to today’s virtual communities of believers: dress and makeup legalisms, Sabbath disputes, head coverings, holiday observance, homeschooling, women working outside the home being likened to “streetwalkers”, legalism about pursuing college at a secular institution, order in using the gifts of the Spirit, and so forth. Similar to our virtual communities, people were being born again after spending their upbringing in churches with autocratic authority structures and some clearly pagan or extrabiblical practices, and these folks tended to backlash in the opposite direction of whatever they have grown up with until a period of responsible small group discipleship had brought them into better balance.
But what happens when a stander or repenting prodigal is persecuted in their traditional church, or even worse, put out of it for being outspoken about remarriage adultery being a hellbound sin? The discipling processes can be short-circuited in some cases before a person has matured spiritually. They can easily become distrustful of all traditional churches, due to the widespread apostasy over the remarriage issue, and assume all pastors are incorrigible and all churches apostate. However, it doesn’t stop there. Instead of becoming spiritually secure individuals, it becomes necessary to disparage and accuse anyone who is attending an actual church and attempting to influence their pastor toward scriptural faithfulness. This was indeed the tone taken in one of the posts by the page moderator, who appears from this behavior to have come out of a faith tradition where church leadership is deemed “infallible” and not to be challenged. Only, who’s there and qualified to disciple him in the virtual church? Who’s properly trained and willing to do so? Only somebody who can see (or has seen) where the man’s error is taking him!
Do not be deceived: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” – 1 Corinthians 15:33
There’s a key reason why SIFC opted for an open community page instead of a closed group – lack of time and biblical qualification to act as a de facto pastor. There are just over 600 self-elected followers to Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional, none of whom are very likely to mistake the page for a suitable church substitute.
(By contrast, a community page started four years earlier, similarly targeted as ours, but which doesn’t call non-covenant “marriages” adultery, doesn’t seek to reform the laws, and doesn’t write about things like hell, toxic Calvinism, and the corruption of our contemporary bibles, has eight times as many page fans.) Even so, ministry, prayer and referral (as appropriate) takes place behind the scenes upon request on UDIU, and there is a comfortable margin of time for this to occur with good handling while maintaining the page, and while assisting on a couple of other pages. People don’t (normally) get insulted, protest loudly and huff off on our page — which I’d say is good for public decorum. They simply “unlike” and “re-like” our page.
Were there 1300 group members to deal with, coming and going through a page-owned gatekeeping process, that’s equivalent to a fairly large church, and maintaining this administratively pretty much requires a staff, as indeed this page has appointed its moderators. The site owner told me he works the page himself an average of eight hours a day.
An overseer, then, must be…. and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil. – Timothy 3:7
Page owners in the marriage permanence arena must understand that their page is a pseudo-church (unless the following is very small or unless they regularly and sincerely urge participation in a real church or house church fellowship wherever possible), and they must understand that the shared leadership of that page are indeed pseudo-pastors, at least to a portion of their members. Is this page owner therefore willing to qualify these folks serving as his moderators according to Paul’s guidelines in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1? If not, what unction do they really have for criticizing the qualifications of a non-widowed remarried pastor? If they don’t consistently “police” the lunacies and heresies surfacing on their page, are they any better than Paul found the Corinthian church to be when he rebuked the leadership for tolerating similar lunacies and heresies in his first letter? If they have defectors who lapse into immorality, is this not a potential sign of pastoral deficiency?
And what is their strategy for discipling and counseling the women in their virtual congregation? There are one or two virtual marriage ministries that have addressed this issue thoughtfully and made effective provision for it. At least one of the leaders of this particular page, however, claim there’s something wrong with a female Christ-follower if, deprived of the covering God expects from her absentee husband, she therefore decides to be under the covering of a traditional pastor. Yet her critics on the page really don’t have anything superior to offer her in the alternative. What then happens in the vacuum is (unfortunately) that some can be preyed upon by insiders and outsiders alike.
Here’s a quick reminder of a few of the substantial benefits someone who can’t or won’t attend a flesh-and-blood fellowship miss out on:
– communion (the taking of which just might be felt by our absent one-flesh partner)
– anointing with oil when ill
– meals brought over when ill
– small helps in severe situations they are unable to do themselves
– opportunity for mission trips
– opportunity to mentor young people
Surely, the Lord would not have His sheep criticized in this fashion for being a part of a congregation that provides things which He clearly intended for us to have that the alternative gatherings, real or virtual, can’t necessarily provide? I think of an isolated late middle-aged woman who died alone in her house in our neighborhood several years ago who wasn’t even discovered until a part of her roof fell in due to heavy snow, and whose out-of-state children then had to be tracked down. How incredibly sad, and I’ve often wondered if she had been a stander.
Let’s face it: we standers tend to be a mess emotionally, and long years of standing don’t normally make it any better. These online groups tend to be a magnet additionally for wounded people who, for whatever reason, reject having spiritual authority over them, who bristle at the idea of tithing (one legalism they do agree not to tolerate), and at other disciplines they shouldn’t be finding excuses to avoid. Often this behavior and mindset is due to being raised in a church that was pompous in requiring the use of titles, and in declaring individual leaders “infallible” while promulgating the traditions of men that contradict the word of God. Standers’ groups should be safe havens for those who have been involuntarily rejected or persecuted by their brick-and-mortar church. But bad behavior that is harmful to the others on the group page should never have a safe haven. Response to this behavior should follow a Matthew 18:15-17 process with no favoritism shown. “Excommunications” should certainly follow this process, and should be done with correct motives which are soul-related. “Excommunication” should never result from other members pouting at being admonished.
For the body is not one member, but many.If the foot says, “Because I am not a hand, I am not a part of the body,” it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body.And if the ear says, “Because I am not an eye, I am not a part of the body,” it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body.If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.– Corinthians 12:14-18
Another thing typically happens in large, virtual pseudo-churches. All of the usual functional and spiritual gifts have a tendency of showing up in the group’s members and manifesting in posts and comments on the page. One of the key pieces of leadership training my honey and I received “way back when” was instruction in what some of these gifts look like in their actual exercise in a group, including both the strengths and the weaknesses of each kind of person so gifted. However, many standers have always been taught some measure of cessationism, so this conversation could not even be had on this particular group page, according to the stated rules. One is perfectly free on this page, therefore, to hyper-apply Matthew 23:1-12, according to the YouTube video of some self-appointed “theologian”, but God help anyone who dares exercise the gift of, say, discerning of spirits in that group. That “passed away” with the Apostles, after all. Unfortunately, satan doesn’t spare the marriages of charismatics any more than he does the marriages of the “Reformed” or the Baptists. Pretending within a group of Christ-followers that the functional gifts don’t exist doesn’t make them “poof” go away. God certainly knows that a body can’t function without a nervous system, so chances are that an “excommunicated” nervous system just might grow back through another member. Successful groups, flesh-and-blood or virtual, learn how to benefit from the functional gifts in an orderly fashion.
I do not share my written perspective on this to get back at the group, for if so, I would name them. I also do not write this out of any desire to rejoin, based on what I so quickly learned about how its governance stacks up with my pre-contemplated desires for investment of time in such a group. At best, rejoining would fulfill only objectives (3) and (4) – not good enough to compensate for the much greater downside, as it currently stands. I will probably not repost this blog to Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional, because a portion of that diverse audience is best not exposed to petty squabbling and (actual) cultishness in the body of Christ. I blush that the poor man who was a new joiner seeking help for a horrible family crisis was exposed to it that day, and can only pray he wasn’t so turned off that he won’t follow up on the good referrals he was given. My main hope is that this post will trigger the marriage permanence community to reflect on what they hope to achieve from group membership, and for the many others administering marriage permanence pages to prayerfully gut-check their own priorities and objectives, responsibly considering some of the eternal implications for running their page.
Surely, making one’s own decision whether to be part of a traditional church or observe Valentines Day are both lawful, according to the Apostle Paul, and whether or not they are both profitable depends on the circumstances involved, which are not for a third party to judge in any event. Similarly, Jesus did not forbid a disciple from voluntarily addressing someone by their title. At least that was the interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas (addressing an angel sent to him in a dream):
““And I said to him, ‘Sir, if any one has a wife who trusts in the Lord, and if he detect her in adultery, does the man sin if he continues to live with her?’ And he said to me, ‘As long as he remains ignorant of her sin, the husband commits no transgression in living with her. But if the husband knows that his wife has gone astray, and if the woman does not repent, but persists in her sin, and yet the husband continues to live with her, he also is guilty of her crime, and a sharer in her adultery.’ And I said to him, ‘What then, sir, is the husband to do, if his wife continues in her vicious practices?’ (The Shepherd, Second Book, Commandment 4:1)
Rather, Jesus taught that it was presuming upon the glory of God to insist that others address us by such a title. Someone of weaker faith might not see one of these issues as the scripture intended, and someone of the weakest possible faith will have issues of conscience over the shallowest reading of scripture or every suggestive, but ill-researched, teacher they encounter. I humbly suggest that such folk are not yet ready to teach others if they elevate such things to a heaven-or-hell gravity.
My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation. – James 3:1
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!
Put me like a seal over your heart, Like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, The very flame of the Lord. “Many waters cannot quench love, Nor will rivers overflow it; If a man were to give all the riches of his house for love, It would be utterly despised.” – Song of Solomon 8: 6 – 7
A fan of our Facebook page, Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional, “inboxed” us one recent evening to ask if we knew of any holy matrimony couples who had been “divorced” under man’s immoral laws and later came out of non-covenant “remarriages” with others to be reconciled to each other by the power of God. We have been sharing true stories like this all week leading up to Valentine’s Day, and we’re not finished yet!
(* names have been fictionalized to protect the privacy of SIFC’s own son’s mother and father in law, but the facts are true and real.)
One blustery late afternoon in February several years ago, our son asked a young lady to marry him after he had led her to the Lord, and she accepted. SIFC had met this young lady on two or three previous occasions, on the first of which, she temporarily had blue hair and various body piercings. The next occasion saw her at our home prior to attending a business dinner as our son’s escort, and I was asked to lend her a pair of tights for the evening so that the “cutting” scars on her legs would not show. It wasn’t long after that, that an early May wedding was scheduled, and the mother-of- the-groom was heading toward the home of her parents to assist the mother-of-the-bride with her gown for the occasion, sewing basket in hand. The family story that unfolded as we prepared for this wedding was an amazing one indeed.
Sonny, his pastor brother “Sam”, and Sally were all from Cajun country in Louisiana, and now were living and working in north central Illinois. Sonny and Sally married young, not long after finishing high school. Unlike the brother, neither Sonny nor Sally are born-again believers to this very day, despite Sonny’s and Sam’s father also being a pastor. Grandfather and uncle co-officiated at the tender wedding of our children in 2011.
A few years into Sonny and Sally’s marriage, Sally met another man and divorced Sonny. She remarried this other man, taking two children, including our daughter-in-love, into this new “marriage”. To the two dark-headed, olive-complected covenant children were eventually added a blonde half-sister. God was nevertheless gracious to Sally, and after some time, He pulled her out of that unholy matrimony union. In due time, she was back home and remarried to Sonny, who had honored his original vows and did not remarry. (Having now met the whole family, I have to strongly suspect the unrelenting prayers of the elder pastor and his wife, Sally’s in-laws back in Louisiana.)
Though Sonny remains a polite but firm atheist, he did not hesitate to forgive his covenant wife, nor raise his little non-covenant step-daughter in such a way that you would never know she is not his own flesh and blood. As far as SIFC is aware, the biological dad has not been part of our son’s sister-in-law’s life since the non-covenant marriage was dissolved between the parents.
This divorce and remarriage trial has left its scars scattered through the family, on several levels that reflect the unresolved need for this home to be introduced to Jesus Christ, so that He may become the center of that home. One of the violent crimes against heaven, when satan drags off a believing spouse into a life of covenant family abandonment and legalized adultery, is that he or she is “AWOL” when a Sonny and Sally enter our lives, speaking of SIFC’s own prodigal, who would have gone out of his way to minister to Sonny a few years before falling away himself. There is no other couple of similar age and experience to model a Christ-centered, restored marriage in front of them, nor moral authority to witness to them that no covenant marriage is beyond God’s touch to bring about ALL of His purposes for it. Among Sonny and Sally’s children, the elder son is a practicing homosexual. Our daughter-in-law has panic attacks, and it’s taken years to get her to wear a swimsuit, due to pervasive scars from the season of cutting herself that resulted from all the turmoil in her family. Though Sonny has forgiven his wife for these events, the lack of Jesus, and of God’s design for biblical roles in their home has kept their relationship on tense and fragile terms where teamwork is present, but intimacy has never been fully restored. Our son and their daughter have a vibrant, Christ-centered marriage, to the praise of God, and the prayers continue down in Louisiana, as well as in SIFC’s home, for the power of God to get hold of that elder covenant marriage one more time! For nothing will be impossible with God.
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
What I tell you in the darkness, speak in the light; and what you hear whispered in your ear, proclaim upon the housetops.Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
– Matthew 10:27-28
“Quick overview. Covenant wife divorced me early nineties. Stood approx. 4 years until Cov. wife became engaged. Starting dating..fell into sin..ended up marrying woman I impregnated 1 week before cov. wife was remarried. Tough second marriage. 3 year separation where I stood for the non covenant marriage and she did come home with another mans child. Fast foward 15 years and she left again. This time as reading the bible and studying the blinders came off. Now back to standing for covenant marriage altho cov wife seems to have had a very blessed marriage. Sometimes I think if I had married one week after I would have had a good marriage and hers would have been bad. The struggle I have is with how my covenant wife has seem to have been so blessed. Reading your blog there was an article where you had come to grips with remarriage being a hell or heaven matter. What was the information the settled the matter in your heart? You see so many people in remarriages that love God…works demonstrate their faith, etc. that it’s hard to believe that an eternity in hell awaits them. Your thoughts are appreciated.”
( SIFC: Of course, we have addressed these recurring questions in many prior posts, such as this one, and this one, but we’re not surprised that the central question keeps popping up.)
Thanks for your question, Page Fan. You raise many issues in your question, and the response can get lengthy in a hurry. Since it’s a question many have, I’d like to give you a quick answer about the events that solidified the heaven-or-hell heart knowledge for “standerinfamilycourt”, and give you a couple of resources to digest on your own. Then, with your permission, and keeping your identity confidential, what I’d like to do is bring a fuller response to everyone through a blog post by the end of February. May I ?
The first thing to understand is what Jesus was telling us in Matt.19:6 and 8. Humanists, from Moses to the Pharisees, to Martin Luther to Pope Francis, have always rebelled against God’s order, which was established at creation, by trying to make the question of divorce and remarriage about allowances and “permissions”.
Jesus came along and said, “no, it’s strictly about metaphysics — to which there are no exceptions.” This is what He’s saying in Matt. 19:6: only God’s hand can form the lifelong one-flesh entity of holy matrimony. He does it instantaneously and supernaturally, creating an entirely new entity, “they are never again two (according to the verb tense He actually used, translated into Greek) but one flesh.” God then becomes the other party with that new entity to an unconditional covenant. All of this occurs BEFORE physical consummation if the couple was chaste before taking vows.
Where they weren’t chaste, but there is no living, estranged spouse, it still occurs before they are back up the aisle and out the door.
This is the foundation that makes all non-widowed “remarriage” adultery, and is why Jesus repeated on three separate occasions that EVERYONE who “marries” a divorced woman enters into an ongoing state of adultery. If it was adulterous for another man to “marry” YOUR covenant wife, it is equally adulterous for your one-flesh to claim to the world that she is “married” to that man, regardless of how “blessed” it might look from the outside.
I assure you, she knows that “hen soma” (satan’s glittery but pale counterfeit discussed in 1 Cor. 6:16) is a hollow substitute for “sarx mia” – the supernatural, God-joined genuine article.
Jesus was not just saying in Matt.19:6 and 8 (SIFC: notice the verb tense again in “it was not [EVER] this way”) that divorce was immoral — He was saying that man’s paper claims of “dissolution” were IMPOSSIBLE. Only death severs the one-flesh entity, and only death removes God from the unconditional covenant He has made with that inseverable one-flesh entity. To the divorced and remarried priest He addresses through the prophet Malachi (chapter 2), He says….” the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she IS (not “was”) your companion and your wife by covenant.”
I have always known from my earliest days as a believer that non-widowed remarriage was fake and adulterous, and this came by revelation of God’s direct word and the Holy Spirit’s counsel to me personally. I stood strong against the rapidly-apostasizing church four decades ago based on that. But even in those days, I only knew a fraction of what I was eventually to learn. So here are the events that clarified things for me:
The first thing was that the pastor of my own church decided a few years ago to take many weeks to teach the entire congregation on Sundays how to use the principles of sound hermeneutics in bible study to detect and avoid error / “spin”. He was so serious about it that he did this right from the pulpit in the main service. He wasn’t teaching on marriage, just general principles. I then read a 1957 book called “Does Divorce Dissolve Marriage?” written around the same kind of rigorous hermeneutic framework as I had just learned in church, written by a bible college president who died in 1975.
The second thing was the range of accomplished bible scholars I met shortly afterward. Soon I met displaced pastors whose covenant wives had divorced them, but they had obeyed the Lord and remained celibate, some of them for 30 years who never had a church again after that, expressly because they refused to “remarry”. These guys (and in one case an accomplished lady bible scholar who had repented of an adulterous “remarriage” with another woman’s “divorced” husband), taught me how to use free online deep bible study tools to get back to the original Greek and Hebrew texts, which then exposed all of the places where liberal bible translation committees had distorted our English-language bibles over the past 100 years or so to make divorce and remarriage seem acceptable. I then found out there were a handful of happily married pastors, in quite a mix of denominations, with congregations who agreed with these “divorced” pastors and preached the truth boldly from their own pulpits — all of the truth. Being able to see the differences in Greek word usage that the liberal commentators don’t tell people about, helped me deeply understand the nature of both one-fleshand God’s unconditional covenants, as well as His character in how He treats His holy symbols.
Once I had this hermeneutics and online tools methodology under my belt, I happened to be accepted as a FB friend by a prominent professor (former Catholic) in a mainline Protestant seminary who had become an early friend of our FB page, and who had once rebutted Dr. David Instone-Brewer’s erroneous and liberal book from 2001. Dr. G allowed me to post marriage indissolubility comments on his wall, which is a gathering-place for Christian leaders and students, but he became uncomfortable and PM’d me one evening when I posted evidence that it’s a heaven-or-hell issue, just as remaining in a sodomous relationship is for gays who claim to be believers.
Dr. G: ” [SIFC}, I think you are beginning to dominate the discussion on my divorce post overly much. I think people understand your point. Some of it is helpful but careful for overkill.”
SIFC: “Good evening, Dr. G. Sorry I’ve offended. I’m in the middle of finishing a blog, so will give it a rest, and I do appreciate the touch-base. I do have a question, if it’s something you’ve addressed before. In your mind, is there any difference between “not inheriting the kingdom of God” and going to hell? This is a serious question and would love to have your input some time. Thanks.”
Dr. G: “Not inheriting the kingdom of God means exclusion from eternal life.”
SIFC: “So I guess your response would be “no difference”?”
Bottom line, he readily admitted that they mean the same thing, and has continued to allow me to post the same kinds of comments ever since. (The other possibility might have been for him to cite “loss of rewards”, as some of the Calvinists do with regard to the born-again who disobey the Lord in this area, but he didn’t do so.)
By that late evening incident in 2015, I knew that it wasn’t wrong to link 1 Cor.6:9-10with Luke 16:18, since after all, Jesus Himself did so in verses 19-31 of Luke 16. Notice He also does so in Matthew 5:27-32, keeping in mind that when those words came out of His mouth, there was no bible committee to sanitize it by adding “helpful headings” and “suggested divisions”. (Dr. G still claims there is adultery and “adultery-lite” depending on whether or not there’s man’s paper involved, but this learned seminarian has never been able to point to any scripture that supports this, except for the (irrelevant) story of the woman shacking up with a non-husband, of whom John’s account doesn’t tell us Jesus told her she had to “come out of” – but neither does John’s account tell us that He told her to hie herself off to the rabbi and “marry” the dude, post-haste.)
Dr. G is similar to John Piper and Voddie Baucham, good men who all agree that “remarriage” is adultery before it actually happens, but who all object, without scriptural basis, to the idea that repenting of this ongoing sin is done the same way as repenting of any other ongoing state of sin.
The third thing that happened is that I was exposed to all of the writings of the early church leaders, from the Apostles – people who had been in the house with Jesus after His confrontation with the Pharisees about remarriage being adultery, where He spoke of becoming a “eunuch” for the sake of inheriting the kingdom of God – to the ones that lived some 300 or 400 years later. They were unanimous about it as well. Even if some of them did consider man’s “divorce” real in terms of a separation, they all knew it didn’t dissolve anything until somebody died, so they all unanimously forbid remarriage while an estranged spouse was still alive.
One of them, Ignatius, who was the bishop of Antioch (died when executed by the Romans in a den of lions) said this around 100 A.D. :
“Do not be in error, my brethren. Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If then, those who do this as respects the flesh have suffered death, how much more shall this be the case with anyone who corrupts by wicked doctrine the faith of God, for which Jesus Christ was crucified? Such a one becoming defiled in this way shall go away into everlasting fire, and so shall everyone that harkens unto him.”
This audio link with important church history details is by Rev. Stephen Wilcox – whom I also highly recommend to you as a contact. Stephen runs the Spirit of Hosea Fellowship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhhGSHJAef4
We have to understand that remarriage adultery doesn’t just break the commandment against adultery. It also breaks the 1st commandment against idolatry (finding God-substitutes / self-worship), and the 8th, 9th and 10th commandments (stealing, bearing false witness, and coveting that which belongs to another).
If we die in the ongoing sin of remarriage adultery we die in all of those other sins as well, and we know from Rev. 21:8 that unrepentant liars and covetous idolators are cast into the lake of fire. Ditto for living in an ongoing state of unforgiveness which Jesus repeatedly stated will send people to hell if they die in that state (see Matt. 18:23-35). Adulterous remarriage constitutes permanent unforgiveness, taking our own revenge, as well as idolatry, covetousness, theft and sexual immorality.
If we stand for our covenant marriage, our motivation has to be right — we have to dread the idea of our God-joined one-flesh being cast into the lake of fire so much that we are determined to go the distance in what will seem like endless deprivation. We have to dread the idea that our children and grandchildren are likely to emulate our example of something that could send them to hell, unless they have the chance to observe us drawing a durable moral line in the sand. Above all, we can’t presume to give the Ruler of All Heaven and Earth a selfish time limit before we go and jeopardize yet another person’s soul by purporting to “marry” them when we are already joined for life in holy matrimony by GOD.
There’s much I can say about the appearance that your wife is “blessed” while “married” to somebody Jesus repeatedly called an adulterer. To gain some perspective, I suggest you read all of Luke, chapter 16; think deeply about everything Jesus was saying in that rich chapter and how it all ties together. The part about unrighteous mammon (following the world system), about John the Baptist who was beheaded for warning a pair of remarriage adulterers to repent or face hell and what Jesus thought about that, and finally the story of the rich man and Lazarus, thinking about how that relates to your exclusive one-flesh and the counterfeit she is “married” to.
But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.– Matthew 5:44-45
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. – Galatians 6:7-8
(SIFC: When we sow peas, we don’t reap corn. We usually reap much later than we sow, and normally, we reap much more than we sow. When the covenant wife “divorces” her husband, she takes herself out of the God-ordained covering-and-authority structure that includes her God-joined husband with God over him, which is also planting a “seed”, of sorts. That act [unrepented], too, is a “work” that is demonstrating her “faith”, is it not? God’s mercy toward her may be because she was never taught any better, but we cannot say.)
And if you have not been faithful in the use of that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” Now the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and were scoffing at Him.And He said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts; for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.” – Luke 16:12-15
In Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and *saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his bosom.And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.’But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony. – Luke 16:23-25
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” – Matthew 7:13-14
Truly, I say to you, “they have their reward in full.” – Matthew 6: 2, 5, and 16
Finally, Page Fan, do remember that God joins and honors valid mixed and pagan marriages as indissoluble, equally as He does “Christian” marriages. However, if anyone in this scenario is unsaved, not born again, remarriage adultery won’t be the primary reason they wind up in hell. Nobody can afford to put the cart before the horse. I hope you will recognize these women in your life, and all the children, as souls first who need Jesus more than anything else.
Blessings, Page Fan, and I hope this helps.
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!
For the report of your obedience has reached to all; therefore I am rejoicing over you, but I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you. – Romans 16:19-20
Would the Apostle Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 7:15 really be the same to the immorally-abandoned spouse of a backsliddenbeliever as he gave to the abandoned spouse of an unbeliever who departs?
What is happening in the apostate church today is causing a contagion that goes a bit beyond what Paul spoke of in in his first epistle to the Corinthians. No leader in the 1st thru 15th century church, outside of the rogue papacy of the Middle Ages who occasionally offered the indulgence of “annulment” (from the inception of that abominable heresy in the late 12th century), would have tolerated divorce and remarriage without excommunicating the guilty party and refusing to sanction any subsequent “marriage” of either partner. We know this from the very consistent writings of the early church fathers in those centuries. Hence, when Paul spoke of the (Greek: apistos – “one who is unconvinced“) , contextually, he was speaking of the spouse of a relatively recent convert who was suffering the persecution from their one-flesh who “didn’t sign up for” a life of discipleship, and emotionally could not live under the same roof with the strong conviction that this event invariably introduced into the home. The purpose of allowing the unbeliever to depart while walking in our own tranquility was (1) to allow refocus on discipleship without guilt or double-mindedness, and
(2) for God’s mercy and the supernatural power of the one-flesh bond to draw the agnostic into the kingdom of God through the built-in sanctification process in their mate. All of the above presumed a pure, uncorrupted church body and godly leadership, such as prevailed in the 1st century church, into which Paul was speaking.
By sharp contrast, the apostate church of today is literally fueling the demand for rampant unilateral divorce and adulterous remarriage among professed believers by performing wicked, vain ceremonies over the already-married-for-life, by counseling those “married” to someone else’s God-joined spouse to remain in those adulterous unions lest they commit a “repeat sin”, by refusing to warn the adulterously-remarried that dying in that ongoing immoral state will send them to hell, by handing pulpits over to pastors who are themselves adulterously “remarried”, and by steering people into unbiblical DivorceCare classes if satan attacks their holy matrimony union. This has created an epidemic of “believers” departing in almost every church, with only a temporary (at best) rebuke from leadership– usually only until such time as the immoral relationship is legalized under man’s law.
Toxic Calvinism (“antinomianism”) has added further fuel to the fire by claiming (often falsely) that the abandoning spouse “wasn’t born-again to begin with“, and results in further hindering, due to the “once saved, always saved” (OSAS) heresy, the warning of hell that backslidden spouses are ethically owed by church leadership. Who today is still publicly rebuking Tulian Tchividjian or Kent Hovind, as they were only a year or two ago? Will the current furor die down in Christian alternative media when Greg Locke “marries” another man’s covenant wife and charges forward in his “ministry” as though he is not apostate before the Lord? Does anyone even remember that John Hagee and Jim Bakker have done so for decades without rebuke? Or that Benny Hinn and Charles Stanley, by the grace of God, both narrowly escaped falling into this apostasy? Paul surely prophesied of an apostate latter-day church, but he left a strong prescription for cleaning out the old leaven. Today’s wolves leave the leaven of the Pharisees undisturbed, and instead claim (temporarily, it seems) that none of these gentlemen were ever born again. Will we allow them to say the same about our one-flesh partner, if we know differently? Is that not damnable slander?
Do we spouses oweour deceived but born-again one-flesh mate who is running from God this warning of hell, if we know they won’t hear it anywhere else? After all, the primary reason the unbelieving marital abandoner is going to hell is because they have never surrendered their life to Christ, not their ongoing state of legalized adultery. They cannot possibly digest a hell message tied to holy matrimony until, and probably for some time after, that eternally-crucial event occurs. However, with regard to the one irreversibly indwelt with the Holy Spirt, does such a warning constitute “striving” and “not allowing them to depart”, such as Paul envisioned? Is such a warning to them from us failing to promote “living in peace”, in disobedience to Paul’s instructions? Further, is challenging in court, or refusing to sign, an unconstitutional unilateral divorce petition which violates our precious 1st amendment protections also a failure to “allow the unbeliever to depart” in God’s eyes, or is it our holy witness of loving our enemy as we ourselves would want to be loved? Is God at all offended by our earnest, eternally-motivated prayers to pull the immoral union apart for the sake of all the souls involved?
By way of illustration, in the state of Illinois the combined fault-based / “no-fault” petition in effect in 2012 (later changed by the legislature in 2015) listed these “irreconcilable differences” assertions by the Petitioner:
That the spouses have lived separate and apart for a continuous period in excess of 2 years
Irreconcilable differences have caused the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage
Good faith efforts at reconciliation have failed
Future attempts at reconciliation would be impracticable and not in the best interests of the family
When no part of these four statements are true for the Christ-follower who believes in the holy will and power of God toward covenant spouses, whom His hand has personally joined and with whom He covenants until physical death, if that Christ-follower is the “Respondent”, they had at that time only three options, only two of which would be according to their conscience:
(1) Perjure themselves by signing off their assent under oath in order to avoid a humiliating and expensive civil grounds trial
(2) Not respond to the petition at all, including not engaging counsel, and accept a default judgment
(3) Deny the false allegations and prepare to bring hard evidence into “family court” to attempt to disprove the allegations.
Due to lack of resources to carry off option (3), many standers would choose option (2), or worse, option (1). “Standerinfamilycourt” chose option (3) and was blessed to have been provided the resources necessary to do so. Needless to say, this is not necessarily the option most evangelicals would consider the “way of peace” to which we are “called”. But, due to the blatant slander of the character and power of God, and the sworn falsehood entailed in option (1), neither is that option necessarily the way of peace with God, even if it seems the “way of peace” with our one-flesh. In “standerinfamilycourt’s” case, sustaining this civil trial compelled the petitioning prodigal to make numerous, disruptive transatlantic trips, further shattering the “peace”, as humiliating evidence of misdeeds and perjuries were brought forward in the courtroom. Several requests and proposals to submit to counseling in order to cut the litigation short were offered by the Respondent and rejected by the Petitioner.
This begs the question: what exactly is “peace” in the context Paul was using it in verse 15?
Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave; the brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us to peace.
The usual rendering of this verse in most contemporary English translations ends with “called us to peace”, or it adds words, by inference, that are not in the Greek manuscript texts so as to equivalently render it “called usto [live in] peace”. The idea of most exegetes (including the brief sermon link by Pastor Stephen Wilcox of theSpirit of Hosea Fellowship behind the clickable picture above) is that the disciple of Jesus is not to strive to induce an estranged spouse to remain in the home (some, though not Pastor Wilcox, go so far as to say, in the marriage — which is nonsensical, since only death dissolves the holy matrimony union, and immoral departure from it only violates the union without severing it, hence, God never gave anyone the “choice” about staying in their vowed state of lifelong holy matrimony, we simply ARE in it if the spouse of our youth is alive, whether we like it or not).
What if, however, Paul actually meant that our “peace” is not merely the result of our chosen actions toward our prodigal spouse or any other adversary, but is, at least in part, the passive result of our regeneration in Christ? Wouldn’t that mean that we are “walking in peace” if we are sincerely living to depend upon and please Him? This would certainly be consistent with the actual untranslated, literal texts, at least. We are called “in” peace, it literally reads, not necessarily “called to” peace (a circumstance that we might be able to influence to a certain degree, but certainly not control).
If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace {G1514-eiréneuó)with all men. – Romans 12:18
Several wise Christian leaders have truthfully asserted that the absence of conflict does not necessarily constitute the presence of peace, just as the presence of courage is not comprised of all absence of fear. Both depend to a certain degree on our behavior responses, which reflect varying degrees of faith. Choosing option (1) above, entailing perjury and blasphemy, does not make for peace with God’s glory. Choosing option (3) may seem contentious on the surface, but may actually reflect a larger purpose of God as well as not only looking out for our own interests but concern for the interests of others, even if it alienates our spouse. Of the three, which option requires the most faith and confidence in God? Which option requires the least faith and confidence in God?
According to Strong’s concordance, there are five Hebrew words which translate into the Greek eiréné (G1515) for “peace”, which is the root word for the English word “serenity”. One of these is shalom, which means not only the absence of conflict, but the presence of overall well-being or wholeness.
Peacemakers; peace-lovers (G1518) are eirénopoios – Matthew 5:9 whom Jesus told us were blessed.
Hence, the idea of conflict avoidance to appease the prodigal and his/her allies, or ‘”option (1)” in the unilateral petition dilemma, seems more closely related to sigao (conflict concealment) than eirene. “Option (2)” might be consistent with hesuchazo in the circumstance of a lack of means to do otherwise, but there is no assurance of wholeness. However, if we’re called to a life of discipleship in well-being or wholeness, this more closely links with the “shalom” understanding of eiréné, which appears to be passive and not at all instructional. The “option (3)” response does not appear to be “striving” (provided it is not motivated by seeking our own vengeance) and can morally be selected as part of a vision for God to do something bigger than ourselves, such as a constitutional legal challenge to an immoral law that is destroying society and triggering God’s judgment on the land.
And the peace (eirene) of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. – Philippians 4: 7
Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful. – John 14:27
Eirene is the most frequently-appearing form of “peace” in the New Testament. Virtually everywhere it’s used, the context is far greater than mere conflict avoidance or conflict concealment or appeasement. Certainly, covenant marriage standers don’t “stand” if they want to avoid conflict. Most allies of our prodigals consider our stands “selfish” and “divisive”, after all. We stand because we seek the wholeness and well-being of our covenant family, and this requires far more than appeasement and conflict avoidance.
In properly understanding what the Apostle had in mind when he gave the instruction in 1 Cor. 7:15, it also doesn’t hurt to check that we have an accurate understanding of what it means to be “called”.
(Note that this verb “called” is consistent throughout 1 Corinthians 7 for our rebirth into the kingdom of God while in a pre-existing condition; called (keklēken) while married or single; called (keklēken) while circumcised or uncircumcised; called (keklēken) while a slave or a free person. It does not seem to be connected with a particular command or instructions other than to remain in that condition, so long as it is not an immoral state that calls for repentance.)
to call
to call aloud, utter in a loud voice
to invite
to call i.e. to name, by name
to give a name to
to receive the name of, receive as a name
to give some name to one, call his name
to be called i.e. to bear a name or title (among men)
(picked out, chosen by God, to obtain salvation through Christ
Christians are called “chosen or elect” of God
the Messiah in called “elect”, as appointed by God to the most exalted office conceivable
choice, select, i.e. the best of its kind or class, excellence preeminent: applied to certain individual Christians
Picture credit: Sharon Henry
We can make no mistake: the believing spouse who abandons their one-flesh companion to pursue and attempt to “legitimize” their adultery partner is every bit as lost as the unbelieving spouse who does so, if they never repent or make restitution, but instead die in the illicit relationship. But the very day-to-day nature of that lostness is profoundly different. In the latter case, the hounds of heaven pursue the unregenerated wayward spouse from outside his or her body. In the case of the immoral believer, a grieved and quenched Holy Spirit, never comforted by man’s paper, is forcibly, unwillingly joined time and again with a harlot or whoremonger, as Paul so vividly describes in the previous chapter. In the unregenerated adulterer, the Holy Spirit is not forced along for the ride. Is it not therefore at least possible that the approach to that wandering sheep was not actually addressed by Paul as specifically as in verse 15, but more generally by verses 11, and 39? Today’s OSAS crowd would have us believe that this difference does not exist, as they would have us believe that sarx mia (God-joined one-flesh) can be severed by other than death, and they would have us believe that man-legalized spouses are morally interchangeable in God’s sight.
Lastly, it should be noted that the Greek term apistos (G571) has usages other than “unbeliever”, including “faithless” or “lacking faith”. Its usage is different, however, than in 1 Peter 3:1 where apeithousin(G544) is used for “disobedient one”, “rebel” or “disloyal one”. It is also distinguished from moichalis (G3428) – a spiritual adulterer or idol-worshipper. Further, apistos is distinguished from parapesontas (G3895) – meaning apostasy or one who has fallen away. All considered, it is doubtful that Paul was talking about a backslidden believer in 1 Cor. 7:14 or 1 Cor. 7:15, in his instruction to allow the unbeliever to depart without challenge of any sort, and his encouragement that the unbelieving spouse is sanctified by the believing spouse. Possibly, this is because a Tulian Tchividjian or a Kent Hovind or a Greg Locke would already have such a hardened, demon-controlled heart, bordering on apostasy, that the choices of their believing one-flesh spouse in seeking family wholeness would be unlikely to have much effect in the short run, regardless. Perhaps in the longer run, however, such a person’s God-joined, one-flesh mate is the only other soul strong enough to wage long term spiritual warfare for their soul, possibly averting the realization of dire warning in Hebrews 6:4-6:
For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come,and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame.
SIFC says this in hope rather than in firm reliance on scripture, only because of the miraculous testimonies of prodigals who have indeed returned to the Lord and to their faithful, praying stander, sometimes after decades of willful apostasy (as contrasted with negligent ignorance of the truth of marriage indissolubility). This may be due to nothing more that the mercy and special favor of the Lord for the obedient stander in these evil times.
Wrapping up, “standerinfamilycourt” would say that any abandoned spouse who was not around for their prodigal mate’s conversion and regeneration, and did not live with them to see several years of progressive transformation thereafter, whose maturing children’s lives and attitudes show they were not “caught by”, rather than “taught”, the way of the Spirit of God by the progidgal’s example during those post-conversion years, is probably best off assuming their spouse was a goat among the sheep, or a tare among the wheat, and applying the traditional view of 1 Cor. 7:15 (except for the false notion that the marriage bond is “broken” or never existed) – as Pastor Wilcox described it in the audio link above. Ditto, for the case where the spouse apostasized from the exceedingly rare church thatdid teach the full truth about the no-excuses indissolubility of holy matrimony, with eternal consequences being frankly exegeted from the pulpit. These last prodigals are consciously rejecting truth that they have been faithfully exposed to, and in that regard, are not unlike the man in 1 Cor. 5 whom Paul deemed it necessary to hand over to satan that his soul may be saved for the last day.
That said, a considerable number of genuinely born-again, Spirit-indwelt prodigal spouses, where the above signs were in solid evidence before they fell away, were sold a “bill-of-goods” by the harlot church and failed to hear the truth for decades since, from leadership who may not even have known the truth about the nature of sarx mia (the inseverable one-flesh state and indissolubility) during the post-1970’s era. These prodigals remain in great danger (if they have “remarried”), of falling under the influence of a John Piper or a Voddie Baucham or a Russell Moore or a David Servant who will tell them between 50% and 98% of the truth, but the 2% which all of these Calvinist shepherds are omitting is eternally lethal, because they all omit, misrepresent and discourage the opportunity for true repentance to someone who has the Spirit-endued capacity to absorb the unadulterated truth. This truth should never be delivered as a cudgel or as a naggy, dripping faucet. It should not be forced, but we should prayerfully ask God to open up to us, as their one-flesh true spouse, the rare opportunity where it is natural to share once or very, very infrequently, and we obey Him in that moment.
As a repentant Solomon once exposited, late in life: Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor.For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up. – Ecclesiastes 4:9-10
Having done what the Lord requires of us, we then should plead before the throne of heaven for the Lord to stir up the grieved and quenched Holy Spirit in our born-again prodigal to cause what was shared to be recalled by Him frequently to their disturbed remembrance, also to hedge them off from the offices (and YouTube channels) of the evangelical wolves, and grant them an overwhelming burden for their own soul and that of their faux spouse. Once we have done that, and we have obeyed in forgiving and restoring them when and if they repent, we will then not have to endure God’s future rebuke that what we failed to do for the least of these, we failed to do for Him.
The one who desires life, to love and see good days, Must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit. “He must turn away from evil and do good; He must seek peace and pursue it. “For the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, And His ears attend to their prayer, But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” – 1 Peter 3:10-12
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
“It’s sad to see a state opt out of licensing marriage, but the truth is real marriage as a legal construct essentially ceased to exist with the legalization of gay marriage. It’s like removing the legal distinction between real money and play money. Real money means nothing once play money becomes legal tender– and everyone is made poorer– even counterfeiters– same story on gay marriage.
“Gays kid themselves if they think they their marriages are of the same substance as marriage prior to gay marriage. Put a drop of fine wine from a wine bottle into a bottle of sewer water and you still have a bottle of wine and a bottle of sewer water, but put a drop of sewer water into a bottle of fine wine and you have two bottles of sewer water. Things of higher value are diminished or destroyed altogether when mixed with things of lower value. Alabama’s move to eliminate marriage licenses recognizes that reality– MR-T”
With a few days’ delay, we noticed a re-post of this on the Facebook wall by a friend of our blog page who lives in Texas, and we commented to MassResistance on their page as follows:
SIFC:
“There are two conscionable alternatives to dealing with civil law that no longer coincides with God’s law in any respect:
(1) pastors opt out of participating in the civil system as an agent for the state (example: the 2014 First Things Marriage Pledge) (2) what Alabama is seeking to do
“Although some 800+ pastors from a wide variety of denominations had signed the Marriage Pledge by two months after Obergefell, nearly 3 years later, few have had the moral courage to make good on it. We have a pretty good idea why not — wrong motives, and the sudden delayed realization of what that might do to the ability of heterosexuals to do what God forbids and get a state “dissolution” decree. So, that leaves Option 2.
“We humbly remind that God’s definition of marriage (Matt.19:4-6) has TWO non-negotiable elements, not just one – as the tone of this post strongly implies. Those elements are: (1) complementarity, and (2) indissolubility. Hence, the adulteration of that wine bottle started to take place 48 years ago, not in 2015, two generations later. Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s andrender unto God the things that are God’s”. He told us that Holy Matrimony does not happen except by God’s hand. It’s therefore quite suspect that the Reformation humanists, Martin Luther in particular, saw fit to hand over to the state that which belonged to God in the first place. Count on God not to allow this issue to dissipate until His full definition of marriage is honored, and pastors from coast to coast repent of whining about sodomy-as-“marriage” while carefully preserving consecutive polygamy-as-holy-matrimony.
“It will be interesting to see, if this progresses to become law, how they continue to issue ‘dissolutions’. It’s probably pretty simple to substitute their affidavits for marriage certificates when it comes to finding another unilateral home invasion warrant, but how will they handle the gory details? Option 1 would have denied them the piece of paper usable as such a “warrant” in a substantial number of cases.”
MassResistance gave a very gracious response to our comment, which we will leave the readers to reference on their own.
Of course, Alabama is the infamous state of dethroned State Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who was removed from the bench in 2016 on ethics charges because he issued an administrative order to lower court judges stating, “until further decision by the Alabama Supreme Court, the existing orders of the Alabama Supreme Court that Alabama probate judges have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary to the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment or the Alabama Marriage Protection Act remain in full force and effect….” citing the fundamental right of these judges to conscience protections and free religious exercise in declining to issue civil marriage licenses to homosexuals. (Presumably, these same judges had no serious compunctions or religious conscience issues with issuing civil marriage licenses to would-be legalized adulterers in the years since 1975 enactment of Alabama’s unilateral divorce laws. Moore is himself “married” to a civilly-“divorced” woman.) Apparently, for all the smoke-blowing that ensued to remove Moore, his successor on the bench has not reversed the 2016 administrative order after almost two years, the lingering effect being as stated in the AL.com article:
“Under current law, Alabama probate judges are not required to issue marriage licenses and some, at least initially, declined to issue licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court ruling.
“Albritton’s bill would take away any discretion by probate judges. The only requirement to make a marriage official would be to submit the documents to the probate judge.”
Take away the discretion of judges….does this sound familiar? It should indeed! This is exactly how brutal totalitarianism came to be injected into “family court” processes and procedures to implement unilateral divorce, without raising a whimper of public protest even though the 1st and 14th amendment protections were being stripped from millions of Americans in the process. Legislating immorality has always been a stealth process — and in the past five decades, it has come to work flawlessly…intractably.
The gay “marriages” taking place in Alabama in this long interim have only been enabled where LGBT-sympathetic judges are willing to issue the civil marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Several counties are reportedly not issuing them at all.
SB13’s sponsor, Greg Albritton appears to be a liberal Republican, according to a 2016 voting scorecard published by the American Conservative Union, where he scored 58%, the lowest of all of his GOP peers, and equaling the score of the highest scoring Democrat in the Alabama Senate. His bill passed a fast-tracked and astounding floor vote of 19-1 in mid-January, and the ACLU published their analysis stating that they do not consider it a threat to liberal interests, so they are not taking a position on it. This is a strong, red flag that the measure is not expected to be supportive of biblical, traditional families, since it is not drawing ACLU opposition. The full text of SB13 (about 9 pages) can be read here.
At first blush, it should seem like a dream-come-true that the state might be giving back to God the authority over the holy ordinance that He never delegated to fallible, carnal men in civil government….
“So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no [human] separate”…..He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. ”
– Matthew 19:6, 8
However, there is an ominous poison-pill: it will no longer be necessary to have vows or a public ceremony should these bills become law.
Jesus pointed back to the first wedding in the Garden for the essentials of God-joined holy matrimony….
And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his FATHER and MOTHER and be joined to his wife, andthe two shall become one flesh’?
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
– Matthew 19:4-5; Genesis 2:21-24
Elements present in the Garden wedding between Adam and Eve: eligible partners without prior, estranged spouses still living, consent, vows, witnesses (Jesus and the serpent), and God’s supernatural, instantaneous act of (Greek :sunexuezen) joining.
Elements absent in the Garden wedding: civil paper and a human officiant.
We all know that the unholy 16th century transaction between church and state authority was a foul fruit of the humanistic Reformers, principally, of Martin Luther who sought access to that which God expressly forbid through Jesus Christ, namely, divorce via a man-made declaration of “dissolution”, rather than the physical death of a spouse. What appears on the surface to be a “taking back” of authority from civil government is actually a mirage in the case of these bills. The texts of these bills SB13 and (pending) HB162 both explicitly provide that there will be no change to the statute with regard to divorce or child “welfare” provisions. Unless there is civil paper of some sort, no unilateral divorces nor totalitarian interference with parental rights would be possible. Hence, a more controlled piece of paper on the front-end, is being swapped for a piece of civil paper with far fewer controls, but effecting all the same state intrusion into the sanctity of the home. The uber-liberal take on this makes for some interesting reading, as well.
In the absence of a requirement for a witnessed ceremony, documentation of consent, and vows, the effect is that common law marriages are being given the same legal status as holy matrimony unions. In other words, a second category of legalized, adulterous unions is being created that essentially legalizes fornication as well as adultery. Absorbed into the longstanding moral vacuum of the contemporary church, the effect on marital stability will be devastating to family structure over time, in the same way that rampant “remarriage” has been. To be sure, pastors will still require the traditional ceremony for the weddings they do, and will continue their evil practice of performing the same over the already married-for-life. But equally sure is the fact that in addition to the legalized adulterers whom they now welcome into their congregations (no questions asked), they will be welcoming a new group of folks likewise not married in God’s eyes – those who have made no vows before Him. As an added bonus, pastors will be relieved of the offense to conscience from signing civil marriage licenses that reflect an immoral civil standard.
STATUS , at this writing
The enacted result, should it come to pass:
– Win for the judges who no longer have a conscience conflict with their jobs (but still should, if they call themselves Christ-followers).
– Win for the pastors whose threat of being sued by LGBT activists is significantly reduced, with the added bonus of avoiding any “heat” from their congregations for implementing something so controversial and “judgmental” as the Marriage Pledge.
– Win for the abusive Catholic dioceses that nationally grant 90% of marriage annulment petitions, the vast bulk of which claim “defective” original consent.
– Win for the heinous state bar association who have always looted the system since the enactment of unilateral divorce, and have purchased increasing political power with the confiscated proceeds, but who will now up their ante from the resulting increase in social and moral chaos.
– Win for the homosexuals who seek to adopt, traffic in, and corrupt children, while gaining government and employer benefits.
– Win for the LGBT activists (such as Tamra Metz and Masha Gessen) who openly admit the movement’s ultimate objective to destroy the institution of holy matrimony and traditional families.
– Win for the shallow veneer of preserving religious liberty (until we stop and consider the denied religious liberty of the non-offending, non-filing spouse whose 1st amendment rights have traditionally been ignored by the system.)
Win-win for everybody, right? Not exactly…major loss for covenant spouses, their children and grandchildren, and for God-defined holy matrimony, as well as for the already downward-spiraling sexual morality within the church. A church full of papered-over adulterers, including behind the pulpit, is hardly ready to resume any authority over marriage the state gives back at this time.
Once again, the biblical covenant family is being thrown under the bus with the blind approval of all of all the above “winning” parties, and will now actually be in worse shape than their counterparts in neighboring states (until the easy-peasy-sleazy virus spreads to those states as well). From the 1970’s until now, marriage seems to be becoming the ever more ridiculous, rambling “house that Jack built”.
While MassResistance’s comments show they are less than enthused with this legal innovation, where is the voice of the churches, or of Alabama’s family policy council? To their credit, the Alabama Policy Institute has been at least tracking and timely-reporting on the bills during January (albeit, with exceptional brevity for such an impactful change – scroll all the way to the bottom of link)….but they do not appear to be taking a position, nor publicly recognizing the serious back-door dismantling threat to the institution of marriage itself. Would that API would have at least reported who the one dissenting Senator was, and why Sen. Phillip Williams [R], who holds an 88% lifetime score with the American Conservative Union,dissented. Unfortunately, neither does the press do this. It is clear that this legislation is all about facilitating sodomous “marriages” and protecting judges, and not about what’s best for the integrity of families or (ultimately) society.
Quoting Masha Gessen (2012):
“It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. … (F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there – because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.
“The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out 30 years ago….”
As is fairly typical for state FPC’s and changes to marriage laws (other than those ushering in gay “marriage”), no blogs or articles have been devoted to this topic since the September, 2017 introduction of the Senate bill. General press coverage, on the other hand, has been favorable both on the Right and Left, with no significant criticisms and only vaguely- expressed concerns (“waving the white flag on marriage”, etc.), despite the radical social impact which legally and morally equating common law and God-joined marriages will undoubtedly bring, absent any coinciding reform of unilateral divorce laws.
The better solution? Continue to regulate marriages per existing law, while pastors with the requisite moral authority, discipleship and courage opt-out of acting as an agent for states whose marriage contract does not reflect the vows being exchanged in the sanctuary. Take the heat for the sake of the kingdom of God, pastors and judges!
The best solution? Remove “irreconcilable differences” (and its equivalents) as a “ground” for divorce if there is no mutual petition for marriage dissolution, and divide assets and child welfare based on proven marital fault, thereby drying up both the demand for “marriage” between homosexuals, and the perverse, lucrative financial incentives that drive the legal machine. (We have asked MassResistance -Texas whether they plan to support the re-election of Rep. Matt Krause, and support 2019 continued repeal efforts in Texas, but they declined to respond to this question.)
Prayer warriors, we have our work cut out for us. Please start by praying that HB162 fails in the Alabama House of Representatives. In the ten days leading up to Valentine’s Day, look for a series of daily posts to Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutionalreflecting concrete ways the church can rapidly improve her witness to the world concerning rebuilding a “culture of marriage”. We believe these steps would prepare the church morally for the responsibility of taking marriage back from the state and reversing the 500 year old Lutheran curse.
The infamous Trojan Horse allowed the Greeks to get in and out of the city with their treasure. After they were out, the whole city burned to the ground.
Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people.
– Proverbs 14:34
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
by Standerinfamilycourt
