The Ark of Safety

We like to cite widely occurring flood myths, complete with fortunate families escaping destruction in a boat, as evidence for Noah's flood. A common thread spread broadly across culture and race says something, after all. According to this article by Jonathan Cheng in the Wall Street Journal [HT: The Drudge Report], the idea is not confined to the ancient past. Is God still giving folk a vision to build an ark, or can it act as a bastion of safety, a charm, in troubled times like these? No, I don't think so, the only ark of safety any of us need today is the Lord, Jesus Christ.

Resurrection Day

Today is the anniversary of LIFE!

Enjoy the celebration of victory,

for he who was dead is alive

and we who believe in him live too.

Have a very happy

RESURRECTION SUNDAY!

Death Is Unnatural

Dead, yet still breathing: that's the condition of every human being at birth. We all exist in the inescapable shadow of an inevitable conclusion. It takes that reality, on average, about 70 or so years to catch up with us, but catch up with us it does. We produce pills, manufacture equipment, and develop disciplines that attempt to extend our dance in the shadows, but the end comes, and its finality claps like a slamming door.

Death is unnatural. 

That's a bold claim, considering that everything dies. Yet, my heart abhors the circumstance, and tells me it's not the way it's supposed to be. Very few, in fact, can embrace the icy arms of death without a revulsive shudder. Maybe our collective gag reflex is meant to tell us something. Could there be that much truth in our common experience of the common? To the atheist, such a thought would be nothing but emotionalism lightly papering over the awareness of death.

…and he or she would have a case, except that… Jesus Christ overcame death!

Almost 2000 years ago, the unnaturalness of death came into sharp relief. Death was shown to be abnormal to the Creator's order, an imposition upon the created after they were created. That imposition was justice dispensed upon those not created to die nor created through death, but who had adopted the unnaturalness of opposition to and independence from their Creator. For those in sinc with God, life is the natural condition.

The naturalness of life is restored to those who follow Christ and who trust him as their shepherd— though they die, yet will live!

A Persuasion Borne of Encounter

In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”   Romans 4:18-22 ESV 

Arminians and Calvinists incessantly argue about the role of faith and why it is what it is.

 Calvinists (for the supposed glory of God) blame faith in its entirety on God. Thy exchange election for faith as the issue of consequence in salvation, all the while never truly admitting that if God is solely to blame for its appearance, than he's also fully to blame for its absence. Since I don't believe God is self-loathing in the least, what does that say about his scathing judgments on unbelief?

Arminians believe faith sparks out of the human in response to God's grace. It doesn't have to ignite, people can resist, both God's determined plan and the Holy Spirit who manifests his grace. The conviction within the soul in regard to the Gospel that the Holy Spirit stirs can be reacted to or ignored. To call that response a work would be to not understand the meaning of the word, "work." 

Positive Confessionists emphasize faith as a willful action, something that does, I think, meet the definition of work. This is

not at all the pattern of Abraham, father of faithful, for he never "worked up" his faith, never lied to himself about what he was experiencing, nor did he ever try to speak his belief into existence. Abraham acknowledged, rather than denied, the facts of his situation, but he didn't allow those facts to dissuade him about God's impossible promise. 

Grace is not an imposition of God, bound to produce faith in a passive, or even an unsuccessfully resisting receiver. Neither is faith an emergent quality of willful exertion persistently plied toward the achievement of a desire. Faith is that seed in everyone that God planted within so that anyone could respond to his promise when the Holy Spirit brought it their way. Faith isn't a foregone conclusion regarding the few to the exclusion of the many— it's a response of the "any," borne of their impression of the ability and character of God

Faith is a persuasion borne of encounter with the Holy Spirit.

The Biblical Duties of Matrimony

I have said that marriage is more about what we give to it than what we get from it. That, of course, is a practical statement, for if we concentrate on what we're getting from it, we'll short-shrift what we give to it and end up undermining it. Unfortunately, the sacrificial attitude necessary to maintain marriage is foreign to the narcissistic baby boom generation and all the alphabet generations that have followed. 

The result—the burgeoning divorce rate. 

One must give continuously, for a lifetime, to make marriage work. Thankfully, there are plenty of happy marriages for us to learn from. There's a fair of amount of not so happy ones to take lessons from too. Those that I've come across that are happy and long lasting are those in which the spouses haven't saddled each other with the burden of making each other happy. Spouses can share our happiness, we can be happy to share life with them, but they cannot, in themselves, make us happy.

Unhappy marriages are often laboring under the faulty assumption that marriage, or at least the one they're married to, is meant to make them happy. It is the epitome of immaturity and folly to expect another human being to have power to infallibly affect our internal state of mind with happiness. Spouses do supply emotional comfort to each other (which takes different forms for husbands and wives due to the gender effects of the Fall), among other things, but they are not the surefire impetus of each other's happiness.

Natural women were cursed to live in a contest of wills with their husbands: redeemed women provide their husbands the comfort of knowing that their wives respect and submit to them. Natural men were cursed with ruling over their wives and the frustration of their toil (a source of preoccupation): redeemed men provide their wives the comfort of knowing that their husbands love them sacrificially (ἀγαπᾶτε) and will lay down their lives for them. 

A husband who has the respect of his wife and a wife who's loved by her husband like Christ loves the church are people who have something that makes life worth living.

When we see ourselves and yield ourselves as bound in oneness, providing our spouse with the kind of comfort we've been speaking about, we give our mates a sense of belonging and security that nothing else on earth can truly supply. My first pastor used to repeat over and over again for the sake of all of us coming into marriageable age, "love is not a feeling, it's a commitment." So true. I wish we all went into marriage buying into that idea, but it's not just an emotional or relational dynamic.

It translates into all those more tangible areas that mark our shared journeys. 

Being a reliable source of provision and care is part of the package, including that care involved with the marriage bed. Despite our culture's incredible fixation on sex, the Word is relatively silent on what, exactly, goes on between a husband and wife in that realm. It does say that nothing is wrong with sex in marriage; that we should have as much as we like in whatever way a husband and wife agree upon; that we should not hold out on our spouse. Perhaps, not that silent after all!

Marriage will not work for the takers, the heartbreakers, the jerks, nor those who would shirk the obligations of love. Marriage is a picture of the love within the Godhead, and must be treated with the honor appropriate for such. Though, in our age, we have managed to treat marriage as no more than a paper plate or plastic spoon, used for a moment then tossed aside, there is still hope for us in the church. And it all begins when we dedicate ourselves to the biblical duties of matrimony.

Why Did God Create Marriage?

From God's omniscient perspective, marriage could have little eternal significance. He knew the end from the beginning and realized there would come a time when marriage for humans would be no longer practiced. In fact, this is THE silver bullet that pierces the heart of Mormonism. Mormon hopes rest in eternal marriages with expansive reproduction of offspring, whereas Jesus said such do not and will not exist. Therefore, Mormons bank all of their hopes on a mirage that actually never was and never will be. 

If marriage has such a limited shelf life, then why did God institute it at all and make such a fuss about it?

God's plans for humankind within history required marriage, but not just for the dominion clause. Breeding and bossing can be accomplished without a  covenant between husband and wife, but effective child-rearing cannot. Fathers and mothers working together is absolutely required. That is why the divorce epidemic is having such detrimental effects on our broader society— children cannot be raised according to design by single mothers (or fathers) in broken homes. Sure, there are exceptions, but it's hard to miss the overall trend. 

Our fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, make-it-up-as-we-go approach to love, marriage and family is a dismal failure.

So, within this space called history, from the fall in the garden to the dead seed of man rising from the dust to face God's judgment, marriage has divine and practical benefit. He who finds a wife, or vice-versa for that matter, finds a good thing. Certainly not something to be discarded after the kids have grown and gone. Certainly not something to discard because it takes too much effort. 

How hard can it be to see that spouse as the gift from God he or she truly is?

Marriage is not a human invention, nor a societal convention that can be tossed aside or experimented with. Oh, we can continue to break marriages upon the rocks of hedonism, but that only delivers the next generation into the cold, dark, stormy deep. That a non-believer opts for the selfish option or takes what seems to be the easier road is not all that surprising— that supposed Christians do is incomprehensible.

When it comes to marriage and family, there's God's plan or there's an inevitable, societal spiral down into chaos. 

God didn't create marriage for that!

Marriage Is About What We Give to It

Marriage is anything but a human invention. 

Marriage licenses formulated at the whim of governing authorities didn't establish it, shifting social mores can't change it, and what God has joined together should not be separated by people. Believe it or not, both historically, and biblically, marriage is not primarily the consequence of "falling in love." Unfortunately, the present cultural understanding of marriage in the West gets none of this.

As a result, God's purposes for marriage have been frustrated and public trust in the institution has been eroded to the point of collapse. Marriage is no longer assumed or expected to be a pathway to a life of blessedness, but has become a roll of the dice, a passing phase, an unnecessary encumbrance. The Bible tells us God instituted marriage to accomplish several things for humankind and to allow several things from our perspective to be accomplished in our lives.

From God's perspective, marriage was meant to provide the human race with companionship in the mission of life, to be the environment for sexual expression and the conception of new life, and to be a bastion of holiness and learning for the family. To be honest, it's not like fallen man was ever going to do well achieving such noble ends. Nonetheless, noble ends these are, and they need to be front and center in our consideration of the institution.

From our perspective, marriage is meant to provide mutual emotional comfort, to supply the security of a loyal commitment, and to be a reliable source of provision and care. These, too, are noble goals, but unfortunately are set before the eyes of inherently ignoble people. Nonetheless, this is the design of marriage, and we need to understand this if we're ever to honor the bond with the gravity it deserves.

Marriage has been romanticized through myth, tale, torrid paperbacks, and the insipid celluloid regurgitations of Hollywood. The emphasis, generally, is on how Prince Charming or Snow White makes their love feel. If these sources are the only input informing one's expectations of marriage, that one will, in all likelihood, make a terrible spouse. He or she will find the trouble of maintaining the bond of matrimony more than they care to bear. Marriage success begins with self-sacrifice, whereas marriage failure sprouts in self-concern.

In the real world God made, marriage is not about what we get out of it, but what we give to it.

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Biblical Grounds for Divorce?

Despite what many folk say, according to Jesus Christ (also here, here, and here) there are no affirmative grounds for divorce. 

What Jesus said about marriage is that it is a lifelong covenant that no one should break. Some people will shatter the bond through abandonment and/or adultery, to their shame, but no one is given the grounds by which they can take the initiative to break it because they want it broken. Those that are the victims of a marriage broken by abandonment and/or adultery have some leeway to remarry, those who remarry apart from those exceptions commit adultery.

Biblical conceptions of marriage and divorce are not the same as legal, secular conceptions; therefore, biblical concepts must be applied to legal ones, rather than the other way around.

 
If a supposed Christian has abandoned a spouse, that one should be rebuked and commanded to return to the care his or her spouse. If that one will not return, he or she has proven not only his or her infidelity to a spouse, but to God. Their unwillingness to provide (what marriage is supposed to provide) for their spouse before God makes them worse than an infidel. According to the Word, the Christian abandoned by an infidel, or unbeliever, is free of the bond and can marry again as long as they do so with a believer. 

If a supposed Christian has entered into a sexual relationship with someone in addition to his or her spouse, that one should be rebuked and commanded to cease the adultery. If he or she will not, that one should be excommunicated. The faithful spouse would have the ability to remarry and not be considered an adulterer, nor the cause of adultery. The wronged party, in effect, is given an exception to the adultery clause for remarriage rather than a positive ground for divorce.

The effect of these allowances is an exception to the Lord's adultery clause rather than a ground given to initiate divorce.

If a Christian marriage is broken out of acrimony, or because of irreconcilable differences, or loss of interest, or anything other than abandonment and/or adultery, the parties do not have the right to remarry. To do so would be adultery. We are grown ups with God dwelling inside of us. If we're actually saved we should be able to find the means of getting along with someone else we're going to spend eternity with. Laying down our lives one for another is the stuff of the kingdom, it's certainly the stuff of marriage as well.

I live and am licensed to drive in Pennsylvania. Our traffic laws do not assign anyone the right-of-way on our roads. Instead, our laws are framed as to whom must yield the right-of-way in any circumstance. So in a mishap, no one can claim they had the right-of-way; one can only be assigned blame for failure to yield such. I see the Bible approaching divorce in a similar fashion: it doesn't give anyone the right to divorce a spouse, it gives an exception to the adultery clause for remarriage for those for whom there was a failure by a spouse to yield to the marriage bond. 

So, although there are biblical grounds for remarriage, there really are no grounds for divorce.

The Disaster of Divorce

America's epidemic is not AIDS, nor abortion, nor even pornography, although all are widespread and portend terrible trouble. The most virulent disease in the West is divorce. It only kills a relative few (although some are notable), but it is destroying our culture, and worse, something these other plagues could not— our churches.

The evangelical church has lost her voice and her way in dealing with the dilemma, preferring pop psychology and hedonism to the Bible when it comes to the subject. As long as American Christians, like any other Americans, continue to sell their souls to the demon of happiness and the phantom of self-fulfillment, marriage won't stand a ghost of a chance. Our society and our churches will continue to decay and be nothing but shadows of their former or their possible selves.

The OT allowed divorce on fairly broad grounds. Anything deemed an uncleanness, or indecency, in a wife (only husbands could divorce) by her husband (how objective was that likely to be?) could result in a pink slip and a "seeya." Who would have guessed that in God's sight "you disgust me" was actionable? Paradoxically, this same God who allowed divorce in the Mosaic code, decried it in no uncertain terms through the prophet Malachi! A forked tongue???

In explaining the apparent duplicity, Jesus said it was the hardness of our hearts rather than the softness of God's that inspired that provision.

I've pastored long enough now, and have seen enough marital failures to realize just how right Jesus was: we are terribly hard-hearted, absolutely unwilling to give another person what reasonably could preserve a relationship. Every marriage I've ever seen fail has done so because one or both parties were too hard-hearted to do what had to be done to maintain the marriage. Usually, it's not long at all until such parties are at it again in a new marriage, likely there to see the same result as they did with the one they tossed away.

We're naturally self-centered, self-absorbed, fault-finding, unforgiving, ungracious, uncommitted, and that's just the Prince Charming and Snow Whites among us. Trying to maintain a relationship that requires dedication and sacrifice in the face of such hard-hearted human nature all but dooms the effort to disaster. Nonetheless, God hates divorce! So, the greatest disaster, by far, in Christians divorcing is claiming to follow Jesus while justifying the thing that God said that he hates.