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“A brother or sister is not under bondage”
When we return to a passage already discussed in Chapter II, a new element enters into the discussion. For there( as Brother John Thomas long ago accepted) Paul discusses quite explicitly a case in which a brother might depart from his wife, or a sister from her husband. The case has nothing to do with adultery, or with guilty and innocent parties, for the couples concerned may have been living in perfect propriety with each other ‘before the Truth came their way. Then, it seems, when only one of the partnership would receive the faith, the unbeliever might be unwilling to stay in a state of marriage. What was the believer to do ?1
The answer given was that, while accepting the marriage’s continuance if the unbeliever would do so, the brother or sister was “not under bondage in such cases” if the unbeliever insisted on breaking the marriage apart. This seems to have two consequences: the first is that a marriage cannot be regarded as having been recorded in heaven, as it were, if neither party at the time knew anything about the will of the true God; and the second is that God’s acceptance of the union must be sought and obtained before, in His sight, the marriage is validated. If they are willing to stay together, the unbeliever is “sanctified” by the believer, and the children of the marriage are not unclean but “holy:” and the easiest meaning to attach to this is that God accepts a marriage-in-being of this kind, and treats the children as legitimately born, for otherwise the union would be irregular and the children illegitimate. However, if at any time of the believer’s baptism the unbeliever repudiates the erstwhile marriage, the believer is “not under bondage.”
Under what bondage? Again the most simple meaning is that there is no marriage bond, for the marriage has never been ratified by God. All our translations seem to permit of this meaning, but the issue seems to be one of interpretation rather than translation, and the simple meaning of the words takes us little further. Of interpretative translations Moffatt (“the Christian brother or sister is not tied to marriage”) clearly takes this point of view, which is entirely in harmony with the reasoning which Paul has been pursuing. And if this is so, it would constitute a title for such a person, left by the unbeliever in an “unbound” state, to enter into Christian marriage afterwards.
It is not suggested that the actual separation of two people married by the law of the land, on such grounds, is either possible or desirable today. Even were the public law to permit of it, the number of cases in which an unbeliever would be willing to press his or her objection to the faith to these lengths must be tiny. But one thing does emerge from it. If a marriage, as it is called, has been made and broken before one or other of its parties came to know the faith, then there is no binding obligation to take account of this in determining the future state of such a person. God has not been consulted about the marriage now dissolved, nor, doubtless, about its dissolution either: and it does thus become possible to take the new convert as we find him, blotting out the past and starting the future without fetters.
Not quite without fetters, perhaps. For the believer might say, “If I had known then what I know now I would never have separated. In these circumstances I do not think I should marry again.” Nothing but honour and praise could belong to such an one making himself an eunuch for the Kingdom of heaven’s sake; it might well be, indeed, that if such a divorced person comes to us for advice, that he should be advised to give this his earnest thought before making his decision: but if, after this has been done, it is then his conviction that God had no part in the former union, it does seem that Paul would advise us to endorse this ,and receive such an one even if he married again.
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Abide in the calling in which ye are called.
This is a thorny subject, needing the utmost mutual sympathy if we are to understand one another; but the point just reached is of immense practical importance in missionary work.
There are areas of the world where even the official attitude to marriage is much less clear cut than it is in, say, the United Kingdom. In parts of Africa a man may only have one wife if he is married in a church or a state office; he may legally have more if he is married by “native custom.” In the Caribbean and elsewhere the so-called “common law marriage” is everywhere, in which a man and woman live together, often for long periods and sometimes permanently in mutual faithfulness, without any formal marriage having been pronounced. One common law marriage may be broken and followed by another, or others. Irregular unions of a more or less promiscuous kind may also be common, and tangled life histories may defy any human unravelling by the time the Truth enters the lives of some such people.
What is to be done? If a man and woman are living together as man and wife when the Truth reaches them, are we to attempt an analysis of their behavior from puberty onwards in a doomed attempt to find who first became “one flesh” with whom ? Are we to delay the acceptance of such people into the faith until the analysis has been made, and then refuse it if our conclusions, with the necessary partings, are rejected? Or are we, seeking certainly the proper regularizing of the existing union, to consider that our Lord Himself would want the past to be blotted out, the present put straight, and a clear undertaking that the unfruitful works of darkness should be abandoned, as the reasonable price of entry into the way of life? It is surely only in this way that anything practicable can be achieved in this important sphere of labor, and it is in this way, I have no doubt, that our missionaries approach the problem.
The problem of plural marriages is one to itself, and a short chapter will be devoted to it, again primarily because of its implications in missionary work.
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“Thou hast had five husbands”
If only we had more case-history, one is disposed to complain, the situation would be clearer. If only there were more specific examples discussed in Scriptures, like the kind of problem we meet today, we should be able to say: “This case is exactly like that one; so we know precisely what to do!”
But the Lord does not work that way: we must bring our own judgment — sanctified, prayerful and godly judgment, but our own none the less — to bear on our own situations, hard though it be, and grievous though the disputing’s which arise. Case histories are few, and they are also perplexing.
We take the case of the woman of Samaria2. She encounters the Lord by a well, and wells are places where by long tradition marriages were made, and perhaps sought? In such a place Abraham’s servant sought a wife for Isaac and found Rebekah; Jacob met Rachel; Moses met Reuel’s daughters, one of whom he married3. And here she, having pointedly directed attention to the fact that she is a woman she mendaciously tells the young man sitting there, “I have no husband!” from what dark motives who can know? Her record was bad enough to warrant suspicion: five former husbands and a present paramour! The prophet who knew her past life knew her heart as well, and kept His own heart undefiled. But — and this is the tantalizing thing — what did He tell her to do? Go find your first husband? Or the first one still living (for surely she had not buried five husbands: if she had been that kind of person she would have married the sixth) ? Or marry properly the man you are now with ?
This, too, is not told us, and we cannot presume to know for certain what He pronounced, or whether He pronounced at all, on what this woman should do. But if we assume the sincerity of her repentance, we seem bound to assume from the very silence of the narrative that the Lord did not impose on her the extreme condition that she should forsake her present companion and go back to her first: that the state of sin in which she was living must be regularized we cannot doubt, but further than this we cannot go. The case-history fails to provide the ready-made answer, and we have to use a Biblically guided judgment.
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“Mercy rejoiceth against judgment”
This will be a piece of case-history, too, but before it we need to propound a principle: that the Christian does not look into the Law and say, “What is the prescribed penalty for this offense? It is now my duty to exact it.” He looks to the law of liberty and says, “What warrant do I have for exercising mercy, compassion, and understanding in connection with this offense? If I fail then to do it, I may myself be judged without mercy for failing to show it.”4
The context of the allusions to James’ epistle seem to make the passages particularly relevant to our present problem. We are to love our neighbour as ourself, so fulfilling the law. We are to be equitable in our treatment of all offences, otherwise the law convicts us of the sin of partiality. We are to be of the same mind in the treatment of murder as we are of adultery: and James says that in the light of the Lord’s statements which make hatred murder, and lust adultery, as we have said. We are to be as ruthless against the bitterness of the hard word or the hidden hate as we are against the defilement of the lustful offence: or does James mean that we are to be as gentle with the latter as we are accustomed to be with the former?5
There is abundant precedent in Scripture that God does not always exact the uttermost farthing of His own prescribed penalties. And never was this more clearly demonstrated than in the case of David and Bathsheba[/note]2 Samuel 11:1-12:25.[/note]. Both were guilty of adultery, and it is likely enough that Bathsheba was a willing victim of the royal lust. The prescribed penalty for that was death by stoning6. David was in addition guilty of deliberate, calculated murder of Uriah her husband7, and for this, too, he deserved to die.
David certainly suffered for his offence. He and Bathsheba lost her firstborn; the loyalty of some of his trusted servants was sorely tried by what he had done, and later rebellions must have had this as one of their causes; and the further enlargement of the royal harem and the household of royal princes provoked deep jealousies which saddened his old age. But neither he nor Bathsheba were stoned. They were allowed to become man and wife. Their later son Solomon inherited the throne. The ancestry of Joseph, legally reckoned the father of Our Lord, was traced through “her of Urias” (as it was through Tamar the incestuous, Rahab the harlot, and Ruth the Moabitess). And Nathan, through whom what is probably Mary’s ancestry is traced in Luke’s record, was also the son of David and Bathsheba. And no added vengeance seems to have been exacted for the murder of Uriah8.
It is legally true that when David actually took Bathsheba for his wife she was a widow, so that technically at that time she was entitled to be married to another9. But she was a widow by David’s hand, and had he not been executed for the former adultery he could have been for the murder, and to suppose that any man of conscience would regard himself as entitled, having escaped these two penalties, to invoke the Law to justify him in marrying Uriah’s relict, is to suppose too much. If this act were impenitently done then it screams adultery and murder before God’s throne for vengeance, whatever the legal position at that moment.
When, therefore, mercy was shown to David, this was a direct divine dispensation with God’s own laws, and it is a question not to be left out of account whether, if God could do this, He would expect us to ignore what He did when we are ourselves confronted with cases where a marriage has been broken, grievous sin committed in the breaking of it perhaps, and a positively unlawful association taken on as a sequel: and this is a good deal more extreme than most of the cases we encounter. If the sinner can be brought to feel a penitence which matches that of David when he wrote:
Have mercy upon me, 0 God, according to Thy loving kindness:
According to the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.For I acknowledge my transgressions:
And my sin is ever before me.
Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned,
And done that which is evil in Thy sight.That Thou mayest be justified when Thou speakest,
And be clear when Thou judgest . . .
Hide Thy face from my sins,
And blot out all mine iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, 0 God;
And renew a right spirit within me …
Deliver me from blood guiltiness, 0
God, Thou God of my salvation;
And my tongue shall sing aloud of Thy righteousness.”10
then who are we to say that God, who took that man’s penitence and used his tears to wash away his sins, restored and used him, and his illgotten wife with him, to His own great ends, would expect of us that we should turn a flinty-faced No to a suppliant who came to us with a full and free confession of his fault, unless he should be stripped of every comfort still left to him in a life where his sin was ever him as reminder enough of his fault. Do we have to risk that such an one should be “swallowed up of overmuch sorrow” before we, considering ourselves lest we also be tempted, can think of restoring him in the spirit of meekness?
God dealt with His people as a nation in the way He dealt with David as a man and Bathsheba as a woman. Hosea must take a wife of whoredoms (but why was she not stoned?) to witness God’s love to a land which commits great whoredom, departing from the LORD. There was a limit to His mercy, but it was not yet, and if Israel would, harlot though she was, she might return and be washed and forgiven, even returning to her God again, against the spirit of the commandment which forbade a twice repudiated wife to return again to her first husband /51/. “I will betroth thee unto me for ever,” He says in the quintessence of mercy.
Of course mercy takes two forms in the question before us, and easily first in the priorities is the mercy which the injured spouse should be showing toward the one who betrayed him. Joseph was a just man in frustrating the letter of justice by declining to make the fiancee he thought a sinner into a public shame. Jesus was more just than the melting crowd of Pharisees when, left alone with the woman, He said, “Neither do I condemn thee.” “Go and sin no more” was, of course, essential to her restoration, but what the Law asked for was not conceded. One of the prime reasons, religious principle and the doctrine of “one flesh” altogether apart, why the believer ought not to divorce a sinning partner is that this act cuts through the main core of the line of reconciliation joining them; and the slender threads remaining unbroken will nearly always yield under the strains of waxing bitterness, or the fatal thrust of a second marriage.
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Summary
This has been a complex tale, and I do not believe that it can be made easier except by using the technique of the executioner. And yet we must attempt a summary, which, to my mind, comes to this:
- Dissolution of a marriage inflicts grievous harm on all parties, especially any children. It contradicts forgiveness and puts a stumbling-block before repentance.
- Dissolution of a marriage defeats the lovely symbol it ought to be of the permanent union of the Lord Jesus with His ecclesia. It violates the desire of God that a man and his wife should live together as one flesh.
- Dissolution of a believer’s marriage is to put asunder what God hath joined together, whatever the causes of the dissolution may be. And the Lord does not so much provide any exception to this, as say that if a marriage is not repudiated before it is consummated it ought not to be put aside at all.
- If a marriage is contracted and dissolved before the ways of God are known, and a new marriage undertaken in the same state, we ought to accept the situation as we find it, asking for a recognition, nevertheless, of the true teaching as the basis for the future. If a similarly divorced person has not remarried at the time of learning the Truth, he or she might well be counselled about the wisdom of becoming a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” but it would be improper to forbid remarriage in the Lord.
- If, despite all counsel, a believers’ marriage is broken, and an injured party does re-marry, then it may still ultimately be needful to restore such an one in the spirit of meekness on a true and sincere confession of what is right. It may even be needful to do so, if the pattern of David in the 51st Psalm is to guide us, to do so on due safeguards when a guilty person does so.
In some ways this might seem like the worst of all worlds: a severe doctrine that divorce of believers ought never to occur, followed by practical counsel which would countenance its occurrence, and even restore the guilty! This, it could so easily be said, opens wide the floodgates to deliberate, calculated and cynical abuse, and could riddle the Brotherhood with its ill consequences. So, in a way, it does. The Lord has in His wisdom given us, in no department whatever of the Truth’s discipline, so clean and straight a rule of conduct that we can ever be safeguarded against abuse and high-handed sin. We know it in connection with marriage out of the faith; we know it already in reference to the present subject: but is it not far better to seek a route whereby we can uphold the high principle, and seek a confession of this same principle from sinners restored, than stain our books of ecclesial jurisprudence with the blood of weak brethren, penitent but no match against their normal desires when the need to cleave to a wife is theirs, for whom Christ died?
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One