The problems of marriage
Principle A
1. Marital problems are symptoms but
the disease is human failure in life. Marital problems are never the disease.
2. Most questions about marriage are
personal and expressions of the symptom, therefore not the real problem.
3. In other words, marriages fail
because people are failures as human beings. It is not the failure of marriage,
it is the failure of people.
4. Marriage is not designed for
happiness; God ordained marriage for virtue. (Happy people in marriage have a
happy marriage; unhappy people in marriage have an unhappy marriage)
5. Virtue is designed for happiness,
therefore virtue is the source of happiness, not marriage. People who marry to
find happiness never find it in marriage, they merely complicate their lives.
Marriage is not a panacea or a solution to anything, marriage is for people who
have found their solutions.
6. Since virtue on the part of both
partners is necessary for a successful marriage it becomes necessary to divine
virtue as the Christian doctrine which must be applied to every facet of life,
including marriage. For believers the answer is not in the passages on
marriage, the answer is in the system — virtue.
Principle B
1. Most people try to solve marital
problems by changing their partners.
2. You cannot change the other
person in marriage, you can only change yourself. There is where marriage has
complicated most lives.
3. Unless you recognise this
principle there is no hope for you in marriage.
4. Marital counseling is a waste of
time. All counseling does is to give an individual attention, stimulate his
arrogance, and try to justify his position rather than taking an objective look
at himself.
5. People do not need personal
attention, they need Bible doctrine which they must learn to apply for
themselves. To the extent that someone is trying to help them they are helping
them from their personality and they are not really changing that person.
6. To put it another way, you can’t
go through marriage on crutches. When you run around and seek advice that is
exactly what you are doing.
7. Most people approach marital
problems from the standpoint of subjectivity. They want to be justified in
their own actions, making it one of the most arrogant functions in life; or
they want to change their mate, making it one of the most unstable functions in
life; or they want to trade in their mate on a new model, or turn their mate
into a slave. The trouble with marriage is that there are two souls involved
and two sets of volition, and one person should never be depersonalised in
marriage.
8. It never occurs to people that no
solution will be permanent because they are failures as people. People fail in
marriage because they fail in life, and people who are failures in life and get
married will obviously fail in marriage. Most people that have marital problems
are losers and the reason is because they have never stabilised their own life
with virtue, honour, and integrity so that they can meet their own problems in
privacy and not make their marriage public domain.
Principle C
1. You cannot change the other
person in marriage, you can only change yourself © by good decisions instead of
bad, obviously.
2. For believers this means
spiritual growth and there is no spiritual growth without learning doctrine and
applying it. The real decision to solve your problems is your daily attitude
toward doctrine. And how high up in your scale of values is doctrine? For some
it isn’t very high up and so they are not only going to have marital
problems,
they are going to have problems in any category of life you wish to name.
3. The problems of marriage are not
simply malfunction between husband and wife in their relationship but in their
failure to comprehend and apply two doctrines: humility and virtue.
4. Most marriages are a failure for
the following reasons: a. Bad decisions in the selection of a mate; b.
Inability to handle personal problems before, during, and after marriage, and
therefore no ability to deal with the problems of one’s mate; c. The biggest
problem of all is failure to learn and apply doctrine; d. People who neglect
Bible doctrine and are unstable in their church attendance are also guilty of
taking bad advice from friends, counselors, psychologists, ministers, or anyone
else who will listen to them; e. Marriages also fail because parents take out
their frustrations on their children. They may be abusive to their children
when they are little and then try to get them on their side when they get
older; f. Infidelity on the part of either party only complicates; g. Worst of
all: No personal sense of responsibility on the part of one or more mate in the
marriage; h. The trouble with marriage is people: arrogant people, subjective
people, people without humility or virtue. Only virtue and humility can solve
the problems, and that is by application, and therefore produce the ideal
marriage: perpetual compatibility. All solutions to marital problems obviously
must be related to doctrine but it must be related to doctrine in the privacy
of the soul, not in public counseling.
1. Obviously you are going to have
problems if you get married for the wrong reason.
2. Generally people get married for
three reasons that are wrong: sex, security, status.
3. Often these reasons are disguised
by the allegation of love.
4. Better to marry for compatibility
than love because personal love has no virtue, but even compatibility will not
work in the long run — but it has a better chance. What most people call love
isn’t love at all, it is something else.
5. What is the problem? Whether it
is marriage or something else people are people and never stop being people.
There lies the rub. If people were perfect it would be different but people are
not perfect and people never will be perfect. And people being people are going
to get married, and they are going to foul it all up unless they have two
things in life which will be mentioned later. Marriage was not designed for
perfect persons; God invented marriage for imperfect persons, for sinful
persons, for people living in spiritual death and functioning under the
doctrine of total depravity. Marriage was invented for people under the
principle of the total depravity of man.
6. Therefore a brilliant conclusion:
The only thing wrong with marriage is people! There is nothing wrong with
marriage in principle. We have to be very careful: What is wrong with marriage
is not the other person, it is you, and that is the only place that objectivity
can be established in marital problems. You never assume that the wrong is with
the other person, although it may be. Objectivity demands that you look at you,
not at the other partner in marriage.
7. Only you can learn and apply
doctrine and make decisions to solve the problems of marriage.
In providing answers you can always
pick up an epigram or two from the various doctrines regarding marriage.
For
example:
a. No woman can be
successful in marriage unless she has learned to entertain herself. That is an
application of the doctrine of marriage. If a lady cannot stand to be alone for
a period of time and cannot learn to entertain herself she will never be successful
in marriage, she will be a millstone around the man’s neck.
b. No man can be a
successful lover of a woman and at the same time be a successful lover of
himself. In other words, arrogance destroys marriage.
c. No man can exercise
his authority as a husband without honour, integrity, and virtue. No woman can
respond to her husband’s authority without humility, integrity, and virtue.
d. Compatibility in
marriage must relate to permanent things so that it will be compatibility and
not “combatability.” Compatibility in marriage, beauty, health, attractiveness
and a pleasing personality, are not necessarily permanent. The only permanent
thing we have in this life is truth or doctrine. God is permanent, so the
marriage must somehow be related to God. Doctrine is permanent, so the marriage
must somehow be related to doctrine. The greatest of marriages will founder
when the people involved are in the cosmic system. Arrogance, subjectivity and
self-centredness are destructive to all forms of living, including marriage.
In dealing with the subject of
marriage it is always better to begin with an epigram. In this way everyone can
get something from the message. Our epigram at this moment deals with our
subject of marriage and very simply put, it is this: A woman may want to punch
a meal ticket but she doesn’t want the meal ticket to punch her!
Compatibility
1. Compatibility is the coalescence
of thought and morays culminating in a rapport that defies destruction.
2. Compatibility opens vast areas to
stimulate discussion and conversation between two people whereby both learn
from the personality and thought content of the other, and therefore are more
attractive to each other even though they do not always agree. A successful
marriage is a perpetual conversation, not one of agreement.
3. Agreement is not necessarily
compatibility for agreement is often nothing more than slavery at worst and
flattery at best. Hence, compatibility is that echelon totally above and
superior to agreement. Agreement or love is not the secret of marriage, compatibility
is.
4. Compatibility develops its own
system and standard of respect. Compatibility respects the other person
regardless of whether they agree or not. Therefore compatibility becomes a
system of thought, a system of admiration and eventually a system of love, for
true love has to be a system.
5. Compatibility is the essence of
implementation. What one lacks the other has; the one supplies for the other
what the other supplies for the one — but always voluntarily. Marriage is the
amalgamation of two volitions into a team, into a system, and neither must lose
volition.
6. Like everything else in life
volition is the key to love. Neither love nor compatibility can be coerced, it
must be subscribed from free will. In compatibility, then, you retain all that
belongs to your person without losing or compromising any standard or priority
of honour and integrity. Compatibility is coalescence without compromise. If
people married on the basis of friendship rather than other motivation their
marriage would have
a
better chance of succeeding, because generally the first manifestation of
compatibility is friendship, not
romance.
In the first marriage in history we
have two perfect people as they came from the hand of God. The first marriage
was obviously, then, the greatest marriage in history but the greatest marriage
in history was a flop and did not hinder the original sin. It had all the
ingredients of going in the right direction because both the man and the woman
still had their free will and neither lost their free will in the relationship.
But when all of the ingredients that are considered wonderful in marriage, and
are, they both failed, so something was wrong with the marriage. The
“something” was that you can never, never put on marriage more than it was
designed for, and that is what they did. You can’t make marriage the source of
happiness. If the man and the woman had been satisfied and happy in the first
marriage there would have been no original sin. You have to remember that
marriage preceded sin. Marriage does not prevent sin. What marriage does is
foster a new brand of sin, much more subtle, much more arrogant:
self-righteousness. Marriage does not prevent sin, it leads to more subtle
forms of sinfulness, human good, and evil. The failure of marriage can be
traced to the beginning of the human race. What happened to the man and the
woman? Adam was weak and the woman was arrogant. With his weakness plus her
arrogance we have the doctrine of the original sin. Failure in marriage
destroyed perfect environment in the garden and things haven’t changed. Married
often people destroy good environment even today.
When people try to solve their
problems by marriage they inevitably create greater problems, problems which
get way beyond their control. Successful marriage is the romance between a man
and a woman who know how to solve their problems through perception and
application of doctrine inside the divine dynasphere. In other words,
successful marriage is impossible unless both partners have honour, integrity,
and virtue from momentum in the divine dynasphere. The key ingredients to a
successful marriage include humility and impersonal love. Without humility and
impersonal love no marriage can be successful no matter how great the romance
or what happened before.
Ephesians 5:20ff — “Always be
thankful.” That means humility and virtue. People who have the ability to be
thankful and grateful have two things going for them from the system of
momentum and function in the divine dynasphere. One of them is thanksgiving;
“for all things.” That requires humility and virtue; “in the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ, even to God the Father; respect each other.” Respecting others is
the function of gate six of the divine dynasphere, functional virtue of
impersonal love toward all which absolutely necessary to perpetually love in
marriage. You cannot perpetuate love in marriage, you don’t have that ability.
No one has the ability apart from integrity and virtue. “Respect each other
through occupation with Christ [literally, through respect for Christ, gate
five].” Note the corrected translation of verse 21. Gate five, directed toward
God; gate six, directed toward man, and in this case toward the opposite number
in marriage: respect each other, gate six, through occupation with Christ.
Marriage, to be successful, must be in the framework of the system: integrity
before
function.
Verse 22 — “You wives, to your own
husbands give respect.” We have a problem here because this is usually
translated “submit.” This is where we develop a lot of arrogant people in
marriage. A person wants to control everything. The word is u(potassw which does have the connotation of authority but it
has the connotation of not authority being demanded but of respect which is the
basic ingredient of love. It has the connotation of voluntary recognition of
authority, not enforced. Voluntary recognition of authority is respect but
authority enforced is fear. Love cannot function under fear. So you have to
have your training outside of marriage for marriage, you have to come into
marriage with genuine humility, not enforced. When it says, “You wives, to your
own husbands give respect, as to the Lord” that is talking about functional
virtue. Ladies who don’t go into marriage with functional virtue are in
trouble, not that it can’t be resolved but it takes doctrine today and
tomorrow, not talking to some woman or some half-baked preacher who doesn’t
know doctrine, or to some psychologist or counselor. They are not going to do
you any good. Only you with a positive attitude toward doctrine can do yourself
any good. If you love the Lord [motivating virtue] you will make it in
marriage. Notice it starts with the woman. The key to the success of any
marriage is first of all virtue in the woman. That means that a woman can put
up with a lot more than a man can. The reason is that men are much more sensitive
than women. A man can be hypersensitive in an instant and he can no longer can
perform sex. Men are much more sensitive than women and we start out by
addressing the passage to the women because the woman is the key. If the woman
has virtue the marriage will succeed. A man can often have virtue and the woman
not have it and the marriage fails. The man walks out of the marriage with his
virtue intact, and that is about all. He loses everything else. Again, virtue
is developed through perception and application of doctrine.
Verses 21 and 22 have a pattern.
First of all we start out in verse 21 with the word “respect” — “Respect each
other.” That is functional virtue, gate six of the divine dynasphere.
Occupation with Christ is motivational virtue. So we have gate five and gate
six of the divine dynasphere. In verse 22 — “You wives,” the vocative plural is
addressed to the ladies first; “to your own husbands give respect, as to the
Lord.” Respect [gate six] to your husbands. That is all the advice the ladies
need, they must give him something — respect. In other words, your soul comes
first; “as to the Lord,” which takes you back to motivational virtue, so the
pattern is the same. That is the secret to marriage. The woman, again, is
mentioned first because she is the key.
Verse 23 — the man is presented
first of all in a strange light. Some of the worst slobs who ever lived are
still the head of the house. Any slob that gets married is still a slob, and he
is now the slob head of the house. That means the woman has a very serious
problem for the husband is the head of the wife. “For the husband is the head
of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” To reject the authority
of the husband as the head of the house is to reject the authority of Christ as
the head of the Church. It is put this way to show the ladies that when they
reject the authority of their husband they are rejecting the authority of
Christ in the life.
“and he is the saviour of the body”
— is not referring to any man, it is referring to the humanity of Christ as the
saviour of the body of Christ. And it is referring to a principle which comes
up later on: in order to be the saviour of the body of Christ, Jesus Christ had
to have impersonal love. He couldn’t have made it without impersonal love.
Jesus Christ went to the cross and there He received the imputation of all of
our sins and was judged for them © for all the slobs who ever lived and all the
nice people who ever lived. He was judged for all, and he was judged for all
because He had impersonal love. Christ had great integrity, great virtue, and
therefore in His love for all [virtue and integrity] he went to the cross for
everyone, the worst person who ever lived as well as the best. That is the
challenge. The man, therefore, must enter marriage with virtue, with impersonal
love. Impersonal love carries romance; impersonal love carries marriage.
Verse 24 — “But as the church is
subordinate unto the authority of Christ, so also wives to their husbands in
everything.” The trouble with the word subordinate is that it means this is a
voluntary thing. You enter into a voluntary system. Note that while authority
is established in the case of Christ over the Church or the husband over the
wife respect for that authority demands two things. The authority is
established. Now that it is established it does not work. Authority never works
unless the person under the authority has respect, and respect demands [in this
case, the wife] that you have virtue, because she is going to discover that the
man isn’t all that he appeared to be in the courtship. The authority of Christ
exists and probably every Christian would say they recognise the authority of
Christ. But do they? Do they go to Bible class every night? Do they live in the
divine dynasphere? Do they rebound when necessary? It is one thing to say they
recognise the authority of Christ, it is something else to actually respect
that authority. And your respect for the authority of Christ as a believer is
based upon your daily attitude toward doctrine. So the authority of Christ
exists but not all believers accept His authority otherwise believers would get
out of the cosmic system instead of living there. By the same token the
authority of the husband exists but cannot be respected unless the wife
possesses virtue. Who are the people who really respect the authority of
Christ? Believers who have advanced to gate five. They have motivating virtue
for life and they do respect the authority of Christ. So you have to advance to
gate five or although Christ has the authority you do not respect it. Gate six,
the same thing. Motivating virtue leads to functional virtue, and functional
virtue is the producer of impersonal love which saves marriages.
Let’s put it this way. Christ has
authority, the authority exists; the husband has authority over the wife, the
authority exists, but there must be respect and that is positive volition. That
positive volition requires the development of virtue. There must be respect for
the husband on the part of the wife and that positive volition requires virtue.
Note that the authority is there but it doesn’t mean a thing unless it is
respected authority. It is no good if no one respects it. A wife doesn’t
respect the authority of her husband because she has no virtue, and the
believer doesn’t respect the authority of the Lord because he has no virtue. So
the authority of the husband exists but cannot be respected unless the wife
possesses motivating and functional virtue. All the counseling in the world
cannot produce this, only daily decisions for doctrine inside the divine
dynasphere. Marriage is not designed for happiness, marriage is designed for
virtue and virtue will then bring happiness.
The problem with marriage is still
people. Marriages fail because people are losers. They were losers before they
entered the marriage, therefore they continue to be losers in the marriage
unless they have virtue. Virtue not only produces happiness but a successful
marriage. Therefore the key is virtue and the key to getting virtue is
doctrine. Only humility and virtue, then, can solve the problems of marriage,
not some counselor, not someone giving personal attention, not some crutch in
the life. Humility and virtue is what produces perpetual compatibility.
The fallacy of counseling is to face
the problems of marriage from your own personality and produce solutions which
fit your own personality. No two people have the same personality and therefore
to counsel from the framework of one’s personality is like trying to solve
problems for others by changing their personality to comply with yours or
conform to yours. Solution by personality change ignores and rejects Bible
doctrine. Counseling means one on one; it destroys privacy. The counselor
becomes at best a crutch. They are depending on what the counselor says and
what the counselor thinks and they are not learning doctrine and applying it,
and they are not developing virtue and no one can depend on outside virtue to
make their marriage go. Solution by personality change ignores or rejects Bible
doctrine and the issue is not personality but what is true. People do not need
to come to you and find a change for their personality. If you cannot solve
your problems through your own personality which is familiar to you you cannot
solve your problems through someone else’s personality which is not familiar to
you, and counselors inevitably bring their own personality into it instead of
doctrine. Counseling in marriage approaches solutions through the personality
of the counselor, not the principles of doctrine and their application. That is
the problem.
If you are to solve your marital
problems and all other problems of human relationship you must not only learn
that you must apply the doctrines of humility and virtue, you must use them in
the framework of your own personality and not that of some sincere and
well-intentioned counselor. A lot of people can give you advice but the advice
always comes from their personality, and their advice comes from the
environment of their personality, not from the doctrine of the Word of God
though they may mention doctrine. Counseling is the one thing in the world that
destroys any possibility of people really getting with doctrine and solving
their own problems through virtue.
The divine institution of marriage
can only work through a system [the system] and the system demands a change in
you, not in your opposite number. That change must be virtue. Too often
solution is simply one person dominating another in marriage so that the
slave-master situation exists. But that is not marriage and, furthermore,
people with marital problems always feel sorry for themselves and want
sympathy. That is arrogance, and they meet the arrogance of the counselor who
is glad to give them sympathy, and together they set up an arrogance rhythm
that wipes out virtue and the application of doctrine. Too much of counseling
is simply sympathy and they don’t need sympathy, they need truth, doctrine, and
they need to apply it for
themselves.
Verse 25 — “You husbands.” Here is a
strange command. The wife is not commanded to do this, she is commanded to
respect. That is interesting. Why? No organisation in life works where people
love the authority. All organisations have authority. You do not have to love
the authority, respect is the issue. It takes virtue to have respect for
authority, to have love takes nothing except being a member of the human race.
Any nitwit can fall in love — “keep loving your wives.” This is a switch. Why
is the husband loving the wife? Because he is the authority, he is in charge.
In the cavalry after you dismount you water and feed and groom your horse
before you go to the mess hall and feed yourself. So we are not just talking
about love like “I fall in love with you,” we are talking about virtue again.
We are talking about the one who has authority exercising his responsibility.
Two “Rs” come out of this. The woman
is commanded to respect the husband because he is the authority, and since he
is the authority he must be responsible for the woman. So there are the two “Rs”
of marriage: respect and responsibility.
There is a vast difference between a
man and a woman, and in marriage the first vast difference is that the man is
the authority. Does that mean that he runs around and shouts orders? No. In
something as wonderful as marriage, a tender relationship between two people,
he must have a sense of responsibility. That sense of responsibility can only
exist with virtue. The woman must respect the man and that can only come from
virtue. So what we are talking about is life. What is life without virtue? It
is unhappiness, misery, the ups and downs, seeking happiness and never finding
it. What you have to do is to seek virtue. So this is a challenge to virtue, a
challenge to impersonal love, a challenge to take the responsibility for what
is now your wife.
Christ loved the Church on the basis
of virtue. That is what is coming up: “You husbands keep loving your wives just
as Christ loved the Church, and gave himself for her.” How did Christ love the
Church? Personally? He did not. He loved the Church impersonally — virtue love.
He loved the Father personally — gate five of the prototype divine dynasphere;
He loved the entire human race, including all who would believe in Christ in
the Church, from impersonal love. So we have motivating virtue and functional
virtue. So this isn’t “husbands love your wives” personally. Again, that takes
no virtue
Another epigram: No marriage can be
successful where the husband is abusive and the wife is abrasive.
In Ephesians 5:25 we have “You
husbands, keep loving your wives.” That is present linear aktionsart and it is
also the imperative mood. Therefore it is quite a command because there is no
way, humanly speaking, either in romance or friendship that one can maintain
the same constant love day by day because there are too many factors related to
change. In other words, human love is like human beings — very unstable. But
virtue love is very stable and that is the command here — “keep loving your
wives, just as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for her”. We have
noted the fact that Christ loved the Church with impersonal love, there was no
personal love involved. He had personal love for God the Father, that was His
motivation; He had impersonal love for the Church and that is why He gave His
life for the Church. Christ loved the Church on the basis of virtue love
[impersonal love for all] and when Christ was on the cross bearing our sins it
was not human love, it was virtue love, impersonal love for all. The key to
marriage is the same thing: virtue love, not human love.
Then we have the analogy continuing
in verses 26 and 27: “that he [Christ] might set her apart [sanctify her],
having purified her by the washing [rebound technique].” Washing refers to the
fact that on the cross all of our sins were judged, including our future sins.
Therefore, when we commit a sin we cite or name or confess that sin, and in
effect what we are doing is going back to the courtroom where it was judged.
That sin was judged on the cross by God the Father and that is why He is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleans us from all unrighteousness,
and that is what is means when it says “having purified by the washing “Of the
water” refers to the pertinent doctrines — “in the word,” the function of GAP at gate four of the divine dynasphere. Everything in life demands that
perception of doctrine also includes application of doctrine. We learn
doctrines to apply them — “that he might present to himself a glorious church,
not having stain, or wrinkle [that’s future], or any such category of things
[related to the cosmic system]; but that she [the Church] should be holy
[ultimate sanctification] and blameless [the Church at the marriage supper of
the Lamb, second advent].”
Verse 28 — “So also husbands ought
to be loving their own wives as their own bodies.” Most normal people do follow
certain principles related to health and hygiene. Most people watch to some
extent what they eat. That is what is meant here by loving the body and the
point is that each person in life has the responsibility of taking care of
themselves. We are responsible for taking care of the body that God has given
us. That is responsibility. We also have a responsibility to wives in that
sense.
“He who loves his own wife takes
care of himself.” A person who takes care of himself and has a sense of
responsibility in one field is going to have a sense of responsibility in
another field. Sense of responsibility is the major part of love on the part of
the husband. In other words, to be loving one’s wife as one’s body is a
reference to the function of impersonal love towards one’s mate as the solution
to the problems of marriage.
Verse 29 — “No one ever yet hated
his own flesh.” Now what does it take to follow out the analogy? If you have
ever had a hangover you know exactly what this means. Anyone who has had a
hangover has taken a vow to lay off the stuff so that they won’t go through
that again. That is because they have some respect for their body. This is
basically what it means. If you don’t develop a sense of responsibility in one
way you are going to hurt in another way — “but he nourishes and provides care
for it, just as Christ also does for the church” — logistical
grace.
Our Lord’s sense of responsibility is manifest in His logistical support of
each one of us.
Verse 31 — “Analogous to this
principle a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall be intimately
united with his wife.” This goes back to the marriage of the first couple, Adam
and the woman. It goes back to the garden of Eden and the first marriage which
occurred and existed in perfect environment for an indefinite period of time.
The fact that the first marriage in perfect environment was a flop causes all
kinds of bells to go off in our head because if under perfect environment
marriage fails obviously marriage will fail under anything less than perfect
environment, “and they two shall continue being one flesh.”
Verse 32 — “This mystery doctrine is
great: I am communicating with reference to Christ and his church.” So there
are a tremendous number of analogies here with reference to Christ and the
Church.
Verse 33 — “Furthermore let each one
of you be loving his wife [in the sense of responsibility, virtue] as himself”.
Since marriage is a divine
institution for believer and unbeliever it must be explained in a way that the
unbeliever can understand sense of responsibility. Motivational virtue for the
believer is personal love for God but motivational love for the unbeliever is
the virtue, the integrity developed from a personal sense of
responsibility
or what we might call self-respect. An unbeliever without self-respect is not
going to make a good husband. Self-respect is personal love for self. Virtue
love for one’s wife must be motivated honourably as a principle.
“and the wife that she respect her
husband.” We go right back to what love means in this passage and what
basically love in marriage is. Love in marriage is virtue love. Marriage is
like every function in life, it is virtue dependent for its success. Human
love, romance, and friendship simply will not carry a marriage. For marriage to
be successful there must be virtue at its foundation, and that virtue is
humility. The wife expresses virtue through respect for the husband’s
authority, therefore true love; the husband expresses virtue through the
function of responsibility through the use of his authority and, therefore,
true love.
Colossians 3:18,19 — the shorter
version of this. “Wives, keep respecting your husbands,” that is the love
involved here, “as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives,” that
means he has the authority, and that love is virtue love, gate six love,
functional virtue: impersonal love which alone can solve marital problems.
The fallacy of counseling
The fallacy of counseling is to face
the problems of marriage from your own (the counselor’s) personality and to
produce solutions which fit your personality. But they do not fit the
personality of the person you are counseling. No two people have the same
personality and, therefore, to counsel from the framework of your own
personality is trying to solve problems for others through personality change;
and you never solve problems through change of personality, you solve problems
through the acquisition of virtue love in the divine dynasphere. Solution by
personality change ignores, rejects, Bible doctrine and/or truth. The issue is
not personality, the issue is truth. If you cannot solve your marital problems
through your own personality which is familiar to you you cannot solve your
problems through someone else’s personality which is unfamiliar. Counseling in
marriage approaches solution through the personality of the counselor, not the
principles of doctrine and their application.
If you are to resolve your marital
problems and all other problems in human relationships you must not only learn
but you must apply, not someone else. The only doctrine that is going to work
is when you apply it for you, and you have to apply it to you in the framework
of not only your personality but in the framework of your marriage. There are a
lot of sincere, well-intentioned counselors. That is the trouble. First of all
they’re sincere and secondly they’re well-intentioned, and neither one is going
to help you. You need doctrine; you need truth, and you need to use it for
yourself. Their advice comes from the environment of their personality, not
from the doctrine of the Word of God. Though they may mention doctrine and they
will communicate doctrine, usually they will distort it. Unless they are a
pastor-teacher who has studied and knows the issue they are going to get into
an ego trip because people with problems are full of arrogant self-pity, they
want attention, and a counselor is the answer to the maiden’s prayer.
Who are these people that can
straighten out your marriage? Some arrogant busybody woman who hasn’t got
anything else to do? Some woman who seeks to superimpose her personality
legalism on you? Some psychologist who is full of human viewpoint? Some psychiatrist
who can always help you with your marriage by advising you to go out and have
an affair? Some half-baked preacher who is full of “thee’s” and “thou’s” and
“Praise God” and “Let us pray” — and after you have prayed you are no better
off than you were before because you don’t know any solutions?
The divine institution of marriage
can only work through the system and the system demands that you deal with you
and change you through doctrine, not your opposite number. Too often solution
is simply one person dominating another in marriage. The slave-master
relationship is not the answer. Furthermore, people with marital problems want
sympathy, again, and therefore they distort and deceive, and that makes their
opposite number look like the villain. Remember, you cannot change your
opposite number in marriage.
People are not better in marriage
than they are in any other facet of their lives. A loser in life is a loser in
marriage. There is hope for losers but it is a spiritual solution . People who
are winners in life are winners in marriage and you cannot improve your
marriage above your classification as a person because you don’t improve
marriages, you improve yourself. Only humility and integrity can guarantee a
good marriage or any successful relationship in marriage.
A few principles from 1 Corinthians
7.
Verse 2 — “But because of immorality
[that is, because there is so much immorality in life] each man should have his
own wife, and each wife her own husband” — that eliminates the concept of the
multiplicity of wives.
Verse 3 — “The husband should fulfill
his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to the husband” — the basic
marital duty is virtue, impersonal love toward each other. The key to the
husband’s is responsibility because he has authority; the key to the wife’s is
respect, the expression of virtue love.
Verse 4 — “The wife does not have
authority over her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband
does not have authority over his own body, but the wife.” Here is a case of
where there is a dual authority system. The reason for this is because the man
and the woman are entirely different, and in their amalgamation as expressed,
for example, in sex, or in a good conversation, or whatever expression you want
to make it, each has something to give the other and each, therefore, has
something by which he can give and respond and exalt in that function.
Therefore, this note which is given in 1 Corinthians chapter 7.
Verse 5 points out that marriage is
and can be a distraction to one’s relationship with the Lord which guarantees
the failure of marriage. Personal love for God as the motivating virtue must
come first. The relationship between a man and a woman in sex, as mentioned in
verse 4, “the wife does not have authority over her body.” The woman’s body was
not made for the woman to fondle, it was made for the man to fondle; and the
man’s body was not made for the man to fondle, it was made for the woman to
fondle. The wife does not have authority over her own body, it was not made for
her to stimulate it, to fondle it; it was made for her husband to do so, and
vice versa. The husband does not have authority over his body but the wife.
Nearly every form of sexual distortion in life comes from the fact that people
ignore this principle.
“Stop depriving one another, except
by mutual consent for a time that you may devote yourselves to prayer, then be
together again lest Satan tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” In
other words. don’t let the marriage relationship distract you from doctrine.
Take time off for doctrine, for spiritual function like prayer.
There is a principle here: For
marriage to be successful each member of the marriage must have privacy in
certain areas of life that are sensitive — like prayer. Marriage was not
designed to destroy privacy. Intimacy does not imply loss of privacy. Not
everyone can have a two bathroom house but you can have a door on the bathroom!
In other words, marriage was not designed for barracks living. Privacy! And,
killing two birds with one stone, take time off for privacy in your spiritual
life. It also means something else. When it comes to spiritual life, two
members of a family are individuals. They have a right to follow their own volition
in spiritual things. No one has the right, even in marriage, to demand that you
go to some specific church or not.
Verses 10, 11 — “But to the married
I give this command, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not divorce her
husband [corrected translation] (but if she does divorce, let her remain
unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), furthermore the husband must
not divorce his wife.” Note the general rule.
Verse 12 — what about marriage
between a believer and an unbeliever? … if any believer has a wife who is an
unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her.”
Verse 13 — And [conversely] a woman
who has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to live with her, she must not
divorce him.
Divorce belongs to the first
category of Bible doctrine, the laws of divine establishment. It is a legal
issue as well as a spiritual issue, and because it is there are certain unusual
laws related to it. There are two categories of divorce: divorce which
dissolves the marriage and gives the right of remarriage; divorce which
separates husband and wife but does not give the right of remarriage.
Epigram: If a person is a loser in life he is
a loser in marriage
An ode to a loser.
Personal love in the human race
Always begins, then turns out base
Minus virtue it cannot stand
Loss of control, it’s out of
hand.
Lover becomes victim to his own
decision
Life without virtue has no precision
The arrogant cannot give it; the
loser cannot give it
Frustrated love becomes an obsession
The lover fails and loses possession
You cannot hold a husband or wife
For without virtue all is strife
So think again before you leap
Without virtue life is cheap
And life becomes a frustration
Leaving you as only an illustration.
Personal love in the human race is a
trap. The arrogant person cannot give personal love because he lacks virtue to
sustain it. In all the passages in the Bible there is no reference to personal
love, it is always virtue love. This doesn’t imply that there is no personal
love in a lot of marriages but it simply says that personal love will not carry
it. It takes virtue love to carry a marriage. Also, none of the passages
implied that marriage is a state of happiness. Marriage is not a state of
happiness, only virtue is a state of happiness and, of course, if you bring
virtue into the marriage then you are going to bring happiness with it. So you
bring your happiness with you, you don’t have it because of marriage. The
passionate and emotional type of person has a personal love of a sort. It is an
obsession which first causes him to lose control of his life and then it
destroys him.
The problem of interracial marriages
There is no passage in the Word of
God on the subject as such. Always it is related to something else, like the
Jews versus the Samaritans or the Jews versus the Gentiles. The Bible is silent
on the subject of interracial marriage, and where the Bible is silent we are
silent. Racial marriage, then, becomes a matter of personal judgement and common
sense versus lack of common sense. One must apply Biblical principles which
would be applicable to any other marriage. Where the Bible is silent on one
subject Biblical principles from other areas can be brought in and applied to
the situation.
The subject of divorce
There are considerations which are
very important when approaching the subject of divorce, Biblically or socially
or any other way.
a. In must be remembered that
marriage is a divine institution belonging to category #1 truth, which is
establishment. Marriage is for both believers and unbelievers, it is not a
Christian institution.
b. The laws of marriage and divorce
apply to both believer and unbeliever.
c. Definition: Divorce is the legal
dissolving of marriage. That is a Biblical definition. There are two categories
of divorce. First, divorce which dissolves the marriage and gives each mate the
right of remarriage — this is category #1. Secondly, there is divorce which
dissolves the marriage legally but does not provide any right for remarriage
Biblically — this is category #2.
d. Category #1 divorce has an
analogy in the death of one partner in the marriage. Category #1 divorce, then,
is like the death of one partner in the marriage. Your ex-mate may still be
alive but to you that person is dead for physical death also is said to
dissolve the marriage. So category #1 divorce is like the death of one partner
in marriage which gives the surviving mate the right of remarriage. This is
taken from Romans 7:1-4 and 1 Corinthians 7:39.
e. Before we can begin an objective
discussion of divorce two objective grace principles must be kept in mind at
all times. The first grace principle: Any sin or failure regarding marriage,
divorce, etc. on your part before you became a believer was blotted out at the
moment of salvation. Therefore you are obviously not held accountable for any
sin or failure before salvation. The second grace principle: If you are now
divorced and remarried contrary to Biblical mandate do not try to resolve the
problem. Do nothing. Two wrongs do not make a right. You should carry on with
the Christian life inside the divine dynasphere. Or, as our Lord would say, Go
forth and sin no more.
Deuteronomy 24:1 — “When a man takes
a wife and marries her, and it so happens that she finds no favour in his eyes
[and idiom meaning she does not please him] because he has found some indecency
in her” — indecency is going to be described as adultery and desertion. She
doesn’t please him because , you see, the man is very sensitive. Why would the
man get upset if his wife committed adultery? Because the man is the weaker of
the two in marriage in this regard, in sex. The woman is the strong one in sex.
A woman can give sex and have many problems and it doesn’t make any difference.
A man can have one problem and he can’t perform. Once the woman commits
adultery with someone else then obviously the man’s had it. He is not going to
perform — unless he is a most unusual person, or an animal. She no longer
pleases him because she has been unfaithful.
In business life and in everything
else this reverses. It is only in marriage that the man is the weaker. A man
can’t have sex at any time; a woman could, and can. In business it is the man
who is strong and the woman is the weak sister; and for a lot of reasons: she
cannot be professional, she wants her rights, she becomes hypersensitive in
business. Many a woman in an office situation is a troublemaker. They are not
all that way, of course, but a lot of woman cannot be professional in business
because of their hypersensitivity around men.
Notice that the man found some
indecency in her and indecency will be defined as adultery in Matthew 5 and as
desertion in 1 Corinthians 7:15. What can the man do? He can keep her if he
wants to or he can divorce her. He chooses to divorce her and now we have our
first Biblical principle — “and he writes her a certificate of divorce and
places it in her hand and sends her from his house.” You have to understand
that the first three verses of Deuteronomy 24 are a protasis. The apodosis is
verse 4, so verse 4 is the only issue and that is where we begin to learn
something because only adultery or desertion fulfills category #1 divorce,
which gives the right of remarriage. And, by the way, it gives both of them the
right of remarriage.
Verse 2 — “And she leaves his house
and goes and she becomes another man’s wife.” And, by the way she is not criticised
for that, she has the right to remarry. The context does not censor the
adulterous woman for remarrying. She has the same right of remarriage as the
man who divorced her. Adultery is a sin but her remarriage is not a sin, says
the context. What is important is that once adultery has been used as the basis
for the divorce the marriage is dissolved, and both parties have the right of
remarriage.
Verse 3 — “And if her second husband
hates her and writes her a certificate of divorcement and places it in her
hand, or if her second husband dies” — if the husband dies she has the right of
remarriage — category #1 divorce; if the husband hates her she has no right of
remarriage — category #2 divorce. Hatred might be classified by 20th century
nomenclature as incompatibility. Divorce for incompatibility does not have the
right of remarriage. There is one exception. When a couple are divorced for
incompatibility, brutality, drunkenness, danger to the children, or one mate
has had an affair or gets remarried, the innocent mate now has the right of
remarriage. In other words, if you have a category #2 divorce and the opposite
number goes out and has an affair, then that becomes a category #1 divorce. Or
if the opposite number goes out and gets married that immediately switches it
from category #2 to category #1. Up to that time there is no right of
remarriage. So, again, there is an exception. Divorce for incompatibility does
not give the right of remarriage until one mate goes out and has an
affair
or remarries.
Verse 4 is the apodosis. “Then her
first husband who divorced her is not permitted to marry her again, since she
has been defiled” — she has had sex with someone else and the marriage would
not work. He would begin to think about that sooner or later and that would end
the marriage right then and there. The woman’s sexual relationship with her
second husband has destroyed the authority of her first husband in marriage. It
has created a field of hypersensitivity which can only produce in him
arrogance, jealousy, bitterness, self-pity and, above all, impotence; “for that
[remarrying her first husband after having one in between] is an abomination
before the Lord,” because it destroys the authority of the man in marriage,
which is the beginning of the breakdown in society; “and you shall not bring
sin on the land.” What kind of sin? Social degeneration and spiritual declension;
“which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance,” client nation to God.
Our Lord has a commentary on this
passage: Matthew 5:31, 32 — “And it was said [Deuteronomy 24:1-3], ‘Whoever
divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorcement [the marriage
is dissolved]’; but I say [Jesus now adds something] to you that every one who
divorces his wife, except for the cause of fornication, makes her commit
adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
What do we understand by this
phrase? Most people miss it entirely because they are subjective, they
immediately think of themselves and maybe identify themselves in such a way and
say, “Oh, I am living in adultery.” The real key to this verse is the phrase
“except for the cause of fornication.” That is the thing that your eye must
pick up. Fornication is the only reason for divorce which gives the right of
remarriage. That is category #1 and it is stated as an exception here, not the
general run. The general run would be incompatibility, brutality, drunkenness,
endangering of life, all legal grounds for divorce but they are not legal
grounds for remarriage. And so our Lord says, “I say to you that every one who
divorces his wife makes her commit adultery.” But there is an exception to that
— if the cause of the divorce is fornication then he doesn’t make her commit
adultery.
There are two categories for
divorce. Category #1 divorce has the right of remarriage. Two reasons: adultery
and desertion, or death, which is comparable. Both destroy the marriage so it
no longer exists. Both parties, the innocent and the guilty have the right of
remarriage, except when adultery is deliberately performed just to get out of
the marriage. Category #2 divorce is without the right of remarriage. This
category protects the woman from male brutality, drunkenness, abuse, murder, or
incompatibility. However, if one party of the former marriage violates this
principle and remarries this gives the other mate the right of remarriage. That
switches is to category #1 divorce with the right to remarry. Or, if one party
of the former marriage has an affair this gives the other mate the right of
remarriage.
Remember “except.” The exception is
stated to show a very interesting fact: both parties, the innocent and the
guilty have the right of remarriage in that exception. Divorce is a sign of
scar tissue of the soul, so this passage comes up again, Deuteronomy 24, under
our Lord’s scrutiny under a slightly different situation in Matthew 19:3-9.
Verse 3 — “And the Pharisees came to
him, testing him, and saying, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for
any or every reason?’ ”
Verse 4 — “And he answered and said,
Have you not read [Genesis 1:27; 5:2], that he who created them from the
beginning made them male and female, and said [Deuteronomy 2:24], ‘For this
cause a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife; and
the two of them shall become one flesh?” This is our Lord giving a brief
dissertation on the divine institution of marriage. The divine institution of
marriage demands the ultimate in compatibility, a compatibility which can only
exist between a man and a woman. But compatibility cannot exist without virtue
and virtue love must precede and sustain marital love, the romance between the
man and the woman. If you have already failed in the matter of divorce and
consider that you are now living in adultery by the standards stated, do not
divorce, do not separate, do not use our Lord’s dissertation as an excuse to
get rid of an incompatible mate. Principle: You are still married and you are
still alive.
The solution is found in virtue.
Virtue will resolve the problem for virtue is the antithesis of hardness of
heart. Virtue love will replace the condemnation of our Lord’s words coming up
in this passage. Living in adultery has a solution called virtue and virtue is
developed inside the divine dynasphere.
Verse 6 — “Consequently they are no
more two people, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no
man separate.”
Verse 7 — ‘They [the Pharisees] said
to him, “Then why did Moses command to give her a certificate and divorce her?”
They thought they had trapped Him. They go right back to Deuteronomy 24.
Verse 8 — “He replied to them,
‘Because of your scar tissue of the soul [hardness of heart], Moses permitted
you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.’ ”
Verse 9 — “In fact, I say to you,
whoever divorces his wife, except for fornication, and marries another commits
adultery.”
The exception is what is important
because the exception sets up the whole grace pattern. The exception is
fornication which is simply a synonym for adultery here. Now, one fornicates
and one does not: both the innocent and the guilty have the right to remarry.
Why? because the marriage is dissolved. The one who fornicates has other
problems, sin problems, but the sin problem is not the issue, the dissolving of
the marriage is the issue.
Fornication or adultery legally
dissolves the marriage unless the innocent mate desires from his own free will
to continue the marriage. They don’t have to get a divorce for adultery, it
just takes virtue to overcome the problem. That is the answer to all the
problems — virtue love. Fornication or adultery as the basis for divorce gives
the right of remarriage. Desertion also gives the right of remarriage, this is
all category #1 divorce. Category #2 divorce does not have the right of
remarriage, only the dissolving of the previous marriage. When anyone remarries
after a category #2 divorce he is said to be in a state of adultery. If for any
reason you think that you are in a state of adultery do not make a bad decision
from a position of weakness. Stay together with your mate for you are one with
that person.
If you ask how you can overcome this stigma of living in adultery the
answer is to reside, function, and continue your momentum inside the divine
dynasphere. That’s it. Adultery is a sin; adultery as a sin is forgiven. First,
it was a sin; it was judged on the cross. Secondly, it is a sin confessed and
forgiven so it no longer becomes an issue. The only issue is: After the smoke
clears you are still remarried. Are you still a loser or not? If you are a
loser you are never going to make it. There is no such thing as a perfect
marriage, that blew up in the garden of Eden. No marriage or any interaction in
life is going to work if you are a loser. The only way to change that is to be
a winner, and that is the road to virtue: Bible class tonight, tomorrow and so on.
Reside, function, and continue your momentum inside the divine dynasphere.
Virtue, honour, and integrity will be your deliverance and will convert your
marriage into the glorification of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Perhaps you can just begin to
understand why counseling is no good.. You must have privacy to be objective in
these matters. Counseling and similar type things — psychological groups
getting together — always have one big problem: the one who is passing out the
information and the one who is receiving it gets personal attention and it
leads to arrogance. It means that your marriage is a bust whether it is the
first marriage and has been going on for forty years. Arrogance destroys
everything. You have privacy to be objective in these matters when it is being
taught from the pulpit. Furthermore you must use the privacy of your priesthood
to resolve these matters. This is a personal matter between you and the Lord.
The doctrine of the Word of God must be your counselor. Anything else becomes a
crutch and you cannot resolve the problems of marriage and divorce by using
crutches. You also must remember that when you are divorced under category #2 —
other than Biblical reasons: adultery and desertion — and your status quo is no
right to remarry, but your former mate has either remarried or had an affair,
you are now free to remarry. In other words, again remember the conversion
principle. But that is not nearly as important as the virtue principle. The
virtue principle says that the only way that you are ever going to be a winner
is to get in the divine dynasphere and get cracking. Take in doctrine every
day, rebound when necessary, live in the divine dynasphere. When you live in
the divine dynasphere you are not in a state of adultery. To get in a state of
adultery you have to get out of the divine dynasphere.
1 Corinthians 7
Desertion is a category of divorce
we have noted from Deuteronomy chapter 24 where the marriage is not only
dissolved but the innocent party has the right of remarriage: 1 Corinthians
7:15 — “Yet if the unbelieving one leaves [or deserts], let him leave; the
brother or the sister [believer] is not under bondage in such cases, but God
has called us to peace.” The word “peace” here means the solution of a problem
apart from violence.
Evangelism in marriage is also the
subject of verse 16 “For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save [lead
him to the Lord] your husband? or how do you know, O husband, whether you will
save your wife?”
Verse 27 — the importance of
objectivity coupled with virtue in dealing with the subject of marriage.
Marriage is always filled with problems because it involves two people, and
they not only have the amalgamation of two people, the coalescence in marriage,
but they also bring together their problems. She brings her problems to him; he
brings his problems to her. If neither have any understanding they have
immediately created a battlefield.
“Are you shackled to a wife?” —
literally from the Greek. Immediately that brings up a connotation that we are
dealing with: the problems of marriage. In this case the corrected translation
tells us the whole story — “shackled,” meaning things are not quite right.
Whenever you bring in shackles you bring in slavery, and when you bring in
slavery someone is not being able to utilise their volition in the marriage. It
may be the man and it may be the woman but it immediately suggests the problem.
The question implies an unhappy marriage.
What is the advice the scripture
gives? “Do not seek to be divorced.” Just because you have an unhappy marriage
doesn’t mean that you have to try to get out of it. “Are you divorced from a
wife? Do not seek a wife.”
One of the greatest mistakes that
people make when they even have a legitimate reason for divorce, like adultery
or desertion, they are always worried about remarriage. People are no better in
marriage than they are as people, and that is the principle of doctrine that
comes out of this. If you are not a happy person you are going to have an
unhappy marriage. Losers are not people who fail because everyone fails. Losers
are people who fail and never do anything about their failures. You can do
something about being a loser. If you are a believer in Christ there is really
no excuse for being a loser except your own neglect of Bible doctrine. So
failure in life inevitably means failure in marriage. Failures in life and in
marriage can only become winners as believers by momentum inside the divine
dynasphere — the system. The system is virtue first. While asceticism is wrong
about forbidding marriage the state of matrimony is a disaster without virtue
from the divine dynasphere — 1 Corinthians 7:28.
“But if you should marry, you have
not sinned; furthermore if a virgin should marry, she has not sinned.” In other
words, marriage is not a state of sin. Marriage is acceptable; marriage is a
divine institution. Marriage, therefore, is one of the most important factors
in the stability of society, in the stability of the client nation to God.
Marriage failure or success is an index in any given generation as to
historical trends, up or down. So if you should marry it is not sin. And why
that? Because there is always a lot of people around who somehow have a
terrible trend toward asceticism and they run around and try to impose upon
others their asceticism by saying sex is wrong except to have children, and
they say you’re sinful in marriage, and all the rest of it. This has always
been a problem and is therefore treated in the scripture: “If you should marry
you have not sinned.”
Marriage is a divine institution and
it is not sinful to get married.
“But such ones who get married will
have trouble in this life” — no matter how wonderful the opposite number you
are going to have trouble because you’re married. The problems in marriage do
not lend themselves to a simple solution. The amalgamation of two people under
one roof in marriage is a divine institution but it is not free from all of the
problems of the world — “and I am trying to spare you.”
Who is the apostle trying to spare?
First of all those who think that of they get married it is a sin. They have
been brought up in an environment of asceticism where that is the thinking. Or,
if a young lady gets married it is not a sin. Furthermore, to go into marriage
thinking it is a panacea and that there will never be any problems again. They
must be spared the shock that comes the first time that they have marital
problems.
All of this adds up to a greater
principle: Without the system — God’s plan, God’s priorities — marriage is
nothing but trouble, misery and unhappiness interspersed with sublime moments.
Sublime moments never last. There is no way for the believer to survive
marriage apart from having the doctrinal ability to do so, and that is virtue.
Believers in the cosmic system are losers. Losers in marriage are also losers
in life. Anyone who approaches marriage with the idea that marriage is a
panacea or a problem-solver, or the road to happiness is thinking like a loser.
To get married for all the wrong reasons is to think like a loser and to act
like a loser. But the good news to losers is the fact that they don’t have to
stay in that status. No one has to remain a loser for God has given us a
present at salvation called the divine dynasphere, and the system; and that, of
course, is going to be the source of deliverance.
Moving on the verse 32 we again pick
up the subject of marriage. Marriage is also a distraction to spiritual life.
No matter how great the marriage is it is a distraction to spiritual life. “But
I want you to be free from worry.” Paul is expressing a professional attitude.
But what follows? How! “The unmarried person is concerned about the things of
the Lord” — Bible doctrine. This is a statement of the Word of God; “how he may
please the Lord.”
Verse 33 — “but the married person
is concerned about the things of the world” not worldly things, just normal
functions in life. Bible doctrine is automatically reduced to a secondary
status in the case of all too many
marriages
of believers — “how he may please his wife”.
Verse 34 — “Therefore his interests
are divided.” He likes doctrine on the one hand but he wants to please his wife
on the other hand and somehow the two get into competition. It is inevitable.
It is an honourable thing to want to please your wife and it is a more
honourable thing to want Bible doctrine. The two inevitably come into conflict,
says this passage. “Both the unmarried woman and the virgin are concerned about
the things of the Lord.” Why? Because they are single, therefore it is easier
for them to put doctrine as number one priority; “that she might be holy both
in body and in spirit; but, by way of contrast, she who is married is concerned
about the things of the world [not worldliness but about the things of the
world], how she may please her husband. Pleasing her husband takes number one
priority over doctrine and the conflict is there.
So what this passage is saying up
through verse 34 is that marriage is a distraction to the spiritual life and
destroys the priorities that produce the virtue that could save the life.
Marriages are not being saved because people lose their priorities in the
interaction of husband and wife.
Verse 35 — “And this I say for your
benefit; not to put a restraint on you, but with a view toward what is honourable.”
There is the solver of marital problems; there must be virtue; “and that you
might be devoted to the Lord without distraction.” That is the key. But you
have to do it; they have to be your priorities. The minister who tries to bully
you into this is wrong. You should not be bullied into any course of action
based upon
someone
else’s opinion, you must fact the issue of the scripture.
Verses 39-40 — “A wife is bound to
her husband as long as he lives; if however her husband dies, she is free to be
married to whomever she wishes, only in the Lord.” This simply sets up once
again the principle of category #1 divorce in analogy. Either death or adultery
dissolves the marriage. She is free to marry, only her own volition must make
the decision. “But in my judgement she is happier,” not that she can’t be happy
in marriage, but “she is happier if she remains as she is.”
1 John chapter Four
We now move to solutions, and to
have any solution that is worthwhile we must begin with God — who and what God is.
First of all, God is eternal. Eternal and infinite God has certain
characteristics which we call the essence of God. God invented marriage and He
invented marriage to work; and the fact that marriage does not work has nothing
to do with the failure of God’s invention, it has everything to do with man’s
failure as a person in life. The person who has no sense of destiny, who does
not have control of his life, and constantly makes bad decisions from a
position of weakness, is obviously going to have a bad marriage.
Most people think of marriage, of
course, in terms of love but we have seen that marriage was never designed for
love; marriage was designed for virtue. Virtue can produce true love and virtue
can also produce happiness. Without virtue the marriage has absolutely no
chance even though the two involved may appear to be the greatest lovers in the
world. The key to human love is inevitably failure. There are two categories of
human love: personal love of a man for a woman or vice versa. We can call that
romance, friendship or a love between two males, two females. But all human
love is personal and is no stronger than the person involved. Since people are
constantly in the process of changing, so does human love. Human love is not
very stable and any marriage which is built upon human love is inevitably going
to fail or have such terrible problems that the marriage becomes a trap and a
source of great unhappiness. Whether they divorce or remain in the state of
marriage it is still going to be a major contribution to misery in life.
So we have to begin somewhere with
the solution and we have to begin where the solution is. First of all, God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have identical characteristics.
Since they have the same essence it is often described as God being one, but
three separate and distinct personalities have these characteristics. One thing
that is mentioned many times in the scripture is the fact that God is holy. The
problem with the word holy as an English word is that its connotation is often
related to some form of arrogance such as legalism and self-righteousness. God
is not self-righteous; God is not arrogant; that is blasphemous and
unthinkable. God’s holiness is just another way of describing His virtue, His
integrity, and in modern English we would probably say God is integrity, God is
the ultimate in virtue. And, of course, God’s holiness is composed of two
characteristics: His perfect righteousness and His justice. God’s righteousness
and justice, or God’s holiness, becomes the point of contact of man as a member
of the human race with God. The righteousness of God cannot accept man’s
sinfulness and the righteousness of God has rejected man’s sinfulness as being
incompatible with His own essence. The justice of God has pronounced the
penalty upon man’s sinfulness: the wages of sin is death. However, man’s
sinfulness does not begin when He commits a sin, man’s sinfulness begins at the
point of physical birth. Human life is imputed to the soul immediately after
birth. Simultaneously Adam’s original sin, which resulted from the failure of
the first marriage in history, is imputed to the genetically-formed old sin
nature at the point of birth so that man is born physically alive [the
imputation of human life] but is born spiritually dead [the imputation of Adam’s
original sin]. This means that man is condemned at birth, and this is the grace
of God because if man does not reach accountability in life and dies first,
then he automatically goes to heaven. But for the rest there is the subject of
accountability and accountability deals with the fact that God imputed sin at
birth.
What happens, therefore, to all the
personal sins that each person begins to commit at any given age? All the
personal sins in life are reserved for the cross. They are never imputed to us
for judgement, they are imputed to our substitute who is the Lord Jesus Christ,
and this is all from the holiness of God. The holiness of God the Father is
made up of His perfect righteousness and perfect justice. At the cross our Lord
Jesus Christ approached as the God-Man. He was true humanity and eternal deity
in one person forever. As true humanity He approached the cross and he said to
God the Father: “Father if it be thy will let this cup pass from me.” The cup
was referring to all of the personal sins of the human race. They were
considered under the content of a cup which was to be poured out or imputed to
Christ on the cross. But then he added from His virtue: “Nevertheless not my
will but thy will be done.” As our Lord Jesus Christ approached the cross one
thing is quite obvious: He had a love for the entire human race. As God He
loved the human race, but He had a perfect love — not our human love which is
so imperfect — because it was based upon His righteousness and His justice
which combine to form virtue. God’s love for all, for the entire human race, is
a virtuous love. It is an impersonal love for the human race does not love God,
and the human race demonstrates its lack of love for God in every generation.
So the fact that the human race does not love God, the fact that the people who
crucified our Lord despised Him, did not change His love for the human race.
The human race is made up of losers; they are born losers. We are born failures
because we are born spiritually dead though physically alive. Nevertheless God
loved the entire human race and sent His Son.
Jesus Christ, as He approached the
cross, demonstrated impersonal love in a magnificent way, for impersonal love
is virtuous, it depends on the subject, it depends upon the Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ is the subject and although the object of His love despised Him — “He
was despised and rejected of men,” says Isaiah — behind His love for all was
His virtue, and also His love for God the Father. It was the will of God the
Father that He go to the cross. So when he came to the cross and was crucified
the personal sins of the world were imputed to Him by God the Father. God the
Father had loved God the Son with an infinite love for God is love and God had
always loved the Son. But God the Father had to set aside His love for God the
Son on the cross and instead His justice had to go into operation. The justice
of God took the personal sins of the world and imputed them to Christ on the
cross and judged., and there is no such thing as a sin that was not judged on
the cross. This is the efficacious saving work of Christ on the cross. It was
the justice of God the Father that imputed those sins and it was the perfection
of our Lord Jesus Christ in His humanity and deity that made it possible for
Him to be the bearer of our sin, to be judged for our sins and to take our
place. Therefore, a message to the entire human race: “Whosoever believeth in
Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” The work of salvation was
accomplished while our Lord was still alive on the cross, and he said: Tetelestai — It has been finished in the past with the result
that it stands finished forever. The work of salvation was accomplished on the
cross, therefore salvation is not a matter of human works. Human works for
salvation is blasphemy, “for by grace are you saved through faith, and that not
of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast.”
The merit lies with the object of faith, not the subject. And so for eternal
salvation we personally have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, we have
personally accepted Him as our saviour for this is the only way of salvation.
That is the greatest decision that we ever make in this life.
But we do make many other serious
decisions and one of the serious decisions is the decision to marry. At the
altar of marriage two people unite their problems, their difficulties, their
personality kinks, and their syndromes, into marriage. When losers marry the marriage
is going to be the most awful type of disaster. Nuclear weaponry is not our
biggest problem today, there is a far greater detonation occurring every day.
People go somewhere and get married! That is by far our most dangerous
self-destructive principle and the detonation from a few bad marriages results
in social degeneration, an entire nation can be destroyed by it — we are in the
process. What we need is the development of virtue, God’s plan for the
individual and God’s plan for the client nation to Himself.
Only the plan of God is going to
change losers into winners. And it all has to start somewhere so it starts with
a pattern. Even though we were born losers God loves us. The love of God is
based upon His righteousness and His justice. God is eternal life, therefore
His love is permanent. God’s love never changes and the reason is because God
as the subject has virtue and integrity. All of us are sinners; all of us are
anti-God by birth; all of us have old sin natures — the total depravity of man,
“all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” applies here. So we are
not attractive to God. We often think that because we have pleasing
personalities or because people tell us we are nice and have done nice things
that somehow we are attractive to God. We are not attractive to God at all. God
doesn’t love us because of who and what we are, God loves us because of who and
what He is, and that is the pattern for winners. Somehow this virtue which God
possesses — which is eternal and not available to us as such because we are not
God, although certain aspects of it are available to us now — is the only
solution to marriage and is the only solution to anything. There is no solution
to anyone’s problems in life apart from eternal salvation and the plan of God
which follows. And so it all begins with “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and
thou shalt be saved.” No marriage can succeed, no problem can be resolved by
the individual for himself as a winner apart from virtue. As a believer in the
Lord Jesus Christ God has made available a system and a plan so that your
marriage can be saved, your marriage can be successful, your marriage can go
on, but it requires something far, far, greater than this nonsense called
personal love. A person who loves you today will not love you tomorrow because
no person remains stable in his personality or his character or his attitudes.
They are subject to variation from day to day, and along with that goes
personal love.
The Christian way of life as such is
divided into two parts: what is invisible and what is visible. The invisible
part of the Christian way of life is the secret for it is the function of your
royal priesthood. Every believer at the moment of faith in Christ becomes a
priest and that means as a priest he represents himself to God. There,
immediately, is where you have a key to the solutions to problems of marriage
because most people are running around looking for counseling, looking for
psychologists, looking for half-baked ministers who don’t know the score as far
as doctrine is concerned. They fail to realise that every believer is his own
priest and he represents himself before God. And since he only represents
himself before God he can only resolve his own problems in relationship to God
as a believer. That is a part of the Christian way of life. The visible part
says very simply that every believer is also an ambassador, and as an
ambassador he represents God to others. Therefore, a man as an ambassador
represents God to his wife, and the wife as an ambassador represents herself to
her husband. Husband and wife therefore having something going for them in
Christianity that others do not have and that is ambassadorship. But
ambassadorship cannot function without the priesthood. Every believer is a
priest and he represents himself to God; every believer is an ambassador and he
represents God to mankind, including whoever he married along the way © his
wife or, in the case of the wife, the husband. So if there is to be any success
in marriage or any success in life it must follow this pattern. First of all
there must be a relationship with God as a believer. You are on this earth for
a purpose: to fulfill your priesthood; you are here to represent yourself
before God and to do so on a daily basis. As a result of that you are to
represent God to man as an ambassador. God has a purpose for your life and this
purpose has a system. The system demands that first of all you be a winner and
then your relationships in life will straighten out. So the function of the royal
priesthood is related to God; the function of the royal ambassadorship is
related to people and circumstances © people with whom you have an intimate
relationship in either marriage or friendship and people with whom you have
simply a casual relationship or merely have contact with strangers.
The invisible function of the
Christian way of life demands perception of Bible doctrine. You must have
information in order to have a relationship with God in order to love God. The
visible part of the Christian way of life demands application of that doctrine
to experience, including marriage. Marriage is an experience, and whether it is
a good experience or a bad experience depends on whether you as an individual
can apply doctrine that you have learned, not doctrine that someone else has
learned. Counseling is no good and you cannot impose your personality on
someone else, either in the problems of marriage or in any other category of
problems. If you are ever going to be a winner you must have the doctrine
yourself and you must apply the doctrine yourself. To the extent that you
cannot apply doctrine that you have learned you are a loser. Losers never make
it in marriage or anything else. Losers are no good as friends; losers are no
good in marriage; losers are just no good in life, and Christians who are
losers are the worst of all. We have perception of doctrine and application of
doctrine. Perception of doctrine must come first. Obviously there will be no
success in your marriage unless you’re learning doctrine and then applying it
yourself.
As a result of this God has
developed a system and God’s system for the Christian way of life is virtue
first. Don’t do anything. Don’t run around and witness to people, don’t stand
up and give your testimony. You need to learn the system before you do it.
Virtue first. Don’t do anything. People want to go out and do great things for
God. That is emotional disaster. God has invented the system and the system
started with our Lord Jesus Christ who had at birth the prototype divine
dynasphere. The system has gates. Gate one: the system calls for power. The
power is the filling of the Holy Spirit; gate two: they system calls for
learning basic modus operandi. You have to learn to use the faith-rest drill
and its three stages. You have to know the basics and you have to be objective.
Humility is the basis for all virtue © enforced and genuine humility. There is
also teachability, and with these three as a background gate four is the
momentum gate; gate four is the perception and application of doctrine.
Perception of doctrine: the function of your royal priesthood. Application of
doctrine: the function of your royal ambassadorship. There is where your
marriages succeed whereas other Christian marriages fail. This is what converts
losers into winners and you will never be a winner unless you start getting
with doctrine. Daily perception of Bible doctrine comes before its application.
These four gates produce virtue. Without virtue there is no hope. Virtue must
come first and once virtue comes through the momentum of gate four then you
have gate five: virtue love. That is what it takes for success in marriage.
Virtue love is perception of doctrine. And personal love for God is the
motivating virtue of life © personal love for God. Gate six: functional virtue
directed toward a husband or a wife.
If you are going to be successful in
life you’re going to have virtue first, and the virtue that counts as far as a
husband or wife is impersonal love. “I love you”: the subject must have
functional virtue — impersonal love, honour, integrity. It all depends on who
and what the subject is. Impersonal love is that category of functional virtue
whereby the integrity of the subject exceeds the repulsiveness, the
unattractiveness of the object. Impersonal love is the only category of human
love for mankind which possesses virtue and, therefore, impersonal love in the
only solution to marriage. Personal love will never cut it, there must be
impersonal love. Impersonal love is something that must be developed as a part
of the system.
That is what 1 John chapter four is
all about. Impersonal love is manufactured inside the divine dynasphere, it
emphasises the integrity of the subject. Personal love emphasises the
attractiveness of the object. The object may be attractive today and not
attractive tomorrow. The objects change with regard to attractiveness. Personal
love is directed toward a few people whereas impersonal love is a functional
virtue directed toward all mankind, the attractive and the unattractive.
Impersonal love is a functional virtue that is motivated by love for God and
since God has no prejudice impersonal love eliminates prejudice from the life.
Obviously then impersonal love is not developed or sustained by the object of
love but by the believer’s residence and function in the divine dynasphere and
its perception of doctrine. Marriage as a problem cannot be resolved apart from
virtue or impersonal love for impersonal love is a relaxed mental attitude
toward all mankind from the spiritual momentum of the divine dynasphere.
Therefore impersonal love cannot be corrupted or deceived by flattery, by human
approbation, by emotional rapport, by the exploitation of arrogance. Every man
becomes weak when in a state of arrogance a woman flatters him. The woman is
obviously trying to gain his attention. She is minus virtue so she throws out
flattery and the man eats it up. The man just falls apart, he is her slave
immediately. Then, of course, this develops a whole system of false rapport,
and from this system of false rapport one day she looks at the man and says, I
don’t care for him any more. She stops the flattery and leaves him dangling.
Impersonal love is totally free from arrogance, jealousy, bitterness,
vindictiveness, self-pity, self-righteousness, implacability, hatred, guilt,
revenge modus operandi. While personal love is optional in life toward people
impersonal love is the mandate of the Christian way of life. It is because
people have failed to develop this mandate that they are not only losers in
marriage but they are losers in everything else. Impersonal love is the
imperative of life; personal love is the option. Anyone can fall in love;
anyone can have a friend, but the requirements of impersonal love demand the
highest form of virtue in spiritual life. Consequently, impersonal love is the
functional virtue of the Christian way of life, while personal love has no
virtue in it at all. Impersonal love is not influenced by the attitude of
others but by doctrine in the soul. In fact, impersonal love cannot exist
unless there is a motivating virtue © personal love for God. You cannot have
gate six of the divine dynasphere without gate
five.
That is why in John 15:12, “This is my mandate that you love each other,”
impersonal love as the function of gate six, “as I have loved you.” God loved
us on the basis of His virtue. You have to remember that “all have sinned and
come short of the glory of God” shows the total unattractiveness of the object.
God says, “I have loved you”. He has loved us as sinners, He has loved us as
failures, He has loved us in status quo total depravity; yet God has loved us.
Why? Because of His virtue, because of who and what He is. In impersonal love,
virtue love, the subject has the merit. The object may or may not have merit,
it is inconsequential; but whether the object is vacillating, oscillating from
one form of success and back, it makes absolutely no difference because the
love remains constant.
Take a husband and a wife. Let’s say
that the husband has virtue love. He has tremendous virtue in his soul, he is a
man of great integrity. The wife has become obnoxious and failed in many ways.
The same virtue that reaches out toward all includes the wife. The same virtue
that handles the person who hates you, the person who despises you, the person
who maligns you and treats you unfairly and unjustly, and yet still loves them
under the integrity of impersonal love, now applies the same to the wife. He
treats her as he would the all. That takes up the slack for her failures, and
vice versa when it is the wife who has the virtue and it is the husband who is
the monster.
God does not love us on the basis of
personal love. God has perfect righteousness and perfect justice. When we
accepted Christ as saviour righteousness was imputed to each one of us, setting
up a grace pipeline between the justice of God and the righteousness of God.
Now the justice of God loves every believer because every believer has His
righteousness. God’s righteousness is always there as the object of perfect
love, and now that righteousness is given to us so that down the grace pipeline
comes logistical support, logistical support for every problem in life. God
loves us on the basis of His integrity and our contact with Him is not His love
or His sovereignty, our point of contact is the justice of God. Therefore all
solutions to anything in life must be based upon integrity, and especially that
part of integrity called justice.
1 John 3:11 — “Because this is the
mandate message which you have heard from the beginning, that we [all Church
Age believers] should love each other”. That is virtue love, not personal love,
and that virtue love makes it possible to become a winner in life.
1 John 3:23 — “This is my mandate,
that we believe in the person of His Son Jesus Christ [that is the first step],
and that we love each other, as he gave us mandate.” That is the function of
gate six and that is how the marriage problem is going to be handled.
1 John 4:7 — “Beloved ones [royal
family], let us love one another, because virtue love is from God; furthermore
every one who loves has been born from God and has come to know God [that is
the key, to come to know and to understand].”
1 Peter 1:22 — “Since you have been
in obedience to doctrine [residence in the divine dynasphere] purify your souls
from sincere love [personal love] of the brethren, fervently love each other
from your right lobe [impersonal love].”
There is nothing wrong with personal
love if it is backed by virtue. Generally personal love is impossible if you do
not have control of your life. Those who do not have control of their life
inevitably are arrogant, jealous, full of self-pity or oscillating into
self-righteousness, full of antagonism, hatred, vindictiveness, implacability,
everything but the virtue-manufacturing modus operandi of gates one through
four. This means, therefore, that if personal love is ever going to be
successful and if you are ever going to find any happiness in personal love you
must have it before you personally fall in love. There is no happiness in
personal love, there is only happiness in virtue. If you have virtue you can
have happiness. By having a personal love relationship there is no happiness in
that alone.
The problems of marriage
Principle A
1. Marital problems are symptoms but
the disease is human failure in life. Marital problems are never the
disease.
2. Most questions about marriage are
personal and expressions of the symptom, therefore not the real problem.
3. In other words, marriages fail
because people are failures as human beings. It is not the failure of marriage,
it is the failure of people.
4. Marriage is not designed for
happiness; God ordained marriage for virtue. (Happy people in marriage have a
happy marriage; unhappy people in marriage have an unhappy marriage)
5. Virtue is designed for happiness,
therefore virtue is the source of happiness, not marriage. People who marry to
find happiness never find it in marriage, they merely complicate their lives.
Marriage is not a panacea or a solution to anything, marriage is for people who
have found their solutions.
6. Since virtue on the part of both
partners is necessary for a successful marriage it becomes necessary to divine
virtue as the Christian doctrine which must be applied to every facet of life,
including marriage. For believers the answer is not in the passages on
marriage, the answer is in the system — virtue.
Principle B
1. Most people try to solve marital
problems by changing their partners.
2. You cannot change the other
person in marriage, you can only change yourself. There is where marriage has
complicated most lives.
3. Unless you recognise this
principle there is no hope for you in marriage.
4. Marital counseling is a waste of
time. All counseling does is to give an individual attention, stimulate his
arrogance, and try to justify his position rather than taking an objective look
at himself.
5. People do not need personal
attention, they need Bible doctrine which they must learn to apply for
themselves. To the extent that someone is trying to help them they are helping
them from their personality and they are not really changing that person.
6. To put it another way, you can’t
go through marriage on crutches. When you run around and seek advice that is
exactly what you are doing.
7. Most people approach marital
problems from the standpoint of subjectivity. They want to be justified in
their own actions, making it one of the most arrogant functions in life; or
they want to change their mate, making it one of the most unstable functions in
life; or they want to trade in their mate on a new model, or turn their mate
into a slave. The trouble with marriage is that there are two souls involved
and two sets of volition, and one person should never be depersonalised in
marriage.
8. It never occurs to people that no
solution will be permanent because they are failures as people. People fail in
marriage because they fail in life, and people who are failures in life and get
married will obviously fail in marriage. Most people that have marital problems
are losers and the reason is because they have never stabilised their own life
with virtue, honour, and integrity so that they can meet their own problems in
privacy and not make their marriage public domain.
Principle C
1. You cannot change the other
person in marriage, you can only change yourself by good decisions instead of
bad, obviously.
2. For believers this means
spiritual growth and there is no spiritual growth without learning doctrine and
applying it. The real decision to solve your problems is your daily attitude
toward doctrine. And how high up in your scale of values is doctrine? For some
it isn’t very high up and so they are not only going to have marital problems,
they are going to have problems in any category of life you wish to name.
3. The problems of marriage are not
simply malfunction between husband and wife in their relationship but in their
failure to comprehend and apply two doctrines: humility and virtue.
4. Most marriages are a failure for
the following reasons: a. Bad decisions in the selection of a mate; b.
Inability to handle personal problems before, during, and after marriage, and
therefore no ability to deal with the problems of one’s mate; c. The biggest
problem of all is failure to learn and apply doctrine; d. People who neglect
Bible doctrine and are unstable in their church attendance are also guilty of
taking bad advice from friends, counselors, psychologists, ministers, or anyone
else who will listen to them; e. Marriages also fail because parents take out
their frustrations on their children. They may be abusive to their children
when they are little and then try to get them on their side when they get
older; f. Infidelity on the part of either party only complicates; g. Worst of
all: No personal sense of responsibility on the part of one or more mate in the
marriage; h. The trouble with marriage is people © arrogant people, subjective
people, people without humility or virtue. Only virtue and humility can solve
the problems [and that is by application] and therefore produce the ideal
marriage: perpetual compatibility. All solutions to marital problems obviously
must be related to doctrine but it must be related to doctrine in the privacy
of the soul, not in public counseling.
Principle D
1. Obviously you are going to have
problems if you get married for the wrong reason.
2. Generally people get married for
three reasons that are wrong: sex, security, status.
3. Often these reasons are disguised
by the allegation of love.
4. Better to marry for compatibility
than love because personal love has no virtue, but even compatibility will not
work in the long run — but it has a better chance. What most people call love
isn’t love at all, it is something else.
5. What is the problem? Whether it
is marriage or something else people are people and never stop being people.
There lies the rub. If people were perfect it would be different but people are
not perfect and people never will be perfect. And people being people are going
to get married, and they are going to foul it all up unless they have two
things in life which will be mentioned later. Marriage was not designed for
perfect persons; God invented marriage for imperfect persons, for sinful
persons, for people living in spiritual death and functioning under the
doctrine of total depravity. Marriage was invented for people under the
principle of the total depravity of man.
6. Therefore a brilliant conclusion:
The only thing wrong with marriage is people! There is nothing wrong with
marriage in principle. We have to be very careful: What is wrong with marriage
is not the other person, it is you, and that is the only place that objectivity
can be established in marital problems. You never assume that the wrong is with
the other person, although it may be. Objectivity demands that you look at you,
not at the other partner in marriage.
7. Only you can learn and apply
doctrine and make decisions to solve the problems of marriage.
In providing answers you can always
pick up an epigram or two from the various doctrines regarding marriage.
For example:
a. No woman can be successful in
marriage unless she has learned to entertain herself. That is an application of
the doctrine of marriage. If a lady cannot stand to be alone for a period of
time and cannot learn to entertain herself she will never be successful in
marriage, she will be a millstone around the man’s neck.
b. No man can be a successful lover
of a woman and at the same time be a successful lover of himself. In other
words, arrogance destroys marriage.
c. No man can exercise his authority
as a husband without honour, integrity, and virtue. No woman can respond to her
husband’s authority without humility, integrity, and virtue.
d.
Compatibility in marriage must relate to permanent things so that it will be
compatibility and non combatability. Compatibility in marriage, beauty, health,
attractiveness and a pleasing personality, are not necessarily permanent. The
only permanent thing we have in this life is truth or doctrine. God is
permanent, so
the
marriage must somehow be related to God. Doctrine is permanent, so the marriage
must somehow be related to doctrine. The greatest of marriages will founder
when the people involved are in the cosmic system. Arrogance, subjectivity and self-centeredness
are destructive to all forms of living, including marriage.
What about marital problems
that are not specifically covered by some statement of the Word of God? What
about different things that occur where it doesn’t say don’t do this or don’t
do that? In other words, if you don’t have a scripture, what do you do?
For
example, what about the problem where the husband works and the wife works?
There are many questions that come out of this situation. What about the responsibility
for the domestic work load? There is no scripture that says, If your wife
works, thou shalt help her clean the toilets! There is no Bible verse that says
the husband should do all the work or that the husband should help, or both.
Since there is no scripture that clarifies the problem per se there must be
some area of doctrine which can be applied. So we are not looking for a verse
which says you do it this way or you do it that way, we’re looking for some
doctrinal approach where the Bible is silent. Where the Bible is silent it is
the intent that the believer will apply doctrine that he knows, or should know.
What is not directly mandated by the scripture, in other words, must be
resolved by the application of doctrine. Application of doctrine where there is
no scriptural mandate is, of course, the most difficult of all systems. It is
much easier to learn doctrine than it is to apply doctrine. Furthermore, what
is even more interesting, where there is no scripture stating the case one way
or the other no one can counsel you in this matter. For essentially what we
have are two problems: the problem of who should handle the housework, etc. and
the problem of the personality issue. Take, for example, the personality of the
husband in connection with this problem. The husband does not like to help
around the house and never intends to. Or, the husband does like to help around
the house and will when he can. Any counseling would be from the standpoint of
the personality of the sex, male or female, of the person who is the counselor.
For example, the counselor cannot advise that the man must help with the messy
floors and, by the same token, the counselor cannot say that the man should do
no housework. In other words, anyone who comes to you and says, look the
solution to this is get in there and help the little lady, and then another counselor
comes along and says don’t lift a finger, it is still her job.
Now,
who is doing this counseling? In one case a silly woman and in the other case a
chauvinistic male. Who is right? Would you believe neither? How can you,
ladies, with your personalities go in an straighten out a domestic problem? You
can’t do it. You are looking at different personalities. You are handling the
situation from the standpoint of your personality and advising from the
standpoint of your personality is not either counseling from the standpoint of
doctrine or the application of doctrine. In fact, quite often it isn’t divine
viewpoint because too many arrogant believers, without actually stating it,
which would be blasphemous, think they’re God and that the personality from
which they counsel is God, and that they can do no wrong — self-righteous.
Notice: Both solutions are wrong. It is wrong to go in there and tell the
husband to help the wife; it is wrong, by the same token, to go in there and
say don’t help her. It is not applying doctrine for you to go in and tell
anyone else and tell them how to do it.
The
counselor, first of all, never has all the facts, does not have the personality
identification, and is not free from prejudice in the matter. The chauvinistic
male is going to advise, Don’t lift a hand boy, you’ve lost control if you do.
A silly woman goes in and says, Help her, help her, the poor thing. A counselor
cannot advise from the scripture because there is no scripture that tells you
which way to jump. Therefore inevitably it reverts to a number of factors: the
personality of the counselor, the sex of the counselor, the background of the counselor,
the mentality of the counselor, and in 95 per cent when women start counseling
it is goofy. And there is the prejudice of the counselor. The counselor who
takes sides is no longer a counselor, he is merely an advocate for one side or
the other. He becomes the pawn in the problems of marriage, he becomes the dupe
— often unwillingly and unknowingly — and the means of intensifying the
problem. In fact much marriage counseling intensifies the problems. So it is
very easy by counseling, which is often done in great arrogance, to make yourself
not an important chess piece on the board of life, but you make yourself a
pawn. You do not need a counselor to work out your problems.
The
first answer, while there is no direct scripture, is to tell you how you are
going to do it, how you are going to solve the problem. You need to work out
your own problem without counseling, without even a minister standing up in the
pulpit and saying while there is no scripture, this is it.
When
both mates are working each has a different energy level at the end of the day,
a different metabolism, and obviously a different personality. Only the two
involved in the problem actually have all the facts that could be collected on
the subject. Only the husband comes home and knows exactly how he feels; only
the wife comes home from work and knows exactly how she feels; only the two
involved in the problem have such facts as which mate is the weaker generally —
physically, mentally and spiritually. (The strongest spiritually can generally
carry a much heavier load) Like so many other marital problems the solution
follows the same pattern. The husband and wife should work out the problem
without bringing in anyone from the outside, and by the outside is meant
parents as well. For solving the problem both husband and wife must have one
thing going for them if they are ever going to resolve the problem. They must
have virtue. There is the key. You can work out your own problems — not only
marital problems but any other problems — if you have virtue and if you are able
to apply the doctrine of virtue to experience, which means occupation with
Christ as the motivation and the function of impersonal love as the modus
operandi, the actual application. You cannot sit down with a husband if you are
a wife, or a wife if you are the husband, and resolve anything unless you have
and utilise impersonal love. Impersonal love is what is applied to the
situation and impersonal love makes you independent of counseling, independent
of all of these various persons who would interfere with your life and try to
run it for you. So there must be virtue.
Now
you have two principles on how you are going to solve this problem where the
scripture makes no statement. First, you are going to work it out between the
two of you, and secondly we have to find out where you are coming from, to use
the modern slang, and you must be coming from virtue. Not personal love,
virtue. Thirdly, no husband and wife can solve this kind of a problem unless
they have the key to the solution, and the key to the solution in one word is
conversation.
The principle of conversation
1.
You must sit down and talk it out. In the conversation you must express your
own virtue and therefore from virtue express your viewpoint in the matter; and
by the same token listen carefully to the viewpoint of your mate. The solution
is found in what both agree to do. From conversation must come agreement on a
procedure, on a policy, and the policy must be made up from the results of the
conversation, and hopefully from virtue.
2.
From the conversation each must understand the position of the other. Don’t
resent the position until you hear it stated in toto. Gentlemen, let her talk
it out, let her get it off her chest. Until you understand the position of your
opposite number in marriage you are in no position to refute it or to agree
with it or to compromise with it.
3.
In order to understand the position of the other in the matter you must be
objective, and this requires impersonal love, toleration and humility. Along
with impersonal love, toleration and humility, which produces your objectivity,
you must have a sense of responsibility. In your personal sense of destiny at
that particular point you must be aware of the fact that you are in the
problem-solving process, you are not a debating society. The conversation is to
resolve the problem, not to win a debate. Therefore the man does not use his
authority and say, this is the way we’re going to do it. And the woman does not
get into her nagging best to beat him down.
4.
Sensitivity to the viewpoint of your mate is a part of the function of
impersonal love. You don’t get it from personal love, personal love is too
prejudiced. You have to go to a higher love, the love that has virtue.
5.
In other words, virtue must be applied to the problem where there is no
solution. So you are applying a doctrine but you are not applying a doctrine
that says, do it this way A, or do it this way B, you are applying a doctrine
where you listen, learn, where you put aside authority in the case of the man,
where you set aside prejudice in the case of the woman, and talk it out; the
principle being that virtue must be applied to the problem
or there is no solution.
6.
Since marriage is a long conversation of a husband and wife you must discuss it
objectively — thrash it out, get the viewpoint out in the open. If there is any
frustration this is venting time. One of the greatest manifestations of life is
for a man or a woman to allow the opposite number to vent, whether it is the
personality of ranting and raving or that sweet quiet little thing that speaks
through her teeth! There must be the venting process. It is amazing how
reasonable people can be if they are just allowed to vent.
7.
This requires cooperation on the part of both parties in the marriage. Each
must express his opinion and state his case so that the other can understand
his viewpoint. And if it is in the personality of the individual a little
venting won’t hurt.
8.
For the sake of the union of marriage, after it has been thoroughly discussed
each party must be prepared to use virtue, the virtue of impersonal love, to
make some compromise to resolve the situation.
Principle
Where
biblical statements are not made all conflicts are resolved by compromise in
life. Therefore people who solve problems are humble and flexible. It is all
right to be dogmatic about a direct statement of doctrine but it is arrogant to
be dogmatic about personal opinion.
1.
If you do not discuss it you cannot resolve it.
2.
The issue is not scripture but the use of virtue love.
3.
If you do not have impersonal love you will not and cannot resolve the problem.
4.
Only impersonal love on the part of both partners in the marriage can resolve
the problem, and whatever solution, whatever compromise, both agree to [the
issue is agreement] is the answer to that couple. It may be a different answer
for a different couple. But for that couple that is the answer unless someone
sticks their long proboscis into their business. People are always experts on
other people’s problems.
5.
It is a problem between the husband and the wife. Therefore men, what the boys
at the bowling alley think about you doing housework as inconsequential.
6.
You have not sacrificed your manhood by flipping the switch of a vacuum cleaner
or doing the shopping at the supermarket.
7. Furthermore ladies, what
the non-working girls think about a working wife not doing all of the domestic
chores is, frankly, none of their silly business.
Another principle
If
you cannot discuss it you cannot resolve it. Nothing is resolved without
discussion.
1.
If you do not have the virtue of impersonal love your discussion will be
converted into active conflict which intensifies the problem, guarantees no
solution, and often results in divorce or what might be classified as a slow
burn over fifty years.
2.
From discussion each person must know the position of the other and from
impersonal love be willing to make a compromise to produce an agreeable
solution. All problems can be solved where humility is willing to
compromise — arrogance never is.
1. When both the husband and
the wife are working, both have a job, there is always an overall objective.
Why are they doing it? What is the overall objective? Saving for a house, a
business, education, etc.
2.
All solutions and agreements must keep in mind the overall objective.
3.
You can always abandon your objective and retreat into the conventional mould
of the husband at the office and the wife at home. If you can’t resolve it you
can abandon your objective.
4.
But achieving objectives together and each making sacrifices to attain that
objective often pulls the marriage together as a team and enhances their love
for each other.
5.
Ladies, what if the monster will not talk? What if in the last three years of
marriage all you have gotten out of him are monosyllables and occasional
grunts? What if the husband will not talk, expect you to work all day and come
home and do all the domestic chores? What should you do?
6.
There are two sides to virtue.
Side
one: You can carry on and keep the marriage going by your occupation with
Christ. Obviously you are going to have to make great sacrifices but, of
course, you wanted him; you got him; and now you have a monosyllabic moron who
couldn’t carry on a conversation if his life depended on it. Application of
doctrine: the doctrine of gate five, motivating virtue. Your occupation with
the person of Christ must exceed the moronic attitude of your jackass husband.
Your personal love for God must be stronger than a husband that will not even
follow the procedure for solution. In other words, you, ought to be motivated
from the higher love, love for God, and step around the unfeeling, selfish and
irresponsible monster whom you married from your own volition, which means also
that you have to take the responsibility for your own decision.
Side
two: You must look at the arrogant husband from the application of impersonal
love and do the impossible of working at the office and keeping the home going
without the reaction of bitterness, hatred and vindictiveness on your part. So
the application in principle is twofold: Gate five can be applied by your
occupation with Christ: gate six can be applied by the function of your
impersonal love.
7.
If you come to hate him because you have no impersonal love you have lost a
greater battle than the battle of his cooperation in the domestic chores. By
comparison your problem of both working and what do we do now that we are home?
is not nearly as great as your own loss of virtue.
Conclusion
Most
people with marital problems are desperate. They need help immediately, they
insist on counseling right now. They aren’t going to go through a lot of tapes,
they want an answer now. What causes this desperation? That is really the
issue. Obviously they are not going to solve anything in a state of desperation
and obviously you can’t sit down with someone over the telephone who is
desperate and say, 1,2, 3, 4, and give them a pat answer. Desperate people are
in no state to be helped. So what causes this desperation?
1.
They have been living in the cosmic system, the home of desperation, or the
mate has been living in the cosmic system and they have not handled the problem
properly. No occupation with Christ or they wouldn’t be desperate. They’d have
a problem and they’d be hurting, but desperation is what destroys solution.
2.
They have failed to use the faith-rest drill. They haven’t claimed any
promises, they do not apply the doctrinal rationales. They don’t even rebound.
3.
Desperation is a condition of emotion coupled with arrogance. There is no
doctrinal thinking, no personal sense of destiny, and no control of one’s life.
Desperate people never have control of their lives.
4.
The desperate person is the product of his own bad decisions but he refuses to
take the responsibility for them. Therefore, there is a total loss of
objectivity and humility. Consequently the desperate person is looking for
instant therapy rather than perpetual teaching authority.
5.
The desperate person wants simple solutions, instantly, rather than the divine
solution which requires time, positive volition, and many decisions made from a
position of strength. There is no such thing as an instant solution to a
problem that has been brewing over a period of time.
6. The desperate person wants
instant and immediate relief though it took often years to become involved in
the problem and a lot of bad decisions went into digging that deep hole.
7.
The desperate person usually wants to be justified in some wrong course of
action. Therefore, the desperate person only provides the counselor with
information which will make him look good and the mate look bad. In other
words, you tell people, what you want them to know and then expect to get good counseling.
But
what this really boils down to in these seven reasons on why desperation is
that nothing that can be solved by desperation. Desperation means deterioration
of your spiritual life. Desperate believers must start with the fact that
he/she is still alive.
Desperation means deterioration
1.
The desperate believer must start with the fact that he/she is still alive, and
being still alive must assume that God has a purpose for his life. You have to
break desperation and you have to come to two conclusions that are possible
even when you are in panic palace or desperate: a. I am still alive; b.
Therefore, God has a purpose for my life. You may be far from the purpose at
the moment but it is an assumption that starts a solution, it is an assumption
that starts to remove the cobwebs of desperation.
2.
The desperate believer must immediately search his own life objectively and
rebound, get out of the cosmic system and get back into the divine dynasphere
for clear thinking.
3.
The desperate believer must recover spiritually before he can resolve his
problems from the privacy of his own priesthood in perception of doctrine.
Don’t try to solve the problem; recover spiritually and get in a position to
solve the problem.
4.
Desperation is not the status quo for application of doctrine.
5.
The application of desperation can only produce greater desperation, greater
panic, loss of judgement.
6.
There must be recovery from desperation before there can be the resolving of
any problem.
7.
Desperate people are not designed to deduce from doctrine the solutions to
their problems, they can only make bad decisions in desperation. Desperation is
a position of weakness — bad decisions from a position of weakness.
8.
Generally the doctrinal solution will take at least one third or one half of
the time it took to develop the problem — which eliminates instant solutions.
There isn’t just one application.
9.
If it took two years of negative volition and bad decisions to create your
problem it is going to take at least a year of perception of doctrine and its
application to resolve the problem. You don’t create problems instantly, you
create them over a period of time. You may create the crisis instantly but the
problem has been going for a long time and the boil finally shows its puss in a
crisis.
10.
The deeper you dig the hole the longer it will take you to climb out of it.
Therefore, instant solutions are not permanent solutions.
11.
It may take 30 days to get a divorce but you have not solved your problem of
being a loser. You have simply separated yourself from the symptom and you
still have the disease.
This is what is meant in principle
by dealing with marital problems or any problems where there is no mandate from
the scripture and no direct application declared in the language of any verse
in the Word of God.