Marriage is a God-given sacrament, one to be entered into soberly and prayerfully. It should not be used to assuage your guilt or solve some problem. Using marriage for such purposes actually blasphemes God more than unsanctioned rack-hitting because marriage is a sacramental covenant ordained by God, committed to in the presence of God. if your motives stink of apostasy, God is insulted by your abuse of His privilege. It is worse than the unbeliever taking communion. You are marrying the wrong person at the wrong time and for the wrong reason, all for show, just because you’re embarrassed that people know you’re engaging in morally questionable behavior.

I doubt I will ever remarry.

I’ve just not been inclined to like anybody enough to want to have them living in my house and, you know, bothering me. I tell this joke: “I might get married again, but she’s got to have her own place.” And it’s really only a half-joke. I really quite set in my ways and very happy not being henpecked and ruled over. For me, emotional and sexual intimacy is not enough of a trade-off in exchange for my liberty, sanity and reason, all three of which are typically challenged by women who allegedly love me.

Beyond that, I have real problems with the doctrinal games ministers play to get around biblical prohibitions against remarriage. As I mention elsewhere, complexity arouses my suspicion, and the ecclesiastical Heimlich maneuver most pastors employ to justify their second or third or fourth marriage generally strikes me as disingenuous. As moral leaders, our spiritual authority is undermined when we start cutting corners on sound doctrine, when we turn a blind eye to sin or start weaseling our way around sin. Certainly God is faithful and just to forgive our sin, but, biblically speaking, remarriage for any reason other than spousal infidelity having been committed against you has you entering into a perpetual sinful state.

Church Folk like to point to Matthew 19, where Jesus condemns divorce. This misses the point that Jesus was engaged in a debate with the Pharisees and was quoting The Law to them. We are no longer under The Law. The Law did not cease when Jesus’ ministry began, but was fulfilled by Jesus’ resurrection. When Jesus arose from the dead, the bonds tying man to the Law were broken. Thus, technically speaking, Levitical guidelines concerning marriage and divorce no longer apply to us. Or do they?

It is the Law that makes us aware of sin. Without the Law, there would, literally, be no sin. We’d be in this anything-goes state, which some of us live anyway. The fact is, many of us get married too soon and for the wrong reasons. And many of us give up on our marriages too soon and become serial marriers, marrying out of religious superstition and fear of hell than out of a genuine sense that this person is God-sent and God-intended for you.

The Apostle Paul provided lots of guidance about marriage, especially in I Corinthians Chapter 7. The takeaway from that chapter is Paul doesn’t like women very much. He honors them like mothers while condescending to them like children. He writes extremely few words to women, as the vast majority of his writings were to men. Paul would rather no one married, but accepts that some people cannot control themselves sexually and would, therefore, be better off within the bond of marriage. This is considerably stupid thinking. People who are having trouble controlling themselves outside of marriage will have trouble controlling themselves inside of marriage. Sisters; if he can’t keep it in his pants, don’t marry him. A man (or woman) with a sexual addiction can and will never be satisfied by a lifelong partner. Paul is incredibly wrong in this idiotic notion of getting married if you can’t control yourself. If you’re having trouble controlling yourself, see a doctor. I’m sure there’s some pill that can help you keep Mr. Johnson in perspective.

Our major problem, as Christians and most especially among Church Folk and most black pastors I’ve known, is our penchant for equating Paul’s pastoral advice with the literal word of God. These are not God’s words. Paul never once claims to be speaking for God or speaking as God,. He is routinely self-deprecating and routinely warns us to know God for ourselves. Moreover, he is speaking to specific churches at specific times in specific places about specific issues and events. Taking Paul’s words out of context and applying a universality to them is incredibly bad exegesis and faulty doctrine. Paul was a crackpot who disdained marriage and, from all evidence, disliked women. While his pastoral advice is surely God-breathed and God-inspired, the accretions of is life experience shade his views. We should not be treating this guy as infallible and absolute.

Third Time's The charm:   Ideally, a vow before God shuld actually mean something.

Let Your Conscience be Your Guide?

Mary Fairchild of About.Com put it this way:

Though divorce is a serious matter in God's opinion (Malachi 2:16), it is not the unforgivable sin. If you confess your sins to God and ask for forgiveness, you are forgiven (1 John 1:9) and can move on with your life. If you can confess your sin to your former spouse and ask forgiveness without causing further hurt, you should seek to do so. From this point forward you should commit to honor God's Word pertaining to marriage. Then if your conscience permits you to remarry, you should do so carefully and reverently when the time comes. Only marry a fellow believer. If your conscience tells you to remain single, then remain single.

Conscience can trick you sometimes. Your conscience is a powerful mechanism, ingeniously designed by God to prompt our moral compass. But it is not necessarily an absolute thing. So far as I know, the only real test of love is time. If it’s really love, then what’s the rush? If you’re all hot for sister, give it a year. Get to really know her—the good and the bad. Then see where you’re at. The main reason most Church Folk I know remarry is for sex. If you took sex out of the equation, there’d be no pressing need to remarry. Loving someone is no sin. Being close to someone doesn’t require God’s blessing or, say, a license. In most cases, these are folks who have hot drawers. They are probably already hitting the rack together, anyway, and their conscience is driving them to marry to avoid shame. But avoiding shame is a disastrously stupid reason to marry.

There is, in fact, only one reason to ever marry: the absolute conviction that this is the person God has ordained for your life. And that conviction needs to be tested and tried. You have to give it time. A firm foundation is made from concrete. But just because concrete appears solid doesn’t make it so. Concrete not only has to dry (where it looks solid), it has to *cure,* a chemical process of reaching its absolute hardness and purity. Time is the only way concrete will cure. Marrying someone while you’re still in that heightened state of arousal, that dimwit infatuation where your nose is all wide over the person and you can’t keep your hands off of them—is a stupid thing to do. You’re not building on a firm foundation and you’re not giving that foundation time to cure. You just want to hit it. Or you’re already hitting it and you feel guilty.

Marriage is a God-given sacrament, one to be entered into soberly and prayerfully. It should not be used to assuage your guilt or solve some problem. Using marriage for such purposes actually blasphemes God more than the unsanctioned rack-hitting because marriage is a sacramental covenant ordained by God, committed to in the presence of God. As I’ve said many times, God responds not to our words or even to our deeds but to our motives. You can throw the biggest Juanita Bynum circus-wedding in the world, if your motives stink of apostasy, God is insulted by your abuse of His privilege. It is worse than the unbeliever taking communion. You are marrying the wrong person at the wrong time and for the wrong reason, all for show, just because you’re embarrassed that people know you’re engaging in morally questionable behavior.

For me, it’s really not a question of conscience. I still love my wife. It’s really that simple: God has not released me from that bond. We stood together and made a promise before God. I take that sort of thing seriously. Beyond that, I’m old and cranky and frankly have not met anyone I was even remotely interested in marrying. I’d rather not have a half-baked marriage of sexual convenience, someone to keep me company and remind me to use fabric softener in the wash. What I had was amazing. Magical. Intoxicating. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s really hard to settle for second best.

I tend to suspect the people who nag me about remarrying have never themselves actually experienced that kind of love. There’s no definitive litmus test to tell you when it’s really love as opposed to infatuation or something else. But we’ve been apart nineteen years, now. And there has not been a single day that I have not thought of her, prayed for her. It was an experience I’ll always cherish, and one I am forced to honor by not cheapening it to merely one of a rapid succession of “marriages.”

Christopher J. Priest
1 January 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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