Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames. – Sir Thomas More
Given his 1535 martyrdom for refusing to recognize Henry VIII’s divorce and adulterous remarriage to Ann Boleyn, does it seem at least a little reasonable to believe that Sir Thomas More might have been deeply troubled about the Marxist social engineering a successor Lord Chancellor named Gauke is currently cramming down the throats of over 80% of the UK citizens, a sample of whom resoundingly told Parliamentrecently they don’t want 6-month forced family-shredding (no-defense divorce) to become the immoral law in their country?
When Ireland was about legalize abortion a couple of years ago, every one of these groups, whose logos appear above, tracked and wrote about it on an almost weekly basis. When gay marriage was in the process of being legalized in numerous countries abroad (not the least of which was the UK), it was the top daily headline for every one of them. The push to radically expand unilateral “no-fault” divorce has been all over the UK papers for more than a year now, ever since a British high court did the right thing by the nation’s families last year in denying a 67-year old woman who had no legitimate grounds to seek a divorce against her 80-year old husband of 40 years. It wasn’t that this woman would never be divorced from her God-joined one-flesh mate under the UK civil law, however (unless the Lord brought her to repentance). It was only that it had been just 4 years since she moved out of their main house, and this decision made her await the final year under existing law to fully go her own selfish way with a chunk of the sizable marital estate.
You guys decided to sit this one out for some reason. One can only imagine if instead of an elderly heterosexual couple, this had been Elton John and his lovely “husband” David Furness being denied a quickie divorce under existing law. Would any of you have been able to resist sparring back at the outraged tabloids? Yet, in over a year’s time, not one of you has even shown awareness that traditional marriage in the UK literally is on its last lonely stand.
Believers who care about this issue were scratching our heads, but still willing to forgive and support you when two U.S. states in the last four years took the tremendously courageous step of very seriously attempting the repeal of forced family-shredding-on-demand by requiring that “no-fault” grounds only be allowed upon a joint petition or other form of documented mutual consent, but for public purposes, you chose to sit that one out as well.
“standerinfamilycourt” means no disrespect, but 90% of the infringement of religious liberty in the name of the Sexual Revolution can be traced directly back to that grossly irresponsible bill Gov. Ronald Reagan signed on September 5, 1969. In fact, innocent “Respondents” on the receiving end of a unilateral “no-fault” petition, having been charged with the made-up crime of “irreconcilable differences”, have suffered the earliest, worst and most numerous of religious freedom violations, including loss of God-assigned parental rights to influence and discipline, loss of ability to choose and direct their childrens’ parochial education, severe financial reprisals in court for not acquiescing to the petition, restraining orders where there was no lawful cause, jail time, loss of licenses, and on and on. And don’t forget, scripture tells us that if a Christian (or anyone else, for that matter) is “divorced” by their spouse, it is immoral to “remarry” for as long as that spouse remains alive, an act which Christ repeatedly called ongoing adultery. That item alone makes unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws the most severe of all religious freedom violations, other than religious acts deemed to be capital violations.
If your mission statements are sincere, how can you possibly be silently sitting these events out? How can you be so embarrassed to be seen with your brothers and sisters in Christ who care as much about this issue as all of the Apostles and early church fathers did?
At least Mr. Reagan eventually admitted that his signature on the death warrant for the institution of binding holy matrimony was his worst act in all of his years of public service.
The people of the UK have a tiny window of time before this destructive law is imposed upon them against their majority will. We’re going to be nice in this post and not say anything about how inexcusably the industry special interest group that is backing this is violating the Article 73 separation-of-powers provisions in the British constitution, but we would like to introduce you to your embattled counterparts in the UK who actively fight for the sanctity of heterosexual marriage in its own right. “Standerinfamilycourt” is pleading with you to come to their aid in any way you possibly can while this time window remains briefly open due to Brexit preoccupation (the hand of the Lord, perhaps?) And we all know you can give these family warriors at least the moral support they need right now!
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mr. Thomas Pascoe and Mr. Colin Hart, of the Coalition for Marriage (C4M). Please consider giving these gentlemen a hand in not allowing the liberal press and ruling elites to control the debate with the sort of narrative that the past 50 years’ track record in this country has overwhelmingly disproven.
Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. – Hebrews 13:4
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Matthew 6:32-33
Video credit: Jeff Morgan. Matthew Johnston interviewing Dr. Stephen Baskerville, February, 2019
Our blog spends most of its time and words mapping out the moral space between scripture and unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, all the while being well aware that this is “taboo” space which is alleged to be at odds with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. Actually, this moral space consists of three moral sub-spaces:
(1) the moral space between scripture and the allowance of fault-based divorce which does not violate the Constitution, but severely violates scripture (Matt.19:6,8 ) – Space “A”
(2) the moral space between fault-based unilateral divorce (Romans 13:4) and mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce – Space “B”,
and, finally
(3) the moral space between mutual-consent “no-fault” divorce and forced, unilateral “no-fault” divorce (Isaiah 5:20) – Space “C”.
(please click to enlarge picture)
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
“standerinfamilycourt” began pondering this due to the repeated persistence, in a small strategy discussion group, of a Catholic man who refuses to budge from Space “A” on both moral and constitutional grounds. He therefore stands opposed to the apparent consensus of the majority in that group: that our divorce law reform objective, particularly insofar as it encompasses the legislatures, should be Space “A” + Space “B”. It’s not at all that this gentleman believes per the bible that death is the only thing which severs and dissolves holy matrimony. On the contrary, as a “good Catholic”, he also believes that an “annulment” decree from the bishop does this, but in that case he would argue that some extrabiblical “defect” somehow made it “not a marriage”.
At the same time, a brilliant young legal scholar in the group also believes in reform encompassing only Space “A” – on technical constitutional grounds related to Articles 3 and 10 of the Constitution, but for pragmatic reasons, can settle for Space “A” + Space “B”, so long as this result doesn’t get overturned in court on those same constitutional grounds. (“Get ‘er done”!) The difference between the two gentlemen is in their motives and reasoning in arriving at the same end point. Our Catholic friend believes there are some instances other than physical death which lead God to assent to “dissolution” if church leadership does, and absent leadership corruption (a huge presumption), this would normally track with fault-based jurisprudence which would be better for the children of the marriage than their parents having an option to decide together to end their marriage. (Church traditionelevated above God’s commandment, by perceived “delegation”). Meanwhile, our millennial believes that God has delegated so much authority to the state that the Establishment Clause must override God’s law in order to prevent a “theocracy”. (State over God, because the alternative in a pluralistic society might be worse.) SIFC cannot agree with either view, because of Who God says He is, and the outright blasphemy involved with corrupting in any measure one of the key symbols of His holiness and His relationship with His people.
That said, SIFC can also “live with” a pragmatic reform result of Space “A” + Space “B”….but upon deep reflection, believes that if Jesus Christ were in this discussion group, He’d say that even Space “A” is too much “daylight” between the instructions He left us with and what we as Christian citizens will settle for in our family laws. Space “A” actually reflects the Pharisaical school of Shammai which He rebuked in Matthew 19, while Spaces “A” + “B” + “C” reflect the Pharisaical school of Hillel which He also rebuked in Matthew 19.
Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter heaven. Matthew 5:20
He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.” Matthew 19:8
Christ’s position would be: only God, and not civil government has authority over holy matrimony, and nothing short of holy matrimony is actually moral:
Space “A” + Space “B” + Space “C” – Space “A” minus Space “B” minus Space “C” = zero human authority to create holy matrimony or grant a divorce from it.
Christ would grant civil government the authority to track marriage and death records to support the union, but would say that all divorce is man-made and of no effect in the kingdom of God, unless the “marriage” it purports to “dissolve” was invalid and kingdom-unlawful to begin with. He would say that all authentic marriage is only God-made, and anything outside of that is adultery, which sends people to hell if they don’t repent of it, and for which He will eventually judge our unrepentant nation, especially if the shepherds of His church remain complicit. By contrast, one recent state is attempting to keep the usurped authority for the state to continue granting unilateral “no-fault”dissolutions, but prospectively only record God-joined unions (and all manner of other man-fabricated cohabitation arrangements) upon affidavit, and doing so in order that the state’s judges may escape perceived persecution and actual liability at the hand of the homosexualist community from conscience-based refusal to officiate sodomous weddings.
“Standerinfamilycourt” is sincerely wrestling with this….
So…just how acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for change in a law that is presently sending people to hell by the millions, in favor of a reformed law that maybe only sends people to hell by the thousands (on the prevention side), and increases the legal avenues for repentance which avoids hell (on the rectification side)?
How much more or less acceptable in God’s sight is it to advocate for a law that prohibits divorce altogether (that is, strikes the dissolution statute in its entirety — whether or not there exist what men might consider to be “fault-based grounds”), thereby sending few or no one to hell because they divorced their true spouse, but sending some to hell because they can no longer civilly-divorce a faux spouse, and which also closes off all avenues of biblical repentance via man’s law? After all, it can’t be emphasized often enough: the law is a teacher, (especially with regard to the unregenerated who have no way of being counseled from within by the Holy Spirit), for better or for worse.
“standerinfamilycourt” may never have the answer to this dilemma until actually standing before the throne of God, when all of a believer’s life works will be judged to see what survives the fire:
For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.
Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are. 1 Cor. 3:10-17
“standerinfamilycourt” is right to be concerned that all of the very costly and difficult activism, in terms of changing man’s divorce law, is only “wood, hay and stubble”. But if legal reform could also change hearts, reduce the massive number of people dying in a state of adultery, and increase theharvest of godly offspring who ultimately become citizens of heaven, that becomes a precious metal which will withstand the fire.
In Mathew 6, Jesus told us to seek His righteousness (presumably for ourselves, but perhaps also for others) while we’re first seeking the kingdom of God. In Matthew 5:6, He declared, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Both verses clearly promise a fulfillment from Him if our heart motives are what they should be, and we’re doing our part to obey the seeking, hungering and thirsting part.
Many earnest believers will argue either (1) “No one serving as a soldier entangles himself in the affairs of this life, that he might please the one having enlisted him” (2 Timothy 2:4), and therefore eschews all political involvement by Christians, or (2) God’s law of marriage only applies to the redeemed. Although the first idea has some merit, the second is completely contrary to Christ’s instructions, so “standerinfamilycourt” respectfully rejects both notions, in times like these.
It seems, therefore, the moral focus needs to be on the net effect on souls arriving in the kingdom of God, in clean wedding garments. That is all that will survive the fiery test of our life works. Obviously, if the “dissolution” statutes were all repealed from the lawbooks of all 50 states and not replaced, the expected result would be a wave of both righteous and unrighteous marital abandonments, the former resulting in repentance from adultery , and the latter resulting in a massive, if not unprecedented, increase in adultery because of the cultural intolerance of being told by government what to do. As predominantly immoral as our society has grown in the past five decades (encouraged by the enactment of increasingly immoral civil laws), perhaps the effects would initially “wash”, then who knows what would follow after that?
Situational ethics and moral relativism are never healthy things, and are downright nauseating to SIFC. This is the mistake Moses appears to have made, in endeavoring to “manage” sin in a pretty identical situation (Deuteronomy 24:1-4) instead of strongly rebuking it, and Christ showed that He was less than impressed with this. After all, it was not Moses whom Christ commended as the “greatest among all men born of woman”. It was instead His cousin, John, who sacrificed his very head to try and warn two adulterers to repent to escape hell. The kingdom of God suffers violence, not appeasement and accommodation! In accepting moral Space “A” or moral Space “A” + “B” for pragmatic reasons, there is both situational ethics and moral relativism involved, because human compromise is being aimed at seeking to prevent a perceived greater evil anticipated from a stricter law, due to inherently evil human nature.
Talk like this can be very unsettling to those who have never had the constitutionally-false notion of a thick wall of separation between church and state meaningfully, intellectually challenged. Certainly, among millennials, there is a long-fed fear (much of it, historical-revisionism-driven and propaganda-driven) causing this generation to struggle in particular with the Establishment Clause, and almost elevating it over the Free Exercise, clause out of concern, (perhaps) that Christianity will lose its moral authority and representation if Allah, Buddha, Krishna and Marx are not given equal place with the Most High God of the bible in our society. A lot of it has to do with the time period in which boomers vs. millennials and generation X-ers lived and grew up. And that has a lot to do with (believe it or not) the downstream effects of enactment of unilateral “no-fault” divorce. Those of us whose hair is now graying grew up for at least a couple of decades during a time when Christian values indeed dominated, and families under all religions actually thrived, even if they were prevented from dominating or having equal representation. That’s because we still HAD our families, directly due to Judeo-Christian domination of power structures and government.
In another February interview, Dr. Baskerville told World Magazine , “The churches withdrew from private life? And the state moved in. What had been the role of pastors and priests became the role of lawyers, judges, and social workers. The church has never tried to reclaim its turf, and has been a major contributor of secularization, of people feeling the church is not part of their life when it’s not enforcing the marriage contract.
“What can be done now? The church has got to step in. Much of the history of the Christian church has been brave churchmen speaking out when the state overreaches its authority. This whole area of sexual morality is, frankly, our turf and God’s turf. The state has a role but is overstepping.”
Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no? But he perceived their craftiness, and said unto them, Why tempt ye me? Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar’s. And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s. And they could not take hold of his words before the people: and they marvelled at his answer, and held their peace. – Luke 20: 22-26
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse posted another excellent question from that interview on the Ruth Institute facebook page: Q: Were churches sleeping when no-fault divorce emerged?
A: Some churches did raise their voices, but much of their attention was diverted at the time by Vietnam and civil rights. There was very little debate, very little discussion. No-fault divorce, the welfare state, and the cohabitation explosion were all usurpations of the church’s role by the state. Governmental power was inserted into a realm of private life that had been the realm of the churches.”
All of the above is true enough, of course, but does not represent the whole picture, at least with regard to the Protestant churches:
[standerinfamilycourt 3/6/2019 on this Ruth Institute Post ]Martin Luther & co are partly to blame for the church apathy. Forced divorce would be a much bigger issue had he not turned over the authority to the civil state to regulate holy matrimony in order to obtain access to man-made “dissolution” certificates, then established the Reformation church on the outright heresy that original holy matrimony bonds can be severed by anything but death. The real insult to the church is that the civil state is deigning to regulate marriage at all, much less on a “no-fault” basis, but heresy reigns supreme, and revised bibles back it up. For the church to do much to oppose state regulation of marriage, much less any kind of tyrannical divorce law, they would have to acknowledge that all resulting “remarriages” are morally and spiritually invalid adultery in all cases. When they can get away, and indeed grow rich, with not doing so, that’s too big a morsel for most to bite off.
One of Martin Luther’s more outrageous quotes (actually acknowledging that only death dissolves holy matrimony, and providing a very creative solution) goes thusly…
Dr. Morse’s Roman Catholic Church has their own canon law, and has continued to claim its authority over marriage, notwithstanding the state’s competing claim to that authority. Both claims are overstated and distorted from a kingdom of God perspective.
Perhaps it’s best to step back and look at the behavior of our nation’s founders and their choices with regard to allocating authority over marriage, between human government (Caesar) and God’s commandment that marriage was indissoluble except by physical death. It was these men who claimed “certain inalienable rights” directly from God, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is interesting to note that neither the U.S. Constitution nor any of the original state constitutions eventually ratified in the thirteen colonies even attempted to allocate the authority to regulate marriage to civil government at all, even though Federalism and Article 10 left the states this space. Based on this, SIFC believes it is fair to say that our nation’s founders started off on the conservative end of Space “A”, fairly aligned with biblical instruction, and this is one of the reasons God incubated and fostered our nation, making it extraordinary in its greatness. In other words, there wasn’t a lot of moral space between the Bible and the Constitution until case law and legislatures put the moral separation space there later.
A Word About Our Founders, the Framers of the Constitution Were all of our principal founders followers disciples of Jesus Christ? No. Many were deists and humanist subscribers to natural law, including Thomas Payne, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen and Benjamin Franklin. Others, like John Jay, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton, Noah Webster were unequivocal about following Christ. Virtually all of them knew and expressed an overt warning that the form of government they had designed and bequeathed to the future citizens of this nation would only continue to function in an environment of national biblical morality.
Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence said: “Without morals a nation cannot subsist for any length of time.”
John Adams said, “Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.”
Though widely assumed to be a deist, Benjamin Franklin said, “God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without his aid?”
( SIFC: That can be the rise of a nation for a kingdom purpose, or it can be tolerated rise of a malevolent stronghold into an empire to punish an unrepentant nation that once enjoyed His extreme favor, and in yesteryear faithfully carried out that purpose, but now is leading the world into deeper debauchery and idolatry.)
Also, observed by Ben Franklin: “Only virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports”, and, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the bible.”
John Adams declared, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our Constitution was made for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
(Tell us 21st century citizens about that, Mr. 2nd U.S. President!)
Finally, Noah Webster said, “…the moral principles and precepts contained in the scriptures ought to form the basis for all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils that men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from the despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the bible.”
It is frequently argued today that we can’t go back to what we first had as a nation (as if the Lord God were indifferent), because our nation’s residents are no longer homogenous enough for it to work, therefore, we have no practical choice but to govern according to the prevailing cultural morality. (Much of this, it can be quite accurately observed, is said with the motive of coddling and appeasing the homosexualists.) “standerinfamilycourt” hereby prophesies that if we continue on as a nation with this ridiculous fallacy, the Muslim caliphate ultimately will not share that opinion with us, and will not hesitate to impose Shariah law on a morally-unruly citizenry. There is plenty of historical precedent for this in the bible and recorded world history. God owes the United States of America nothing, but He allowed first the Assyrians and then the Persians to overtake the nation of Israel. After seven decades of subjection, He required an intense purge of unlawful “marriages” and restored societal morality before He would restore sovereignty to His favored nation whose religious leadership was complicit in the systemic evil.
The following is only a theory on SIFC’s part, but it has been well-tested by the first nearly 200 years of our nation, when Baptists, Anabaptists and Methodists (who were socially disdained back in England) got along just fine with the Anglicans and Presbyterians. Later on, the Jews and Catholics got along just fine with the Protestant leaders and citizens under the civil marriage laws that prevailed until 1970. God’s moral favor gave cover for civil governments to impose that morality on the Mormons and Muslims, a circumstance that today shows signs of beginning to break down. Civil law does not need to prohibit man’s consensual divorce in order to appease God and wisely govern the people, but it must never forcefamily dissolution and fragmentation on innocent family members while morally and financially rewarding the guilty family members. Society begins to break down at the point when obeying God’s biblical family law (whose very core is Gen. 2:21-24 and Matthew 19:4-6,8) becomes either very difficult or impossible under the corrupted civil laws of men.
Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people. – Proverbs 14:34
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
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
This blog post has been in-progress for the better part of a year now. In a way, there’s both good and bad in that happenstance. On the “good” side, the British “wheels of progress” have ground very slowly – God be praised! On the bad side, we’ve witnessed an adulterous royal “wedding” (to which the U.S. sent its second most godless Anglican clergyman to take part in the nuptials), and….the echo chamber of the UK media has had little pushback as they trot out the same unsupportable arguments that have long been discredited and overwhelmingly disproven by the five decades of ruinous track record for unilateral “no-fault” divorce in the U.S.
A hopelessly flawed official report (“study” result) was published in the House of Commons in October, 2018 with enactment recommendations. Part 2 of this post will break down that “study” for our readers, in detail.
Since last spring, “standerinfamilycourt” has been reading an avalanche of articles that look and sound like they have literally been plucked from a dusty 1969 box, and retyped to add the requisite “u’s” and replace the “z’s” with “s’s”. Those articles were “snake oil” back then, when U.S. church and government leaders were shamefully duped by the latent cultural Marxism taking dead aim at the U.S. Bill of Rights, and they’re still “snake oil” in their recycled state as they’re being dusted off (again) in London.
Where’s the mention of the direct impact this regime has had on the willingness of U.S. young people to ever marry at all, rather than cohabit (and thereby keep the reckless totalitarian government out of their homes altogether), and the concupiscent attorneys out of their pockets?
Where is the mention of all the constitutional challenges being renewed by citizens in numerous states to try to overturn the various U.S. state laws and vindicate their violated fundamental rights?
The chief argument that seems to be carrying the day in the UK (according to the media and the official Parliamentary report) is the utterly bizarre notion that forcibly shredding someone’s family and destroying their generations, robbing their family’s hard-earned wealth and materially compromising most family members’ futures will somehow “reduce conflict”. Hello?
Another key U.S. reality that goes unmentioned in the UK (one-sided) debate: the bulk of attorney fees in the United States’ $100 billion-a-year “family law” industrial complex come not from the divorce itself, but from years and years of subsequent legal conflict between family members for so long as the children remain minors. Fifty years of U.S. experience have exposed this spurious “reduced acrimony” argument as completely untrue, so it’s beyond ridiculous that in a day and age of worldwide instant media access, elite special interests are pulling this over on the British public! If only the BBC would dare to air the U.S. documentary DivorceCorp,and give the railroaded British citizens a truthful look at their future under this “reform”.
“Barbaric!” they all hissed. Several of us would argue that what’s really barbaric is what the U.S. has been saddled with for decades, which was the literal incubator that has since led to a veritable Pandora’s Box of ever-worsening religious freedom and parental rights violations, for both intact and government-shattered families.
Not one of these liberal “rags” showed the least bit of concern or compassion for Tini’s grieving family members – the ones with the clean hands! How outrageous of every one of them to demonize this faithful and gracious husband who has every right and responsibility before God to keep his family whole.
The real fault in the Tini Owens case, contrary to the media hype and thick emotional huckstering, is that existing UK law still allows for an entirely unilateral divorce to be had by the offending party after 5 years of self-imposed non-cohabitation, and probably allows an abandoner to also take half of the family assets, which in the case of the Owenses, was considerable:
“They built up a hugely successful £5million-a-year mushroom growing business and amassed four ‘nice houses’, including a stunning £630,000 Cotswolds farmhouse, where the family lived, and holiday homes in Wales and France.” – Daily Mail, July, 2018
Much hand-wringing ensued the refusal of the appeals courts to hear the case, rather than state the obvious: Ms. Owens had separated from Mr. Owens in 2015, and according to one media source, had been in an adulterous relationship from 2012, so Mr. Owens could have filed a fault-based petition against her in due time much shorter than 5 years, but apparently feared God and had compassion for his wife. The reality is that the UK government did not owe Mrs. Owens a financial reward for selfishly breaking up her 40-year marriage and leaving her blameless husband four years ago. It is against sound public policy, indeed, for them to do so.
Three things tend to be a commonality with elite social engineering, as we’ve painfully learned here in the “colonies”: emotional pitches run absolutely amok in the media, the laser-like focus always locks onto the most extreme outlier case that could possibly be dredged up, as if this rare case was going to bind and ruin the whole nation, and lastly, there is a conspicuous absence of grassroots demand for the “urgent” change outside of commercially-paid and sponsored “surveys”.
As was the case in the U.S., and continues to be, there are a few quality voices speaking out against this poorly-justified piece of legislation, including Thomas Pascoe, campaign director at Coalition for Marriage, who recently said in an interview, “We already have no-fault divorce, but it takes between two years when both parties agree and five when they do not. This standstill period recognises the gravity of divorce. It allows both parties time to try and save the marriage and allows both time to make reasonable adjustments to their lives where no agreement can be found.”
Similarly, Colin Hart of the Christian Institute points out the resoundingly obvious truth that “no-blame” actually constitutes no justice.
Finally, in the House of Commons briefing paper, Sir Edward Leigh (Conservative) was quoted as having pointed to evidence from other countries which, he said, showed the wider consequences such legislation might have. ” Sir Edward then set out other potential impacts of family breakdown, drawing on evidence from a study in the US which argued that 75% of low-income divorced women with children had not been poor when they were married, but Douglas Allen also points out in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy that “the real negative impact of the no-fault divorce regime was on children, and increasing the divorce rate meant increasing numbers of disadvantaged children.” In the UK, Sir Edward continued, a 2009 review by the then Department for Children, Schools, and Families had found that a child not growing up in a two-parent family household was more likely to experience a number of problems which he detailed. He also spoke of other research on the effects of family breakdown. Sir Edward considered that the potential adverse consequences of no-fault divorce should rule out its introduction.” (Sir Edward was on the right track, but still didn’t have the gist or full evidence of what this kind of legislation has done in the U.S. after the divorce, nor that it has been the least bit successful in curbing “conflict” – a function of disingenuous problem definition by the majority.)
Sadly, none of these voices are availing themselves of the abundance of available, documented evidence that these policies have horribly failed in country after country around the world. History is eerily repeating itself fifty years later, with no lessons learned. As was true in the 1960’s, female attorneys have been conspiring this con job, and gaining the blind support of the elites. According to the president of the UK Supreme Court, Baroness Hale, the majority of “solicitors” (practicing attorneys) in the UK are women. She has been advocating for unilateral, forced divorce since the early 1990’s, as had the feminist U.S. womens’ bar groups. Lady Hale asserts in 2016, more than half of all divorce petitions were submitted on the basis of adultery or “unreasonable behavior” (a.k.a. “emotional abuse”, in U.S. legalspeak). We actually need to be honest about the fact that the main driver of divorce is, and always has been adultery (and the desire to legitimize adulterous relationships). Civilized, sustainable societies don’t incentivize adultery. The objective of these feminists has always been to remove the father from the family (forcibly, if necessary) so that he won’t be in a position to obstruct further social engineering.
These special interests allege that the (existing) law forces separating couples to “make more aggressive allegations against one another” in order to secure a divorce, verbatim the overblown 1969 argument in the U.S. , as if sweeping excrement under an “irreconcilable differences” rug, will take away the stench. On our side of the pond, we know that all this philosophy has accomplished is train our society to lie in ever-broader ways and blame others for our own self-indulgences.
This cartoon points out the U.S. situation where the very same lobbying professionals who were falsely asserting that unilateral divorce-on-demand would “reduce acrimony” – rather than merely postpone it, were actually about to start ramping up their profits by egging the acrimony on during the proceedings and long afterward – to the point of having non-custodial parents jailed and worse.
In the UK, it’s objectively true that such “aggressive” allegations must be made to shorten the waiting period from 5 years to 2 years under current law, while in the U.S. prior to 1970, only one state allowed a couple to mutually agree to end their marriage, while the UK does not allow for mutual consent divorces either, according to the government discussion paper(a fact that conveniently escapes the “problem” definition in the House of Commons analysis – for which there is, in fact, a commercial reason that goes undiscussed). Both were unstable situations, however, mustthe UK repeat the U.S. constitutional travesty of killing a gnat with a sledge hammer and reaping the harsh societal consequences? What would be wrong with instead implementing a mutual consent joint petition, with perhaps a 180 day waiting period? Why not retain fault-based grounds where there’s no consent, but eliminate the waiting period altogether if the charges are proven? As Thomas Pascoe pointed out, no alternative models were adequately considered, which strongly implies that a prescribed “solution” was looking for a “problem”, rather than the other way around.
No-fault divorce was reportedly first introduced by the Family Law Act 1996, but its provisions were later deemed “unworkable” after a pilot attempt and it was repealed. It has been widely supported by prominent members of the judiciary, lawyers and relationship charities (in other words, the elite, and not broad citizenship demands. ) Quoting a 2001 article in the Daily Mail about the repeal,
“The admission came as Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine at last killed off Part Two of the Family Law Act, which would have allowed a husband or wife to ditch their spouse in 12 months without ever having to bear blame or answer for their behaviour.
“Opponents of the law brought in nearly five years ago by John Major’s Tory government, and enthusiastically backed by Labour, insisted no-fault divorce would increase break-ups rather than help families.
“Lord Irvine has now acknowledged that the opponents of the system were right and the law would be repealed.”
So, what has changed, UK?
Between that previous attempt to move toward forced-divorce-on-demand and the current campaign, the Anglican Church liberalized its doctrine in 2002 to promote “remarriages” that Jesus consistently called adulterous, effectively clearing away any temporal reasons for meaningful opposition from the country’s largest and its state church.
Writes a friend of “standerinfamilycourt” who lives in Cornwall,
“It’s been handed over to the Crown prosecution who believe it’s the only way forward now for the Government to pass , So sad
“I spoke to my MP Derek Thomas Conservative MP for St Ives Cornwall, knew him before he was an MP but when I talked to him about divorce and remarriage his face went blank, end of conversation. I will have to write or email him a letter, we are going down the pan quickly here in the UK Brexit abortion now this, yes sad to say the big wigs here follow the States, money to be made let’s go go go.”
Perhaps this Cornish friend will now be able to educate her MP about the five-decade U.S. adventure in state-enforced family shredding, and inform him that a growing number of people in the States don’t think setting back the family clock 50 years is actually that bad an idea. This is not yet a “done deal”. Bad policy was enacted and repealed before in the UK. This is even worse policy, and does not deserve to be enacted, despite the powerful endorsements. Even India had the common sense to repeal faultless unilateral divorce practices in their country, ruling them unconstitutional violations of equal protection and property rights.
Discretion will guard you, Understanding will watch over you… To deliver you from the strange woman, From the adulteress who flatters with her words; That leaves the companion of her youth And forgets the covenant of her God; For her house sinks down to death And her tracks lead to the dead; None who go to her return again, Nor do they reach the paths of life. – Proverbs 2: 11, 16-18
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
David Franklin, director for Bartow Baptist Association and Georgia coordinator for the National Day of Prayer, called upon those at the prayer gathering at the State Capitol to stretch their hands toward the two houses of legislators and pray for unity in the government. GERALD HARRIS/Index
by Standerinfamilycourt
“Now no one after lighting a lamp covers it over with a container, or puts it under a bed; but he puts it on a lampstand, so that those who come in may see the light.” – Luke 8:16
“….gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” – Galatians 5:23-24
There’s no question about it, disciples who make up their mind to pay the very high price to obey Christ, that is, to choose not to enter into a subsequent intimate relationship or civil marriage with another person while their legally-estranged true spouse is alive, is probably the most countercultural type of figure in modern society, probably on a scale with the first “Followers of the Way” in the first century church, even if their executed bodies are not being used as street torches, as recently depicted in the 2018 motion picture, “Paul, Apostle of Christ”.
“For we bestow our attention; not on the study of words, but on the exhibition and teaching of actions, — that a person should either remain as he was born, or be content with one marriage; for a second marriage is only a specious adultery. “For whoever puts away his wife,” says He, “and marries another, commits adultery;” not permitting a man to send her away whose virginity he has brought to an end, nor to marry again.” (Athenagoras – 175 A.D., A Plea For The Christians, 33)
“Standers”, for purposes of this post will also include those who, based on moral conscience and scriptural instruction, have exited a civilly-legal “marriage” of the sort Jesus called continuously adulterous, even if they’ve never actually had a covenant spouse (as Jesus defined in Matthew 19:4-6). The true measure is the extent that their life choices and the significant, visible sacrifices they make, speak biblical truth about marriage into a deafened, jaded culture, and this measure is what this post will bring into focus. Repenters from an unlawful union are standing for the sanctity of holy matrimony in their own circumstances, and quite often they suffer even greater censure and persecution at the hands of other believers than do those standing for the soul of their true one-flesh partner and for the rebuilding of their own covenant family. In a broader sense, the ranks of “standers” also includes pastors with congregations, many of whom are in intact biblical, covenant marriages, who gladly suffer very real career consequences (along with their family) as the high price for putting rightly-divided scripture and the souls of their flock above the corrupted circa-1970’s doctrine change of their denomination. Likewise, “standers” include Catholic priests who stand strong against abuse of annulment canons, and who speak out for the souls of those served communion while they are living in what that church euphemistically calls “irregular circumstances”.
Not all standers can go lobby at the state capital, or have the means (time, treasure, talent) to bring a constitutional appeal of their state statute, or create effective media that exposes the travesties of unilateral “no-fault” divorce to the uninformed, nay, the duped public. But, not being able to do these things certainly doesn’t meanthey aren’t making a very significant contribution in the big picture journey toward success. Of course, those whom the Lord has resourced to do both over time, will make an even greater contribution.
The truth is that many of these standers who have a covenant spouse off in the Far Country in an adulterous civil-only “marriage” to a counterfeit would actually prefer not to see unilateral “no-fault” laws reformed to be consent-based only. They fear the possibility that their prodigal may lose the ready ability to repent by divorcing out of these immoral arrangements, and may die in their sin as a result, if the counterfeit spouse won’t consent. There would certainly be a much greater risk of this if we went all the way back to the fault-only laws of the 1960’s. We talked to those reform risks in a much-earlier blog post. Meanwhile, the Lord is still using even the passive witness of covenant marriage standers in many powerful ways. Here we discuss just seven of them that relate to cultural influence.
At the end of our days, here is how the Lord will test the result of all of our choices and activities, in terms of how we’ve used our time, treasure and talent. Our part in getting an evil law repealed won’t count for much in itself, really, but the souls that we’ve helped to heaven as a result of the sacrifices in our role, most certainly will:
“For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward.If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.” – 1 Corinthians 3:11-15
Here is how countless unsung “standers”, in their everyday lives, are making an enormous difference, in this life and the next:
1.) Standers’ eventual reconciliations with the spouse of their youth is slowly debunking the legal myth of “irreconcilable differences”
One of “standerinfamilycourt’s” absolute favorite activities is collecting, organizing and resharing all of the miraculous testimonies of covenant families being put back together by the Lord God Almighty after decades of estrangement, and after intervening adulterous remarriages that even involved the birth of non-covenant children.
The divorce industry estimates this is roughly 5% of couples the legal system has forcefully estranged at the request of just one of the spouses. To be sure, some of these reconciliations are sinful because the spouses involved still belong in God’s eyes to somebody else, namely the spouse of their youth.
But think of it: 1,000,000 marriages a year “dissolved” by the legal system for a span of 50 years since unilateral “no-fault” divorce was enacted in the 49 United States: that’s approaching 50 million marriages cumulatively, of which 5% is 2,500,000 “irretrievably broken” marriages nevertheless made whole again in that time span, over 40,000 for each state in the union. Just imagine if even 1,000 restored constituent couples showed up to register a 5-minute testimony before the state legislative committee hearing, where a bill is being considered to restrict the availability of “irreconcilable differences” as grounds for divorce only by mutual petition! Will such a bill continue to be killed “off the record” in the Calendar Committee, as has been the case in Texas at least once since 2017? Would mainstream news media dare to ignore a story like that?
2.) Standers’ celibacy (and typical financial sacrifice) acts like a vehicle-mounted bullhorn into the culture
Our culture has for centuries screamed that we are entitled to a sexual relationship throughout our lives, and therefore any law, moral or civil, that makes this less accessible is by definition harsh and unjust. This was the siren song of the Catholic humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, who quite literally managed to stamp the Protestant Reformation with the ticking time bomb of family-destroying licentiousness. Jesus begged to differ:
For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven….” – Matthew 19:12
Standers, if their motives are pure, always put eternal souls first in everything they undertake while their one-flesh spouse is off in the Far Country.
To be sure, it’s much easier not to be called a “divider of the brethren” by their pastor when they won’t go to that adulterous wedding, or won’t join that home group run by the adulterous couple who gives the most time and money to the church, or when they complain about the “marriage enrichment” class that’s scheduled featuring “the blended family pastor” being a bad influence on the flock. It’s much easier not to have their adult children upbraiding them for not being “emotionally stable” enough to “move on” and stop causing conflict in the extended family when their one-flesh has “remarried” the estranged spouse of another living person. It’s substantially less excruciating not to have to endure the pain and worry on the faces of our elderly parents who may well go to their graves wondering what’s going to happen to their child when we reach their age. (Truth be told, it’s hard enough dealing with those emotional thoughts in our own hearts from time to time.)
The pastor who no longer has a congregation, as a directconsequence of refusing to “marry” another, after his covenant wife has left him to “marry” a more prosperous pastor, but who goes on to establish an enduring marriage permanence ministry while he’s replaced in his former church role by a shepherd who is indeed “the husband of more than one wife”–perhaps creates the loudest bullhorn of all. But the congregation he was forced to leave may never fully understand the extent of their loss, this side of eternity. Here, unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws have successfully attacked a church with its own doctrine, removing a godly pastor in the process and replacing him with a godless one who only has the veneer of “managing his family well”.
3.) Standers’ lifestyle is actually admired by the future policy makers of our nation
The future policymakers of our nation are increasingly the children and grandchildren of divorce. They are some of the Sexual Revolution’s survivors. In four years of readership responses to 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce! , some of the best have come from those young people who are raising tiny children and still suffering from having too many “grandparents” in the picture. They can’t believe someone would make the kind of sacrifice it takes to actually obey the bible. They can’t believe the integrity of standers, compared to their own pastor. They can’t believe what they weren’t taught in church that might have made a huge difference in their estranged parents’ marriages. They can’t believe that they can yet draw a spiritual line in the sand in their own young family for the sake of their own children and grandchildren, and someone will stand with them. Some can’t believe that a few mature people will say, “Judgment begins with the house of the Lord”, so stop ragging on the gays when most of the heterosexuals are living in papered-over adultery.
“standerinfamilycourt” got the first taste of this in March, 2013 while attending the March For Marriage in Washington, D.C. organized by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). A parade of well-spoken, far-seeing millennials took the platform and talked about how the corruption of marriage had impacted their own families of origin. Many looked idealistically at the hope of repealing “no-fault” laws, recognizing that this was the vehicle that took the nation from “Point A” to where we now were, on that chilly early spring day when oral arguments were in progress at the Supreme Court for two same-sex marriage cases. It wouldn’t be long before some of the rulings to follow, in the spate of 2014-2015 homosexual rights cases, would embolden a revival of judicial challenges to unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws by the aggrieved, and would strengthen legislative efforts for “family law” reform, which were also reviving after a period of dormancy, made more urgent as the culture continued to deteriorate.
As authors Leila Miller and Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse capture in their respective books, these young adults grew up silenced and stifled to speak out against either their parents’ selfish personal choices or the government-promoted family fragmentation and sequential polygamy norm that prevailed in their church pews when they were growing up. Now they see adults not only not hesitating to “diss” the blatantly unscriptural “blended family pastor”, but also care so much about a return to 1st century biblical morality that they’re willing conspicuously to live it out in their own lives, in other words, to take up their cross and follow Christ.
Assuming the Lord stays His own hand of judgment long enough for the emerging voices in this generation to begin to have influence over their peers and the existing power structures, the pendulum will eventually swing back from the current cultural depravity. We see this even now, as a sizable percentage of this age group simply refuses to participate in the entrenched moral corruption.
4.) Standers’ unselfish prayer life goes straight to God’s ear on behalf of the nation for which they are interceding
Every covenant marriage stander lives with the very real possibility that their prodigal spouse will die unrepentant in their sin and wind up in hell. They live with the terrifying possibility that some or all of the children will emulate that parent, and meet the same eternal fate. They wish they could evacuate all their progeny from this immoral culture that prevails even at church, and go colonize Mars, if that could but change the trajectory for their covenant family. If they spend any time on their knees at all, they know that the situation was the result of demonic forces going all the way back to the snake in the Garden just before Eve bit the apple, and it’s going to take nothing less than God’s direct intervention to redeem any part of the situation.
Paul warned the Corinthian and Ephesian churches (and by extension, us):
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh,for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete. – 2 Corinthians 10:3-6
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. – Ephesians 6:12
It’s not at all fun to wear this armor. With so much on the line for them personally, however, standers tend to have more motivation to faithfully, consistently and persistently do so. Nobody wants to see their one-flesh life partner meet with the same fate as the rich man Jesus discusses at the end of Luke 16.
Meanwhile, God, who has been allowing a progressive series of ever more devastating (unheeded) judgments on the land over each of the past 5 decades since the enactment of civilly-forced divorce, along with legalized baby-murder and hireling behavior by His shepherds, is seeking for a reason not to go ahead and finalize His judgment. Standers know this. God finds various ways to keep reminding the community of covenant marriage standers that giving our nation over to its worst internal and external enemies is not His preferred choice of action, but the hour is very late, historically speaking.
Abraham came near and said, “Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will You indeed sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous who are in it?Far be it from You to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” – Genesis 18: 23-25
5.) Standers are driving bible study much deeper than would be the case if this controversy over holiness did not exist in the church
Most Christians today assume that the myth that our founders “required” a rigid separation between church and state, while perceived as patently invalid when it comes to abortion or same-sex “marriage” being unacceptable, but when it comes to heterosexual marriage laws, they don’t see a substantial biblical issue. That’s because our bibles have been altered over time by the social engineers of the last two centuries, who posed as seminarians.
We all thought for a long time that we could simply select a contemporary English bible version that made the text within clear and relatable, with lots of “trustworthy” commentary notes at the bottom, bring it home to the coffee table, crack it open once in a while, and trust it completely as guidance for our lives. In fact, since Christ died (we were told) for our past, present and future sins, we were “under grace”, even if our understanding, hence our obedience to it, was less than perfect on an ongoing basis.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”, right?
Little did most of us know, that most contemporary renderings of Romans 8:1 omit a very crucial last phrase from that verse…
“…no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk by the Spirit and not according to the flesh.”
And though most of us knew that Luke 16:18 forbid remarriage after man’s divorce without any exceptions, we didn’t dare imagine that the next 13 verses containing the story of the rich man and Lazarus was an eternal warning against seeking “your best life now”, by doing such a thing, even though it was literally the next thought out of Christ’s mouth, wrapping up the conversation in Luke 16. Indeed, in most of our churches, one simply did not speak of hell, especially concerning anyone who had ever repeated the Sinner’s Prayer, no matter how they were currently living….much less connect the adultery repeatedly spoken of by Jesus with regard to remarriage, with the adultery spoken of by Paul in asserting that such will have no inheritance in the kingdom of God (“do not be deceived”).
Even though there were at least three recorded instances of Jesus Christ warning that for any man to “marry” any divorced woman was committing adultery, we were assured by celebrity seminary presidents that this was only a one-time act, “over with” on the wedding night, then covered by “grace” and duly forgotten by God who “hates divorce” (yet, He allegedly “authorized” it for “biblical grounds” and allegedly was Himself “divorced”.) We were further assured, given that “all authority is from God“, we must obey civil laws that conflict with God’s law, and that therefore, there are “greater” and “lesser” grades of adultery (adultery-lite, if you will, in the presence of civil paper) with differing eternal outcomes than would appear to be supported by our bibles. We swallowed hard or scratched our heads at the blatant conflict between Matthew 5:32; 19:9andMark 10:11-12; Luke 16:18, but alas, the footnotes that might have shed some light in an earlier era, pre-1970’s… Revised Standard Version, Second Edition of the New Testament, 1972 – Matthew 19:9
….were now being quietly removed by the Zondervans who stocked those bible bookshelves and cut the sales deals with Amazon. Most of us, having not attended bible school or seminary, having not been taught the history of the scripture manuscript texts, nor whose hands those texts passed through (including when and why), having not been taught how blatantly that which issues forth from today’s pulpits is at profound variance with the unanimous writings of the 1st through 4th century church fathers – many of them actually martyred, most of us never would have imagined the need to dig hard for ourselves into our study of the bible, in a way that goes all the way back to those texts in their original languages. Most us didn’t at the time know the basis on which we truly needed to call out our denomination’s leadership when they changed their marriage doctrine in the 1970’s by a vote of the pastors, to accommodate unilateral “no-fault” divorce enactment.
Most of us had no idea that we couldn’t rely on the “scholars’ ” rendering of the koine Greek verb moods and tenses, where taking certain liberties could turn Christ’s or Paul’s meaning literally on its head, if it served to prop up the Sexual Revolution that was occurring in the church and had been ongoing since the 16th century for Protestants. (Without elaborating too much here, there is also irrefutable evidence that the same process was ongoing with Catholic bibles for the same reasons and in the same time frame. Try going to biblegateway.com and bringing up Matthew 19:9 in the old Douay-Rheims version, alongside the newer NABRE version, for just one illustration of this.)
All of that was until…. the civil law of the Sexual Revolution collided head-on with the holy matrimony unions of several clean-living seminarians who had a talent for research and writing, and also collided with a few bible school grads whose churches were censuring them for repenting of their adulterous civil-only unions by divorcing civil-only spouses who really belonged to someone else, and remaining celibate, upon their studious discovery of the undiluted truth about “marrying” the estranged spouse of another living person. Thankfully for all of us, by the Lord’s hand, this was occurring with divinely-orchestrated timing, just when technology and online resources were drastically bringing down the cost of the requisite research tools, and removing various barriers to accessing those tools, as well as barriers to broadly communicating their findings to anyone who was interested. This at times has led to confirmation by pastors and linguists half a world away. By then, there were at least tens of thousands of covenant marriage standers on social media who were looking for assurance that what the Holy Spirit was leading them in (intensely countercultural) was indeed backed by scripture they could test and research and confirm for themselves.
The books these scholars then wrote have been literal Godsends. When it becomes abundantly evident that we can’t trust the most acclaimed seminarians and publishers of the day, we must all assume responsibility for our own deep scholarship of original sources. We didn’t plan on any of this, but it’s not all bad. Bible study will probably never be “boring” again!
6.) Standers’ “saltiness” in remaining in a less-than-perfect church is affecting their pastor’s conscience, even if they’re seen by him as a “troublemaker”
“If you have a prayer request, volunteers are waiting to pray with you in the prayer room”, they said. “Stop in before you leave.”
The stander thinks, “uh-huh, how am I going to ask Mr. & Mrs. Blended to join me in praying that my spouse will leave their adulterous remarriage, rebuild our covenant family, escape hell by not dying in that ongoing state of sin, and set an example to our generations not to repeat his / her sin?”
This is just one of the many examples of the various crosses a stander bears to try and be salt and light in their local harlot church. No stander should ever attempt to do this unless (1) they are exceptionally strong spiritually and uber-confident of who they are in the Lord, and (2) the church is otherwise a strong discipling church where none of the pastors are living in that kind of sin. If there is anyone in spiritual authority in that church who is “married” to somebody else’s spouse, the proper biblical response is to flee that kind of unbiblical leadership.
Generally, to do this for any length of time, standers need to have a very strong support network among the virtual (and occasionally-meeting) marriage permanence community. If you hear your prodigal was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer, take it both places, by all means. Prayer requests for the demise of your one-flesh’s adulterous “blended” household probably belong only in the stander community, at least until the prodigal is on his or her way home. Or maybe not. Be led by the Holy Spirit in deciding, and you will not fulfill the evil desires of the flesh.
Some standers find themselves in trouble in bible studies and home groups. It goes without saying that someone in an adulterous remarriage is not qualified to teach or lead in the church, yet nevertheless, it’s quite common that they do, so the Lord will excuse a stander for declining to be under the leadership of such a person.
“Godly couples” in ongoing adultery with someone else’s spouse?
And is the “husband” onboard with leading this group?
However, some of the conflicts that might come up may not even involve questions of marriage. For example, goaded for some weeks to join a “small group”, and having received no response to a letter written to the senior pastor to orient him to the difficulty of a covenant marriage stander participating in a small group where couples in adulterous remarriages were also members, “standerinfamilycourt” decided to attend a large group under the leadership of one of the junior pastors. This was a gathering of around 100 people in a church that is approaching mega church size. We were instructed to cluster according to the town we live in, resulting in a sub-group of around 15. One man seemed to dominate the group, knew it all, and was a dogmatic Calvinist. As he went on about the Holy Spirit being a “guarantee” that one cannot lose their salvation, “standerinfamilycourt” ventured to inform him of what the Greek text literally said (see comments above about deep bible study), that the original texts use the word “arrabōn(ἀρραβὼν)“, meaning down-payment. Perhaps it was just the idea of a new face walking in and contradicting the man, but more likely, a lot of Christians were sold a comfy-system that they don’t want disturbed – ever. Even so, perhaps a little seed was planted for the other 13 participants enticing them to delve a little deeper.
Standers have a couple of unique opportunities in such churches, nevertheless. For example, why not volunteer to teach a generic class on applying hermeneutic principles to the study of scripture, how to use deep bible study tools found online, and the history of our bible texts to reconcile those areas where (usually manipulated) scripture seems to conflict with other scripture?
Some female standers with home space available have taken into their homes the young, abandoned wife with a baby — so that the church would not push her into an adulterous subsequent relationship using twisted scripture, rather than take on the church-wide responsibility to contribute to her longterm financial needs.
There are times when it is just not possible to stay in a church that does not subscribe to the no-excuses indissolubility of holy matrimony, according to scripture. Other times, though it’s frequently uncomfortable, that’s still where the Lord would have us right now. There’s very little chance that state legislative efforts cropping up in a few states to repeal “no-fault” grounds for divorce unless there’s mutual consent, will ever come up for a vote, much less pass and get signed into law, unless someone is there recruiting the pastor’s active support. The pastors to affluent suburban communities are actually the ones needing the most encouragement to support these efforts.
7.) Standers are emboldening more pastors and priests to forsake false, comfortable teaching for Christ’s hard teachings, straight-up and undiluted
This part of the movement is blessedly growing, which may be the influence that eventually pulls our nation back from the brink. Some of these pastors have experienced the walk of a stander, and the restoration of a God-joined holy matrimony union for themselves. Either way, God is orchestrating quite a bit of cross-pollination which also crosses denominations. It would be great to see these pastors begin engaging other pastors on “family law” reform, especially in states where a repeal or reform bill is active before the legislature.
– A Pennsylvania bible college president writes a book in 1957, a very disciplined hermeneutical masterpiece that the succeeding leadership of his evangelical denomination tried its best to keep buried deep in the bowels of their headquarters basement, even though at the time, it carried an endorsing foreword by the General Superintendent of that denomination.
– A Connecticut pastor in an intact original marriage who juggles his congregation, leadership of a K-12 school, and a weekly radio broadcast ministry…who confronts other pastors with Jeremiah 23 as needed, and calls out the adulterous legalized unions, urging physical repentance, is hopefully sending a few prodigal spouses home to their true mates.
– A fiery black pastor in an intact original marriage regularly dishes unpopular truth out to his Philadelphia-headquartered megachurch and its global satellites. His tone is far from “diplomatic”.
– A Milwaukee pastor in an intact original marriage realizes that government regulation of holy matrimony was never delegated by God, and in fact, Matthew 19:6,8 backs this pastor up completely. He refuses to marry anyone under a civil marriage license, and teaches his flock alternative means to secure property and other rights in biblical marriage, while forgoing some of the government benefits that doing so entails. God sees the weddings in this congregation as covenantally-binding all the same.
– A Canadian pastor in an intact original marriage commends a teenage girl in his congregation for walking in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 5 instructions while the guest of a church in the U.S. when she finds out that her host and hostess are in a “marriage” Jesus repeatedly called adulterous, and cuts the trip short because of it.
– An Ohio Baptist pastor in an intact original marriage refuses to perform any wedding he wouldn’t do right in front of Jesus Christ, and also refuses to take people already in those unions into this church as a couple, no exceptions, no excuses.
– Another Ohio pastor in an intact original marriage gives up his Cincinnati church congregation on good terms when his conscience no longer permits him to perform weddings over people with living, estranged prior spouses, nor fellowship with people in such a union. He tearfully apologizes to those he has done the wrong to in performing their biblically-unlawful marriage, then departs to form a house church and weekly conference call supportive of the stander community and reconciliation of holy matrimony unions. He writes a landmark book on the topic that carries a spirit of gentleness and truth.
– Another Baptist pastor in Arizona openly rebukes several pastors and leaders of large media ministries who are divorcing their covenant wife to “marry” an adulteress, and all too often, one who is another man’s legally-estranged wife.
– A famous evangelist in the Charismatic movement reconciles with his covenant wife instead of getting entangled in the pursuing attentions of a serially polygamous female “pastor”. (She went on to other infamous exploits, enough said.)
– A Florida pastor in a long marriage with a widow who gave up his congregation to write two landmark books on the indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony and the invalidity of subsequent civil marriages while an original estranged spouse is alive, including the required means of repentance.
– A soft-spoken seminary graduate on the east coast writes a very important scholarly and historical book, and accompanying historical paper before he himself marries, then later finds himself standing for his own marriage, and experiencing a God-orchestrated reconciliation in some very difficult circumstances.
– A Houston pastor in an intact marriage who uses his blog to patiently teach principled hermeneutics on a weekly basis.
– A courageous African Cardinal stands up to Pope Francis’ plans to allow civilly-divorced and remarried parishioners (who have estranged prior spouses from valid marriages still living) to take communion, and to further liberalize “annulment” practices.
– A Virginia pastor leaves the legal profession to establish a marriage permanence church and family integrity radio broadcast.
Are these diverse shepherds “harsh”, “unloving”, “Pharisaical”, “unmerciful”, “unpastoral”, “pushing a ‘works-based’ salvation” ?
No, unlike most of their peers who adhere to the majority opinion, they’re simply focusing on eternal souls, and eternal outcomes. They are the handful who are fulfilling Christ’s instructions to “feed my sheep”. The law of this territory is that souls are more important than feelings, once forced to make a choice between the two. Being “pastoral” utterly fails if most of the sheep don’t ever make it back into the right (eternal) fold. Pastors like this act as a voice of conscience to all other pastors, even in the midst of a denouncing and reviling response from them. Pastors like this remind everyone, from the county court judge to the Pope, that even if “possession is 9/10ths of the (civil) law”, Jesus echoed John the Baptizer in the firm rebuke that such possession never exceeds 0/10ths of GOD’s law. Taking it to the next level, “standerinfamilycourt” would like to challenge these exemplary pastors to consider that “the law is a teacher”, and take the case to their state capitol (preferably with a church bus full of like-minded saints), so that we can get back to the days when people didn’t typically go to hell for much more than not knowing Jesus. Just imagine the character of your congregations if murder or rape or theft were legal! You are the “salt” of the pastorates, so please do for biblical marriage what you’ve always been willing to do for the sanctity of life. We stand very little chance of success repealing this abomination in 50 states without the solid support of church leadership!
“standerinfamilycourt” would like to close with this: how many laws would ever get enacted, or how many immoral laws would remain on the books if everyone knew that availing ourselves of that particular law would send us to hell? How many legislators would vote for a law like that if they could see people in the hell-flames for observing it? How many would refuse to vote for repeal of such a law, or conspire to keep its repeal from coming to a general vote of our state representatives? We have immoral civil laws as a result of the traditions of men that were built around sincerely-believed and long-unquestioned heresies, such as Chapter 24 (V, VI) of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which forms the basis for the (extrabiblical) fault-based grounds for civil divorce. Having answered this question, apart from the example of standers conspicuously devoting their lives to the restored wholeness of their covenant families, snatching people from those flames, and willingly bucking the contemporary taboo against even speaking of hell, how else would the world ever find out that this is actually the case, according to God’s word?
And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember thatduring your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony. – Luke 16:24-25
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment. – James 3:1
A covenant marriage stander recently posted an urgent request to a marriage permanence Facebook group to “set her straight”, referring to a young lady with close to 2,000 followers who posted a “Note” entitled as above. Most of us know that no other topic on the face of the planet today generates more instant theologians. The transformative power of this topic on just about anybody and everybody is legendary, to say the very least.
It’s not that “standerinfamilycourt” believes someone must attend or graduate from bible school or seminary to write authoritatively on the indissolubility of holy matrimony. On the contrary, the more typical experience, over the past 150 years or so, is that such an educational component actually ruins its graduates and steers them far away from the Spirit-driven biblical truth, unless the Holy Spirit is very persistent in pursuing them and changing their heart. However, it seems reasonable that a person needs to either come from an exceptionally excellent discipling home in their youth, or they need to have lived long enough in adult life to have taken on some significant discipleship challenges before they are very likely to know whereof they speak. A fair impression concerning a young person, therefore, who has 2,000 followers and no other disclosed connection to ministry or background is, more likely than not, she’s doing a whole bunch of ear-tickling. The last thing we need in Christendom is an Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez personality creating a fifth gospel, lecturing and labeling as “legalist” anyone who declines to adopt it!
SIFC told this complaining stander that, after having read the Note, it is indeed erroneous on most of its points, but with no prior connection with this young lady, and no indication (since she lists herself as “single”) that her soul is in imminent peril from being herself in an adulterous legalized union, it does not seem appropriate to invade her wall for the purpose of spanking her in front of her followers. Now, somebody with a very public ministry and half a million followers, which merchandizes heresy and pockets the proceeds, is definitely a different kind of case. In this complained-of case, this open letter will need to suffice.
Dear Amateur Theologian:
Social media is a wonderful thing, affording opportunities that many of us would never have, otherwise, to make our voice heard to the masses. “Standerinfamilycourt” is not going to say that’s a bad thing, necessarily, but rather, that when it comes to our parallel life in the kingdom of God, it is a fearsomely responsible thing.
Our response to your Note of January 1, 2019 will linger in Luke, chapter 12 where Jesus says this:
“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows.But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
One advantage of youth and lack of experience is that more often than not, youthful exegetes will fit into the second grace category, but not indefinitely. That you can persuade close to 2,000 people to read your personal Note on your Facebook wall is very impressive, indeed. It would be even more impressive if that influence could be harnessed for the kingdom of God to pull people from the broad path that everyone wants to be on, but whose destination (Christ tells us) is destruction, over to the narrow path which requires us to lay our own lives down in this life, so consequently few want to be on that path but nevertheless its destination is eternal life. Even so, you clearly have a bright future as (perhaps) a writer for a “Christian” publication like Crosstalk where you can secure an even larger audience, as you hone your excellent writing skills and increase their commercial circulation. Indeed, most of us would say that you have been given much.
“I’m not writing this note to espouse an opinion. My heart is simply to bring some clarity to what the Scripture actually says, means, and requires of us”, you say.
You’re way ahead, my dear, perceiving already that popular Christian writers aren’t so presumptuous as to share truths or, even worse, moral absolutes. No, they’re endlessly humble and so they share “hearts”. That alone, will take you much further than someone who says, “thus saith the Lord.” However, we’d respectfully challenge that anything that doesn’t actually line up with “thus saith the Lord” is by definition…an opinion. Clarity is as clarity does, after all.
In addition to your very correct observation that …“It is too important a matter to leave to some surface, passive reading of scripture and neglect the diligent study required to come to an accurate understanding of God’s original intent”, you deserve additional kudos for recognizing the continuum betweenantinomianismandlegalism(“So, it was no surprise to see both legalism and antinomianism manifested in many views concerning marriage. “) This (accused) “legalist’s” main contribution to this conversation will be to hopefully bring your understanding of legalism more into alignment with what Christ told us the spirit of Phariseeism is. We’re quite sure that you wouldn’t want to fall into antinomianism unintentionally, by misunderstanding what actually constitutes “legalism” in the kingdom of God!
If it won’t overly offend you, we won’t directly link to that Note of yours, since attempting to refute hermeneutical errors point-by-point would make this post very long and boring , but we would like to give our readers a rough overall outline of its contents and, speaking as an unabashed “legalist” by your measuring stick, answer a few of your main points. Fair enough?
“Note” High-Level Outline:
(1) SAMT’s notion of covenant, and assertion that the marriage covenant is conditional and can be “broken”
(2) SAMT’s notion of marriage rights & duties / Failure to fulfill these
(3) SAMT’s notion of “biblical grounds for divorce”
(4) SAMT’s application of Deuteronomy and other Mosaic laws to marriage and divorce today
(5) SAMT’s assertion that there’s a difference between biblical references to divorces and “sending away”
(6) SAMT’s inferences from Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well
CONCERNING BIBLICAL COVENANT (Point 1): Our young Note-writer (hereafter, let’s call you “SAMT”: self-appointed marriage theologian) spends considerable time in the Garden of Eden recounting the creation basis of the first wedding, and asserts that the essential element of covenant is, therefore “do not be unequally yoked”, citing 2 Corinthians 6:14-18. You show in your version of this, “SAMT” that you profoundly misunderstand who the respective parties to the biblical marriage covenant actually are. “SAMT”, you imagine that the parties are simply the husband and the wife, which is the humanist view and is natural enough if you weren’t paying any attention to what Jesus, and the prophet Malachi said about that.
So where, then, does the notion come from that there’s a superior and an inferior party to every biblical covenant? It actually comes from ancient near-eastern culture, where covenants were absolutely binding on the more powerful of the two parties, even if the less powerful party had difficulty honoring their end. In fact, that was the whole point in making a covenant in the first place, there was a weaker party who might not keep up his or her end. In Genesis 15, Moses gives the account of how God illustrated this to Abram, just before he got his new name, Abraham:
And He said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it.” He said, “O Lord God, how may I know that I will possess it?” So He said to him, “Bring Me a three year old heifer, and a three year old female goat, and a three year old ram, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” Then he brought all these to Him and cut them in two, and laid each half opposite the other; but he did not cut the birds. The birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him. God said to Abram, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years. But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age….It came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I have given this land, From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates…”
Obviously, God deliberately yoked Himself with an unequal covenant mate here. He did not require terrified Abram to walk between the split carcasses – He had to do so Himself! Later, He commanded Hosea to be unequally yoked to a prostitute in holy matrimony, although the walked-out marriage was anything but holy until Hosea redeemed Gomer, his God-joined one-flesh off the slave block. Hosea serves as a type, a foreshadowing of Jesus’ role. “SAMT”, if you’d like to learn more in-depth about biblical covenant, and about the nature of the God-joined one-flesh entity, please click here, and here. Your version is taken out of context, “SAMT” and in fact is a subtle mix of Christo-feminism, and long-winded excuses not to obey Christ’s most basic commandments, which do not actually exempt our one-flesh spouse and which include:
The upshot of all of this, “SAMT”: since God is one of the parties to the marriage covenant of our youth, and He has never once, in all of biblical history, ever failed to uphold His end of an unconditional covenant He was a party to, the marriage covenant can certainly be violated by the inferior party (and perhaps even by both husband and wife), but it is absolutely not possible for the marriage covenant to be broken, contrary to your humanistic assertion. You say you are “single”, and do you plan to exchange conditional wedding vows someday? “I might”, rather than “I do”? If that’s your plan, you are not actually consenting to holy matrimony, and as a consequence, God who knows your heart, will not create sarx mia , the supernatural one-flesh entity of holy matrimony. That might sound good to you, since you’d apparently rather shuck an unsatisfactory spouse in the name of Jesus, but your union will be no better than married gays or than today’s abundance of remarriage adulterers. If this is “harsh” and “judgmental” to you, then take it up with Him. The people you disagree with didn’t write the bible! Picture Credit: Sharon Henry
MARRIAGE RIGHTS, DUTIES AND DEFAULTS (Point 2) Says “SAMT” of this topic:
“God’s intent for marriage is that the two become one, and that they love and care for their spouse. Under the old covenant law, a husband had the responsibility to provide for the basic needs for his wife. If he did not do so, but he withheld any of these things from her she was free to go. She was released from the covenant because he did not keep it.”
As if Jesus never bothered to deliver the sermon on the mount, “SAMT” you look to the Mosaic law to define the rights, duties and remedies for defaults in marriage, and you insist that this remains the standard for Christ-followers. Your theory shows a considerable misunderstanding, even of Mosaic law. The above quote, taking scripture seriously out context, does not refer at all to God-joined holy matrimony. What you have latched onto refers to Moses’ attempt to regulate the practice of taking a concubine slave in addition to a God-joined covenant wife, in other words, the concurrent form of polygamy. You quote Exodus 21:10-11 :
If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights. If he will not do these three things for her, then she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.
What was the “money” involved? Her usual slave price to go free was waived. Our budding theologian somehow infers from this that a contemporary covenant wife may divorce her husband, despite everything both Christ and Paul clearly, specifically and repeatedly said to the contrary, after Jesus completely abrogated the Mosaic regulations for His higher law, and despite the fact that no woman under the Hebrew patriarchy ever had any right to divorce her husband for any reason. In doing this, “SAMT”, you ignore the effects of testing your theory by applying the hermeneutical principles of Culture and Comparison, and you twist the Content to suit your desired outcome. You did not Consult the writings of the early church fathers to see what they said to the contrary because they were echoing Christ and Paul. “SAMT”, it can’t be said often enough, that anything at all written about MDR isn’t even worth reading unless it is written in such a way that it demonstrates that these principles have been faithfully applied. Otherwise, the integrity of this topic soon gives way to feelings, emotions, lust and ideologies, typically humanism and feminism.
Do we have something that resembles the concubinage situation described in Exodus 21 today? Yes, indeed we do! It’s the consecutive polygamy of remarriage adultery, in fact. Today’s equivalent instruction for regulating this immorality, with the exception of “conjugal rights” (since Jesus made clear that such relations were continuously sinful): voluntarily provide for this adultery partner and any non-covenant children when you must separate from him or her to end the ongoing sexual sin.
We have to agree with you, “SAMT” in what you say next. Indeed, 1 Corinthians 7 is the “go-to” chapter in the New Testament for the rights and duties of marriage, with three important caveats, which we hope you didn’t miss:
(1) the rights and duties are strictly to one’sownspouse, the one God inseverably joined you to for life, not somebody else’s
(2) there is a male and female in each status being addressed, with this symmetry continuing throughout the chapter and four or five different statuses. We must not attempt to transfer the advice from one group to the other for our own convenience. Not one of these statuses addressed, however is a “divorced” category, only “married but estranged”. Paul believed Jesus that all divorce was man-made, and not only immoral, butimpossible between a one-flesh covenant couple.
(3) any separation between God-joined spouses was to be aimed at reconciliation when possible, not permanent severance.
You dish out some pretty good marriage advice from this point in your Note, “SAMT” (for a single person, anyway). But then you launch into a fiery manifesto on domestic abuse, with the peculiar bias that it’s always the man beating on the woman, and you declare:
“Many women who seek counsel from the church regarding their abusive situations at home are told that they still need to submit, or they are accused of being the cause of the abuse because they must have failed to be submissive enough. The stories of what women have been instructed to endure and sent back home to in the name of holiness is honestly disgusting.”
(Any chance that you go around beating up on pastors who don’t toe your ideological mark, “SAMT”?)
Instead of lingering on 1 Corinthians 7:11, where you just were, as the biblical remedy for an unsafe home, you’re then diving back into Mosaic law faster than you can say “Zipporah”! Your tone and ideology sound identical to the subject of an earlier blog of ours. In case it isn’t clear from scripture, nowhere does Christ or any of the Apostles give any permission to divorce for abuse or adultery or abandonment, but more about that when we get to your theories about “biblical grounds”.
Says “SAMT”… “God designed marriage to be a blessing to both the husband and wife. It is really sad that we have reduced it to some obligation to live under the same roof regardless of how the other party treats us.”
Says “SIFC”: God designed His relationship with us to be a blessing to Him and to everyone around us. It’s really sad that we have reduced it to some obligation for God to let us into heaven anyway regardless of how we treat Him.
And, oh “SAMT”, what have you done to the context and tone of Malachi 2, my dear? You have stood this poor prophet on his head! You drill right in on verse 16, “God hates divorce”, but this context of this is impossible to get right without starting at verse 13 and understanding who exactly the prophet was addressing when he spoke for the Lord in declaring that fellowship was broken with the priest of God who had divorced his wife and married another. You go into a litany of reasons why God hates divorce, but skip right over the one He forthrightly declares: it corrupts our offspring and our generations. You do this because you speak as more of a feminist than a disciple. No form of humanism is ever compatible with discipleship. They are polar opposites!
Next you say:
“However, when one party has broken covenant, God does not hold the innocent party to a broken covenant, and God does not call them a sinner for issuing a bill of divorce to someone who has broken covenant with them.
We’ve already covered the biblical fact that the marriage covenant can be violated but never broken due to who the covenant parties to holy matrimony actually are. So, let us ask you this, “SAMT”: does God ever call someone a sinnerfor disobeying Him?
So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no [hu]man separate. – Matt. 19:6
But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband(but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife. – 1 Corinthians 7:10-11
No, He actually likens the rebellious to a witch or a sorcerer, my dear.
“So, we can’t accuse everyone who has been through a divorce of being a sinner for having gone through it!” say you.
Very true, “SAMT”, but only if the person did not initiate the lawsuit before the pagan court, and did not even consent to it. If they did, they have practiced the sin of witchcraft and they need to repent. Even then, unless the marriage was biblically invalid from the beginning because of the existence of a prior living estranged spouse, they are still married in God’s eyes. If that seems like an “accusation” to you, then there’s something very wrong with your heart toward God.
God hates divorce but He Himself had one! “
No, “SAMT”. If you trouble to read just a bit further in Jeremiah 3, you soon find God saying, “return to Me, for I am married to you.” For more about the rampant abuse and proper exegesis of that particular scripture, please click here.
PRESUMED “GROUNDS” FOR DIVORCE , ATTEMPTS TO APPLY MOSAIC LAW TO CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE, WITH OR WITHOUT “PAPERWORK”
(Points 3 , 4, and 5)
From here, we’re about to dive into some heavy-duty scripture abuse debunking, “SAMT”. Scripture abuse always results when anyone fails to apply all five principles of disciplined hermeneutics before they make personal decisions and, even worse, presume to teach others: Content, Context, Culture, Comparison and Consultation. There’s nothing worse than treating the word of God like a bag of trail mix, latching on to things out of context and discarding or ignoring the bits you don’t like. Next you say….
“This verse [referring to Matthew 19:3-10] is often quoted to claim that divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery. Others claim it means divorce is only permitted in cases of fornication, meaning only when a man discovers his bride was not a virgin when they married. Some claim that even if divorce is permitted in the case of adultery or fornication, remarriage is never permitted. All of these opinions are wrong.”
Just as your own opinion is equally wrong, “SAMT”. Unfortunately, all of the above is both unsupported and directly contradicted by scripture, and more specifically, by the very words of Christ which we’ve already cited above, in verse 6, which is the only verse that deserves any focus in this passage, until we get to verse 12,where Jesus speaks of living as a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of God, after forbidding anyone to marry a divorced person. This, “SAMT”, makes everything you go on to say about what question the Pharisees actually asked amount to a total red herring. It doesn’t matter what they asked, only what Jesus said in response. Ditto for your leap back into Deuteronomy 24, since Jesus chose instead to quote Moses’ better word in Genesis 2:21-24, rather than Moses’ ill-fated attempt to regulate sin and hard-heartedness on the trail to the Promised Land.
Contrary to your assertion, adultery has never been biblical grounds for divorcefrom a God-joined union either in the New Testament, nor the Old Testament. Under Mosaic law, sexual sins against betrothal and marriage were punishable by stoning, not divorce. That’s because the one-flesh entity had to be severed somehow to allow for remarriage. Nobody can say with certainty what Moses wrote Deuteronomy 24:1-4 concerning, but it’s far more likely that this regulation was covering one of the many non-capital reason why a betrothal contract could not be consummated under Jewish rules of ceremonial cleanness (“some indecency”)–and so, the reason for defilement of the land existed both before and after the severed union. Whatever the reason for the Deuteronomy 24 passage, there is not a single Christian today to whom it applies, because Jesus abrogated all of the Mosaic regulations when He said of several things where the prior moral law was simply not worthy of the kingdom of God, “it is written, BUT I SAY UNTO YOU…” He also clearly commanded us to live reconciled lives.
This really gets people’s knickers in a twist throughout Christendom, but no other context is possible after the sermon on the mount, except that Jesus was disagreeing with both Hillel and Shammai. And it’snot a matter of “paperwork”, either!
“….MOSES allowed you to divorce your wives, BUT FROM THE BEGINNING, IT WAS NOT EVER SO!”– Matthew 19:8
Which brings us to debunking the definition of “legalism”…. The first thing to understand, “SAMT”, is that this is not a biblical term any more than, say, “homophobia” is. You will not find it in any translation, because it is the jargon of “Churchianity” . When Christ and Paul rebuked the behavior of the Pharisees, there are four key points:
(1) they were the ones pushing man-legalized immoral abandonment of covenant (2) they were the hangers-on to Mosaic regulation after Jesus abrogated all 613 of them in favor of a higher moral standard (3) Per Jesus, the 10 Commandments remain in full effect (4) If the word of God makes clear that dying in a certain state of sexual sin will cost us our inheritance in the kingdom of God, obeying is never “legalism”.
“Legalism” to Christ is applying any part of the Mosaic regulation that lies outside the 10 Commandments (you know, stuff like Deuteronomy 24:4). “Legalism”, therefore, excludes urging obedience to the direct commandments from Christ’s ministry. Around here, we call “legalism” Judaizing heresies, such as Paul spoke of to the Galatians. So, the solution to antinomianism is obedience to Christ’s commandments, not accusing those who do obey and who urge others to obey, of somehow holding people to (inferior) Mosaic standards. In fact, it’s usually the very same accusers like yourself who want to do that, in lieu of obeying Christ. Moses after all, was considerably more lenient in matters of marriage than is Christ. Almost everyone instinctively knows this, and that’s why they can’t seem to let go of Moses.
READING INTO JESUS’ CONVERSATION WITH THE SAMARITAN WOMAN AT THE WELL
“It is sad that so many so often misrepresent the heart of God. They read things in Scripture that are actually full of love and grace and the beauty of God’s heart towards the hurting with such jaded eyes. The story of the woman at the well is a prime example of this.“
What’s really sad is that some who would deign to teach others imagine that God’s “heart” is any different than what repeatedly came out of His Son’s mouth. That’s either blaspheming the Father or it’s accusing the Son. Which brings us to another red flag “no-no” of unsound hermeneutics — the negative inference, or what Jesus “didn’t say”. In this young lady’s defense, though, it’s quite common to see middle-aged seminarians do the same thing, though they should certainly know better.
In the case of the other scarlet lady with whom Jesus was merciful, the woman taken in adultery, here’s what Jesus didn’t say: “neither do I condemn you because nobody is without sin, and it’s impossible to live a holy life which is why I’m about to die for you. Stay away from those hypocritical Pharisees next time.” No, Jesus gave her a commandment: “Go and sin no more.”
Why would we imagine, that just because we don’t see the words captured in John’s account of the exchange at the well, Jesus did not tell this woman who was shacking up with a boyfriend the same thing He told the other adulteress? What Jesus supposedly “didn’t say” is no proof of anything! For a more in-depth discussion of what was actually going on at the well, click here.
“SAMT”, we’re just about done here. You spend the rest of your Note in righteous indignation, accusing biblical truth-tellers of “picking up stones” when they tell people what scripture says, while it’s clear that feminist ideology has a stone or two in your own hands. You make it sound pious by going on and on about God’s “heart” and your “heart” as if He’s schizophrenic and you’re not delusional. We hope you learn one day that words like “grace” and “love” cannot be limited to temporal matters and people’s feelings – since that’s actually not very “loving”. If your definition of “love”, “grace”, “mercy” doesn’t include an eternal dimension, you are at risk of “loving” people straight into hell. If you don’t believe us, try substituting other sins, ones that make you recoil, and see if it’s “unloving” or lacking “grace” to urge them to repent with their feet, at the risk of their feeling “shamed” and “condemnation”.
Here’s another side of God’s “heart”, SAMT… back to Luke 12:
I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that have no more that they can do.But I willwarn you whom to fear: fear the One who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear Him!
Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division;for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;–to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;–to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;–to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;–to Controversies between two or more States;–between a State and Citizens of another State; –between Citizens of different States, –between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects. United States Constitution, Article 3, Section 2, Clause 1
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. United States Constitution, Article 10
Two landmark cases of the Sexual Revolution in the U.S., namely Roe v. Wade – 1973 (depriving pre-born children of their fundamental right to life), and Obergefell v. Hodges – 2015, legalizing sodomy as “marriage”, were seen by conservatives and original constructionists (with a fair amount of justification, we daresay) as “legislating from the bench”. An extra-constitutional fundamental right (to “privacy”) was established without actually amending the Constitution via Congressional and state legislative action as called for in Article 5. Leading up to those cases, several other cases also turned on a judicially-presumed “right of privacy”, including Eisenstadt v. Baird – 1972 (establishing the right of unmarried individuals to purchase contraceptives) and Lawrence v. Texas – 2003 (declaring state laws against sodomy “unconstitutional”). It should be noted that the fundamental right that is explicit in the Bill of Rights is the right to freedom of association, which came to be closely associated with a presumed “privacy” right which, even worse, has come to override the priority of other conflicting fundamental rights of impacted parties, in order to arrive at some of these activist, individualist decisions that don’t comport with balancing fundamental rights in a way that is best for society as a whole.
As for prioritizing the protection of fundamental rights that inherently conflict with one another, most reasonable people would concur with the principle: “My fundamental rights end where yours take up.” For example, a baby’s right to life was ruled in Roe v. Wade to unduly infringe upon a woman’s right to “free association”, but is that reasonable? A homosexual pair’s right to “free association”, protected by local SOGI laws (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) was ruled to have priority over a wedding professional’s free exercise of religion in a matter before the U.S. Supreme Court last year with a landmark ruling in his favor delivered in June.
SCOTUS did (effectively) rule in 2015 that homosexual couples have a fundamental right to remain married, but our unilateral divorce laws continue to deny that same fundamental right to innocent heterosexual spouses who oppose the purported “dissolution” of their marriage as profoundly harmful to their immediate and extended families’ true best interests, and significantly infringing on the family members’ rights to free association and free religious exercise. In fact, the Petitioner’s presumed right to “free association” with an adulterous partner, and “privacy” are treated as trumping their innocent spouse’s right to free religious exercise and conscience, as well as their right to protection of property with due process of law, along with their right to protection of decades of extended family relationships. My right to bear arms must necessarily yield to your right to life if I misuse my fundamental right in order to advance my individual selfish interest at your expense. And so forth.
Most immoral laws and court rulings indeed result from immoral prioritization of conflicting fundamental rights – a balancing that always has been unavoidable when it comes to the Bill of Rights protections. It is popular (and ridiculously false) to claim that “you can’t legislate morality”, but is that not precisely what laws against murder, rape, battery, larceny and defamation actually do? Don’t discrimination laws of all types “legislate morality” ?
C.S. Lewis famously said,
“There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”
Indeed, if someone isn’t legislating morality, it certainly doesn’t leave just a neutral vacuum. The evidence is all around us that somebody else is surely going to be legislating immorality –and in constantly increasing amounts, to the corrosive detriment of the whole of society. As the morality and sense of the good of the whole thereby disintegrates, the whole nation can go down to historic ruin because immoral laws can be exceedingly difficult to reverse no matter how much vile impact they’ve produced.
This concludes the long introduction to the topic at-hand.
Our U.S. Constitution and state constitutions were designed with an intentional separation-of-powers so that the three branches, legislative, executive and judicial, historically operated with prudent boundaries; checks-and-balances on each other. It wasn’t perfect, but it continued to pervasively function well over a long period of time — until the Sexual Revolution hit in full force in the 1970’s. In addition, the concept of Federalism served to set boundaries of balance between states’ power and the power of national leaders. Unfortunately, both of these mechanisms in recent decades have worked together to make the erosion of equal protection in marriage laws enacted with unconstitutional statutory provisions increasingly difficult to counter or overturn, at least with regard to the heterosexuals who (after all) produce the children who become the next generation of citizens.
As we’ve seen since former President Obama swept into office in 2008, it’s been a far different story with regard to homosexuals, who achieved superior protections to all other citizens, and relaxation of those legal boundaries, vis-à-vis heterosexuals . Homosexuals have typically not been required to undertake the expensive burden of taking marriage cases through all levels of the state courts before a lower Federal court would hear and rule on the case. Homosexuals have often been extended special privilege in overturning a state marriage law that state judiciary authorities declined to review. By contrast, heterosexuals in modern times have been forced to bear the expensive burden of exhausting all state channels of review, with SCOTUS being the first allowed Federal engagement point of review. The odds of getting a constitutional challenge heard there are approximately 90 to 1 as recently reported. Reportedly, less than 1% of the 9,000 some cases submitted for SCOTUS docketing ever make it oral arguments. Unless at least four Justices agree to hear the case, it will never be heard, and no reason need be given. To make matters worse, the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Court revealed that the Justices had been using a “vetting pool” of clerks, rather than having their own clerks read the cases, reducing the chances of a case which so fundamentally “takes on” the Sexual Revolution having its day in highest court in the land even more remote. To his credit, Justice Gorsuch announced that he would be joining Justice Alito in breaking with that convenience. Most recently, Justice Kavanaugh was mum on that issue, so presumably he’s using the “cert” pool, as the now-retired Justice Kennedy did. That means liberal clerks still probably outnumber conservative clerks in that pool, but “standerinfamilycourt” digresses except to say that even the conservative clerks are going to have an ideological bias against the perception of “legislating from the bench”.
Unfortunately, the whole concept of “legislating from the bench”, tends to be ideologically charged. It refers to using courts to violate the constitutional separation of powers in Articles 1 and 3, also the interference with Federalism and states’ rights prohibited by Article 10. Our constitutional republic is gravely harmed in the clear-cut cases of “legislating from the bench” where special rights have been created for a group of people in a case precedent that will in fact deny fundamental rights to everyone else in order to implement and enforce the same. Our constitutional republic is equally harmed when an ideological majority uses the concept as an excuse to deny fundamental rights to a group of people whose state constitutions and the Bill of Rights is supposed to guarantee them. The latter has historically been accomplished either through applying an inappropriate standard of judicial review, or wrongfully declining to hear such a case coming from a lower level.
For example, in 1986, Florida pro-se constitutional challenger Judith Brumbaugh related in her book, “Judge, Please Don’t Strike that Gavel on My Marriage”, that she managed to get her appeal of Florida’s unilateral “no-fault” divorce law docketed at the U.S. Supreme Court. They ultimately declined to hear the case “for want of a Federal question”. It was striking that Judith’s request for “cert” even got docketed. This blog has documented many earlier challenges to unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws based on religious freedom and equal protection grounds, where the state appeals courts applied the rational basis standard of review, instead of the strict scrutiny basis that is constitutionally required when fundamental rights are being denied by a state statute. The latter requires that the states prove a compelling interest in denying those fundamental rights, and that such laws be narrowly-tailored to meet that interest in the least intrusive way upon those rights. What tends to happen is that SCOTUS will apply Article 10 first, and say there is no “Federal question” (unless conflicting results are found in lower courts in different circuits on the same issue) even when it is clear that not only is the Bill of Rights being violated, but the state courts are tolerating wholesale violations of Articles 1 and 3, and thereby compromising the separation-of-powers between the branches of government. What’s really happening is the actual inverse of “legislating from the bench”, that is, taking away true judicial discretion and validating a phony cause-of-action from the floors of the state legislative bodies, while being allowed to do it through what amounts to judicial collusion and self-dealing.
Although SCOTUS intervened twice in equal protection cases involving marriage or divorce between homosexuals between 2013 and 2015, the last heterosexual divorce case “standerinfamilycourt” could find that was heard appears to be in 1996 out of Mississippi, and it involved the termination of parental rights for a mother who had suffered a divorce to which she probably acquiesced. (Mississippi’s “no-fault” law is the only one in the country that was comprehensively enacted in 1972 so as to not force divorce on a non-consenting spouse except on a fault basis.) The matter at issue was not even the divorce itself, but her inability to pay the transcript costs that blocked her from fighting the termination of her parental rights at the request of her now-“remarried” husband. There was already significant precedent for the costs of access to courts not to be permitted to deny access to her avenues of initial hearing or appeal. That case was simply remanded back to the state on that very narrow basis.
In the landmark case, Loving v Virginia (1967) there were no such concerns with violating Article 10. The Lovings had secured the help of the ACLU to fight the state’s anti-miscegenation laws all the way up through the state appellate system in a class action suit, until certiorari was requested and granted from SCOTUS. However, neither was there any artificial requirement imposed by SCOTUS to wait for differing outcomes in other regions of the country, lest the spurious claim be made of “want of a Federal question”. The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) ….
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
….makes such assertions highly questionable when Bill of Rights protections are being denied by state legislatures to its citizens.
The sequence of events in the Loving case, as laid out in the majority SCOTUS opinion:
“On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground that the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment. The motion not having been decided by October 28, 1964, the Lovings instituted a class action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia requesting that a three-judge court be convened to declare the Virginia anti-miscegenation statutes unconstitutional and to enjoin state officials from enforcing their convictions. On January 22, 1965, the state trial judge denied the motion to vacate the sentences, and the Lovings perfected an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. On February 11, 1965, the three-judge District Court continued the case to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the highest state court. The Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and, after modifying the sentence, affirmed the convictions. The Lovings appealed this decision, and we noted probable jurisdiction on December 12, 1966…”
Fundamental rights to stay married, and to live where they wished were on the line in this case that was decided unanimously by the Justices, two and a half years before unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws began to be enacted in the various states. While it should never be the case, the ugly reality is that the changeable prevailing morality tends to drive landmark SCOTUS decisions and fundamental rights get some lip service, but tend to take a back seat. For more on the constitutional challenges to unilateral “no-fault” divorce that were decided at the state level under an erroneous standard of judicial review, but never heard by SCOTUS, please click here, and here. Several of the gay marriage cases decided in 2014 cited the right to stay married.
If subsequent state legislation conflicts with a state constitution, there is no violation of Federalism for SCOTUS to enforce the state constitution where a state supreme court denied certiorari.
First-level state appeals are required to be heard, but are sometimes dismissed on technicalities, and hearings for state Supreme Court appeals can be declined without comment, simply based on the number of cases submitted, with “standerinfamilycourt’s” constitutional attorney advising that the state Supreme Court might hear perhaps 5% of the few thousand appeals submitted each session. Given the influence-peddling on the state level for states that have an elected judiciary, which was ongoing both before and after the jaw-dropping Citizens United ruling by SCOTUS (money is “speech”), it is important, in theory at least, to have an unobstructed path to SCOTUS. Appellate decisions at the state level, and demonstrably also by SCOTUS, are becoming almost uniformly ideological rather than independent, with the effect that constitutional checks-and-balances between the branches of government are becoming ever-weaker, and stare decisis (ruling by precedent) is pretty much a joke these days. While in a rare instance there might be a favorable individual challenge where the ruling would be limited in its impact to the law as applied to just that case, no state appellate court wants to invalidate 50 years worth of unconstitutional marriage dissolutions by admitting the laws are unconstitutional on their face, knowing the social chaos that would result, so these courts will be duplicitous in avoiding ever being put in a situation where they would have to so rule. Some basis is going to have the be found for taking a constitutional challenge up through the Federal court system despite the long history of being barred from doing so by Article 10 arguments.
In one sense, given the long history of barriers and difficulty of getting any true appellate justice in 1st and 14th Amendment-based challenges to unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws, either on the state or Federal levels, the question of whether it would be “legislating from the bench” to declare them unconstitutional on this basis might seem like a moot or futile question. However, if judges could be sued in Federal court because they ruled while having no true subject matter jurisdiction due to the Article 3 violations entailed in the statute, then this might suddenly become a very relevant question. As this post is being written, the theory that state divorce statutes unconstitutionally strip judges of the discretion required by Article 3 is being tested in Federal court in several states. As soon as some initial outcomes are available, the updates will be the subject of a future post.
Then I will draw near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me,” says the Lord of hosts. “For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed. – Malachi 3: 5-6
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!
Dear Members of the Texas State Committee on Juvenile Justice and Family Issues:
I came before you in March of 2017 to testify for HB93 for the repeal of no-fault divorce laws in Texas. My testimony can be viewed online on your website.
Now I would like to present to you an analogy to help bring better understanding of what you are allowing when you have allowed no-fault divorce to continue in our state.
You received your privilege of representing people of our state when those people exercised their privilege to vote and voted for you. You chose to run; they chose to vote. The result is the seat you are now sitting in. All this took place because there are rules in place to create a healthy environment for us to “do government”.
So please imagine this chaotic scenario:
What would you think if one of your constituents walked into the Capitol Building one day and declared that you were no longer their choice for office and must be removed? This person is not just any constituent; this person voted for you.
And what would you think if they had the erroneous right and ability to remove you simply by making a subjective statement on how they no longer like this relationship you are now in, as voter and representative?
Imagine they could simply file a complaint at the information desk which would guarantee the issue be brought up on the House floor in front of everyone. There really is no need to discuss the issue on the floor, after all, because they need no reason for your removal. And you will have no opportunity to object to their statement because your side of the story need not be heard. How can you defend yourself, really, when you have not been accused of doing any wrong? The situation has nothing to do with your work performance, anyway. It all comes down to their whims and singular feelings about your relationship. They no longer want you in your seat. That is all that is needed.
What if you wanted to keep your seat? After all, this one voter does not represent your whole constituency; others are involved! I regret to tell you, the rules were changed years ago that allow one voter, any one voter, to remove you at any time for no reason other than their feelings, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Once the voter objects, your job is gone and your career is over. The entire process can be completed in as little as two months’ time, because we wouldn’t want to inconvenience the public with the legal bill to defend your job.
Please remember: this voter also has access to everything you own and all your private information. They can walk into your office at any time and take your computer, read your emails, force your aides to speak against you, even take over your office and lock your door! They can force your aides to become their aides and work for their campaign to elect someone else in your place. You cannot stop it. But then again, why would you? Even though they voluntarily entered this relationship and chose to vote, you wouldn’t want to force someone to stay enslaved in this voter/representative relationship, would you?
This process could take place at any time, with any representative, as many times as a person would choose, ad nauseum.
Representatives could be shuffled in and out of office the whole session long. I know that making laws is why you are in office, that’s your job, but it’s ok if your job never gets done due to these personal whims of one person. Sure, the whole of the public would pay the price, but aren’t this individual’s desires more important? The courts say this is in the best interest of all your constituents, though years of research would say they are exactly wrong.
Would you think this public policy is not such a great one and needs to be amended or removed?
What would you do if the media folks showed up and opposed your efforts to change these policies? They would make a handsome living off broadcasting these voter objections at the Capitol, after all. But they would not say that out loud; instead, they will tell you that you are being selfish and old-fashioned. They would say that the law is now in the eye of the beholder, subject to redefinition by anyone living under it. Would you be “ok” with that?
Chaos.
Can you imagine this sort of logic applied to every area of law? If it can happen to the most fundamental and important of relationships- family ties, human beings- why not apply to it to everything else, because everything else is less important?
This matter could not be more serious.
Where do we draw the line? Where do you draw the line?
You may think my analogy sounds impossible, but that is what people of 50 years ago thought of the idea of a society where people dissolve marriage and family with the click of a button, literally.
If you do not stop this nonsense here, this analogy that sounds impossible today could be the way of life tomorrow. You are in the position to draw the line.
Let’s reestablish a healthy environment to “do family”; support healthy family relationships by requiring contested divorce cases to be brought for real reasons and every case to be heard thoroughly by a judge. If doing what is in the best interest of the children is really valued at all in this legislature, I implore you to leave hypocrisy behind and protect family by repealing unilateral divorce.
Most sincerely,
Kristi Davis
Texas Citizen 3-Time (Generational) Divorce Sufferer under No-Fault Divorce in Texas
( SIFC:Kristi Davis testified on March 8, 2017 before this Texas Legislative Committee where at least three committee members actually derive income, either directly or indirectly, from unilateral divorce laws. She has recently launched a blog page called Healing and Repealing for Strong Family Trees – www.healingandrepealing.com )
Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short. – Romans 12:12
For many of us who obey biblical instruction to stand for the wholeness of our families, to treat an involuntary or our own sinfully-initiated civil divorce as a chaste separation of the indissoluble, no matter how long it takes, no matter what pseudo-authority an immoral civil law system attempts to exert over us, no matter what we suffer at church as a consequence of this biblical obedience, we yet find ourselves in a very long journey that increases the number and sharpness of the rocky shoals we must now figure out how to navigate. As the journey lengthens, we often lose the support of others after a long season, based on circumstances we can’t control. We’re hard-pressed, even so, to point to a single hero of the bible who didn’t also experience this, but it seems really hard when it’s us; when it’s our kids inflicting some of the cultural persecution and suffering their own mortification over our convictions.
Along with the long road comes the intensifying spiritual warfare, because what we are daring to do is shake the very beams and timbers of the world’s oldest and most powerful satanic stronghold. We are generally a pretty strong lot, if our motives for doing this are what they should be. We can’t be “taken out” permanently by our own covetings and lusts, even if our foot might slip on occasion, and we can’t be shamed out of it, even by close friends or disgruntled family members, if our worst terror is that our prodigal spouse faces an eternity in hell if they die before repenting, or that our children and grandchildren might be deceived into emulating him or her some day. We bear up, some of us, through intense economic hardship, lonely illnesses, the slander and accusation of others in the body of Christ, whose own carnal choices make our contrasting choice seem threatening. When satan knows, after years and sometimes decades of trying, he can’t get to us any other way, he often doubles back around on efforts to get to us through our children. There are several forms this can take, and though “standerinfamilycourt” has blogged on this before by way of personal tales, this post will try to take a look at how this commonly develops, share some things that might be helpful to think about, and finally share some encouraging outcomes.
Catholic author, Leila Miller has written a highly-praised book called Primal Loss, in which she asks a set of questions to seventy adult children of divorce about their feelings and experiences, which she captures in the book. Most were accounts of parents who, for the most part, remarried and would never have considered standing for the indissolubility of the only marriage God recognized as such. The parents largely went along with the culture, and had no godly input to do otherwise. The kids mostly say their adult life has suffered in various ways.
These accounts captured in Primal Loss make a good contrast against which our own choice to obey God’s commandment throughout unwanted marital estrangement can be compared to the emotional impact on our adult children of our not doing so, for a little balance and perspective. The whole premise of Miller’s book was the grievous temporal emotional impact on the adult life of these casualties of the popular divorce culture, especially where society expected them not to contradict the conventional wisdom about their “resiliency”. Her premise is true enough: our culture deeply frowns on adult children of divorce speaking up about how the selfishness of man’s divorce has impacted them as adults, and this expectation is no different for children of standers from the perspective of virtually everyone around them, except us standers. One of the most repeated (and striking themes) as stated by many of the adult children in this book is how much they truly resent having to explain to their own children Nana and Papaw’s estrangement.
“standerinfamilycourt” has two adult children of the covenant marriage. Both were young adults when the marital issues first surfaced. Both were raised all their lives in an evangelical home, where they were not even allowed (by their prodigal parent) to spend the night in a home where there was a biblically-adulterous “marriage”, even if the offending couple was part of our church. Both are now happily married, attending church regularly with their young families, and teaching their own children marriage permanence. Both stood firmly, along with their respective spouses, with this covenant marriage stander for nearly a decade leading up to the unilateral civil divorce action, and for at least a couple of years until a prodigal husband legalized his adultery, almost a dozen years into their ordeal. SIFC is well aware that many standers have a very different personal situation with regard to their children’s ability or willingness to support their stand.
All this said, SIFC has been violently thrown out of the house of each of these adult children at least once in the past 3 or 4 years, for a reason directly related to pressures from the covenant marriage stand, and has been threatened with never seeing the grandchildren again if it continued, and if SIFC didn’t quit the “cult”.
What are some of these pressures that we wish we could spare our kids (and their kids), which inevitably result from the only choice we can righteously make before God?
(1) The adulterous prodigal and their new spouse are relentlessly pouring on the emotional pressure to validate their “marriage”. This is an all-consuming, driving force among those who know their relationship is invalid and immoral in God’s eyes. In fact, the more they knew this before they entered into pseudo-marriage, the more intense the effort becomes to gain acceptance. Cards, bribes, invitations and pleas will proliferate. Scripture will be twisted to call into question the kids’ “unwillingness to ‘forgive’ ” or their “failure to honor their mother and father”, or their “disrespect for the authority of civil government”. They will be pointedly reminded that their own current church would recognize this new “marriage” (too often true enough).
If those measures don’t succeed, the grandchildren will often be contacted behind the backs of their parents. The child’s conscientious spouse, who never asked for any of this ongoing conflict, will start to fear for their own marriage due to the household turmoil all this lobbying causes over an extended period of time. If not properly navigated, the adulterers eventually “win” from the simple grind of wearing down family members, and they know they can easily deflect the blame at the same time, preferably onto the stander. The problem is not their immoral betrayal of their own flesh and blood progeny, it’s that irksome covenant marriage stand, and an “ex”-spouse who is “deliberately prolonging the pain” for all, by “using the kids”, instead of “getting help” or “moving on”.
(2) The children were not raised with the idea of marriage indissolubility, and they support the adulterous union because that’s what peace with our culture dictates. It usually takes two firmly-convicted parents to raise up children who would fit into the first description discussed above. Given the apostasy of most churches and the widespread legalized immorality in most extended families and friends’ families, this stands to reason. Beyond this is the fact that many abandoned spouses come genuinely to Christ only as a consequence of the marital rupture, and did not raise their children with biblical marriage concepts. In this latter case, the kids come to associate the stander’s sudden “fundamentalism” with all the prevailing lies of the culture about following Christ.
This really puts the stander in a serious pressure-cooker, and can result in much greater actual isolation from children and grandchildren than the first group of circumstances. These standers often find themselves suffering in silence as their grandchildren are exposed to one or more normalized immoral relationships that they know imperil two generations of souls. They also suffer much humiliation in these circumstances. They suffer almost irresistible fear and a sense of helplessness to do anything about it, even to the extent of fearing to wear their wedding ring in front of the family. To them, I offer an encouragement from the recent film, “I Can Only Imagine: The Bart Millard Story”. Bart’s mother left her abusive covenant husband for good cause, and formed a series of immoral relationships soon after. Bart’s dad, long before he came to Christ toward the end of his life, never took off his wedding ring. He, too, was a stander even as a pagan. Even as a drunk, he was having one of the most important silent influences a man could have on his son’s future life.
(3) The adult children have their peers to appease (and you’re embarrassing them; putting them on the spot). They go to work, to dinner parties, they’re on facebook and at soccer practice and scouts. It’s sharply painful to them to be asked how their mom or dad is doing. Social media exposure makes this circumstance particularly painful for both the stander and the children who feel “trapped” between their parents, in front of their friends, no less. It’s not uncommon for adult children of standers to “unfriend” one or both parents because of this, particularly if there is any activism involved on the stander’s part, or bragadocious posts on the prodigal’s part – both circumstances being very common. They dread being asked by these friends if they (like us) think that they or their divorced-and-remarried parents / aunts / uncles / siblings are living in sin. Even the most faithful of born-again adult children may not be very comfortable with thinking about these matters in eternal, heaven-or-hell terms. Their focus tends to cling tightly to how people are made to feel in all of the swirling circumstances. This concern often extends to what they fear your grandchildren might let slip to their own young friends, because so many of those children’s parents are divorced and remarried, as SIFC’s daughter once protested.
(4) There’s a ninety-five percent chance they are not comfortable with talk of hell, nor of remarriage adultery sending people to hell, especially by the millions. The very thought that it could be true is even more terrifying to them. God bless the Francis Chans and David Pawsons of the evangelical world who are now setting the example that’s giving us permission once again to talk about hell, after a decades-long church taboo against it! In the meantime, we’ve been up to our eyebrows in toxic Calvinism and toxic Lutheranism, with extrabiblical statements like: “He died for our past, present and future sins”, or “God looks at our sins, no matter how bad, through the shed blood of His Son, and He has thrown them as far away as the east is from the west.” (Presumably, without any repentance required other than “in our hearts”). Our kids are tempted to presume that just because a couple came together in “remarriage”, and a sovereign God didn’t stop it, He must have “joined them”. Most contemporary evangelical pastors look right pastMatthew 19:4-6, 8 (and related passages) to presume that God “provided for” divorce, and that all civil marriages other than homosexual or incestuous ones are morally interchangeable. Against that backdrop, linking Luke 16:18 with 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 seems almost sacrilegious. However, we need to be mindful that Jesus and Paul each made that linkage twice.
Empathetically, can we blame an adult child for feeling intense alarm and strong denial at someone / anyone saying out loud that a parent they always thought was “saved”, who may have even baptized them, is now headed to hell just for choosing the same serial monogamy that everyone around them chooses?
Let’s face it, if we didn’t know there was a biblical hell-penalty for dying in unrepented remarriage adultery, we might still stand celibate out of our first love for Jesus, but we’d have far less company in doing so. Furthermore, we’d be unloving not to give our blessing to the remarriage of our born-again one-flesh partner, knowing that the “loss of rewards” the Calvinists like to say they will reap in eternity makes their happiness in this life all the more important to them. We’d be downright cruel to keep calling it adultery, even though Jesus repeatedly did. It would be harsh on our children and grandchildren not to do whatever we could to ease the intense stress they are already under, if there were no risk of hell for children and grandchildren who go along with the immoral culture and who someday emulate it. But the biblical fact is what it is, so we “soldier on”. Jesus never promised us bloodless spiritual warfare.
Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.– Matthew 10:34-36
Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.– Matthew 24:11-13
The Apostles instead promised us we’d be surrounded and outnumbered by desperately wicked people in the last days. There is no way a serious stand can impact our children and grandchildren for the good unless the taboo against talking frankly about hell is gone from us. If we give place to the taboo out of fear of man, satan wins.
(5) Their spouse isn’t onboard, including the spouse’s parents or siblings. Perhaps your child’s in-laws are living in the sin of remarriage adultery themselves, or some of their other children or other relatives are. Perhaps they are a clergy family in a church where adulterous weddings are routine (or denominationally mandated), and “blended” families are typically the most productive members of the congregation. Or perhaps your child married an unbeliever, either equally or unequally-yoked. Perhaps you are a serious threat to your son-in-law, or daughter-in-law, because they actually have a living, estranged spouse. Whatever the reason, expect your adult child to be impossibly-torn in such circumstances, and always make your own choices that protect the sanctity and irreplaceability of their marriage, unless that marriage is biblically-adulterous.
(6) You were once the prodigal, now repented and standing, but your kids still don’t trust you. I am talking here to the one who divorced a faithful, godly spouse to “marry” someone else you were attracted to, rather than stay and persevere through the issues in your God-joined marriage. The Lord has brought you back from the Far Country, given you godly sorrow over what you’ve done, but your kids are applauding your spouse’s new relationship(s) because they don’t want to see the other parent hurt again, and aren’t ready yet to buy in to your repentance. You don’t understand how they’re not persuaded by the years you’ve chastely waited for the Lord to put your family back together since the day of your genuine repentance. From their perspective, the years they thought they could count on their intact family before it got disrupted by your change of mind (and heart) still speak louder than anything that’s happening now. That’s a really hard place to be, but not beyond the Lord’s touch.
So, what do we DO as standers with all of this? To be honest, it seems easier to talk about what we don’t do, first. – However tempting, and however much legal or informal alienation has developed, we don’t “write them off”. This is especially crucial for men to understand, in their God-assigned role as the patriarch of the family.God did not let Eli off the hook when he sinfully abdicated his role as the moral shaper of his adult sons. Giving in to this abdication urge is an affront to God’s design for the family, even in the extreme situation of legal restraining orders, and even in the second generation. Whose authority trumps here, God’s or “Caesar’s”? Be bold, and ask God to bring the children / grandchildren to you, and to remove that restraining order, in Jesus’ holy name!
– Don’t lose sight of the fact that the baseline battle is for souls, not circumstances.
– Don’t forget that the battle is ultimately the Lord’s, but He still needs kingdom soldiers (in their full armor) to carry out spiritual warfare.
– Don’t be the “cobbler whose own kids (and grandkids) went without shoes”. (This is for the street preachers, etc. out there who think it’s OK to not expect wholeness for their covenant family, as long as they’re “doing something for the kingdom of God”.)
– Never lose sight that NO prodigal mate “divorces” ONLY their covenant spouse, they also “divorce” their entire covenant family, spiritually and practically, especially if they then enter into legalized adultery.
– Don’t be so presumptuous as to give GOD a time limit. His singular will IS for ALL your covenant family to be whole in this life and to make it to heaven. Yes, we know it doesn’t always happen that way, but Abraham wasn’t lauded in Romans 4 for comparing himself to others.
DO be so bold as to stare satan down after a discouraging incident with the kids. You’re a King’s kid, and it’s your birthright, as well as your calling to do so. Balance that with the other piece of advice given to “King’s kids” (Luke 6:35) by Jesus Himself. Imagine if God treated us like we treat Him, or if He was intimidated from coming after us in spiritual warfare out of His weariness or fearfulness!
DO ask the Lord for special Spirit-revelation about the specific people causing the conflict, and pray for a unique opportunity to be a blessing to them. Follow through when it turns up.
DO prayerfully ask the Lord to pour His peace over the conflicts your kids are experiencing, and a hedge of protection over their marriage, that they would feel His presence and instruction navigating these difficult conflicts.
DO accurately walk in your Kingdom marital status 24/7/365, shutting out all resulting intimidation as “noise”. Paul never once spoke of “divorced” people in 1 Corinthians 7, nor did he actually speak generically of “single” people (despite the bad translations). If Paul believed one single word of what Jesus told him, which led to his instructions in Romans 7:2-3 and 1 Cor. 7:11 or 39, why in the world would he? Paul spoke of the widowed and the never married (“virgins” – parthenos), and the married. When he spoke of the unmarried (agamois – / agamos: without a[nother] wedding), he was usually speaking of widowers like himself. To Paul, there were no “divorced” people, only legally estranged, married people.
DO pray about wearing your wedding ring and using your married name without apology. Yes, it’s probably going to threaten your counterfeit replacement and irk your one-flesh spouse. But who is it who is guilty of the covetousness, theft and falsehood? Certainly not you!
DO remember how loudly your celibate stand is already speaking to everyone around you. This is for when you’ve shared a deep, essential truth (such as ongoing adulterers going to hell without exception), and you feel the need to “lay low” until the kids or grandkids come to you again.
DO ask the Lord to raise up supernatural barriers to exposing your grandchildren to the legal-but-adulterous (and legal-but-sodomous) unions in their lives, the best of which would be firm conviction in their parents about how morally damaging the exposure is. Yes, SIFC’s prodigal was spot-on all those years ago, and the kids have never forgotten it (to his current chagrin).
DO use bible stories (open bible) to straightforwardly communicate unpopular truths to the grandkids in an age-appropriate way, and pray with them. This is not a guarantee that you won’t incur flak or passing wrath as consequence of doing so (including from your spouse when it gets back to them). It is best to do so as a response to a conversation the grandkids initiated, and it’s best to make this an occasional, infrequent occurrence rather than a constant one. You are NOT out of line, and your ARE under God’s covering. If your spouse reprimands you, treat it as another (rare) opportunity to emphasize souls, eternal destinations, and the impact of the example we set before our children and exposed grandchildren.
DO ask the Lord before fully taking onboard their perspectives about the “damage” you are “causing” their children, your grandchildren. In 2016, my daughter claimed that my reading the John 6 account of Herod, Herodias and John the Baptist to the two elementary-aged granddaughters caused the older one to “wail in despair” about her Papaw going to hell “if she didn’t pray for him”. I had led this granddaughter to the Lord two years earlier, and knew she was comfortable with prayer. If there had really been such a “damaging” reaction, it would have been far more likely come from the younger one. We had prayed together with our arms around each other that day, and they had come to me.
DO be purposeful about spiritual disciplines, including prayer in the Spirit, fasting, devotions, scripture memory. We don’t operate in this kind of realm apart from spiritual warfare, and we don’t “dabble” very safely in it, either. Do them enough that the odds are your kids and grandkids will frequently “catch you” at them.
DO understand “standing” to include standing firm (holding our ground, occupying our God-assigned space). Try a word search in biblegateway.com on the word “stand”, and see how consistently this concept is associated with the word “stand”. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and havingput on the breastplate of righteousness,and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace.
– Ephesians 6:13-15
Early on the morning of “Boxing Day”, December 26, four months ago, SIFC was thrown out of our daughter’s house and sent home early on an 11-hour northerly journey in hazardous weather as a result of answering a question her husband had asked the Christmas night before. The culprit? On the surface, it was radical feminism, but on the inside, it was the Holy Spirit challenging her ideologies that are in conflict with the kingdom of God, and which if not repented, are quite likely to seriously threaten her own marriage down the road. The question posed by her husband was not even directly on marriage, but it was on politics. In retrospect, after the explosion that occurred at her house in August, 2016, SIFC should have demurred from engaging, since both granddaughters, ages 7 and 9, were again in the room, and because the topic area, involving a Trump administration nomination, was highly likely to drift into marriage ethics, were I to give a frank, honest answer about this morally unsuitable nominee. (SIFC is only a lukewarm Trump fan for morality and character reasons, and these kids both detest him for defeating Hillary.) Unavoidably, the conversation did drift into marriage permanence and the immoral living conditions of the nominee, who was also not pro-life, as I recall. Because my views were “polluting” and “confusing” her daughters by opening them up politically to “abuse” in their mother’s estimation, it was urgent that I be out of their house forthwith, our daughter declared (to the utter shock and dismay of her husband). Day older, day wiser. It was I who had played into that demonic trap, for the Holy Spirit did attempt to warn me. I spent the drive home pleading the blood of Jesus over their marriage, after thanking them sincerely for including me in their Christmas.
There was never any apology (except from me for not having the discernment to tactfully change the subject from politics), but by early March, our daughter was texting me about the younger granddaughter’s April birthday party, and the older one’s starring role in the annual school musical, scheduled ten days after that birthday. It appears that I had correctly discerned the demonic nature of that December setup, and correctly responded to the harsh treatment that resulted. A week ago I returned from spending a week in their home, this time without conflict, even though our granddaughters were bringing me their bibles and asking for bible stories, and even though they again asked me about Papaw, wanting more prayer for him. I had stared satan down, had shouted to him on the way back that he cannot have any part of my covenant family, in Jesus’ name, and I didn’t have to worry about creating conflict by wearing my wedding rings because the whole extended family knows they never come off. After all that had happened, I got to be the one that was there for them, doing practical things to ease stresses currently in their home, that for once, I have nothing to do with contributing to. Strangely, the other set of grandparents, who live only an hour away, weren’t even there or in touch, as far as I know.
Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble at them, for the Lord your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you. – Deuteronomy 31:6
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.
– John 7:24
…and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell. – Matthew 5:22
Who are you to judge the [household] servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
….But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.For it is written,
“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me,
And every tongue shall give praise to God.”
So then each one of us will give an account of himself to God.
Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. – Rom 14:4, 11-13
Last week, a deeply-respected ministry leader in the marriage permanence movement reposted an earlier-year piece that showed a photo with various faceless members of the marriage permanence fellowship he had founded, whom he said had given up on God to restore their covenant marriages, and were “no longer standing” (whatever that means in practical terms), while blaming a range of other marriage ministries for the “confusion” that allegedly caused these folks to stray from purpose. In so doing, he lumped several ministries, good, bad and ugly, all together in one all-encompassing “heresy bucket”, and quite possibly complained prematurely about some redemption stories that were not yet fully written by the Author.
A comment to this gentleman’s post, challenging this ministry leader to provide example evidence of unbiblical public teaching and conduct for one of those denounced ministries was quickly deleted, and a late-night PM exchange, initiated by the ministry leader, ensued about the commenter’s alleged “disrespect” and “anger”. In his estimation, his own ministry audience wasn’t entitled to objective support for his position, and asking for it on his ministry wall was (in his estimation) “slander” of his integrity which constituted “accusing him of lying”. It is always tempting to put a time and means limit on God in our human impatience.
(Furthermore, we might all be eerily reminded of one other prevalent human authority that claims the right to press unsubstantiated charges and impose non-objective labels that require no evidence to establish–and where the slightest dissent or challenge causes immediate out-of-proportion backlash: namely, “family court.” )
SIFC has often blogged about the intense, wearying spiritual warfare that constantly dogs the covenant marriage movement.
At our best, satan finds himself unable to assail either our theology on the indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony, or our personal integrity in walking joyfully in its truth over the long term–and I do emphasize the latter. So, the next best thing, and the low-hanging fruit for the demons of hell, is to constantly introduce endless internal wedge-issues and jealousies that discredit the movement and make it appear to be a reactionary “cult”, majoring in the minors (with our own tendency to fully cooperate, sadly).
Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me,for whoever is not against us is for us.Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward. – Mark 9:38-41
The offending, deleted facebook comment which was deemed “slanderous, angry and disrespectful” in the estimation of this ministry leader went like this:
“Too broad a brushstroke, my brother. Some of these “ministries” are rightly associated with each other, and in some cases it is shameful slander to associate them. We should “judge” each of these solely by what they actually teach and by the personal example of their leaders.
“You say, ‘I have personally met [the founding couple of the ministry] and have exchanged numerous communications with [the restored, repented formerly prodigal husband, now deceased] before he passed, as well as various others at all levels in their organization over the past 15 years.’ …..
“But, in fact, this is saying nothing at all that is of discernment. You are not the only one who has met and corresponded with the [extended ministry family].
“I am asking you to please stop slandering Rejoice Marriage Ministries unless you can prove that they teach falsehood or prove they live ungodly lives. I am proud to be a monthly supporter, as I have been for over 10 years.”
Although this particular post (and others like them) have been repeatedly reposted, the virtuous leaders of the maligned marriage ministry have never, to the best of my knowledge, chosen to answer back or retaliate in any way — something which is very much to their credit. Instead, they forgive, overlook, and allow God Himself to defend them, just as most individual standers must do with respect to their prodigal spouse and the sinning allies of the prodigal in their extended family. Perhaps an argument can be made that SIFC should best follow their example (which is ultimately following Christ’s example), and this is not without biblical justification. Unfortunately, as described in an earlier recent blog,
“On the other hand, outright slander against a very effective and godly pioneering marriage restoration ministry was actively defended by the [separate] site owner when interjected by another commenter, interfering as she was with help SIFC was attempting to provide to a new [group page] member in the crisis of his wife leaving him. Nope, this site is clearly not safe for referrals from Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional as originally hoped. ”
….these unsubstantiated allegations are directly interfering with actual instances where opportunities to minister to real, hurting people, according to their core needs at that point, have suffered as a result of inflated egos and unfair biases. And this disappointing public conduct is well below the normally high character of some of the players involved.
In the humble opinion of “standerinfamilycourt”, it is most just and most helpful to look at some objective attributes of these ministries and recognize that each ministry falls along a continuum, in terms of faithfulness to the kingdom of God with regard to marriage permanence. In such a framework, we can put into perspective the really flawed ones that God nevertheless finds a way to use to His purposes, the ones in the middle that are biblically faithful but whose structure and kingdom strategies we might not personally find to our taste, and (finally) those we are most aligned with. Attempting, as the offending post did, to put them all in one bucket is divisive at best, and ineffective-to-slanderous at worst.
Some key marriage permanence ministry attributes, from SIFC’s perspective:
1- How consistently are their public teachings perfectly-aligned with God’s undiluted word, after applying rigorous hermeneutics?
2- Are any of their leadership, board members or featured public “restoration testimonies” objectively in a marriage that Jesus would call continuously-adulterous according to Luke 16:18?
3- Do they pre-screen members according to whether they are standing for the God-joined marriage of their youth, or (instead) have an estranged, living spouse somewhere in the picture?
4- If the latter, what is the evidence of their motive or objectives for not screening out people in who are in legalized adultery? Is the motive godly, on balance? (Note: this is closely tied to the first attribute.)
5- Do they teach that dying in an adulterous remarriage is a heaven-or-hell issue, either directly or indirectly? (Note: this is a reliable proxy for whether or not they counsel people out of their adulterous civil subsequent unions, but not necessarily a direct proxy for their beliefs.)
6- Do they believe in and teach the concept of inseverable, instantaneously-joined one-flesh, which can only be created and terminated by the hand of God?
7- Do they believe and teach indissoluble, unconditional covenant, including God’s participation in that individual covenant?
8- Do they explicitly understand that there is a massive difference between “marriage permanence” and “holy matrimony indissolubility” according to Matthew 19:8 ?
If we were to assess each ministry by assigning “kingdom faithfulness points” on a scale of 1 to 10, most faithful to least faithful, for each separate attribute suggested above, this continuum would emerge on an fairly objective basis that is far better than smearing “anyone who is not us”. We thereby avoid the stain of judging “another man’s” house-servant unjustly within the household of God. We give a more appropriate and measured weight to things that are more a matter of preference, rather than true doctrinal or practice issues. We also see more objectively the degree of difference between the least faithful “ministries” and the most faithful ones. A perfect score – most faithful – on this test is (8), and the worst possible – least faithful – score is (80).
There are some additional criteria crucial to marriage restoration ministry that are more difficult to assess and objectively measure for comparison purposes which have been excluded for this reason in the (8) criteria chosen above. The most important of these is the rate and extent they are leading those they attract, and to whom they minister, to saving faith in Jesus Christ. A ministry that decides as an operating principle to screen out those who are in estranged “marriages” Jesus called adulterous (but they are not ready yet to admit it) is quite likely excluding the religious unsaved to a large extent, given how pervasive divorce and remarriage is in the cultures of all western nations. Therefore, the testimonies of people who say they authentically came to the Lord as a result of their marriage crisis, and learned to stay in Him regardless of the marriage outcome, are important.
Catholic-based ministries have proven, in “standerinfamilycourt’s” opinion and experience, to be very effective at influencing the broad culture for marriage permanence. However, because by official doctrine, they weight the guidance of their human leadership as equal to or above the actual canonized word of God, it is not really an apples-to-apples comparison to rate them, under these eight criteria, against evangelical Christian marriage ministries who claim to hold themselves directly responsible for operating according to God’s written word alone. Hence, Mary’s Advocates, The Ruth Institute and National Organization for Marriage can probably be compared with one another using some of these guidelines, but they will be excluded here, since they are not part of the divisive controversy that keeps surfacing in the permanence of marriage community.
Here’s an example of scoring outcomes for ten evangelical ministries that in some way help people fight for what they perceive to be their marriage – with a brief description of each, their score, and the main factors influencing each score. Each of these received either a “10”, a “5” or a “1” on each of the 8 criteria, to keep things simple. Long-term consistency of practice, or official public statements in a given criteria resulted in either a “10” or a “1”, while observed minor inconsistencies in specific criteria resulted in a “5” being assigned. These are arranged in descending order by raw score, from most-to-least supportive of “marriages” called adulterous by Jesus, Paul, the other Apostles, and the early church fathers prior to the Nicene period:
Family Life Today (score: 80) – Founded by covenant couple Dennis & Barbara Rainey, this ministry holds to the traditional unbiblical Protestant “exceptions” for adultery and abandonment. It also employs Ron Deal, the infamous “blended family pastor” who is divorced, with a living true spouse, and remarried, who is prominently featured on most of their broadcasts and special events. Hence, they are misaligned with scripture in several crucial heaven-or-hell matters, and register negatively on all of the other biblical faithfulness criteria. Any claim on the part of this ministry to preserve “covenant” marriage is based in part on a faulty definition of what constitutes a covenant marriage.
Scale: this ministry’s facebook community page has about 450,000 followers.
Focus on the Family (score: 80) – James Dobson-founded evangelical and political organization with some leadership and board members in adulterous subsequent marriages following man’s divorce from their true spouse. Similar theology to Family Life, and they regularly feature the “blended family pastor” as a guest on their broadcasts. This broadcast ministry regularly glorifies adulterous remarriage and features theological guest interviews with suchenemies of covenant marriage indissolubility as Dr. John MacArthur, where extra-biblical “exceptions” to the indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony are emphasized above the bulk of what Jesus had to say to the contrary.
Scale: their facebook community page has 2.85 million followers.
N.A.M.E. (score: 80) – National Association for Marriage Enhance ment is a church-based network of marriage counselors founded by the late Dr. Leo and Molly Godzich, and currently run by Pastors Arnold and Gwen Tackett, who are professional counselors and hold credentials with the Assemblies of God. This organization holds large conferences, and established local church-based chapters. Their score reflects the errant theology of the 1973 Position Paper of the Assemblies of God on Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage, and the fact that N.A.M.E.’s 20th annual conference in 2015 featured — guess who? Ron Deal, the “blended family pastor”. Some of the “marriages” they attempt to save are adulterous remarriages, which hinders the reconciliation of the true covenant marriages that were displaced by the adulterous civil unions. There does not seem to be a central facebook presence for this ministry, only local chapters.
Covenant Keepers International (score: 70 ) – This is a very large international ministry with many local chapters with local leaders. Unlike N.A.M.E. it is not primarily church-based, nor focused on professional counseling. It was founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma by Marilyn Conrad, a stander whose husband passed away before there was an opportunity to reconcile. Current directors are Rex and Carolyn Johnson, a restored covenant couple. This ministry reportedly has some local leadership in marriages Jesus would call adulterous, and they do not screen such couples from their ministry, but this can vary by chapter location. Their statement of beliefs on marriage indicates belief in an “exception” for “sexual immorality”, hence their doctrine appears to have some serious gaps, and they do not believe in no-excuses indissolubility as part of their conviction on marriage permanence. CKI got 5 split points each for criteria 2 and 7, otherwise scoring was the same as for the three organizations listed above them. Standers involved locally with CKI give them high marks for focusing on basic discipleship, the priority of each person’s direct relationship with Jesus, and these particular standers would avoid an adulterously-remarried chapter leader. Scale: the central ministry does not seem to maintain a facebook page, allowing the local chapters to do so, with typically 100-200 followers each.
Desiring God (score: 55 ) – This ministry was established by Dr. John Piper and is an extension of Bethel Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Dr. Piper is faithful to the teaching of Christ concerning the indissolubility of the covenant marriage of our youth, but the Calvinist nature of this church prevents the full biblical belief that believers can fail to inherit the kingdom of God after professing Christ, even if they divorce, remarry, and die in that state. He and his associated pastors teach against remarriage after divorce, but if those things do occur, they teach that repentance from those subsequent unions is “repeat sin”, and that those second vows supercede the original vows. Based on these facts, criteria 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8 were rated at 5 points, reflecting assumptions that there would be some leadership and membership in adulterous unions in this large, Calvinistic ministry, and Piper’s teaching on the covenant nature of marriage is watered-down a bit from the true biblical standard, with basic doctrine skewed by their belief that rewards may be lost from remarriage, but not one’s entrance into the kingdom of heaven. Finally, there would be a belief in permanence, but not indissolubility, if second vows can be deemed to supercede original vows. Scale: This ministry’s facebook page currently has just under 1 million followers.
Rejoice Marriage Ministries (score: 25 ) – This is probably the oldest ministry dedicated to supporting those standing for their authentic covenant marriage aside from Covenant Keepers. It was established in the early ’90’s by restored couple, Rev. Bob and Charlyne Steinkamp. In the early days they say they interacted with Covenant Keepers which was also in its infancy and hadn’t yet expanded into geographic chapters. Unlike CKI, Rejoice has never done so, and in fact, for many years (notably, until a bit after former prodigal, Rev. Steinkamp passed away, and the adult children were added to the leadership of the ministry) they actively discouraged standers following their ministry to develop contact with one another. For this reason, the “levels of leadership” their determined ministry critic claims to have corresponded with, simply don’t exist. Since this critic refuses to disclose any details about that, it’s difficult to comment further. Nevertheless, this remains a very flat and closely-held leadership structure consisting of all born-again family members, all of which reflect God-joined, original covenant marriages. There is some paid office help and web administrators, some volunteer prayer warriors who have been with the ministry for many years. They publish and distribute a wealth of free and low cost books, audio and video content, prayer cards, bumper stickers, and the like, to support covenant marriage stands.
Rejoice does not have a fixed annual conference schedule. They take their ministry “on the road” for conferences periodically, as and when the Lord leads, and they conduct large monthly bible studies locally which are now live-streamed and recorded. They periodically hold large, international conference calls when they have covenant stander testimonies to share, but not on any fixed schedule. “Standerinfamilycourt” attended the December, 2010 funeral of Bob Steinkamp, has personally met the family members, and has been by the very modest longtime home of founder Charlyne. On a separate occasion, SIFC attended a 3-day road conference live and on-site.
As noted, Rejoice is followed by many who are estranged from remarriages and who prefer to stand for the wrong prodigal partner. This is a direct consequence of a longstanding ministry philosophy of not screening out those whom they might potentially lead to Christ for the first time. It is very important to note that SIFC has not, in more than 12 years, ever seen one instance of this ministry compromising, diluting or suppressing the word of God to attract or retain anyone. They strongly emphasize personal discipleship as the stander’s highest priority, and provide them significant aids to assist in this. While it is certainly possible for determined non-covenant standers to tune out the portions they don’t want to hear, SIFC’s suspicion is that over time, they either repent or depart. (We should note that the late Rev. Steinkamp’s pastoral credentials came from the Assemblies of God, and most likely before the 1973 man-voted doctrine change with which his writings make crystal-clear that he never agreed. In SIFC’s opinion, this still had the effect on him to be careful in his published writings to tell everyone in an adulterous remarriage to “seek the Lord” about what they should do personally, but in general terms he unequivocally called all such unions sinful and in need of termination.) Scale: this ministry’s facebook community page has about 19,000 followers.
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall (score: 17) – as we all know, this is “standerinfamilycourt’s” own outspoken ministry, started a little over three years ago. The original intent of the blog and facebook pages was to try and pull together a legal, constitutional “class” of disenfranchised Respondents in unilateral divorce cases to aid in a constitutional challenge to the Illinois “no-fault” law. The Lord, however, had a different vision and took these pages in the direction of pulling together various parts of the marriage permanence community who would not otherwise be aware of each other, so that they may work more effectively together as a voice of conscience to the clergy, to lawmakers, to national pro-family voices who routinely give the indissoluble side of “biblical marriage” the short shrift. There is significant ministry to individuals occurring behind the scenes, but not constantly. SIFC’s professional training and background is in financial and legal matters, not formal bible training. The Lord has provided in such a way that no donations are necessary at this time to sustain the ministry, but in the future, a taxable nonprofit (501c4) may be formed for the purpose of assisting lawmakers and constitutional challengers of unilateral divorce laws, as political opportunities come about by the Lord’s hand. (Or the Lord may again have a different vision, to which SIFC would definitely yield). People contacting our pages for deep ministry are typically referred with recommendations to other ministries, according to the person’s particular need, after receiving prayer here for their situation. As is the case with Rejoice discussed above, there is no practical vision or intent to screen out people estranged from adulterous remarriages, but neither is there the slightest compromise with the undiluted biblical truth about non-widowed remarriage in anything we publish. People who follow these two social media pages either get convicted and repent, or they “unlike” and “unfollow” us (possibly cyclically). It has been our consistent “run rate” over the three years of our existence to lose two “likes” for every five that we gain weekly, so we grow slowly but steadily. Our score consists of seven “1’s” in all of the criteria except #3, as it does not fit our operating model or ministry objectives to screen out anyone from participation and interaction with our ministry. Scale: our facebook community page has about 600 followers.
Restoration of the Family (score: 17 ) – this biblical ministry was started by another constitutional challenger of unilateral divorce laws, Judith Brumbaugh of Florida who is an older widow, and her low-key ministry has been in existence since the late 1980’s, supported by donations and sales of books. While there is occasional involvement in some family-related Florida political issues, the primary focus is discipleship materials and biblical teaching. As with Rejoice Marriage Ministries and 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall, there is no known pre-screening for interaction with the ministry (mailing list inclusion, etc.) There is here a strong emphasis on personal discipleship. Their scoring is identical to 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall on all eight of the criteria, and differs from Rejoice only in that they do consistently tell people to exit adulterous marriages as a direct heaven-or-hell matter. The founder of this page maintains only a personal wall on facebook rather than a public page, and does not classify herself as a “public figure”, so her ministry scale based on facebook’s count of followers is not available. She shows, however to have just under 500 “friends”.
Christian Principles Restored (score: 17 ) – This ministry was established by Dr. Joseph Webb, also of Florida. Dr. Webb is a seminary-trained, righteously-married pastor who came under conviction through a journey of self-study about the indissolubility of God-joined holy matrimony. He has written several books, done interviews, and spoken at conferences and retreats. CPR’s scoring is identical to 7 Times Around the Jericho Wall and Restoration of the Family on all eight of the criteria, and differs from Rejoice only in that they, likewise, do consistently tell people to exit adulterous marriages as a direct heaven-or-hell matter. CPR’s pages show no evidence of pre-screening their participants so long as they are receptive to the strong truths coming out of their ministry. Scale: this ministry has a couple of infrequently-updated facebook pages with a following of under 200.
Theological Foundations / Spirit of Hosea (score: 8 )- Founded in the late 1990’s by Rev. Stephen Wilcox of New Brunswick, Canada, who has stood for his own covenant marriage for over 30 years, and became an ordained pastor during this time. His ministry encompasses a large fellowship of standers and people who have repented to exit the adulterous remarriages they became involved in, and includes the information pagecadz.netwhich carries testimonies of repentance from adulterous remarriages, a ministry web page marriagedivorce.com and a YouTube channel carrying his audio sermons. He has an outreach to other pastors to encourage them in adopting a fully-biblical view and practice around marriage indissolubility. In addition, he serves as the general online chaplain to the marriage permanence community, including the many who were pushed out of their churches, or who cannot find a church sufficiently supportive of marriage indissolubility that they feel comfortable in. Scale: this ministry runs facebook group pages to which members must be admitted by an administrator, rather than community pages open to everyone. The Theological Foundations facebook page has just over 100 members, and the Spirit of Hosea facebook page has just over 70 members, neither of which is indicative of the very high volume of traffic on the pages outside of facebook.
Please note the vast score gap between the five ministries most supportive of remarriage adultery and the five who are least supportive of continuing in (or attempting to restore) 2nd or subsequent “marriages” where there is one or more estranged spouses in the picture. Note, too, that the only ministry with a “perfect” score does deliberately screen out people from fellowship who are standing for the restoration of non-covenant marriages. The next cluster do not, to the best of our knowledge, do so but neither are there biblical gaps in their consistent teaching, either by error or omission, and they rely on this biblical integrity to naturally winnow out non-covenant standers over time, while getting the essential message across to more of those who need to hear it.
None of this cluster of five ministries has any leadership in such a non-covenant marriage. (Some have leaders who have repented and removed themselves from such.) The four ministries in the cluster with a score of 17 or less actively and consistently tell one and all that dying in such an arrangement is a heaven-or-hell matter, hence, everyone needs to exit those arrangements in all cases.
Rejoice falls in between the two clusters with a score of 25, but this is not due to error or biblical omission in their teaching. The main difference between their score and the cluster of 17’s is due to the fact that they don’t actually tell everyone to get out of their adulterous unions (while still regularly teaching with full biblical accuracy what constitutes remarriage adultery). Instead, they tell their readers and subscribers to seek the Lord about what to do. They also do not directly teach that dying in such a union costs people their souls in eternity. They do teach in general that remarriage adulterers forfeit their inheritance in the kingdom of God, but they don’t emphasize hell. Rejoice is materially more faithful in discouraging and opposing adulterous remarriage than Covenant Keepers because Rejoice has no leaders at all in non-covenant marriages, and would never allow such. On the other hand, none of Covenant Keepers’ founders and current central leaders are in non-covenant unions, but some of the regional leaders reportedly are. Rejoice, on the other hand, never features non-covenant restorations in any of their teachings or events, but Covenant Keepers reportedly does. Rejoice does regularly share audio and video testimonies of people who have penitently come out of adulterous remarriages and reconciled with their true spouse.
(Please click the graphic to enlarge in your browser.)
Sometimes, differences in ministries were actually put there by God Himself to accomplish a specific kingdom purpose. This is true even in the least faithful of them! This is due to cross-pollination, where a faithful ministry is provided an entry-point for conversation with the multitude of followers from something which that less-faithful ministry has published, and also through the mutual “friends” (policy-makers and national influencers among them) who are following both the pure and the popular corrupt ministries. This is true also because of what we call “critical mass” that comes with some of these ministries that tell people what they want to hear. While it is never appropriate to form a direct alliance with unfaithful ministries, it is appropriate for faithful ministries to speak into them opportunistically, as Jesus and the Apostles frequently did. That said, it is never appropriate to label a ministry as “unfaithful” unless they are specifically not faithful with their public handling of the word of God. If they are unfaithful in that way, then the clear evidence of it should be easy to produce. If they are not, then we are accountable to the kingdom of God for slandering them as if they were.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth.So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.Now he who plants and he who waters are one; but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor.
– 1 Corinthians 3:6-8
We might examine some of the persistent reasons why some in the stander community propagate the impression that Rejoice fosters adulterous remarriages, and promotes their “reconciliation”, given that their teaching is fully biblical on a consistent basis, and there is no remarriage adultery at all in their leadership. One key reason is that non-affiliated sites that are known to be run by site owners who have “married” the spouse of another living person (and are “standing” for that remarriage due to some unbiblical excuse or “exception”) extensively promote their materials. These sites, run by non-covenant standers, regularly redistribute Rejoice’s posts because they admire the ministry’s principles and methods. This, of course, is beyond the practical control of Rejoice Marriage Ministries. Two examples of such non-affiliated sites with owners either in or divorced from non-covenant “marriages” are Malachi 2:16 and RMM Fan Site (which looks quite deceptively like the authentic Rejoice site). They are attracted by Rejoice’s hopeful, positive salvation-and-discipling message, and the fact that non-covenant “marriages” have the (volume-based) appearance of reconciling much more frequently than God-joined unions, since this can happen over and over again in the counterfeit cases.
(Jesus, too, was accused of “apostasy” simply because the sinful followed Him, and because up to a certain point, He did not discourage them. The actual engagement point came for Christ’s sinful followers where He made clear that what He was teaching and commanding made the difference between heaven and hell, invoking a choice. Still today, many think they are following Him who consider obedience to be “optional” in this matter.)
But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” – Matthew 13:26-30
Another important reason for the erroneous perception that Rejoice Marriage Ministries promotes the reconciliation of non-covenant “marriages” comes from the tales of those standing for true covenant marriages who attend Rejoice live events and who wind up in a prayer circle next to someone who is “standing” for an adulterous remarriage. Since Rejoice intentionally does not have a policy to screen such people out from their ministry events, this does happen. It is natural (and certainly expected) for those who are standing for authentic Matt. 19:4-6 unions to feel queasy about “agreeing in prayer” for the restoration of a biblically adulterous relationship, but there are certainly reasonable alternatives to so praying, and these prayer circles do not necessarily translate into “support” for such unions, on the part of the ministry or anyone else, IF biblical teaching is never compromised in their publications and events, nor shied away from by that ministry in their one-on-one encounters.
Yet another reason Rejoice is lumped in with unbiblical ministries by some in the marriage permanence movement is that Rejoice strongly encourages all standers to remain accountable to others in flesh-and-blood, brick-and-mortar church bodies, however difficult and uncomfortable that might be (or might become) in a given situation. This runs directly counter to the wounded places that never healed in some individuals, and sometimes even, counter to the desire not to be accountable (on a long term basis) that is harbored in the true hearts of some in the movement, along with their deep desire to avoid the face-to-face conflict that always results from keeping up our responsibility to be salt and light in the world. While there certainly does come a valid time to “shake the dust off our feet”, many would prefer not to get their feet dusty in the first place. To these folks, it becomes very tempting to slam a ministry whose faithful teachings bring conviction about this particular matter, while it offends their own rigid ideology which even has a label in the movement: “pulpit-pew“. Indeed, one ministry that keeps fostering these accusations is a virtual / online church (and a very good one, at that), which is sustained by the donations of people in the marriage permanence community. By defending not only one but two potential “competitors” for those donations, it’s little wonder that this ministry leader subconsciously felt that SIFC had “attacked” his ministry with the brief and bland facebook comment that ended by disclosing longterm financial support for Rejoice. He of little faith!
Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am of Paul,” and “I of Apollos,” and “I of Cephas,” and “I of Christ.”Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? – 1 Corthinthians 1:12-13
“Standerinfamilycourt” can be humble enough to admit that the selection of different criteria, or perhaps disclosure of some privately-learned facts we are not privy to, might change this illustration and comparison, so we won’t presume to call it an analysis. No deep interviews were conducted to obtain confirmation of various surface observations made in the scoring. A few of the ministry leaders who have gone on record with their broad-brush criticism of Rejoice Marriage Ministries are from the same southern Florida region where the family ministry is based.
I do believe I have related everything these local critics have told me to-date that is verifiable. Rejoice, meanwhile, does not make a practice of having much public interaction with other marriage ministries, choosing not to use their donated resources in that thankless, bottomless manner. As a continuing donor, quite frankly, SIFC appreciates that. The point of this blog post is to offer some calm perspective and good reasons to stop the senseless carping, to encourage the refocus of everyone’s time and energy within the marriage permanence community to our own assigned role, since there’s plenty of work for everybody. Or we can just continue to play “cult” on some kingdom-inconsequential level, proving our worldly critics absolutely correct! Our choice.
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal Unilateral Divorce!
All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify.Let no one seek his own good, but that of his neighbor.Eat anything that is sold in the meat market without asking questions for conscience’ sake; for the earth is the Lord’s, andall it contains.If one of the unbelievers invites you and you want to go, eat anything that is set before you without asking questions for conscience’ sake.But if anyone says to you, “This is meat sacrificed to idols,” do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for conscience’ sake;I mean not your own conscience, but the other man’s; for why is my freedom judged by another’s conscience?If I partake with thankfulness, why am I slandered concerning that for which I give thanks?
Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.Give no offense either to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God;just as I also please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit but the profit of the many, so that they may be saved. – 1 Corinthians 10:23-33
Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise,making the most of your time, because the days are evil.
– Ephesians 5:16-33
“Standerinfamilycourt” has never been one to belong to dozens of social media sites and pages, being extremely selective and purposeful about which ones merit THE LORD’S time which has been entrusted to advance the kingdom of God. This balance of time is certainly going to look different from disciple to disciple, depending on the particular assignment we’ve been given in these last days. The half-dozen sites SIFC has committed to membership in generally serve these main purposes, consistent with kingdom assignment:
(1) plug into high-quality scholarship of others so that 7 Times Around the Jericho WallandUnilateral Divorce Is Unconstitutionalcan be as reliable as possible in dividing God’s word (and on the flip side, promote respectful avoidance of misusing the word of God)
(2) provide a trustworthy connection point to refer opposite-sex individuals who contact our pages seeking to be ministered to deeply — which should be done by a same sex person who is spiritually mature.
(3) extend the reach and circulation of our posts so that the stander community is aware of, and connected with, other voices and communities who are our natural allies in the righteous, interdependent quest to abolish unilateral divorce and clean up the apostate churches to the extent possible.
(4) keep tabs on what satan is up to these days in opposing God’s kingdom. He loves to send in intruders and hang out on standers’ pages, too, while constantly shifting his ugly tactics.
Many covenant marriage standers will belong to an astounding number of sites and seem to be online “contending for the faith” all day and night. Knowing firsthand how addictive social media is, especially to isolated and often-alienated standers, one has to wonder how much time is being truly spent in intercession for the rebuilding of our torn up families, pleading with the throne of heaven for the soul of our estranged one-flesh partners, and praying protective hedges around our impacted loved ones, especially given satan’s particular rage against us. Not a few in the marriage permanence community, if they were completely honest with themselves and others, have seemingly given up expecting the Lord to restore their holy matrimony union (if they haven’t instead come out of an unholy matrimony union). Some, wrongly in my view, see Paul’s instructions in 1 Cor. 7:11, “remain unmarried [celibate] or be reconciled…”
as “either / or” instead of “both / and”, and this is reflected in how they spend their time and emotional energy. I pray that the Lord will greatly surprise these folks one day.
A well-run site for covenant marriage standers (and for others with hearts open to the truth of marriage indissolubility), will have ground rules that look something like this:
– this is not a dating site – name-calling, gossip, personal attacks and bad language will not be tolerated here – off-topic posts and those pushing divisive, controversial ideologies not essential to inheriting the kingdom of God will not be allowed in our space, nor will debate on them be permitted – promotional posts for unrelated ministries, products, etc. will be removed as spam
It is not typical at the present time for most pages which are geared to a doctrinally pure, continuously-maturing covenant marriage stander or repenting prodigal membership, to have more than a few hundred members or followers, nor rapid net growth (joiners far exceeding the unjoiners). Yet when one gives this reality some reflection, such small following is still equivalent to a small-to-medium-sized church congregation. Given the other reality that in a lot of cases, a particular site may become the church-surrogate for an unfortunate number of standers, the integrity and consistency with which the rules are applied takes on a sobering importance. Everyone in this marriage permanence community has recently had a front row seat for the sad spectacle of what happened under the cronyism, carnality and lack of accountability in Greg Locke’s brick-and-mortar church. Though virtual fellowship is not typically a matter of financial stewardship, the situation might not be too different in some of the stander sites in many other important respects, complete with defecting sheep who fall into carnality because the responsibility for discipling the members wasn’t quite what it should have been in some sites where the defectors were hanging out. When a standers’ site is growing at megachurch pace, it doesn’t hurt to take an objective look at what might be driving that aberrant pace and be a bit wary of failure to consistently apply the site’s own rules.
SIFC joined a fast-growing page recently that seemed to be well-run, at least as it appeared from the outside. Its owner is an organizer of weekly conference calls of very high quality, good attendance, and excellent guests. The live streaming of these calls had just become available on that site, with convenient playback. Despite misgivings some months earlier about the pushiness of the owner in posting the call notices on several restricted-topic sites and being rather obstinate about respecting those owners’ reasonable requests not to do so, SIFC began to join these conference calls on a fairly regular basis due to the quality of the speakers. Site membership had grown to about 1300 with a dozen or so new joiners weekly to site membership. At first it appeared this site would nicely meet all three of SIFC’s top desired purposes for joining, as described earlier, and for committing to being a contributing member of a helpful standers’ group. Some of the handful of soundly-based groups that had been fruitful a year or two ago had since gone fairly inactive, so the time seemed ripe.
After two or three weeks’ participation, SIFC has come away feeling as if comments in response to some of the posts had invited everyone there to a dinner party where, unknowingly, there had been served meat sacrificed to idols, which offended some guests of weaker faith. Let me explain.
At the time point of joining, there was quite the conversation ongoing on about a male stander who had fallen prey to a heretical remarriage apology page, but had simultaneously been a member of this particular group, from which he evidently pursued several female standers (as confessed by one of them) before selecting a another stander to “marry” while his covenant wife remains a living prodigal. To-date, two of our blog own posts have early-flagged and discussed the role of this man’s profuse legalistic ideologies which directly contributed to his moral fall, and (likely) to the ongoing depth of estrangement from his true wife.
Against this unfortunate backdrop, it was incredibly disheartening to see legalistic and dogmatic posts by one of the page’s moderators in the next two weeks on all of the following off-topic issues that drew contentious debate:
– the alleged”corruption” of attending a flesh-and-blood, brick-and-mortar church that has an appointed pastor or pastoral staff
– the alleged “pagan-ness” of Valentine’s Day celebrations
– the alleged “impropriety” of addressing anyone, great or small, by a title
This appeared to be the only type of post ever observed being made by this gentleman in that time frame. Not only were the moderator-poster’s extrabiblical biases being promoted, but anyone not practicing them was being overtly condemned. SIFC’s first appeal to observe the site’s own posted rules was made to the owner in a comment on the post. The site owner publicly commented that he agreed with the legalism complained of, and would therefore allow the posts to remain for the heated and unseemly discussion that ensued. SIFC challenged the moderator-poster on all three of the above distractions, a man whose “story” hadn’t been revealed in SIFC’s short sojourn on the site, but his faith background can likely be guessed from the ethnicity of his name and the apparent appeal to him of these particular dogmas. One of SIFC’s challenges was quickly deleted by somebody with access to do so, and SIFC received two PM’s from the site owner claiming that the dissenting comments constituted “name-calling”. (Apparently because SIFC used the “L-word” as a descriptor). In a display of spiritual maturity, this fellow removed himself for a morning from the page membership, then the next thing SIFC knew, the page was “no longer available”. Not only was I removed, but evidently also blocked from the page.
This site had all of the ground rules described above in place, and then some, as follows:
“This is NOT a dating site. There is ZERO tolerance for name calling, gossip, slander or profanity. If you do not answer questions, you will be ignored, and you and your posts may be deleted. Posts of false doctrines or false teachers will be deleted. This is not a debate forum. Keep posts focused on [marriage, adultery, divorce and remarriage].
DO NOT POST VIDEOS BY UNAPPROVED SPEAKERS. APPROVED SPEAKERS HAVE THEIR WEB SITES LISTED AND/OR ARE MODERATORS. VIDEOS SHOULD BE APPROVED PRIVATELY BY A MODERATOR PRIOR TO POSTING ON [site name]. (Examples: types of baptisms, tongues, women head coverings, dress or other topics that Christians have been divided on hundreds of years) Not a place to advertise your business. Violators and their posts will be deleted without warning.”
These were indeed enforced against infractions committed by non-cronies of the page owner, as SIFC observed on one occasion when a lady was admonished, not for a post but for a question she raised about a legalistic and divisive doctrine. On the other hand, outright slander against a very effective and godly pioneering marriage restoration ministry was actively defended by the site owner when interjected by another commenter, interfering as she was with help SIFC was attempting to provide to a new member in the crisis of his wife leaving him. Nope, this site is clearly not safe for referrals from Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional as originally hoped.
Reflecting on this incident in its aftermath, several thoughts come to the surface that (at least in SIFC’s estimation) if heeded will help keep the looney-tunes “cult” perception, not to mention actual stander defections from biblical morality, at bay so that the marriage permanence community as a whole will be taken seriously by people who can potentially help us make a difference for families, a goal I’m certain this site owner shares.
Many years ago, SIFC and spouse were trained in our charismatic, nondenominational church, which practiced a plurality of pastoral leadership as modeled by the 1st century church, into a 13-week course for house church leaders called “The Maturity in Christ Series”. We weren’t very chronologically mature at this time in the early ’80’s, but we then went on to teach this course together to new leaders a couple of times after that, while we co-led a house church with a seasoned couple who were both bible college grads. Without denominational leadership and sound doctrine, the atmosphere was ripe for every kind of lunacy to be tracked in from outside, and indeed, we observed much during this time that was successfully resisted by the framework that the leadership had proactively established and the careful grooming and monitoring of the lay leadership. On one occasion, there was an administration of (Matthew 18:15-17) public church discipline to a male house church leader who had become romantically involved with a troubled female in his charge. This man was put out of the church for refusing to terminate the immoral, extramarital relationship.
In those days, marriage permanence was preached from the pulpit of that church. Unlike the affluent Methodist church downtown, the number of remarried divorced pairs could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The typical dogmas and distractions that regularly surfaced were very similar to today’s virtual communities of believers: dress and makeup legalisms, Sabbath disputes, head coverings, holiday observance, homeschooling, women working outside the home being likened to “streetwalkers”, legalism about pursuing college at a secular institution, order in using the gifts of the Spirit, and so forth. Similar to our virtual communities, people were being born again after spending their upbringing in churches with autocratic authority structures and some clearly pagan or extrabiblical practices, and these folks tended to backlash in the opposite direction of whatever they have grown up with until a period of responsible small group discipleship had brought them into better balance.
But what happens when a stander or repenting prodigal is persecuted in their traditional church, or even worse, put out of it for being outspoken about remarriage adultery being a hellbound sin? The discipling processes can be short-circuited in some cases before a person has matured spiritually. They can easily become distrustful of all traditional churches, due to the widespread apostasy over the remarriage issue, and assume all pastors are incorrigible and all churches apostate. However, it doesn’t stop there. Instead of becoming spiritually secure individuals, it becomes necessary to disparage and accuse anyone who is attending an actual church and attempting to influence their pastor toward scriptural faithfulness. This was indeed the tone taken in one of the posts by the page moderator, who appears from this behavior to have come out of a faith tradition where church leadership is deemed “infallible” and not to be challenged. Only, who’s there and qualified to disciple him in the virtual church? Who’s properly trained and willing to do so? Only somebody who can see (or has seen) where the man’s error is taking him!
Do not be deceived: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” – 1 Corinthians 15:33
There’s a key reason why SIFC opted for an open community page instead of a closed group – lack of time and biblical qualification to act as a de facto pastor. There are just over 600 self-elected followers to Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional, none of whom are very likely to mistake the page for a suitable church substitute.
(By contrast, a community page started four years earlier, similarly targeted as ours, but which doesn’t call non-covenant “marriages” adultery, doesn’t seek to reform the laws, and doesn’t write about things like hell, toxic Calvinism, and the corruption of our contemporary bibles, has eight times as many page fans.) Even so, ministry, prayer and referral (as appropriate) takes place behind the scenes upon request on UDIU, and there is a comfortable margin of time for this to occur with good handling while maintaining the page, and while assisting on a couple of other pages. People don’t (normally) get insulted, protest loudly and huff off on our page — which I’d say is good for public decorum. They simply “unlike” and “re-like” our page.
Were there 1300 group members to deal with, coming and going through a page-owned gatekeeping process, that’s equivalent to a fairly large church, and maintaining this administratively pretty much requires a staff, as indeed this page has appointed its moderators. The site owner told me he works the page himself an average of eight hours a day.
An overseer, then, must be…. and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil. – Timothy 3:7
Page owners in the marriage permanence arena must understand that their page is a pseudo-church (unless the following is very small or unless they regularly and sincerely urge participation in a real church or house church fellowship wherever possible), and they must understand that the shared leadership of that page are indeed pseudo-pastors, at least to a portion of their members. Is this page owner therefore willing to qualify these folks serving as his moderators according to Paul’s guidelines in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1? If not, what unction do they really have for criticizing the qualifications of a non-widowed remarried pastor? If they don’t consistently “police” the lunacies and heresies surfacing on their page, are they any better than Paul found the Corinthian church to be when he rebuked the leadership for tolerating similar lunacies and heresies in his first letter? If they have defectors who lapse into immorality, is this not a potential sign of pastoral deficiency?
And what is their strategy for discipling and counseling the women in their virtual congregation? There are one or two virtual marriage ministries that have addressed this issue thoughtfully and made effective provision for it. At least one of the leaders of this particular page, however, claim there’s something wrong with a female Christ-follower if, deprived of the covering God expects from her absentee husband, she therefore decides to be under the covering of a traditional pastor. Yet her critics on the page really don’t have anything superior to offer her in the alternative. What then happens in the vacuum is (unfortunately) that some can be preyed upon by insiders and outsiders alike.
Here’s a quick reminder of a few of the substantial benefits someone who can’t or won’t attend a flesh-and-blood fellowship miss out on:
– communion (the taking of which just might be felt by our absent one-flesh partner)
– anointing with oil when ill
– meals brought over when ill
– small helps in severe situations they are unable to do themselves
– opportunity for mission trips
– opportunity to mentor young people
Surely, the Lord would not have His sheep criticized in this fashion for being a part of a congregation that provides things which He clearly intended for us to have that the alternative gatherings, real or virtual, can’t necessarily provide? I think of an isolated late middle-aged woman who died alone in her house in our neighborhood several years ago who wasn’t even discovered until a part of her roof fell in due to heavy snow, and whose out-of-state children then had to be tracked down. How incredibly sad, and I’ve often wondered if she had been a stander.
Let’s face it: we standers tend to be a mess emotionally, and long years of standing don’t normally make it any better. These online groups tend to be a magnet additionally for wounded people who, for whatever reason, reject having spiritual authority over them, who bristle at the idea of tithing (one legalism they do agree not to tolerate), and at other disciplines they shouldn’t be finding excuses to avoid. Often this behavior and mindset is due to being raised in a church that was pompous in requiring the use of titles, and in declaring individual leaders “infallible” while promulgating the traditions of men that contradict the word of God. Standers’ groups should be safe havens for those who have been involuntarily rejected or persecuted by their brick-and-mortar church. But bad behavior that is harmful to the others on the group page should never have a safe haven. Response to this behavior should follow a Matthew 18:15-17 process with no favoritism shown. “Excommunications” should certainly follow this process, and should be done with correct motives which are soul-related. “Excommunication” should never result from other members pouting at being admonished.
For the body is not one member, but many.If the foot says, “Because I am not a hand, I am not a part of the body,” it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body.And if the ear says, “Because I am not an eye, I am not a part of the body,” it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body.If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.– Corinthians 12:14-18
Another thing typically happens in large, virtual pseudo-churches. All of the usual functional and spiritual gifts have a tendency of showing up in the group’s members and manifesting in posts and comments on the page. One of the key pieces of leadership training my honey and I received “way back when” was instruction in what some of these gifts look like in their actual exercise in a group, including both the strengths and the weaknesses of each kind of person so gifted. However, many standers have always been taught some measure of cessationism, so this conversation could not even be had on this particular group page, according to the stated rules. One is perfectly free on this page, therefore, to hyper-apply Matthew 23:1-12, according to the YouTube video of some self-appointed “theologian”, but God help anyone who dares exercise the gift of, say, discerning of spirits in that group. That “passed away” with the Apostles, after all. Unfortunately, satan doesn’t spare the marriages of charismatics any more than he does the marriages of the “Reformed” or the Baptists. Pretending within a group of Christ-followers that the functional gifts don’t exist doesn’t make them “poof” go away. God certainly knows that a body can’t function without a nervous system, so chances are that an “excommunicated” nervous system just might grow back through another member. Successful groups, flesh-and-blood or virtual, learn how to benefit from the functional gifts in an orderly fashion.
I do not share my written perspective on this to get back at the group, for if so, I would name them. I also do not write this out of any desire to rejoin, based on what I so quickly learned about how its governance stacks up with my pre-contemplated desires for investment of time in such a group. At best, rejoining would fulfill only objectives (3) and (4) – not good enough to compensate for the much greater downside, as it currently stands. I will probably not repost this blog to Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional, because a portion of that diverse audience is best not exposed to petty squabbling and (actual) cultishness in the body of Christ. I blush that the poor man who was a new joiner seeking help for a horrible family crisis was exposed to it that day, and can only pray he wasn’t so turned off that he won’t follow up on the good referrals he was given. My main hope is that this post will trigger the marriage permanence community to reflect on what they hope to achieve from group membership, and for the many others administering marriage permanence pages to prayerfully gut-check their own priorities and objectives, responsibly considering some of the eternal implications for running their page.
Surely, making one’s own decision whether to be part of a traditional church or observe Valentines Day are both lawful, according to the Apostle Paul, and whether or not they are both profitable depends on the circumstances involved, which are not for a third party to judge in any event. Similarly, Jesus did not forbid a disciple from voluntarily addressing someone by their title. At least that was the interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas (addressing an angel sent to him in a dream):
““And I said to him, ‘Sir, if any one has a wife who trusts in the Lord, and if he detect her in adultery, does the man sin if he continues to live with her?’ And he said to me, ‘As long as he remains ignorant of her sin, the husband commits no transgression in living with her. But if the husband knows that his wife has gone astray, and if the woman does not repent, but persists in her sin, and yet the husband continues to live with her, he also is guilty of her crime, and a sharer in her adultery.’ And I said to him, ‘What then, sir, is the husband to do, if his wife continues in her vicious practices?’ (The Shepherd, Second Book, Commandment 4:1)
Rather, Jesus taught that it was presuming upon the glory of God to insist that others address us by such a title. Someone of weaker faith might not see one of these issues as the scripture intended, and someone of the weakest possible faith will have issues of conscience over the shallowest reading of scripture or every suggestive, but ill-researched, teacher they encounter. I humbly suggest that such folk are not yet ready to teach others if they elevate such things to a heaven-or-hell gravity.
My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation. – James 3:1
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