I can’t say I disagree with Walsh on this.
Dalrock has a nice take on some of the comments. Some of the ladies can’t seem to take the heat, even though men have been dealing with it for a long time.
As I’ve mentioned before, when men call other men out on their sins, they tend to feel brave doing so, and men generally will acknowledge their failure. When men call women out they feel like they are being a bully, and even worse when you call a woman out you are off for a day at the (hamster) races.
About five months into my ‘ex’s’ separation and affair, I was talking to the spouse of a Vineyard pastor, who challenged me: My ex had asked if she could come back a month or so before, and I had said “yes, but you have to agree to counseling”. According to the VY pastor’s wife, I was “not loving her like Christ” by adding the stipulation of “counseling” and therefore I was to blame for her not coming back. This and other roughly parallel experiences were real eye openers for me. Painful, but necessary, eye openers.
If the shoe were on the other foot, I doubt she would have provided similar unconditionality.
In my church, where the former pastor–RL–had an affair with the secretary (BW), RL talked an initial talk of repentance. As a result, some folks were trying to insist that PL (RL’s wife) take him back.
Unbeknownst to anyone, RL was still boffing BW while talking the talk of repentance.
Ergo, we excommunicated both RL and BW.
Still, had PL taken RL back, that would have only compounded the damage.
divorce is a sin issue. our culture has cycled around to the place where divorce is overly accepted, and there is no community shame in causing or choosing a divorce. that does not mean there are not consequences … there most certainly are … it means we live in a society where it is accepted and even celebrated … and the negative consequences are blamed on something else, anything else, and trivialized.
there are reasons God gave us “out” for divorce – much needed reason. but that still does not make it good. it means that God loves us enough to protect us.
i have a hard time wrapping my brain around frivolous divorces b/c i cannot comprehend doing that. i believe i can honestly say that b/c i had many opportunities to leave my first husband – and it would have been approved and celebrated by the church and the community.
so when i run into someone who made such a choice, i’m a bit shocked. it doesn’t happen often b/c i don’t run in circles where i get to know people enough to hear their stories. but i did meet a woman a few years ago who divorced her husband just b/c she didn’t think they were good for each other anymore. i was incensed. and though they didn’t have their own children, they were both heavily involved in the lives of their nieces and nephews.
it always disturbs me when i hear about men or women who treat divorce frivolously. it is terrible the way we manipulate lies to make them palatable and even seemingly desirable.
there are two women in my life right now, though, who are in truly terrible marriages – terrible abuse. i rarely recommend divorce … and even then with much gravity and sadness. it matters not the reason, divorce is hell.
may God forgive those who belittle His creation and design … those who destroy families and cause their children to live in fear … those who can’t decide whose bed to sleep in at night … those who move on from one mate to the next like people trade in cars.
may He give us wisdom and strength to fight this battle called life … to stand strong and firm on and for Truth … to love people enough to be honest with them … and to love ourselves enough to face our own reality.
marriage is hard. it doesn’t take many months of married life to figure that out. but life is hard. life is as much about making choices *not* to do things as it is *to* do things. when one says, “I do,” to another, they are also saying, “no,” “absolutely not,” “i will not give that a second look or thought,” “i will not flirt with that idea,” etc, to anything that leads to a possible ‘yes’ with someone else.
if it were easy, the Bible wouldn’t have so much to say so extensively about it all. but it’s not easy. it is hard.
love … is a choice.
marriage … is a choice.
our society has lost its *blush* b/c we’ve trivialized sin and choose to bathe in the lies that the consequences of whatever sin i choose are okay … after all, “kids are resilient! they’ll be fine!”
may God have mercy.
I jump in to say that while I don’t accept the Calvinist idea of state-sanction being what makes it a ‘marriage’ neither to accept the flip side of that, which is that state-sanctioning makes a dissolved union “divorced”. I can’t say that I am wise enough to go much beyond that; but I do think we have tacit permission to separate if need be — just that this does not mean you are free to run off and have another ‘marriage’.
Ideally, I favor getting the State out of the business of licensing marriages and returning that back to religious institutions to regulate as they see fit. At this point, we cannot trust the State to be on the side of common law/natural law.
I don’t look at this as a Reform vs. Arminian thing; it’s about what government’s place ought to be in this matter. In a perfect world, government would be on the side of God’s law; not only do we not live in such a world, government has done a wonderful job destroying families through “no-fault” divorce and their hijacking of justice in the process via “family courts”.
What Walsh sort of misses here: conservatives have been hammering “no-fault” divorce for quite some time. Back in the day, Jerry Falwell–who was no Calvinist–lambasted “no-fault” divorce, and listed divorce as one of the grievous “national sins”. This was at a time (the early 1980s) when gay “marriage” was not even on the radar. Dobson was also quite outspoken about “no-fault” divorce.
What we have now takes total equity out of the process.
Does that mean everything will be perfect if we return this from the State back to the churches? Not by a long shot.
At the same time, in that scenario, it will be solely on the Christians to reform it, rather than wait on a secular system to come around to see their perspective on matters.