The Warfare of Marriage (and Relationships)-A Spiritual Editorial

I’m going to try to make this one brief.  Given the topic I may very well fail.  We’ll see though.   Let’s make this a series, no? Let me first say that no I'm not married and I give commentary based on the Standard that comes from on High.  Don't believe me? Reference it. I encourage you to actually (see last week).  Now, let's get going'

The idea of a healthy marriage is for two folks on the same page to get together and spend the rest of their lives together.  Throwing in the God context, it’s designed to be the prelude to a family, in which the two folks pass on their “on the same page” Godly Values to the next generation so that their legacy can be propitiated and they can genuinely multiply (Genesis 1:28). 

Well, this is awesome because two (or three) folks coming together in Christ’s name means Jesus is in the midst of that (Matthew 18:20).  And Jesus can pass his Values onto the man, the man to the woman, and the parents to the kids (1 Corinthians 11:3; Ephesians 6:1-10).  If every family acted like this, we’d be awesome right? Right. 

The problem with this is that this is the ideal, God’s default Model for how a family should be...and like with a lot of things God wants by default, we fall short of it (Romans 3:23).  Our heritage, experiences, and stereotypes pollute the marriage.  How you figure?  Outside influence.  Primarily by Satan’s schemes.  The last thing that Satan wants to see is two folks who come together (in the context of marital best friendship) to advance God’s Kingdom and Glorify Him not only through what they do, but what they are.  Next to relationship with God, the relationship with a spouse is the most important and most intimate relationship out there.  Hence outside influence being a bad thing.

Now everybody need somebody right?  I mean God gets all His stuff done in the context of relationships (i.e., Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. etc. etc.).  However, marriage is the kind of relationship where ideally the only person that should be allowed in that “joint closet” is Jesus.  Often in our iniquity and pain, we let everyone but Jesus in that closet, forgetting we share that closet with someone and it should be sacred.  I like to call this “Haywire Matrimony”.    It comes in two tiers:

Tier I: Someone who knows God AND is competent to help who we can trust.   Non-ideal but not all that bad.  So long as the person who seeks the outside help has enough discernment to understand what it means to give Godly counsel and tear down principalities, this one isn’t so bad.  Problem with this one is pretty much that whomever is seeking the help doesn’t have enough power directly from on High to hash it out without the help.  This is a process; many people go through this.  This one isn’t necessarily all that negative.

Tier 2: Gossip.  Gossip bad.  Very bad.  This is where the person seeking the outside help just wants to vent and someone to listen.  This is where they find that route to attack their spouse because they don’t feel like they can engage their spouse directly.  Sometimes they’re right.  A lot of people who land here have bypassed the advice from on High and that from folks in Tier 1.  Furthermore, a lot of people doing this wind up cheating.  Others overcome this (because Jesus IS a redeemer after all) and reconcile their marriage. 

The point is that marriage is war.  We have to fight.  Satan wants that marriage to go into the toilet...and we have to pray, forgive, and engage effectively to keep it afloat.  It is a labor of love, but it is labor.

Let me address the men.  If you can read this and you want to get marriage, keep this in mind.  All of it.  And that you’re supposed to lead.  If you can’t meet this challenge, go into the duck off with the Lord as opposed to wasting your time, and the time of any ladies you come across because without understanding these things you will fall on your face.  And hard.  Now, if you don’t see it here, stay tuned because I’m going to address the men over the next several weeks.   Have a good weekend, folks!

Errors? Where?!: A Multi-Pronged Commentary Toward the Inerrancy of Scripture (or Sola Scriptura)

*digs up the old blog*

Man it has been a while.  I normally blog over on Facebook now (http://www.facebook.com/360Encouragement)

However, I found it advantageous to upload my document here.  I hope you like it.

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Greetings:

What I wanted to do with this particular snippet is discuss the inerrancy of Scripture.  I have a previous commentary on the matter over in main blog, Weekend Encouragement, Unit 11 (Because Accursedness is No Fun) conclusion.  However, I wanted to take that commentary a little bit deeper.  First, let’s begin with the fact that the Bible if God’s Word without error and just analyze this right here for a moment. 

Introduction

Remember that the Bible is a book about morality, and a book about history, heritage, and identity.  It is, first and foremost, a game-planning book for God’s Comprehensive Will from the beginning to the end of time.  Analyzing it from this perspective, it can be better seen why certain things were necessary so that God the Father can be all in all.  Next, let’s discuss how God operates.  God swore upon Himself to the people because there is nothing greater than Him in the universe.  So His Standard is the greatest Standard.  And thus, God only honors what He does (what is in line with His Moral [the Standard He set in Scripture] and Comprehensive Will).  The key to this point is that there are no other authorities that demonstrate or describe how God operates other than the Bible.   Therefore, first off, the remaining essential doctrines of the Christian faith all come from Scripture (which came from God Himself). And furthermore, if we want to know the gold standard, we must read and understand Scripture.  To this end, we should check our “self-help” books.  If it’s not in a Biblical context, it’s not helping us all that much.  As far as reflecting that Standard, well I’ll get into that later. 

Attacks on Scripture

As with the remaining doctrines of the Christian faith, Scripture comes under attack.  I would argue that the primary reason that Scripture is attacked is because there was never a historical report of a book falling from the sky or something to that effect.  Well, I consider that silly for the reason I mentioned earlier: The Bible is a book about history, so let’s kill that argument (not shared by too many), and go to the others.  Let’s break what I feel are the top three arguments down.

Argument 1: The Bible Isn’t Relevant Today

The Bible was physically written by around A.D. 400, 500 or so.  So I guess at first glance you could say the Bible is dated.  But let me break down and break apart this argument.  First, from a practical perspective.  Let’s look at some of the concepts of the Bible.  First off, Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, having been told they would surely die.  They committed the first sin, and they and everyone since them has died.  Lazarus was raised (but died again) and Jesus was raised (because He’s the Messiah).  Everyone who can read this is going to die someday.  Of course, this is unless, Jesus comes back beforehand.  But otherwise, everyone else is dying.  Second, the Sodom and Gomorrah argument.  Those towns were so egregiously immoral God used a divine move to wipe them out.  Roman Empire?  Well, they were so mired in sexual immorality it was ridiculous.  There were places the affluent in Rome could just roll up in somewhere and just have sex with some folks.  And there’d be no problems with it.  And the slaves?  Marched for hundreds of miles from their native lands to Rome butt naked.  Come on man, really?  And their leader considered himself divinity.  Their own sin (lust/pride/envy....yep, those) caused their downfall.  And today....people’s lusts, pride, and envy are causing them to go down left and right.  Are some people “getting away with it”?  Well sure.  But that human power is bound to fail them. 

What’s my point?

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecc 1:9)

The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).  While this pertains to spiritual death of separation from God, 1 Corinthians 11:27-32 puts more of a duality on it, in that watching ourselves we avoid spiritual and physical death. 

Conclusion: It happened then, it’s happening now, and it’ll keep happening until Jesus comes back.

Argument 2: The Bible is chauvinist and women had no rights

If you take a look at the old testament, a few things stand out.  One person brought up to me that female slaves were held in a lower context than male slaves.  Slavery was to pay off debts in the Old Testament.  And today?  Well, they can put you in jail over not having paid your bills so what has changed? And once those debts were paid, folks had the choice of sticking around or moving on.  And another brought up to me that if a woman was raped she had to marry her assailant-the Deuteronomy passage.  Time to debunk this myth.  First off, the law never binds a woman to marry her rapist.  In these times, a woman was under the authority of her father or patriarchal familial figure until that person turns over authority to the husband (even now men traditionally ask for the dad’s blessing before marriage), and what loving dad is going to turn his girl (because women married younger during this time) to some raper man?  Exactly.  He paid a fine.  (Ref: Deut 22:28-29, Exodus 22:17).  And if they married, the man had to take care of his wife and was disallowed to divorce her for any reason (Deut 24:1-4, Matt 5:32, 19:9).  And if a man raped a woman promised to another man, well...off with his head (Deut 22:22-27).  Even today, laws are incredibly biased toward women.  And they should be to an extent.  A rapist need to be prosecuted, fined, everything really.  But I mean women who falsely yell “Rape!” are often just let go to roll on down the lane.  Again, what else is new? 

Let’s go to the other side of this argument and the other elephant in the room.

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. (Ephesians 5:22). 

I bold the last part because men often abuse this verse, and women often shut down when they hear it and want to choke us out.  But is because of generational sin and a general deviance from God’s Model for life that men demand by-default submission and women resist this to their last breath.  But a lot of folks don’t even understand that first off, the woman only submit to a man in the way she submits to God.  If the man isn’t godly, the woman should not submit to the ungodly principles that man may be displaying (each responsible for their own salvation, Philippians 2:12).   She should encourage and enlighten him in her nurturing nature, but nobody is allowed to follow something that isn’t of God (Matthew 6:24).   We also forget these verses like it.

Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. (Ephesians 5:21)-God wants peace in every relationship.  Should you be “right”, or should you be moving toward harmony?  Trust me, the harmony takes care of the “right”-ness.  Which is why God put it here like this.  Because God wants to be our gold standard, we do the submission for Him, and then He sends the Power to deliver that person over to us.  It’s the Biblical context of  “attracting more bees with honey than vinegar”.

 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word  That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:  (Ephesians 5:25-29)

First off, I want you to notice that God gave way more instruction to the man here than he did the woman.  That’s a tall task; for a man to have to be like Christ in this specific way to be a functional husband.  But thus, that is the submission standard.  And while this is instruction to a man, it’s also like a cheat sheet to a woman.  If your man does this, it’s alright to submit to him, in order to gain greater harmony with God as two becoming one flesh. 

A lot of people would try to discredit Paul as in his epistles he often writes about the man being the head of the woman, and that women should not have authority over a man.  Well, it’s not like Paul came up with that idea from thin air.  In the church of Corinth the gender roles had become distorted.  The women were dominating the men and the men were acting sheepish.  Those passages were not to demean women, but rather to invigorate the men, to get back to their “as Christ loved the church” roles as spiritual leaders.  Not to mention that is says no authority, not no teaching (although a man should be going to a man who has been where he currently is on how to be a man, but I digress).  I could go into a whole commentary on Biblical gender definitions, but I’ll save that for another time.  And I will just say these two points.

Women were made to help men do what God gave them (Genesis 2).  For a woman to even know what this is, she has to have her own separate purpose independent of the man, so that the two come together in one hybrid purpose within God’s Order (1 Corinthians 11:3). This is why God gave both the man and the woman dominion (Genesis 1:28).  Women were also created to uplift other women, and be powerful and productive in their own right.  Ragab was a prostitute but still understood who God was and why those scouts were there.  She stood up for God’s Standard and her people were protected.  Mary is probably the most important woman of all time.  Jesus was born through her starting with the Immaculate Conception.  And last but not least, when Jesus had risen and the men had scattered, Jesus used the women to go tighten the men up.

Conclusion: The Bible protects women.   It protects everyone, as God doesn’t play favorites.  The Word is designed to produce powerful and productive people, male and female, playing their role.   And there’s nothing like a godly woman to get and KEEP a man on his toes.

P.S. For those of you who only see women being powerful in the context of helping men, you tell me when God ever did something without someone first submitting to Him and what He was doing, male OR female?  Everything gets done in the context of relationships, so get relationships fortified and glorifying God.

Argument 3: Men wrote the Bible

In a sense, this argument is right.   Men took to the papyrus or what have you and wrote the words.  However, they got the instructions from on High.  Also, for one say that a man could distort the words of the Supreme Being of the universe, multiverse (basically if it exists, God has authority over it), gives man far too much credit. 

We all know the 2 Timothy 3:16-17 argument about Scripture being sacred for teaching, reproof, and etc. right?  Well, there’s another verse like it that more directly touches on my point.

¹⁶ For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. ¹⁷ He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

¹⁹ We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. ²⁰ Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. ²¹ For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:16-21)

That is the divine inspiration argument.  But it could be (and has been) argued that this was indeed cleverly devised and placed in Scripture.  But let’s put this in perspective.  To say that these things are not true give one of 3 arguments, all of which I will debunk or prove asinine to even bring up.  That (1) God does not have the authority He speaks of, (2) God is not real at all, or (3) God cannot be defined because a book didn’t fall from the sky..

Let’s tackle (1).  I'd like to think I already have.  Everything written in Scripture, the types of phenomena that occur, both positive and sinful, have happened, keep happening and will happen.  Something has to be causing all of that right?  Well, it’s someone.  The Father in Heaven in His Comprehensive Will is sending this world to a place of destruction, but has provided a way out through His Son Jesus Christ.  If you don’t know about Him, you should go see Him.  Soon.

And (2).  God isn’t real.   I don’t think anyone in this camp should be reading this.  But in case you are, why must a being that in your mind and according to your worldview does not exist to you be discredited and debunked?  Simple.

³ For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. ⁴ They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

Yep.  Calling you out.  Why else would you want to disprove a being who embodies Orderly Love?  A being who seeks to protect and empower against things that hurt us?  One with every bit of knowledge there is to know.  And every bit of power and authority there is to have.  One that if you have Him, you can’t lose? Because your standard of love, prosperity, and victory are different from His most likely.  Open your mind, and come see about His Son.

With the way the world is, if God’s not real...grab an M-80 and start the revolution.  Because humanity surely isn’t going to fix the crap in this world.  Open your mind.

And before you call me a Bible thumper, everybody has sin (Romans 3:23).   The difference between those in the world and those in Christ is that we have a gold standard by which we can recognize and overcome our iniquity. And we desire it through motive, word, and deed.

And (3) God cannot be defined.  Well, the Bible defines Him.  How can you have a God at all who is not defined?  One who is dynamic and can change (looking at some of those other faiths).  Who would want a supreme being who had opinions and not facts?  That’s just no good.  But how can you have boundaries without a definition?  How can you have order without boundaries?  Must we all just fly by the seat of our pants and just do whatever’s clever?  Yeah, that’s worked so well for humanity leading up to now. I personally would prefer not to have a God-free world inundated with chaos.

Conclusion:  God is God, and has dominion over all.  Your argument is invalid.

I just want to wrap this up by saying this.  Knowing the Bible never got anyone into Heaven by itself.  There is no substitution for the saving grace of Jesus Christ (John 3:16), and the sealing of His Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14).  And once you get the “Yay I’m not going to Hell!” part out of the way, then you can move on to gaining a deeper knowledge of God through both the reading of Scripture and direct contact with him through prayer and supplication (Philippians 4:6-7).  And pray in the context of the Lord’s Prayer, in that we submit to what God wants for our world as opposed to a whole bunch of things we want.  Remember, God only honors what He does, but His comprehensive Honor upon our lives will make you wonder why you wanted ANYthing else. 

That’s my spin in on it.  Thanks for reading!