Re: [Church_of_Christ] Re: Questions on Marriage
Bethel Anschultz wrote: Beth: Are you sure God "defined" marriage as one man and several wives or did He just allow it because of the hardness of their hearts? No matter what he "allowed" to transpire in the old Testament between man and woman...all that changed with the nailing of the Law to the cross.
I'm not responding here to the issue of marriage, but I did want to respond to Beth.
We need to be careful to not confuse what we call the "Old Testament" with what Jesus called the "Old Testament". Jesus, via Jeremiah 31.31ff, said that the days were coming when YHWH would make a new covenant with His people, not like the covenant He made with them when He brought them out of Egypt. So right there, we have a definition of the old covenant as being the Mosaic covenant, made only with the nation of Israel, given some two or four thousand years after the "Old Testament" began.
In other words, the "Old Testament" is not the same thing as the old covenant. We should not confuse the two, but I'm afraid that 99.974582% (a very rough approximation, you understand) of Christians do so.
Why is this important?
Because when you confuse the two, you toss the baby out with the bath-water. When we proclaim that "[w]e are not living under the Law of Moses now", we need to be careful to realize that does not mean we have no responsibility under the collection of 39 books we in the modern-day refer to as "the Old Testament".
We are still under the covenants which God established with Adam, and with Noah, and with all the earth and animals of Noah's day, and with Abraham. Other parts of the "Tanakh" (an acronymic term in Hebrew referring to the Law, Prophets, and Psalms, which is how Jesus refers to the "Old Testament" in Luke 24:44) also apply to us even today. The New Covenant did not replace anything except that covenant made between YHWH and the Israelites when He brought them out of Egypt.
In fact, if you toss out all of the "Old Testament" by confusing it with the "Law of Moses", then you toss out Jesus' teaching on marriage. When the marriage issue was brought to him, he did not give a new teaching based on his own authority; rather, he based his answer on the authority of the non-Mosaic-Law portion of the "Old Testament". If that portion does not apply to us, then neither does his answer. We've just nullified Jesus' teaching on marriage and divorce.
One final point: strictly speaking, God did not define marriage as between one man and one woman. We assume that's the God-given definition, because that's the Designed specification. Jesus validates our logic by using the same sort of appeal to original design specs in his answer concerning marriage and divorce. When Lamech marries two wives just a few generations later, his marriage is neither condemned nor affirmed; it just "is". But the scriptures do refer to the two women as his "wives", which lends credence to the idea that there is more affirmation of this marriage than condemnation. Note that this polygyny occurred before the Law of Moses was given, and thus is not part of the "old covenant" under which we no longer live. I would not presume to present this polygyny as being part of God's original design, but neither would I toss it out on the faulty misperception that it was part of the "old covenant".
-- Kent West <*)))>< http://kentwest.blogspot. com
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