We have the first wedding in Gen. 2 and the first perversion of it by Gen. 4:19. So it has continued ever since. The abuse of marriage has been a blight on every society, and certainly is today in our culture. The stats are depressing. Marriage involves choices, so choose well when you marry! Gen. 6:1ff is a pivotal passage in the unfolding of history leading up to the flood: the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair – and they chose accordingly. Next stop, the flood. Why? There is nobody who influences you more than the person you marry. One may want to argue that the children of God could just as easily have influenced the daughters of men for good and history would have turned out differently. The fact is, we can theorise all we want, but the facts were different. Why didn’t it go the other way? Because the choice they made revealed they were not sufficiently persuaded of the need for spiritual character over good looks. Because they did not seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness in respect to marriage, it was only a matter of time before they did not seek first the kingdom in other matters too. You may have a lot of qualities you are looking for in your intended, but at the top of the list have the fact that the person you marry must be a committed Christian. Marry a faithful Christian!
Take you courting days seriously. Courting and romance are usually good times, fun times, but they are also serious times and not without risk, for the simple reason you will marry someone you court! As wise a man as Solomon was brought undone by his foreign wives and led him into idolatry. But I know this person who married a non-Christian and he/she eventually became a Christian. So? It makes about as much sense as saying I know this bloke who smoked, drank, caroused every night with loose women all his life and lived to be 92! Any man who tries to make a living being a professional gambler backing poor horses with the highest odds will go broke. Occasionally a 100 to1 long shot will come in, but not very often. A farmer, if he knows that with a certain crop he has a 70% chance of a good harvest but with another crop he has a 30% chance of a good harvest, you know what he’ll plant. If an airline only gets 10% of its flights to their destination safely will you fly with them? – 10% is about the figure of non-Christian conversions in marriage. One cannot remove risk from life, but one can minimize it. Life is about sensible, wise choices, rather than backing yourself as the rank outsider who’s going to turn wisdom on its head and be the exception.
Fornication is accepted as the norm before marriage in our community. It’s justified on the basis that “everybody is doing it” and it is essentially a trial marriage. Nonsense! Marriage is a commitment for life so how can you trial that? We celebrated our golden wedding anniversary a couple of years ago. The marriage now has a different set of dynamics to what it had when we were in our first years – so how could I trial living with a woman for 50 years before I could commit myself to be married to her for 50 years? It’s impossible. And at the end of the fifty years of trial I couldn’t marry her because I would have to live with her for, say, 60 years, before I could decide whether I could be married to her for 60 years and so on. Besides, stats show that trial marriages, or let’s call it what it is, serial fornication, doesn’t produce what it purports to do – a reduction in divorce.
When God brought Israel out of Egyptian bondage and formed them into an independent free nation in the wilderness, He gave them a law, and as part of that law He found it necessary to legislate concerning marriage and divorce. Of course marriage had been around since Adam and Eve, but it had been abused by the world and people had lost sight of God’s original design. Also, they were a “stiff-necked” people (Deut. 9:6). Deut. 24:1ff was the law concession to a hard-hearted people – Moses “suffered” (allowed), said Jesus but it was not what God wanted. God was working out a purpose in Israel, a nation which was chosen without respect to their will, but simply on the basis of their descendancy from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The New Covenant is a superior covenant to the Old with better promises. It is not imposed: God forces no one to become a Christian. If we choose to accept its promises we choose to accepts its conditions. Nobody is physically born a Christian, but one can choose to be born again (cf. John 3; Heb. 8; Jer.31 – no more teach his neighbour). So the terms of the New Covenant do not have to make allowance for a hard heart and neither do they. A Jew was born physically into the Kingdom of God without his prior consent, but the second birth requires a thing called repentance (a change of mind). Repentance is God’s antidote against hard-heartedness. Softening the heart is a prerequisite for become a Christian.
Jesus made no allowance for hard-heartedness in His covenant. We must be willing to submit to His will – He shall rule in the midst of His enemies but His people shall be willing (Ps. 110:2,3). So this leads us back to marriage and divorce. Jesus took it back to its original design (Matt.19:1ff). What does this mean? One man, one woman, for life with one exception! The disciples understood it and thought it was tough, but Jesus didn’t back down. People try to make this doctrine so complicated but it can’t be. The law of marriage is not a proposition from Liechtenstein or part of an entrance examination to be admitted to the Mensa society. When you think that the law of marriage was designed for the great majority of mankind, it must be simple enough to be understood by all.
I have a library of several hundred books and I’ve probably got more books on marriage and divorce than any other subject in the Bible. Someone’s always writing on the subject. You’d think it a terribly complicated subject and God was trying to confuse as many people as He can. Many of the authors preface their book with some comment about how many years of study of the subject have produced the book as if they were writing about the Pentateuch, or at the very least, the twelve minor prophets! I pick up the books just to see what angle they’re trying on now. When you pick up a book and in the preface it makes some comment along the lines of, Now, finally so-an-so has unravelled the truth on this or that subject. take it with a grain of salt. We ought not to be surprised about all the views of marriage when people use the Bible to justify homosexuality. Men are trying to justify man, not God.
There are only a very few verses in the Bible about marriage and divorce. Jesus said but a few words and the disciples understood. They thought it was pretty tough, but they understood it! We can understand it too.
Marriage has the potential for the greatest happiness and also for the greatest disasters. The higher you fly the further the possibility of falling. The next generation of airliners are going to carry 800 passengers – marvelous – until one goes down! What if we violate this commandment of marriage? It is sin(Gal. 5:19). God hates divorce according to Malachi. How does it effect the church? Like it affected Israel. We live in a land that downgrades marriage, is filled with divorce and yet a land where the expectation is everyone is entitled to a partner. That mentality has affected the church. The church as a whole no longer stands firmly on the Bible with regard to this subject (and others too). It’s an increasingly rare thing for Matt.19:12 to be exemplified anymore (ie. becoming an eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven). Why this approach? Besides the lack of understanding of repentance and baptism, it is because there is a huge number of adulterous people in our society. Rather than call for repentance it is believed to be better to overlook it for the sake of numbers. But what’s the point of having a church full of unsaved people – unless you are going to teach them how to be saved which would involve telling them that those who practice adultery cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven. We do not help our society by adopting its values but by challenging its standards. Paul asked some disciples in Acts 19 to tell him about their baptism. As a result of that enquiry he re-baptised them. We have the right to ask people the reason for their divorce. It does matter. From time to time people ring me up wanting to know if I will marry them. When I had my celebrant’s license I would tell them it’s possible but my first question was to ask if either of them had been married before. If so I wanted to know why they were divorced. The answer determined whether it was possible for me to marry them.
Baptism will do many things:- it will save us, wash away our sins, put us into Christ, spiritually circumcise us, even fulfil the typology of the flood of Noah and the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites. There are things it will do incidentally, such as make us wet, and maybe make us cold and give us a cold. But there are many things baptism cannot do:- if you go down short you will come up short, if you go down tall you will come up tall; if you go down single you will come up single and if you go down married you will come up married. One of the things that baptism will not accomplish is the performing of a marriage ceremony. “Naturally” you might say, but there are those who believe it does. There are those who say that you can go down in an adulterous situation and come up in a married situation. “Really?!” Yes, and sadly, it is more and more commonly believed that if one is involved in an unscriptural divorce and remarriage before gospel obedience, then baptism will somehow or other make it right. One good thing out of this is that they understand that the laws of marriage and divorce apply outside of Christ and that they have sinned and need forgiveness. They think they can get forgiveness by baptism without repentance.
Where there is no law there is no sin (Rom. 4:15) and brethren laboured for years to try to say that people in the world weren’t answerable to the law of Christ. They said it was akin to the world not being required to eat the Lord’s Super. The fact there is a logical order and progression in obedience is not to be interpreted to mean that people in the world aren’t under obligation to remember the Lord Jesus in His appointed way. Acts 17:30 says God commands all men everywhere to repent. He wants all men to honour the Son (John 5:23) – he wants all men in worship on the first day of the week as His faithful children.
But they never told us what the law of marriage and divorce is if you are not a Christian. That’s because Jesus has all authority in Heaven and on earth and there is only one law on such- His! If we want to avail ourselves of God’s institution called marriage, we have to abide by His laws on its design. Baptism will not result in forgiveness without repentance. If someone turns up at the church building in a stolen car and is baptised does that mean he can keep the car?! If someone turns up on the run from Police and is baptised does that mean he is now a free man? If one turns up married to two women and wants to be baptised it doesn’t mean he can keep both after baptism. If one turns up in an adulterous situation and is baptised it doesn’t mean he can stay in that relationship. You see, if one goes down a repentant sinner he comes up a forgiven sinner, but if he goes down an unrepentant sinner he comes up an unrepentant and unforgiven sinner.
So when you marry, choose well, and honour the Lord’s teaching on marriage and divorce. C.W. Bradley, a gospel preacher, wrote an open letter: Be not deceived, God is not mocked for whatsoever a man sows that shall he reap. His is an unchangeable truth. There are no exceptions. It is true in the natural kingdom and it is true in the moral and spiritual kingdom. In the realm of the moral and spiritual, the reaping may be delayed. It may not begin till this world is over and we all stand before Him who “shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil”. Yet oftentimes the reaping begins on this earth. Rather frequently I receive phone calls from those whom I’ve never met who say they must talk to someone who can give them guidance. One night recently, I received a call from a very disturbed person. Here was a young mother of two children, who some time ago, was divorced from her husband. In her loneliness, she let herself fall in love with a married man with four children. Soon they began to meet each other and live in sin. Eventually the man divorced his wife and married his new lover. This man grew up in a Christian home and was taught the truth regarding the church. More recently, he has become concerned about his relationship with the Lord. He and his new wife have been attending worship and she has come to see the beauty and simplicity of the Lord’s church. She wants to be a Christian. And now the reaping has begun. In this woman’s heart, there exists the grim reality that she broke up a home. She stole a man from his wife and four children. She understands that the man, too, must bear his responsibility for what happened, but try as she may, she can find no justification for what she did. And try as I may, I am not able to open the Bible and give her any hope as long as she continues in this sinful relationship. Truly, the way of the transgressor is hard.