Man, Woman, and Family in Christ – Part four

II. “Only In The Lord”

We are all apt to rebel against the suggestion that our private affairs are the concern of anyone beside ourselves. And marriage is so very much a matter for the two people concerned that interference from outside runs the risk of provoking the sharpest resentment. But every department of the believer’s life is in some way bound up with his outlook on his God, and his God’s approval of him; and nearly everything we do also affects our brethren and sisters, so that it is true, whether we instinctively like it or not, that “none of us liveth to himself”¹.

At a time of life when marriage is only a remote, if desirable, expectation, and marriage to one known person in particular has not yet influenced our judgement, we are freer than we shall ever be again to consider whom we ought to marry, and also whether it is any business of anyone else. During the period of courtship and early marriage we may be in no mood to listen to such discussions, so bound up may our emotions be in the very present object of our affections. Later, when married life has settled down, we may be able to reflect again whether what we have done was wise: and should it turn out that we conclude that it was not, there is very little to be done except make the best of a situation which is not as good as it might have been.

So this chapter is addressed primarily to young people not yet irrevocably paired off, to others still heart whole, and to their advisers. And since some of the latter will inevitably be those who have rueful reflexes on the past, not many of us are really exempted. Even those very nearly committed can sometimes reflect in time, and an earlier draft of this chapter was used to happy effect — happy for all concerned — in this connexion.

In the earliest Old Testament times it was obviously impossible to lay down strict rules as to whom the children of promise should marry. Adam and Eve were created for each other; in the earliest generations some measure of close in-marriage was unavoidable: and in later times it was clearly extensively practiced, as a simple reading of the history of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob clearly shows². But it is clear from early days that some restriction on the right to marry indiscriminately was in force.

Though the statement “They took wives of all that they chose” doubtless conceals offences much worse than indiscriminate marriage, it certainly suggests that the ‘sons of God’ allowed their desires to outrun the purity and separateness expected of them. When Abraham sought a wife for Isaac from his own kindred, he was not merely fulfilling a family custom, but was deliberately safeguarding him from marrying a daughter of the Canaanites. When Esau did contract such marriages, his wives were a grief of mind to Isaac and Rebekah. And though the sending of Jacob into Syria for a wife was at least partly a subterfuge to save him from being murdered by Esau, it was in good faith that Isaac forbade him to take a wife of the daughters of Canaan³.

It is when Israel has become a nation in Egypt that the way is prepared for strict rules governing the marriages of its sons and daughters. Moses himself comes under attack from his brother and sister because of the Cushite woman he has married during his exile*. With respect to the nations of Canaan, Moses lays it down expressly that no marriages are to be entertained with the doomed peoples, either taking their daughters or giving the daughters of Israel to their sons; and he gives the reason: “for they will turn away thy son from following Me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and He will destroy you quickly.” Even in the troubled times of the Judges there are indications that the scruples here set out were not wholly forgotten, for Samson’s parents expostulate with him for desiring “a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines.” And though the commandment was all too frequently honoured only in the breach during the subsequent history of Israel, the same conscience is witnessed in the complaint of the historian that Solomon married many strange wives, who fulfilled the prediction of Moses by turning away his heart. It not infrequently happens later that, when a bad king reigns over the people, this can be traced at least in part to the influence of a heathen mother⁴.

The reforms which accompanied the times of Ezra and Nehemiah laid special stress on the importance of avoiding the contamination of heathen marriages. And here, too, the evils which overtook the nation in the days of the kings is attributed to the same evil cause: that heathen women turned away the hearts of the chosen people⁵.

Notwithstanding all the breaches of the law concerning heathen marriages, there is really no doubt that they were strictly forbidden to Israel, on the grounds that they could only result in turning the people aside from their unsullied faith in the true God. And the breaches only served to establish the point of the law by bringing on the people precisely the evils which had been foretold.

By New Testament times the lesson had been learned, and those who reckoned themselves as most God-fearing among the Jews cherished their separation from the heathen in far more particulars than in abstaining from marriage with them. A man whose mother was a Jewess, but whose father was a Greek, was inevitably under some suspicion by the purely Jewish people around him⁶. The Samaritans were despised as a people of mixed race not deserving the title of Jews, for all the fact that they claimed to worship the same God and honour the same Law⁷.

The teaching of Christ changed the nature of the barriers. Henceforth there was to be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free, in the Christian fold, and mixed marriages between persons of different race could clearly no longer be forbidden when Gentiles were admitted to the common Lord’s table without circumcision or adherence to the Law. But a difference persisted. It was no longer between the fleshly children of Abraham and the others, but between the true disciples of Christ and the others, and in such a context the question of marriage between unbeliever and believer was bound to come to the fore.

It seems to have done so in a very interesting way. As the gospel progressed, it was sure to come quite quickly across cases in which couples married according to their pagan customs would face its teaching and have to make up their minds. Sometimes whole families would accept the faith together⁸, but sometimes the sad prediction of the Lord Jesus would be fulfilled, and parents would be set against children, parents-in-law against children-in-law, and, doubtless, husbands against wives, by their diverse reactions to what they heard⁹.

Corinth provided a test-case. Paul is obliged to address himself to the question, “What is a believing husband to do if the wife whom he married in paganism refuses to receive the gospel? Or what is a believing wife to do in similar circumstances?” And his answer is illuminating. If the unbeliever repudiates his or her partner because of the new faith, the partner need not insist that the marriage be kept in being. If the unbeliever is willing to continue the marriage, the believer must continue it also, and that on two grounds: first, that “the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified in the brother”; and, second, that the believer has an opportunity of bringing salvation to the other for as long as they stay together: “How knowest thou, 0 wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, 0 husband, whether thou shalt save thy wife?”¹⁰

The meaning of the first of these seems to be this: when the marriage was undertaken, it was not submitted to the true God for His blessing, for the true God was not then known. God had not, in the fullest sense, joined these two together. But, even though one of them was still not a believer, for the believer’s sake God was prepared to validate the marriage retrospectively, and to accept the children as validly born in wedlock: “else were your children unclean, but now are they holy.” This has important repercussions when we come to consider the permanence of marriage, but for the present they lead us simply to this conclusion: if Paul and his readers thought it a matter of such importance to resolve the status of a mixed marriage, even when this was innocently entered into, how seriously must they not have regarded the importance, where free choice existed, of being married “only in the Lord?” It seems to be accepted entirely without question that a believer would not, unless he were married already, enter into marriage with an unbeliever without seriously impairing his Christian loyalty.

The point is made clearer yet in the same passage. Paul can legislate for those already married, exercising compassion and understanding; but when a marriage has been terminated by the death of one partner, what then? They are entitled to marry again (even though Paul mentions the wisdom, for those who have the strength, of remaining unmarried); but if they should marry there is but one restriction: “She is free to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord”¹¹. It follows with absolute clarity that those who have never been married at all, if they are true believers in Christ, have the same liberty and the same limitations to it: they also are at liberty to be married to whom they will, or to marry whom they will, only in the Lord.

Nowhere else in the New Testament is this subject treated with the thoroughness we find here, but the well-known passage: “Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers”¹² has all the force customarily given to it. It is true that Paul does not mention marriage by name; it is also true that there can be other forms of compromising yoking with unbelievers which would fall under his condemnation; but it is impossible to think of a single commitment for which Paul’s advice is better fitted than that of marriage. For what yoke is more intimate, what need to walk in step more urgent, and what fellowship deeper, in this life, than that which obtains between a man and his wife? If the unbelieving partner is a pagan, is it not to seek fellowship between light and darkness if a believer consciously accepts him or her as a partner — the one walking the road of idolatry, and the other of truth ? Is not this an attempt to bring idols into the temple of God, or make God at home in that of the idol? Could a believer be at ease in professing to worship God at the Lord’s table, and consciously and deliberately bestowing his love upon a heathen in his home?

Of course it could be protested that the entire discussion, from both Testaments, presupposes a situation which no longer exists. And there is truth in the objection. In Israel it amounted to a clear choice between Jehovah and Baal, or Rimmon, or Molech; and between the pure observances of the former, and the abominable indulgences of the latter. In the days of Jesus and Paul it could equally be a choice between the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Ar­temis, Zeus or Hermes’¹³ once again involving a decision for holiness or gross indulgences. There were, no doubt, sophisticated pagans in the latter days whose allegiance to their gods was nominal only, but they were pagans none the less, for no faith is also a wrong faith.

But in many places at the present time a form of Christianity has been traditional for centuries. Other religions are over wide areas nearly unknown. In some missionary regions, and in areas where extensive immigration of Moslem, Hindu or other races has occurred, this is perhaps less true than it was half a century ago (for the militant non-Christian religions are said to be making greater headway than the Christian ones in many places), but it can still be taken for granted by many true believers that they are unlikely to be seriously tempted to marry that kind of pagan.

Is it, therefore, it may be asked, relevant to quote for the 20th century passages which strictly apply only to a situation we rarely meet? And while the answer may not be simple, it must still (at least for the great majority of cases) be Yes.

For, to begin with, the great majority of members of modern civilized societies are not worshipers at all. Partners chosen at random are more likely to be people who do not “go to church” than people who do. And this is very distinctly a case of a believer marrying an unbeliever. The potential partner may not worship idols set up in temples, but he or she will be worshiping the idol of practical atheism, of supposing that God does not matter, and life can very well be lived without Him: a perilous situation indeed. And then, if the partner worships God according to beliefs and practices which we as a community have felt obliged to reject, to decide that it is innocently possible to marry such an one is tantamount to deciding that the differences between us are unimportant. And the importance or otherwise of doctrinal differences is not to be determined by whether or not we have marriage in mind! If separation is right and proper, it remains right and proper even though we have fallen in love; if separation is not needed when love makes its appearance, it becomes a very serious question as to whether it was ever needed.

1. Romans 14.7
2. Genesis 20:12; 24:15; 29:18
3. Genesis 26:34; 27:46; 28:1
4. Numbers 12.1; Deuteronomy 7:1-4; Judges 14:3; 1 Kings 11:1-4; 14:21; 2 Kings 8:18, 26.
5. Ezra 9:1 – 10:44; Nehemiah 13:23-30
6. Acts 16.3
7. John 4.9; 2 Kings 17:24ff.
8. Acts 16:31-34; 1 Corinthians 1:16
9. Matthew 10:21; Mark 13:12; Luke 12:53.
10. 1 Corinthians 7:12-16
11. 1 Corinthians 7:39
12. 2 Corinthians 6;14 – 7:1
13. Acts 14:8-18; 19:23-41