Tag Archives: Contemporary heresies

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

So What (ELSE) Has 50 Years of “No-Fault” Divorce Gotten Us?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

To deliver you from the strange woman,
From the adulteress who flatters with her words;
That leaves the companion of her youth
And forgets the covenant of her God;
For her house sinks down to death
And her tracks lead to the dead;
None who go to her return again,
Nor do they reach the paths of life.
– Proverbs 2:16-19

On August 13, 2019, author and family law reform activist Beverly Willett achieved the noteworthy milestone of having an accurate, objective article  about the legal and societal debacle of unilateral (so-called “No Fault”) forced divorce ,”What Has Fifty Years of No-Fault Divorce Gotten Us? “,  published in a Washington D.C. secular media weekly, despite the graphic, unflattering details she offered up.  Kudos deserved, kudos gratefully extended to Beverly for her hard work on this piece.     The Washington Examiner’s publisher had announced in 2013 that it would seek to distribute the weekly publication to at least “45,000 government, public affairs, advocacy, academia and political professionals.”  The publisher also asserted that the Examiner‘s readership is “more likely to sign a petition, contact a politician, attend a political rally, or participate in a government advocacy group than those of Roll Call, Politico, or The Hill.”
You can bet “standerinfamilycourt” applauded as Beverly did some extensive, long-overdue cultural myth-busting in that great piece.

[ SIFC Trigger warning, for anyone thinking of clicking on that August article, who already suffers MGTOW-ish sentiments and high blood pressure:   there’s a gratuitous embedded song and interview by Pistol Annies (I guess to appease the feministas) that “standerinfamilycourt” found hard to suppress from auto-playing:
“a feel-good divorce song that was ‘needed’ — Ah broke his heart and Ah took his money” (isn’t that special?)   This has zero relevance to Beverly’s piece other than to illustrate her points,  and is best experienced with zero sound , while scrolling resolutely down.]

Among the frank and excellent points that Beverly made  in the actual article:

(1) the 14th Amendment due process violations involved, including “the plaintiff’s obligation to assert grounds, the defendant’s right to be heard, including the right to cross-examine and call witnesses, and offer evidence, and the right to impartial decision-making.”

(2) Oversold reduction in animosity or acrimony, which was postponed in cases with children until after the decree, but turned out to be a predictably-hollow “merit”, since the theft of property and parental rights were still involved anytime a divorce is forced (as it is some 80% of the time), and revisits would go on and on until the kids aged out.

(3) The skyrocketing divorce rate, followed by the later avoidance of marriage by those who were stung in childhood and learned firsthand how harsh and one-sided our unconstitutional  “family laws” are.

(4) Increases in poverty, suicide, depression.

(5) The national normalization of adultery.

 As much as all this is for a writer to get a typical reader’s arms around, we all know that Beverly’s piece just scratches the surface, and writing about much more of it would have caused her readers’ eyes to glaze over.     Unfortunately, what was expedient to leave out for the general audience who has been fed 50 years worth of myths has even further future implications for the very survival of our constitutional republic.    Hence, SIFC picks up where Beverly left off, to point out what else it’s important to recognize easy, sleazy divorce has cost the nation.

So what else has 50 years of “no-fault” divorce gotten us?

*  Metastasizing erosion in due process, now impacting many other segments of society than just discarded spouses

This shouldn’t be surprising.   We’ve observed very frequently and very accurately that the breakdown of the family was planned and orchestrated decades before the laws could be passed that enabled the fragmentation we have today, and that the nation’s “family courts” have served as a testing ground for how much degradation in constitutional protections citizens would be willing to trade for increasing levels of sexual autonomy.    The family has always been the natural buffer limiting the need and the feasibility for state control of people’s lives.    This limit has always been unacceptable to some of our power holders.

We saw with the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings how little regard some of our sitting Senators have for due process staples like “innocent until proven guilty”, if due process stands in the way of ideological “sacred cows” such as abortion-on-demand (which always takes a human life without due process), or protecting women from (even self-perceived) “attacks”.     Patriots were relieved when Mr. Kavanaugh was confirmed despite the orchestrated and fabricated smears, none of which were proven with any actual evidence.    But the takeaway from that episode remains that plenty of elite power-holders don’t share the values of our nation’s founders, hence anyone who shrugged and rested easy just because that particular skirmish was won last year, wasn’t paying attention.      And sure enough,  the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the ABA is lobbying to relax due process in cases where sexual assault has been alleged, by requiring that the accused prove his innocence rather than the accuser prove his guilt.     After all, nobody has missed the absence of full due process in “family court”, and the ends justify the means, right?     Any resulting change in the laws for prosecuting sexual assault will obviously be unconstitutional,  but guess whose members are in charge of ruling on any appeals that the falsely-accused might pursue?     Once again, this reflects 50 years’ experience gained from unconstitutional divorce law challenges being summarily dismissed without fear of SCOTUS intervening, at least in heterosexual cases.

* Rogue political involvement by professional associations

Licensed professional associations once had a noble tradition of ethical codes and standards of practice that were developed and enforced in the public interest.   Unfortunately,  feminists and other sexual activists started infiltrating those organizations in the post-war period, and started coming to power in the 1970’s, which is how an American Bar Association-sponsored “Uniform Marriage and Dissolutions Act” model legislation (UMDA) that was so contrary to the Constitution and so contrary to sound public policy gained enactment so quickly in so many states, as the ABA also saw to it that “family law” attorneys ran for election to state legislatures and got appointed to the relevant committees, despite the obvious conflict-of-interest.

At about the same time, homosexual activists were infiltrating the American Psychological Association, with the strategic goal of getting homosexuality declassified as an emotional disorder, which occurred in 1973.     These events are connected by the fact that both professional groups shared a common goal of breaking down the nuclear family as a powerful institution.    Both of these professional bodies have grown wealthy and powerful enough to destructively marshal the media and make bribes masked as “donations” to block the reforms that would restore our society and constitutional republic.   Such reforms, of course, would topple their financial and ideological empire.

Anyone who doubts that unilateral “no-fault” divorce was but one element of a centrally-orchestrated plan for Marxist social change that already existed in 1969, or that much of it would necessarily be accomplished over a few decades, initiated by subterfuge, should do some deep reading here (see especially, pages 6-8).   Just as the collective of mental health professionals knew, or should have known in the early 1970’s that there was no scientific basis for reclassifying homosexuality as naturally-occurring,  so the collective of practicing attorneys knowingly advanced a grossly unconstitutional model law.

*  Substitution of “family courts” for the guaranteed due process of criminal courts when domestic violence is alleged

Although many states did not enact UMDA verbatim, but instead chose to keep a mix of fault-based grounds, along with the no-fault grounds, some states did get rid of all of their fault-based grounds to leave “irreconcilable differences” (or its equivalent) as the only available grounds.    False allegations in divorce cases was a complained-of issue, and the idea was to cut out the need for an evildoer to lie to the court in order retain assets and at least partial access to the children.    The consequences for the innocent spouse and children were trivialized and dismissed, often heinously virtue-signaling that there was “no such thing as an innocent spouse”.     During this time, many state laws criminalizing adultery were also dismantled or reduced to a slap on the wrist.

Unfortunately,  the new regime encouraged even worse and more damaging forms of perjury in the form of fraudulent protection orders to gain assets and child custody.     Some rogue attorneys encourage this even when there is no provable abuse, precisely because constitutional due process is uniquely circumvented in “family court” and nothing will have to be proven in exchange for the financial and parental “club” that can now be unwielded over the “Respondent”.   They also know that even having a jailed actual physical abuser can make it tough for attorney fees to be either earned or paid, so they wheedle their clients to route through no-fault “family court” to keep family dirty laundry “private” for the sake of the (typically confused and bewildered) kids.     Obliging the attorneys does not present a conscience issue for non-Christians or for most adherents to the Westminster Confession of Faith (which unbiblically endorses divorce and remarriage for adultery and “abandonment”), so it’s easily sold even to some people of faith.   But what does the bible actually say about personally bringing one’s spouse before a pagan civil judge?     What does the bible actually say dissolves a marriage, and leaves somebody free to “remarry”?   Who does the bible say should “bear the sword” against actual wrongdoing?

* Strengthened hand for Marxists and others who have always objected to the Bill of Rights

Anyone with a serviceable knowledge of U.S. history knows that Marxists have always existed as a minority group in our country.
In the past they were kept on the fringe due to most Americans’ abhorrence of the havoc Marxist leaders wreaked in other countries, persecuting and impoverishing their own citizens, until most of those systems collapsed.    Today’s youngest voters either were not taught that chapter of history or have no one surviving in their lives to educate them.    Indeed, the violent, black-hooded thugs who call themselves “AntiFA” do so because they object to the First Amendment.     Most of us know from a 1926 article in Atlantic Magazine that unilateral “no-fault” divorce enactment quickly followed the Bolsheviks into power in Russia early in the 20th century, and caused so much societal chaos that Stalin later had to scale it back a bit.  In 1959, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev reportedly said in a speech:

“We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism.”

Unilateral “no-fault” divorce transfers some measure of family assets to the state and a disproportionate share to the offending spouse and the attorneys.    It transfers God-given authority over the upbringing of children directly over to the state.   It requires a measure of totalitarianism to sustain itself, and hence it persecutes anyone who believes and who states on the witness stand that only God alone has authority to “dissolve” a marriage, and He does so exclusively by physical death.   It suspends virtually every Bill of Rights protection imaginable for the “Respondent”:  right to jury trial, right to seek redress of government grievances, rights against unwarranted search and seizure of financial records, rights against compelled speech (in some states), right to free religious exercise and association, just to name a few that Beverly Willett didn’t already mention.   Again, some younger voting adults are shocked to hear that it wasn’t always this way with our divorce laws or that we didn’t always have the resulting societal fallout such as active shooters a couple of times a month, since it’s all they’ve ever witnessed.

* Continued, escalating erosion in parents’ rights

“Family Court” also pioneered the pushing aside of parental rights without due process nor equal protection under the law, and where typically the only “offense” committed was wanting to keep the marriage together, which then gave rise to the Father’s Rights / Parents Rights Movement, endless allegations of parental alienation countering the often-false allegations of “abuse”, and finally, MGTOW.    Solomon was wise enough to know even he could not split the baby in half (though he suggested it to make a point and to ferret out the truth)….neither can an administrative function posing as a judicial function pretend to do so.   Today the child becomes the tug-o-war rope in a system where his or her “best interest”  boils down to judicial lip service, and where the chief aim is to shred the home at all costs as rapidly as possible, in the interest of unfettered sexual autonomy (and a years-long future fee revenue stream arising from the severance).

In due time however, such a toxic system, which more typically exposed children to the often-immoral post-divorce home of the Petitioner (since objective fault could no longer be taken into account in most states in deciding child custody and visitation), and where perjured accusations often took over via restraining orders, or created two immoral homes in “amicable” situations, the damage could not possibly stop with the legalized no-cause destruction of once-married homes.    Enter children born or dragged into cohabiting homes, where the legal profession had no issues with setting up the same rules for the even-more-inevitable severance game.    Enter the single household “with benefits” – and children in-tow.   Enter the homosexual home  and the polyamorous home.    Enter a generation of young people with gender dysphoria whom government leaders now declared “were born that way”, and whose identity derangement must be humored with surgery, opposite sex bathroom privileges, and court-compelled parental sponsorship of the dysphoria, lest the child revert to the state as a ward of the foster system from which the purloined children may now be trafficked for filthy Federal lucre.

As recently as 2017, even intact married families found themselves fighting in court for custody of their own biological children if they were not willing to consent and pay for gender transition procedures, this recalcitrance being judicially deemed to be “child abuse” and a risk of suicide, while the much higher risk of suicide in post-transition individuals was ignored.    As it now stands, several Leftist state legislatures have passed laws mandating that LGBT “history” and pornographic “sex education” be taught in all grades of public school, many of them also mandating no prior notice to parents and no parental right to opt their children out.    In the earliest case, more than a decade ago, one kindergarten father in Massachusetts was literally jailed for asserting his parental rights over his biological son’s education.    In many other situations, children are routinely confiscated and placed in the foster system on allegations of “medical neglect”.      There is a bottom-line for why all of this is happening to parental rights:  we eventually were no longer raising enough solid citizens over the past few decades to execute positions of responsibility with sound conscience and appropriate sense of the true and sustainable public interest.

But what happened to the landmark SCOTUS rulings that once hedged-off parental rights as fundamental rights?    Part of it was arguably the changing landscape for households where children were now raised, as discussed above, making parental rights across the board far more difficult to guarantee on a practical basis.    The other part of it was a fruit of unilateral “no-fault” enactment being so fiercely and corruptly protected in rogue state courts whenever constitutionally challenged, in part, due to what now follows….

It’s become impossible to move off this parental rights topic without briefly mentioning the culmination of all of this evil, the little-known State-Federal piracy partnership in “family-court”-trafficked children, which began with perverse Federal legislation in the late 1970’s.   In its simplest terms, states (many of whom incur annual taxpayer-borne transferred social costs north of 10-figures resulting from their unilateral “no-fault” laws) have been offered and paid per-head Federal subsidies for every child they place in foster care, without regard to how their inventory of children for that nefarious purpose was sourced, in a program called Title IV-D of the Social Security Act.   SIFC again refers readers to the detailed sources of this information, while here noting the takeaway that significant, perverse financial incentives arising after many of these landmark SCOTUS rulings which once guaranteed and reaffirmed parental rights,  today actually reward individual states for usurping the fundamental parental rights of the vulnerable, and these are enabled by widespread corruption in the periodically-elected state level judiciary function.


* The birth of new “fundamental rights” that bypassed the Constitutional amendment process, to be handed down from the bench in order to neutralize and supersede original Bill of Rights protections.

Believe it or not, our founders “overlooked” providing us with a “right to privacy” in the Bill of Rights.   Instead, their design called for freedom of association in the First Amendment, and protection against unwarranted, unlawful search and seizure in the Fourth Amendment.   At the same time, many of the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights explicitly warned that this Judeo-Christian blueprint for a constitutional republic could only sustainably govern a “moral and religious people”.   This was sufficient for a couple of centuries in protecting other founding fundamental rights such as free religious exercise, property rights, the right to life and liberty.   Unfortunately, most of these interfered with the “right” to take an unborn life, or to take property in furtherance of the Sexual Revolution.    There was not a fundamental right to be found that was robust enough to protect and foster unfettered sexual autonomy, and in the 1970’s most citizens would have been too classically-educated and too close to the shedding of the blood that had upheld international challenges to our founding fundamental rights, to ever consent to changing those rights at the ballot box.    No, getting past this solid barrier was going to require a bit of “judicial” relaxing of separation-of-powers  as had just worked so masterfully as the “legislative” relaxing of separation-of-powers which had recently ushered in “no-fault” divorce.     Of course, the “right to privacy” was instrumental in declaring a fundamental right to feticide in 1973, and to sodomous relationships in 2003 (hence, also to adulterous relationships), but in another 1973 case involving a pornographic movie house, the high court said this…”Our prior decisions recognizing a right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment included only personal rights that can be deemed fundamental or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty . . . This privacy right encompasses and protects the personal intimacies of the home, the family, marriage, motherhood, procreation, and child rearing . . . cf . . . Pierce v. Society of Sisters; Meyer v. Nebraska.”

SIFC would argue that parental rights were already well-covered under the concept of ordered liberty without creating a named  fundamental “right” to disordered liberty, or libertinism.     It can reasonably be argued that when a deemed new “fundamental” right materially interferes with the basic fundamental rights named by our founding documents, the courts have gone too far in interpreting the 14th Amendment.    In other words, when special rights or super-rights are created for a certain group of behavior choices that override the most basic fundamental rights of other people, there is by definition no longer equal protection under the law.

* Dulled will and ability to discern between symptoms and the disease actually causing them.

A very important discipline in business is root cause analysis, because managers have a vested interest in accurately stating problems, then applying disciplined techniques to systematically “peel back the onion” to arrive at the correct root cause before investing in and implementing a solution.    If this is not done objectively, only the symptoms will be treated, and not only will the problem recur, but serious resources will be wasted.   Sometimes in business there is non-cooperation or even active interference with this process by individuals who have a vested interest in not having the true root cause identified and effectively addressed.   Stepping back, many of the societal evils we routinely have today, we rarely experienced prior to the 1970’s.   Something that changed in the early ’70’s has caused most of the serious woes for our nation.

Activists in the marriage permanence community are often frustrated by endless traditional “pro-family” activist hand-wringing over symptoms in a decaying society who has kicked the nuclear family slats out from under itself,  symptoms such as the rising cohabitation rate, the school and church shootings, child-trafficking,  clergy sex abuse cases, the abortion rate, the opioid crisis, the push to legalize marijuana, the bathroom privacy issues, Chick-Fil-A getting kicked out of the local airport, judges being persecuted for declining to officiate gay weddings, and on and on.  On the one hand, these are all emotional issues that are powerful short term fundraisers that get staffers and rent paid at the nonprofits who champion conservative cultural issues.  By contrast, appealing for funds to support public activities to end peoples’ absolute “rights” to terminate their marriages at-will and legalize their planned or existing adultery is at best a  longterm proposition which is going to offend some significant donors whose wealth derived to some degree from the current system.    Even if research funds to gather and publish data are socially acceptable (providing that, they point only to divorce in a generic sense), any research funds that might potentially lead to correlating adulterous remarriage as a systemic root cause seems far out-of-bounds for now.    The problem is that evidence is growing by the day that this hamster-wheel cannot keep turning like this forever before the nation literally comes down around our ears, with God allowing it.     Civil war and foreign invasion cannot be fended off forever once our Constitution has been rendered sufficiently inoperable.   From Caliphate-loyal, ethics-immune members of Congress to “sanctuary” cities and states to  huge corporations officially pushing First Amendment-destroying legislation, there are bad actors working fervently toward these things with growing success every passing day.

* “Do Something, Anything” mentality.

John Stonestreet of Breakpoint.org recorded a podcast in the wake of the El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio mass shootings that is very astute.     Desperate times indeed call for desperate measures, but that still does not justify unstudied knee-jerk reactions.    As noted above, these cries are typically for “do something that doesn’t gore MY ox.”    Ban guns, so I personally don’t have to repent from my adulterous remarriage or reconcile with, or make restitution to my rejected covenant family (which just might contain a wounded potential mass shooter).   Ban guns, so the practice of commoditizing and commercializing the acquisition of other people’s children to validate an immoral household, does not have to cease.

John’s podcast points up the growing threats to two additional vital provisions for sustaining our constitutional republic, our decreasing practical ability to uphold the 2nd and 4th amendments represented by the currently-favored knee-jerk reaction to mass shootings:  Red Flag laws.   He points out that doing the wrong thing can make many things substantially worse, even if the intent was good–and that the result may prove intractable or irreversible.   We’ve been denying, suppressing and altering truth in this way for five decades, actually, and it’s become a very bad habit for both citizens and leaders.
The very same can fairly be said of enactment of “no-fault” unilateral divorce laws that began on September 5, 1969.   When will we as a nation learn our lesson?

Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed..

Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Before becoming more sensitized to the abusiveness of “family laws” for those parents still with minor children in the home, and where the petitioning spouse has a lesser income than the so-called “Respondent”, this blogger stood on the sidelines of the gun debate and didn’t have that much of an opinion when it came to banning certain weapon types, “standerinfamilycourt” confesses.    Why would any non-military citizen ever need a flame-thrower or an AK-47?    When SIFC was only ten years old, an opportunity arose to fire an M-16, back-to-belly with a very stout sergeant bracing the effort.  The “kick” that resulted was absolutely stunning, and resulted in a lifelong conviction that a gun in the house would more likely do harm to self and loved ones than to any intruder.    Prayers go up constantly for a son who trained and qualified for concealed carry, with precious little ones in the house, SIFC having personally lost more than one young companion to household gun accidents where somebody got careless in years gone by.   But I digress.     At that time, the entire Constitution and national border sovereignty were not literally hanging by a timely-elected POTUS (er…thread).

Thanks to “no-fault” laws and the related widespread abuses of restraining orders by the legal community, many more innocent people have been charged with either emotional or physical “domestic violence” than have ever been guilty of either.    Red Flag laws will mean that these people who have already have suffered the stripping of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, their Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Amendment rights, along with their contractual rights under Article 1, Section 10– all through NO FAULT of their own–now additionally stand to lose their Second Amendment rights as an after-the-fact result, in yet another situation where nothing has to be proven, only an allegation made.

A word or two about the Fourth Amendment before moving on:   all divorces, whether fault-based or “no-fault” require the exposure of private financial records, in this case without a warrant being required.    How can there be any “probable cause” if the only “crime” alleged is “irreconcilable differences”?    There can be no warrant without actual charges being leveled against person, as opposed to a relationship, can there?    “Family Court” uses those disclosures not only to keep the Petitioner as financially whole as possible after filing for the unilateral shredding of their own family, but also for purposes of determining how much of the family assets can support legal fees both pre- and post- decree.    Perhaps most egregiously, forced financial disclosure is used to help determine which spouse to grant primary custody to in a way that leaves the spouse with the most assets on the “outs” –  to further enhance future legal fees.   Our Constitution says this stuff is none of the court’s business unless probable cause of a crime exists.

SIFC wishes the Fourth Amendment violations associated with unilateral “no-fault” divorce stopped with forced financial disclosure.    Unfortunately, the violations can extend even to deeply humiliating bodily invasion, if any sort of sexual abuse is alleged in some “family courts”, even under so-called “no-fault” grounds.
Dr. Stephen Baskerville described this in his April 29, 2019 address to the Ruth Institute’s  annual Summit for Survivors of the Sexual Revolution.     Activist Jeff Morgan also recently interviewed a Texas man who was subjected to the same.    Delicacy and brevity would have us move on, but the curious should give these a listen, but keep in mind that “no-fault” laws enable such things to be triggered without any evidence of probable cause.

* Corrupted churches and apostate denominational doctrine.

Churches had a clear choice to make after September 5, 1969.   Option 1 was to get involved and educated, much as they did with so-called gay “marriage” and abortion, and do whatever was necessary to fulfill their citizenship obligation to resist the clear constitutional incursion and frontal attack on the families in each congregation; to stand publicly against unilateral, forced divorce in the Lord’s power.   Option 2 was to haul out the existing doctrine on the sanctity of marriage, do the economic math around attendance and giving, then grab a red pen and decide whether existing doctrine could withstand, without alteration, the impact on both attendance and giving that opening the divorce floodgates would soon precipitate.     Unconscionably, most churches and denominations chose Option 2.

Church history tells that the very need for Option 1 had its genesis in the acts of the 16th century “Reformers” including Martin Luther and John Calvin in ignoring God’s word (Matthew 19:6,8) to hand jurisdiction over marriage to the civil state in the first place.    The seeds for apostate marriage doctrine were sown both in the various writings of these reformers, and then ratified in the heretical Chapter 24 of the Westminster Confession, which denied the absolute lifelong indissolubility that Christ repeatedly taught, and fabricated in substitution a humanistic doctrine that allowed man’s divorce for adultery and liberally-defined abandonment, as well as (ironically)..apostasy.     A little more than 200 years after that, the obvious disconnect between actual scripture and the WCOF, along with the growing mass-literacy rate and availability of bibles prompted the Anglican church to sponsor a phased program of subtle text revisions, verse and phrase suppressions, and word mistranslations under the guise of “modernizing” and readability.   By the time the mid-20th century rolled around, a divorce attorney specialist could get by with calling himself or herself a “Christian” while passing a lie detector test and having most of the public believe him or her.    Approximately 50 years after this, the online technology emerged to actually detect and document what had happened to our bibles, but this was unfortunately not soon enough to head off the official marriage-related doctrine changes that occurred in the 1970’s in many denominations, and the waves of false teaching and apostate practice the churches had adopted in the meantime.

In a way that most sophisticated marketing organizations would roundly applaud, Christian media and virtually every denomination accommodated everything it did from that point forward to the “inevitability” of unilateral, forced divorce, as state after state enacted the UMDA “model law”.    Mainline churches already were willing to perform weddings over divorced people whose spouses were still living, largely due to the heresies in the WCOF, but conservative denominations voted to allow this for the first time in the 1970’s.     Even most mainline denominations did not allow divorced-and-remarried clergy until the 1970’s, but they also made this horrible change contrary to the direct counsel of scripture.    Both changes almost guaranteed that churches would never rise up to oppose unilateral, forced divorce laws (or even so much as describe them accurately in sermons and writings) even when the deleterious effects of their error started to emerge in the late 1990’s.   “standerinfamilycourt” would like to humbly suggest that had the churches chosen Option 1, God’s hand of protection would still be on this nation, and most of those deleterious effects would never have emerged.    Had the church chosen Option 1,  and exercised the many resistance actions that lay within her exclusive power,  “no-fault” divorce would have been sent to the dustbin of history decades ago.    Instead, many churches have recently gone on to either “consecrate” or otherwise sanction sodomous unions, including one prominent denominational leader who wrote a particularly cheeky piece just four years ago insisting this would never happen.

Choosing the cowardly acquiescence of Option 2 made biblical church discipline virtually impossible to administer thereafter.    As a new believer and newly-wed in the late 1970’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma, SIFC vividly recalls the sensational lawsuit of a “scarlet woman” against her Collinsville, Oklahoma church for attempting to apply biblical church discipline.  This woman was divorced, and it was discovered that she was shortly thereafter cohabiting with a boyfriend.    The pastor went to her privately and asked her to either separate or “marry” this man.    She declined, so the pastor asked her to leave the church.   She again declined, so that pastor publicly put her out of the church, all according to the instructions Jesus gave in Matthew, chapter 18, and Paul reiterated in 1 Corinthians 5.    The scarlet-lettered woman wound up winning a big settlement against the church for alleged public defamation, loss of reputation, pain and suffering.    Pastors and denominations all over the country took note, and started looking the other way at all sexual sin that the member didn’t readily repent of in the first private confrontation.   Obviously, a behind-the-pulpit papered-over adulterer lacks the moral authority to even open his mouth about most publicly-accepted heterosexual infractions in the first place, while they reproduce “sheep” (goats, really) after their own kind.   SIFC knows many faithful, standing pastors whose wife was literally poached from him by another pastor, and many faithful, legally estranged pastors’ wives whose husbands have run off and “married” another woman.

Churches stopped teaching that any remarriage at all was continuously adulterous, and that this adultery, even though legalized, sent people to hell who died in that state.    They started treating people as if they believed that only sodomous sexual sin, though legal, sent the unrepentant to hell.    This is a very important point because to this very day, most clergy and denominational leaders have an insufficient grasp of how serious a religious freedom violation forced-divorce constitutes to an authentic Christ-follower.

*  Corrupted public education systems that supplant the parents’ role.

The state of Massachusetts was an early adopter of sodomy-as-marriage several years before the Obergefell decision of 2015, and they were quick to mandate indoctrinating “education” in the public schools to reinforce its acceptance in the next generation, beginning in kindergarten.    Books with this objective were written to desensitize children to homosexual practices and they soon stocked public library shelves, if not also school library shelves in many states.    Back in the good old days, parents were deemed worthy of detailed advance notice when “sex ed” of any type was scheduled involving their child, and the court-protected right to opt the child out was honored.     These parental rights have disintegrated in the U.S., Canada, Europe and elsewhere since the legalization of sodomy-as-“marriage”.    Parents have been jailed in the U.S., as well as in other countries, for attempting to shield their children from homosexual indoctrination.   In some countries outside the U.S. private schools have been required to carry mandatory pornographic and LGBT-approved history courses, while homeschooling has been outlawed and home-schooled children removed from their Christian homes.   At least two European home-schooling families sought political asylum in the U.S. who were under threat of losing their children to the state in their home countries (initially denied by the leftist Obama Administration, but one case later granted by a judge).

Some might question the merits of connecting this development to the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, as opposed to the Obergefell decision legalizing gay “marriage”.    SIFC has sought to demonstrate earlier in this post that universally cancelling the enforceability of the marriage contract and the rise of the LGBT political agenda were actually co-orchestrated back in the late 1960’s by the same group of Leftist elites, who viewed durable marriages and strong families as “oppressive” and a barrier to their aspirations for power.    Even gay “marriage” has been admitted by several LGBT activist leaders as never having been an end in itself, but was always aimed at rendering marriage itself an outdated historical relic.  Had unilateral “no-fault” divorce not been implemented, homosexuals would have no interest whatsoever in a marriage they could not easily get out of.

Even with the central orchestration of normalized adultery via divorce and remarriage, and normalized sodomy in all of its manifestations, part of the loss of parental control over the public education system is due to another feature of legalized family fragmentation as public policy:   we have gradually reached a point where society is  no longer raising citizens capable of wresting back control.     There would be no “Drag Queen Story Hour” at public libraries if a significant number of today’s young parents weren’t perfectly willing to directly expose their own tender children to homosexuals.

Conclusion
Patriots have been arguing for all 50 years since enactment began, that unilateral, forced-divorce laws are unconstitutional on many levels, and may well be the most unconstitutional laws ever passed.   Fifty years on,  it’s now becoming increasingly clear to the observant that these laws, if not repealed and reformed, are likely to bring down the entire Constitution for everyone else in the country — as planned and calculated some time before state-by-state enactment.   Beverly Willett pointed out in the Washington Examiner that,
“The Supreme Court has never recognized a fundamental right to divorce, but for 50 years state divorce laws have nonetheless legislated such a de facto right. “

Conversely (or perhaps perversely),  Texas Family Law Association chief lobbyist Steve Bresnan argued before a House legislative committee this past spring in opposition to HB922, a bill to make “no-fault” divorce available by mutual consent only:  “no state court has ever found no-fault divorce to be unconstitutional”  (even though the bill’s sponsor is a practicing constitutional attorney who lined up an entire parade of constitutional attorneys to testify about the multi-level unconstitutionality of unilateral “no-fault” divorce in the prior legislative session.)    They’re both right, and they’re both right for nearly the same unfortunate reason, as pertains to the state and Federal benches.    Homosexuals are not about to bring a challenge to these laws, and for some odd reason, they’ve proven to be the only appellants who are consistently able to get their marital rights cases heard in either venue.

Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people.
–  Proverbs 14:34

Church Discipline, citizenship, Discipleship, Divorce, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Spiritual Warfare

Top 10 Excuses “Christians” Give For Living In Papered-Over Adultery

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by Standerinfamilycourt

Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.   –  James 4:4

August 29 is the traditional date that the martyrdom of Jesus’ older cousin, John the Baptizer, is recognized.    Traditional marriage champions, both Catholic and evangelical (or what few remain of them in either church), rightly point to John for calling Herod and Herodias to physically repent of their adulterous remarriage.    Jesus called John “the greatest of all those born of women”.

Our Catholic friends were particularly eloquent this year about the event where John sacrificed his head to warn two people, and everyone watching, from hell.   Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s brief video-chat focused refreshingly about what scripture suggests was going on in the daughter Salome’s heart, and in her mother Herodias’ heart.   Meanwhile, Bai MacFarlane shared a piece by James Hahn where he makes the point that it is actually normal for sexual immorality to result in all sorts of wanton disregard for human life, in order to get rid of the evidence of guilty sin:  “John the Baptist was murdered because of the sexual immorality of Herod and his brother’s wife, Herodias. Herodias knew that what they were doing was wrong and she no longer wished to be reminded of her sin. She wished to continue, for whatever reason, to live in this sin and John the Baptist was a painful reminder day in and day out. So trapped by this sin was she that she forfeited the possibility of gaining even half of the kingdom. Instead, driven by hate and guilt, she chose to hold the head of the Baptist on a platter.”    

As Bai herself prefaced her post: “Separated-faithful spouses are a life-long voiceless reminder that marital abandonment and divorce are wrong. The perpetrators want separated spouses to shut up. On the feast day of John the Baptist, separated-faithful know they are in good company. (from James Hahn: “John the Baptist was murdered because of the sexual immorality of Herod and his brother’s wife, Herodias. Herodias knew that what they were doing was wrong and she no longer wished to be reminded of her sin).”

Herod and Herodias, of course, were papered-over adulterers.    What they had done was perfectly legal in the eyes of men.    The only thing is, the universal immorality of what they’d done cannot be papered over in the conscience, even with thick excuses.      Jesus said very plainly, then He and His apostles, along with their disciples,  reiterated many times and ways afterward:

“So they are no longer* two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate….Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been* this way. ”   – Matthew 19:6,8

*The verb tense and mood of the original manuscript would more accurately read, “never again” for “no longer”, and would more accurately read “it has not ever been this way from the beginning”.   

John, of course, was serving notice to the king of Judea that his  “paper” expires upon his or her death, after which kingdom of God rules will govern his and her eternity.     In God’s courthouse,  Herod was still married to the daughter of the king of Petra, and Herodias was still married to Phillip.    

In five years of exchanging daily with all kinds of people on this topic, these are the rationalizations that emerge.   Some of them twist scripture and take it out of context to stand Christ’s meaning on its head.    Others are simply man-fabricated (as is the concept of “divorce” itself) out of thin air and antichrist humanism.

So, what are the Top 10 Excuses for living with someone else’s spouse instead of the only person on the face of the earth that God’s hand joined me or you to?

10.  The church says our first marriage(s) were never valid.

9.   My church says my first marriage which took place before I became a Christian doesn’t count.

8.   Deuteronomy 24 says divorce is recognized by God, allowed by Moses, and that I can’t go back to my first spouse.

7.   He / she never became a Christian and left me, so I’m not “bound”.

6.    He / she committed adultery, “breaking” the marriage bond.

5.   If my pastor was willing to do the wedding, it couldn’t be unbiblical.   Divorcing out would be repeat sin.   

4.   He / she was “controlling”.

3.    He / she abused substances.

2.   God wants me to be happy. and wouldn’t make me live the rest of my life without sexual and economic companionship.

1.    He / she was emotionally / physically abusive.

“standerinfamilycourt” does not yet have a ministry with the funds to poll people about such a sensitive topic as justifying the marrying of another person while our original spouse is still living, so the above is purely anecdotal.     Here’s a recent polling view shared by the AARP of the claimed causes of the divorce itself:

According to these statistics, the #1 single driver at 27% (as was the case with Herod and his brother Phillip’s wife, Herodias) is infidelity.  Nebulous cultural excuses like “growing apart” and “incompatibility” combine for another 37%, while domestic violence only comes in at 9% (and probably also includes emotional perceptions of “abuse”).   How blessed it will be one day when God has our society turning around because a good-sized slice of that pie reflects “repentance from a biblically-unlawful union to gain heaven”.

If churches did the job Christ charged them with of making disciples, at the very least, there would be far fewer biblically-unlawful legalized unions occupying their pews.  These post-divorce  “weddings” wouldn’t take place to begin with, and we’d be hearing far fewer excuses, along with a sharply-reduced demand for divorce which is driven (in part) by immoral church acquiescence.  But then, if churches today were doing the job Christ assigned to them, we wouldn’t be living, in the constitutional republic God established at the cost of much shed blood, under profoundly immoral and unconstitutional “family laws”.

He said,

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become lost its savor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.”– Matthew 19:6,8

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Prayer, Spiritual Warfare

“SIFC-isms” … A Random Collection

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by Standerinfamilycourt

But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment.  – Matthew 12:36

After five years of writing this blog, and slowly building its modest following, it’s nice to reflect whether a net contribution has been made to the marriage permanence culture since the first several posts went “live” on August 23, 2014, and the accompanying Facebook page, Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional was launched.    In “George Bailey” fashion, what exactly would be missing if the Lord hadn’t taken “standerinfamilycourt” on this unwilling journey of marital estrangement, of quibbling with the corrupted pulpit, and with the equally-corrupted courtroom?    When the Lord finally ordains that this keyboard be silenced, and no one survives to pay the annual hosting fees, what might the audience miss most?

First, SIFC must humbly acknowledge that almost all of what follows has built in some way, or been corroborated by, the Holy Spirit revelations granted to other faithful disciples, authors, videographers and assorted truth-warriors in the Lord’s Army.   Only one or two of these was the direct, independent revelation of the Holy Spirit to this blogger personally.   Even the tradition of beginning and ending each post with a scripture quote is owed to the irreplaceable legacy of the late Rev. Bob Steinkamp of Rejoice Marriage Ministries, a returned, repented prodigal husband and marriage permanence ambassador until the Lord took him home in 2010.

It would be an understatement to say that most of these “SIFC-isms” have started fights.   In August 2014, it’s no exaggeration at all to recall that most of Christendom considered it “uncouth” to explicitly link 1 Corinthians 6:9 with Luke 16:18, even though Jesus did exactly that in the 13 verses that immediately follow the remarriage “clobber verse”.   Many a hireling (pastor) over the years has accused SIFC of being “a divider of the brethren”, such is the sorry state of our culture which directly resulted from the enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce.

1.)  There are no “ex” spouses in the kingdom of God, only ex-adulterers.

2.) The marriage covenant is unconditionally founded on Genesis 15:8-17, and its parties include a superior (divine) and inferior (human) party.   This makes the covenant binding on the divine party, even if the human party violates the covenant.

3.)  The God-joined one-flesh entity is not only a supernaturally-created party to the holy matrimony covenant, but also a spiritual weapon in the miracle restoration of a believer’s covenant family.

4.)  All worthy contemporary writings on the nature of marriage and its biblical permanence are written hermeneutically, and (conversely) all corrupt writings on the topic, at best, can only rest on 1 or 2 out of 5 of the essential disciplined principles.

5.)  #1M1W4L

6.)  #somuch4irreconcilabledifferences

7.) #noexceptionsnoexcuses

8.) #LukeSixteenEighteen

9.) Biblical grounds for divorce:  to repent of one’s adulterous “marriage” to someone else’s spouse, in order to reconcile with the God-joined spouse of our youth.

10.) But what about the BELIEVING spouse who departs?

11.) If your bible says that a heaven-or-hell issue is involved, it’s not “legalism” (ditto for similar assertions about “the essentials of the faith”).

12.) Why are contemporary pastors legalistically trying to apply Deut. 24:1-4 on a unisex basis when Moses did not deliver the regulation on that basis?    What LAND (given by God as an “inheritance”) is being “defiled” when covenant families are made whole again?

13.)  Jesus not only taught that divorce was “immoral”, He taught that it was metaphysically impossible.

14.)  Jesus didn’t teach marriage “permanence”, He taught absolute holy matrimony indissolubility.

15.) Remarriage adultery is not the “unpardonable sin”, you say?   You’re right!   And you should be singing your praises to the high heavens that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the only sin under heaven that mankind is given NO OPPORTUNITY to repent of!

This, dear readers, is the key evidence that will convict “standerinfamilycourt” of unique sedition against 21st century  “churchianity” and against the Sexual Revolution in general.  It is probably not an exhaustive list, but only the items that have generated the most “spirited discussions” or countering pieces, and been the most re-shared.    A closing challenge:   This is a very big job.  What evidence will uniquely convict you for your role in the struggle, dear reader?

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
– Matthew 10:28

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

Church Discipline, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Discipleship, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Spiritual Warfare

The Apostasy of Joshua Harris: Reversible or No?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

“But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction.   For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”    – 1 Timothy 6:9-10

Boy, has this event sparked a lively social media war about whether or not Joshua Harris “was ever saved to begin with” between the Arminians and the Calvinists! This kind of conversation is actually healthy and thought-provoking, as long as it stays reasonably civil between brothers, so to speak. That said, don’t be surprised to find both camps at least partially wrong when scripture is looked at objectively, and is compared accurately with the speculations that abound on both sides. This situation is not too unlike the occasion when Jesus rebuked BOTH the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai.

Many Christian periodicals and bloggers have weighed in with their “take” on the apostasy of Joshua Harris (and the faith-questioning  expressed shortly thereafter by Hillsong songwriter Marty Sampson).      Aside from the positions taken by observers on the presumed validity of their original regeneration,  much was also said that was worthwhile (and true enough) about following the celebrity culture of modern Christendom with emotions / feelings pre-eminent, rather than a craving pursuit of the word of God.     It was not for nothing that the Apostle Paul said, “imitate me as I imitate Christ.”

Quite amusingly, a slew of divorced and remarried people vigorously applauded Harris on social media for dropping the “legalism” he allegedly reflected in his famous book.  Some publicly confessed cohabiting before marrying their first spouse, but virtuously “waiting” after they divorced that spouse before they entered into their adulterous remarriage with a “Christian”.

And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt:“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’   But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’   I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
– Luke 18:9-14

(SIFC will leave it to the readers’ imaginations just who was calling whom a “Pharisee” after being informed that according to the rightly-divided word of God, they are still married to their original spouse.)

Since the devil has managed to cause at least one covenant marriage to be severely bruised and violated in these defections, and nothing “standerinfamilycourt”  has reviewed to-date has adequately dealt with the role of the Holy Spirit in a once-regenerated apostate’s life, it was clear there would eventually be a post on these events in
“7 Times Around the Jericho Wall”, but SIFC decided to hang back for a bit, reading up while the others wrang their hands over Harris’ post-announcement fling with the LGBT community.    Harris’ famous book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”  was not familiar, either before or after its renouncement by the author.     A facebook comment expressing hope that his covenant wife would stand and pray for him was met with a derisive response from someone who follows Mrs. Harris on twitter:  she had reportedly been showing her own New Age propensities for quite some time.   (SIFC will need to take the gentleman’s word for it, not personally being on twitter.)

These words of the current pastor of Harris’ former megachurch in a communication to the congregation were insightful…

“Today after I got the news, I read through Paul’s first letter to Timothy, and found it quite grounding. Several times Paul mentions former Christian leaders ‘swerving from’, ‘wandering from’ or ‘making shipwreck of their faith. So while this is sad and confusing, it isn’t new. Christian leaders occasionally veered from faith at the very beginning. Paul said some had gone off-course theologically. Others behaved in ways that violated Christian conscience. For others it was greed. In every case, Paul’s hope was for redemption and restoration.”

1 Timothy 1:18-20
This command I entrust to you, Timothy, my son, in accordance with the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you fight the good fight, keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith. Among these are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan, so that they will be taught not to blaspheme.

Note, too, that Paul never once claimed any of these particular individuals were false converts. Doing so would essentially deny that the individual involved was indwelt with the Holy Spirit at the time of their regeneration.    The Apostle did not appear prepared to declare such in any of the cases he mentioned. Along with 1 Cor. 5, this makes the 2nd time Paul talks of “handing a believer over to Satan” in hopes their soul will be saved in the end.    An unbeliever doesn’t need “handing over” because Satan already controls them, and it would be cruel to use his kingdom authority do so without the Holy Spirit indwelling them.   I like to counter the toxic Calvinists out there by saying, “once saved, guard your heart!”

Joshua Harris’ online biography states that four years ago he left the pulpit of the megachurch he founded to go back to school and then became a marketing consultant – actually, quite a suitable second career for a megachurch founder!   He then had several years to be influenced by the world on a daily basis, and to develop a love for money, worldly success, corporate culture (and apparently, the ideologies of gender disorder).    Reportedly, his covenant wife followed him on this worldly path.   

“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.”
– Hebrews 6:4-6

“For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. “
– 1 Corinthians 7:14

Sadly, at this point in time, Joshua Harris does not appear to have a believing wife.    Shannon Harris does not appear currently to have a believing husband.     That doesn’t mean God is not actively pursuing both.     Neither does it mean that either or both of them were “never saved to begin with”.     It is interesting to do a deep-dive into the Greek word translated “unbelieving” in 1 Cor. 7:14, because in a one-flesh, God-joined union, this points to the one-flesh state being a spiritual weapon by which the seed of the woman will crush the head of satan after he has bruised the man’s heel.     The context in 1 Cor. 7 does point to a converted spouse and a spouse who has not been converted, however, the broader meaning ….

*apistos  ἄπιστος  –  literally, “faithless”  or “not faithful because unpersuaded”

[4102 pístis (from 3982/peíthō, “persuade,” “be persuaded”) – properly, persuasion (God giving His persuasion about what pleases Him); faith.   The root of 4102/pístis (“faith”) – 3982/peíthō (“to persuade,” “be persuaded”) – signals the core-meaning of faith in the Bible: “the Lord’s inworked (inbirthed) persuasion” (G. Archer)]

…means that the counsel in verse 7:14 could also apply to once-believing spouses who have declared themselves apostate.   False doctrine and bad influencers can come along later and rob us of our prior conviction.   That sort of event, however, does not and cannot ever remove the indwelling holy spirit, if He indeed indwells.    Notice how close the English word “apostasy” actually is to “apistos”,  but that root word in Greek is actually aphistémi  ἀφίστημι .    Although before Christ, the Holy Spirit came and went but He did not indwell, the Hebrews had a word, shobeb (  שׁוֹבֵב  ) for “backslider”.

If it weren’t for the many empirical restorations of repented prodigal spouses who return home, first to the cross, and then to their one-flesh spouse, and if not for the parable Jesus told of the prodigal son (who was, after all, a child of his father both before and after his sojourn in the Far Country),  Hebrews 6:4-6 would be an absolutely terrifying verse to everyone who loves an apostate or backslider, especially their prodigal spouse.    We all thankfully know of many cases where it did not actually turn out to be “impossible” to renew the person to repentance,  and as Jesus Himself stated, “with man this is impossible, but not with God for nothing will be impossible for God.”  

So, was the writer of Hebrews actually “blowing smoke” when he cautioned that apostates cannot be restored to the kingdom of God?  Or is it that the Calvinists are right about a faulty regeneration?   There are actually three possible explanations for the discrepancy between that Hebrews passage and what many of us blessedly experience.     The first possibility is what the Calvinists are quick to claim in all cases:   the person actually wasn’t regenerated, and thus, wasn’t indwelt with the Holy Spirit until some point in time after they supposedly “fell away”.     We have so many harlot churches with pulpits occupied by wolves and “hirelings” that we cannot discount that possibility for a certain percentage of the cases.     However, those who insist that this circumstance is always the case like to cite 1 John 2:19, which (in context) speaks of antichrists in the last days:

They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.

The Calvinists give this verse their own spin, as if it said, “so that it would be shown that none of them were ever of us.”   John goes on to clarify, however,

Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.  (verse 22)

…..which makes a great segue into the second possibility for the discrepancy presented in Hebrews 6:4-6, which is the context around whom the writer was addressing, and why they were being issued that holy caution.    As John the Apostle was warning, this, too, has to do with denying and specifically renouncing the identity of Christ.     The epistle to the Hebrew believers living in Rome under the reign of terror of Nero was written because these believers had an offer outstanding to return to good standing in the Jewish synagogue in Rome, and thereby escape the horrific persecutions Nero was imposing in his all-out war on Christ-followers.    But there was a big problem:  in order to return to the synagogue, each individual believer had to renounce the deity and Sonship of Christ.

Therefore  everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in heaven.  But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.
– Matthew 10:32-33

Based on what Jesus said about the “unpardonable sin”, this would also have to be a permanent renouncement.      SIFC didn’t hear of either Harris or Sampson saying anything that approached such a renouncement….

HARRIS (7/26/2019, on twitter):   “I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus. The popular phrase for this is “deconstruction,” the biblical phrase is “falling away.” By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian. Many people tell me that there is a different way to practice faith and I want to remain open to this, but I’m not there now.”

SAMPSON (early August, 2019 on Instagram):  “Time for some real talk… I’m genuinely losing my faith.. and it doesn’t bother me… like, what bothers me now is nothing… I am so happy now, so at peace with the world.. it’s crazy / this is a soapbox moment so here I go xx how many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it….”How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send 4 billion people to a place, all coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it….”Christians can be the most judgemental (sic) people on the planet – they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people… but it’s not for me. I am not in any more.”

[    SIFC:   Marty Sampson, we should all note, was never called to follow or place his faith in “Christians”, he was called to follow Christ.   We may have to concede this particular case to the Calvinists, after all.]

Some of us are old enough to remember Bob Dylan’s brief season of discipleship ( “Gotta Serve Somebody“) before reverting back to Judaism.     The fact is that many prodigals who are still trying to fill a God-shaped hole in their heart with any number of tempting God-substitutes have various reasons for being blinded and deceived, and when this happens, few actually renounce Christ, so much as they attempt to “hide out” from Him for a season.     We tend to call this “falling away” or “apostasy”  or “deconstruction” (as Harris would have it), but often what they are doing is either testing their limits with the Father, or seeking to “own their own faith” after being brought up all their lives in a Christian home.    As long as they don’t run out of time on this earth before the Hound of Heaven catches up with them, the result is often redemptive.

A few perceptive Christ-followers commended Harris for “owning” his season of backsliding rather than faking , “reinventing” or “redefining” the terms of his discipleship from behind the pulpit.

As Christian Post contributor Will Vining put it in an August 10 commentary,

“The reason I commend Harris is how he handled his departing. As I mentioned in my last article, A Warning Against Progressive Christianity, the progressive Church is full of those who made the same journey as Harris. The main difference between Harris and the progressive Christian is one denounced God and left the faith, the other molded God into the god they wanted, thus making an idol.”

Those who attempt this contribute to the sometimes well-earned reputation for hypocrisy in the church.     SIFC said a hearty public “amen” to that, but added that we should all pray that those hounds of heaven pursue him  and Marty Sampson relentlessly, and for the sake of their respective covenant families, that season would be mercifully brief.

Peter also had some chilling things to say about apostasy in the form of backsliding, and made it clear that he neither believed in “once saved, always saved” nor subscribed to the idea that true believers “never” fell away:

For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”  – 2 Peter 2:20

This blog post was mostly written before SIFC got a chance to read Dr. Michael Brown’s take on these two high profile “fallings away”, and believes he also provides good insights why we should still intercede and not give up on people who have taken up residence in the Far Country:

Can an Apostate Return to the Faith?

Joshua Harris has departed the faith, he says, to go pursue friendship with the LGBT community, but we all need to keep in mind God’s power to make this process work in reverse even more frequently, bringing apostate people back from that world.     The Mainwaring family is just one great example of this, out of several.   Listen to Doug’s personal testimony (starting at about 3:30) from  2014:

Mainwaring (who returned to his estranged wife and the Catholic faith):  “…kids deserve both a mom and a dad in the home.   For that reason, I have as much problem with no-fault divorce as I have with same-sex marriage, and it took some doing, but after a dozen years of being apart, my ‘ex’ wife and I pulled our family back together again.   And that was over 3 years ago now, and we could not be happier, and I want to say again tonight, I LOVE MY WIFE!”   

Guarding our hearts is the deliberate process of finding out accurately who Jesus is, and rediscovering that fact as many times in life as necessary.    The fact that a practicing homosexual could fall in love with Jesus again made falling back in love with his God-joined, one-flesh life companion a comparative “cake walk” even with same-sex attraction.

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”   Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”   And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.
I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.”

What “rock”?   The foundational, divinely-revealed, Spirit-whispered unshakeable conviction that Jesus Christ is the Son of the Living God, of course!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

Church Discipline, Divorce, Lost culture, marriage, Marriage Restoration, morality, Prayer

We Respectfully Disagree With Rev. Wells’ Wrap-up to “Does Divorce Dissolve Marriage?” Here’s Why

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by Standerinfamilycourt

And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.
– Malachi 2:15

We periodically rerun the book series by the late Assemblies of God pastor and bible college president Milton T. Wells on our Facebook page, because until the mid-2000’s no book came closer to the undiluted truth of God concerning man’s “divorce” and adulterous remarriage.     John Piper’s books are roughly equivalent to Wells’ book, but they don’t teach (nor does Dr. Piper actually practice) disciplined hermeneutics necessary to overcome all the damage that’s been done to our contemporary English language bible translations.     Rev. Wells’ deeper concern for a better hermeneutical grasp is probably due to the fact that he was an Arminian who believed that the “born again” (those sealed with the indwelling Holy Spirit) can still walk away from the faith and wind up in hell, rather than a Calvinist who believes all eternal losses for the born-again Christian are limited to “loss of rewards”.

Yet the fact remains that both Wells and Piper came to the same unsupported conclusion, that despite “remarriage” being adultery by the rigorous case they each made,  and despite Paul’s multiple warnings that unrepented adulterers have no inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, both concluded the “remarried” must not leave their continuously-adulterous civil-only union to put their covenant family back together, or (failing that) to obey Paul in remaining celibate until that true spouse has passed away.   Both men presented impeccable, or near-impeccable cases for why these subsequent unions are not actual marriages in God’s eyes, yet neither shepherd managed to follow the case they made to its unavoidable conclusion concerning true repentance and restitution.   More than one previous post has dissected Piper’s faulty (and sometimes spuriously dishonest) assumptions about this, so we won’t repeat what was said earlier.    We will focus here on what Rev. Wells had to say (with the denomination’s General Superintendent literally looking directly over the author’s shoulder as the latter wrote the Foreword to Wells’ book).

From pages 48 through 51 (Chapter VII) of the original text….

“Many a spouse of an unscriptural union is in deep distress when he (or she) learns through the reading of the Scripture that he (or she) is party to an unscrip­tural union. A letter written to C. Morse Ward, speaker on Revivaltime, a gospel broadcast of the Assemblies of God, is typical. It follows, in part, as it ap­peared in The Gospel Gleaners:

Dear Brother Ward,

I have lived in sin and rebellion against God, but now I want to live wholly for Christ no matter what the cost. I have three living husbands, and a voice keeps telling me I should leave the husband to whom I am now married. He says that he does not know what he would do were I to leave him. Am I re­sponsible for this man’s soul?   I am restless and constantly haunted that I am living in adultery. I have four married children and I want to be a better tes­timony to them. My present husband has given me a beautiful home, and we have all the money we need, but how can I enjoy it?

Mrs.____. 

 

A portion of C. Morse Ward’s answer follows: At the well of Samaria Jesus met a woman who had a similar problem. It is interesting to read that story in the Gospel of John, chapter 4. She had had five husbands and Jesus said of her present companion, ”He whom thou now hast is not thy husband.” There is no direct statement that Jesus sent her back to any one of the five.

( SIFC:  We dealt hermeneutically with the above popular heresy of C. Morse Ward in this post, “What About That Samaritan Woman?”)

“Sin tangles our lives to such an extent that although forgiveness can be obtained, certain things can never be straightened out. Paul could never bring back to life the Christians he had slain as Saul, the persecutor. Much of the havoc he wrought in his rage against Christ (Acts 8:3) he could never undo. He simply lived by this rule: “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Philip­pians 3:13,14.  It seems to me that there are certain things that you are powerless to undo. “

( SIFC:   Since living on, unrepentant, in a state of ongoing sin necessarily takes a person in the opposite direction of sanctification needed to reach the marriage supper of the Lamb, we have valid cause to question how one can reasonably expect to “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”, while continuing to covet and retain the purloined spouse of another living person with whom God did not make you sarx mia, but instead, you made yourself hen soma.    The idea that we “can’t undo” a human fiction is (well) fictional.   David righteously recovered his God-joined covenant wife Michal from Paltiel, though he also had non-covenant wives (some of them widows) with whom he was only hen soma.    John the Baptizer told Herod in no uncertain terms “it is not lawful for you to have YOUR BROTHER’s wife” after there was no question from historical accounts that he had “married” her under Jewish law.  Comparing the sinful past ACTS of taking the life of the saints, with the ongoing sin of continuing on with driving a stolen car, or spending from a stolen wallet, or continuing to sleep with the God-joined spouse of another living person is comparing apples to oranges, and is dishonest at best. )

It is true that you have your present husband to consider. Do you want to leave him a divorced man? Would he then be clear to marry again?

(   SIFC:  Here’s where building on a right, hermeneutical foundation as laid out by Jesus in Matthew 19:6,8 is crucial to getting the answers to these questions right.   The foremost consideration with both our covenant and any non-covenant “spouse” is whether they would or could die in a continuous state of sin that will keep them out of heaven, according to what clear scripture says — ignored by “Brother Ward” here, if we don’t take the right action to fully repent.  How can we legitimately say we “love” someone or anyone if we don’t care about where they will spend their eternity?    Will this guy be left “a divorced man”?    Not likely, unless he already was one civilly before entering the “marriage”.
Yes, he’ll be civilly divorced as a result of the required act of repentance, but we have to look at what Jesus said about the validity of the union to begin with, and we have to look at where Jesus said “divorce” comes from…and doesn’t come from.    “Brother Ward” is once again conveniently ignoring crystal-clear scriptures:  “He said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not [ever] been this way. ‘”    If this “husband” has a living, estranged wife, exiting the false “marriage” frees him to redeem the generational sin of what he’s done and put his covenant family back together with the one he never actually ceased to be married to.   Can this released “husband” remarry?   That obviously depends on whether he, too, has a living, estranged true spouse of his youth.  He may remarry her, or if there is no “her” he may marry for the FIRST time.)

You won’t solve one question by creating a dozen new ones. Entering a sort of Protestant clois­ter is not the answer to your problem. The answer to your problem is in the words of Jesus to another woman, ”Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” 27

( SIFC:   An essential part, we would respectfully submit, to “go and sin no more” is this: “Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.”   – 1 Corinthians 6;18-20.    In light of what Christ said about becoming a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of God in identical circumstances (Matthew 19:12), it’s hard to square “Brother Ward’s” out-of-context advice with the bulk of in-context scripture.

(C. M. Ward: “Letter Column,” Gospel Gleaners, September 2, 1956, Spring­field, Missouri, Gospel Publishing House.)

“Some conservative teachers of the doctrine of divorce find in I Cor.7:10,11,17 and 20 permission by the Apostle Paul for converted spouses of adulterous un­ions, contracted before they were regenerated, to remain together. They base their conviction on the Scriptures and reasons which follow. The Apostle said. “And unto the married I command . . . Let not the wife depart from her hus­band” (I Cor. 7: 10). These teachers reason that this statement has reference to both valid and adulterous marriages, since it is assumed that there must have been many converts in the Corinthian Church who had been married the second time before they were both born of the Spirit, and whose first mates were still living when they entered the Church.

( SIFC:  Such “conservative teachers of the doctrine of divorce” to whom Rev. Wells refers, still are not applying principled hermeneutics,  but he fails to blow the “h”-whistle on them here, whereas some contemporary pastors have done so in recent years.   We previously dealt with this popular 1 Corinthians 7 faux pas in this blog post, and again in this one.   Following through on what Jesus repeatedly said about the invalidity of subsequent “marriages” while our original spouse still lives, and what Paul repeatedly said about the only thing that “dissolves” our original marriage, it is a stretch to envision anyone who is not either widowed or never-married being “called” while in anything  but our original God-joined union, plus a possible tacked-on, papered-over immoral relationship.)

Was not Corinth a city notorious for its licentiousness? It is believed by these teachers that the Apostle was referring to Christian spouses of adulterous unions in I Cor. 7: 17, and 20. “Only, let each member go on living in the same condition which the Lord originally allotted to him, and in which he was when he heard God’s call” (I Cor. 7: 17, A. S. Way’s translation). “In whatever condition of life each one heard God’s call, in that let him remain” (I Cor.7:20, A. S. Way).

(   SIFC:   Remember when we spoke earlier of the General Superintendent literally looking over author Wells’ shoulder?   Watch below for how our intrepid author — whom you can almost see holding his nose as he types away, navigates the “pickle” he has pulled out of the canning jar… On the “plus” side, this isn’t a dedicated chapter, but is mercifully buried in the Appendix.  How ironic that a hermeneutically-meticulous shepherd is forced to relax the disciplined hermeneutics which his denominational superiors felt free to ignore with their bone-headed, politically correct insertions!)

Ralph M. Riggs, the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God (1956) presents the status of those described thus: When the Passover blood was applied to the door posts and lintels of the Jewish home in Egypt. Jehovah said, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). A new life begins at Calvary. Jesus’ cleanses the past and accepts us as we are when we come to Him. “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife” (I Corinthians7, 20, 27), “This is good for the present distress,” Paul said concerning their problems then. The same can be said of our similar problem now. Art thou bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Let the status quo prevail. The past is under the Blood. Start life anew as a new creature in Christ Jesus. To this agree the experiences of many forgiven Blood-bought souls and the witness of the blessed Holy Spirit…

( SIFC:  Above is the last thing the author said – through others – of what the individual Christian should do who, for whatever reason, is in an adulterous “remarriage” to someone else’s God-joined spouse — and not even Wells’ own words or thoughts, but quoting the words and thoughts of those who outranked him in the denomination, before he himself moves on to tackle the “safer” subject of adulterously remarried church leaders and their role in the church…. until Wells finally says this to wrap up, in his own words:)

“God indeed genuinely saves the souls of men and women of unions disapproved by Christ who sin in ignorance during their unregenerate state, but when Christian professors continue deliberately to walk in darkness, they cannot claim I John 1:7. “But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. ”

( SIFC: Rev. Wells would have surely been aghast, had he lived long enough to witness the development of homosexual “marriage” in civilly-legal form.  Might he have taken a bit different position than the above, had the Lord had a chance to make His own LGBT counterpoint to this spurious argument before Rev. Wells graduated to heaven?    We dealt more fully with this popular “last resort” heresy, after all the other “exceptions” and human excuses fail rigorous scriptural examination,  in our earlier post, “But Mr. (or Mrs.) New Creation Hasn’t Passed Away”.)

The pas­sages discussed above (I Cor.7:10, 17, 20, and I Tim.3:2) may give evidence that God tolerates the continuation of an unscriptural marital relationship entered into before conversion, but they do not indicate that, by them, God validates such a union as acceptable and approved by Himself any more than He approved of Israel’s having a king, although He tolerated it. See a fuller treatment of
I Cor.7:10,17,20 in the Appendix on pages  108 through 112 and I Tim 3:2 on page162. The texts will there be viewed in the light of their context.”

( SIFC:  Rev. Wells suggests above, apparently without a lot of personal conviction that marked all that he had to say in the body of his book, that the last-mentioned scriptures “may” provide evidence that God “tolerates” departures from Christ’s commandment to allow living on in a union God did not join, and then he gratuitously splits hairs between God’s “acceptance” and His “tolerance”.    This, of course, flies completely in the face of Jesus’ message in the sermon on the mount, where Jesus declared  such days to be over, and kingdom of God standards to be in full effect henceforth.    There is no objective biblical evidence that Paul recognized man’s divorce as dissolving holy matrimony in anything he said in 1 Corinthians 7, or that he ever addressed “divorced” people anywhere in that chapter. )

In conclusion, even if such “toleration” were true in the 1st century church, how could such possibly still be valid, 18 centuries later, especially after history tells us the saints of the first four centuries of the church had eradicated divorce and remarriage so completely that, as Rev. Wells himself quotes historian Kenneth E. Kirk in documenting, that this New Testament morality controlled the church and general culture for 15 of those centuries, despite the fact that the concept was completely new to the world up to that point?

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

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

No, such accommodation is strictly carnal man’s idea, and indulging it inevitably leads precisely to a place  Rev. Wells also did not live long enough to witness:  pollster George Barna famously documenting in 2000 that a full 90% of the evangelical respondents he surveyed admitting two things, as a matter of fact:

(1) their last “remarriage” occurred after, not before, they considered themselves “born again”

(2) at least one divorce had also taken place at their own initiation or mutual consent since their salvation experience.

If indissolubility was in reality a part-time, circumstantial “ideal”, without heaven or hell consequences for living in willful disobedience, it would hardly have been worth Rev. Wells’ studious efforts to write this book in the first place!   The concept of indissolubility (as contrasted with the ideal of “permanence”) demands its unavoidable conclusion with regard to what repentance from an unlawful union entails, especially in light of what Jesus said in Matthew 5:30-31, and said again in Luke 16:18-31.

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.   –  Proverbs 29:25

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?  May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?  Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?  Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.   –   Romans 6:1-4

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Divorce, family law, Lost culture, morality, Spiritual Warfare

Sorry, But Forming A Committee To Flout God’s Sexual Ethics Started Long Ago…With Heterosexuals

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by Standerinfamilycourt

That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.
 –  Ecclesiastes 1:9

The American Psychological Association achieved the political coup of the century in 1973 when homosexuality was removed as a disorder from the  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.    Homosexualist political activism had gained steam after the 1969 Stonewall bar raid and riot, and had established an extremely loud voice with the APA by 1971, coercing a questionable reliance on the since-discredited Kinsey Reports, and grossly downplaying the public health and self-destructive effects of sodomy in defining what constitutes a diagnosable emotional disorder.

In the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City [], gay and lesbian activists, believing psychiatric theories to be a major contributor to anti-homosexual social stigma, disrupted the 1970 and 1971 annual meetings of the APA….There was also an emerging generational changing of the guard within APA comprised of younger leaders urging the organization to greater social consciousness [2]. A very few psychoanalysts like Judd Marmor [5,52] were also taking issue with psychoanalytic orthodoxy regarding homosexuality. However, the most significant catalyst for diagnostic change was gay activism.

The opponents of the activist influence on the APA board’s 1973 recommendation forced a referendum vote of the membership:

“Psychiatrists from the psychoanalytic community, however, objected to the decision. They petitioned APA to hold a referendum asking the entire membership to vote either in support of or against the BOT decision. The decision to remove was upheld by a 58% majority of 10,000 voting members.

“It should be noted that psychiatrists did not vote, as is often reported in the popular press, on whether homosexuality should remain a diagnosis. What APA members voted on was to either “favor” or “oppose” the APA Board of Trustees decision and, by extension, the scientific process they had set up to make the determination.”

This travesty, as we all now know, laid the groundwork for much false “science” to develop that later conferred “born that way” (contrived) immutability to said emotional disorder,  which in turn led to the societally-devastating ability to elevate a destructive behavior choice to a civil rights issue in many states and localities through SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) laws, and finally, a second layer of  redefinition of what remained of God’s definition (per Matthew 19:4-6) of marriage, by judicial legislation that culminated in June, 2015 in the Obergefell SCOTUS decision.    SOGI’s create a super-protected class of special rights that trump the fundamental constitutional protections of all other U.S. citizens.   And, if only, the APA’s authoritarian, virtue-signaling quest had ceased with its efforts to normalize sodomy….

But, alas, the APA has continued to “evolve”, as more homosexual activists actually started to infiltrate its ranks to ensure that the faulty DSM removal decision is never reversed but instead, continuously enforced and reinforced.   Per an article yesterday by Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins,

“Division 44 is also called “The Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity (SPSOGD).” Division 44 was founded “in 1985 by a group of pioneering LGB psychologists and their allies,” and one of its primary purposes is to “promote the development and delivery of affirmative psychological services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and gender nonconforming and queer people.” In the service of this purpose, last year Division 44

‘formed a task force on consensual non-monogamy (CNM), in recognition of relationship diversity, which intersects with sexual/gender identities in interesting ways. ‘

‘Consensual non-monogamy’ is a euphemism for adultery, sexual infidelity, or polyamory.”

It should be pointed out this idea was hardly new to the APA!   Following shortly after the natural passing of the 16th century Reformers, (who also were notoriously discontented with biblical sexual ethics, specifically with God’s definition of marriage as regards lifelong indissolubility), were a group of 17th century clerics and Members of Parliament in England who where determined to gain a durable edict doing something about the “legalism” of Divinely-compelled monogamy, so in 1643 they convened the Westminster Assembly.

While it would be misleading to paint the assembly as not being concerned with an array of issues relating to the rule of King Charles I, a Catholic, there was also much humanistic animus against the indissolubility of holy matrimony, seen as a “Catholic” teaching, instead of more properly as Christ’s teaching.    So what do you do when a government is in charge that won’t cooperate on liberalizing the sexual ethics of the day, but insists on biblical sexual ethics?   Why, you form a committee of pseudo-experts (of only one persuasion), and you challenge that authority based on “social science” and “enlightment”, of course!    After all, the house of the adulterous monarch founding the more “reasonable” Church of England had been put down, and royal descendants of his discarded covenant wife had been given the upper hand, promising to reverse all that Reformation “progress” after barely a century.    In the name of nonconsensual serial monogamy, something had to be done!

Parliament finally passed an ordinance to hold the assembly on its own authority without Charles’s assent on 12 June 1643.[20] It named as many as 121 ministers[a] and thirty non-voting parliamentary observers: twenty from the Commons, and ten from the House of Lords.[22] The Assembly was almost entirely English; Parliament appointed Englishmen for the counties of Wales, but the French stranger churches (churches of Protestant refugees from Catholic France) sent two ministers in place of any from the Channel Islands.[14] Many of the divines were internationally recognized scholars of the Bible, ancient languages, patristics, and scholastic theology. Many were also famous preachers.[23] Most of these theologians had retained their positions in the Church during the tenure of William Laud. Some had been ejected from their churches or cited by ecclesiastical courts for their views. Some had fled to the Continent, and one to the American colonies.[24] Nonetheless, they all considered themselves members of the Church of England and had received episcopal ordination. Most were conformists, meaning they agreed to follow the Act of Uniformity 1558 and the Book of Common Prayer.[25]

The Assembly was strictly under the control of Parliament, and was only to debate topics which Parliament directed. Assembly members were not permitted to state their disagreements with majority opinions or share any information about the proceedings, except in writing to Parliament.

The result, four years later was a Calvinist triumph that became the staple for the harlot church, reinforcing its gross immorality in the 20th and 21st centuries, as if Jesus Himself handed it down.     One of the most harmful doctrines in the Westminster Confession is found in Chapter 24, which abused numerous scriptures to fabricate “biblical grounds” for man’s divorce and ecclesiastical permission to defy Christ and marry again while our God-joined spouse is still living:

“V.  Adultery or fornication committed after a contract, being detected before marriage, giveth just occasion to the innocent party to dissolve that contract.l   In the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce,m and, after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead.n

l Matt. 1:18-20.
m Matt. 5:31,32.
n Matt. 19:9; Rom. 7:2,3.

VI.  Although the corruption of man be such as is apt to study arguments, unduly to put asunder those whom God hath joined together in marriage; yet nothing but adultery, or such wilful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage:o wherein, a publick and orderly course of proceeding is to be observed, and the persons concerned in it not left to their own wills and discretion in their own case.p

o Matt. 19:8,9; 1 Cor. 7:15; Matt. 19:6.
p Deut. 24:1-4.”

Because of this landmark Reformation document, we now speak of “orthodoxy” instead of obedience to scripture,  and bow down low to what the majority think, rather than what Christ commanded.
This, of course, set a powerful example for future corrupt church leadership in the 20th century, (ironically, in 1973, the same year as the APA official redefinition-by-committee of long-established moral truth), and ultimately, this power lesson, walked out by the church wolves, was not lost on the sexually lawless pagans.   Sustaining  such “reforms” over time, however, requires that its advocates remain temporally “large and in charge.”

Social conservatives are fond of asking these days,  “if you change the definition of marriage not to require a man-woman union (of whatever sort  or duration, in circumstances short of incest), why is there any logical reason to limit it to ‘two’  or to ‘persons’? “

SIFC believes this is a valid question, but a deliberately myopic one.  The more revealing question is,  “if you change the definition of marriage from lifelong indissolubility (also a creational non-negotiable, according to Jesus) between a man and a woman,   how can you expect any other creational non-negotiable to apply?”    
It is this question that finds us at the true foot of the “slippery slope”.  One cannot only “partially” reject the teachings of Christ, consequentially or otherwise.

The Christian social conservatives complaining about the “slippery slope” and saying “we told you so!”  aren’t wrong in their sentiments. But they are loath to acknowledge where the slippery slope accurately began, because they rather hope to preserve part of that slope…the part that imposes biblical morality on others, but not on them.     It is a core mission of this blog to keep pointing out why that kind of a “strategy” will never work — namely, because God Himself will never allow it!    Church leadership is going to be required by the Most High to officially renounce the harlotrous doctrine of  WCOF Chapter 24, to excommunicate people in adulterous “marriages” with someone else’s discarded spouse who refuse to forsake those unlawful unions, and to cease creating new ones by undertaking vain “wedding” ceremonies in which God is no party at all.

Commentator Laurie Higgins correctly observes (while not necessarily considering #LukeSixteenEighteen violations “adultery”):

” ‘Consensual non-monogamy’  is a euphemism for adultery, sexual infidelity, or polyamory. Leftists must paint sexual immorality with a glossy finish if they’re going to deceive people and advance their socially destructive ideology.”   

From God’s perspective,  it doesn’t matter whether polygamy is concurrent or consecutive, nor does He consider polyamory any more immoral or abominable than either form of polygamy, even though a good 60% of  His “church” is these days engaged in one of them.  Furthermore, if the next stronghold does indeed prove to be civilly legalized or decriminalized pedophilia, and this in itself doesn’t trigger his final judgment on our land,  the legalized sexual abuse of children will simply be an escalating form of judgment where several prior escalations have fallen on deaf ears, despite the loud (and also unheard) outcry of that harlot church doing the complaining.

A worthless person, a wicked man,
Is the one who walks with a perverse mouth,
 Who winks with his eyes, who signals with his feet,
Who points with his fingers;
Who with perversity in his heart continually devises evil,
Who spreads strife.
Therefore his calamity will come suddenly;
Instantly he will be broken and there will be no healing.
– Proverbs 6:12-15

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

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

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

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by Standerinfamilycourt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I prefer Unwillingly Divorced.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.
– 2 Corinthians 5:18

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

 

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

Miami Megachurch Had Covenant Wife Literally Arrested for “Standing”

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by Standerinfamilycourt

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

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

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

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

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

Tracy writes this in a  Sept 2016 post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

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

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

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by Standerinfamilycourt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Dan and Rachel Evans wedding, 2003

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

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

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

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

SBC leader under fire for comments about divorce, abuse

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

“…but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

“Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes!”   –  Jesus, Matt. 18:7-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

 

 

citizenship, Discipleship, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

The Marriage Moral Space Between The Bible and The Constitution – Conscionable for Christ-followers?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:32-33

Video credit:  Jeff Morgan.   Matthew Johnston interviewing Dr. Stephen Baskerville, February, 2019

Our blog spends most of its time and words mapping out the moral space between scripture and unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, all the while being well aware that this is “taboo” space which is alleged to be at odds with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.   Actually, this moral space consists of three moral sub-spaces:

(1) the moral space between scripture and the allowance of fault-based divorce which does not violate the Constitution, but severely violates scripture (Matt.19:6,8 )  –  Space “A”

(2) the moral space between fault-based unilateral divorce (Romans 13:4) and mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce  – Space “B”,

and, finally

(3) the moral space between mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce and forced, unilateral “no-fault” divorce (Isaiah 5:20) –  Space “C”.


(please click to enlarge picture)

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

“standerinfamilycourt” began pondering this due to the repeated persistence, in a small strategy discussion group, of a Catholic man who refuses to budge from Space “A” on both moral and constitutional grounds.     He therefore stands opposed to the apparent consensus of the majority in that group: that our divorce law reform objective, particularly insofar as it encompasses the legislatures,  should be  Space “A” + Space “B”.     It’s not at all that this gentleman believes per the bible that death is the only thing which severs and dissolves holy matrimony.   On the contrary, as a “good Catholic”, he also believes that an “annulment” decree from the bishop does this, but in that case he would argue that some extrabiblical “defect” somehow made it “not a marriage”.

At the same time, a brilliant young legal scholar in the group also believes in reform encompassing only Space “A” – on technical constitutional grounds related to  Articles 3 and 10 of the Constitution, but for pragmatic reasons, can settle for Space “A” + Space “B”, so long as this result doesn’t get overturned in court on those same constitutional grounds.  (“Get ‘er done”!)    The difference between the two gentlemen is in their motives and reasoning in arriving at the same end point.    Our Catholic friend believes there are some instances other than physical death which lead God to assent to “dissolution” if church leadership does,  and absent leadership corruption (a huge presumption), this would normally track with fault-based jurisprudence which would be better for the children of the marriage than their parents having an option to decide together to end their marriage.  (Church tradition elevated above God’s commandment, by perceived “delegation”).  Meanwhile, our millennial believes that God has delegated so much authority to the state that the Establishment Clause must override God’s law in order to prevent a “theocracy”.    (State over God, because the alternative in a pluralistic society might be worse.)  SIFC cannot agree with either view, because of Who God says He is, and the outright blasphemy involved with corrupting in any measure one of the key symbols of His holiness and His relationship with His people.

That said, SIFC can also “live with” a pragmatic reform result of Space “A” + Space “B”….but upon deep reflection, believes that if Jesus Christ were in this discussion group,  He’d say that even Space “A” is too much “daylight” between the instructions He left us with and what we as Christian citizens will settle for in our family laws.   Space “A” actually reflects the Pharisaical school of Shammai which He rebuked in Matthew 19, while  Spaces “A” + “B” + “C” reflect the Pharisaical school of Hillel which He also rebuked in Matthew 19.

Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter heaven.    Matthew 5:20

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.”     Matthew 19:8

Christ’s position would be:  only God, and not civil government has authority over holy matrimony, and nothing short of holy matrimony is actually moral:

Space “A” +  Space “B” + Space “C” – Space “A” minus  Space “B” minus Space “C” = zero human authority to create holy matrimony or grant a divorce from it.

Christ would grant civil government the authority to track marriage and death records to support the union, but would say that all divorce is man-made and of no effect in the kingdom of God, unless the “marriage” it purports to “dissolve” was invalid and kingdom-unlawful to begin with.   He would say that all authentic marriage is only God-made, and anything outside of that is adultery, which sends people to hell if they don’t repent of it, and for which He will eventually judge our unrepentant nation, especially if the shepherds of His church remain complicit.   By contrast, one recent state is attempting to keep the usurped authority for the state to continue granting unilateral “no-fault” dissolutions, but prospectively only record God-joined unions (and all manner of other man-fabricated  cohabitation arrangements) upon affidavit, and doing so in order that the state’s judges may escape perceived persecution and actual liability at the hand of the homosexualist community from conscience-based refusal to officiate sodomous weddings.

 

“Standerinfamilycourt” is sincerely wrestling with this….
So…just how acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for change in a law that is presently sending people to hell by the millions, in favor of a reformed law that maybe only sends people to hell by the thousands (on the prevention side), and increases the legal avenues for repentance which avoids hell (on the rectification side)?
How much more or less acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for a law that prohibits divorce altogether (that is, strikes the dissolution statute in its entirety — whether or not there exist what men might consider to be “fault-based grounds”), thereby sending few or no one to hell because they divorced their true spouse, but sending some to hell because they can no longer civilly-divorce a faux spouse, and which also closes off all avenues of biblical repentance  via man’s law?    After all, it can’t be emphasized often enough:   the law is a teacher, (especially with regard to the unregenerated who have no way of being counseled from within by the Holy Spirit), for better or for worse.

“standerinfamilycourt” may never have the answer to this dilemma until actually standing before the throne of God, when all of a believer’s life works will be judged to see what survives the fire:

For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver,  precious stones, wood, hay, straw,  each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. 
If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward.  If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.

Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.
1 Cor. 3:10-17

“standerinfamilycourt” is right to be concerned that all of the very costly and difficult activism, in terms of changing man’s divorce law, is only “wood, hay and stubble”.   But if legal reform could also change hearts, reduce the massive number of people dying in a state of adultery,  and increase the harvest of godly offspring who ultimately become citizens of heaven, that becomes a precious metal which will withstand the fire.

In Mathew 6, Jesus told us to seek His righteousness (presumably for ourselves, but perhaps also for others) while we’re first seeking the kingdom of God.    In Matthew 5:6, He declared, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”  Both verses clearly promise a fulfillment from Him if our heart motives are what they should be, and we’re doing our part to obey the seeking, hungering and thirsting part.

Many earnest believers will argue either (1) “No one serving as a soldier entangles himself in the affairs of this life, that he might please the one having enlisted him” (2 Timothy 2:4), and therefore eschews all political involvement by Christians,  or (2) God’s law of marriage only applies to the redeemed.    Although the first idea has some merit, the second is completely contrary to Christ’s instructions, so  “standerinfamilycourt” respectfully rejects both notions, in times like these.

It seems, therefore, the moral focus needs to be on the net effect on souls arriving in the kingdom of God, in clean wedding garments.   That is all that will survive the fiery test of our life works.    Obviously, if the “dissolution” statutes were all repealed from the lawbooks of all 50 states and not replaced, the expected result would be a wave of both righteous and unrighteous marital abandonments, the former resulting in repentance from adultery ,  and the latter resulting in a massive, if not unprecedented, increase in adultery because of the cultural intolerance of being told by government what to do.     As predominantly immoral as our society has grown in the past five decades (encouraged by the enactment of increasingly immoral civil laws), perhaps the effects would initially “wash”,  then who knows what would follow after that?

Situational ethics and moral relativism are never healthy things, and are downright nauseating to SIFC.   This is the mistake Moses  appears to have made, in endeavoring to “manage” sin in a pretty identical situation (Deuteronomy 24:1-4)  instead of strongly rebuking it, and Christ showed that He was less than impressed with this.   After all, it was not Moses whom Christ commended as the “greatest among all men born of woman”.    It was instead His cousin, John, who sacrificed his very head to try and warn two adulterers to repent to escape hell.   The kingdom of God suffers violence, not appeasement and accommodation!  In accepting moral Space “A” or moral Space “A” + “B”  for pragmatic reasons, there is both situational ethics and moral relativism involved, because human compromise is being aimed at seeking to prevent a perceived greater evil anticipated from a stricter law, due to inherently evil human nature.

Talk like this can be very unsettling to those who have never had the constitutionally-false notion of a thick wall of separation between church and state meaningfully, intellectually challenged.   Certainly, among millennials, there is a long-fed fear (much of it, historical-revisionism-driven and propaganda-driven) causing this generation to struggle in particular with the Establishment Clause, and almost elevating it over the Free Exercise, clause out of concern, (perhaps) that Christianity will lose its moral authority and representation if Allah, Buddha, Krishna and Marx are not given equal place with the Most High God of the bible in our society.     A lot of it has to do with the time period in which boomers vs. millennials and generation X-ers lived and grew up.   And that has a lot to do with (believe it or not) the downstream effects of enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce. Those of us whose hair is now graying grew up for at least a couple of decades during a time when Christian values indeed dominated, and families under all religions actually thrived, even if they were prevented from dominating or having equal representation. That’s because we still HAD our families, directly due to Judeo-Christian domination of power structures and government.

In another February interview, Dr. Baskerville told World Magazine ,

“The churches withdrew from private life? And the state moved in. What had been the role of pastors and priests became the role of lawyers, judges, and social workers. The church has never tried to reclaim its turf, and has been a major contributor of secularization, of people feeling the church is not part of their life when it’s not enforcing the marriage contract.

“What can be done now? The church has got to step in. Much of the history of the Christian church has been brave churchmen speaking out when the state overreaches its authority. This whole area of sexual morality is, frankly, our turf and God’s turf. The state has a role but is overstepping.”

Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?  But he perceived their craftiness, and said unto them, Why tempt ye me?  Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar’s.  And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s. And they could not take hold of his words before the people: and they marvelled at his answer, and held their peace.
–  Luke 20: 22-26

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse posted another excellent question from that interview on the Ruth Institute facebook page:  Q: Were churches sleeping when no-fault divorce emerged?

A: Some churches did raise their voices, but much of their attention was diverted at the time by Vietnam and civil rights. There was very little debate, very little discussion. No-fault divorce, the welfare state, and the cohabitation explosion were all usurpations of the church’s role by the state. Governmental power was inserted into a realm of private life that had been the realm of the churches.”

All of the above is true enough, of course, but does not represent the whole picture, at least with regard to the Protestant churches:

[standerinfamilycourt 3/6/2019 on this Ruth Institute Post ]  Martin Luther & co are partly to blame for the church apathy. Forced divorce would be a much bigger issue had he not turned over the authority to the civil state to regulate holy matrimony in order to obtain access to man-made “dissolution” certificates, then established the Reformation church on the outright heresy that original holy matrimony bonds can be severed by anything but death. The real insult to the church is that the civil state is deigning to regulate marriage at all, much less on a “no-fault” basis, but heresy reigns supreme, and revised bibles back it up. For the church to do much to oppose state regulation of marriage, much less any kind of tyrannical divorce law, they would have to acknowledge that all resulting “remarriages” are morally and spiritually invalid adultery in all cases. When they can get away, and indeed grow rich, with not doing so, that’s too big a morsel for most to bite off.

One of Martin Luther’s more outrageous quotes (actually acknowledging that only death dissolves holy matrimony, and providing a very creative solution) goes thusly…

Dr. Morse’s Roman Catholic Church has their own canon law, and has continued to claim its authority over marriage, notwithstanding the state’s competing claim to that authority.   Both claims are overstated and distorted from a kingdom of God perspective.

Perhaps it’s best to step back and look at the behavior of our nation’s founders and their choices with regard to allocating authority over marriage, between human government (Caesar) and God’s commandment that marriage was indissoluble except by physical death.    It was these men who claimed “certain inalienable rights” directly from God, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.   It is interesting to note that neither the U.S. Constitution nor any of the original state constitutions eventually ratified in the thirteen colonies even attempted to allocate the authority to regulate marriage to civil government at all, even though Federalism and Article 10 left the states this space.    Based on this, SIFC believes it is fair to say that our nation’s founders started off on the conservative end of Space “A”, fairly aligned with biblical instruction, and this is one of the reasons God incubated and fostered our nation, making it extraordinary in its greatness.    In other words, there wasn’t a lot of moral space between the Bible and the Constitution until case law and legislatures put the moral separation space there later.

A Word About Our Founders, the Framers of the Constitution
Were all of our principal founders followers disciples of Jesus Christ?   No.    Many were deists and humanist subscribers to natural law, including Thomas Payne, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen and Benjamin Franklin.     Others, like John Jay, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton, Noah Webster were unequivocal about following Christ.    Virtually all of them knew and expressed an overt warning that the form of government they had designed and bequeathed to the future citizens of this nation would only continue to function in an environment of national biblical morality.

Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence said: “Without morals a nation cannot subsist for any length of time.”

John Adams said, “Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.”

Though widely assumed to be a deist, Benjamin Franklin said, “God governs in the affairs of man.  And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without his aid?”

(    SIFC:   That can be the rise of a nation for a kingdom purpose, or it can be  tolerated rise of a malevolent stronghold into an empire to punish an unrepentant nation that once enjoyed His extreme favor, and in yesteryear faithfully carried out that purpose, but now is leading the world into deeper debauchery and idolatry.)

Also, observed by Ben Franklin:  “Only virtuous people are capable of freedom.   As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports”, and, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the bible.”

John Adams declared, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our Constitution was made for a religious and moral people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

(Tell us 21st century citizens about that, Mr. 2nd U.S. President!)

Finally, Noah Webster said, “…the moral principles and precepts contained in the scriptures ought to form the basis for all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils that men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from the despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the bible.”

It is frequently argued today that we can’t go back to what we first had as a nation (as if the Lord God were indifferent), because our nation’s residents are no longer homogenous enough for it to work, therefore, we have no practical choice but to govern according to the prevailing cultural morality.   (Much of this, it can be quite accurately observed, is said with the motive of coddling and appeasing the homosexualists.)   “standerinfamilycourt” hereby prophesies that if we continue on as a nation with this ridiculous fallacy, the Muslim caliphate ultimately will not share that opinion with us, and will not hesitate to impose Shariah law on a morally-unruly citizenry. There is plenty of historical precedent for this in the bible and recorded world history.  God owes the United States of America nothing, but He allowed first the Assyrians and then the Persians to overtake the nation of Israel. After seven decades of subjection, He required an intense purge of unlawful “marriages” and restored societal morality before He would restore sovereignty to His favored nation whose religious leadership was complicit in the systemic evil.

The following is only a theory on SIFC’s part, but it has been well-tested by the first nearly 200 years of our nation, when Baptists, Anabaptists and Methodists (who were socially disdained back in England) got along just fine with the Anglicans and Presbyterians.    Later on, the Jews and Catholics got along just fine with the Protestant leaders and citizens under the civil marriage laws that prevailed until 1970.   God’s moral favor gave cover for civil governments to impose that morality on the Mormons and Muslims, a circumstance that today shows signs of beginning to break down.  Civil law does not need to prohibit man’s consensual divorce in order to appease God and wisely govern the people, but it must never force family dissolution and fragmentation on innocent family members while morally and financially rewarding the guilty family members.    Society begins to break down at the point when obeying God’s biblical family law (whose very core is Gen. 2:21-24 and Matthew 19:4-6,8) becomes either very difficult or impossible under the corrupted civil laws of men.

Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people.
– Proverbs 14:34

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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