Category Archives: Marriage Restoration

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

Help – I Want to Get Out of My Adulterous Remarriage, But Can’t

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by Standerinfamilycourt

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.  – 1 John 4:1

The moment a blogger attempts to rescue perishing souls and dares to connect the cultural soul-poison of remarriage adultery with its biblical eternal outcome (“do not be deceived, no adulterer has any inheritance in the kingdom of God” – 1 Cor. 6:9), it amounts to nothing less than kicking satan’s hornet nest in mid-summer.  Trust us, satan fights hard to control and manipulate those souls – often doing so by fear of doom!

Once hardened to the straightforward protests because the focus is unwaveringly on souls, the evil one will regroup to bring on challenges that also attempt to challenge our compassion here at
“7 Times Around the Jericho Wall.”    A couple of those potent challenges can be seen in the comments to one blog post from about a year ago:
“HOW DO I KNOW WHETHER GOD JOINED MY FIRST MARRIAGE?”

Typically, the person bringing the challenge truly does have circumstances where there are enormous, and even dire barriers to ceasing to cohabit with a faux spouse as a necessary element of true repentance.    In other situations, the person is merely impersonating such a person in a truly sick attempt to discredit God’s word, and to discredit any such ministry by challenging the compassion of both.  From where this blogger sits, discerning between these types of encounters doesn’t always come easy – and we’ve been at this for almost seven years now.

In this post, some of the common characteristics of this kind of challenge will first be explored, for discernment purposes.
Then, a few generic, practical suggestions for this sort of impossible situation will be at least offered – which may or may not “land”  well, depending upon one’s true heart condition.    We shall then finish off by connecting the advice in this post with the new geopolitical reality that landed on January 20, 2021 in the United States.

Characteristics of a typical “compassion” challenger (in no particular order):

(1) they insist they have no options to physically exit an illicit living arrangement  (no money, no health, no friends, no relations, can’t afford a lawyer,  noncovenant dependent children, etc.)

(2) they are persistent if they don’t get the answer from this blog site that they hoped for, making repetitive arguments numerous times.

(3) their inquiry typically makes apparent that they haven’t read the blog post they are challenging, or its related links very thoroughly.

(4) they insist they have been praying about their situation for quite some time, and God has been silent, so they need an urgent answer from us.  They openly assert that they expect us to peer into their heart and speak for God, or the consequences will be dire for them.

(5) they often assert that they are living celibate in their faux marriage in a distant part of the adulterous home.    (What could be the harm in that?)

The more of these elements that are present in an inquiry, especially a redundant (“but you don’t understand my circumstances”) inquiry, the greater the suspicion that we’re really dealing with an impersonator – one of the demonic individuals bent on countering the movement who is quite deft in taking on various personas, and has many years practice at it.    Within reason, we always seek to be open in the blog comments to earnest questions, but the days do grow short, our extensive  blogsite is keyword-searchable, and any expectation that we will be such bad time stewards as to regurgitate a previous blog post in response to an individual inquiry comment is (frankly) badly misplaced.

Practical Suggestions for Exiting Immoral Cohabitation When  Resources Are Limited

When it comes to adulterous remarriages, unilateral, “no-fault” divorce, while profoundly unconstitutional, can be a good thing.  Unless one happens to live in the state of Mississippi, nobody living in the U.S. can legitimately argue that they “can’t” get a relatively cheap civil divorce because their faux spouse refuses to cooperate.   One could even reasonably argue that as of the date this past week when SCOTUS formally declined to hear the last of the many election fraud / foreign election interference cases, we now have to live as Christ-followers in a barbaric society that no longer has a functioning U.S. Constitution because of six  or so current justices who appear to be badly compromised – but more about that near the end of this post.

I am reminded of a top-ten ditty back in the 1970’s here, called “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”…

But I’ll repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover
Fifty ways to leave your lover

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

While the context here is obviously a paperless immoral cohabitation, are these not actually the same in God’s eyes as the papered-over situation where God’s  word tells us He doesn’t recognize the paper?    Some godly, high-integrity marriage permanence pastors,  who are well-deserving of any Christ-follower’s deep respect will insist that God expects obtaining a civil divorce out of an adulterous remarriage, for “true” repentance to be complete.   I respectfully disagree, both based on the lack of such a requirement in scripture, and the logic that Jesus taught that “divorce” is strictly a tradition of men (Matthew 19:8).   In other words, there is nothing to “dissolve” in the case of adulterous remarriage, nor is it a “sin” to live reconciled with the covenant spouse of one’s youth without a second ceremony, because man’s paper did not “dissolve” that original state of holy matrimony.
This biblical fact has long been an important consideration in the event that unilateral no-fault divorce laws were ever to be appropriately judged unconstitutional and individual state laws changed to require mutual consent to “divorce”.     

Obviously in most cases, a legal dissolution and reconsecrating of covenant marriage vows in reconciliation cases is desirable, but the point is that not doing them, reconciled or unreconciled, will never keep a repenting, regenerated person out of heaven, according to scripture.    Ditto for Catholic “annulments”.
For the unreconciled, God alone sees into every heart to gauge how open a repenting person truly is to God bringing back their estranged true spouse into the holy matrimony home, which is precisely why demands or pleas that “standerinfamilycourt” give assurances of heaven based on so-called  “heart repentance” are badly misplaced.   Only God, through the indwelling Holy Spirit can ever give that kind of assurance, and only those who are regenerated (“born again”) have the Holy Spirit indwelling them, according to scripture.

To circle back around to the main point, the only biblically-based requirements for exiting an adulterous “remarriage” as a regenerated person, and being fully reconciled with God are:
(1) leave the illicit home permanently
(2) sincerely desire to be reconciled to your true spouse whether or not that appears possible, and whether or not godless society persecutes you for it.    (They probably will, and you won’t ever fool God on this one.)

Whom does scripture say should be providing for an indigent / disabled believer who believes they literally have nowhere to go if they exit their immoral cohabitation?

A big clue can be found in 1 Timothy 5:

Honor widows who are actually widows; but if any widow has children or grandchildren, they must first learn to show proper respect for their own family and to give back compensation to their parents; for this is acceptable in the sight of God.  Now she who is actually a widow and has been left alone has set her hope on God, and she continues in requests and prayers night and day. But she who indulges herself in luxury is dead, even while she lives.  Give these instructions as well, so that they may be above reproach. But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Obviously, back in the 1st century church, “divorcees” were nearly non-existent because the church of Jesus Christ never recognized man’s “divorce” nor “annulment”,  and God has always spelled “divorce” as follows:  D-E-A-T-H.     However, in context of today’s immorality inside and outside the church, we have a lot of figurative “widows” and “widowers” for whom the only remarriage that is legitimate is back to their covenant spouse.    It seems not unreasonable that arrangements should be made first with extended family, and failing that, with the church – including the body of other covenant marriage standers, many of whom could benefit from having a roommate while they await the repentance of their own covenant spouse.   Many of these standers will themselves have come out of an adulterous “remarriage” and have skills and space to take care of a disabled repenter.   Most disabled people in the U.S. at least qualify for some level of sustaining state and Federal benefits, including Social Security, that could help ease the financial burden on the care-giving family member or fellow stander.    Many covenant marriage standers’ groups can be found on Facebook or online web pages these days where connections can be made with solid Christian stander communities, and a few of those links will be listed at the end of this post.

As for continuing to live celibate in one’s adulterous household, this notion is quite common, in particular, with Catholic-background people where that church officially condoned this practice as part of its broader contemporary compromise of true biblical marriage indissolubility.    These folks will often say they can’t get an “annulment”,  so this is their “solution”.    There are several kingdom of God problems with this kind of “solution”.    I personally like the response a commenter recently made to this issue on the blog post linked above, though this (characteristically) didn’t satisfy the inquirer:

“We are here as witnesses to the unsaved and the world watches us – we are told in 1 Thess 5:22 to ‘abstain from all appearances of evil’ – Why would a sister be living with another sister’s husband? the ‘appearance’ still exists.

“Would you ask a sister – to live with another woman’s husband? Is that seen to the world as ‘chaste and separate’?

“God who designed marriage – also provides all the tools needed for reconciliation – ‘disabled, isolated and no income or the ability to obtain income’ – are no obstacles to God – providing you have a genuine heart to reconcile – he can and will do what you can’t – if you do what you can….”

(Amen!)

The Big Picture is Drastically Changing – For the Worse:

To close out, “standerinfamilycourt” believes strongly that the relatively-affluent and the poor alike, in this nation of the United States have a high risk of losing all or almost all of our creature comforts in the not-too-distant future, as usurped Marxist  rule makes further inroads to eliminating our national path back to a constitutional republic.     In the U.S., the extreme dysfunction and compromised state of all three branches of the Federal government (plus the military) has been exposed since the November 3, 2020 election, such that constitutional separation-of-powers are rendered almost completely inoperative, hence checks and balances on outright crime and treason in office are rendered effectively “moot”.   This sadly occurred with  the acquiescence of at least six of our nine SCOTUS justices, who likewise proved themselves unwilling to sacrifice personal comforts in order to do what’s right for the nation at a critical time.    The result is that, as one immorally-living set of top leaders replaces the next in the White House, our nation is left under illegitimate rule by those who came into office by what could justifiably be called sedition and Communist China Party purchased collusion (i.e. unprosecuted treason).    These illicit leaders have taken deliberate, unilateral actions in the first few weeks of their White House occupation to seriously break down the national defenses of our nation against these colluding foreign enemies, and we face many serious risks ranging from the “global reset” and collapsed financial currency to a widespread  attack on our electrical grid that could reportedly kill up to 90% of our population over a year’s time.

What a shame, on top of all these losses, to lose one’s soul as well, for the sake of shaky, disappearing material comforts!    Marxist regimes confiscate property at-will, and they wipe out livelihoods with the literal stroke of a pen.   They unleash bioweapons on their own people, and get rid of “the least of these” without a pang of conscience.   They deliberately go after true citizens of the kingdom of God for the way they live and for their convictions.    When God continues to allow this to happen without intervening after the normal channels fail to stop it, it’s a strong sign that His judgment on the nation is fully landing.  He is removing His hand of supernatural protection for the nation’s pervasive sexual immorality and, in particular, church leadership condoning the breakdown of the biblical family over decades of concurrent and consecutive polygamy, divorce and remarriage.  We’ve been “given over” to our own desires, and at that point, the only reversal of this sequence of events is for church leadership to reverse its course on the same.    We know this from following Israel’s history, and we can only hope that it’s not too late already!

“We have been unfaithful to our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land; yet now there is hope for Israel in spite of this.   So now let’s make a covenant with our God to send away all the wives and their children, following the counsel of my lord and of those who fear the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the Law.   Arise! For this matter is your responsibility, but we will be with you; be courageous and act.”

Then Ezra stood and made the leading priests, the Levites, and all Israel take an oath that they would do according to this proposal; so they took the oath.   Then Ezra rose from before the house of God and went into the chamber of Jehohanan the son of Eliashib. Although he went there, he did not eat bread nor drink water, because he was mourning over the unfaithfulness of the exiles.   So they made a proclamation throughout Judah and Jerusalem to all the exiles, that they were to assemble at Jerusalem,  and that whoever did not come within three days, in accordance with the counsel of the leaders and the elders, all his property would be forfeited, and he himself would be excluded from the assembly of the exiles.”  – from the Book of Ezra, chapter 10.

For this very reason our founding fathers repeatedly warned (I believe, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) that we can only retain our constitutional republic through biblical morality.

www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

 

Links to a few helpful covenant marriage standers sites where chaste connections can be made with other standers:

Covenant Marriage Standers (Facebook)

MADR (Facebook) 

Testimonies of Repentance from Adulterous Marriages  (Facebook)

Restoration of Christian Marriage (MarriageDivorce.com)

 

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

Count of God’s Gracious Blessings During the CCP* Virus Crisis

by Standerinfamilycourt.com

The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

  SIFC Note:  “CCP” stands for Communist Chinese Party

The last blog post in 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall was so sobering and heavy that it seems good to follow up with a lighter one on the same subject.     The Lord promised never to leave us nor forsake us, even when the whole world is in an uproar and evil is having a nearly unrestrained reign of terror.

The temptation here is to use a slick “top-ten” reverse countdown, but there are far more than ten “silver linings” observed by this blogger, and all of them are hugely important to the final outcome in our society from this crisis, so this will be a long list, and in no particular order.

1.  Millions of parents got back to parenting their own children, the way God has always designed.  (“These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”)

2 . “Family courts” were slowed way down, delaying unnecessary divorces.   (All “divorces” out of our original covenant marriage are unnecessary by God’s definition – Matthew 19:6,8 – and He doesn’t recognize them under any circumstances.)

3.  We haven’t heard one thing about “drag queen story hour” in a month of Sundays.

4.  Ditto for the “urgent” need to mutilate the genitalia or alter the hormones  of an emotionally-unstable minor child, lest they be at “risk for suicide”.

5.  Kids all across the country suddenly became safe on the toilet, and when changing clothes to get exercise.

6.  Parents have had countless opportunities to personally teach their children how to conduct life:  bake bread, cook a meal, fix broken things instead of throwing them away,  budget scarce funds, care for a pet, sew a mask for the hospital helpers.

7.  The price of gasoline went down for the foreseeable future.

8.  Smog magically lifted from some of our cities.

9.  Many of us received auto insurance refunds.

10.   Jobless people got free food because farmers would otherwise been forced to waste their production.

11.   Many churches are reporting greater attendance at online, streamed services than they ever had in the megachurch building.

12.  Megachurches, meanwhile, have become unworkable for the foreseeable future, and have devolved into the much more scriptural  and less anonymous house churches.

13.  An icon of yesteryear culture is making a glorious comeback: the drive-in movie!

14.  Schoolchildren everywhere (and their parents) are now immersed in the workings of U.S. Constitution.

15.  Little girls and little boys are having the opportunity to see scientists in action as role models, and coming off as national heroes.  Who will this inspire one day?

16. Little girls and little boys are getting a refreshing pause from athletes and Hollywood celebrities as role models.

17.  We are all being reminded of the U.S.A.’s  founding principles, and what all it took to win them,  on a daily basis.

18. We are being treated to group worship videos from all over the world to lift our spirits.

19.  The animal shelters magically emptied of previously unadopted pets who found homes at last.

20.  County sheriffs gave us all a civics lesson in the letters they sent out stating that their oath of office to uphold the Constitution precluded them from enforcing “emergency order” fines and jail penalties for “crimes” their respective legislatures have not so designated.

21.  Millions of Gen-Z’ers dreaming of a socialist Utopia got an unpleasant taste of socialism in action, as empty store shelves shocked them back to reality.

22.  Meanwhile, these same Gen-Z’ers will benefit from a moratorium on the importation of low wage foreign workers who have for years been permitted to usurp their jobs and futures.

23.  Dozens of great doctors and scientists became emboldened to speak out against the Federal public health agencies who have become part of “the swamp” in the last 3 or 4 decades, raising the hope that America (and other countries) might emerge physically healthier for the future.

24.  A few states and countries did their CCP virus response without violating our Constitution, and because they did, we have objective data on how we can handle it better next time.

25.  More people are clued into end times prophecy, and watching for the promised return of Jesus.

To be sure, there are some real “bummers” out there, as well:  isolated grandparents and great grandparents, destroyed businesses, lost lives and lost privacy, the threat of compulsory vaccinations and digital tracking, food shortages,  dangerous criminals being released from prisons,  law-abiding business owners taking their place in the lockups, stress levels abounding, domestic abuse (including child abuse) in lockup, growing incivility in discourse about the situation, social media censoring, and on and on.  The national debt burden that our children and grandchildren will have to contend with is tragic and disappointing to those of us who so wanted to bequeath them a better future.   Another star-studded National Day of Prayer has come and gone without any signs of the necessary movement toward national repentance in the churches of the United States.    Yet, we have received blessings from God we don’t come anywhere near deserving.

Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good;
For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
 Who can speak of the mighty deeds of the Lord,
Or can show forth all His praise?
How blessed are those who keep justice,
Who practice righteousness at all times!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

 

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

Are Christians Engaging in “No-Fault” Repeal Activism Sinning?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

 “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.”
– John 18:36

It is not unusual to encounter Christians who are  uncomfortable engaging in secular political activity of any type, even when a nation’s constitution is being existentially threatened, its children confiscated from fit parents and trafficked to abusers for the Federal money that changes hands with the state;  others of its children being legally murdered on the delivery table;  its elderly legally euthanized or starved in their bedridden state, and many other abuses of the human dignity of His image-bearers equally-horrific as these.

The more gentle-spirited of these cite teachers such as David Bercot, who argue the writings of the Early Church Fathers as evidence that Christ-followers must not presume to engage politically (especially ~ 26 minutes).

But there’s another camp.   More recently, these reservations of conscience have gone beyond reticent discomfort, to something resembling a more “pious” way to say “STFU“.     One young  know-it-all, whose tastes seem to run more to the social justice “gospel”, recently scolded “standerinfamilycourt” on our facebook page Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional, as follows:

“Also, I have noticed this trend going around that i call, “tough guy preachers” where Christians are acting harshly with people who disagree with them. I have noticed that there is a common denominator with this trend- it is the Christians who have involved themselves politically to a great degree and are passionate about king Saul… I mean Trump.

“Since you all hold to the historic Christian view of divorce and remarraige (sic), I would have all of you know that the early Christians had nothing to do with politics- in fact, they flat out refused to participate in them, the military, the government, or any institution that required their participation on the systematic disobedience to Christ’s commands.

Jesus said not to turn away those who would borrow, and will send people to hell for the sin of omission when it comes to caring for those in need.

Will Jesus say to you, “depart from me” for you voting His widows and orphans out of the country?

Maybe, just maybe this divorce and remarraige (sic) issue should be secondary for you people.”

Spoken like a young man who obviously hasn’t personally experienced much extreme harshness in life, and isn’t going to be persuaded by any amount of rightly-divided biblical arguments that actual souls are on the line (too tough-guy preacherish, right?)   This fellow makes the ridiculous presumption that those who politically support national border sovereignty, and who reject the Marxist “social gospel” as the false gospel that it is, must neglect the poor in the local and world communities.   Since he lacks any actual evidence for levelling this broad-brush charge, he uses his ideology as the defacto “evidence” thereof.   Certain things, according to scripture are indeed heaven-or-hell matters, regardless of how “fruitful” or “charitable” they look on the exterior…therefore, basic morality in the nation’s “family laws” eternally matter to at least an equal extent as the material compassion Jesus spoke of, and neither should be neglected.

As for “tough guy preachers”,  what would this pious scolder call Jesus Christ?   Or John the Baptist?   What would he call the Apostle Paul?   For that matter, what would this young man say to someone like Rachel Held Evans or Jim Wallis (who recently led a “prayer initiative” to reverse the 2016 Presidential election results)?    Apparently, Marxism in the name of Jesus is a “higher virtue” – to some,  at least – than forms of political engagement which stress personal morality and collective responsibility.    This fellow is quite typical of the clear majority of his generation, but thankfully not all of them….

Many Americans Just Don’t Know . . . While Others Must Have Forgotten

On the other side of the coin, it’s also thankfully welcome to see a committed Christ follower leading people, in the name of Jesus, to our state capitals to demand the repeal of laws that sanction utter and contemptuous disrespect for the sanctity of  life and marriage.    Who’s right here?   Whose position is godly in reality?

History has plenty of Christian activists the Lord has used to accomplish God-sized human suffering relief projects, even when some of them were not morally perfect, and quite often when some came very close to being so.    Aside from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was engaged in attempting to rid Germany of the Nazis, we also think of William Wilberforce,  of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (in the days before he became a sodomous, philandering hypocrite whose underlying character couldn’t handle the fame),  of founding document signers like Daniel Webster, and of the many faithful disciples today who lead family policy councils or Christian legal defense ministries across the country.   We think of believers serving in Congress or the state house.    We think of believers who defied civil law to operate the Underground Railroad, freeing escaping slaves in the 19th century – an operation that involved many pastors.  Some saints have been martyred for their efforts to bring legal reform to immoral governments – can we then say they brought martyrdom on themselves due to disobedience in getting “entangled in the affairs of life” or did Paul have some other context in mind for his admonition?   Is it wrong for a Christ-follower to make a living from political activism or from government service?

There are several factors that make contemporary believers uncomfortable with Christian political activism, among them:

(1) The church is often complicit in supporting moral evils
The reasons behind an ongoing 60-year history of church impotence against the Sexual Revolution are myriad.   They range from the humanist origins of the mainline Protestant denominations and the fear of man, to the indirect mega-profit from the continuation of the legalized abomination in question.    Nothing new here:  Wilberforce had to contend with a corrupt, complicit church as well, and so did Bonhoeffer, sadly.  

(2) failure to understand the spiritual warfare involved  
Many Christians are unaware of opposition in the spiritual realm, or are unschooled in it, or are simply unwilling to take it on.    They don’t want to maintain the moral purity or rigorous spiritual discipline necessary to engage on that level and be that channel for the Lord’s power.

(3) heightened risk of idolatry and wrong motives
Speaking of spiritual warfare, if we don’t do regular health-checks on our egos and motives, and fail to guard our hearts, this target we’ve painted on our own backs by engaging the kingdom of darkness are never out of satan’s sight.    Those who do engage must constantly readjust, to maintain total dependency on the power of God, focus on the glory of God, and stay plugged into the Power Source.    That’s hard work!   We must often do so in an atmosphere of undeserved criticism and slander that’s devil-commissioned.   On top of all that, we must maintain balanced family commitments and relationships, so that our project doesn’t morph into our idol as the going gets progressively tough, and discouragements come.

(4) resource-intensiveness (time, treasure, talent)
Even Jesus counseled not to start building a tower without first counting the cost and making sure we have the resources to complete it.    He pointed out the ridicule that might come from not being able to complete it, but there’s even damage to the cause itself possible, from not reasonably sizing up what it’s going to take, and asking the Lord to meet any shortfalls before starting.

(5) interference with family relationships
Touched on earlier, the thought continues that our number one priority is the souls of our progeny and spouse.    None of us possesses the resources to clean up the world, while fulfilling our kingdom obligations to those we only get one shot at bringing up, or bringing along.     We must rely on the Lord to bridge the gap, while being as responsible as we can humanly be.   Everyone knows of missionary kids who grew up apostate or delinquent, and so do the many opponents of our kingdom calling outside the home.

(6) possible neglect of the basic gospel work
Face it, as evidenced above, we’re going to get accused by satan of this one anyway if there’s any form of sexual ethics at stake.     None of us wants the “neglect” charge to be rendered true in the course of our mission.   It really needn’t be.    Testimony to the gospel is as much of a function of how we walk before pagans and weaker Christians as we go about our task, as it is of anything we say or hand out in the form of tracts.   Some causes, if creditably walked out, are the gospel in action, especially projects involving the sanctity and integrity of marriage which is itself a prominent symbol of the gospel.

(7) political success may not yield imperishable results 
(1 Cor. 3:12-16)    And it may necessarily yield any results so in our lifetime.   Will this political cause merely increase our comfort levels while living in this present world, or will it snatch souls from the hell-flames?   Will it perhaps help stay the hand of God’s judgment on a nation?

“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.”

What sorts of outcomes or prizes can be expected to survive the fire spoken of here?     Of Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer and King, whose political achievements do you think survived that testing fire?

Notice that the following scripture does not say, “you will go to hell unless you mind your own business and go about your own work”.    It says to make it our goal to do so.   Occasionally in the course of history there arise factors whereby leading this quiet life minding our own business entails looking the other way while true evil is inflicted on our helpless neighbor.

Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before. and to aspire to live quietly, to attend to your own matters, and to work with your own hands, as we instructed you, so that you will behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need.–  1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

This is certainly not the first article ever written asking this question, but “standerinfamilycourt” has a pointed reason for bringing the matter back up now: we need more success engaging pastor support at the state level in the repeal of unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, as courageous legislators in various states sponsor worthy reform bills that might not otherwise have a chance of being enacted.   So far, these legislators have not had the clergy support they deserve for this cause.    We would like to improve the pastor engagement levels, without which ultimate success at meaningfully reforming “family laws” seems remote.

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

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

They Have Seen the Enemy, and They Only Think They Know Who “He” Is

by Standerinfamilycourt

Why are the nations in an uproar
And the peoples devising a vain thing?
The kings of the earth take their stand
And the rulers take counsel together
Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying,
“Let us tear their fetters apart
And cast away their cords from us!”

He who sits in the heavens laughs,
The Lord scoffs at them.

– Psalm 2:1-4

For five years, our blog has flown “under the radar screen”, so to speak, steadily building a following while virtually all of the “haters” were people who professed to be in the church, and who smeared us as “graceless”, “Pharisees” and “legalists” for calling their non-widowed remarriages and “blended families” what Jesus consistently called them:  continuously adulterous households.
Oh, we had the occasional LGBTQ(xyz) “troll”, primarily on our Facebook page, but with only one memorable exception,  those encounters were as fleeting as they were typically obscene, and rarely did they ever carry over to anyone else’s publication space.   Apparently, that’s beginning to change, as it inevitably had to if our efforts were ever to grow effective enough to contribute to meaningful engagement in the larger idolatrous, adulterous and sodomous society that has arisen as a direct consequence of what author Maggie Gallagher once famously called The Abolition of Marriage.

Not too long ago, one of our “nextgen” marriage warriors pointed out an article he came across in Patheos, from July, 2019 that was apparently triggered by one of our guest bloggers’ offerings:  “What Happened When A Covenant Marriage Stander Wrote His State Legislators About Forced Divorce”, by octagenarian Billy Miller.
SIFC remembers congratulating Billy upon noticing how unusually high the readership was showing for this piece, according to WordPress’ built-in statistical tracker.

Evidently, our readership had a bit of “unexpected assistance” from a rather contemptuous source, unbeknownst to us, namely, from the article entitled “Why Complementarians Hate No-Fault Divorce. “   It seems we quite innocently committed the high crime of using the taboo “p-word” in this May, 2019 post, referring to our guest author as a “family patriarch” (in the traditional sense, never intending the highly-“triggering” feminist / Leftist connotation).   In our circle, being a patriarch is an honorable, hard-earned lifetime achievement, as it has been up until about 5 triggered minutes ago, in the sweep of human history.

“Standerinfamilycourt” readily admits to being a “complementarian” because all authentic followers of Christ are bible-believers who believe the account of Moses (and the Holy Spirit)  in Genesis 1 and 2… SIFC also readily admits to being white, and to believing that sex is “assigned” at conception – not birth.

“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’  God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth’….Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.’  Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.   The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.   So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.  The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.  The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

No one can possibly be a follower of Christ and not believe the authority of the account in Genesis, because Christ immediately referred back to it in Matthew 19:4-6 when challenged by the Pharisees concerning the permanence of marriage, in His declaration of the lifelong indissolubility of the God-joined marriage bond He makes in Matthew 19:8.     All that does indeed make us “complementarians”.   We know that God created two sexes and gave them a joint job to perform in the Garden.    We also know that it was the very first feminist rebellion against God that caused the sexes to have unequal treatment in the world, with both winding up suffering as a direct consequence.    That’s precisely how it always works with a one-flesh, God-joined entity!     (Perhaps a more accurate and objective title for our critic’s article would have been:  “Why Cultural Marxists Hate Due Process and Biblical Marriage”.)

Interestingly, “standerinfamilycourt” (as opposed to our recent guest blogger) remained rather invisible throughout the opposing blogger’s retaliatory rant, and as a result, covenant marriage stander Billy Miller took most of the editorial “heat”.    However, around the same time as Billy’s guest blog was running on “7 Times Around the Jericho Wall”,  so were some of the following titles, all of which apparently went unnoticed and unread, hence unmentioned, despite the enemy reconnaissance visit and the additional fodder that was on offer at the time:

Death of a (Postmodernism) Sales(person): The Sad Passing of Rachel Held Evans  (May 8, 2019)

Pet “Parenting” Trend: How Has “No-Fault” Divorce Contributed?
(May 10, 2019)

Top 10 Ways Mothers Would Be Helped If “No-Fault” Divorce Laws Were Reformed   (May 11, 2019)

Top 10 Ways Fathers Would Be Helped If “No-Fault” Divorce Laws Were Reformed  (June 10, 2019)

The “Equality Act” Is Unconstitutional For All The Same Reasons “No-Fault” Divorce Is: So Why Is Nobody SHOUTING The “U”-Word? (June 3, 2019)

Sorry, But Forming A Committee To Flout God’s Sexual Ethics Started Long Ago…With Heterosexuals (July 9, 2019)

These, of course, would have all been conspicuously on display at the time our detractor googled us up, right there in the lefthand sidebar.   But apparently, we learn from this that self-absorbed narcissists don’t always notice their surroundings.   This…even though SIFC was deemed to be a blog owner who apparently qualified, in this counter-blogger’s estimation, as belonging in the class she dubbed, “More Serious Backlash Against No-Fault Divorce” (SIFC is sincerely flattered, by the way), right along with the likes of Al Mohler and S. Michael Craven – whom she rapaciously called a “twit”.   Apparently, she assumes her position is unimpeachable, and thus impervious to impact from objective scrutiny.  Or…perhaps she’s blowing a lot of hot air about how she perceives the “threat” to the UNFD ideology and regime (enough to superfluously justify writing her piece to “rally the troops”, but evidently not enough to warrant much study of those who dare to publicly disagree with her).   Had she but dug a little deeper, she would have soon learned that this blog stands far, far to the right of either of those two Christian gentlemen!  She would have also learned that our combined faith and secular community’s objections to unilateral, so-called “no-fault” divorce laws run far deeper than a simplistic belief in  “complementarianism”…and (commensurately), our efforts go well beyond writing articles she doesn’t like.

By contrast, “standerinfamilycourt” does believe in knowing something about the critics and obstructionists of meaningful family law reform, and what’s behind their rabid ideology, one which requires utter totalitarianism to sustain.    Our detractor goes by the nom-de-plume, “Captain Cassidy”,  and further discloses herself to be an atheist / feminist by the name of Cassidy McGillicuddy.    She tells us she was raised Catholic, converted to Pentecostalism in her mid-teens, married a preacher, and deconverted after college.    She blogs about “religion, deconversion, video and tabletop p gaming, psychology, modern culture, and other such topics at Roll to Disbelieve. Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr–or at her community’s official forum at RolltoDisbelieve.com!”    SIFC, of course, also goes by a nom-de-plume, but does so for biblical, prodigal spouse-honoring reasons that would otherwise limit the impactfulness of this blog’s content.

Recent events point to the undeniable success of her “deconstruction” movement, which has, of late, successfully removed some of the weak and wounded sheep and would-be shepherds from the flock of the harlot church, but to find out what actually happened to “the Captain’s”  estranged preacher-husband (who apparently had the bad judgment and disobedience toward scripture to marry an atheist), it would take a bit more searching and reading that will have to be deferred for now.    Invariably, estranged spouses who are also estranged from God will tell you how abused they feel.   She clearly thinks being able to ditch her marriage, along with the rest of her family’s fundamental constitutional protections, is the greatest thing since sliced bread,

“…Divorce represented women’s only real escape from intolerable marriages.  However the men controlling most countries’ legislative systems had long ago ensured the difficulty of obtaining that escape…”   

(SIFC would add the unmentioned undercurrent here, “…escape…with any of the family assets or with deleterious custody of children”), but we’ll have to leave the speculation about the “Captain” right there for now, so that we can address a limited selection of several erroneous points and misrepresented historical presumptions she highlights, endeavoring to do so in fewer than 6,000 words overall.   For now, it’s best to remind everyone that just because an individual mortal does not believe in the authority of scripture nor in the existence of its Author, this does not exempt any such mortal from its operation nor from His eternal rule.

Opines Ms. McGillicuddy in her opening:

“For a while now, we’ve been talking about complementarianism, 
a sexist ideology held by mostly by right-wing Christian culture warriors.  One major plank of that ideology involves a vicious hatred of  no-fault divorce.     Today, I’ll show you what that plank looks like and why complementarians hold to it so tightly. Then, I’ll show you why, 
in their eyes at least, they really should hate no-fault divorce.”

  SIFC:   Our perspective is….if only it were actually true that “one major plank of ‘that ideology’ involved a ‘vicious’ hatred” by the evangelical establishment of a legal regime that systematically strips all innocent spouses, male and female, of virtually all of their Bill of Rights protections.   Unfortunately, our experience is that the group she is demonizing is actually all too fond of unilateral, forced divorce with the bulk of the spoils going to the marriage spoiler, and with guilt-by-accusation, no questions asked.  Many (but not all) are themselves sequential polygamists, or relatives of serial monogamists, who would really not like to see divorces return to a fault-basis, or to require mutual consent.   Too messy, too expensive, and too publicly accountable!   Other evangelicals talk a great game publicly, but take money from deep-pocketed Marxists, whose global aim to break down the traditional family those global financiers profoundly share with Ms. McGillicuddy.    Our other perspective is…this breathed-upon dust-creature just called the Maker of all heaven and earth a “sexist ideologue”!   But we do agree whole-heartedly with “the Captain’s” last statement, even if we can’t quite align with her reasons for it…right-wing culture warriors should absolutely hate (so-called) no-fault divorce…at least, of the sort that does not require a mutual petition to effectuate.

Continues “the Captain”….

“Back in the 1970s, right­-wing Christianity began to morph and evolve into the superpoliticized, superpolarized juggernaut that we know and loathe today.  Initially, the leaders of this end of Christianity 
sought to end the advances of the Civil Rights Movement. Outside of the Deep South, however, most people rejected hardcore racism.
After a short period of flailing around, those leaders hit upon hardcore sexism instead.  That sexism manifested as bitter, vehement  opposition to abortion rights.”

SIFC:  (…Penned as if abortion magically spares black and Latino women in the womb.)   Apparently, murdering pre-born black and brown women for sexual convenience is not “sexist” or “racist”, in the blogger’s estimation.

Penned as if “some religion” morphed, instead of conscience-laden human beings asserting their God-implanted conscience.   Penned also, as if only one ideology has “morphed” into a de facto religion.

“…However, it wasn’t enough for some Christians. The leaders of the
Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and groups like it needed to stem 
a rising tide of female leaders in their denomination. Feminism whittled
away at their male privilege. OH NOES!!!”

 

SIFC:   Speaking of “oh no”, apparently “the Captain” is unaware of the May, 2018 feminist-faced, Soros financed-and-instigated Dallas coup-d’ etat in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, leaving them now more acceptably “woke”.   However, that’s probably not enough for some anti-Christians.

“….Eventually, they figured out how to stop women’s advancement dead in its tracks.”

 

  SIFC:  Oh really?   “standerinfamilycourt” assumes that assertion depends on how “advancement” is defined.    SIFC was a young, married adult during most of the 1970’s, who struggled to get an education and establish a professional footing in a male-dominated work world that was just as much about family connections and classism as it was about racism or sexism.   After filing a successful EEOC equal-pay complaint in 1976 that eventually benefitted many in that firm, SIFC went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees financed by employers, raised a family under Christian complementarian principles, launched a daughter who came by those same life successes far earlier, with far less effort 25 years later, and blazed the trail for two generations of professional careerists….meanwhile, the so-called “women’s movement” moved far afield from economic issues in the classic Marxist bait-and-switch.     SIFC can assure the readers that today’s workplace looks nothing like the chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, profanity-laced workplace of the 1970’s.    On the other hand, it seems “the Captain” might not quite be in her 60’s yet, and might be relying more on media accounts of “how things were” than actual lived experience.    Or….she could be defining “advancement” not in terms of economic opportunities, but in terms of sexual autonomy, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.   Either way, the SBC was a colossal failure at curbing either form of “advancement”, if indeed that ever was their express intent.

From here, “the Captain” goes on to regale us with her interpretation of complementarianism.    Much of this is predictable, coming as it does from the keyboard of a professing atheist, and not especially noteworthy.    That said, SIFC would be remiss not to highlight this straight-faced assertion, and let the bespoke speak for itself:

“….Though their belief defies established scientific consensus in any
number of directions, like there being more than just two genders, complementarians think these differences have a biological basis.
Therefore, even non-Christians need to be forced to adhere to   the supposedly ­divine plan.”

SIFC:  Silly us !!  Therefore, it must follow that the only remedy for “legislating morality” (on a biological basis) is to legislate IMMORALITY, right, Captain C?   And, technically, what actual “consensus” can you objectively point to –  in all these directions, inquiring minds want to know?   That of the APA, perhaps?

“….Within marriage itself, complementarian men secured their power­bases. Their idolized doctrine granted them complete dominance within
their homes. Husbands blatantly privileged their leisure time above their wives’ own. Many began ruling their households with iron fists–financially and emotionally abusing wives without hesitation or
hindrance.   If any wives complained, men had complete 
assurance that their churches would always take the men’s sides.
This one doctrine granted the men of the culture wars everything they ever wanted.

Everything in the world…..

“Divorce represented women’s only real escape from intolerable marriagesHowever, the men controlling most countries’ legal and legislative
systems had long ago ensured the difficulty of obtaining that
escape.  They created the system, then gamed it to the point where women couldn’t meaningfully escape their grasp.
In many areas, women had to jump a lot of hoops to gain a divorce–including gaining the permission of their husbands to end the union.   If a husband felt amenable to the breakup, things ran smoothly.  If not,
however, he could make his wife’s life hellish. We can see hints of that hell in “get abuse” among
Orthodox Jews.  Men, of course, have always had a much easier time  jumping the hoops their fellow men have set in place;
these hoops exist for the have­ nots, not the haves.
(Incidentally, abortion runs along similar lines.  Anti­abortion laws affect poor women most.) “

SIFC:  Oh my, where to begin with this diatribe!   In the Captain’s defense, first of all, she has plenty of pseudo-Christian allies who are more than happy to buy into her jaded view of married life and men.   Here, however, is GOD’s view (just in case He might actually exist):

“In the same way [as Christ who…while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously; and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness…] you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior…

“You husbands in the same way [as Christ who…while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously; and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness…], live with your wives in an understanding way, as with someone weaker, since she is a woman; and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered.”

By now, we can probably count on the Captain’s head exploding, but the point is, that whatever she imagines was going on in the traditional home and in the 1970’s-1990’s church, it cannot be legitimately blamed on authentic Christ-followers.    And, given that society was by any measure considerably less toxic to our offspring, pre-1970’s than now, neither can it really be blamed on a supposedly “toxic” state protection of the family from that era, and earlier….but SIFC is jumping ahead a bit.    (The “poor women” most impacted by legalized abortion seem to be the unborn ones who never see the light of day, and a few who do live, maimed, to see the light day and tell the world about it. )

Continues “the Captain”….

“Most states had a list of reasons they considered virtuous enough for a woman to gain a unilateral divorce.  Adultery, desertion, and physical abuse often featured on these lists. The law required women to prove beyond reasonable doubt that one or more of these things was
happening.   And they had to prove it in the context of a humiliating civil court trial….”

SIFC:  Actually, most states had a list of causes of action deemed compelling enough, beyond the Petitioner’s presumed “right” to unfettered sexual autonomy, to warrant destroying the lives of potentially innocent spouses of either gender, and the children of the marriage, by pulling the financial, relational and social rug literally out from under all of them without due process.   Those laws required petitioners of both genders to prove by a preponderance of the evidence (not “beyond a reasonable doubt”, as this blogger wrongly claims) the charges they were bringing against a fellow citizen of the United States of America who, up to then, remained under the protection of the Bill of Rights and state constitutions.   (That’s actually how a constitutional republic functions and sustains itself, Captain C.)

“….Often, one or both spouses committed perjury to prevent or smooth the entire process!”

  SIFC:   And of course, we all know that the advent of a $50 billion a year industry, that U.S. taxpayers subsidize to the tune of more than $120 billion a year, has magically and forever banished perjury from the halls of “justice” we know today as “family court”.  Wink, wink.  

From there, Ms. McGillicuddy launched into a decidedly myopic and “party-line” debate about the effect of unilateral family-shredding-on-demand on the historical divorce rate in the United States:

“Christians often blame no-fault divorce for the rising divorce rate.
After reviewing the available resources, for the skyrocketing divorce rate­ going on around that time.   However, Cambridge’s Law and History Review disagrees.   their scholars think the opposite.  No-­fault divorce, that journal 
tells us, ‘followed rather than led the long­ term rise in America’s divorce rates.’  People had already noticed that rise before
 the “no­-fault ‘revolution’ of the 1970s.”

SIFC:   As if these were the only “scholars” to weigh in on the matter!   It’s just like the bunch that gratuitously points to the declining suicide rates among women, who can now have their cake and eat it too, while completely mum on the rising suicide rates of their husbands (who are often deliberately alienated from their children’s lives, falsely accused on leverage-motivated restraining orders, and jailed when they cannot meet exorbitant and rising child support demands that under the Federal-state payola scheme known as Title IV-D, their earnings can never support), and their sons, who are often abused in mom’s subsequent immoral relationships.    The fact is that there are “scholars” who are fixated on justifying and enabling the narcissistic desires of adults, and there are other scholars who are quite appropriately measuring and documenting all the vile impacts of state-sponsored unilateral family-shredding on the next generation – and never the twain shall meet.    Sadly, it was not until the mid-2000’s that anybody studied the systemic impacts of fundamental due process denial on the marriage rates of younger adults, especially the children of divorce.  It wasn’t until the early-2010’s that an  impeccable 30-year longitudinal study was released that documented adult child outcomes by family structure, which (among some other culturally-inflammatory findings) concluded by regression analysis that step-parent “blended” families fared even worse in generational outcomes than single-parent families.    Clearly, these vaunted Cambridge scholars overlooked some of the most pertinent “available resources”.

People these days have noticed that the main reason the divorce rate has leveled off in the U.S. (and other western countries with no-fault divorce), is that far fewer married households are being formed in the first place as a direct consequence of the practices of today’s “family courts”, particularly during the years of childbearing and rearing age.   When fewer than 50% of all children are being raised in an intact, married home these days, and increasing social media exposure catches up with the unspeakable routine evils of “family courts”, the kids don’t grow up dummies, but realists.

As for the Cambridge “scholars” disseminating the 50+ year old opinions of the National Association of Women Lawyers (given how obscenely lucrative and politically powerful the divorce industry became – powerful enough to push aside the basic fundamental rights of nearly a million people each and every year for 50 years), it must be recognized that these are hardly “disinterested” parties putting forth their “study results”.    It should also be noted that an educational institution quoting NAWL hardly constitutes “scholarship”, any more than self-selective, self-reporting “surveys” of homosexual households constitutes “social science” around gay parenting.

Onward to the criticism (with which “standerinfamilycourt” heartily agrees, actually), of the appeasement experiment that the states of Louisiana, Arkansas and Arizona undertook with the “covenant marriage” option, and its predictably poor uptake, human nature being what it is:

“Seeking to regain their power, however, has proven difficult for complementarians.   Few people in or out of their tribe care to revive the dark days of at fault divorce….And as I expected, horror stories soon ­emerged from the women caught in these kinds of marriages….”

SIFC:  Setting aside for a moment the egregiously-overlooked fact that a good many “complementarians” are not males, nor are they bourgeois or white, but many are accomplished professional women of all colors from a variety of states beyond the “bible belt”, and setting aside the obvious fact that the Captain is herself a “culture warrior” for societal moral anarchy, let’s have a look at the poor, feckless gals she says were “caught in these kinds of marriages” (although the link she pasted in about the statutory covenant marriage experiment  does not say a single word about even one “entrapped” wife).     Reading this shrillery conjures up the bizarre vision of a shotgun (statutory) covenant nuptial – where the bride-to-be must have been forced at gunpoint, or through blackmail or misrepresentation, to sign such an encumbering document as would require her to submit to counseling before both marriage and before any grant of man’s divorce, and to forgo the one-sided fiction of  “irreconcilable differences” as a legally-valid ground…but only in that particular state.  Unthinkable!!

(  SIFC: There are several far more astute and equally unflattering things to say in rebuke of that three-state “band-aid” experiment in preserving consecutive polygamy while pretending to be doing something meaningful to preserve traditional families, but that will have to be the topic of a future post.)

And with that, it came time to beat up on our friend, Billy….and on the good Dr. Al Moehler….on the grounds of the “serious” escalation of backlash against court-forced family-shredding for any reason, no reason or for a made-up reason, upon demand.    She taunts Billy for seeing some kind of “bogey-man” when he made this perfectly-true observation on our blog page…

“While you are at work your wife could file for divorce, get a Protective Order based on her word that she is afraid of you, and you couldn’t get into your own house. . .”

…while herself remaining oblivious to the effect of her label, “The More Serious Backlash Against No-Fault Divorce” and what all that says about her own bogey-man perceptions.    Does she really feel threatened by an elderly gentleman, with no money to extensively lobby with the big-leaguers, taking time to send an email to each member of his state legislature telling them the due process side of the argument?    We get the impression she feels very threatened, actually.   And if there’s any doubt she sees all Christ-followers as oppressors and “bogey-men”, she makes that unquestionably clear by the end of the post, even though she has the most oppressive and well-financed lobby in U.S. history squarely in her corner for the foreseeable future.   Or, could the Marxist enemies of the natural family actually be seeing the cracks in their own empire as a result of the courageous, both those of faith and of no particular faith, speaking up and taking the persecution for pushing back…even exposing the evil underbelly that (frankly) can’t be hidden from public view forever?

Famously, the New York state chapter of the National Organization for Women opposed the 2010 enactment of unilateral no-fault divorce laws in that state, based on the well-documented 40-year track record of being anti-woman.   Marcia A. Pappas, President, NOW NYS, Inc. Lillian Kozak & Gloria Jacobs, Co-Chairs of NOW NYS, Inc. Domestic Relations Law Task Force wrote in 2009, in a paper entitled“No Fault Divorce Legislation Hurts Women”:

“The National Organization for Women, New York State, Inc (NOW-NYS, Inc) strongly opposes no-fault divorce legislation that has been introduced in our Legislature.  Opposition to unilateral no-fault divorce has been our long-standing position with strong support from the entire NOW body…. There are myriad reasons why spouses choose to stay in a marriage or to divorce. This is true for battered women a well as women who have never been battered. No-fault divorce takes away their options, it allows the spouse with no grounds, batterer or not, to obtain a divorce over the objections of the less powerful spouse without negotiating a divorce settlement….There is much need for change to the current Domestic Relations Law before we send the weaker party and the children afloat on the sea of no fault induced poverty, as was the case in California, the first state to introduce no-fault divorce….
In addition, as reported in the Domestic Violence Task Force report previously referred to: “experience from other states shows that where grounds are unnecessary, domestic abuse [and other grounds] may be treated as tangential and therefore irrelevant to the allocation of marital resources…”

Baptist seminarians are the “scary guys” to the Captain, but prominent feminist leaders pointing out the hard facts…that removal of fault from the justice system more often than not sends women and children to the poor house…apparently isn’t scary at to this believer-hating blogger.

Of the really scary guy, Dr. Moehler, she says….

“All these nutbars fully share that blithering, foam­flecked, full­throated HATRED for no­fault divorce.  I’ve seen plenty of Christian men furiously rant about their hatred of women’s rights right up to and
including the right to vote. But most of their vitriol goes to no­-fault divorce.”

As we pointed out earlier (and last year), this really scary guy stood completely aside, fearing for his own denominational job, while another guy, whom she would no doubt deem even scarier than he, was booted from the helm of another major SBC seminary, and stripped of his retirement benefits at age 75, on ginned-up allegations, with not a scrap of evidence thereof produced in proof, and no due process to speak of.   It’s really “scary” to the Captain Cassidys of the world whenever due process is imposed, but she doesn’t even realize that she can take comfort in the fact that even evangelical women, occasionally forgetting that they are the mothers of sons for whom they’d normally like to see the benefits of due process, can become rabid “foamflecked” feminazis who scare the bejeebers out of men at the top of a denomination, especially comfortable men whose organization has literally been purchased by socialist global financiers who also see the biblical family as standing in the way of their power-grab.   Truth be told, much of the harlot church is fully in bed with her comrades, even if it’s only passively.    The Captain seems to be shadow-boxing against a mis-identified enemy.

Dr. Moehler and S. Michael Cravens were actually echoing the sentiments of the New York State Chapter of the National Organization for Women in 2009, when they vigorously opposed enactment of the last-to-be-enacted state unilateral no-fault divorce law on the basis that these laws had in reality impoverished women, far more often than “empowered” them.

“Captain Cassidy” ends her manifesto with this delusional assertion:

“If Christian-­dominated  American society had not turned divorce into a hellscape for women, an at­-fault  divorce system likely would have remained in place indefinitely.  Remember this, next time Christians whine about their lost power.”    

It should be noted, that far from “whining”, church leadership of either gender is typically nowhere to be seen when government social policies affecting families at the very root are on the line, and especially while the Sexual Revolutionaries are out in force at pivotal political moments.    They’ll purportedly go to jail as the persecution cost for not officiating homosexual nuptials, but go right on doing weddings over unions Jesus consistently called continuously adulterous.

(Picture credit:  Jaime H. Rivera)   

There’s plenty of documentation that the implemented Marxist strategy to bring down our constitutional republic by moral corruption long pre-dated this marital “hellscape” Ms. McGillicuddy alleges, and there’s zero evidence that anything but adherence to good, old-fashioned morality and individual self-sacrifice for the common good would have curtailed these well-orchestrated designs of the leftist social engineers.   This makes her assertion that were it not for troglodyte Christian husbands, “at-fault divorce would have remained in place” (as if enforceable marriage contracts were perfectly compatible with designs for sodomy-as-marriage, and as if there had ever been a groundswell of grass-roots demand for suddenly-unenforceable marriage contracts, rather than the elitist, special-interest legislative and judicial cram-down that actually occurred)…. absolutely laughable.   For a far more revealing and accurate account of those historical events (sans the demonization of Christ-followers — who have a fundamental right to follow Christ, by the way), SIFC recommends the book, “Stolen Vows” (2001), by Judy Parejko.

“Standerinfamilycourt” would be remiss to conclude this rebuttal without pointing out the Captain’s evidently-irresistable impulse to liken her every perceived threat from “patristic white male Christians” against the unfettered sexual autonomy vehicle of man’s “divorce”, to threats against the unfettered sexual autonomy vehicle of murder in the womb during all nine months (and shortly thereafter, of late).   SIFC counted no less than seven such impulses, punctuating each of her major arguments, and proving that if one has no respect for the sanctity of life, neither will there be any respect for the sanctity of holy matrimony, and vice versa.

To be sure, we are commanded by Christ to treat the vilest, most narcissistic individual critic of His saints as one of His precious Image-Bearers (even if that would purportedly insult them), and treat each of them in a way that leaves the judgment  to God for their acts flowing from the dark condition of their hearts, while praying for their eternal best.  May there be top-to-bottom healing in that ruptured McGillicuddy family.   This does not, however, mean that we let their toxic ideology go publicly unrebuked and unchallenged when it is indisputably harming all of society and threatening our constitutional republic (which all such people actually hold in contempt), in both the short and the long term.

The wicked flee when no one is pursuing, But the righteous are bold as a lion.   –  Proverbs 28:1

www.standerinfamilycourt.com 

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

 

 

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

Applying Gender To Scripture As it Suits Us: A “New” Eisegesis

by Standerinfamilycourt

Ye adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity against God?   –  James 4:4

Occasionally, “standerinfamilycourt” is forced to ban someone from our pages who is a persistent troll, who vehemently disagrees with our message, and who has as little respect for the purposeful decorum and mission of Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional and this blog page as they have respect for God’s word, rightly divided.    When such a person is an unchurched heathen or self-professed atheist, it’s sad enough, but when it’s someone steeped in contemporary “churchianity” who is in dire circumstances, and has been through the typical rough times that everyone who has suffered the larceny and indignity of being betrayed and involuntarily divorced has suffered, it’s downright heartbreaking.     However, from the beginnings back in 2014, the planning for these pages involved a strict “troll policy”, knowing that our message…

(1) would be tremendously unpopular with pew-sitter and pagan alike, and

(2) nevertheless, still needed the dignity to reach and persuade powerful people in the church, media, and government with scriptural truth which has not been manipulated by rogue bible publishers for well over 100 years.

Our pages were deliberately not set up as group forums, and consequently are not the place to debate theology.    There are hundreds of other places to do that.    Our page has the deliberately-planned mission and purpose which will not “morph” for as long as it takes to accomplish that mission and purpose, or to silence us altogether.     We do our very best to put the rightly-divided word of God out there as it appears in the original manuscript texts, after rigorously applying a full range of sound hermeneutical principles, as all worthy books by others on this topic do, and as all heretical books on this topic deliberately omit.     That’s the way it’s always been on our pages, and we bend for no one who can’t present solid proof according to hermeneutical principles and original texts that we’re materially wrong.    So far in a little over five years, no one has done so.   Instead, the usual challenge is thick with ad hominem,  and appeals to what hireling celebrity pastors have to say.

A recently-banned individual is physically suffering from a debilitating degenerative disease, whose covenant wife abandoned him because of it, and divorced him to adulterously “marry” another. This man is an extreme example of what compromised church leadership often leaves pages like ours contending with.    He works at Walmart and became a drain on the household income and self-indulgent lifestyle that many in our culture feel entitled to.   Having  been cruelly abandoned for greener pastures, he now desires to “marry” a female caretaker and feels there surely is an “exception” to Christ’s “unreasonable” moral code for people like him.    When he failed to secure “standerinfamilycourt’s” assent for this based on circumstances and a “God” who would never be that “unfair”, he next set his jaw on arguing his legalistic interpretation of Christ’s remarriage prohibition by strict application of gender, which he presumes provides him his “out”.    Obviously, he could go to almost any hireling pastor and get a hearty pat on the back for both his theory and his “plan”, most likely dubbing it as “God’s ‘provision”.      SIFC, however, told him in no uncertain terms he would lose his soul  if he indulges this plan of his, and that he needed to take counsel that he was no bible scholar.     This led to public charges of “arrogance” and “judging” directed at us, and he was issued the standard “troll warning”.

Having no appetite to invest time and posting space in a balanced, hermeneutical debate on rightly-dividing Matt. 7: 1-3, he was cut off when he ignored the troll warning.    People who follow our pages regularly get a balanced view on the topic of “judging” people inside and outside the church, as well as a chance to frequently observe the cultural havoc that antinomianism has wreaked in the church ever since the Reformation.

Standing firm for biblical moral absolutes in a wicked, selfish evangelical culture absolutely guarantees the perception of “arrogance” on SIFC’s part.  Long have we been accused by so-called “Christians” of “driving” people (potential converts, they mean) away.   These people who say this are shameless emotional bullies, and SIFC will not be shamed (or bullied) in the name of Jesus.    Long have we been accused of having no empathy or “compassion” for people’s human weaknesses, even after we point out that, according to scripture, this life is a “mist or vapor” and that eternity is forever.    As this individual vigorously attempted to do, we are regularly accused of personally “condemning people to hell” – a superpower we repeatedly assure people God did not grant us.     Pointing to the fact that Jesus’ words in Luke 16:18-31 also “condemned people to hell” who pursued non-widowed remarriage (and their “best life now”) did no good whatsoever.    In their mind, the Sovereign Creator of heaven and earth has no righteous authority to set moral absolutes for the building of holy character, nor for the good of society as a whole.   All humanists believe this, which is why humanism is always completely incompatible with true discipleship.   Speaking of hell, this person tellingly  likened obeying Christ in this area of sexual ethics to being “condemned” to living the rest of his natural life “in hell”, completely oblivious to the volumes that such an attitude speaks of the person’s actual relationship with Jesus, who apparently isn’t enough for him.   Another male commenter on our page (bless him!) attempted in vain to point out this latter observation to the wounded gentleman — who had repeatedly pressed the same lines of argument on other recent posts without violating the troll policy.

So, what is this gender-based eisegesis, and has it been contagious?  In a certain sense, it’s not really that new.    The Judaizers who try to justify and promote both consecutive and concurrent polygamy have a very similar legalistic argument, actually — and not too coincidentally, they are typically professing Christian men who have been badly burnt by a faultless unilateral divorce they got no say in (join the club, gentlemen).   Their pores absolutely ooze resentment while they claim to have “forgiven” their “ex” wives like the Good Book tells us to.    In this particular manifestation, our now-banned outraged troll posited the following (after previously exhausting several other arguments on other threads that were just as silly and unfounded)….

“my ‘ex’ divorced me, I didn’t divorce her.    In Matthew, it doesn’t talk about the wife divorcing her husband.   It says only if the husband divorces his wife and marries another woman is anybody committing adultery.   I’m not marrying a divorced woman and I didn’t do the divorcing, so how can I be guilty of adultery if I remarry?   If you’re going to throw out one thing Jesus said, you might as well throw all of it out.”

Besides an allegedly “selective” hermeneutic, SIFC was literally accused by this chap of having a log in the eye, but the irony of the above statement is rich, is it not?     Our determined critic doesn’t mind throwing out every bit of what Jesus (more importantly and centrally) said in Matthew 19:6,8 about man’s divorce not only being immoral, but also metaphysically impossible.    Our amorous friend was determined to hyperfocus on the what, because he didn’t dare attend to the why of what Jesus actually made an undeniably consistent pattern of saying, in elaboration to His indissolubility proclamation.    Grab a snatch of God’s word a la carte and completely ignore all context involved.   Ignore also what all of the apostles and earliest church fathers unanimously echoed in their writings.      Not very originally, our troll friend threw nearly every conventional argument out there that all determined remarriage adulterers invariably do (not “the unpardonable sin”, Jesus “allowed” divorce and remarriage for “sexual immorality”,  etc. etc.), before tossing this one last salvo out there.    If there was a touch of originality to this final argument of his, it was in the transparent feeble-mindedness of it, so we hope it doesn’t sprout legs and journey destructively through the marriage permanence community the way several other feeble-minded heresies have nevertheless done.

Moses did indeed deliver his regulations in a gender-specific fashion, but that doesn’t mean Jesus also did, even if one of His scribes chose a writing style that spoke to a patriarchally-oriented Hebrew culture to whom he was recounting the same incident as Mark related to a Gentile audience that included both sexes equally.  Jesus issued the most famous sermon in history in order to abrogate most of the sayings of Moses with a higher moral law than “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth”…. “it is written….but I say unto you….MOSES allowed…but I say unto you….”  

Another of Jesus’ scribes and one of his apostles both took pains to point out where the resurrection of Christ deliberately put men and women on equal footing when it comes to obeying Him from an authentic and sincerely grateful place in our hearts, not merely following a mechanical legality to the letter while finding a loophole for the unpalatable core principle involved.    “If I can’t get out of responsibility for my marriage even when my wife is unfaithful”, the disciples reasoned, “it’s better never to marry at all…”    As we see in scripture, several of them later changed their accustomed humanistic bias about this matter, and grew spiritually into teaching the same no-excuses unisex indissolubility that Jesus taught.

 And He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her; and if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery.”
– Mark 10:11-12

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
– Galatians 3:28

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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

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

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

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


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?

1 Comment


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!

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

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