Clough Proverbs Lesson 70
DI #2: Troubles in Marriage
I’d like to answer
some questions that have been handed in.
The first one is: Will you please
explain page 34, framework pamphlet number 2 where angels have no bodies when
in Genesis 6:2 they apparently do. Well,
that’s not the only place, in the Abraham narrative the angels come to the
tent, they walk up to the tent and they actually eat and obviously they have
bodies. However, Hebrews
Are we taking your
words about marital problems too far if we try to apply them to living
groups? If we say that because two
people do not get along and so forth, they’re out of it. Well, the only thing I can say to that is if
you have two believers, the Holy Spirit is controlling one and the Holy Spirit
is controlling the other, I don’t see how the Holy Spirit can fight with the
Holy Spirit, [can’t understand phrase], but obviously there will be people who
have a natural personality bent and are incompatible, so to speak, in that
sense of the word, and so forth, but as far as a real irritating relationship,
there’s something wrong spiritually with it.
Does God still
give the gift of healing today? Now this
gets involved in a big long discussion about what you mean by the gift of
healing, what kinds of healing and so on and I suggest that you read Merrill
Unger’s book, Demons in the World Today
because there’s a chapter in there, a fine chapter on healing, it discusses the
whole thing, he gives you a more complete answer than I could possibly give you
in five minutes.
Explain the idea
that God is no respecter or persons with the verse in Romans that says “God
will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy,” end quote. In context, Romans 9, you’ll find a complete
discussion on my tape of Romans 9, that passage. The point is, that statement is made after
the fall and it is made about Gods’ sovereignty into a universe that has
already fallen and already warrants damnation.
And God is simply saying in that context I will be merciful to whom I
will be merciful. By definition grace is
unearned and therefore sovereignty accompanies grace at every point. We don’t have an un-sovereign grace, grace is
not automatic. If it were it wouldn’t be
grace. The two words, sovereign and
grace, go together.
The next question:
How can violence be a reason for divorce if it says that adultery is the only
reason for divorce? We’ll get into that
today.
You have mentioned
many times that signs and wonders were for the Jews; what about Romans
Now today we’re
going to continue, and finish actually, the second divine institution. We have studied in the book of Proverbs laws;
these laws are devoted to the spheres of life and next week we’re going to
start on the third divine institution, which is the family. Now the fundamental point that has been made
over and over is that marriage is God’s institution; it is not a human
institution thought up by men, it is not what you will inevitably learn in
sociology class, that it has evolved itself into existence. Cultural evolution cannot explain
marriage. The Bible claims that marriage
was instituted by God, in fact, God was the one that married Adam and Eve. The first wedding was conducted by Jesus
Christ in His preincarnate form in the Garden of Eden. So marriage is God’s institution, not
man. There is an immediate result about
this and that is, as I point out in my wedding services, that all the
counseling you need for a marriage is found in God’s Word.
I’ve just come
from a very interesting conference all week at Dallas Seminary where we had
Professor Jay Adams who wrote the book that you see listed in the bulletin, Christian Living in the Home. Dr. Adams is a professional psychologist, one
of the very, very, very few in the country who is developing a biblical, a
wholly biblical methodology of treating personal problems and marital problems
and so on, and very facetiously he was at one point in his lectures discussing the
various schools of psychology and he’ll to a psychologist and he’ll be a member
of a various approach, he’ll use a different kind of approach, and the major
schools are three, and he mentioned that you can identify who the school is by
the man and his tools that he used. He
said for example, if he’s a Freudian he uses a shovel, that means he digs up
the past. If he’s a Rogerian he comes in
with a problem and he says, oh, I see you have a problem, and the idea is to
reflect back to the counselee [can’t understand words] orientation and so
forth. And so if he is a Rogerian he
will use a mirror so you can see yourself.
If he is a behaviorist he uses dog biscuits, the idea of a reward for
doing good. But if he’s a man of God
operating biblically he’ll use the Word of God.
Now it’s just that simple and you don’t have to bring any extra tools
into the scene, all that you have is basically in the Word of God since after
all, who was it that designed marriage?
God did. Doesn’t it follow then
that God has also given us instructions to how to make it work? Yes he does.
And where are those instructions found?
In His Word. So very simply
stated, that’s the issue.
We’ve discussed
certain principles, the role of the man, to review; review won’t hurt you, contrary
to the grimaced looks. The role of the
man, in fact, if I repeat it once more maybe one more person will learn
it. The first principle on the role of
the male in Scripture and it is the hardest point, especially for American men,
and that is that every man in Scripture to be successful must submit to God’s
authority. Now it’s true, God Word wants
men to be leaders, wants men to be the initiators but you can’t be a leader and
you can’t initiate if you yourself are not submissive to God. So the first point is a submissive attitude,
positive volition toward God’s Word and toward His authority.
The second
principle is that the man must learn to link his call to his ‘ezer, to his wife. God has given every (?) man a woman who is
his ‘ezer, and the man’s job is to
learn how to work with her, not against her.
And that gets into the details.
And you can get to that step, believe it or not, if the first step has
occurred.
And the third
principle that we have learned is that every man must learn the details, which
we’ll say the “how to” on a day by day basis, how to love his woman, with
knowledge 1 Peter 3 says, “dwell with them as weaker vessels according to
knowledge.” And the knowledge comes by
personal enduring prayerful application of the Word of God on a day in day out
basis and there is no other way. But the
learning time comes over many, many days and months and years.
Then the role of
the woman, her (?) position, again, very, very difficult, must be also positive
to the Word of God and God’s authority, a very difficult step indeed because
the woman is faced with an ambiguity in her soul, she doesn’t want to, because
she’s a sinner, submit to God, and also because she’s a sinner she doesn’t
really want to submit to her husband.
And Genesis 3:16 is very frank in pointing that out. She doesn’t want to do this. Yet on the other hand, she knows that is
right; that is what the Word of God says.
And so in order to reconcile it she’s just got to get her heart
straightened out and its submission to God’s Word. And if this attitude isn’t straight, then
everything else falls by the wayside.
Dr. Adams was
sharing with us some of the things they have found in their counseling clinic
in Philadelphia over many, many years of work, and explaining how many
housewives that walk into the counseling center are very, very depressed, oh, I
can’t get my housework done because I’m depressed; I can’t do this because I’m
depressed, when as a matter of fact, what you find upon investigation is that
the housewife, frankly, is in rebellion against God, doesn’t like her role,
blaming God for the whole mess and therefore she’s copping out, not doing her
housework, and then feeling depressed because she hasn’t done her
housework. It’s precisely the other way
around. So he said they’ve learned over
the course of some time to ask three critical questions to every depressed
housewife: the first question is lady, how’s your ironing? And usually he says when he asks this
question, [can’t understand words] it’s because what he has found is that’s one
of the household chores that most women detest more than any other one, and so
it’s a good checker-upper, to see if her attitude’s right there, well it’ll be
right in other areas. Then the second
question is: are the kids getting their lunches in the morning or are you
getting them, because over the years they’ve found that to be a critical
indicator. And the last one, lady, has
the green hairy stuff begun to grow in your refrigerator. So these are some of the critical things that
explain the problem with the woman.
The second
principle that we’ve studied here is that she must loran the principle of
submitting to her husband in his calling.
That has to be learned, it doesn’t come natural to any woman and it’s
learned by taking the Word of God and submitting herself to it on a day in and
day out basis.
Then finally, just
like the man, she’s got to learn how to, how to work in the details of life,
how to submit herself, how to respond in various areas. Now since this is our last time in the second
divine institution, we’re going to depart from Proverbs here and we’re going to
study some passages that have to do with trouble-shooting in a marriage
situation. What happens when the things
start to break apart; what do we do now?
So these passages, which we will study this morning, have to do with the
principle of reconstruction; how do you deal with a marriage problem. Now obviously in the course of the next 50
minutes you’re not going to get an answer to every problem but we will indicate
the general principles that are involved in the solution to these.
The first
principle, the first area, and we’re going to have to spend a lot of time on
this one because it’s just this first area where you go astray, at least in
mental attitude, and it’s in this area, if you’ve got this one straight it acts
as a platform for the other areas, but if you don’t get this one straight, if
you let this go by the board you are never going to have an adequate solution
to anything else in the home. So the
first thing that you have to deal with is the problem of the grand cop
out—divorce. In other words, our
marriage doesn’t work so we’re going to blow the whistle on the whole thing.
Now why do we
bring this up? You say I never think of
divorce. When you get in a pressure
situation in marriage because of the human viewpoint culture the first thought
that comes across is let’s quit. So this
question has to be dealt with because if you have a couple that are really
going at it, and as long as either one thinks there’s a way out of the problem
other than working this thing out inside the marriage, they’re never going to
work hard as unto the Lord to solve the problem. So what you have to do in this kind of a
situation is close the door on all human viewpoint escape routes before the
person will understand that you don’t solve the problem by going out the
door. You stay in there and solve it in
there; there is no authorization to kick over the (?) and say I quit; that’s
not the biblical solution. If that’s the
temptation…and this is why we start with a hard line on this thing. And there’s other reasons. If God limits marriage and says divorce is
not the solution, it also follows then that God has to give on His side of the
fence grace to us to solve the problem without divorce. So there’s another reason for this. If there isn’t any divorce allowed by God in
a particular situation, then obviously God is obliged to give the grace
necessary to solve the problem without divorce, otherwise you’d go on in a
boxing ring for forty more years. The solution can be solved, the couple can
change, and the marriage continues. Now
you don’t hear much about that because today everybody’s passive, they don’t
want to change, they’d rather take the easiest way, which is divorce.
Soon we’ll have in
our tract rack a paper that was given at the conference, a very good one by Dr.
Peters for divorce and remarriage and I hope to have this and you can take
that, it’s the most detailed analysis, it’s got every Scripture in the Word of
God that deals with it. We had over 100
ministers that were in this seminar and most of the guys there knew the Hebrew
and the Greek and we had a very, very excellent discussion of this paper and we
went through all these different verses, and the logic and so forth, used. So if you know some couple that’s having
problems you should get that tract because at least it says now look, here’s
the boundary lines, here are the goal lines, here are the side lines, the game
is played inside these lines. There’s no
escape outside.
Let’s look at
passages of Scripture that discuss the divorce problem. First turn to Matthew 19, again keep in mind,
if you are liberal on the issue of divorce, you have nothing when it comes to a
strong problem inside the marriage. The
tendency is just run for the divorce rather than sticking it out and solving
the problem. In our pride it’s much easier
to smash the whole thing than repair it.
Matthew 19:3, here’s one of the classic references in all of God’s Word
to divorce, and this passage gives you the outline of it and the background for
it.
Matthew 19:3, “The
Pharisees also came unto him, testing him, and saying, Is it lawful for a man
to put away his wife for every cause?” “put away” is (?) for divorce, “Is it
lawful for a man to divorce his wife for every cause?” Now why did the Pharisees ask Him this? Because of the problem that we’re going to
get into when we get down into verse 7, the problem of what did Moses teach:
we’ll get into that in verse 7 but notice the conversation starts out, verse 3,
what about the divorce thing. Divorce
was high in Jesus’ day; it wasn’t as high as it is in this country now but it
was high; people were divorcing and so it was a contemporary issue. And so Jesus, just don’t speak in platitudes,
we want to a solution to a modern contemporary problem, what do You say about
the issue of divorce.
I think it’s very
interesting in that context where Jesus goes to solve the contemporary problem. Verse 4, “And he answered and said unto them,
Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning, made them male and
female,” now of all places to go to solve a contemporary problem He goes to
Genesis. And not only does He go to
Genesis, He goes to Genesis 1. And not
only does He go to Genesis 1, but He even interprets it literally. So this is one of those places in the New
Testament where Jesus did not have any enlightenment of the modern humanist,
didn’t know any better so He still believed in a literal Genesis. And so when He says this He builds His
doctrine of marriage off of a literal interpretation of Genesis. Please notice that. The answer to the divorce issue rests
squarely on a literally interpreted Genesis.
There are other reasons, you see, for allegorizing Genesis; it gets you
out of all sorts of problems. Jesus said
“the One who made them at the beginning, made them male and female;”
Verse 5, “And He
said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to
his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.”
Now that is a quotation from Genesis 2, so in verse 4 he quotes Genesis
1 and in verse 5 He quotes Genesis 2, and again He quotes it literally, He
quotes it and He says, “A man shall leave his father and mother,” now Moses
wrote it, apparently, but He says God said it.
That’s the divine authorship of Scripture. A man leaves his father and his mother; he
leaves the third divine institution and cleaves to his wife.
So this orders our
divine institutions for us. The first
divine institution is responsibility; responsibility precedes all other
institutions and you can’t make any of the institutions function unless you
first make responsibility function.
Responsibility is the key, and if you have a person who is
irresponsible, a person who does not perform, a person who’s always got an
excuse, who always wants to escape responsibility, you’re never going to get
the second divine institution to work properly, marriage, you’re never going to
get family to work properly, you’re never going to get society to work
properly. Society is can’t be built on
irresponsible people. So responsibility
always logically precedes the other institutions. Now what Jesus has done in this statement is
He has taken the third divine institution, which is family, and He’s saying a
man who leaves his family and cleaves to his wife, meaning that his association
under the third divine institution is temporary; his association in the second
divine institution is permanent. So the
second divine institution is the base of the third, not the other way
around. So you have the first one that’s
the base for the second; the second is the base for the third, and the third is
the base for the fourth.
So we have this
second divine institution now placed in a permanent position. “He will cleave to his wife and they shall
become one flesh.” Then He adds, and
this is the thing that’s often quoted in marriage service, “Wherefore they are
no more two, but one. What, therefore,
God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” Now, what is the joining together, because
God does it, it says so in verse 6, “What God has joined together.” What is that “God?” All right, the emphasis is the difference
between God and man, and that is the divine origin of the institution. God has ordained that the male and the female
be one in this life, one to the end of their life. That is what God has said and man does not
have authority to contravene God’s laws.
So what Jesus is saying by the word, “let not man put asunder” is that
no man has the authority to legislate a collapse of a marriage. The right of divorce does not rest with the
state. The right of divorce does not
rest with the legislature. The right of
divorce does not rest with the courts.
The right of divorce, if it exists, rests solely with God. What God has joined together don’t let man
tamper with it. These institutions are
God’s institutions, ran by God’s laws and we have no choice in the matter. Oh yes, you can make laws, but you will reap the
results of breaking God’s law.
All right, God has
joined it together. Now Matthew 19:7,
the Pharisees catch it, and they say does this mean no divorce? Does this mean the possibility that you have
to stick it out? Does this mean there is
absolutely no basis whatever for divorce?
They catch the implication of verse 6 very quickly. You mean to say, Jesus, in this contemporary
society with all these people getting divorces that all these divorces are man
made; men trying to break asunder what God has joined together? And so they say, “Why did Moses then command
to give a writing of divorcement and put her away?” In other words, we’ll go back to the Old
Testament law where divorce was allowed.
And they say now look, Jesus, if what you’re saying on the basis of
Genesis is correct, going all the way back in time to Genesis, what do you do
about Deuteronomy where Moses gives the Law here. Genesis is first, then you have Deuteronomy;
does Deuteronomy contradict Genesis?
Well, before we go
any further, notice what they had said Moses said; it’s not what Moses said,
it’s what they said Moses said. They say
Moses said, “command to give a writing of divorcement, and command to put her
away.” That’s what they said Moses
said. Now let’s go back and see what
Moses really said. Deuteronomy 24, as
usual Moses is being misquoted by the Pharisees; that’s not what he said; he
didn’t say I command you to give your wife a bill of divorcement and I command
you to put her away. That’s not what
Moses said. Let’s see what Moses really
said. Let’s go back to the original text
and take the man’s own words and stop trusting the newspapers.
Deuteronomy
24:1-3, verses 1-3 in this passage are what we call the protasis of a
clause. For those of you who aren’t
trained in syntax, protasis is the first part, “if” everything is true in
verses 1, 2 and 3, then verse 4 follows.
Now you have to be careful because as I pointed out in the Deuteronomy
series it doesn’t read that way in most translations. The more modern translations have tried to be
more faithful to the Hebrew; the King James doesn’t do a very good job
here. But the first three verses
together are the “if” clause, then verse 4 is what Moses said. But please, let’s not rip Moses’ words out of
their context. Moses said “if” such and
such is a thing occurs, “then” something follows. First let’s look at the nature of an “if”
clause. Does an “if” clause command you
to do something? An “if” clause doesn’t
command you to do anything; an “if” clause is just if a situation arises, then
in that situation go ahead and do this.
But the “if” clause doesn’t say this condition exists. Got that!
For example, if Adam sinned, then he should believe on Jesus
Christ. Now is a command for Adam to
sin? No, it just says if this thing
that’s said happens, then you do this.
So when you see an “if” clause, it’s not a command to do something; it’s
saying if the bad thing happens that’s against God’s will, that God doesn’t
want to happen, then you’re all under the pile, then you do this. But be careful, this is not a command to
divorce; it’s a command if divorce has already occurred, then what do you do
about it? That’s the flavor of
Deuteronomy 24.
Let’s see what the
condition is. Now in this part of
Deuteronomy Moses is just taking illustrations; he could have used many, many
different illustrations; he’s using one illustration of a divorce that was
going on in his day. “When a man has
taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favor in
his eyes, because he has found some shameful thing in her; then let him write
her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his
house.” Now that’s the way it reads in
the King James. What it should read is:
“When a man has taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she
find no favor in his eyes, because he has found some shameful thing in her, and
he has written her a bill of divorcement, and he has given it into his hand,
and he has sent her out of the house, [2] And when she has departed out of the
house, she goes and she is another man’s wife.
[3] And the latter husband hate her, and he write her a bill of
divorcement, and he gives it in her hand,, and he sends her out of the house;
and if the latter husband die, who took her to be his wife,” THEN verse 4
prescribes what is to be done. So verse
1-3 are not commanding divorce. What
it’s saying is it occurs.
Now here’s
something that you have to notice about legislation in the Old Testament. God has a command; it’s up on a very ideal
level, a high level. “Thou shalt love
the LORD thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy
mind.” These are the ideal commands;
that’s always the place where God commands.
Notice in the Bible He never commands anything less than ideal. Then down here God commands… or doesn’t
command, what He does is He prohibits certain things in detail. But in between here, in between the high
ideal level, which here is monogamy, life-long monogamy, that’s His command,
that’s what Jesus goes back to in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, He says this is the
way God ordains it, there be only one husband and one wife, period,
forever. So that’s the command, that’s
the ideal. Now God never commands
anything else but that. You’ll never
find anything else in Scripture except that ideal; there’s nothing else than
that. You’ll find accounts of polygamy,
you will find accounts of divorce, yes, but you never find commands for
them. You’ll only find commands for
life-long monogamy.
Now, God is
omniscient, He’s designed us, He’s decreed history, God therefore knows what is
going to happen and so He knows that we’re going to all fall down less than
that; there are going to be troubles in marriage, there are going to be people
falling apart, there are going to be people who reject grace solutions to their
problems and therefore say the problem is bigger than God’s answer, and I’m at
the end of my rope and I don’t know what to do and I can’t get out of this and
this is too bad and so forth, there’s no escape for me. And we’ll find people in this intermediate
zone. But then underneath there’s a
ceiling, where God says ah, but if you fall short of the ideal you’d better
make sure you don’t do this. And that
puts sort of a lower bound on what is tolerated and you can be in fellowship in
various situations here at a less than ideal level. Is it true that there were divorces going on
in Moses’ day in Deuteronomy 24?
Obviously there was or he wouldn’t have made the legislation, but he’s
saying look, if your marriage falls below the ideal, fine, God doesn’t tell you
to break it up. This is talking to the
Jewish people here. But if in the Jewish
nation you were to break up and have a divorce, then there are certain controls
on the divorce. But this command is not
a command; that is just an if-then type clause and it’s very, very different
indeed, from God’s will in the matter.
This is just a toleration.
Now come back to
Matthew 19:8 and this is why Jesus responds the way he does. “And He said unto them,” Jesus responds to
this attack, that these people are saying well Moses commanded divorce, and
Jesus says no he did not… no he did not.
“He said unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts
allowed [permitted] you to divorce your wives,” “because of the hardness of
your heart,” notice, because man is sinful and will fall short of life-long
monogamy, then Moses did permit divorce, yes he did, but it wasn’t a
command. And it wasn’t God’s ideal. The only reason for divorce is because of
sin. Now you think of that next time
somebody says well, the Lord led me to get a divorce. Maybe He did, maybe He didn’t.
This was the
command, this is the prohibition. Now
let’s go further and see Jesus’ clarification of the Mosaic Law. Moses, because of the hardness of your
hearts, did allow you to put away your wives,” did allow you to divorce, “but
from the beginning it was not so.” In
other words, He denies that the Mosaic legislation is a command or an ideal
model for God. He absolutely undercuts
the whole principle. There is no room
for divorce in God’s second divine institution, from the beginning.
Matthew 19:9, “But
I say unto you,” now here’s Jesus’ redefinition and restatement of the Mosaic
Law. “Whosoever shall put away his
wife,” that is, whoever divorces her, “except it be for fornication, and
marries another, commits adultery; and whosoever marries her who has been put
away commits adultery.” That’s very
strong language. What is
fornication? Notice there are two words
in verse 9; one says “fornication,” the other says “marriage.” Have you ever noticed something strange about
that verse? Why doesn’t it read this
way? “Whosoever shall put away his wife,
except it be for adultery,” that’s the way most people read it, “except it be
for adultery, and shall marry another commits adultery.” But isn’t it interesting Jesus didn’t say
that. And there’s a reason. The word “fornication” usually taken to mean
illicit sex outside of the second divine institution has a bigger meaning in
the original language than just that narrow one. Fornication means a life pattern; it is
associated in the New Testament with extreme compound carnality. It is the woman’s life pattern in this
case. This is her style of sinning. Now everybody has a certain style of sinning,
some people sin in one area, some in another.
So don’t look down your long spiritual nose at somebody else’s sins in
an area different than yours. Everybody
sins, you just grow up with your own style; you’ve heard of lifestyles,
everybody has a sin style. And what he’s
saying, when the sin style of this woman lies in this area of habitual
extra-marital sex, then divorce her, and you can divorce her then. Notice He doesn’t even command divorce in
this case. Now later on we’re going to
get into the prophet Hosea and this will be amplified there. But notice what it says, He says “Whosoever
shall put away,” “whosoever divorces,” notice how it’s worded, very carefully
in verse 9 so Jesus can’t be quoted as commanding divorce. He says, very passively almost, if you do
you’re committing adultery, except for one cause, and the one cause is where
you have a life pattern of fornication… a life pattern of this kind of thing.
Now it’s not too
hard to imagine why because the second divine institution can’t coexist with
this lifestyle. You’ve broken all
fidelity. You have broken the central
heart of the whole institution. See,
this is not talking about an incident; it’s talking about incidents, plural,
here. “Whosoever shall put away his
wife, except” it be for this pattern of illicit sex going on and on and on,
then… then you you’re allowed to divorce.
Now that is Jesus hardening up and He makes the Mosaic Law much more
severe than Moses. But that’s the norm
and that’s in the Gospel. Now I didn’t
write it, that’s God’s Word and that’s the way God wrote it.
But there’s one
more text in the New Testament that gives another reason for divorce, apart
from fornication and that’s in 1 Corinthians 7:10. This is the only two passages I’m aware of
that take this divorce problem into consideration. Now the second reason for divorce; you see
here, incidentally, do you see as you study the pages of the New Testament how
conservative toward His institutions.
Now it’s not that God is being cruel.
Some of you that have been in marriages involving tremendous heartache
and so on, you just think God is being unnecessarily cruel in keeping people
like this together. No He isn’t, because
God is thinking of things that you’re not thinking of. God is thinking about the place the second
divine institution stands in relation to society, in relation to children, in
relation to all sorts of factors. Now
you may just think of your marriage in relation to your subjective feelings,
well, I don’t like it, I don’t like to face this problem all the time.
God says fine, but
there are other problems besides what you like.
You’re a creature that lives in God’s universe, and there are other
institutions; what about children, when the second divine institution
collapses, look at the neurotic kids we have running round out of divorced
homes. Why is it that one out of two or
one out of three marriages that I perform among the college students we have
divorced parents sitting in the pews?
Why is it that out of those marriages one out of two that I perform,
they almost have to have a referee to untangle the fighting parents? Well I’m not going to sit in that pew; well
I’m not going sit with you, and so on, they can’t even have a marriage for
their children without bringing their own garbage into the relationship. Divorced people that still want to fight,
been divorced for 15 to 20 years but they still want to fight and mess up the
marriage of their kids; it’s more important for them to fight than it is to
have a good marriage for their kids.
I’ve been in that situation, over and over with the parents. Now it’s pretty stupid and pretty childish;
you ought to look at the expressions on their face, right through the wedding
service. It really looks great; sometimes
I should take a picture of it and send it to them and say you really made it
nice for your kids at their wedding.
Take a good look and frame it.
All right, 1
Corinthians 7:10, “And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord,”
now be careful here because people take this passage to mean Paul’s giving his
opinion; I’m going to answer that in a moment.
When he says, “not, but the Lord,” he’s talking about not Paul but
Jesus, he’s saying Jesus gave this command, “Let not the wife depart from her
husband.” In other words, they are not
to depart. It’s very simply; you don’t
have to allegorize, you don’t have to go back to the Greek, it’s all there,
that’s what it means, let her not depart.
Verse 11, “But and
if she does depart,” again you see how carefully God’s Word is worded, it’s not
a command for her to depart, it’s just saying but if she does, “then let her
stay unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband,” now this applies to the man
too, it’s just that in God’s Word most of the instructions are directed to the
man, that means it doesn’t apply to the woman backward, toward the man who does
this, the problem is that the man is addressed in Scripture because he’s the
head of the family. When you see these
commands don’t just feel inferior to one sex or the other, it’s both ways, it’s
just that they’re addressed this way.
“Or be reconciled to her husband; and let not the husband divorce his
wife.” Now that’s the New Testament
norm, right there, stated again from… the same as Matthew 19.
1 Corinthians
7:12, “But to the rest speak I, not the Lord.”
Now that doesn’t mean what follows is of less value than what precedes;
that phrase, “I, not the Lord,” means Paul says in the office of apostle I add
my apostolic opinion; I don’t give you something that we learned from
Jesus. So this is not meaning that what
follows is culturally relative to the situation, Paul was just giving his
bachelor opinion or something; it’s not that at all; what follows here is of
equal inerrancy and authority with what precedes, but it’s just from a
different source. In one case it was
from Jesus, the other case it was from Paul.
“If any brother that has a wife that believes not,” and here she’s an
unbeliever, the condition is clearly stated, “and she be pleased to dwell with
him, then don’t let him divorce her.”
Don’t him put her away. The idea
is now I’m a Christian and there’s lots of nice looking Christian women around,
I’ll dump this bag and get a new model.
And that was the tendency in Corinth.
And so he said huh-un, even though that woman is an unbeliever you stay
in the institution. Then he adds
reasons, “For the unbelieving husband,” [can’t understand phrase] [13] “And the woman who has a husband that
believes not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave
him.” Same principle as verse 12
backwards, toward the other way.
Verse 14, “For the
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife,” what does that mean, “and the
unbelieving wife sanctified by the husband; else were your children unclean,
but now are they holy.” It talks about
the concept of shared blessing. Under
the second divine institution God sees it as a unit. And He can have a believer in the
relationship and an unbeliever in the relationship, but since together before
God, they’re together by virtue of their… [tape turns] … by the unbelieving
partner. Now, in all the pages of God’s
Word those are the only two reasons God will permit divorce to lawfully occur. The state will permit it to occur; other
people, marriages counselors will permit it to occur. As far as God’s saying, huh-un. Now those are God’s standards and you say
isn’t this unnecessarily restrictive.
All right, what do some people who have been in the divorce situation
tell you? I just show two supporting
evidences why God is merciful in tightening up the loopholes here and this is
an act of mercy, not of hate, not of crassness, but it’s an act of mercy.
First, studies
that have been shown on divorcees inevitably report that there is always a deep
sense of guilt in both partners after marriage.
There is a deep sense of guilt and sometimes you’re not conscious of it
but it comes out. For example, one
person reported in Newsweek, said: When I came out of divorce court I had this
feeling that I had failed, a 39 year old woman.
A 52 year old man said: I still view my divorce as the greatest tragedy
of my life. Now why do they have those
feelings? Psychologists can’t explain
the data that’s being picked up on some of these observations; they’re trying
to explain it as social pressure. We as
Christians explain it, no-no, it’s not social pressure, the reasons for the
guilt is that man was made in God’s image and built to function in the second
divine institution the way God said he was.
And if he feels guilty it’s because he’s guilty. It’s very simple; he’s guilty of violating
God’s institutions; that’s why the guilt is there.
And then there’s a
second supportive reason, not only the remaining and abiding guilt but those of
you who are acquainted with divorces in your own family, and acquainted with
couples who are divorced, just look around; these divorced people, when they
remarry, how often are their second marriages successful? Ever notice that? People who are divorced are usually divorced
two, three, four times; now how come. It
can’t be that two, three or four people are bad. It’s because they never learned to solve
their problems in their first marriage, that’s all, so they just carried it
into the second one, carried it into the third one, carried it into the fourth
one. You look around some time; people
who get divorced and remarry, how stable is that second marriage. Now oftentimes it is but it’s usually because
of Christianity or something else that’s come in.
Now we’ve got to
move on. This is the (?) so if the
marriage is falling apart you (???) , there’s no escaping from the (?) by the
easy route of divorce. The Word of God
just cuts that right out from underneath in the start, so that stops everything
in that route, now you have to reassess.
The next thing you have to do, it says, if there is no divorce then
God’s grace must be sufficient. Let’s
turn again to our favorite verse, 1 Corinthians 10:13 and watch how it (?) the
objection. Here’s a couple that are
having trouble in their marriage. So
they come up and they say look, our problem is absolutely unique, you never saw
a marriage so messed up as ours; we’ve got problems that you can’t
believe. What does 1 Corinthians 10:13
say? “There has no temptation taken you
but such as is common to man,” oh, but you don’t understand our marriage,
“There has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man,” do you know
that that verse says? That’s a bunch of
baloney. It’s a bunch of baloney! No couple faces problems that are unique. If you’re having trouble those problems are
not unique. In principle they are the
same kind of problems Christians have faced so far for 19 centuries. So don’t come with a big story that our
problems are unique; huh-un.
Another objection
that you often get is oh, but our problem isn’t unique but the trouble is in
our case, you see, we just can’t solve the thing, there’s now way we can solve
it, the problem is too big for us. Let’s
read further in verse 13, “God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tested
beyond that which you are able,” another excuse down the drain. But people still come back, the problem is
too big, we can’t cope with it, we’re incompatible, that’s another excuse. Name two people that were compatible since
the fall. That’s not an excuse, “God
will not allow you to be tested beyond that which you are able,” when you come
up with the excuse that your problem is bigger than God’s grace, do you know
what you’re doing? In effect you’re
calling, very politely of course, but you still are calling God a big
liar. Do you know what you’re saying in
terms of this verse? God has allowed you
as a couple to endure a test beyond your means to cope with it, that’s what you
are saying. You are denying the text of
God’s Word, that God is not a faithful God and He’s plopped a problem in your
lap too big. And finally you usually get
another final discouragement in the whole thing, yes, but there really isn’t a
solution there, there just is no solution, we’ve tried before, there’s no solution
to this problem in our marriage. What
does the last part of verse 13 say? “God
will, with the temptation, make a way of escape that you may be able to endure
it.” Now, it’s your word against God’s
and you know where my vote is. So we
don’t buy those kinds of answers, that the problem is bigger than what God will
supply.
I want to conclude
by going to Proverbs 5 for the final end of how do you reconstruct a messed up
marriage; what are some of the principles involved? Proverbs 5:21, you go back to a principle,
ultimately the reconstruction of a bad marriage goes back to these three
principles. You start putting them into
practice. What was the first principle? Both the man and the woman have got to get on
positive volition toward the Word, and I’m not just saying that as a
panacea. I’m not just throwing that out,
oh yeah, I’ve heard this before. But
there is no solution for you unless your attitude toward God is right and that
has got to happen. You can go from now
until the rapture with a counselor and it won’t help you a bit unless you get
your attitude straight with the Lord, and you’ve got to recognize this because
a lot of people don’t. They say oh, I
have my Christian life over here, and then I’ve got my messed up marriage over
here. It doesn’t work that way; you’ve
got a messed up marriage, you’ve got a messed up Christian life. You can’t separate the two; huh-un, because
the marriage is given after the filling of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians 5:18.
Now let’s look at
Proverbs 5:21, [“For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, and he
ponders all his goings.”]. The contest
in implementing this first step, in getting right with the Lord is simply a
contest between pride and suffering on one hand and humility before God and blessing
on the other hand. Now in blunt terms,
that’s your problem and the people who are fighting in their marriage, people
who are having a tremendous mess in their house are actually preferring the
left side of the equation better than the right side. They would prefer to have their pride with
their sorrow than to have humility with blessing. What they would love to get out of a
counselor is this; they would love to get the pride moved over here so they
could have pride with blessing and humility with suffering, see, that’s where
they would like to kind of bend the terms, but God doesn’t play ball that
way.
And so this is the
most painful part of the whole process.
No matter what we say later in this next step, the most painful process
of putting a marriage back together occurs in the heart, right here, is that we
want our pride with the blessing and God doesn’t play games that way. You have to have the humility before God with
the blessing. It’s ironic when you see
this, but we all are like this, whether we have problems in our marriage or
not, but have you ever thought of the fact of how precious is to us? People prefer it, we all do, we prefer to
keep our pride, even though we are hurting, bleeding, laid out on the floor,
dying, I’m not going to give up my pride, I love it; I cherish it. And as long as we don’t God just keeps on
pouring on the misery, pouring on the suffering, pouring on the cursing, the
result of negative volition, that’s what it is, and he just keeps pouring it
on.
And we keep saying
all right, this hurts, this stings, this smarts, I’m injured, fatally, but I’m
not giving up my pride. So it’s
amazing. Here you actually have a
portrait of a human heart God still has to change. Now that can’t change by your efforts, that
is where God’s grace comes in. You can’t
manufacture a humble attitude; try it.
I’m going to be humble today; try it.
You know that can’t come by you working it out. That has to come sheerly by grace, that is a
gift of growth and that is where you have to look up to God and just simply say
Lord, my heart needs changing. It was
changed, potentially at regeneration, but in this kind of a mess you have all
sorts of… you’ve got to get the humility, the humble mental attitude. By humble I don’t mean walking around head
down, like that, I mean taking your position under God’s authority. If God’s Word says it you do it, you don’t
say oh, I’ll do it tomorrow afternoon.
Huh-un, you do it right now, Sunday morning. That’s what humility means. God says do it, and you know, God’s Word
never says hey, you know, it would be real nice if you did this. God doesn’t ask us to do anything, God orders
us to do anything that He asks.
Let’s go to the
second principle. What do you do after
the submission to God’s authority? Well,
the second principle was you have to learn your role, biblically. That’s the second implementation of the
second principle. Well, you can’t do
this without the first principle. The
first principle, are you going to submit to God’s Word. And when God’s Word says your role is thus,
your role is thus, your role is thus, if you haven’t submitted to God’s Word at
the first step you’re not going to submit it to it at the second step, right? So you see why the attitude is necessary.
Okay, the man’s
role is defined in Scripture, we’ve gone through that. That has to come out in the course of
practical things. The man has to start
taking the initiative in the spiritual direction of his home, in the family
role and doing certain things. He’s got
to do that, that’s what God said. Now
here’s where pride comes in, because pride always says well, I’m going to show her,
and it smarts to say well, God says I have to do this. So you swallow your pride and do what God
says. And if she laughs at you, tough;
God’s Word says it, you do it. And same
with the woman, submitting—I’m not going to!
I’m not going to give up my freedom.
God says submit—no!
Submit—no! Okay, (?) it. And it’s that simple, it’s that simple! So the second thing is you’ve got to learn
the roles; your roles have to assume this position.
Now we come to the
last step, the third step about the details.
Both the second step and the third step, if you bought that book that Jay
Adams wrote, you’ll see in that a lot of suggestions, very specific
suggestions. One of those suggestions
that he found in some of these ministries that works out, that appears to be
working very well is his suggestion of a family conference table, based on
Ephesians 4:25. So turn back to
Ephesians 5:25, this is something practical that can be done. Here are the rules; I’ll give you the rules
of the thing as he’s developed them and then I’ll show you how the Scripture
moves into the situation. The idea is to
get some communication started between the man and the woman in order that
problems can get solved.
First you’ve got
to get the communication started. How do
you get the communication started? By
doing it. How do you do it? Well, you have to talk. Where do you talk and how do you do
that? You get a place and a time in your
home where you do this, and the ministers at some of the workshops tossed
things around and they came to the conclusion pretty much based on their
corporate experience that one of the best places you do this is in some neutral
room, no in the bedroom. Do it in the
living room or some place and just have a chair or table or something where you
go, that’s your spot; when you have a problem to talk about you go to that
spot. Why is it so necessary to limit it
to one place in your house? Because when
you later on get the habit of going to that place, it sets up your mental
framework. Like you hit the sack you
sleep; you go to the table you eat, you go to this place you talk. So the place, the behavior pattern has been
associated with the place, so it’s important you have a specific place in your
house where you can go to talk things out, and a specific time that you can do
this because if you don’t you won’t do it; unless you say we’re going to do
this at 10:30 tonight and so forth, if we need to do it we’ll do it at
10:30.
And usually when
you’ve got a bad problem you’ve got to do it every day for several weeks and
then you do it on an as needed basis.
But you go there and you have a family conference, and you start off by
implementing the principles of Matthew 5 and 18, the idea first you get the
mote out of your own eyes and that is before the other person, you say where
you’ve come short of the Word of God. By
the way, on the table you have the open Word of God between you, so it’s not
you versus the other person, it’s God’s Word that dictates the rules of the
conference. Everything is tied to
Scripture. That’s where you’ve got to
know the Scriptures. Everything is tied
to Scripture; God’s Scripture give the control; is this right or is this
wrong? Let’s look it up, you’ve got the
open Bible in front of you and hopefully you have something up here to go find
the problems with; that’s why I’ve been going through Proverbs. So you go to the Scriptures and they become
your authority. Now if you don’t have
the Scriptures there you can have a boxing match because it’s your standards
against the other person’s standards.
But if you have the Scriptures between you it’s God’s standards, and
that’s where the humility factoring is in; God dictates to you what the
standards are. So you have the
situation; people are there talking at a table and there’s the Bible, the Bible
is between them.
All right, one
little thing that he found out kind of worked from this situation, and if it
gets violent and the conversations gets out of hand and you’re not making any
progress, one of you just quietly stand up, don’t say a word; if you try to
straighten the other person out while you’re talking you’re not going to
straighten it out, you’re just going to go into round three. But if you stop your talking and one stands
up it acts as a signal, just calm down, we’ll start all over again.
All right, now in
the course of this, Ephesians 4:25 is the principle what you’re doing in all
this. This is given for all Christians
but it applies particularly to Christians in marriage, “Putting away lying,
speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another,”
and it certainly applies in marriage.
Speak truth, now oftentimes speaking the truth hurts, at the beginning,
because all of a sudden what you thought was a little problem in your marriage,
a wart, turns into a cancer, and oh my God, I never thought it was this
bad. All right, it was that bad, but so
what, at least you found out how bad it was; now you can start working from
there. So you speak the truth in
love. But I don’t love you any more,
plunk. What does that do? Well, it’s not very good news but it’s the
truth. Is that the end of the
marriage? Huh-un, because what are the
terms of divorce, Jesus didn’t say if any man put away his wife because he
doesn’t love her, that’s all right. He
didn’t say that in Matthew so that can’t be an excuse; you learn to love again,
that’s all.
So here’s the
problem, you identify it, it comes out all sorts of ways; in these kinds of
things this is where you deal with specifics.
To cite an illustration, a man might learn that his wife is resentful,
he can’t figure out, you’re living with a woman, you know she’s resentful, she
doesn’t say it but you can just kind of feel it, you know, it kind of goes
around the room with her, and you just know that she’s resentful. And so you’ve got to do something, so you
find out in talking with her why she’s resentful. If she buys a new dress, buys new clothes,
has her hair done, never noticed it but the other women you all notice. Naturally she’s resentful, you didn’t know
you were doing that so she tells you, it hurts, so now at least you found out
something. Okay, so you correct it. Now you’d never have found that out if you
hadn’t gone to something like this and asked.
You see; 95% of the problems can be solved right here; there are some
more complicated ones that can’t be but they can be solved right here. A woman, for example, might learn that her
husband would like to invite his business associates to the house but he never
does it because he’s embarrassed the way she keeps the house. She can never understand why he doesn’t share
his business with her; he’s ashamed to.
Well I didn’t know that. Well you
do now, and you know enough of the Word of God to know what you should do about
it. Change it.
So these are the
kind of things that come out of these things, specifics, every day little picky
nitty-gritty things, but there is what tear up the marriage. And you solve it, it might take some of you
$150,000-$200,000 in psychiatric bills, just that one little trick of sitting
down and (?) out the principles.
Let’s look at this
further in Ephesians 4, notice it goes on, verse 29, this should apply to your
family conference, I advise you if you’re going to have this and you have a
real tough time, read this passage together when you start. “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of
your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying,” well look what you
did yesterday, you clod, now that is not edifying. All right, God says edifying, if you have
something to say, say it truthfully that you did something wrong, you did this
or left this undone, all right, fine but you’re doing it not out of an attitude
of just get him, but you’re doing it out of an attitude of correcting, let’s
see if we can correct and solve the problem.
Now Ephesians
4:30, here it shows you the (?) of the whole thing. “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby
you are sealed unto the day of redemption,” have you ever thought of how verse
30 works into the context in this kind of a situation; that in your marriage
both of you are grieving the Holy Spirit if you’re not communicating like
this? And this explains why you’re tubed
out spiritually. You wonder what big sin
you did? It wasn’t any big sin, you did
all these little things that are crept in, tubed out the communication,
bitterness, so you’re grieving the Holy Spirit.
Verse 31,32, the key, “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and
clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice; [32] And be
ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for
Christ’s sake, has forgiven you.” Now
you can’t forgive someone if you don’t know what the issue is. See, that command presupposes there’s been
communication in order for the forgiveness to occur, and then the forgiveness
occurs; you can’t have a forgiving attitude and have the attitude of verse 31;
those two are completely incompatible.
Now look; we’ve
studied the second divine institution, we’ve gone through Proverbs written by
the God who made marriage, if we implemented these principles, don’t you see we
would have a much more powerful testimony for Christ in today’s society? Where is that most people hurt? Where is it that the obvious manifestation of
the gospel can be most clearly seen?
Because you’re a Cornelius Van Til and go around and wipe out everybody
intellectually? No, the place where the
great demonstration is made is in the home; that’s the language most people
understand. And it’s not because you
have an ideal home; don’t walk away from here and feel guilty because you don’t
have an ideal marriage. That’s not… you
missed the whole thing. Your testimony
is not dependent on having an ideal marriage; your testimony is dependent on
what you’re doing with the problems of your marriage. That’s the testimony because everybody’s got
the problems; it’s what you’re doing about them, scripturally or
unscripturally, there’s where the testimony is.
And when you do this, then people will say Christianity is the total
answer to my problem.