Good News Divorcees: We Are Forgiven

Confronting 3

Good News Divorcees . . . We Are Forgiven

Paul Hinman

(Previously titled Confronting the Guardians of the Doctrines of Man)

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 Paul Hinman

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For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

I Peter 1:18-19 NIV

Foreword.

The paper you are about to read is a treatise based on my own personal experience in local churches over a period of several decades. Although the impetus for setting my hands to the task was the treatment of divorced Christians within organized religion, it also addresses other areas where I see that the church has compromised its orthodoxy by assimilating the values of the culture.

I have come to the conclusion that many churches have traded truth for pragmatism, and darkness for light. They are no longer a healing salt for the wounds of a battered generation. Rather they have so diluted their basic precepts, that they are like the salt that Biblical cultures used to spread over the fields of their enemies to prevent any crops from growing. Indeed, these churches need to heal themselves from the inside out, before they can be of any benefit to a sick society.

I have not turned a blind eye to the good that most churches have accomplished in forwarding the gospel message of Jesus Christ. And yes, I do believe the Holy Spirit is alive and active in many churches today across America. My charge is against those churches who decry 'the sky is falling' over incidentals, while failing to see the great chasm developing beneath their own feet as they try to entice the world into their ranks.

Regrettably, I have been assured at every turn that the issue of divorce and/or remarriage in the church has been thoroughly hashed and rehashed many times. So I write with the resignation that my words may never get off the printed page. However, silence is no longer an option as I see the signs of the times announcing the end of times in my generation. Economics, politics, and religion are aligning themselves with the prophecies of Revelation for a one world government.

Having said that, the true church needs to divest herself of all her worldly trappings and purge herself from the 'canker' of the culture, to prepare for what I believe to be the next apocalyptic event on the world stage, the Rapture. What better place to start than to remove all schisms within the body of Christ.

Usually, every writer has some general audience in mind when they begin to transfer thoughts to paper. My words are intended for every lay person or novice in every congregation, divorced or otherwise. Perhaps more so to the 'otherwise', because it has been my observation that usually the Sunday-morning only crowd are accepting as truth, anything spoken from behind the pulpit, without accountability to scripture. So with the exception of the chapters on the biblical grammar of related texts, every thing I reveal can be verified by any seeker of truth through prayer, a Bible, and a matching concordance.

I simply challenge the reader to let scripture interpret scripture.

Contents

Chapter One: Houston, We Have a Problem.

ISO

Pride and Prejudice

B1 Bomber

NSAID'S

I S S

Marketing of the Church

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Telemarketing

The Twilight Zone

By Another Other Name

Watchman, What of the Night?

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Adoption and Divorce

Chapter Two: Where's the Beef?

After Calvary

Pregnant with Grace

Thinking Outside the Bun

Keep the Main Thing. . . . .

Sufficiency of Christ

We Believe in the Literal Translation of Scripture

Gag on a Gnat, Divorcees and Masonry

Refocus

Secret Name Revealed

Hoodwinked

Report on Free Masonry - Home Mission Board, S B C

Without Wax

Chapter Three: Defending the Doctrines of Man

Man Defining Sin

Statute of Limitations

Liberty of Conscience 1776

Bay Baptist Claim Exemption from Illegal Taxations

The Assumption of Mary

Reaping What is Sown

Chapter Four:Reasoning from Scripture

Frivolous Divorce

1 Corinthians 7

1 Corinthians 12 - Brookshire Banner

The Lordship of Jesus Christ

Matthew 15:11 - The Silver Rule

Naves Topical Bible

Luke 6:13-16 - Selection of the Disciples of Jesus

Galatians 2 - Peter and those of the circumcision

Romans 3:24 1 John 1:9 - Worst Case Scenario

Book of Ester - Discrimination

I Timothy 3

Galatians 1:14 - Traditions of Man

Dark Green

Galatians 4-5 - Freedom in Christ

Chapter Five: You Have Heard it Said ......But I Say ....

Wait on the Lord

To obey is better than sacrifice

Whose kingdom are you building?

Beyond the Law

O.T. Test for Adultery

It is written . . . or is it?

Heirloom/native seed

Larry Burkett

Chapter Six: How Should We Then Live?

Charge to the church—Charge to the divorcee

The Good Ship Lollipop

Transparency

Take Heed

Will the real church please step forward?

Man's Propensity

Litmus Test

What options does the church offer the divorcee?

Charge to the never-divorced

Living Dead

Day in Court

Charge to the divorced/remarried

Walking Wounded

Bad Choices

The Walls of Separation

Humming Bird Mentality

Now What?

The Temple in Jerusalem

Walking Temples

Here is an amazing thing . .

Admonishment

Gordian Knot

The Fund Monster

Erroneous and Dysfunctional Doctrine

Used Cars

Addendum Getting technical

The Beginning of the Quest

Spiros Zodhiates (Exec.Editor NAS)

Passing the Torch

R.C.Sproul

Walter L.Callison

A.T. Robertson

A Rabbinic Anthology - C.C.Monteflore - H. Loewe

Is a covenant really important to God?

D I Y for the Divorcee

Dr. Bob Utley, Bible Lessons International

What the GDM's Don't Want You to Know

Moses and Zipporah

No Law - No Transgression

Geneva Bible

Noah Webster's Bible

Greek for the Lay Person

William Tyndale 1526

Final Words

Chapter One: Houston, We Have A Problem

Is there an illness festering within the body of Christ that can no longer be ignored?

Years ago there was a motion picture based on the true account of events that transpired aboard the near fatal flight of the space shuttle Apollo 13. I believe it won an award for Tom Hanks. During the return trip to earth, part of the essential life support - system was severely compromised, and if drastic steps were not taken, the crew would not live to make a touchdown at Cape Kennedy. Mr. Hanks then makes his call to Cape Kennedy with his now famous line, Houston, we have a problem. An emergency think tank was brought together to evaluate the problem and arrive at a viable plan of action that had the best chance of saving the lives of the astronauts.

The challenge was to make repairs to the support system using only the materials and tools that were accessible to the crew in their return capsule. The solution itself was life threatening, but the alternative was certain death. The outcome was a credit to the ground crew and the calm resolve of the astronauts who made the necessary adjustments and sacrifices to save the mission and their own lives.

Recent reliable polls indicate that just such an emergency situation is hibernating within the halls of evangelical churches today. And it may very well be that the 'called out church' as we once knew it, may become only a memory.

The problem first came to my attention a few years ago when I agreed to commit myself to teaching a 13 week course on Experiencing God at a nearby rescue mission. About five weeks into the study we had a discussion time in which I threw out a question concerning what role the church played in meeting the needs of the homeless. What I got back was like a pan of cold water to the face. The response was 'zero, nada, zip,' and it was unanimous. Without exception, every guest in the group said the church was of absolutely no help whatever when it came to their homeless circumstances. But how could this be? Had the church abandoned its mission mandate of Acts two to spread the gospel message by being light and salt to the world? So I began to investigate, and what I discovered was even more troubling.

The well known and respected Barna Group did a three year study to evaluate the culture's appraisal of Christianity. The results were so revealing that they decided to name the book after the response they heard. So they titled the book Unchristian. In a nutshell, this was the result of their findings:

In virtually every study we conduct, representing thousands of interviews every year, born-again Christians fail to display much attitudinal or behavioral evidence of transformed lives.

Barna's definition of born-again is: a person has to say that they have made a personal commitment to Jesus that is still important and that the person believes they will go to heaven at death, because that person has confessed their sin and accepted Christ as Savior.

For instance, based on a study released in 2007, we found that most of the lifestyle activities of born-again Christians were statistically equivalent to those of non-born-agains. When asked to identify their activities over the last 30 days, born-again believers were just as likely to bet or gamble, to visit a pornographic website, to take something that did not belong to them, to consult a medium or psychic, to physically fight or abuse someone, to have consumed enough alcohol to be considered legally drunk, to have used an illegal, nonprescription drug, to have said something to someone that was not true, to have gotten back at someone for something he or she did, and to have said mean things behind another persons back. No difference. ('Unchristian', page 47)

If this is true, the Author and Finisher of our faith must be in mourning at this very moment. If Jesus wept over Jerusalem because they would not come to Him when He walked this earth, how much greater must be His grief if the church that He died to establish is being assimilated by today's culture.

Like a trained physician, those who care for the health of the body of Christ must search out and identify the illness and correctly prescribe a remedy to revive the body and return it to its proper function in a sick and dying world. Even if the solution requires a radical spiritual upheaval to return it to its healthy condition, the alternative is the slow spiritual death of the church as a positive influence if today's culture.

Like the ground crew in Apollo 13, we must seek a cure using only the time proven tools available to every born again believer; that would be fervent prayer, rightly dividing the Word of Truth, and walking the talk. Since it is a spiritual house we are trying to heal, the Christian community should not reach outside to the secular world for healing material. The remedy must be sought out within the covers of the Book we as Christians base our faith on. The prescription will be hard to administer, and it will be a slow recovery period, but like Apollo 13, time is of the essence and the alternative is unthinkable.

"The most compelling common message people hear from us is that Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations. They think of us as hypocritical because they are measuring us by our own standards" (Page 48,italics mine).

I S O

About 18 years ago I worked for a national manufacturing company that wanted to go international. To accomplish this, they needed to establish what is known as ISO credibility. The International Organization for Standardization an internationally recognized agency that verifies you are who you say you are, and can do what you say you can do. They are roughly what I would call the Ralph Nader of commerce, on a world wide scale. Here is how it works.

If a company claims to manufacture fracturing units capable of fracturing a well 2,000 feet deep, and under x amount of pressure, in under five hours, and they want an international business, then ISO comes in to verify if they are indeed a company that can deliver on their claim. At the risk of oversimplification, they basically pick up your promotional material, and hold your feet to the fire. So, if you can't deliver, don't make the claim.

I was the quality control inspector at just such a company, so I had to show what I had inspected and when it was inspected. I had to show a paper trail for material traceability back to the original manufacturer. I had to prove we had a procedure to identify and correct any parts that failed inspection, and what we did with those parts that could not be corrected so they would never find their way back into a completed unit. Having proved all this, we got our international rating, and a noticeable boost in our stock. If the twenty first century evangelical church was evaluated by its own promotional material, the Bible, it would lose its 'ISO ratings' in the eyes of the culture, and it would be labeled hypocritical'.

One such point of accusation, and the main focus of this paper, is the selective application of the sufficiency of Christ concerning divorce in today's church.

Every denomination of Christianity has certain foundational tenants by which it identifies itself. Every catechism frames certain doctrines, general as well as specific that separates it from all others. Among these are what I would call 'irreducible minimums', the bare essentials from which that denomination will not back down. Among the Baptists, some of these are the Trinity, the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, and the sufficiency of Christ. It is this last term that I would like to address.

Romans 3:25 says that Jesus Christ was set forth to be a propitiation (covering) through faith in his blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past. Simply stated it means that the cleansing blood of Jesus was sufficient to cover all the sins, of all mankind, throughout all time. There is no sin, no matter how heinous, or offensive, or abhorrent, that the lifeblood of the Lamb of God cannot cleanse. Be it murder or rape, drug addict or drug dealer, abortion or abortionist, idolatry or idol maker, the occult or child sacrifice, they are one and all forgiven to those who accept the substitutionary death of Christ.

Lest there be any doubt that all sins are categorized by God under one heading-SIN, Romans 3:22-23 levels the playing field at the foot of the cross when it declares Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all that believe: for there is no difference: for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. (KJV) Any attempt to categorize sin by degrees, ignores the holiness of God. Even prior to the cross, under the Levitical system, if you violate the law at any one point, you are guilty of violating all the law.

With few exceptions, every church I have attended considered the stain of divorce as somehow being exempt from the cleansing power of the blood of Christ. Judging from their attitudes and actions, they have categorized this one sin as unique from all others, and in doing so, they have declared that the blood of reconciliation is somehow deficient in its capacity to forgive the supposed sin of divorce. It is as if that stain will can never be removed from the fabric of our lives. According to them, the failure of a marriage will forever be on the spiritual 'rap sheet' of the divorcee. If such is the case, how can we believe it to be sufficient to cleanse the rest of the failures in our past?

The law of non-contradiction states that two contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time, and in the same sense. If God declares the sacrifice of His Son to be an acceptable payment for the sins of mankind, but mankind decides it to be insufficient in some manner, one of them must be wrong. Who than shall we believe? Should we defend the Word of God as it is written, or shall we defend the doctrines of man?

Is God trying to deceive us with false security, or is man simply trying again to find one more way to justify himself over his brother in Christ? Listen again to what the scripture says. Just as all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God in verse 23, so also all have attained to the righteousness of God through faith in Christ Jesus in verse 22. (emphasis mine) What it does not say is, all those except divorcees have attained.

Now consider the cost of the sacrifice that was required to reconcile sinful mankind to a holy God. Since we have not been "redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold, or by vain conversations received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot (I Peter 1:18, emphasis mine), then we who have been redeemed will be presented before the Father blameless. For Christ did not offer up the blood of bulls and goats which have to be continually offered up, but by His own blood, thereby putting an end to all sacrifice once and for all. Nor should He offer Himself often, . . . but now once in the end of the world has He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself (Hebrews 9:25-26).

If the blood of Christ is not sufficient to pay for the sin of divorce, what more does the church require? Shall we add corruptible things as silver or gold? Should we supplement the blood of God with the blood of bulls or goats? Most emphatically, God forbid!!! Or as Dr. Bob Utley would say, Croak No!! This is clearly a case where it is the vain conversations received by traditions from your fathers that is being defended here by the church in the matter of divorce. And sometimes the traditions of man are defended with more zeal than the truth of scripture.

Pride and Prejudice

In 1991, John Warwick Montgomery edited an apologetic book called Evidence for Faith. It contains a chapter entitled Pride and Prejudice which chronicles the stranglehold tradition can sometimes have on rational thinking. It seems there was a young Hungarian surgeon in the 1840's who was assigned to a hospital in Vienna, Austria that was in the grip of an epidemic called childbirth fever. The mortality rate for expectant mothers entering the hospital for delivery was one in six. This Dr. Semmelweis made a monumental observation. The deaths occurred with greatest frequency in patients who had been examined by physicians who had just autopsied puerperal fever victims. Something was being transmitted from dead patients, to living patients. So he made a change.

On his wards he insisted that following autopsies, physicians would wash their hands in chlorinated lime water. Within three months the mortality rate dropped to 1 in 84. Not satisfied, he concluded that the disease could pass between living patients, so he ordered the hand washing after every exam, living or dead. The mortality rate dropped even further. But instead of being recognized as the discoverer of bacteria by his peers, he was ostracized and persecuted because he restricted the convenience of the physicians. Instead of being promoted, he was fired. His life story does not have a happy ending. He died at the age of 31 of a bacterial infection in a mental asylum. As McMillen so accurately reflects, We mortals might as well face it- the human mind is so warped by pride and prejudice that proof can rarely penetrate it. So it almost always is with the doctrines of man.

The obituaries record the mortality rate for bacterial infections. But no such records exist for the victims of pride and prejudice. But just as bacteria is destructive to the human body, so to, any doctrine of man that is perpetuated by pride and/or prejudice is life threatening to the living organism that is the body of Christ. The Guardians of the Doctrines of Man, or the GDM's as I will call them, would argue that the indefensible practice of prejudice towards the divorcee is necessary for the overall spiritual health of the church as a whole; without recognizing that the supposed 'cure' is more detrimental to the body than any possible imagined threat from us. So, you may well argue, if it is so prominent in our churches, why hasn't it received more notoriety than it has? I think the answer lies in the performance of the B1 bomber.

B 1 Bomber

This magnificent marvel of aerospace technology was designed for the express purpose of 'flying under the radar' of the enemy's defenses undetected. With its smooth outer body configuration it does not send back to the point of origin any more recognizable blip on the radar screen than a large bird. And who would suspect a large bird of being a threat? Likewise in our churches, the treatment of divorcees passes almost unnoticed in the evangelical church because it does not appear to be life threatening.

Unlike Gnosticism, or the Nicolaitans, or Jezebel, Paul might not categorize it as a doctrine of demons, but for sure he would challenge it as causing a schism within the church body. Because it does not challenge such foundational issues as the deity of Christ, His virgin birth, or resurrection, etc. the lack of 'respect of persons' shown by nondivorced people flies 'under the radar' so to speak. The very presence of this prejudice is all the more amazing to me because in the first century New Testament church, divorce was not a divisive issue. In my estimation, it is a reemergence of Old Testament Phariseeism. These were the original GDM's, verbalizing strict dedication to the letter of the Law of Moses as they defined it, all the while violating the spirit of the Law. Today's GDM's take scripture (1 Tim. 3:2&12) and in the guise of 'literal translation' violate the spirit of Grace. In both cases, it is no more than one group of believers exercising control over other believers

That is Pride. That is Prejudice. That is a Problem

Somewhere down the road of church history, somebody misdiagnosed what they perceived might be harmful to the body of Christ, namely the divorcee, and overlooked the real nemesis, the leaven of Phariseeism. (Mark 8:15) The prescription intended for good (categorizing the divorcee as spoiled goods) caused more harm than good.

NSAID'S

In her 2001 book, Pain Free in 6 Weeks, Sherry A. Rogers, M.D. goes to great length to describe in detail the dangers of prescribing NSAID (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) over a long period of time. The basic formula is aspirin with little attached chemical groups that can be patented and sold for whatever the market will bear. They are so much like aspirin that some call them a new sort of aspirin in disguise. Technically, these drugs are called cylooxygenase inhibitors. Dr. Rogers explains:

All that means is they turn down or moderate inflammatory chemistry so that we do not hurt so much. It is sort of like driving down the highway and seeing the red oil light of your car come on. If you smash it with a hammer that is analogous to taking NSAIDs. You have done nothing to address the danger, you have just turned off the annoying reminder. "You've done nothing to fill your oil reservoir, and so you are headed for disaster as the oil reaches an engine-damaging, level.

The same thing happens with NSAIDs. They don't do a thing to restore function or enable you to find the cause of your chronic pain and inflammation, but they do have pretty nasty side effects. They can cause fatal liver and kidney damage, fatal hemorrhage from the bowel, as well as irreparable damage to vision. What is more astounding is that they actually cause bone to deteriorate. And the longer they are taken, the more bone they destroy, with the unsuspecting victim accumulating more osteoporosis and osteopenia." (Emphasis in the original, page 75)

Maybe, just maybe, in the last couple hundred years, some well intending church fathers saw the divorce rate begin to increase and saw the damage and pain it brought to those families. Not wanting the same thing to happen to the church as a whole they decided, apart from scriptural authority, to prohibit these supposedly dysfunctional people from being placed in leadership positions. Supposing divorcees would cause some kind of 'inflammation and pain' to the body of Christ, they prescribed a masking of the symptoms by reinterpreting 1 Timothy 3:2&12 (the husband of one wife), as having never been divorced, thus barring divorcees from the 'joints' or ' workings ' of the church.

In the previous analogy, the red light would be the Holy Spirit warning the church that some preventative maintenance has been overlooked, like premarital workshops, or godly role models. Smashing the red light would be diverting attention from the debilitating disease of religious Phariseeism, (the 'log' in Matt. 7:3) to focus on divorce (the 'speck').

Nothing has been done to address the source (the real problem) of the illness, which is the reemergence of legalism. Just as NSAID's cause the bones to deteriorate, legalism will deteriorate the foundation of grace on which the church was founded. Is there not a minister in the house that can diagnose the cause of illness and stop trying to second guess the symptoms? Has the church so soon forgotten that it is "by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God? (Eph. 2:8) When you choke down or limit grace, when you constrict the workings of the gifts of the Spirit, you cause irreparable damage to the functioning of the body of Christ. For it is the extending of grace, and not the perpetuation of legalism, that reconciles sinful man to a holy God.

What the well intending church fathers prescribed was a spiritual