by Standerinfamilycourt
Who could ever forget the young Iranian-American pastor’s wife who traveled the country and courageously spent so much time in front of the powerful in her devoted effort to win her husband’s release from a cruel foreign prison as his health hung perilously in the balance? Naghmeh has shed her covenant surname in the past year in response to her freed husband’s divorce petition. As Pastor Saeed approached his sudden early-2016 release, tragic new allegations started to pour out of his wife, of abusive treatment by him toward her that dated back, she says, to shortly after their wedding, of his addiction to pornography that began prior to his arrest and continued during the imprisonment, of adultery committed on the eve of his arrest in Iran, and of restraining orders and legal separation papers filed in their home state, seemingly before the plane carrying him home to the U.S. had even touched down. How did a man manage to continue as a pastor when his wife was filing for protective orders against him even several years ago?
By her own Facebook declaration, Naghmeh had fallen under the influence of an unbiblical “abuse” ministry which calls itself A Cry for Justice. The purpose of this “ministry” seems to be to persuade wives who suffer any sort of actual or imagined abuse to file a unilateral divorce petition (which Naghmeh did not actually do, but instead she provocatively filed for a legal separation as her husband was enroute home)–and to feel no biblical remorse or concern for the soul of their spouse in doing so. Further, if their church leadership disagrees with this course of action for any reason, they are to be deemed “misogynistic” and dismissed from any further authority or influence in the “victim’s” life. {Core message: this is too hard for our all-powerful God to handle in the time frame we desire, so by all means, make eternity-altering decisions based solely on your emotions, and take “justice” into your own hands. (Love, satan.) }
So appalled was “standerinfamilycourt” after viewing this group’s media pages, that a blog post was started, revised, torn up, started again — but alas, the timing didn’t seem quite right to expose the evil proselytizing of ACFJ while the raw emotions were carrying the day for this pair, without coming off as insensitive to the tragedy unfolding in the Abedini family. The preservation of individual covenant families will always be far more important than anything “7 Times Around the Jericho Wall” will ever have to say on any topic.
Eighteen months later, we see this from a very wounded wife whose husband has effectively been biblically-disqualified for now, by satan’s schemes, from carrying on in his calling:
The article to which Naghmeh refers in her post appears on a blog page called Gentle Reformation (describing itself as “a cooperative effort by friends in the R&P faith-Reformed and Presbyterian-to speak the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in its many applications through the media of the internet“). Written as an interview with Rebecca and William VanDoodewaard: she an author and he a seminary professor, it was entitled: “A High View of Marriage Includes Divorce“. It was gratifying to see several members of the covenant marriage standers’ community gently correcting the fallacies in Naghmeh’s post, and correctly pointing out that only death, not divorce, will ever dissolve her holy matrimony covenant. This is especially encouraging in light of Naghmeh’s page-following which currently stands at 81,611 souls.
Notwithstanding the fact that both of these denominations, Reformed and Presbyterian, labor under the exegetical falsehoods of the marriage clauses of the Westminster Confession, it seemed interesting to dissect this blog to see how it is that they figure something which Jesus declared man-made, and which He personally abrogated from the law of the Old Testament, was somehow deemed “necessary” to a “high view” of the holy ordinance which God defined, with indissolubility being one of the two essential attributes (Matthew 19:6) from the beginning. Perhaps even more interesting is to investigate exactly what else these folks deem a “high view” of marriage to entail.
This exchange begins:
“God hates divorce, doesn’t He? Absolutely. Isn’t the gospel about forgiveness and love? Yes, it is. And pastors and elders can use these two truths in isolation from the rest of Scripture and biblical principles to deny people divorce for biblical grounds. “But marriage is a precious thing,” one pastor told a woman whose husband was in prison for pedophilia. “It would be a wonderful picture of God’s grace to move on from this and focus on your marriage,” another one told the husband of an adulteress. “We’re working with him; he’s really struggling, and so you need to forgive him,” a session tells a woman whose husband has been using pornography for years.
“Evangelical and confessional churches are striving to maintain a high view of marriage in a culture that is ripping the institution to shreds. So extra-biblical barriers to divorce can be well-meant. They try to protect marriage by doing everything possible to avoid divorce. In doing so, they not only fail to keep a high view of marriage. They also spread lies about the gospel, divorce, the value of people, the character of God, and the nature of sexual sin.”
SIFC: We can’t say it often enough: Marriage heresy is born out of (and actually gets its oxygen from) the failure to grasp the crucial concepts of one-flesh and unconditional covenant that Jesus was describing in Matthew 19:6. Any attempt to defend marriage permanence on any other basis falls flat against the emotionally-charged arguments that are the very calling card of satan’s serial polygamy surrogates. The aim, of course, is to loudly distract from the clarity of actual scriptural instruction, God-breathed and divinely given for a particular situation, because of a culturally distasteful (or doctrine-discrediting) element therein. Both principles, one-flesh and unconditional covenant, are mutually exclusive of the man-made doctrine of “biblical grounds” for marriage dissolution--unless the divorce in question is a repenting divorce from a man-joined unlawful union with somebody else’s God-joined spouse. It then becomes unnecessarily debatable who exactly it is “spreading lies” about the gospel, divorce, the value of people, the character of God, and the nature of sexual sin.
Evangelical and “confessional” churches (we suppose that’s those who follow the morally corrupt WC) are actually maintaining the lowest possible view of marriage, perhaps the lowest since the days that Jesus and His cousin sharply rebuked Pharasaical Israel over the same issues. Evangelical churches fell into this apostasy about 50 years ago, and “confessional” churches have been practicing it since their mid-17th century inception.
That said, let’s get into the “meat” of the VanDoodewaards’ argument, which is organized as four “lies” they endeavor to debunk. The problem is that their own perceptions of each “lie” entail many more lies of their own when faithfully tested against scripture:
The first lie is that forgiveness means that the offended party is bound to continue living with the guilty party once there’s an apology.
SIFC: While it’s entirely possible that pastors and church counselors who are either ignorant of the supernatural dynamic of one-flesh principles, or who erroneously define them, or who outright reject them as inconsistent with their “pastoral” dogma, may indeed give erroneous advice of this nature, but that does not mean that Jesus or Paul or Peter taught that an abused or at-risk party is bound to continue living with an abuser, as has been charged here of those who are calling out this militant disobedience to scripture. The additional problem is that the VanDoodewaards are here speaking merely of an offended party having a “right” to haul their one-flesh into a pagan courtroom for a “dissolution” certificate, and they are implying that it’s acceptable in the sight of God to uproot one’s family just because one feels “offended” by their spouse. Here we’re straying off into the subjective realm of “emotional abuse” (the fruit of self-focus; the idolatry of self-worship) where offense is purely in the eye of the beholder — which is very dangerous and unjust territory indeed. Just because a person is “offended” does not mean their own heart attitude is at all acceptable to God. Hard-heartedness (especially toward our one-flesh spouse) will cause a person to also harden their heart toward God — Who is also a holy Member of their unconditional marriage covenant. (Yes, we unapologetically call it unconditional).
Hear what the Apostle (and the Holy Spirit) actually had to say on this point:
But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband (but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
– 1 Corinthians 7:10-11
The poison-pill in this scripture, and deemed to be “misogyny” and “injustice” by these “ministries”, is the “remain celibate or else be reconciled“ commandment to which man has been trying for centuries to insert exceptions that the Holy Spirit apparently “omitted”. It was likewise the “unbearable” poison-pill as perceived by the Reformation humanists, including John Milton, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Erasmus Desiderius. This is not to say that there’s any evidence that Naghmeh is currently pursuing an illicit relationship, but her promotion of heretical “ministries” is surely coming as a stumbling block to many desperate, estranged spouses. It is not compassionate, nor is it “merciful” to encourage anyone to saw chunks off the literal cross that we are called and allotted to carry as individual disciples, for this runs the tragic risk that our lightened and abbreviated cross will some day become too short to span the fiery gap over the perdition of self-worship (idolatry) into the kingdom of God.
Wives in particular are told that God requires that they forgive a repentant spouse, which is true, and that this means that they need to stay in the marriage, which is not true.
SIFC: Scripture tells us that the option to “choose” whether or not to “stay in the marriage” is not actually ours to make, be we a husband or a wife. We ARE in the marriage, like it or not, until the physical death of one of the marriage partners, if we are indeed married in God’s sight. The VanDoodewards are here conflating the biblically-allowed practice of a reconciliation-purposed season of separation, as God’s best for both spouses, with the purely man-made (and forbidden) practice of dragging a one-flesh spouse into a pagan courtroom to extract from them their property and God-assigned parental rights, based purely on our own allegations, where we know in advance that no evidence of those allegations will ever be required of us under our nation’s immoral “family laws”.
It’s like saying to parents who discover that the babysitter molested their children: “Oh, but the sitter said sorry. It would be unloving to not ask them to watch the kids again. You need to demonstrate your forgiveness.” The argument is that Jesus forgave you and took you in: why can’t you do the same for a spouse? Because I am not God: I am human, too, and can’t atone for my spouse’s sin in a way that can restore an earthly marriage.
SIFC: We here encounter satan’s other timeless calling card: the classic and spuriously-chosen false analogy. Our relationship with the babysitter is not a supernatural and inseverable one-flesh relationship, nor an unconditional covenant relationship. Therefore, forgiving and continuing to employ the babysitter can indeed be separate considerations, for they are not supernaturally joined to us for life, nor are they morally-bound to carry out an essential gender-specific role in the emotional wellbeing of our shared progeny, perhaps for generations to come.
It is godless to simply wash our hands of the soul of either person, whether they are our spouse or the babysitter. The crucial difference is that living in permanent state of irreconciliation with the babysitter is unlikely to threaten his or her soul, while living in a permanent state of irreconciliation and estrangement with our one-flesh, joined-for-life, covenant partner is highly likely to damage or destroy that person’s soul along with the souls of our children and grandchildren — the very reason God hates the treachery and violence of man’s divorce of the spouse of our youth.
Sacrificing a person to save a relationship is not the gospel. The gospel is that Someone was sacrificed to free us from sin and bring us to God. We cannot always bear the relational punishment for someone else’s sin.
SIFC: The first premise that needs to be closely scrutinized here is, what is meant by “sacrificing a person”? What is exactly being “sacrificed” here? Their feelings and emotions? Their self-actualization? Their self-esteem? The ease and comfort of their life on this earth? All of these things are purely humanistic, and if they are derived from disobeying God’s commandments, instead of being found complete in Christ, they are God-substitutes. In other words, the are idolatry. Idolaters, we are are told twice by the Apostle, have no inheritance in the kingdom God. Paul sternly warns us: “Do not be deceived.” Jesus, in fact, did bear the relational punishment for us. How dare we mock His blood by claiming it’s not necessary or possible (under His supernatural enabling) to do the same for our one-flesh? It’s not as if this undertaking was of our own accord, rather than divinely-commanded! (See 1 Corinthians 7:11 above.)
The sacrifice we ought to be focused on is the sacrifice of eternal souls, not the sacrifice of temporal comforts. That’s the gospel!
As a matter of fact, the supernatural one-flesh entity is of itself a spiritual weapon deliberately designed by God, as is the three-way unconditional covenant to which GOD HIMSELF remains a party, even if both spouses choose to bail out. That’s the primary reason why Paul can make the truly remarkable statement in 1 Corinthians 7:14:
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.
Instead of self-actualization, the primary purpose of holy matrimony is for both spouses to help each other, and the generations of their progeny, to achieve their inheritance in the kingdom of God against the vast list of wicked desires along the way that would cause them to be deceived into forfeiting the same. This divine purpose of true holy matrimony is to stand firm for a lifetime against satan and all of his wicked mouthpieces who would be so brazen as to suggest otherwise.
We can forgive them, and will if we are a Christian….Forgiveness is always the Christian thing to do, and it simply means that the guilty party is forgiven, not absolved from all earthly consequences.
SIFC: Here comes satan’s third unmistakable calling card: the mixture of a small nugget of truth with a massive pack of lies. Read on….(by the way, we are never called to deliberately inflict those consequences on the offender by our own self-serving choices and actions that directly disobey Christ’s very clear commandments.)
…but that doesn’t mean we have to live with them.
SIFC: Very true…see 1 Corinthians 7:11. In fact, married disciples with a prodigal spouses may be called to a very long season of standing celibate and being a lighthouse for others, including their children and grandchildren.
You can forgive someone and divorce them.
SIFC: Very untrue. What did Jesus say?
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. ”
– Matthew 19:8
Jesus had just taken the divorce-happy Pharisees, with their similar network of wicked, man-manufactured laws, not back to the law of Moses’ wickedness-management found in Deuteronomy, but back instead to the other famous writing of the same Moses — Genesis 2:21-24.
Scripture commands forgiveness where there is repentance
SIFC: Very untrue. What did Jesus actually say?
Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions.
– Mark 11:25
Scripture actually commands of mortal men and women unconditional forgiveness, while leaving room for God to impose any consequences on them. Forgiveness hinging on repentance is a prerogative reserved for the Most High alone.
…but it never requires that a relationship be continued in the way that it was before covenant was shattered.
SIFC: An unconditional covenant to which the Lord of Hosts, the God of Angel Armies is a direct party cannot possibly be “shattered” — it can be violated and badly-bruised, but according to the word of God, the only thing that actually breaks such a covenant is physical death. These authors show profound misunderstanding of the nature of God’s covenants, as well as the integrity of His character in His acting within them.
This lie of “forgiveness” places the burden on the innocent party. The sinner gets counsel, support, help, and prayer, while the sinned-against gets pressure, guilt, and a crushing future. Acceptance is often labelled the “Christian” thing to do.
SIFC: The only reason this appears to be true is directly due to the disobedience and carnality of the contemporary churches who should be faithfully obeying the commandment to apply church discipline, according the instruction in Matthew 18:15-18 and 1 Corinthians 5. Their failure to do this does not create a license for us to willfully disobey Christ’s clear commandments to us as individuals. What’s being overlooked here is that God’s justice doesn’t always occur within the time limits we arrogantly set for Him. What’s being overlooked is the bounds of our job versus the power and remit of the Holy Spirit to change hearts, ours and our spouse’s.
As for this burden on the innocent party, what did Jesus say?
Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
– Matthew 11:29-30
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. The “burden” that is alleged here to be wrongfully transferred to the victim is actually transferred to the holy and all-powerful Third Participant in the unconditional covenant of holy matrimony, making this a false charge, and essentially calling God a liar.
Since Christ gave divorce as an option in some circumstances, divorce can be the Christian thing to do, too.
SIFC: There are no circumstances where Christ gave divorce as an “option”. There are, however, circumstances where Christ gave man’s divorce as a commandment: to repent of an adulterous civil-only union with somebody else’s God-joined, estranged spouse. This is the sole instance where man’s divorce is the “Christian thing to do”, because several souls are in danger of hell otherwise, including one’s own.
The second lie is implied: God hates divorce more than He hates abuse and sexual sin. To put the lie a different way, God loves marriage more than He loves the women in it.
SIFC: We assure the readers: this implication is exclusively that of these authors, and does not necessary represent the opinion of the Most High. After a long season of depravity, a penitent Solomon found out what really “yanks God’s chain”, to-wit:
There are six things which the Lord hates,
Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him:
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
And hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that run rapidly to evil,
A false witness who utters lies,
And one who spreads strife among brothers.
– Proverbs 6:16-19
(We would humbly suggest that both the “Reformed” authors, and all those who harken after them, have committed some of these abominations just in the course of this article, not the least of which are: misrepresenting the word of God, and coming between one-flesh covenant partners with their heresy.)
While God created marriage, loves marriage, and says that it is a picture of Christ’s relationship with the church, Jesus didn’t die to save marriage. He died to save people. He sacrificed His life to protect His sons and daughters, and hates when they are abused, violated, and humiliated, particularly in a relationship that is supposed to picture Christ and the church.
This fact is especially true for women, who suffer at the hands of men whose actions mock servant leadership and so blaspheme the name of the Christ whom they are called to represent.
SIFC: Pssst…The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Who, therefore, said retribution was to be left in our own hands? Certainly not Jesus!
“Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“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.
– Matthew 5:10-12
Do any of us dare to re-manufacture Jesus Christ to our own specifications?
Denying a woman legitimate divorce allows an unrepentant man to continue in this abuse and blasphemy.
SIFC: Biblically speaking, this would only be true of a woman who is in a remarriage which Jesus repeatedly called adulterous, and the man-part is true of her adultery partner to whom God’s hand has never joined her at all. This is the only woman “entitled” to a legitimate divorce (and only because this never was a “marriage” in God’s eyes to begin with). This man is the true mocker and blasphemer so piously referenced above.
If we want to value and treat marriage rightly, we need to think about Jesus!
SIFC: No arguments here, provided the “Jesus” in question is the real Jesus of the bible. This would be the Jesus who proclaimed man’s divorce not only immoral but actually impossible with regard to God-joined holy matrimony unions.
His care for His Church is not an abstract idea. We see it lived out in the gospels every day in purity, tender care for widows, and intolerance of the Pharisees who thought they could be right with God while checking out beautiful women at the market. Christ’s love for His church found very concrete expression on the cross—willingness to die to save His beloved people. Yes, God hates divorce. And there are some things that He hates even more.
SIFC: Repeating a false premise does not render it true …As already discussed above.
The third lie is that divorce is an unclean thing
SIFC: Man’s divorce is of no effect at all, clean or unclean, with regard to God-joined holy matrimony. It is a clean thing indeed (repentance) with regard to legally terminating non-marriages, that is with regard to disentangling from legalized sodomy, from legalized adultery, and from whatever legalized abominations lie ahead as further foul fruits of the Protestant “Reformers” heinous acts redefining of marriage back in the 16th century.
…often the fault of the innocent party.
SIFC: The innocent party remains accountable to obey God’s laws regardless of the degree of abuse or suffering that has gone before, or that which results as a consequence of obeying Christ. The purported efforts to “dissolve” holy matrimony are always satan’s fault, but he’s limited to working through disobedient and / or deceived human instruments.
This is a misunderstanding of divorce. Divorce is not the innocent party ending a marriage. Divorce is the innocent party obtaining legal recognition that the guilty party has destroyed the marriage.
SIFC: Well and good, but nothing is actually dissolved in that event. God word couldn’t possibly be clearer that only death “destroys” holy matrimony, regardless of what man’s paper says.
So often, we see the divorcing person as the one who ends the marriage—they are not! Where there has been sexual unfaithfulness, abuse, or abandonment, it is the guilty party who ended it by breaking covenant.
SIFC : See above. Who misunderstands man’s divorce?
While legitimate divorce is not mandatory, it is a biblical option, on moral par with maintaining the marriage.
SIFC: On the contrary, the only legitimate use of man’s divorce is not, in fact, “optional”. It IS mandatory. Jesus and Paul both made very clear that everyone who dies in the immoral state of being legally “married” to the God-joined spouse of another living person (that is, adulterers – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b and Luke 16:18b) will wake up in hell.
The 1992 report by the PCA study committee on divorce and remarriage comments:
It is also interesting to recall in this connection Jeremiah 3:8, where Yahweh is said to divorce Israel for her spiritual adultery (idolatry):―“I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries.” If God himself can properly divorce his bride because of adultery, then, given Christ’s unqualified adherence to the authority of the Old Testament, it seems difficult to conclude that Jesus would not have had similar words on his own lips. (218)
SIFC: The biblical illiteracy of the above statement is truly breath-taking! It reflects not only (a probably feigned) ignorance of Israel’s culture and history, but also an arrogant presumption that most of us won’t open our own bibles and keep reading past verse 8 to verse 14 where the same Lord tells Israel, “Return to me, for I am your husband.” God did NOT drag Israel into a courtroom to economically and morally abandon her! He temporarily severed the kiddushin betrothal that existed between them until she repented. Both modern history and the totality of prophecy clearly shows that God did not “divorce” Israel. To say otherwise is crass Replacement Theology, which is one of the many wicked heresies of mainstream denominations. Furthermore, we have no need whatsoever to speculate what Jesus might have said because we know precisely what He DID say (repeatedly) .
The church needs to be clear about this: legitimate divorce is holy and biblical if God Himself can speak of initiating it.
SIFC: This is shameful direct slander of God, because Jesus made it more than abundantly clear that only man initiated divorce, not God. Matthew 19:8.
Divorce does not end a covenant.
SIFC: Correct! Only death dissolves an unconditional covenant in which God is a participant.
It protects the spouse whose covenant has been violated—a picture of covenant protection in the face of human unfaithfulness.
SIFC: Correct again! The only biblically lawful form of man’s divorce legally disentangles a covenant spouse from an immoral but legally-sanctioned relationship with someone other than their true spouse so that the violated rights and wholeness of the covenant family can be restored in this life. Happens all the time, actually.
Always discouraging divorce, always making it a last, desperate option that really fails to show gospel power, implies that we know more about marriage than God does and value it more highly. If there are legitimate reasons for divorce, then making divorce look like a lesser option is wrong. God allows it: who are we to discourage people from choosing a biblical option?
SIFC: The only legitimate reasons for man’s divorce have already been discussed above.
The fourth lie usually involved in this discussion is about pornography. It is often classified as not technically adultery, so spouses are denied the biblical right to divorce. This is mind boggling.
SIFC: Moot point. Covenant spouses are divinely denied the “biblical” right to divorce for ANY reason, because only death, not adultery nor pornography, dissolves the covenant. Aside from that, Jesus said:
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
– Matthew 5:27-28
So, Jesus also equated head-lust with adultery, as the authors correctly do, but this still does not create any biblical right to man-made divorce as a remedy for pornography addiction any more than adultery does.
(The rest of this section goes on to elaborate how heinous and destructive porn addiction is, and nobody would disagree, so we will skip all that, except to mention the dishonesty of the authors in implying that not to obtain man’s divorce from such a person is somehow “countenancing” the addiction and is “reflecting poorly” on the gospel. The two matters are not objectively related, and one of them isn’t even a reality in the kingdom of God.)
Do you see how these lies, sometimes borne out of a desire to protect marriage, actually bring about a low view of marriage? By granting, supporting, and even facilitating a biblical divorce, we take a stand to say that we can forgive without being forced to live with people who have shattered us.
SIFC: This is dishonest and conflates terms again. It is not necessary to obtain a false court statement purporting to “dissolve” what God’s word repeatedly tells us only physical death can dissolve, in order to enter into a protective separation where safety and peace compels it. No paper ever protected anyone from anything, ever. There is no such thing as a “biblical divorce” unless it’s repenting of a biblically-unlawful union, one that violates any aspect of Matthew 19:4-6.
This protects marriage by allowing the innocent party to leave a relationship that has been broken. By backing biblical divorce, we protect women whom God loves, showing Christ’s love when spouses have not. This protects marriage by refusing to allow sinners to abuse the institution with impunity.
SIFC: Contorted reasoning, not too unlike what was recently offered up by a Catholic author in his ridiculously untenable effort to morally justify the abomination of church-granted “annulment” (the arrogant practice of retroactively issuing an ecclesiastical paper which presumes to inform God whom He did and did not supernaturally join as one-flesh).
This Catholic deacon wrote:
“Annulments Serve the Truth of Indissolubility
It’s going to sound counterintuitive, but the Church’s annulment process exists to preserve the truth of the indissolubility of marriage. This sacred truth is so important that an explicit process to determine whether marital consent should be declared `null’ is absolutely necessary. Why? To maintain the other side of that coin—those occasions when marital consent cannot be declared null.”
– Deacon Jim Russell, Archdiocese of St. Louis, Crisis Magazine, July 5, 2017.
If “annulments” are so “necessary” to uphold the indissolubility of holy matrimony, why is there no mention of this practice in the New Testament nor in the historical accounts of the 1st through 4th century church? Similarly, why is there no sanctioned or approved mention of the practice of obtaining a government-issued “dissolution” paper in scripture in order to uphold the “honor” of holy matrimony, especially in light of the clear commandment which Paul gave in 1 Corinthians 6:1-8 ?
I’m sure there’s a formal label for this fallacious form of debate, because it insults the reader’s intelligence, but SIFC is not intelligent enough today to recall what this maneuver is called. The general outline of this fallacy of logic goes like this:
“It is a valuable service we do, to mint counterfeit $20 bills, otherwise you’d have no way to verify that your authentic $20 bill is authentic. “
By publicly stating that sexual sin and abuse, not wounded spouses, ends marriages, we hold the marriage bed in honor. This protects marriage by creating a holy fear of violating it.
SIFC: By publicly stating that sexual sin and abuse, not wounded spouses, “ends” marriages you are denying the biblical truth that only physical death ends marriages. By promoting serial polygamy, you are pretending to hold the marriage bed in honor, but you are actually desecrating it. Such things are heart issues, and by encouraging people to do what Jesus Christ clearly forbade, taking our own vengeance, you flatter yourself that you are “creating a deterrent”, but what you are actually doing is interfering with true discipleship while causing real souls to hang in the balance.
By offering biblical divorce, the church affirms that pornography is depravity, and will not be countenanced by Christ’s church. Naming and disciplining sexual sin as the evil it is and offering divorce to the innocent party makes the value of marriage clear as we refuse to see it damaged, abused, or treated lightly.
SIFC: Sorry, but man’s divorce is certainly not the remedy prescribed by Christ nor by the apostles. This is:
“If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
– Matthew 18:15-17
“I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindle not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.”
– 1 Corinthians 5:9-13
Because of the inserverability except by death, of the one-flesh entity created by the hand of God, and because of the indissolubility of the three-way covenant in which God remains holy Participant even if both spouses abandon it, man’s divorce is of no effect in the kingdom of God, but EXCOMMUNICATION is of very real effect, for both Jesus and Paul would not have explicitly prescribed it. Wives were never called to take their own revenge or rise up legally against the worst of husbands. Proper resorting to the criminal justice system where necessary, submitting to biblical church discipline (if offered — which we know cannot be assumed) and protective separation while caring for the soul of that prodigal spouse is what godly wives are called to do.
Yes, some of the godless rage against the evangelical church coming from militant feminist / humanist theologians like the carnal VanDoodewaards and from groups like “A Cry for Justice” certainly seems justified in a sense, but make no mistake, the remedy they demand for it is of satan. Where was the leadership of Saeed’s home church in Boise years before her husband went to Iran, when his desolate wife was finding it necessary to file a domestic violence restraining order (a public record) ? What was their excuse for leaving him in the position of a pastor under those circumstances, with apparently no church discipline invoked at that time?
Developing and maintaining a high view of marriage does a lot. It protects women and children, often the people most hurt by sexual sin. It keeps us from falling into sin ourselves: the higher our view of marriage, the less likely we will be to dabble in something so devastating. And a high view of marriage honors the One who created it for our good and His glory—the One who promises to judge the adulterer and the sexually immoral.
SIFC: Agreed, which is why we reject carnal, humanistic solutions and follow only God’s written instructions. There is no such thing as a “high view of marriage” without submitting to its no-excuses attribute of indissolubility, because every kind of adultery sends people to hell. Yes, God promises to judge the adulterer and the sexually immoral, but the objective should be to promote the offender’s repentance so that they don’t die in that state and so that they escape that eternal judgment in favor of the loss of lesser crowns. At the same time, all biblical care needs to be taken to avoid turning the innocent spouse into just as vile an adulterer.
Please pray for all members of the Abedini family, keeping in mind that the real enemy is satan, his demons and his “mouthpieces”. Pray, too, that the Lord would remove all unsavory, unwholesome company from the lives of both spouses ( 1 Corinthians 15:33) and that Holy Spirit conviction also would fall on all those Naghmeh is influencing during this season in which she herself has fallen under the demonic power of her wicked influencers.
But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men [ and women] as these. For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
– 2 Timothy 3:1-7
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