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Would you turn to begin with to the book of Exodus? And I'd be glad if we could read round, starting there, working round the back row, and coming back to the front, if we get as far as that, the first 17 verses, one at a time, Exodus chapter 20, the first 17 verses. Read loud, we just hope the microphone can hear. Well, as you know, the general topic is man, woman, and family in Christ, and you could reasonably ask, what has the chapter from the Old Testament, before Christ came, dealing with the Ten Commandments got to do with man, woman, and family in Christ? But also you could answer it in part, couldn't you, because the verse that says, honor thy father and thy mother, deals with children in relation to their parents, and that's a family, and thou shalt not commit adultery, deals with one's behavior towards other people's wives, and thou shalt not commit thy neighbor's wife, does the same thing. So there are at least three places in those Ten Commandments where the topic we're considering is touched upon. But the reason I had the chapter read was quite different, and it was this. Just imagine yourself, any one of you, standing one by one, in front of any teacher who then says to you, now these are the things you've got to do, and these are the things you've not got to do. You ought to have no other God beside me, you're not to make any grave an image, you're not to take the name of the Lord your God in vain, you're to honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy, you're to honor your father and your mother, you are not to kill, commit adultery, steal, or bear false witness, and you are not to covet a variety of things set out in the seventeenth verse. Now I rather feel that in this twentieth century and in this year, 1981, most people put in that position would say, who are you to talk to me like that? Because there's no doubt, is there, that these verses are laying down absolutely plainly and clearly and simply, you are to do as you are told, say the verses. Now you live in a country where you have freedom of worship, and freedom to do this and freedom to do that, and freedom to make an noise in classrooms at school, and freedom to make the teacher's life misery for them, and all kinds of things that don't really harmonize with doing as one is told. And we don't live in a kind of atmosphere where people like doing as they are told, they like doing as they like. We do our own things, we do it our way. Now that's not the way the Bible ever talks to us, and I think one of the hardest lessons that those who want to be true disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ have to learn is the lesson of doing as we are told, of being obedient, of accepting that somebody has the right to tell us what to do. The Bible takes it for granted all the way through. There's no right to decide which gods they would worship, they were very severely punished when they worshipped the wrong ones, or which way they would behave, or whether they would have a rest day or not. One of the reasons why they were turned out of their land was because they didn't keep their Saturday Sabbaths as they should have done. All the way through the instruction was do as God tells you to do, and then it will be right with you. Let's give you another example. In the same book in the previous chapter, Exodus chapter 19, I read verse 5. Now therefore if you will obey my voice indeed, says God, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people, for all the earth is mine, and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel. If you will obey my voice indeed, if you will do as you're told, then I will be well pleased with you, you will occupy a high position in the earth, and you will enjoy pleasure and prosperity. That's what God said to Israel, what he keeps on saying. Let's look at it from the standpoint of the various works of creation that God made. Just turn to Genesis chapter 1. Genesis 1 verse 1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light, and it was good. And just go through just briefly the various things that God did on the six days described before us here. On the first day, let there be light, and there was light. On the second day, verse 6, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters, and God made the firmament. On the third day, verse 9, let the waters under the heaven be into one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. On the fourth day, verse 14, let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and seasons, and days, and years, and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and it was so, and God made the appropriate lights. On the fifth day, verse 20, and God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, and let fowls fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven, and God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, and he created the winged fowl. On the sixth day, verse 24, and God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, creeping things, beasts of the earth after its kind, and it was so, and God made the beast and the creeping things. And then, on the part of the and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image. Now just summarize in detail what God did on those various days. He made the light. He made a firmament to divide waters below from waters above. He caused the earth to be drained so that there might be dry land, and rivers, and seas. He caused vegetation to grow, and he made the sun, moon, and stars. He made the beasts, and he made man. And the further you go in the direction of that list of things, the more uncertain does God's absolute rulership become. Light is just light. It comes from objects that shine, and they shine when they're hot enough, or when they've got the appropriate conditions, and they've got no say in the matter at all. They're just hot objects or illuminated ones. When the waters are separated above and below, there they are. God separates them, and water can't think and decide how it will move. It flows downhill if he gets the chance, and it drains when the opportunity comes. It's just water. It does as the conditions dictate. When God drained the earth, you had dry land that stays where it is, and waters that flow, and again they obey the laws of nature. When God made the heavenly objects, they're heavenly and once you grant that the earth is 93 million miles away from the sun, and once you have seen what its orbit will be, you know that in about 365.23 days per year, it will get back to the place where it was in relation to the sun, and then you'll do it again and again. And the moon in relation to the earth goes round the earth at its distance of about 225,000 miles once every 28 and a half days, or whatever it might be. And it's just the way they're built, and the laws of nature, that's the way they will keep on going, though they're God's laws. It never occurs to anything like that, to do anything that God doesn't want it to do. When you come to living things, it's a little bit different. When God said, let the earth bring forth the grass and the trees and so forth, well, the earth no doubt obediently did so, and it still does. Also, when God said, thorns also and thistles, shall it bring forth to thee? When none had sinned, then thorns and thistles it did bring forth, and in the ordinary course of nature, that's what you get. If you have grass seed, you sow it, you get grass. If you had, and you wanted to do it, thorn and thistle seed, and you sowed those, though why you would, I can't imagine, then you would get thorns and thistles. And the only exception to that law is me, because when I sow grass seed, I get thorns and thistles, and I've never been able to understand why that is, but it seems to happen all the time. There may be an explanation, but you must tell me if you think of one. It's, the law of nature is generally obeyed that those things do as they're expected to do. When you get the moving things, well, it's a little bit different, because they do have a kind of freedom of will. If you create a horse, then the horse will move about to where it sees the pasture, and if you create a fish, the fish will go about to where it can find its plankton, or whatever it is that fish eat, unless it happens to be a fish eating fish, and then it will go to where the little fish are. So these things move about, and they have a certain freedom of choice, but their choice is always dictated by their appetites, not just their appetites for food either, but by their appetites for each other, so that the next generation will arise. It's only when you come to man that this thing breaks down, because when you come to people like us, we don't instinctively obey the law of God at all. In some of our natural appetites, we do, because when we're hungry, we try to get food to eat, and when we reach the appropriate age, we try to find somebody with whom we can make friends and live and become the parents of their children. So yes, we do have certain natural appetites of our own, but in other respects, we're quite different from the rest of creation. We don't naturally do as we're told, and the reason why we are not very pleased when we are told to do as we are told is that we don't do it naturally. We've got something else deep within us that makes us think otherwise, and if we're going to begin to make any kind of inclusion and all kinds of things upon our lives in the matter of man, woman and family in Christ, we have to get fixed in our minds the idea that somewhere along the line we must prefer to do as we're told. That's why I'm beginning rather a long way around about in this. Turn to Genesis chapter three then and find out how it came about that we are the kind of people that we are. Can we read round again Genesis chapter three verse one until I say stop, going on from whatever you did stop last time. You know shiny pressure that you die. I think they heard the words of the Lord God. The Lord called him to heaven and said, He said, I heard that voice in the garden, and I was just saying, because I was naked, and that is what he said. He said, he told me that thou was naked. The man said, for one of the two men who is to be with me, to be with the tree that I have been. That would be enough for now thank you. Now notice the way in which that thing progressed. In the first place God gave a perfectly clear and distinct law, eat what you like except for the fruit of a certain tree called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the second place a tempter, we didn't discuss who the tempter was or why it tempted in this way, came along and said, has God said you are not to eat of every tree of the garden? The woman answered, we may eat of every tree except one, and concerning that one tree, God has said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it lest you die. Now I can't find anywhere previously in that chapter the words of God, neither shall you touch it. All that God had said apparently was, you shall not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest it, thou shalt surely die. Why, I wonder, did he put in those words, neither shall you touch it. Now some people would say that was an invention on Esports, she attributed something that God hadn't said to him, but I don't think that can be right because she hadn't sinned yet, and if she was saying something about God that wasn't true, she was sinning already, and her sin came when she ate the forbidden fruit, so it can't have been wrong to say what she said when she said that God said, neither shall you touch it. And I reckon something like this probably went on that we don't really know. They were a very friendly group of people, God and his children, during those first days in the garden, however many or few they were. They got on well together, and God seems to have been in the habit of paying them regular visits in some form that they could understand and that they could bear, for when later they heard the voice of the Lord God as he walked in the garden in the cool of the day, it rather looked as though it was a habit of his through whatever manifestation it was. And so perhaps regularly, day by day, it pleased God to have communication with and conversation with his children, and it looked to me as though once the woman might have said to him, that tree of knowledge and good and evil, we know we're not to eat of it, but is it all right to handle it? And God said, better not you know, because once you start that way you don't know when you'll stop. That's true isn't it? You'll probably have the same kind of experience. Mother makes a delightful cake, and she puts the cake in an eye shot, and you say, can I have a piece? And she says, no, leave it, it's for your birthday, three days time, whatever it might be, when you've grown up to one year older than you were. So you say, all right mother, and she goes out of the room, and you say, that's a nice looking cake, of course I mustn't eat it. It wouldn't do any harm to feel it, would it? So you feel it, and the frosting is soft, and you've got to get rid of the frosting somehow. Well, when mother comes back there are only the crumbs, and you can see why can't you? If only you'd asked before mother in doubt, would it be all right to touch it? She would have given the same advice as it looks as though God gave to eat. No, leave well alone, don't go near it, because if you do, well you might one day find yourself committing the same. So I think that when the innocent Eve, just like a schoolgirl, just like a little child, said to the serpent, no, God said, don't eat it, and don't touch it, she was fully speaking the truth, and that is what God had said. However, the tempter said, you shall not surely die, and God doth know that in the day that ye eat thereof ye shall be as God to know good and evil. By the way, our common version says, shall be as God's. It's the word Elohim, it is a plural word, it could be rendered God's, but usually it just means the one Almighty God, and ye shall be like God is the most likely meaning of the word. As though the tempter said, one, it won't kill you, and two, you'll be a God in your own right if you have it. So there was the temptation. Take it, you'll enjoy it, you'll know a lot more when you've had it, and you can be your own God. Now what the woman ought to have said when all those things were put before her was, well, whatever you say, I've been told I mustn't eat it. Even if you're right, that it would make me very wise, that God has said don't touch it, so I won't. He made me, he has the right to say. And even if you're right, it would make me an independent God, I'm not supposed to be an independent God, I'm supposed to be under the one God there is, so no thank you, I won't have any. That's the kind of answer she ought to have given. But with the temptation before her, and with the statement that she wouldn't come to any harm if she did, then obedience was put in a bad place. It was what she could get that became more important than what would happen to her, and what she could get that became more important than what God wants me to do, and so she did it out of purely personal motives for what she could get from me. She saw that the tree was good for food, and the fruit thereof to be desired to make one wise, and she took and she did eat. She tried to make herself her own goddess. When she gave to her husband, apparently with his eyes wide open, took of the fruit and committed the same sin that she had, he either wanted to be his own god or was determined to go the way his wife went, and anyway the two of them went together and the result was they became fallen creatures. Well the rest of the story would be comical if it weren't so tragic. God says to the woman, what did you do that for? She said, because the servant beguiled me, which is true, there was no excuse. Then God said to the man before that, hadn't he, he said to the man, what did you do that for? And the man said, the woman gave to me, and I did eat. Now you can say that was the first case when a man blamed his wife for something he'd done wrong. I don't think he was just doing that, he was blaming his god. He said, the woman whom thou gave us to be with me, she gave me of the fruit and I did eat, and already the seeds of real rebellion in the man's mind is your fault, God. If you hadn't given me that woman, I wouldn't have done it. So you get the basic human unwillingness to do as we're told, coming right to the fore in Adam's answer to what God said when he said, why hast thou done this? Well you know the outcome, they're expelled from the garden, they are given the coats of skins by God in replacement for their improvised aprons of pig leaves, and they become the prey to all the weed growing and thorns and thistles that the earth could bring. They become certain of dying and one day they do both die and sin multiplies in such a way that there's a murder in the next generation when Cain kills Abel and then the world becomes so bad that by the time we get to Noah it has to be destroyed because wickedness is almost everywhere and all that arose because people wouldn't do as they were told. Now the way to climb back from that is not easy. We are all in the model of our first parents. When God said let us make man in our image, we had the opportunity, if only our first parents had taken it, of remaining in God's image, willingly obeying him and gladly doing as we were told. But when the sin took place we learned that Adam begat a son in his image and called him Seth, and so all the rest of us are like Adam, who in some ways was like God. We've got the right kind of shape and the right kind of mind, the right kind of understanding, but it's still to be true that even modern man is made in God's image, but there's this big difference that now we don't want to go God's way, we have to be waiting to do so, or we have to be compelled to do so, or we have to be reborn to do so. Now we who meet with the Bible in our hands are not merely people who are God's creatures and for that reason should do as we are told, we are some of us people who have already been recreated in our baptism in the Lord Jesus Christ and all of us are thinking of that in due course and so for everybody in that position there's the statement that Paul makes later, you are not your own, you are bought with a price. So in addition to the duty of all creation to do as God tells us, we have the double duty to do as God tells us when we have been baptized into Christ or when we think of being, because we either have been or are going to be, bought with a price that involved the death of God's beloved Son, and so there's not merely the duty to do as we ought, there's the urge to do so, because such was the love that God gave to us in causing Christ to die for our souls. A man and woman side of this coming straight into our subject in Genesis chapter 2. I'd like us to read from verse 18 to the end of the chapter, again taking up where we left off. Genesis 2 from verse 18. And then I gave the name Paul to Adam, but for Adam there was no time to help me. Yes, thank you. The picture I have in my mind as to what happened then is something like this. It may not have been a bit like it really, but that's the way in which it presents itself to me. There we have in the Garden of Eden all the living creatures that were made and they're all tame. None of them will do any harm to Adam when they come to him and they're all there in couples. That's the bit I can't prove, but I think they were all there in couples. The work of creation of the animals had already been done anyhow and no doubt their males and their females had all been made. So they're brought before man. There's a token of his authority. He gives them all their names, which means he has the right to rule over them. So you're a lion and you're a pig and whatever it might be. There was nothing personal in that remark. So there you have them and they come along. The animals come two by two and when the parade is over there's just Adam one by one. And to Adam there was no time to help me for him. All they have got their spouses or their husbands and Adam all by himself without one. That's what the record is presenting before us and no doubt he realizes what God says. It is not good that man should be alone. Interesting isn't it that when the work of creation is described in chapter one, at the end of each day's work we learn and God saw the light that it was good or God saw the earth that it was good or God saw the creatures that they were good and at the end God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good. And here we have Genesis chapter two saying it is not good. So Genesis two obviously is written before the final part of man's creation has been brought about and that is before man has been made what God meant him to be. Remember the words are let us make man in our image and after our likeness. So God created man in his image and in his likeness. In the image of God created he him male and female created he them. So until they were male and female it wasn't good. So in some way therefore these words of Genesis two are to be incorporated in Genesis chapter one verse 26. It wasn't all at once good. It needed two stages before it became good and that was when the woman was made as well. So the man needed a partner. God said I will make him and help meet for him and both the people who read the help meet for him said I will make him a help meet for him. Joining together the help and the meet as though they were one word or putting a hyphen between. I think probably because help might come so easy but really it isn't like that. God didn't say I will make him a help meet for him. He said I would make him a help meet for him. Meet meaning appropriate, suitable, adaptive. So I'll make him a help of the more help meets right. I will make him in help meet for him. So you look through all the animals and you say well a lioness wouldn't do or a pigess wouldn't do. You want the right kind of help so I will make him in help meet for him. He wants one of his own kind. Now we must presume but we don't know anything about it that when God made the rest of creation he made a male and a female in the same way from the same dust of the ground. Made them independent. Didn't make them in the way he made man and woman. We know from Genesis chapter 2 that when he made man and woman he made it in this precise way that the man was there to begin with without a woman. That then he was put under anesthesia and surgery was performed and the bone was removed and that bone was shaped into a woman and that woman was presented to him and then there were two and Adam looked and said having been told no doubt what had taken place this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This starts us off on a line that's not going to be too easy to follow. Again because we live in the 20th century and because people don't look at each other in these ways now and women don't like in particular to be regarded in the kind of way that Genesis chapter 2 brings out. So can I begin by apologizing for being a man? I can't help it you see it's the way I was born and I don't think my second name is chauvinist at least it's not meant to be. I don't feel like that at all. In fact I think I could say quite frankly that some of the things in the relationship between man and woman, husband and wife or whatever it might be, which the bible sets out and which in loyalty to the bible I have got to accept and also got to knew are things which I wouldn't have chosen for myself. The idea of being a boss in a family didn't happen to appeal to me. It's just one of those things which without the word boss there but authority or something is required by God and there's something in the relationship between man and woman set out in the bible that is again there for us to accept and that's again why the message of being obedient becomes so important to us. We all tend to rebel against these things in these days and especially in the days of women's liberation it's not easy at all for a woman to accept the kind of position that the bible says she is in in relation to the man. Not easy for the man to treat it right, I don't know it never was but it's not easy at all now. So let's again quite humbly recognize that this story of creation is meant to tell us something about how how God wants men and women to regard each other. It clearly doesn't convey within it at all any idea of what you would call authority to begin with because the authority wouldn't be needed when they were unfallen. Everything would go right until they sinned. It's only when people have become sinners that things begin to go wrong and so when God says therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they too shall be one flesh. If you could imagine there being children of unfallen parents themselves with no sinful tendencies in their hearts then I take it that a man would leave his father and his mother's home and would be joined in matrimony to his wife and the harmony between them would be such that the idea that A tells B what to do would never have arisen. It would be an automatic compliment of the lives that they would live as creatures who were obeying their God so all would go well with them. The reason why we have to talk about this kind of thing at all is because things have gone wrong but I must pursue that just a little bit further now having got to that point we may as well pursue it to the I hope not bitter end. So can we turn to 1st Corinthians in the New Testament chapter 11. I will just read the first two or three verses of this chapter. 1st Corinthians chapter 11 yes. Be ye followers of me even as I also am of Christ. That's a good starting point by the way for what I want to read later. Paul says follow me but he says I'm following Christ so he means let me lead you on the way to Christ not follow me because I'm Paul but follow me because I am following Christ who tells me what to say to you. It's another case of a man set under authority doing as he's told and therefore able to tell other people to do as they're told. Then he goes on now I praise you brethren that you remember me in all things and keep the ordinances as I delivered them to you but I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ and the head of the woman is the man and the head of Christ is God. There are three postulates there aren't there the head of every man is Christ the head of the woman is the man and the head of Christ is God. Now two of those things I think we can accept without difficulty one of them we might have difficulty in pursuing it but we can accept it in words at least. The one that gives us no problem is the head of Christ is God. We know that so we know that Christ is the son of God we know he said I do always those things that please my father we know that God has honored him with every name and that the Lord Jesus Christ will one day take all the things that he has done and give it to God the father that God may be all and in all so we're quite satisfied that the head of Christ is God though mind you it wasn't always easy for Christ himself to recognize that to know it yes but to do it well that's another matter that we're talking about in the adult class. That one though is fairly easy for us to accept because we're outside it we can see God being the head of Christ and it doesn't hurt us because he's so. Now when Paul says the head of every man is Christ well every believer knows that that's true and everyone who intends to become a believer knows that he or she must accept that as true. Christ is our head and our Lord we are expected to do as he tells us. It's the bit in the middle of those three which isn't so easy that is the head of the woman is the man but the fact that the other two are there makes it a bit easier doesn't it because he's putting four beings in order of authority and God Christ man woman or woman man Christ God. That's the sequence and he says you have no doubt that God is the head of Christ you have no doubt that Christ is the head of the man I must now tell you that in the law of Christ there is a headship I won't say for the moment what kind of headship but there is a headship which exists between man and woman too that the thing that God did in creation he really meant when he made the woman from the man and said I make him and help suitable for him there is some sort of dependence existing between man and woman and particularly between husband and wife which was part of God's plan from the very beginning when we get that firmly fixed in our minds we'll perhaps find it easier to follow let me just say one thing though just you can regard this sugaring the pill if you like but it isn't meant like that have you ever looked around at almost any religious body and sort of counted heads and saying how many men and how many women there are in that congregation well I have I've done it quite a lot for all kinds of reasons some of which will emerge God willing a bit later in this week well the answer is that even in the most shall we say matter of fact religions like ours there's probably something like a 60 40 ratio of women to men there are more women who obey the gospel than there are men quite a lot more when you get to the more emotional religions the disparity becomes even greater until you get to christian science and spiritualism they're nearly all women but with us it's about 60 40 or something like that now there must be something to make it like that and I haven't any doubt in my own mind that one of the major reasons for it is that the man the male man is naturally the more rebellious creature men like having their own way more than or in a different way than if you like women like having their own way god has so made us that even in these emancipated ages there are quite a lot of female men who are happy to do as they're told who don't mind being in subjection who like playing the second fiddle who enjoy that position better than being on top that's even in when it's not considered popular or right that it should be so women find that an easier position to accept than men do and one of the things that follows from that is that if you're willing to do that with each other you're also willing to do it with your god and the natural rebelliousness of the male man who wants to go his own way reveals itself in that quite often starting with earliest ages it's the young men who leave the sunday school first or go out into the world or take a lot of time to think about it before they come back if they do come back and accept christ and it's the young women who in a greater proportion stick closer to this and accept christ earlier and don't have so much trouble about doing so and again there are plenty of exceptions to that it's just statistical this but broadly speaking it works out that way that on the whole women accept obedience more readily than men do well that carries with its own problems in ecclesial life when there are far more women than men but all the same if ever young women you're supposed to feel a bit resentful that the bible does give a second place in authority to yourselves rather than to men bear in mind that so far as salvation is concerned you have a real advantage it's much more likely that people like yourself will accept the road of salvation and you've got a much smaller sacrifice to make in doing so far as humility is concerned than arrogant male man has so be grateful for that it's it's worth a lot more than the need to be a bit humble this from the time now the one last point i want to make now is continuing the story of creation and bringing out something else that will help us a lot as we go on it's still in the new testament and i'd be glad if you would turn to ephesians chapter five chapter five of ephesians i'd like you to read around again if you will please starting at verse 22 and reading to end of ephesians five so that he must present himself a glorious truth not having spiraled before any victim okay this should be holy and without that doesn't sound right chapter five verse 28 and well this time shall a man meet his father and mother and shall be joined in his way reading thank you when reading around there are several ways of trying to have the right verse ready when it comes to your turn one way is following while it's being read you don't often go wrong that way the second is to count ahead and say my time will come at verse 17 or whatever it is which is all right if you counted right if you happen to be looking at the right chapter but it goes away disastrously if you haven't and of course the third way is to fall into daydream when you'll never get it right so let's try to give us attention shall we then we shall know where we are now there's something very important in this chapter there's a lot it's all important and we'll come to it again later but you will notice that he's repeating some of the things i said about the position of the sexes in relation to each other in marriage about wives doing as their husbands ask and husbands loving their wives but that husbands loving their wives set in a very different context here from the way in which we might normally think of it they say that in old-fashioned victorian homes husbands thought they were the boss by decree of god which in a sense that is true but only in a sense and exercised it so they could do just as they liked and lay down the law with a very heavy hand and generally be tyrants in their houses whether it was true i don't know because there are plenty of examples the other way around the wife wielded the rolling pin when it was quite different but the the theory was that you had a kind of right to be a boss and there were no responsibilities in return now it's certainly not the way which is set out in this chapter and the way in which it brings in the lord jesus christ into the picture shows us the right way in which any sort of authority in a household ought to be exercised husbands love your wives as christ also loved the church and gave himself up for it that he might purify it to himself a holy bride having no spot nor wrinkle nor any such thing and if you ask how did christ love the church did he do it for the sake of being its boss and the answer is no though he is the head he did it for the sake of bringing about its salvation and giving it everything he could because he loved it and the extent that he went in making it possible for that to happen was to die for it so that lord jesus christ won the right to his lordship by claiming nothing but himself by but by giving it up and making himself the offering that made it possible for people to come to salvation and what that chapter brings out if it brings out no more is that whenever any man thinks of being a married man any believing person and thinks of the responsibilities that that involves he should bear in mind that the lord jesus christ gained his authority by the sufferings he underwent by the sacrifices he made by stopping thinking about himself and by thinking about the one he loved and desiring to bring about the benefit and the blessing of that one and if every man who always exercised such authority as belongs to him in that kind of spirit then he will do it a lot better than he sometimes does i speak as a fool being that kind of a person having gone through my own years of married life and not always been quite as good as this i can assure you and if every woman had a husband like that then she would find that her position in life would be very much more bearable and enjoyable than it sometimes can be if the man is a mere tyrant it's getting as far back as one can get to being in the garden of eden again and the words that are said at the end of genesis chapter two so if we both kinds of sections bear that in mind in our responsibilities to each other life will be much easier all around however the apostle doesn't merely say husbands love your wives because christ loved the church he almost seems to leave his subject he starts off by saying wives do as your husbands say husbands love your wives and then having said even as christ loved the church he spends the next few verses in describing christ as though he was adam and the church as though it was eve even to the extent of we are bone we are of his body of his bones and of his flesh he even quotes the words of genesis chapter two about christ therefore shall the man leave his father and his mother and shall leave his wife she'll be joined unto his wife and they twain shall become one flesh and he says this is a great mystery but i speak concerning christ and the church nevertheless let each one of you separately love his own wife as himself and the wife see that she hear her husband so the apostle having started off with how any given christian husband ought to behave in relation to any given christian wife and the other way around goes off onto what looks like a side theme but it isn't it's the major theme of the lord jesus christ and his church or his bride and he's saying in effect that when god said let us make man in our image and after our likeness and when god made man male and female he had in mind that that would be a little picture of the big thing he had in mind and the big thing he had in mind was the lord jesus christ his husband bridegroom and the believing church as being his bride that was where it was all working up till i've taken i mean i've officiated out a fair number of weddings in the course of the last few years and when the parties concerned have happily agreed that it should be so amongst the declarations that the bride and the bridegroom have made is this the bridegroom says in the name of our lord jesus christ and in the presence of our heavenly father i do call upon these persons here presence to witness that i do take thee and the rest of the formulae and then i promise so to live with my wife that our union may faithfully bear witness to the love of our lord for his church and the wife to be says in reply so to live with my husband our union may faithfully bear witness to the devotion of his church to our lord and that if you start a married life in that kind of way puts the thing in its right perspective and shows where it's intended to lead and it tells every married couple man be as much like christ as you can in relation to your wife and wife be as much like the obedience of the church to as you can in your relation to your husband and then you present the right picture to the world then your life will have a real meaning in it and then it will come most safely and most securely and most harmoniously to its appointed goal we might complete that one by just looking at the picture which we have of that event in revelation chapter 19 revelation 19 i shall read from verse 5 and a voice came out of the throne saying praise our god all ye his servants and ye that fear him both small and great and i heard as it were the voice of a great multitude and as the voice of and as the voice of mighty thunderings saying hallelujah for the lord god omnipotent reigneth let us be glad and rejoice and give honor unto him for the marriage of the lamb is come and his wife hath made herself ready and to her it was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen clean and white for the fine linen is the righteousness of the saints and that's the goal which we're all working it's the goal moreover to which is i think you can see although in our ordinary life there's a man and there's a woman they are in relationship of man and woman husband and wife the giver of and the receiver of a certain measure of authority between them but as soon as it comes to our relation to christ we're all part of the woman and the subordination which is expected in our ordinary lives of one to the other becomes everybody's subjection to christ and we are all as it were in the female you

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and between us all and our God through the Lord Jesus Christ. But there are several passages in scripture where another kind of obedience is spoken of. And it will help me to introduce another topic by bringing that in first of all. So would you turn to Romans chapter 13? And perhaps following the same technique as yesterday and starting in the same place, with a rather crooked back row there. I think we can make it out alright. We go there, and then we go there, and then we come back around there like so. It doesn't really matter. Romans chapter 13, then, can we read the first seven verses, verse by verse, please? Romans 13, starting at verse 1. Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there is no power but God. The powers that be are ordained with God. This the residence for whom this is the power, and this is the ordinance of God. And that it be with which shall it stay to this day of care and action. For who is not of care of good works, but to the evil? Will thou then not be afraid of the power? See, that which is good now shall have praise for the name of the Father and the Son. May the Lotus Most ц commissions get this and beg him that he should not be afraid of the power, because he is the servant of God, that will be his saviour, as he will from his seed. Can we go on, please, to Verses 5, 6 and 7? Yes, thank you. Now, in that chapter, and in several others in the New Testament, the apostles are dealing with the relationship of believers to the country in which they live, and are saying, obey the laws, be a good resident, don't be noted for disobedience, but pay respect to the powers who are placed over you. That's another kind of obedience which is called for in these pilgrim days, from the disciple of God even to the earthly powers which are run by unbelievers, that they must always, or nearly always, do as they're told. I said nearly always because there are certain circumstances in which the disciple of Christ can't do as the country tells him to do. And there was one case of that, as you might perhaps remember, when, just after the day of Pentecost, when the disciples were preaching the Gospel in Jerusalem, Peter and his friends were commanded by the rulers that they should speak no more in the name of Jesus. And Peter's answer on two occasions was, whether it is right in the sight of God to obey you rather than God, you judge. And on the other, we ought to obey God rather than men. So there was a case where, if the powers that be made a law or issued a commandment, which would have made the disciple into an unfaithful disciple, then the disciple must say, I will not do as you say, I must do as my God says. And the really important thing to bear in mind there is that one doesn't choose to be disobedient, one doesn't like the law. And I don't say, I will break the law because it suits me better not to keep it. You say, if there is a law given which cuts across the commandments of God, then and only then, for the sake of my loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ, I must say, no, I cannot keep that law. And that's what Peter was saying on this occasion. Now that goes a little bit further and extends even into family life too. You might remember that the Lord Jesus Christ once said, I am come to set a father against the son and the son against the father, and the mother against the daughter and the daughter against the mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law. I have not come to send peace but a sword. And there what the Lord was saying was this, that when the Gospel is preached, there will be some who are willing to obey it and there will be some who are not. And the line between obedience and disobedience can cut right across family loyalties. There will sometimes be a son who is willing to obey and a father who is not, or the other way around. A daughter who is willing to obey and a mother who is not, or the other way around. A daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law who are not. Even a husband and a wife. And whereas that is not discussed in the particular passage that I've mentioned, where the Lord doesn't, as I can recall, mention husband and wife, that would be the one valid occasion when a partner who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ could cut across the duty of obedience and say there is a higher loyalty that I must follow. So sometimes children have had to accept the hostility of their parents, and if necessary endure being turned out of the home because they wish to follow Christ. Sometimes they've had to say, I'm sorry, I can't agree with your command that I should not be baptized because baptism is called for me from me by my God. And sometimes husband and wife have found themselves in the same situation. You might like to turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 7. I'd like to start at verse 10 and read down as far as verse 16, verse 17. Reading round again if you will please. 1 Corinthians chapter 7 from 10 through 17. That doesn't sound right to me somehow. 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 10. But to ask, I seek, but to ask you, God, not the Lord, if any brother hath a wife that believeeth not, and she who thinketh well with him, let him not be awake. For the river which casteth out a friend that feareth not, will keep his feet on the ground, and he hath a wife that believeeth not. For the unbelieving husband is fortified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is fortified by the husband. Tell us between the children and the children, the law and the holy. For if the unbelieving wife, woman, departs, a brother or sister is not in his honor, in such a state that God will call him to peace. For what knowest thou, O wife, where thou shalt be by heaven? Or how knowest thou, O man, where thou shalt be by life? But if God hath to read it to the other man, as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk until he be in no condition. Thank you. I'll be using that passage for other purposes too before this course is over, God willing. But for the present purpose, I just want you to know that the apostle meets a situation in which a husband and wife become aware of the truth, and they make their decisions as to whether they will believe or not. And in these cases we are here considering, one says yes and the other says no. The apostle Paul then considers, so what does the believer do about it? He doesn't have to consider what does the unbeliever do about it, because the unbeliever will make his own mind up and he won't ask the apostle Paul. But he does have to answer the question, what does the believer do about it? And the answer is the believer does the utmost that the believer can to make the marriage continue to work, so that if the unbeliever is willing to stay and doesn't feel that he must forsake the believer because the believer believes, then they stay together and the believer accepts the situation. If the unbeliever insists on going, then the believer must stick firm to her or his faith and decline to follow him into wherever he goes away. So it can be a case where a husband is set against the wife if the unbeliever won't have it. It needn't be a case like that. If the unbeliever is willing to go along with the marriage already existing for the sake of keeping their union going, in those circumstances it says the apostle Paul, the believer should accept it and continue to live along, even hoping that time will arise when her example or his example will be useful in bringing the unbeliever to the faith. How knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? And how knowest thou, O husband, whether thou shalt save thy wife? So having gone as far as I need to go on the road of discussing what the duty of obedience is and the rare circumstances in which we do the opposite and say, no, I can't, as I'm told, I want to continue to use the basis of this passage for another reason. We'll leave it behind for the moment and just go back to Old Testament times. You will remember, I'm sure, that when Israel came out of the land of Egypt and they were to enter into the promised land, they were going into a land that was absolutely rotten with sinfulness. You can tell how bad it was by the fact that when God had appeared to Abraham some hundreds of years before in Genesis chapter 15, he said that the children of Abraham would go into exile in a land that wasn't theirs and they wouldn't come back to what God calls the fourth generation. For, he says, in the fourth generation they shall come here again for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full, by which God meant that the time had not yet come to exterminate the inhabitants of Canaan, but that time would come. They were going the way that would ultimately lead them to such a state of incurable sinfulness that the only way to deal with them would be the way that God had dealt with mankind at the flood, and that was to remove them from the sea. So Israel was told, when you get into that land, that what you do is wipe out the nations that are there. It's not a pleasant thing, but I don't find it pleasant. That's what the instructions were. And they were also told that amongst those who were not wiped out, they must in no circumstances consider taking the daughters of the land as wives for their sons or giving their daughters as wives for the sons of the land. There must be no contamination of the holy people by association in marriage whether with sons or daughters of the heathen in the land where they lived. At this stage, we can't imagine quite what were all the problems besetting that land, but it does look as though they had given themselves over to such a riot of immorality that the whole place was simply riddled with disease. It was probably a totally venereal disease, cultured land, where even physically to associate with them would have been to run great dangers. But apart from that, their godlessness was also such that to associate with them would cause their people to be turned aside from the one true God and to worship the abominations of the heathen idols of the lands in which they lived. So don't take their daughters to your sons, said God, and don't give your daughters to their sons, he said. Now that was a principle upon which Israel was expected to live throughout the days of their life in the land. They didn't keep it very well, they didn't give any of God's commandments very well, but they were expected to marry within their own race, to let chosen people be married to ought to marry chosen people, so that they would, if they did this, remain faithful to their God, would not contaminate his worship, would not introduce heathen idols, would not be defiled by immoral practices, but would live faithful to their God. Well, they didn't do it. They were badly mixed up with the people of the land and they were contaminated and they did suffer the ills of the people around them and God's very severe judgments came down upon them when they were divided into two nations, partly because of the immoral behavior of Solomon, and then having been divided into two nations, were piecemeal taken into captivity, the northern kingdom first and the southern kingdom afterwards. Now, you might well say that's a long, long way away from the circumstances in which we are living in the twentieth century, and so it is, both in time and circumstances. But we might then go forward from their time to New Testament times, which, although a long way away in time, wasn't so very far away in circumstances. Because there there were the Jews, who had now at last resolved that they would worship the one true God in their own false way. But at least they were not contaminated with idols. And there there were the heathen nations around them, which were worshipping their Greek gods and goddesses, and were contaminated with the moral practices that went with them. Now, we don't meet very many clear statements in the scriptures about the way in which the believer should react to those nations around them in the matter of marriage, but we do meet some. There really is one, isn't there, in this chapter that we read together. 1 Corinthians is a letter which seems to be full of answering problems which arise. In some cases there are problems which have been reported to Paul. In other cases there are problems they had actually raised with him. He's trying to answer the difficulties they felt. And I feel those verses we read together are verses that deal with a problem of that kind. Somebody had said to Paul, we know that you have said that believers should only marry believers. In fact, however, some of us were married before we were brought into contact with the truth. And we are members of broken unions. One party believes and the other party doesn't. What do we do about that? Now, not being very much concerned for the moment with Paul's advice as to what they do about it, which I've partly considered already, the reason for mentioning it is that it looks as though Paul had already given them very clear counsel on this matter. You are not to marry people who are not of your faith. And then he deals with the problem about marriage is already existing and says, as I've already said, accept that if the unbeliever will, do your utmost to bring the unbeliever to the faith in his time, but if you have a choice about this matter, then marry only in the faith. And he does give one example at the end of this chapter when he says that if somebody becomes a widow and she wishes to marry again, she is fully entitled to do so, whether it's wise or not she can. And he says, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will, only in the Lord. And even when he's talking about these marriages where they were contracted beforehand and one person believes and the other person doesn't, you get the impression that he is telling us that God is willing to make a concession. He doesn't want people to marry out of the faith. If they've done it before the faith comes, the situation can't be helped. God wants them now to make a go of it. It is at all possible. And moreover, he will accept it, God will, as a marriage which is fully valid in his sight when he says the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband, else were your children unclean, but now are they holy. And he seems to be saying, although that marriage had you both believed at the time, sorry, had only one of you believed at the time, shouldn't have taken place, yet now that it has, before you became believers, then God will accept it as being a fully valid marriage with respect to both husband and wife and children. Now the only other passage I want to quote in this connection would be from the second letter to the Corinthians where I'll read from verse 14 of chapter 6. 2 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 14. Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what fellowship have righteousness and iniquity, or what communion hath light with darkness, and what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what portion hath the believer with an unbeliever, and what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? For we are a temple of the living God, even as God said, I will dwell in them and walk in them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore, come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and I will be to you a father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. Now you will have noticed that the word marriage isn't mentioned there. But he does say that believers should not form part of a team with unbelievers being yoked together as two animals are yoked together when they draw a plough. That's verse 14. He does say that righteousness ought not to walk side by side in friendship and fellowship with unrighteousness. He does say that Christ and the personification of iniquity can't dwell together. He says you don't set up idols in the temple of God. You don't ask God to keep company with an unbeliever because you've introduced him into God's presence. And every one of those is so far-reaching in advising the disciple to keep away from association with idolatrous unbelief that there can be no doubt, I think, that everybody who contemplated marriage in the first century would see that Paul was telling them quite plainly that you're not doing the cause of God any good if a believer marries an idolater. I'm keeping it on that level for the moment because I acknowledge that this is a quite different situation still from the one in which we exist today. So there we have the advice don't corrupt and don't compromise your faith by being linked together in binding associations with people of idolatrous faiths or I suppose of no faith at all. Now although that could well cover other kinds of association it could cover association in recreation it could cover business associations it could cover all kinds of things in which people work closely together with unbelievers yet marriage is the most intimate of them all for it's difficult to imagine a situation in which a believer chooses to be married to an idolater without seeing how that believer's faith must be challenged at every turn how his practices will be contrary to those of his wife or hers to those of her husband how they'll want to go different ways on the day of worship how the things that they're willing to do will be different the things they can tolerate will be different the language they use will be different their attitude towards the Lord and Master of the believer will be different it's a life which would be bound to be lived in a total state of strain throughout the whole of its existence for as long as one remained a believer and the other one an unbeliever and of course there's always the possibility that the believer might come to the faith but there's also the possibility and it's much more likely one of the two that the unbeliever would go away from it and become cold with it or leave it all together those are good reasons and there are others why the apostle would give that advice in the first century and so now we come to the 20th and we try to relate that to our own situation now it's a situation which is made worse for us by the fact that I mentioned yesterday that there are more religious women than there are religious men and there are more Christadelphian girls than there are Christadelphian boys and even if every Christadelphian boy chose himself a Christadelphian girl as a partner in marriage there would still be girls left over and the girls in particular therefore are in a very difficult situation some at least, when the question of marriage comes about if there were a requirement that believers should continue to marry believers that it would be very hard on that excess, as it were of unmarried female Christadelphians now we have to discuss this thing on two levels one is, is it nevertheless right and the apostle's advice and a duty or at least a thing of obvious desirability that a believer should only marry a believer or be married to one and the second is if that is accepted, then what do we do about it when numbers are unequal where in any case, fancies robe in such a way that people may not find anybody they even like to marry within the bonds of the faith in their own immediate neighbourhood or with those they come across now the first point we have to make is that it is perfectly true that there are not many idolaters about these days that is, there are not many people who worship heathen idols and have gone, carry on the abominable practices of the heathen it isn't the truth that there are none and with the advent of equal opportunities and with immigration from non-christian lands taking place in my country at least and I imagine in yours there are in fact heathen temples around there are in fact ways of worship which have nothing in common with the Lord Jesus Christ and in connection with that, I think we have to say that with all the old force, the apostle would certainly say don't do it if ever you contemplate marrying or being married to somebody in that situation but there are a lot of people who are not in that position I suppose they are the majority there will be some who have other varieties or would look upon it in that way themselves of the Christian faith who would acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord who would say that they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as described in the Bible there are some who have no faith at all who are just perhaps good living perhaps not always good living lazy unbelievers who may have a nominal faith but don't do much about it in practice and there will be others who have abandoned any sort of faith at all but being neither idolaters nor Christians are still it may be good living people so is it alright in those circumstances to relax the first century and the Old Testament rules about marrying out of the faith well, I think I should give you an example at this stage it's some years ago now that I was giving the morning and evening addresses at one of our Ecclesiastes in Leeds in Yorkshire where there are three Ecclesiastes and after I had given my talk in the morning and had had my lunch and was looking forward to a nap there came a ring at the doorbell and I turned up the recording brother of another of the Leeds Ecclesiastes and very unceremoniously I was baffled into his car and hijacked taken away from the house where I was staying into another home where having got me inside his door he pushed me into his lounge room and said there they are, she's going to marry him out of the faith now talk to them which I didn't enjoy very much but that was the situation in which I found myself so I had to tell them to which the Christadelphian daughter of this person and the non-Christadelphian fiance of the daughter what we thought about marrying out of the faith well you can tell by the recording brother thought and what he'd done to me now the question is what did I think well I thought a rather bad trick had been played upon me but that's beside the point I did in fact think as he thought about the problem in front of them at first I was just supposed to be embarrassed and a little bit resentful but he put me in a position where I had to face without any warning the non-Christadelphian fiance of the Christadelphian girl but after about ten seconds prayerful reflection I said to myself well this is just right this is the way it ought to be we ought not to be telling her you shouldn't be married to him we ought to be telling him why we have a principle or a practice which would make it undesirable that that should take place so I talked mostly to him rather than to her and these are the things as far as I can remember that I tried to say I told him that if we were faithful to the commandments of our God we regarded our faith as the most precious thing that we had this is the way of salvation for us the teaching we received we believed to be not only true but precious we look upon the Lord Jesus Christ in his saving work and the meaning of his death our duty of baptism as believers our hope of his return and all the other things that belong to the Gospel as being the most important things in our life there could be nothing more significant than being saved from sin and being brought into the blessings of the Kingdom of God through faith then I said that our faith had been brought into its present state when through the labours of earlier Christadelphians various serious false teachings of Christendom had been recognized and then had been rejected and we had to say without any sign of self-righteousness or pride and without trying to partake of the assurance of the Pharisees that that situation still existed that there was truth here which we hoped that we had been pleased God to give to us and there was untruth or perversion of truth in many bodies even calling themselves Christadelphian and we wished to safeguard the truth and the confidence of those who had it and their single-minded faith from the compromise that would inevitably follow were we to look charitably upon marriage with those who didn't share that faith I told him that there could be nothing more intimate than the married life between two people who love each other and nothing more if I can put this frankly nothing more difficult to understand than sharing a man's bed and not sharing his hope of glory the idea that one would surrender oneself to a person in that position and become his partner and bear his children while at the same time one had the feeling that if I reached the Kingdom of God he wouldn't and so death would part us because there's belief on the one side and there isn't faith on the other was a very incongruous way of thinking I went on to say that if you do willingly marry someone who hasn't accepted the faith then you may be in danger of saying to yourself, though you never say it in words I'm putting side by side two things, one is the salvation of that man the other is having him as my man and the second is the more important to me which can't be right can it? if one accepts an offer of marriage from the man in that position, I tried to say to them it is by way of saying that I care less about your salvation, mine too perhaps than I do about having a partner and having a home of my own even if we take it outside the relations of the two concerned and we suppose that a way of living can be arrived at then every Sunday if the believer wants to continue faithful she would go this way and he would go that way or stay at home or go out and play golf or whatever it might be and there couldn't be any happiness in knowing that your partner didn't share your faith, even if he was kind and nice and indulgent and let you go your way and gave you every facility it would still be a situation where strain would exist and there must be an ache in the heart of a really faithful believer every time she looked on the face of the man she loved and said that man is not a candidate for the Kingdom of God and then when you go beyond that and you come to the case where children are born into the marriage and they see that mother goes to the Christendom meeting room and father goes to the Catholic Church or to the Mormons or he doesn't go and the child may perhaps even with the indulgence of the father be brought up in the Christendom and Sunday school but one day comes to wonder now why are they this way he this way and she that and anyway why did she allow herself to be married to Mindo's second chances doesn't her face really matter to her very much and then he or she meets a partner with whom he or she wishes to be married and the ground is cut away from the feet of loyalty by the fact that mother or father did it first you can see that this is a growing and a complicating problem and it can dilute the loyalty of the page it's got all kinds of difficulties and disadvantages associated with it well I made that speech to a room that was about as silent as this one is but I hope not for the same reasons I hope this one is silent because you're taking it in and might perhaps come to agree with me but in that room I thought I sensed a very considerable hostility growing to what I was saying on the part of both the girl who was a Christendom and the man who wasn't and when I said goodbye to them that afternoon I was greeted with such a very uncordial goodbye that I thought I'd made two enemies well the story didn't quite finish there because a few days later I think it was during that same week I was in Leeds again giving a lecture at some place in town and the girl was there which I was glad to note I can't remember whether her fiancée was I don't think he was anyway take them with me just in case we should encounter each other a chapter that I'd written called Only in the Lord about the wisdom and rightness of marrying in the faith and I gave it to her well she took it but with a very bad grace and so I was pretty sure that I'd lost a friend well that was that until about three months later I think it was when I had a letter from her in which she said Dear Uncle Alfred, I think she called me, which I thought was nice anyway, Dear Uncle Alfred you will be glad to know that John which wasn't his name, so she didn't call him John but I am doing you'll be glad to know that John has been baptised we're hoping you've been married and I think it wasn't about two months time but please will you take our wedding service well that couldn't have been nicer, I thought that was a lovely thing well that was the end of that one of the very few success stories that I have and so I treasure that one but it is important to look at it in that kind of way and I was deeply glad and grateful that they came to do so I hope some of the reasons I've put in front of you now will seem to you to be good reasons as well you meet all kinds of problems in this connection and I'll tell you another episode that didn't end too well it was during one of the earliest visits that I made to this country and I was staying in the house of a widowed sister who had a very attractive daughter aged about 18 I think and she was called Mary from now on which also was not her name and the mother said to me Mary said she wants to be baptised splendid said I but I've advised her not to said mother whatever for said I because said she Mary will one day be likely to want to get married and I thought it very likely indeed and she said and there are no eligible young brethren around here so you see if she gets married first and is baptised afterwards she won't be marrying out of the faith will she well as a piece of cold logic it was indisputable she was right of course as a piece of advice it was shocking and I said so I told her I should take the first opportunity to give the absolutely contrary advice to her daughter on the ground that you can pull the wool over the eyes of the arranging brethren but you can't do it with God you can adopt a maneuver that may take all power of discipline out of the hands of earthly powers but it is all perfectly clear and plain to our maker and if our maker sees somebody being advised and accepting the advice to get round the rules as it were by doing the marriage first and then having the baptism afterwards he's not likely to be very pleased with it so I did have the talk and I did give the advice and the girl took no notice and followed what her mother had said and she did marry and then she was baptised and well I'm happy to say at this stage that the fears that that would lead to her departure from the faith didn't materialise one of the relatively rare events took place and the husband himself saw that the faith was right and the unbelieving partner did save, we hope it will be saved the husband and he was baptised too so what I feared wasn't right but the advice I'm sure was right there is a sequel to the story though and that is that she left the faith and he didn't and that's very sad and that's nothing to do with the story but it's a very peculiar episode but what I have to say to you is I think the plain counsel that for the sake of one's own happiness in all the days that come throughout our lives, if one is contemplating marrying or being married to somebody who is not a Christian then think very hard and regardless of the possibility that it may reflect upon one's ecclesial membership if the arranging brethren take that kind of position put the other point first and say is this really the right thing to be doing ought I to be contemplating what might be the rest of my life married to him in the situation of the greatest intimacy with somebody who has not accepted the faith because remember they mostly don't when this kind of mixed marriage takes place the unbelieving partner doesn't usually accept the faith though he or she sometimes does and though the believing partner may remain faithful in situations of great and sometimes increasing difficulty it doesn't always happen, perhaps it most often doesn't happen and even it does, it's a very hard life to live and one has made one's own bed and has to lie in it so do please bear in mind that one's own happiness and one's own salvation and the salvation of the possible partner too may depend upon being firm with oneself going down one's knees to one's God and asking for strength to do the right thing and now the point comes well then does that mean that he is saying that there is going to be about 35% of our sisters who are doomed to remain unmarried for the rest of their lives and well no it doesn't mean that that isn't what I meant even if it did mean that in certain cases and I do know some when people don't get married but live an unmarried life and die an unmarried death we don't need to take that quite as hard as we sometimes do says he from the security of his unmarried life but even so we don't need to take it quite as hard as we sometimes do I know some of the happiest people in the Christendalpian world as those who have learnt to live with not being married and who accept it not as a cross, not as something which is a burden to be borne, to be resented and to be angry about but who say well I live a different kind of life that's all and live it so successfully in the service of the Lord that I have rarely seen more radiant faces than one or two I can think of, one is just before my eyes now as I'm talking so it is quite possible to rise above a situation even like that and live a life in God's sight which is more fruitful in his service than a married life would be if one accepted it in the right way so in the event of it happening to anybody in this room and it does happen to people that marriage doesn't come along don't please say until the bottoms drop out of my life because it doesn't have to be like that in a different context when the Lord Jesus Christ is discussing what to do about a broken marriage and I shall come to that subject too a little later he says and he's talking about men but the same would apply with the change of terms to women as well there are some eunuchs which are born eunuchs there are some eunuchs which are made eunuchs of men there are some eunuchs which are made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake he that is able to receive it let him receive it and while I don't think he's really talking about a man deciding not to get married I think he's rather talking about a man in some circumstances deciding not to get married again but when he's talking about that the Lord is saying well there are some men who are physically incapable of being married there are some who in response to the barbarous customs of the times are made incapable of it by other men there are some who would choose to accept the limitation and simply voluntarily not get married for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake and he's discussing some circumstances where a man but it could be a woman either chooses to remain unmarried and the Apostle Paul says of certain people who make that choice they are happier if they so remain when the alternative would be compromised so if it does happen that way and marriage doesn't come along well there's a very useful, successful and contented life that can be lived in God's service even for those who are left like that I wouldn't have liked it if it had happened to me but it does happen to people and as I say it can happen and lead to the development of a very full and satisfactory life in Christ however that's not the advice that I'm giving, that's something that may happen and which people may choose for themselves but it has to be their choice the advice I'm giving is, and this is where we come to it, that if it happens that whether for lack of a suitable Christadelphian partner or simply because we find ourselves attracted to somebody who is not a Christadelphian be we brother or be we sister in Christ the right way to approach that situation is not reject it completely throw the thought away and have nothing to do with it but is or reasonably can be to say I like that person, he or she appears to like me, I would like to be associated with that person in friendship I'd like to be dated, I'd like to date I'd like to think in terms of marriage but to make very plain to the person concerned that you are a Christadelphian, don't leave it until it's too late to do so when you have been compromised and to make it plain to the person concerned that this is where you go to worship, this is the way you spend your Bible reading hours, this is the God you pray to and say in effect, now you see the kind of life I live, I mean to go on living it. If you'd like to find out what it's about then come with me come home, come to the meeting join me in Bible readings from the very start don't join in the practices that make it harder for you from the beginning until all of a sudden you think I'd better open his eyes to the fact that I'm a Christadelphian when it would be much harder to do but do it soon do it straight and do it with courage it is very possible that some people with whom you might like to be associated will be lost to you because you've done that it is also very possible that some people might come to the faith and the believing potential wife is usually that way around or potential husband, it's sometimes that way around, might bring to the way of salvation the one who can also be to the happiness of them both, their partner in marriage so that's the way I would recommend to any who find themselves in that position to approach the problem by the way my wife wasn't a Christadelphian when I first met her and when we did meet and liked each other under considerable difficulty in making up my mind what to do I mean it isn't easy and I know it isn't I said to her look I'd like you to give me one assurance she already knew that I was a Christadelphian and she was already coming with me to meetings and that is suppose I grew tired of you tomorrow and had nothing more to do with you would you continue learning this faith which is now being preached for its own sake because it's right and equally if you got tired of me tomorrow would you do that and she said she would of course when you're in that situation you don't always know what is said, is said in a way that you can fully accept, but it turned out I didn't throw her over so the thing was never put to the test and she was baptised and we were later married and I've never had any occasion to regret it she might have I don't know but I never have and so that is the sort of approach from a certain amount of personal experience I can recommend it pays handsome dividends and it can as I say result in the way of life being available to somebody else we've been talking a lot about about being married to a believer or wrongly to an unbeliever I have to approach now a topic that will be obviously in your minds in these days and which is in mine though I expect I'm very square and very uninformed about this kind of thing but it's obvious that we're living in a world where the very institution of marriage is under attack or indeed has been abandoned in many areas I didn't quite realise how far it had gone in this country it may have gone as far in Britain too for all I know until the other day I was informed that in certain places of residence for university students in this country perhaps in all of them I don't know one is given the choice when one goes there as a student whether to live in single quarters or in double quarters with a person of the other sex without being married and that anything one's parents say makes no difference one has the right of choice one can go this way by right and live in sexual intimacy with somebody whom one has not married and may never intend to marry and I suppose not always with the same partner that's the way of life which has opened up to us which is commonly accepted you must know this better than I do but I'm growing up, I wish I didn't and I'm gladly learning more about these things can I say that this is a case where what I said yesterday about the right of God to intervene in our lives must be born always before us and no matter what men say no matter what they say in high school no matter what they will allow in universities to trade one's body for lust because men will have it so and there will be no punishments attaching to it and because by suitable application of the appropriate remedies one can avoid bearing children or whatever it might be to do that because the world lets it happen even the world's shame is no longer very much attached to it and it may even be expected of you and you may be thought of being somebody who's not quite whole if you don't do it it's something that the Bible absolutely condemns that there must be no compromise with it, the Bible is quite plain that we must keep our bodies wholly to our God and give them only to our partner whom we choose in marriage and preferably in the Lord and everything else is sinful that it can be fatally sinful that there's no compromise with it that we have no right to say go ahead and do it if you like, it's your own life live it your own way as the Apostle Paul puts it in the chapter I'd like us to read together the thing is quite clear cut there's an unquestioned duty would you turn to the legend of the Hebrews chapter 13, the last chapter Hebrews 13 I'll just read the first few verses Let love of the brethren continue Forget not to show love unto strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares Remember that You are in bonds as bound with them them that are evil and treated as being yourselves also in the body Let marriage be held in honor amongst all and let the bed be undefiled for fornicators and adulterers God will judge I read that in the English revised version, just to relate it to your King James version, if that's what you're using marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled but formongers and adulterers God will judge they mean the same thing anyway and there the Apostle Paul not only recommends that one should treat marriage as being a sacred thing that one should approach it with bodies that have not been defiled by other associations and that therefore one should abstain from defiling associations outside marriage he adds the strange and strong words fornicators and adulterers God will judge and we've no right to temple with that, that's what Paul is saying and he means every syllable of his severity and having said that one has to say something else this again will crop up in connection with other problems and that is such is the world we live in that for all I know any company of young people above the age of puberty and they contain people who are already compromised in this matter I'm deliberately not looking just in case there should be anybody like that but it does happen and what we have to say in this connection is that it shouldn't have happened we shouldn't willfully do it and certainly not willfully do it again but we descend to 1st Corinthians chapter 6 and I'll read for you from verse 9 1st Corinthians chapter 6 verse 9 Or know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God be not deceived neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor effeminate nor abusers of themselves with men nor thieves nor nor covetous nor drunkards nor revilers nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God in which as far as I have read the apostle is condemning as having no right in God's kingdom fornicators and adulterers and it would seem those guilty of homosexual misbehaviour too, effeminate and abusers of themselves with men and saying the kingdom of God is closed to people like that but then he goes on to say in verse 11 And such were some of you but ye were washed but ye were sanctified but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God which is to say those who go on practicing those things cannot find a place in God's kingdom but no matter how dark the life might have been of those who used to practice such things or have in any way however likely been compromised in such things yet the mercy of God is fully equal to the situation and when they receive the faith and are washed and sanctified they are equals of those who have lived the Pharisees righteousness in hoping for and working towards the kingdom of God so even when there has been something which ought not to have taken place in the sexual life of one who wants to become a believer or even has become one the right kind of repentance and the mercy of God can reach even that situation the prodigal son can come home and so can the prodigal daughter and the one who devoured his father's substance in riotous living and has consumed his substance with harlots as the elder brother said about him can come back and his father will haste to meet him but do bear in mind that that prodigal son didn't at the age of shall we say 17 or whatever it might be say to himself now let me see I'll be able to enjoy the kind of life I want to enjoy for the next 20 years so I'll go ahead and do it and then when I get to a really old age like say 40 and these things no longer please me then I'll go religious and I'll go back to my father and say please have me back don't do it that way you can't program sin you can't timetable repentance you can't say I'll have this to myself and then I'll repent because God at least will entertain the severest doubts as to whether that really is repentance if you do it that way what he wants is that as soon as one knows that a certain course of life is right then from that point one takes it on let's join in the word of prayer O God our heavenly Father who knowest the stuff of which we are made and who is aware of the thoughts and intents of our hearts children as we are of parents who fell from grace Thou knowest our temptations and our weaknesses Thou knowest our faults and our sins Thou knowest our hopes and our desires Do Thou look down upon us in Thy mercy and grant us Thy grace to live from now on faithfully before Thee confessing with contrition anything we might have done wrong, seeking for strength in the desire to do right Do Thou lead our paths into seeking for and accepting a partner who will strengthen our ways in Thee and whom we in our turn can strengthen sharing our common faith Do Thou help us if we are in problems where our hearts are already entwined with those of others who do not follow Thy ways and move us to take whatever action in strength is needed and move them to receive Thy ways Do Thou look down upon all as problems crowd upon our lives and give a clear counsel as to what should be done Do Thou help those of us who are already in the faith of the Lord bound to happy unions with our partners in the faith to see with vision and understanding the problems of those with whom we come in contact that knowing how easily it is for any one of us to fall we may all rely upon Thy strength and come to Thee for counsel and guidance and be granted happiness now and in the age to come life everlasting through Jesus Christ our Lord Amen

Transcript

Well, I've got a topic which I must talk about this morning because it's so very much in the air these days. Especially when they tell me, I've totally got my figures wrong, but is it at least one marriage in three that now ends in divorce? Or is it now one in two, I forget. It's such a very, very high proportion that the likelihood of this kind of thing hitting us in our own lives is increasingly great. And we need to know both what we ought to do before the danger arises, how we ought to react to those who have been in that position and also to any examples of this kind of thing that might arise in our experience when those around us have their marriages broken and start fresh marriages again. So I have to talk about marriage and divorce. Now, first of all, I'd like to take a clear understanding of what the Old Testament has to say about the practical possibilities of such a thing. We have to define some of our terms rather carefully to do this and we start off with the meaning of the word adultery. The seventh commandment says, thou shalt not commit adultery. The practice of the law of Moses was that those who did and were caught should be put to death by stoning, man and woman alike. And the meaning of the word in Old Testament times was really quite simple. It was that if you take a married woman or a woman who is betrothed to be married and any other than her husband or her intended husband engages in intimacy with her, that's adultery. In other words, in Old Testament language, a married or a woman intending to become married are essential for adultery to have been committed. The reason for that is that the law did not forbid men to have more than one wife. Consequently, if a married man chose to step outside the bums of his marriage and engage in intimacy with another woman, then provided that woman was not herself married or engaged, although he shouldn't have done what he did, he could put the situation right by marrying the girl with whom he had associated. Or again, if he had a desire to become linked with some woman other than his existing wife, he could take another. So it wasn't necessary under Old Testament conditions to divorce a wife in order to take another wife. God very clearly regarded that as being very much of a second best in people's lives. The idea of people multiplying wives to themselves was not in accordance with what God wanted people to do, as we shall see, but it was done and it could lawfully be done. As we know in the case of Abraham, whose wife was Sarah, but whose associate, from whom Ishmael was born, was Hagar. As we know about Jacob with his two wives and his two concubines, Leah and Rachel and the two concubines. When we come to New Testament times, the situation is different. For there, though how has it come about, we don't really know. It seems quite clear that the standard of respectability had changed. And even though it might, for anything I know, still have been possible in certain surroundings to have more than one wife lawfully, and the Jew could certainly do so when the Lord Moses allowed it, the practice seemed to have died out. Men might no doubt misbehave in all the ways they always have misbehaved, and so might women. But in actual marriage, they seem to have accepted that you took only one person whom you call the wife. So when we shall come in a moment to the question as to whether divorce and remarriage are allowable, and when the rulers ask the Lord Jesus the question, is it lawful for a man to put away his wife and marry another, they are taking for granted that you need to put away your wife in order to marry another. In other words, they are practically assuming that the standard of respectability is that you have only one wife at a time. The situation's changed in another way in the New Testament too, and that is that whereas the Lord Moses never says anything about a woman's availability of access to divorce, if she wishes to get rid of her husband and marry another, that situation is mentioned in the New Testament. So there has arisen another practice that can happen, namely a wife can in principle, whether she should do it or not, is another matter, be separated from her existing husband and married to another one. So bear in mind that distinction that in the Old Testament adultery had to involve a married or a betrothed woman, whereas in the New Testament it could be either way around, a married man might be guilty of adultery by association outside his marriage and so of course as in the Old Testament could a married woman. Now when the Old Testament talks about divorce, it very rarely does so. There's really only one authenticated case of this which we will turn to to leave it as quickly as we can so that we do know that the facts are there. So Deuteronomy please chapter 24. I will read to you the first four verses. Deuteronomy 24 verses one to four. When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it comes about that she find no favor in his eyes, because he has found some uncleanness in her, then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. And when she is departed out of his house, she may go and be another man's wife. And if the latter husband hate her and write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house, or if the latter husband die, which took her to be his wife, her former husband which sent her away may not take her again to be his wife, after that she is defiled. For that is abomination before the Lord. And thou shalt not cause the land to sin, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance. Now I'm not going to dwell upon that passage very largely because one is not at all sure what the first verse means. It seems that a man marries a wife and he may find something about her which he deems to be here a thing of uncleanness. The Hebrew calls it a matter of nakedness. There was a big dispute in the days of the Lord Jesus Christ as to what was meant here. The more severe of the Pharisees thought it meant finds that she has committed adultery. It's hard to see that that could be so, because if that was unprovable then she could be put to death for it and no divorce would be needed. It's possible that there might be other things which I'm not going to enter into of which he might have found uncongenial in a marriage which would allow him to dismiss her as a wife but would not involve guilt on her part. One can think of things that might imply that but we won't need to. In which case he sends her away as it were without a stain on her character. He can legitimately cease to regard her as his wife but she is not guilty in the eyes of the law of anything that could be punished so she can be married again if she wants to. The only provision which the law makes about this is that what she can't do is be dismissed by her second husband and then go back to her first. You can see the reasons for that because if a man decides this woman is not suitable to be my wife then she doesn't become more suitable by going back to him again afterwards. The reasons he alleged the first time must still be the reasons which he used to dismiss her and so he can't go back upon them and say oh well it wasn't true after all because if you do that you're just simply creating confusion. You're giving people the liberty to live fast and loose just as they want to and anything could go wrong in a land like that. So you can see how the law had to provide that if there was such a thing as divorce at all it couldn't in those circumstances be reversed and go back to its old situation when you have already said that woman is not fit to be my wife. Now with that background let's now go and see what the New Testament has to say. I want to take some five passages one by one. I won't comment very much about the first two or three of them but then we'll come to the detailed ones and regard them in greater detail. First of all turn to Luke chapter 16. In this chapter between two parables the parable of the unjust steward and the parable of the priest. So can we read Luke 16 from verse 14 through verse 18 and if you can start in this corner we can then simply do. Of all the prophets' words of God since that time the nemesized priest, any man present into it. Thank you. Just because of one word that was read there if I can get as far as the blackboard I can find a piece of chalk. Yes I can. I'll just introduce you to one little fact about the words here that you might like to know. Did you notice the word tittle appear in that chapter and it was read as title. Where's the verse now? It will be verse 17. It is easier for heaven and earth to pass than for one tittle of the law to fail. Now the Hebrew language is the language in which the law was written. There are some words which are quite hard to tell from each other. For example that letter is the letter R and they call it resh. That letter is the letter dalet a D and they only really distinguish especially if you write this one on the square by that little bit stuck on the end of the dalet. That's a tittle. Again for example the letter faith is like that. It doesn't really have that top of it projecting. It projects more like this way. It has the kind of sound and we would write it as CH. You stick a little tail on the end of it like that and it becomes tate. These are either t or t depending which way you're using it and that is a tittle. So in the Hebrew it's the little bit you stick on the end of a letter to make it into another letter and the Lord is saying the law is so sacrosanct before God it mustn't be trifled with that not the tiniest little bit will go wrong and it's the little tittle he's speaking about. When in Matthew chapter 5 the Lord is saying similar things he says not one jot nor one tittle two words there shall pass away from the law till all be fulfilled. Now again speaking of the Hebrew language nearly all the letters are that kind of size in relation to each other. One or two of them like a lamedh project a bit above and another one like a final tsadeh projects a bit below but broadly speaking they're all that kind of size except for the little one which is just like that in relation to the other high up on the line and extending no more than half the way down. It's a very small letter and its name is yod or in English jot and so even that little bit won't be lost so he takes the tiniest letter in the tiniest bit of a letter and says those are the things you must take notice of. In the Greek language that yod is is replaced by the tiniest of the Greek letters which is the iota like that and that too is very small in relation to the other letters for example you put its nearest neighbor theta by its side and you can see how big it is. So what the Lord is saying is the law is so important that we mustn't trifle with the smallest part of it so it's one jot or one tittle that we're talking about. Right now going back to these few verses in that context this is what has been happening. The Lord has described the Pharisees and the rulers of the Jews in terms of a steward who is having control over his master's goods and he ought to be faithful to his master and he hasn't been so he's being dismissed from his office and instead of reforming his being dismissed he makes things worse by interfering with the accounts and trying to get his creditors to treat him kindly and the Lord says that's what you are you're unjust stewards you're not looking after that which has been given to you in particular you're not taking care of the commandments of God and in one particular case you've turned it inside out and that's why he repeats in verse 18. Whosoever putteth away his wife and marryeth another committeth adultery and he that marryeth others is put away from her husband committeth adultery you are trifled with the law and made it easier for people to put away their wives and to be married away again or for the wife having been put away to marry again you're playing ducks and drakes with the law of God and that is unfaithful stewardship so you can see how severely he regards the strict letter of the law about marriage and divorce we'll come back to the details of that in a moment. Just very briefly turn to Romans chapter seven there's a passage like this in Romans and there's one in first Corinthians as well I'll pass it by just to show that it's there and then we'll go on to other matters Romans chapter seven can we go on reading the first three verses please seven verses one through three thank you and although the apostle is using those words to illustrate something quite different from actual marriage and divorce he is making it very plain from the clear provisions of the law that a woman who is married has no recourse under the law to becoming separated from her husband the only conditions under which she can legitimately be married again are if her husband dies right now having got those two we'll go to the really important ones I think we'll begin by quoting Matthew chapter five I'd like us to start reading at verse 27 and read on through verse 32 yes thank you now I'm going to leave out those words saving for the cause of fornication for the time being though I may come back to them later and I want to take together what we had in verses 27 and 28 about the law's commandment thou shall not commit adultery and what we have in verses 31 and 32 about whether or not one has the right to divorce one's wife and to remarry a divorced wife between the two there's a very important verse that you'll understand in a minute first of all the Lord takes that which is quite unmistakable and he says the law of Moses says you must not commit adultery and we no know what that means in both Old Testament and New Testament terms then the Lord goes on to say but I say something different I say whosoever look upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart now in a way it's not different because he isn't in any way reducing what the law says about committing adultery he is saying there are more ways than one of doing it there's the practical unfaithfulness which takes a woman who is not your wife and engages in intimacy with her and there's the mental way of doing it which sees that the desired object and inside wants to commit a forbidden act but doesn't actually do so in other words I think what the Lord is condemning here is that if you've passing your eye upon somebody to whom you have no right of access and you say I would take that woman if I could or I would take that woman if I dared then you have as good as committed adultery I should say as bad as committed adultery in his eyes this is the big difference between the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ in practice and the teaching of the Old Testament even when they both say the same thing as they quite often do in principle the law was a law for a people living in a country and it had to be capable of being discovered by policemen and judged by magistrates and executed by those who punished people you have to see the thing before you say that it had happened so adultery to the eyes of a policeman when you see adultery and the punishment is because it has happened or the attempt has been made to cause it to happen and then the punishment is carried out it's all outside because the law can't punish inside it doesn't know what your thoughts are doing but God does and the Lord Jesus Christ says and don't suppose that you are any better in God's sight if you merely think something and would do it if you could that if you actually did the guilt is there in both cases so don't take refuge in not actually committing the forbidden act the Lord says to us in connection with all kinds of things about adultery about hating one's brother about committing theft all kinds of things like that the Lord says if you think it and you do it if you're dead then you've done it in God's eyes that's why for example taking up some of the Lord's words here the apostle John can write in his first letter whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer because he hasn't killed anybody but if you take the Cain and Abel kind of story you have to hate before you kill and if Cain didn't happen to have a weapon handy or if he'd struck the blow and missed or if it proved not fatal he would still in his own mind have been a murderer and in God's eyes too even though no death had followed so that's what the Lord's saying about adultery the fixed desire to do it is as bad as the thing itself and that's why he goes on to say as he does in verses 29 and 30 if I write I offend thee pluck it out and cast it from thee for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell and if thy right hand offend thee cut it off and cast it from thee for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell by the way the word hell there is the Greek word Gehenna which is putting into Greek letters the Hebrew word Gehenna which means the valley of Hinnom just outside Jerusalem and that was the place where they always had fires burning to destroy rubbish and trash and sometimes the bodies of criminals so the Lord is saying it's better for you to do something that he's talking about here than to run the risk of being discarded as trash and burnt up and he might even mean before the judgment seat when he says that so why does he say if your right eye offend you pluck it out why does he say it at all why does he say it here and why does he say if thy right hand offend thee cut it off again why does he say it at all and why does he say it here and the answer must be this the first thing that happens before anybody commits adultery is that he sees the object that he wants to and that becomes such an obsession with him that the thought act is done or the real act is done so the Lord says if you find yourself looking in that way then truck your eyes out which is why we're saying don't look that way anymore take away the temptation from yourself so that you won't be guilty of the actual act it's better to do that and lose the thing you are desiring so much than to run the of the danger of incurring guilt before God's judgment seat and again if your right hand stretches itself out to take something that doesn't belong to it or to grasp someone it shouldn't be grasping then pluck away your hand from the seed mentally as it were cut it off take away the thing you desire to do so that you won't have the desire festering within you it's better to do that and lose the thing you want to have than to lose your life before the judgment seat of God so you can see how that is linked with the business of not committing and not wanting to commit adultery the Lord says when you feel that kind of temptation coming over you look the other way and tie your hand to your side right now he said that he goes on to the words about divorce in verses 31 and 32 I'll just read them again to remind us of the picture it has been said whosoever shall put away his wife let him give her a writing of divorcement but I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife saving for the cause of fornication causeth her to commit adultery and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced commiteth adultery so he's saying that he is not accepting that provision which was given under the law of Moses as being the right thing for a believing person to do he ought not he says to put away his wife and if he does so that that wife can marry somebody else then he's making her an adulterer and her new partner an adulterer and the context is like this you must not commit adultery verse 27 you must not want to verse 28 and you must not seek a legal excuse for doing the same thing without it appearing to be so verses 31 and 32 so he condemns the act as the law does he condemns the desire as the law doesn't say and he condemns the expedient of getting what you want without it looking like adultery which is what he is saying in those verses so he's talking very much about motive in what he says that will be important to us later so as far as these words have gone the lord seems to be setting a very high standard indeed and saying marriages ought never to be dissolved with that in view let's turn to perhaps our next easiest passage if any of these and that's mark chapter 10 can we read in mark chapter 10 the first 12 verses please starting where we left off i think it's over in that corner isn't it the But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. Can I get this color, I think, Mallory? Thanks. This is called shaman and this is called being male and this is female. Most of them are male and most of them are female. So then there are no words for any kind of God. What therefore God is going to get her, but not man, put this under it. And we have to discuss about this again for the whole night. Can you show us a little bit more, please show us a little bit more, and then again, if you need to go through a little bit. And if you need to go through a little bit more, can you show us a little bit more about that? Thank you. Now verse 12 of that reading introduces that matter which I had mentioned before, something that could be thought of in New Testament times, and couldn't have been thought of in Old Testament conditions, namely that a woman might take the initiative in bringing about a divorce, but the Lord says if she does so and then becomes somebody else's wife, she herself is guilty of adultery in doing so. So he deals with both cases there, the man who puts away his wife and the woman who puts away her husband. If you add together all the New Testament passages, then I think every possible case is dealt with in one way or another. Now the cause of this questioning is the question asked by the Pharisees in verse 2. Is it lawful for the man to put away his wife, tempting him? If we read the Matthew record, which we shortly will, it says is it lawful for the man to put away his wife for every cause? Now the reason for all that controversy was this. The Pharisees were divided into two camps. There was that which followed the leader Shammai and was strict, as Pharisees go. There was that which followed the leader Hillel, and he was lax and easygoing, as Pharisees go. And never was Hillel more easygoing than in the matter of marriage. Shammai would have said the only reason why a man could put away his wife is if she was unfaithful to him. That wasn't what the law said of course, the law would have had her killed for it. But Shammai said that's the only reason that is allowable, and that was how he interpreted the words that we read in Deuteronomy 24. Now Hillel says this thing of uncleanness about a wife that might lead a man to put her away can be all kinds of things, including the fact that she's not a very good cook. If she isn't a very good cook, then he can dismiss her and marry a better cook, hoping I suppose the second woman would be better, unless she's sampled her cooking beforehand. If he sees somebody who looks prettier than his wife, then his own first wife is relatively unclean, so he can get rid of her that way and marry another. And in fact the floodgates to divorce for any cause whatsoever were pretty well being opened up by the disciples of the school of Hillel. So when the Pharisees came and said is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause, then they were apparently asking him to judge between the relative strictness of Shammai and the easygoing laxity of Hillel. So that's the background against which the question is asked. They both no doubt have in mind, they both no doubt have in mind that clause in Deuteronomy 24 which did allow for a writing of divorcement because they say so. Verse 4, when Jesus asked them, Jesus said what did Moses command you? And they said Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement and to put her away. And they were very wise in saying suffered because Moses hadn't commanded it, he just allowed it. For the hardness of their heart they could do it if they were determined to do it, but that was not the thing that God really wanted them to do. Then he went on to say in verse 5, Because of the hardness of your heart Moses wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh, so then they are no more twain but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder. And the teaching of the Lord could hardly be clearer than this could it? He says although there was a provision in the law of Moses, when in one special set of circumstances they might then divorce their wives, that was not the way God wanted it. That was the way God provided for the determination of hard hearted people. And you ought not to be hard hearted people, you ought not to want to do a thing like that. You should take your instructions, he says, from the Garden of Eden, and from the original creation story. And he says then, God hath made them male and female, verse 6, and for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, verse 7. And he is quoting from Genesis chapter 1 and from Genesis chapter 2. For chapter 1 said, So God created man in his image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them. And in chapter 2, where Adam saw his wife and said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, the record goes on to say, Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they too shall be one flesh. In those second set of words, incidentally, you find the real basis for believing that God not only did not want people to break up their marriages, but didn't want people to marry more than one wife, for they too shall be one flesh, as the Lord quotes it. He speaks of two and not three or four or more. So that the ideal of the beginning was that marriage should go on for life, and that marriage should be between one and one, one man and one wife. That was how God wanted it to be. So then the answer of the Lord Jesus Christ to this mixed body of disciples, of Hillel and Shammai, some of whom wanted an easy answer, and some of whom wanted a stern answer was, You're both wrong. God doesn't want divorce and remarriage to take place at all. He wants married partners to stay together for the rest of their common lives. So that's quite clear and plain, isn't it? And no exceptions are provided for. Everything in Mark says that the straight line is, Don't divorce and don't remarry. Right, now we take Matthew chapter 19. We won't need to read the whole of this because we've got most of it in the Mark record. But what we'll notice first of all, that that clause that caused us a little difficulty in Matthew 5, and we left it out for the time being, is back again in Matthew 19 verse 9. Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery. And whoso marryeth her which is put away, doth commit adultery. Apart from that, the main teaching of this chapter is the same as that of the other one. There's only that what might be slight or it might be big difference to take note of. However, there is an important addition. And we find that in verses 10 to 12, and if we could read those three verses round please, I'll be grateful, 10 through 12 of Matthew 19. Please, if I could say one thing to one, if the case of the man who rebelled with his wife, it is not good to live. For the citizens of all nations are to see this thing, there is very little meaning to this thing. For there are some units which were still born from their mother's womb, and there are some units which were made units of man, and there are few units which are made themselves units, for the human being to have this thing. Yes, thank you. Now, we did refer to this passage yesterday in a different context, I think, but it may have been the first day. But its setting here is this. They come to Jesus and say, under what conditions can we divorce our wives and remarry without guilt? The Lord says, unless we take that exception into account, under no conditions should you do that. Thereupon the disciples, hearing what he says, are apparently quite outraged by what he answers, they say, if the case of a man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. Now, what they appear to be saying is this, if you are telling me that when I have married a woman, I ought to stick to her throughout our common lives, no matter how she behaves, I'd rather stay bachelor. That's what they seem to be saying, isn't it? If the case of a man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. And the Lord doesn't in any way say that he wasn't saying something like that. He goes on to say, well, some people are willing to accept this. Some people, faced in this very difficult condition, are willing to put themselves in a position where they don't live a married life after they've been betrayed in this way. They are willing, for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, to treat themselves as being single people from that time onward. But he also says, it isn't easy to accept that. Some can and some can't. Not all men can receive this saying. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Now, the reason why I quote those words of the Lord Jesus Christ about the disciples' outrage when the Lord lays down his ideals, is that I think it disposes of one way out that so many people do think of. At this point, we are bringing in that so-called accepted cause. And what I have to say from now on is that I'm going to tell you what I think about that. Not every Christadelphian thinks the same. And in charity, one has to admit that they might be right and I might be wrong, or I might be right and they might be wrong, or we might both be wrong. At all events, there is a definite distinction of opinion as to what that verse means. First of all, I'm not trying to scrub the passage. The passage is there and has to stay there. The Lord does say in Matthew 5, and he does repeat in Matthew 19, that a man who puts away his wife except for the cause of fornication is guilty of, and is likely to make her guilty of, adultery. Now, the most usual understanding of that is that the Lord is saying that there is one ground on which you can, without guilt, divorce your partner. And that ground, if we accept that, is adultery. In other words, if you find your wife is unfaithful, and it's usually read the other way around as well. She finds that her husband is unfaithful, but the Lord doesn't actually say that. Let's assume that too. If you find that your partner is unfaithful, then you may legitimately divorce yourself from that partner and marry or be married again, and you will not be condemned for it. That's what the usual statement is. It has sometimes been expressed in this way. I'm almost quoting something now. This crude and wicked act, meaning adultery, dissolves the marriage bond. It no longer exists. I could even give you the reference for that, but I won't. Anyway, that statement has been made. Now, let's assume for the moment that that statement is right. If it were right, it would mean not just that adultery can be a reason for divorce. It would mean that adultery must be a ground you can't avoid for divorce. Because if it dissolves the marriage bond, it no longer exists, then you're no longer married, and so there you are, the marriage is gone. And the Lord isn't saying that. He doesn't make any commandments about it. He doesn't say you must put away a partner who is guilty of that act. He only says if you do it for any other reason than the one he's thinking about, then you're guilty of bringing an adulterous situation into existence. So that it isn't possible, I think, to look at it quite in that way. The Lord is not saying it would be impossible to forgive an adulterous partner. He's not saying you mustn't even try. He's saying that whatever is the meaning of this word fornication, that's the only reason that can justify the breakdown of a marriage and starting again. However, let's assume that he is talking about adultery. Then if he were, the Lord would be saying that if your partner is unfaithful, you can put her, or him we say, away and be married again, and you've not broken the law of God or the law of Christ. Now if that is so, why ever would the disciples have been so outraged and say, if the case of a man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. They weren't, after all, 20th century people, these disciples. They were good, conservative, first century people with a decent attitude towards life. And if the Lord had been saying to them, you mustn't put away your partner for poor reasons, but you can if she's unfaithful, I think they would have said they've got all that they wanted. They would have regarded that as being the way of escape from a bad situation, and they'd have been quite content, but they weren't. They said, if the case of a man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. And if it is right that the Lord is saying that one has the liberty to put away one's partner if she or he is unfaithful, I don't see what all the fuss was about. They would have thought, I would have thought, that they've got reasonable liberty. Can you imagine the first century disciples saying, if I can't put away my wife for other reasons than unfaithfulness, I'd rather stay bachelor. I can't. And so I don't think they could have understood Jesus' words to mean that you can divorce for adultery and remarry. They must have had some other idea as to what he meant. Now the question is, on which I don't want to take a lot of time, what might it have been? Now you notice the Lord is using two words. One is fornication, and the other is adultery. Now they're both concerned with sexual sins, and the fornication word is a much wider word than the word adultery. It can include any kind of sexual aberration, including homosexual ones. But in this particular setting, I think one has to say, the Lord wouldn't have used two words if one would have been enough. And if he had been talking about adultery by the wife, he could have said so, and it would have been perfectly plain. Whosoever shall put away his wife unless she commits adultery, and marry another, then he makes her commit adultery, or he commits adultery himself. It would have been quite plain, and we would have been in no doubt, and he doesn't do it. And I suggest to you that there's good reason to think that when two words are used in the same context, they don't mean identical things. When the Lord says, for example, in Mark chapter 7, for out of the heart of man, evil thoughts proceed, fornication, adultery, and various other things, he doesn't mean the same thing by those two. When the letters of the Hebrews says, fornicators and adulterers, God will judge, it doesn't mean the same thing by those two. When Galatians 5 reads, the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, fornication, adultery, and a lot more. Again, it doesn't mean the same thing by those two. So whereas the former word used by itself could include a whole lot, when they're used together, one suggests they might mean different things. Now, a little story as to what nearly happened in New Testament times. A man was engaged to a woman, and he thought he found she'd been unfaithful, because she was going to have a child. And he didn't want to create a public fuss, so he decided he would put her away privately. Now, there it seems to me you have the kind of situation that the Lord might have been talking about. That if you are betrothed to a person who is legally bound to you already, as she would have been under the law of Moses, and if you discover before you come together in marriage that she's been unfaithful to her promise, then you may renounce the idea of marrying her. And in the New Testament terms, that could be called putting away your wife. You know what I was talking about, it was Joseph and Mary. Because that was what Joseph thought he'd found in Mary, and he was going to put her away privately. And the words were of the angel to him, Joseph, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife. So she, although betrothed, was called his wife, because she was bound to him. Now, to me it makes very good sense if the Lord is saying if you are intending to marry a person and you find that she is not faithful to her promise, then before it happens you may put her away. But afterwards you shouldn't. Now, that's what I think about those words. In other words, I'm about as severe as a man can be as to the meaning of the words about marriage and divorce. Not quite so bad when he gets an army battalion, maybe tomorrow, but at this point, very severe indeed. That is, that the Lord is not making any concessions whatsoever to a couple already married. I think he is saying you ought, if you want to fulfil the ideal laid down in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, not even to contemplate breaking up your marriage. It should last as long as the life of the shorter lived of you lasts. And only then is it proper in God's sight to remarry. He is not making any exceptions to those already married. He is not making life easy for anybody. He is laying down an ideal that simply doesn't compromise with anything. I think. Another reason why I have for thinking this is this. It isn't the Lord's habit to lower his standards for any reason whatsoever. He may be prepared to consider very sympathetically those who don't rise to it. That's why I'm not quite as hard as you might have thought. But he does nevertheless make very plain what the ideal is. And I find it very hard to imagine that the Lord would take a marriage in which, for example, an overbearing husband makes life so impossible for his wife that she leaves it and falls into the arms of somebody else. Where she is guilty of adultery, but he is guilty of things just as bad, and concentrate only upon the defense of one of them. I can't see him doing that. It would seem to me the Lord reads all our hearts, and the hearts of the sinner who sins in public are no more worse in his eyes than the hearts of those who behave badly and almost provoke the sin. So we ought all to recognize that in married life, when anything goes wrong, it may not be only the fault of the one whose public wrong is seen. It may also be the fault of the one whose private wrong is driving the other person into whatever offense he or she commits. By the way, it can happen not only with cop-fetched wives, it can happen with hen-fetched husbands, so it can happen both ways around this. So that should be borne in mind too. Now, the one thing I want to make before we resume this subject tomorrow, is that in all the passages we have quoted, either from the Lord's lips or from the Pharisee's lips, the sequence is, is it lawful for a man to put away his wife and marry another? Or, you say it is, and you're breaking the law by doing so. And that's always the connection, putting away and marrying. Now, the Lord has been very much concerned with motive in the Matthew 5 record, who shall have a looketh on a woman to lust. And it seems to me that all these passages are concerned with that kind of situation, in which A, being dissatisfied with his wife, B, wants woman, C, and so gets rid of B. The motive is there when the divorce is entertained, and the remarriage was in mind at the time. So I think in all these passages the Lord is talking about what you want to do in order to get your own way with some other person. And I think we need in our minds to distinguish very sharply between what you do because you want something else, cause and effect. And two things that might follow in history, as for example, without passing judgment on it, a case where a man having an unfaithful wife is left alone to look after two children, and after some years meets another lady and they get married. Where you simply cannot say that he's marrying the second person was in mind when he was deserted by the first one. Where the motive, in other words, doesn't exist at the time when the divorce takes place. Now tomorrow, while saying a lot more about the ideal and the way in which we ought to look upon our own pending manages, I'll cope with that situation a little bit further. For the moment, leaving a subject high in the air, let's dwell upon that a little and then come back for what I hope will be a better termination when we resume the topic. Mr. Weather Prayer. O Lord who knows our weaknesses, and sees deep into our hearts and knows how easily we could fall from Thy grace and be guilty in Thy sight, watch over us and help us to put our ways before Thee, and to say when evil beckons us, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, and receive us in this prayer we ask Thee through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Transcript

Now, before going any further with the scriptural counsel about the wrongness, but the possible mercy to be shown in the case of divorce and remarriage, I want to suspend a few moments. I want to still think that they're really quite obvious. As you know, in these days, divorce is a very easy thing to get. And I suppose most people who, even if they go to the trouble of getting married, do that. Having in their minds the knowledge that if this thing doesn't work, it needn't be continued with. It can be dissolved almost as easy as it was started. It's quite easy for people to break up one marriage and go their several ways and start another. And I suppose that can't help but have the effect upon the mind of those who enter upon their first marriage. And they can say, well, I hope it will work out all right, but there's always a next time. And from the somewhat exceptional multiple film star marriages of 50 years ago, we're now getting the almost routine multiple marriages of people who get divorced and start again. And it's obviously both a very unsuccessful thing for the second and third, and however many it might be, marriages break down as often as the first one does. Except the people are a little older and the chance that they're dying instead of divorcing becomes greater. But also the very philosophy on which it starts is making it much more likely that it won't succeed. See, if any of us marries a wife or marries a husband and says to himself, well, this might work out or it might not, then the little difficulties which arise can easily assume the proportions of saying, well, it hasn't worked out. So while I'm still young, let's break it up and start again. And so the very fact that that kind of thing happens makes us less tolerant with each other's faults, less careful about our own, less willing to try to find a means of living together, and certainly less willing to endure difficulties when they arise or even when they persist. And I would think our Victorian foreparents, who knew very well that they were expected to stay respectable and respectable meant to stay married and not be divorced and not remarried, learned how to put up with each other much more effectively than people in these days are willing to do. And though they no doubt had their quarrels and their great difficulties, they also realized that since they had to live together for the next 50 years or whatever it might be, it was no use going on like that. You don't want to have protracted cat and dog life. And so they tried to resolve their problems. They came to understand that they were not as big as they thought they were. They grew used to each other's mannerisms. The things that made them want to throw things about became more bearable. And altogether they lived a life which could be endured even when it wasn't perfect. I think one of both those things could happen. It could either become much better as it went along, as one got used to the faults of the other person, so did the love grow and mature, or you didn't find that way of resolving it, but you learned to be patient, and you put up with things, and even when they hurt, and there were unhappy marriages in those days too, well you could keep an unhappy marriage going and put the right face on it. And the Bible never tells us that life will be a bed of roses for anybody, whether married or single, or whether married for the first or for the second time. It tells us that life has to be lived and lived in faith in God, and that there are tribulations to go on with. And so either one lives an increasingly happy married life, or one learns to live with a life which may never become any happier, but has to be put up with. And either way, the servant of the Lord Jesus Christ can do it, if he knows that it ought to be done. And the Victorian married couples did it because they knew it had to be done. And in one way or another, life was bearable, and it even became very happy. I realize in talking like this that there could be a kind of sneaking suspicion in the minds of those who are listening. Now, is he talking about his own married life? Is he saying that this is a thing that has to be put up with, and that it's very difficult, and he's putting a bold face on it? So for the sake of my absent partner, can I assure you, no, I am not. We do very nicely, thank you. My wife has learned to put up with my faults extremely well, and that's why we get on so well. So don't assume for a single moment that I'm hiding the unhappiness of my own matrimonial estate beneath words which say some people have to learn to put up with it. That's not me. My wife, perhaps, but not me. We do very well. But perhaps we wouldn't have done. If either of us had thought when we started, well, break it off if it doesn't work, and while there's time, start again. It has. And I don't think it needed too much of the, we can't break it up, so we'll carry on. But if we had started with the feeling that we could break it up, we might not have learned to live happily with each other in the way we effectively have learned. I'm sure Sylvia, at least, had quite serious problems in putting up with me. And whether she would have tried again if she hadn't told to not to, I don't know. I don't think she would. But many people would. Many people do. There's something else about this as well. When married life first starts, it starts in the flesh of what for most people has a very large percentage of sexual attraction in it, the mere fact of coming together as men and women and enjoying each other in a carnal way is part of the early experience of marriage. The more you feel that when one marriage doesn't work, you can break it up and start again, the more likely it is that the carnal part will be predominant and that the idea of enjoying one another in a bodily way will be the principal motive bringing people together. And quite obviously for anybody's experience, that isn't the whole of married life. It isn't the whole of even early married life. And if it were, it would become oppressive. Either of the partners could be so demanding upon the other that one at least would not be happy in the state in which they found themselves. And that really means that both wouldn't. And as that married life goes on, as our ordinary life goes on, again it's quite obvious that that kind of part played in married life can't be as dominant as it was at the beginning. The honeymoon days can't last forever. And they can't last forever because we grow older, because our sexual powers change, because our sexual desires change, because there comes a time when the purely carnal enjoyments of the early days are not the fully enjoyable things that they were and not the frequently enjoyable things that they were. And if one starts life on the assumption that that's what makes a marriage, with the urgent impulsive desire to fulfil that side of marriage and achieve that experience, then certainly there will be frustrations for everybody. And there will be the increasing feeling as time goes on that this isn't working out. Let's try again while there is time, time being marked by the ominous onset of middle age and then old age. And that doesn't do anybody any good. It isn't physically good for one to think in that way or to behave in that way either. And it isn't going to lead to fulfilment. The number of occasions when anybody trying again does better the second time are very, very much fewer than the number of occasions when trying again you do worse the second time and proceed from disillusionment to disillusionment. One has to learn not merely to live together as man and wife in the carnal sense, but to live together as man and wife in the kind of partnership that the Bible speaks about, being one flesh because we are achieving one aim, wanting one goal, helping each other on the one path of life. And the idea that a marriage can be broken down doesn't help towards achieving that kind of thing at all. That demands a recognition that this must and should go on. So apart from all the laws laid down by God or all the ideals set out in Scripture, it is practically ruinous to start a married life on the assumption that you can break it down. One of the things which is needed to make it work is the knowledge that it's got to work. Not the only thing, but one very important thing. Now having said that, I want to take up where I left off yesterday, in which we were discussing, or in which I was pronouncing, on the question as to whether or not marriage had to remain forever according to the divine law and what could be done in the cases where things break down. Now what I'd like to do to begin with is just quote a few examples from Scripture which will give us the right kind of mood for understanding how the mercies of God can operate. We'll start off with one that has nothing whatever to do with marriage and divorce. Well it has something to do with marriage, but nothing to do with divorce. In the second book of Samuel, you'll know it well. We'll begin by reading around the first six verses, 2 Samuel 11 verse 1 through to 6. Thank you. Just look at the background of that story to begin with. God's people were at war against a bitter enemy, and David hadn't gone. Now we don't know why he hadn't gone, but the chapter does rather suggest that he would have been able to go if he'd chosen to do so. We learn, but David tarried at Jerusalem. So here we have an unemployed king who might perhaps have been busy about the law's work and being kept with his mind so occupied in what he ought to be doing that he wouldn't have time to let his thoughts wander and his mind stray. He was putting himself in a very dangerous position this day by staying at home while his men were at war. He had time on his hands. He needed something to do. And the devil finds work for idle hands to do, the Proverb tells us. That could so easily have been David's situation. And that's part one of the ingredients that we need in order to put our own lives right in God's sight and avoid the dangers that yawn in our way. That is to be busy in the Lord's service. Not to be unoccupied with our minds free to wander, with our fancies going where they will, with evil thoughts taking root in our minds. It can so easily happen. You remember how the Lord spoke a parable of a man who was afflicted by a demon. And the demon was cast out and the man left his house empty, swept and garnished. And there came seven other demons, worse than that one, and dwelt within that man. And the last state of that man was worse than the first. And I suppose what the Lord is telling us is that if we have some evil in our nature and we manage to say we'll be rid of that for the time being, but we don't put some good to take its place and don't find a job to do, then sooner or later we can fall prey to worse sins and worse vices. And that can represent an almost incurable condition. We've got to find something to do with our lives to avoid the kind of temptation which this verse refers to. Now the second verse. And it came to pass in an evening time that David arose from off his bed and walked upon the roof of the king's house. It's not a very good thing for fallible, ambitious human beings to walk in high places and look down. Because when you get on the top and you look down, you can think you're God. Everything else is beneath you. This belongs to me, said David. In effect, that's my Jerusalem. These are my people. That's my woman if I want her. The wrong idea could come into his head because he was looking down upon something that belonged to him. There's something like that in the book of Daniel, too, you might remember. In the fourth chapter where Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed a dream, and Daniel had warned him against that dream being fulfilled, Nebuchadnezzar walked on the roof of his palace and he looked down upon Great Babylon and he said, Is not this Great Babylon that I have built by the might of my kingdom and by the might of my power? And he looked down upon the wonders of Babylon and he thought he was God. He'd made that Babylon. It belonged to him. He could do as he liked with it. Then he forgot the true God. And the result was that that man was turned out of his palace and driven to live with the beasts of the field for the next seven years and wasn't let out again until he repented and knew that there is a God in heaven who can set up over God's kingdoms and learned to humble himself under God's hand. So whenever we're supposed to think that something belongs to us or we can get it if we like or we have the power to take, let's remember that we're not God. That it's God who has the right to decide what we do. Then there's the next verse or the remainder of that verse. And from the roof he saw a woman washing herself and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. Now, I don't know where she was that David would be able to see her from the roof of his palace. There's more than a suspicion that wherever it was it would have been better if she'd been doing it somewhere else. Because that was David able to see what was going on. And there was revealed before him all that was found desirable of her charms. And she would have been well advised not to be washing into a public place. If the words later, for she was purified for her uncleanness, mean that it was actually possible for David to conclude that her menstrual time had gone and that it would be perfectly possible for him to enjoy intimacy with her, then that might be what it means. It looks to me as though Bathsheba is running very severe risks which came to fruition in the way in which she was behaving at that time. There's no proof of this and one can possibly be drawing the wrong conclusion. But we can certainly not be drawing the wrong lesson. And the lesson is that when any good-looking young woman puts herself in a position, or clothes or partly unclothes herself in such a way that when seen by the eye of a lustful man she can provoke his lust, then she is doing a very unwise thing. It's the female way of seduction. It can be positively sinful and certainly it can be dangerous. And we ought to bear in mind that that kind of risk ought not to be run by one who is or who intends to become a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. Without seeking to look uncomely, then it should be made very plain that one is not offering oneself, not inviting the wrong kind of attraction, not putting oneself in the danger of having the experience that Bathsheba did. There's a lesson of what used to be passionately called modesty in this, which is still very much needed. We ought to make it very plain that there is a barrier between ourselves and those who would take advantage of us, which says no admission. We don't want to wear garments that say, as stupid people do sell in the shops, yield on what we've got around us. We want to wear things that make it quite plain, but only with the right person at the right time and on the right conditions are we in obedience to God able to make ourselves available. There must be no tempting to promiscuity in the way we go on. So, can I ask our young folk, male and female alike, to bear that in mind, that whatever the terms of the times, however provocatively one is allowed to guard oneself in these days, this is not the wise point of view from a scriptural teaching, it can even be sinful. If Bathsheba wasn't quite so forthright in her ways as Potiphar's wife, she may very well have had the same idea, and Potiphar's wife was an adulteress in her heart. So that's the next theme around from this passage, which wasn't at all why I started to quote it, by the way. But the one that follows now is that David exercised his kingly rights, as he took them to be, and took advantage of the commoner's no-rights of Uriah the Hittite, and knowing very well that Bathsheba was another man's wife, took her and committed adultery with her and fathered her child. And then things went from bad to worse. Having put himself in that position, he sought to draw back from the shame that would bring upon him publicly, not from the offensiveness, but from the shame, and made matters worse by recalling Uriah from the field of battle, and sending him home in the hope that it could reasonably appear that this child was Uriah's child, and Uriah wouldn't go. So then David made him drunk in the hope that his inhibitions would be disappeared, and he really would go and have the intimacy with his wife that could mean that he might have been regarded as the father of the child, and that didn't work. And finally he was reduced to sending him back to the field of battle and instructing George to have him killed by the enemy's hand. Now it's hard to imagine a worse conspiracy of sin than that that David committed. He begins by allowing himself the liberty of committing the capital offense of adultery with one of his subjects, which is a mean thing to do. Then he goes on by committing the capital offense of murder by having the man who would not father the child he had begotten done to death on the field of battle. And if the law of Moses had been carried out upon David with all the severity that it might have been, then David could as it were have been stoned to death twice, once for his adultery and once for his murder. He'd broken two of the Ten Commandments within a very short space of time, that I shall not kill and that I shall not commit adultery. So if the life of David and his reign had terminated at that point, we could have had no complaint against the justice of God. In fact, I'm still surprised. I still can hardly appreciate how gracious and merciful God was to David. Because he was, wasn't he? So after that event has finished then, let's go over to Chapter 12 and see the outcome. Second Samuel, Chapter 12. If we could go on reading, please, at verse 1. And on till I say stop. He drank from his own cup, and laying with him, and was under the hand of the daughter. And again a child was under the hand of the father, and he felt that his own father was unheard. The death of the wet man was with him, and the son was with him, but there was a woman and a child, and that took the man away from him. And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to him, As a Lord with her, the man who hath done this thing shall surely die. And the child was born again, or far, because he did this thing, because he had no faith. And they considered this, there art a man, this day the Lord, God of Israel. I know that he came in over Israel, and I am going to be at the end of Saul. And they gave me my master's house, and my master's wife, and she died as well as the two of them, and gave me the house of Israel, and those two of them. In fact, as the two of them, I was more over the two of them, even though they may have died. So, I decided to see my master over this, So, the man's tent was most immediately intact, and all other men and children had repercussions, that the three brothers had killed their mother This is another story of the son's life. because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the life of the lion of the cup to be thy wife. Just say to the Lord, Behold, how righteously you were once the eye of thy own house, and I will take thy wife, and I will put thy wife before thy wife. It gives me much to get into. I do need somewhere I will find a wife for the sake of this film. Now, please take a look at this film. What do you think of the art in which this film is based? In view of the translation, I extend this to the Lord. I need him to say what to do with it. The Lord ought to have this in view of what I stand, so I shall not lie. How many of the tests I have seen now seem to have great potential to incriminate the Lord of my name. The child also will be born to me soon, two in a while. I don't quite understand. It's like being executed and then imprisoned for life, isn't it? But I suppose what David meant is, in his confusion, that the man certainly must restore the lamb, and he was worthy to die, which is what the revised version says. The man concerned is worthy to die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold. But that he shouldn't have seen that this was directed against him is a remarkable indication of how blind we can be when our own faults are concerned. We can see other people's faults very clearly, but our own? No, we need those pointing out with some considerable care before we can see that they're there. We can see the most in other people's eyes with the utmost clarity, but beams in our own? No, not quite so easily. So David had had the message rubbed in. Nathan told him the parable and then said, which David ought to have known, thou art the man. This is what you've done. You had access to anything you wanted in this kingdom, and you could have taken much of it lawfully. So what did you do? You went and stole the dearest possession from a man who was fighting for you on the field of battle. That was your iniquity. And David now, having awakened from his intoxication of passion, realized that he had done all these things so wrongly, and he said that he sinned and repented of what he had done. And on the basis of that repentance, God was able to restore him, and he did not execute him for murder. He did not execute him for adultery. He allowed him to remain king, and he even allowed him to keep Bathsheba. And though the first son died, the second one became the next king of Israel in the shape of Solomon. It's an extraordinary parade of divine mercies, which I accept, but I don't understand how it could have been so gracious. Except that, David's repentance is something quite remarkable to read, as you might find if you'll turn to Psalm 51. This Psalm is the basis of the first hymn in our hymn book. One of my favorite hymns, not because it leaves me comfortable, but because of the things to which it gives expression. Psalm 51. It's clear when thou judgest. It might seem a little surprising that David was able to say to his God, against thee, thee only have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight. You might say, what about poor Uriah the Hittite? Hadn't David sinned against him, or even Bathsheba too? And of course he had, against both of them, grievously. But I'm sure that what David is saying is something I tried to emphasize in our first talk, and that is that the responsibility for everything we do is the responsibility we owe before our God. It isn't just that we can live our own lives, and in living those injure somebody else. It's that whatever we do is seen and known by our God, and we have a duty to him not to do those things. And if we do them, we've sinned against him. Most of all, for he is the one against whom a sin is most serious. So David is really saying not, I didn't sin against Uriah, and I didn't sin against Bathsheba. He is saying, I sinned against no less than you, O God. It was a fatal sin which I committed against my God. You had the right to tell me how I ought to live my life, and I didn't do it. I broke your commandments, and I failed to honor you. So the duty of obedience that we were talking about earlier comes out again in these verses. Now, to sum it all up, David shouldn't have done any of the things he did up to the point of having Uriah killed. He was guilty of two offenses that carried the death penalty. When these things had been done, then he couldn't escape the consequences in that the sword never departed from his house, and also in that great shame came upon him when Absalom took David's concubines to himself when he rebelled. But also, God was able to forgive him utterly, the physical consequences he must bear, but the forgiveness could be granted to him, and he could be restored to his kingship, and God did not, as this sound says later, take away his Holy Spirit from him. So what we have to say is that we do know of one example at least where the strict law of God said execution, but the mercy of God provided something better. Now it would be quite plain that it is not an invitation to go and do something which is very wrong, and then hope for the mercy of God. That's what the Bible calls sinning with a high hand, and there can be very severe punishment against that. But it does suggest that when things have been done which are then so utterly repented of that the man takes to himself sackcloth and ashes for what he's done, then God's mercy can sometimes be shown. Right, now with that example before us, let's go into the New Testament. And take John chapter 4. We'll start reading at the first verse. No, we needn't start quite so soon. We'll start reading at verse 6 and go on again until I say stop. John 4 verse 6. John 4 verse 6. John 4 verse 6. That's enough, thank you. Now, it isn't easy to be quite sure how to reconstruct this scene. One of the things we know for sure, one is that it was in Sumeria, which was a kind of halfway house between being Jewish and being Gentile. The Samaritans did believe some of the Old Testament, particularly the law of Moses, and they had a very good understanding of the Old Testament, and they had something therefore of the Jewish faith. But Jews didn't like them, and it wasn't usual for Jews to go through Sumeria if they could avoid it. If you can picture them out of Palestine, you've got Judea there, you've got Sumeria there, you've got Galilee on top, and you've got your way round, the River Jordan there, and the Decapolis over here. And Jews would take the long journey around that way to get to Galilee, rather than go through Sumeria, because they didn't like to mix with the Samaritans. And the Samaritans didn't like the Jews very much either. However, Jesus, having no such inhibitions, went through Sumeria and at Shechem, Sychar as it's called here, sat down by a well, waiting for his disciples to bring food, and there there came this woman of Sumeria with a picture of water, with a picture to draw water from the well. And while the disciples are away, Jesus engages them in conversation and asks her for a drink. Now, the woman's answer is one that you might expect, unless perhaps we are justified in seeing a rather surprising tone in it. She said, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest a drink of me, which am a Samaritan woman? Now, if it weren't that what Jesus tells her later about herself is known to us as well, that might seem quite innocent. But we know that the Lord said to her, Thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou hast is not thine husband. One wonders a little bit whether she wasn't saying it in a rather different tone of voice and saying, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest a drink of me, which am a Samaritan, and a woman? As though she may have had designs in her mind that she wouldn't have scrupled to have, that she was willing to make the most of her opportunity, as it were, finding herself alone with a man. It looks very like that, as though she was subjecting the Lord to temptation. And I think the Lord is perhaps reminding her that not only can he not be caught by that kind of guile, but also that he knows what she is up to, he knows the kind of person she is. Thou hast had five husbands, you who say you are not married. Thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou hast is not thine husband. He gives her a very plain picture of how well he's seen right through her. However, the important thing after that is that we're not told the conditions under which the Lord would accept her belief. She did say she believed on him. She went and called the men of the city. They all seemed to have shown some kind of faith in him. And they may very well have formed the raw material for the conversion of a Samaritan city, when Philip went there some years later. So a preaching work started here, could have matured at a later time. But go call thy husband and come hither, Jesus had said. I have no husband, she answered. That's right, the Lord Jesus says, you haven't. What you've got now is a man you're living with. You had five husbands already, and now you're living, as it were, in sin. That's what the Lord is saying to her. Now, it looks as though she must completely have repented of the way of life she were living. We're quite certain the Lord wouldn't have accepted her on any other basis than that. But the thing we really need to know, we're not told, and that is what the conditions the Lord laid down as to how she should repair her married life. You see, if he'd said something like, get rid of that man and go back to your first husband, we would have known exactly where we stood. Now, whatever he did say to her, and he may have said more for all we know, we don't know what it is. So we're left in the position where whenever we have problems arising in ecclesial life due to marital difficulties, we don't have the Lord's case history, as it were, to give us exact examples of what he did. We do with David and Bathsheba. We know that case well. The whole story is before us. But we don't have this one. We only know that in some way he could receive her, and in what way we're not told. And I feel that if it had been an absolute requirement that she should go back to the first person to whom she was legally married, and that was the Lord's demand before he could receive her, then I think we would have been told that. Since we haven't been told, well, we have to say, we have to do the best we can with prayerful judgment when difficulties do arise. That's all I can draw from that one. But now go over to chapter 8. I'll read this one aloud myself. Chapter 8, verse 2. Jesus sat down and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now, Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned. But what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down with his finger, wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it being convicted by their own conscience went out, one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more. Now, there are some very sad and surprising things about this story. In the first place, there is that rather shocking thing about the parishes of the Lord Jesus' day, that they weren't so much concerned about justice as about getting Jesus out of the way. They'd use any means to that end. They'd plant a man with a withered hand in the synagogue on a Sabbath day, and they'd watch to see whether Jesus would heal him. They got no pity for the man with the withered hand at all. He was the cheese in the mousetrap. And if Jesus healed him, well, they'd have Jesus. And that was the only reason why they did it. They wanted him to heal him so that he could be condemned, not because they cared about the man. The same was true of other Sabbath day miracles as well, which the Lord was provoked into doing, and they watched to see whether he would so that they might condemn him. And here is the most disgusting case of all, where in order to get Jesus condemned in his words, they take a poor fallen woman and they plant her in the midst without the slightest regard for her feelings, or for justice either. And they wait to see what Jesus will do. I suppose if he condemns her to death, they might say, ah, we'll tell the Romans about that. We're not allowed to put people to death. And if he says, we'll show her mercy, they might say, well, here's no man to say, not one jot, not one tittle, she'll pass on the law, he's breaking it himself. So they thought they had him both ways, but about the woman they didn't care. And it looks as though that was one of the things the Lord Jesus did care about most. They brought it before him and they said, this woman was caught in adultery in the very act, which in itself, by the way, is surprising, because in that event they should have been able to bring the man as well. And the Lord required that they should both be killed. And they only brought the woman, which is rather astonishing and very displeasing. Anyway, they brought her and they accused her and they said to Jesus now, Moses said she should be stoned, what do you say? And he ignored them. And they kept on saying it, time and time again. And all the time they were saying it, there was the Lord writing on the ground. Now, some people think it's worthwhile to speculate what he was writing on the ground. I don't know whether they're right or wrong, but it isn't the way it appeals to me. I have no idea what he was writing. I don't particularly want to know what he was writing. What he was doing was stooping down and not looking at them. Just busying himself. He might have been doodling for all I know. But things were being written on the ground and they were there looking at the woman, looking at him, trying to get him to accuse her or not to accuse her, but at least getting an answer from him. And Jesus just wrote on the ground. I think he was suddenly ashamed of them, of course. And bitterly unhappy that people could do a thing like that. Just waiting to see if they'd realized the horror of the thing they were doing. And put it right before it was too late. But they wouldn't. They were so obsessed with their desire to get Jesus killed on the basis of what he would say about this mouse in the trap that they were not concerned with human justice or human feelings at all. They couldn't be moved by his just doodling. So he raised himself up and said let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone and then so as not to be watching the effect of their conscience. Just to leave it to them. He bent down and perhaps doodled again. He was certainly writing once more. The thing he had said to them did what his own silence couldn't. At last they saw something of the fact that if their private lives were examined then maybe they'd be standing there to be judged instead of her. I think it's very possible in fact that there could have been those present who were not guiltless in the matter they were accusing her of. The Lord did call it an evil and adulterous generation. He did describe scribes and Pharisees of whitewashed graves as though they look all around outside. Just see what you get when you look inside. There were plenty of sins to make those people guilty men. They were being hypocrites. Some of them it would seem. Even presuming to bring such a case as this before his court. So he stooped down and he doodled on the ground and then beginning at the oldest, the most hardened in sins they went out until the youngest, the most precocious, the most likely to stand up and say I'm righteous because I've not been tempted yet. You know the kind of thing. These people went out their own way and they left the woman alone. Now, although they were pressing their legalisms on him, the fact is the Lord himself quite carefully observed the law. Because when they were all gone, he looked up and stood up and he said, hath no man condemned thee? Hath no man, Lord? Well, that's all right, said Jesus. There's no case to answer. For the law said that in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall everything be established. There are no witnesses. There's no case. The case is dismissed. So he had every right to give the answer he did, even from the law's point of view. There was nobody there to do the accusing. But what we're concerned with is simply the answer he gave which is, neither do I condemn thee. That's the legal part. Go and sin no more. And again the picture that gives to us is of the Lord Jesus Christ willing of his mercy to forgive things which the law would have condemned by death and let a person start again, even though death ought to have been the outcome. He is doing with this adulteress what God through Nathan did to David with Bathsheba in the Old Testament. There's no conditions, again laid down, which will guide us as to how we should react when problems do arise. But the atmosphere of mercy is being set before us there and it's something we need to remember. I think I may have quoted already, but we'll do it again just in case I didn't. 1 Corinthians chapter 6 again to show the manner in which God at once lays down the law and then offers the door of mercy. 1 Corinthians 6 verse 9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God, be not deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkers, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God. I do remember we did quote this now, but we'll still continue. And such were some of you, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. Now there the Lord is plainly saying through the Apostle Paul that no matter how grievous the sin was, which they in their ignorance were guilty of, then when they come to the Lord Jesus Christ and are baptized, they can be washed and cleansed from all that and can start a new life. Now that doesn't say what you do in the case where somebody who has already been washed and cleansed and started a new life, or somebody who is not in ignorance but knows that these things are wrong already, falls and is guilty of this kind of thing. Now one can say about that is that the Bible does reveal some examples of mercy, even in a case like that, without again laying down the conditions under which it can be shown. In the same letter, in the previous chapter, there's a story of a man who committed incest with his father's wife or presumably with his stepmother. This was an appalling offence and the Apostle Paul says that just simply can't be tolerated out with the man. And the man was in fact withdrawn from by the ecclesia, quite rightly so too. But we learn in the next letter to the Corinthians that that man had repented and shown his deep sorrow and he was allowed back into the fellowship of the church, the Apostle Paul told them to do so. So in spite of the horror of his offence, forgiveness was possible. Now as I said yesterday, one can't take the ideals of the Lord Jesus Christ laid down in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 and Luke 16 and elsewhere and then say to anybody now that's the ideal, but it's alright if you do less. One can't say that's what the law says, the Lord it says, about the permanence of marriage and that there shouldn't be divorce and remarriage, but it'll be alright to me if you do something which doesn't quite rise to that. One simply has no right to offer any relaxations to the Lord's law. And yet what I've been trying to draw from the example I put before you is that when offences do occur when even people who ought to have known better do fall from grace and when things are committed, perhaps even in the matter of marriage and divorce, but I'm not going to give examples of this now, where the wrong thing has been done and discipline has rightly been exercised and such people then suddenly realize or gradually realize, come to realize the thing they've done and are bitterly sorry about it and wish to seek restoration. Then I think the examples we have before us tell us that such cases should be carefully and sympathetically and mercifully considered. And that without in any way trifling with the high ideals the Lord has given us, there should be some means whereby one can leave open the door of mercy and of restoration to people who committed that kind of sin. One says this remembering always that the Lord talks about the inward heart of everybody and says whosoever hath looked on to lust hath committed adultery. One says that knowing the thoughts that could have been in one's own mind over the years being very grateful that they didn't lead to the breach of God's law in a practical way which is so obviously possible when those kind of thoughts do come. But saying inside a very much humbled heart there but for the grace of God go I and being very thankful that the man who could very well be a Pharisee if he's not careful has been spared the physical manifestation of desire and hoping that God will forgive the inward thought that may have led that way. I think that takes us, no it doesn't, we have a few moments longer. Questions? I have a question, if a person comes in that never met a priest before her husband to be that kind, and she says he's been divorced, can you marry her if it comes more than a million times? I'm glad you asked that question. The answer I give may not be quite the answer that would sometimes be given by some other brethren but this is the one I would give in good faith. I'm glad you asked that question. First, I don't think that sins committed before baptism are automatically wiped out by baptism. They're only wiped out if one confesses them and regrets them and doesn't go on doing them. Let me give you an example of that. I was talking to a brother in New Zealand actually quite a long time ago who holds very severe views about marriage and divorce, much more severe than I hold. And he says, if someone has been divorced and remarried before baptism, it makes no difference that union has got to be dissolved if the first partner is alive. I don't agree with him by the way, necessarily, but this is what he said. And he said, let me give you another case. Mr A robs a bank on Monday and gets $50,000 and on Tuesday he's baptised and that wipes away his sins so he keeps the $50,000. Is that right, said he? Of course the answer is no, it's not right, is it? Obviously not. He's got to repent of his sin, restore the $50,000 and if necessary, serve a prison sentence for what he did. So he says, well now it's no different, is it, in the case of somebody living a life of adultery? It is the case that somebody who has been divorced and remarried is living in a life of adultery with the new wife in the Lord's sight because the old wife is still alive. Then that is not wiped out by his baptism if he keeps on living with her because the offence goes on. Now what I have to say is if his premises are right, his conclusion is right too. If it is a life of continuous adultery, if you've gone living with a second wife while the first wife is alive, then baptism doesn't make any difference, that thing would have to be put right, there would have to be a separation. So if I adopted his premises I would say it can't be done, that's what I would say if I took that standpoint. However it is my view that when divorce has taken place and remarriage has taken place regardless of whether the first partner is to arrive, which is a technicality as no one is conscious at all. But regardless of that I would say if the remarried couple fully acknowledge, and I would like them to do this the principles and the ideals of scripture that divorce ought not to take place and remarriage ought not to occur, but they recognize that they have fallen short of that ideal then for my part I would say such persons upon that confession ought to be received. And similarly if a person who has been divorced and has accepted the faith and has not yet married does confess his or her inability to rise to the ideal of making himself a unit for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, as in the lines of the Matthew 19 passage. But recognizing that that is the case, that he has not been able to rise to the ideal, but that circumstances make marriage for him something he can't do without. Then I would say that upon recognition that the ideal has not been achieved I wouldn't exclude that case either. So you're probably beginning to get my mind on this matter which is that you can't authorize exceptions but you can say that if the Lord's ideal proves too high for people who have achieved then it may very well be that upon the right frame of mind being shown such things can be accepted in our midst. That is about where I stand. Any time? It would depend a little how you define the condition in which he's living I think. If you say because to live with the new wife is continuing adultery and he knows it is then the repentance he professes can't be sincere. Then both those things being accepted, what you say would be right. But if what I said yesterday is right that the Lord is dealing with motives in what you do and that the motive determines whether the thing continues to be a sin. If a man divorces his wife with adulterous intent with respect to another woman and marries her with that same intent then certainly he is living a life of adultery. I would think it was possible for that person to change his mind sincerely deeply to regret the events which had led up to the situation and genuinely say I realized that all this was quite wrong and I'm penitent and I'm contrite and then seek for restoration and to my mind the right solution would not be to demand separation from the partners. I don't think that would be the right answer. I would want to be as sure as a man can be sure that repentance was sincere and I wouldn't hurry about it. I wouldn't say divorce today and marry tomorrow and get back into fellowship on the following day. It would be something much more long drawn out than that in my mind but I would not rule out the possibility if I saw reason to believe that the person concerned really did regret what he had done. This is David and Bathsheba exactly because David took Bathsheba and he had her husband murdered and he did say how deeply sorry he was and Nathan did accept him. So it's that kind of case I would use in my parallel. It's worth that. O Lord we should have asked thee before we began that knowing thy holiness and thy law and knowing our fallibility and our weakness that the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart might be acceptable in thy sight. We ask thee now that thou wilt accept what we have said and purify it from anything that was wrong and receive us in thy mercy as we seek to regulate our lives in accordance with thy will through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Transcript

Needs to be dealt with and so can we begin by reading around from 1st Corinthians chapter 11? And the first 16 verses please First Corinthians 11 1 through 16 Well, I think a closer look at the two halves of it flow and maybe we can clarify the issue. I have written about it in several places and still there are some questions that come up in reference to what I really meant and maybe this is the best time to try to explain it. Let's begin with the spirit of a child and what that really means. The spirit, as far as I'm concerned, is the most fragile characteristic in human nature. The spirit of a child relates to self-esteem and self-worth. There's a natural tendency in children and all of us in the universe to question our adequacy, to need constant evidence that we are worthy individuals, that we have something to offer, that we can compete, that somebody loves us, that somebody cares for us. That's really what the spirit is all about and you have to handle the spirit of a child very carefully and you can damage it when you're not even intended. You can damage it by insult, by humor, by just being so busy that the child doesn't feel included, doesn't feel loved. The spirit of a child is very, very fragile and it won't take very much harassment. If you don't love a child, if you don't like him very much, if he's dumb or he's ugly, he'll usually come to you very costly to the emotional apparatus of children to experience those kinds of frustrations. On the other hand, while the spirit of a child is extremely fragile, the will of a child is not fragile at all. Now, introducing this topic gently, there are some things in the Bible that seem to be based upon one chapter alone. For example, the evidence that there will be a rebellion at the end of the thousand year reign of the Lord Jesus Christ is found only in Revelation chapter 20. The fact that there will be a second judgment, if that's how you interpret the words, as I do, is also found only in Revelation chapter 20. Teaching concerning the covering of the head of the woman is found only in First Corinthians chapter 20. And in all those cases, I think one sometimes wonders, why is the thing mentioned in the Torah? It is so important, why isn't it mentioned more often? And in none of these cases do we get an answer. We just have to say, this is part of the Bible, why do we not say we will receive it? I think probably in connection with at least two of the three things I've mentioned, if we'd been allowed to choose in the Bible, we would have preferred that the verses were not there. I don't want to believe in a rebellion at the end of the millennium, but the Bible seems to say so and I can't get around it, so I believe it. And I don't particularly want to impress the things set out in First Corinthians chapter 11 either. I would be more comfortable if that chapter, or at least the first half, had not been written, but there it is. It's been written by an inspired apostle of God and we have to face it and try to take it in that stride properly. So let's see if we can understand it without, as it were, antagonizing each other and trying to arrive at a proper significance of this statement that a woman ought not to pray with her head uncovered. Now the first thing I want to point out is that the occasion for this is in some ways peculiar to the first century, but not in others. And the part which is peculiar to the first century is the business of the woman praying all prophesying. Well, the all prophesying implies that there were spiritual women around her who had the power of appearing in inspired utterances from God, which is an unusual state of affairs. It happens with Deborah and Barak in the New Testament and with some of them, but very few women. And we do know it happened in the New Testament times, because when Peter was speaking to the Jews on the day of Pentecost, he quoted to them the words of the prophet Joel, who said, This is that which is spoken by the prophet Joel, saying, It shall come to pass in the last days that I will pour out my spirit from all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your old mens shall see vision from the young men, and shall be in dreams all the way round. So there is a definite statement by Peter that the promise is being fulfilled, which includes some prophesying women. Now we do know that when Paul was on the way back to Jerusalem at the end of his third missionary journey, when he stopped at Caesarea, he stayed in the house of one pilgrim, and that record says this same pilgrim had four daughters which did prophesy. I have a mental picture, by the way, in my mind of what Paul went through at that time, because he was on his way back to Jerusalem where he was determined to go in order to bear witness to his own people. And every time he stopped on his journey from the southern part of Greece back to Jerusalem, he was confronted by inspired people and said, You shouldn't be going to Jerusalem. And the last time it happened was in Caesarea, when he was almost on the doorstep of Jerusalem, where he stayed in the house of a pilgrim, himself a prophet, and there were four daughters which were prophesying. And I reckon that Paul was prophesying that very thoroughly during that period and told by both this man and his four daughters repeatedly and time and time again, You ought not to be going to Jerusalem. Especially since he had made up his mind that he was going, and when Agavus came up from Jerusalem and bound his own hands and feet and said, So will the Jews bind in Jerusalem the men that weareth this girdle, that could almost have been the last straw, if you can call a girdle a straw. Anyway, one way or the other, Paul was being very distinctly told by all the prophets and prophesies that he met that he ought not to go to Jerusalem, and he still went because he knew he had a job to do. Anyway, that was an aside. The point I was mentioning that for is that there definitely were prophesying women in the first century church. How many there were, I don't know. But I would presume that there were some in Corinth, or at least there were some who said they were. You never could tell with Corinth. Corinth was a strange kind of place. It was a boiling over kind of place where emotions ran high. It was a turbulent seaport. Everything found a home in Corinth, including old advices. And Paul bears witness to them in this letter, which is dealing with problems of all kinds. Just some of the things they were doing, for example. They divided themselves into parties. If they didn't fight with their fists, they wouldn't be fighting with their words. And he says, I am of Paul, I am of Hebrews, I am of Apollos, I am of Christ. They tolerated quite evil things in their community, like the dreadful case of the incestuous man in chapter 5. They were going to law with each other to get their rights, like the events of chapter 6. They were, it seems, in danger of converting the breaking of bread service into an orgy, as in the latter part of this chapter, where some people went taking plenty of food and drink with them, and some people went taking very little because they've got very little. And they had their so-called love feast before they had their breaking of bread. And it seems things got very much out of hand. One is starving, and the other is drunken, the apostle seems to be saying. So they were not a very good example in some ways, although they were a very warm-hearted body of people. These believers in Corinth, who partook of all the bad habits of the sea port itself. Now it seems that they, amongst other things, misused what they called their spirit gifts. Chapters 12, 13 and 14 of this letter are written, it seems, very largely to tell them that if they do claim to have gifts like the gifts of tongues, the gifts of prophesying and so forth, they ought not to be quarreling with each other as to who should speak. They shouldn't all be speaking at the same time. And if there was a gift of tongues in their midst, then somebody should speak with the gift, and then somebody else should tell them what it meant. And only under those conditions should they do it. You get the idea that in the background of all this, there were a good many fake prophets in Corinth. There were people who said they got spirit gifts and they hadn't. They said they were speaking with tongues and they were gambling. And the apostle was trying to set all that kind of thing right. Now I should think there could even have been some fake prophecies too. But in all events, there were people in Corinth who thought that they were specially privileged people, and the ordinary rules didn't apply to them. So when Paul begins by saying, every woman praying or prophesying with her head uncovered is under her head, he seems to be talking in particular about those who had or who claimed to have spirit gifts. It looked as though these particular women, if they really did have the spirit gifts, would have had the right to offer public prophecies, because after all, the prophecies would come to them given by God, and there it was to be uttered. And it also looks as though there were some people who were claiming to do it, but really, we're doing it making up the evidence that they were prophets and prophecies. But the apostle puts one kind of criterion before them, and he says a woman who prophesies is still a woman, and she's not a special case. And the way in which she behaves in the assembly is the way in which the other women behave. So if a woman prays or prophesying with her head uncovered, she's not doing the right thing she should do as the rest of them do. And that seems to be accepting that there was a practice in the early church whereby their women did cover their heads in the place of worship. Now, that's stating the bold historical facts as I understand them. The question now is, what's it all about? What's it for? What does it mean? And should we, in our own ecclesial associations, be following the same kind of practice? Well, the apostle uses a very distinct, even if it's difficult, line of reasoning. Let's read again verse 3. We read this on at least one previous occasion, but I'd like to read it now. But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ. The head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. Now, their head doesn't mean this. It means the one in a position of authority. So the heavenly father is in a position of authority as concerning his son, who is in a position of authority as concerning the men in the church, who are in a position of authority as compared with the women in the church. And we're not now in the position of saying whether we like that or not. This is what Paul is saying. So you take relative headship, and the woman has a head which is the man, the man has a head which is Christ, and Christ has a head which is God. And that's purely symbolic. We're not talking about the head on our shoulders at all at that point. However, then we would go into verse four and read, every man praying or prophesying having his head covered, dishonor of his head, we meet the word head in the natural sense of the term. This, the thing that sits on your shoulders. And the apostle is saying that if a man goes into the assembly of the congregation and he's wearing something that covers his head up, he is dishonoring his head. Now you say, which head? And that, you have to say, it can't mean he's doing any dishonor to his own physical head. Whether you're wearing a hat or not doesn't make any difference to the state of your own head, as if your own head could have on, as compared to the rest of your body. So he must therefore be saying, if a man covers his head up when he goes into the assembly, it is as though he was covering up his spiritual head, and his spiritual head is Christ. So he's saying the men go into that community and they don't cover up their natural heads because they want to show that they are revealing and proclaiming and honoring their spiritual head, which is Christ. And when the apostle goes on to say the man ought not to cover his head, for as much as he is the image and glory of God, he's taking the same kind of line. The man in the community bears that which reveals the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ over him and discloses it to all comers. Now then, when he goes on to say, there's five, but every woman praying or prophesying with her head unveiled or uncovered, dishonored with her head, we have to ask the same kind of question again. What kind of a head are we talking about now? She goes in having not covered up her physical head, wearing no veil or hat, and in doing that, says the writer, she is dishonoring her head. Which head? Now, again, not the physical head. And we have been given a list of heads. The head of the woman is the man. The head of the man is Christ. The head of Christ is God. Now, although I don't believe this is the usual explanation of those words, it seems to me that there can be no escape from the conclusion that the apostle is saying that every woman who goes in with her head uncovered is dishonoring her immediate head, who is the man. Now, why? Now, let's suppose that we are dealing with these things in a symbolic way. Then the man goes into the church and he doesn't cover his head up. What does that mean? It means he's honoring Christ. The woman goes into the assembly of the church and she does cover her head. What does that mean? It means she is not disclosing, not revealing to view that which that head represents, and that's the man. So, if she's not doing that, what is she doing? She is getting the man out of the way. She's putting him out of sight. She goes into the congregation, therefore, having shown that she is there in the presence of God as of right. She's not there because there's some man around who's let her in. She's there because she has a right to be in the presence of God. She goes there, covers up this head, and by implication honors the one which is higher up. Which is the Lord Jesus Christ. So, if we are at all disposed to regard what the Apostle Paul is saying here as a bit of a humiliation, imposing upon us something we don't want to do, something quite out of accordance with the liberty of the 20th century, then while I share with you the wish that this had never been necessary, the fact that it is necessary because the Apostle Paul has said it, and so what he is saying is that the worship he has between the believer and his God or the believer and her God is not dependent upon any other mediator than the Lord Jesus Christ himself. It is him alone whom we honor when we go into the place of worship. Or, putting it as he has put it in at least two other passages, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. There's no national barriers. There's neither bond nor free. There's no service barrier. There is neither male nor female. There's no sex barrier. You're all one in Christ Jesus. So, in the matter of worship and the salvation, there is no question of inferiority or authority. The woman isn't saved because of no less. She goes into the gesture of salvation, the message of salvation, the position of salvation, because salvation is open to all men suddenly, whether men or women. So, I reckon that when this ordinance comes before us and when we are asked to, in the case of our womenfolk, to cover our heads in the place of worship, it should be seen as the Apostle's way of expressing our dependence upon Christ alone. And it shouldn't be seen as a gesture of humiliation. Humility, yes, not humiliation. Of course, there are things about this that are not easy to understand for me, too. I don't really quite understand why the Apostle Paul says, if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn, though I think he's using the language of ridicule. I think he is saying, if you are so rebellious against the ways of God that you intend to disclose your head, then go the whole hog and cut your hair off. It's a way of trying to shame those who behave in that way into recognizing that they can't carry it to its full length and therefore not doing it at all. I don't quite understand either why the Apostle says the woman should have power on her head because of the angels, or literally, I suppose, a sign of authority on her head because of the angels, though I think it probably means something like she has a sign that she is under direct heavenly authority and not in this instance under that of the man. I don't think she is going to the place of worship that God might be worshipped by her direct. So, overall, it seems to me, first, that the teaching is clear as to what one ought to do, and second, that the meaning of it is a meaning of liberation and emancipation before God and not the other way around, and it should therefore be undertaken gladly. However, there's a verse which is always causing difficulty, and it really shouldn't, and that's the last verse that we write together. But if any man seemeth to be contentious, we have no such question, neither the church nor the woman. Now, it's all too easy to read those words as though they were saying that I've given you my reasons for thinking that a head covering should be worn, but if you want to argue about it, don't let's bother about it. The custom can be waived. Now, some people do read it like that. I've met some recent occasions, in fact, where women focused associated with the Christian community have thought it is their right to come into the place of worship not wearing a head covering because they say, well, I'm seeming to be contentious, so the custom doesn't apply to me. We can do without it. Now, I have to tell you that that is not the right way of reading that passage, but there is no possible defense for me in the capacity of that word, but it means something quite different, and I will give you it from the Revised Standard Version now, chapter 11, verse 16. If anyone is disposed to be contentious, we recognize no other practice, nor do the Churches of God. Now, you see what that means. He is saying quite clearly that I have given you my reasons why you should behave in this way in the Church of God, but I'm not going to argue with you if you want to argue back. I'm just telling you, I'm laying down the law. No other practice is to be recognized, and moreover, it applies not only to you, but to the other Churches as well. We recognize no other practice, but the Churches of God don't do the same. You should conform. Now, I should think, and I'm taking the risk here, that there are people who have got other versions than the ones I have so far quoted. I've quoted King James and the Revised Version, which allows of the ambiguity. I've quoted the Revised Standard Version that doesn't. Wood does have got other versions, please tell me. Any other than the King James and the RSV in this room? There isn't? Oh, I thought there was. That's a shame. Well, I'll still take the risk. When you go away and you find the New American Standard Bible or the New International Version or whatever it is around, look up that verse and see what it says. I'm quite confident that, in fact, if it does give a decision at all, if it will be in favor of the one I've been mentioning, that no other practice is to be recognized. Now, one other thing I should say, they tell us in an expected way, that in the first century, if a woman went about unbound, she was commonly regarded as being no better than she ought to be. That she may very well have been confessing to a simple way of life and seeking to advertise her profession as being a harlot. And that, therefore, it could have been the token of respectability in those days to wear a covering so that you were not confused with any moral woman. Now, I admit that this is very likely the case. But then when those people who say that go on to reason, so it only applies to the centuries where that was true, so we don't need to bother now. I have to say, now, if they possibly used that kind of reasoning, I could perhaps agree with you. If he had said, in the condition of the times, any woman going about uncovered gains herself a bad reputation, then I would have to say, yes, perhaps that doesn't apply anymore. But that is not the reasoning he uses. The reasoning he uses is fundamental reasoning about the head of God, of Christ being God, the head of the man being Christ, the head of the woman being man, because of the angels. All the other things which are there are reasonings of fundamental kind, rather than of a local, temporal kind. And whereas as I say, I like this as little as anybody else as being there, it is there. And because it is based upon such fundamental considerations, we can't say it's a first century rule only. And so, again, I have to say, we should in humility accept it and practice it and make this our way of life in the gatherings of the Eucharist. Nothing is ever lost by being a bit too aware. Something may be seriously lost by being a bit too proud. And no one will lose anything in God's sight by saying, well, I don't really understand what this is for, if we have to say that. I don't quite appreciate why you did lay down this question, if we don't. Nevertheless, I see the custom there, and I will be glad to be informed. You will tell me later what it all meant perhaps, but now I'll form the gesture of humility before you and then we'll do the thing that you've asked. So, can I make that recommendation to all our young girls and young women, and can I ask our young men to help them? And don't let anybody be pompous and proud and arrogant about this. The relation between the sexes is one where the Scriptures set out a position. They make the male position the dominant one and the female position lack of service and help. And they do it in a way that we can't escape. But it's the business of every man to say, if that's my position, it carries enormous responsibility with it. It doesn't carry the right to be arrogant. And it's there not because I deserve it, but because that's where God's put me. And it's the business of every woman to say, if that's where God has put me, I must accept it. It doesn't mean that I'm inferior in His sight. I'm no whit the worst in the way of salvation. And even if I don't like it, it can be good for me in the end, which it certainly can. And in that spirit, we ought to accommodate to each other. I've always appreciated the difference between the prayers of men and women in the Jewish synagogue. The man says something like, I thank thee, Lord, creator of heaven and earth, that thou hast not made me a woman. And the woman says, I thank thee, Lord, creator of heaven and earth, that thou hast made me as it pleaseth thee. And that's so much the best answer. To say, it has made me as it pleaseth thee is infinitely more humble and more accommodating than to say, you didn't make me something like that. It's a bit like the Pharisee, isn't it? I thank thee, God, that I am not as the rest of men. It's not the way to talk. But God be merciful to me, the sinner, is the way to talk. Now, I think I'll just briefly sum up the main things that we've said together. And then, if there are things you'd like to raise, please do. We began by talking about authority. And we recognize that we all have to acknowledge the right of God to decide how we should live. And He can pry into every corner of our lives, and we mustn't try to stop Him. He has the right to decide how we ought to behave. He has given a delegation of authority in creation to mankind as compared with the animals, to Christ as compared to mankind, and in certain affairs to the man as compared with the woman, and obviously to the parents in relation to the children. And all those things are things we should follow in gladness, recognizing that it fits us for His best service in the age to come. He's established a rule of marriage between man and woman which, as an ideal, wants the man and the woman to remain together for their joint lives, which discontinuances one's right to separate from one's partner and take another. He has, though, established also a canon of mercy, whereby people of all kinds, who've fallen into all kinds of sin and disgrace, can come before Him, and though their sins be scarlet, can be made white like wool, and can be cleansed and purified in His sight. He laid down a rule for ancient Israel that Israelites ought not to marry the heathen around them, and the practical advice not to do the same thing amongst the churches of Christ is still there, and believers ought to marry fellow believers because of the unity of the life which they intend to live together, because of the incongruity of choosing a partner who doesn't share the same faith, and the strange lack of balance between the intimacy of marriage and the non-intimacy of worship, which would follow if we didn't accept. God recognizes, though, that when marriages have taken place before the faith has been accepted, then in those circumstances, the situation must be accepted for as long as the unbeliever is willing, and bids the believer be compliant and helpful and continue living a married life with the unbeliever for as long as the unbeliever will have it so. The Bible sets before us a pattern of purity in our pre-marital lives, keeping ourselves whole and pure and chaste in God's sight, and though I haven't said this before, I was reminded of this after one of our classes, bids us look upon our potential marriage if we are to be married as one which is so holy, so much a matter of giving oneself entirely and receiving entirely, that we ought to seek both men and women alike to go to our partners clean and pure and undefiled, giving ourselves to them absolutely and to them alone when the time comes. Again, the opportunity of forgiveness is there when we have fallen short of this, and we can start again from that point when forgiveness has been sought and confession made, but we ought to live lives free from fornication until the time of marriage comes, and then, as I say, in full purity, accept one another in full surrender. And the Bible sets before us the pattern of the fact that if we do follow the Genesis pattern and a man leaves his father and his mother and pleads unto his wife, and they too become one flesh, that this could speak not only of our earthly marriages but of the union between the Lord Jesus Christ and His Church, that this union can lead us both now to seek to live as though we were mirroring that in our lives, the man as the Christ and the woman as the Church, and to the time when we all, as the woman counterpart of the Lord, will be joined together with Him in the unity and blessedness of the marriage of the Lamb when the Lord returns. Now, I hope and I fear that there may be questions. I don't quite know which is most, but there is now a little time in which you can raise them, so please go ahead. … So there you are. You have several of those days in which to think these up, so I hope you've thunk. I was wondering about the covering of the head. In the Jewish religion, it's always the man who covers the head. Yes, it is, isn't it? … I suspect that there are several things about post-Christian Jewish practice, which are a deliberate rebellion against the Christian way of doing things. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect it. It's the funniest sight in the world to go to see David's tomb in Jerusalem, see the men with programs on their heads because they haven't got proper coverings, and the women going bare-headed, but they do it. And I think there are several cases where the Jews do, in fact, go quite contrary to Christian practice, because they know it's Christian practice. But it wasn't like that. With no evidence. The only evidence we've got about the Jewish gesture of acknowledging sacred things in the Uptism, is that they took their shoes off. Take off thy shoes for off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standeth is holy ground. I don't recall anything about head coverings. If anybody else does, please tell me, but I don't. Anymore? Yes? I think he has to be speaking in general terms. In other words, although with respect to any particular woman, the one who exercises what is called headship over her must be the particular man with whom she is linked, her father if she's not married and her husband if she is, yet what is being laid down here is the principle of the thing, that there is a relationship between a womanly state and a manly state, which puts the man in the next stage up, in the line of authority, and therefore that the woman, considered as exemplary of womankind, covers her head, in order to cover up the man who is exemplary of mankind, applies in general, and it's not concerned with a particular race to a particular person. At least that's the way I would look at it. One further question. Could you amplify praying and prophesying in our present context as a visual situation? Well, I'll try to put a bit more clearly what I was trying to say before. Yes, but I'd better go a little bit further, I suppose. There are a number of passages in the New Testament which regulate rather severely the right of a woman to speak, in the assemblies of the Church, where Paul says, I wish your women to keep silence in the Church, where he says, I suffer not a woman to speak, and where he gives reasons for that. And it would seem to me that it was the practice the Apostle was seeking to encourage and require that the actual public ministry should be done through the voices of the men alone. Nevertheless, in the days when the spirit gifts were bestowed upon both men and women, there were exceptional occasions where, because the spirit said so, then the voice of a woman heard in prophecy could and should be heard because the voice came direct from God, as it were. So in our present context, I think the way in which one reasons is this, the way in which I would reason. Paul said to the Corinthians that even if there be a woman prophet, and if she have a prophecy to utter, she should not distinguish herself from other women by discarding her head covering. She should take her place as a woman like all the rest by keeping her head covering. Now in our present context, this would seem to mean that now that the days of women prophets have definitely gone, at least for the time being, then the general rule applies without any controversy. There are no imaginable exceptions to the rule because there aren't now any women prophets. That's the way I would look at it. If you can improve on that, please do. This is not merely me dictating. If you'd like to add, I'd be glad to hear from you. Did you also amplify under which occasional situation would it apply? Would this apply to a newly Bible class? Would this apply to Sunday school situations where the sister may not be an active participant in the general discussion on Sunday school? You're not here referring to head covering, but to raising her voice, are you? Or both? Or both. I can't give a definite answer. I almost wish I could join the company of those who are absolutely certain that the covering should be one on all occasions because it's so easy to give that kind of an answer. And I think I would give that answer if I could, not because I would want to insist on it, but if the teaching were as clear as that, that is what I would say because it's so clear. I think I would say that I'm sure this ought to apply and that it should be insisted on for our meeting in fellowship at the breaking of bread. I'm referring to the covering now. And I hope there will not arise any kind of women's lib movement that will resist that. Sometimes I think I see signs of it coming. I do hope it won't. It's not for the good of any of us. And I hope that the arranging building will accept their responsibility and disallow it. I think it should be demanded that that shall not be done at the breaking of bread service. This is the way I would look upon it. I have felt for some time that I'd rather err in the direction of being conservative and going a bit too far in following the Lord's precepts than in stopping too far short. So on the whole I welcome the same thing being done at our public preaching service. But I know that in America that's nearly a dead letter now. I'm not sure that it ought to be. But equally I'm not sure I can give chapter and verse to require it to be otherwise. So I accept that but with a certain discomfort. I also accept some of the reasons for it but with the same discomfort. And that is, well, strangers coming into the meetings will think it's odd if they see the ladies with hats on because they don't do it anymore. Now I'm not sure in my own mind which is the worst evil to make the stranger feel that we're an odd group because there are too many hats around. And then when they do come to the truth accept it naturally because they've seen it being done. Or to beguile the stranger into thinking we don't bother about hats and then give them the shock of finding that we do when they come to think of joining us and being requested then to make a sudden change. I don't honestly know which is the best bit of practical politics there. I'm not certain that they don't make them feel uncomfortable to begin with is the right policy. So I think I have some respect for the young people around here who are wearing their coverings more than others and I appreciate their reasons for doing so. I'm not laying down a law because I've got no law to lay down. But that's what I would say about that. Bible classes, I've got the irrational attitude towards this that the more formal it is the better it is that the same policy should be followed. This is what we do in Britain generally speaking. At Bible classes too our sisters usually cover their heads. They certainly do in my occlusion. Nobody I think has laid down a law about it but it's an accepted practice and I'm rather glad it is. It removes sources of embarrassment anyway. As to speaking, I wish I could be sure about this. The breaking of bread should be done entirely through male lips. I don't have any doubt. I've got relaxations in my own mind about this. If it was a small community for example and people to read the word were needed I wouldn't object to a reading around in which all voices took part. I would quite like that myself. Though I think on occasion it's been done too. But it isn't the common practice. Similarly in our public preaching I think that as the witness for the church should be in the hands of the men. When it's a matter of teaching children then clearly this is a job a woman does so well anyhow. I can see that nothing in the way of authority is outraged by that. It doesn't put anything in the way of competition between man and woman teaching each other. So I'm sure that comes right outside the scope of the Apostles restrictions and should be encouraged and allowed. I don't know about discussions in Bible classes. We don't again in my own occlusion. It's entirely a male affair. I can't make up my mind which is the right thing. One has so much one can learn from one's female associates. There are acute and sensitive and highly spiritual minds in the midst from which one can profit. And I have to confess I have occasionally eavesdropped upon sisters classes by hearing tapes that have been prepared and have greatly benefited from the things I've heard too. So that as you can see I'm not being a chauvinist about this. But I do want as far as it can be done to honor the precepts laid down in Scripture. I feel none of us should take our own steps to seek an emancipation that Scripture doesn't offer us. It's far better to be on the side of obeying a bit too much than rebelling a bit too much. So again in practice when one has informal Bible discussions I like to see it shared. When there is a formal meeting I think the Scripture is better preserved and honored by going in the direction of the Apostles letting the man do the talking. But it's very much of a subjective thing and I can't give the clear answers you'll get from certain places in Ontario about this for example. I think I heard somebody say, ask him about this, so do will you. In a marriage if your partner tells you to do something you know is wrong but you know there's a strong chance that if you're in a marriage what should you do in case of that? I got the bit where you said if in a marriage your partner tells you to do something you know is wrong. Now I missed the rest. Could you tell me? I think the first step is to do is wrong but there's a strong chance that if you don't get to will that you won't manage what you're doing. Are you able to give me a kind of arbitrary example of what you have in mind? If it would embarrass you don't, can you make one up? Well would this be any good as an example if your partner says well now I don't want you to go to the meetings anymore or something of that kind. I don't wish you to bring your children to read the Bible and things of that kind because I don't want that kind of thing. You gave an explanation though which I didn't hear. Tell me. Let me give a general answer anyhow and then you can tell me where I missed your point. I would have thought that if one's partner, whether a Christophian partner or not, issued a statement that says an instruction not to do things which were plainly one's duty in Christ or to do things which were contrary to that duty then no matter what the effect would be one had to say I'm sorry I can't do that and you would have to follow the way of Christ rather than what the partner says. If for example you don't bring up your children to do Bible reading then I think you have to say sorry I must do that and to bring them up in the nature and abolition of the Lord. He says you're not going to meetings any more than I would say I'm sorry unless you lock me in I have to go and whatever that does to the marriage I think would have to be accepted painful though it be. Not in an aggressive kind of fighting him kind of spirit but in a very humble one which does the utmost one can to conciliate but nevertheless digs in one's heels at the moment of crisis and says I'm sorry that's as far as that I cannot go. Now does that help or not? To elaborate on that idea of authority the children have been commanded to obey their parents and that is a direct command and say that a young person or teenager was exposed to the truth that they wanted to go to church and go into Sunday school and Bible classes and things and their parents burned into it and didn't want them to go. There is no direct command saying you have to go to church or you have to go to Bible class but there is a direct command saying you have to obey your parents and in that case you can cause more strife and more damage if you go to church and rebelling against your parents and by following the will and being an example so you have to be sure what your command is to do. I think the spirit of what you're saying though is very wise though I'm not sure how far it should be taken. I would say that starting at the beginning if a child, a teenage child, a later teenage child perhaps in his parent's home becomes convinced that the truth should be obeyed and the parents seek to hinder that then in all humility the child would have to say well this is one of those things where I am convinced a father against his son, a son against his father I have to do as I am told by the Lord baptism is required of me, baptism I must undertake and it would need to be done in a very careful, humble and submissive spirit where only at that point did rebellion arose where one didn't then see to be a nuisance in every other way which I think is part of what you were saying. I would think that would have to go however to the lengths of continue to keep one's Bible and read it whatever the parent said though not flaunting it in his presence again doing it in a humble way and I would think it would also go to not allowing oneself to be prevented from going to the breaking of bread service. Beyond that point I can well see that when you're in submission to your parents there are things which you have to accept for the time being so as not to create a worse situation. I would think the gesture of somebody being converted by the humble attitude of the dependent is one that you were pointing out there and it's wise to do. I wonder if I can give an example I don't actually know what happened in this case at least I didn't know yesterday I'm not quite sure even now a brother wrote me and he said a lady with whom I work has learnt the truth and wishes to be baptized her husband has told her that she is baptized he will no longer continue the marriage which will break up and he will leave her and I think probably ultimately divorce her. Now you tell me what answer should be given to that one what should the lady do? Any of you? Be baptized. That's one answer. Any contrary answer? Compromise. What kind of compromise could there be? I can't think of one really I mean you can be baptized or not baptized you can't be half baptized I think It is that's right yes thank you that is just what I would say certainly Do I take it we would generally agree then that she ought not to allow that to stop her being baptized? Looks as though we should Now the person who wrote me had given me his own advice to her which was that he thought she should be baptized in secret without telling her husband Any comment? Was that right? I think I heard one no I heard several nos Would those who said no, anyone who said no tell me why they think it's wrong Because that was because there seems to be an aspect in that the relation is lying and we're not supposed to lie Excellent, I think they put it just right The answer I gave to him was if she is baptized without telling him it is pretending she's not being baptized and that is you say acting a lie I think the situation could be explosive anyhow as soon as he found out but I'm sure it's wrong morally that she should do that in secret Any comments there Fred? She's also not saying that of course she believes it That's right yes, it would seem to me that you have to say in that case that the Lord did say that there would be some cases where obeying the truth can break up a marriage It's a dreadful thing to contemplate but you can't disguise it you can't say, oh it won't happen in your case, it will all blow over because sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it didn't I think you just have to say in the humblest possible way, do what duty tells you and be prepared to face the consequences But there's always that business about the quiet conversation of the wives that can put things right perhaps in some cases Let's read, it's not really relevant, let's read just a passage out of 1 Peter I ought to have put it earlier perhaps it'll make a useful tale piece to the series 1 Peter chapter 3 I'll read from verse 1 Likewise you wives be submissive to your husbands I'm reading the reverse standard version So that some, though they do not obey the word may be one, without a word by the behaviour of their wives That's a lovely way of putting it, isn't it? Behave in such a way that even some husbands who have not obeyed might be brought to do so by the way they see their wives behaving When they see your reverent and chaste behaviour let not yours be the outward adorning with braiding of hair decoration of gold and wearing of robes but let it be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable jewel of a gentle and quiet spirit which in God's sight is very precious So once the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves and were submissive to their husbands as Sarah obeyed Abraham calling him Lord And you are now her children if you do right and let nothing terrify you And that has reminded me of something I ought to have said before and which I ought to quote now Would you turn back to the letter to Titus? There's a group of verses here which I think are the finest piece of potted instruction for how to live in a family life and within an ecclesia that I know anywhere in scripture Again I'll read it from the RSV since I have it open Titus chapter 2 But as for you Teach what befits sound doctrine Bid the older men be temperate, serious, sensible, sound in faith in love and in steadfastness Bid the older women likewise to be reverent in behaviour not to be slanderers or slaves to drink They are to teach what is good and so train the young women to love their husbands and children to be sensible, chaste, domestic kind and submissive to their husbands that the word of God may not be discredited Likewise urge the younger men to control themselves Show yourselves in all respects yourself in all respects a model of good deeds and then your teachings show integrity and gravity and sound speech that can't be censured so that an opponent may be put to shame having nothing evil to say of us Now in just a few verses there the apostle Paul has included old men, old women young women, young men going round the corners of a square as it were and he's given each one their walk in life and he's telling all our old men who are not here present so I can say this without fear or favour that they should be wise old men that they should be structurally, soundly instructed old men that they should have things that they can say that will teach the young men the way they ought to behave There's a kind of succession of wisdom in this which the apostle is constantly advocating No generation should presume from what it was taught by the last generation It must equip itself for being the head of the next So Paul's words to Timothy Those things which thou hast seen and heard of me, the same commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also Takes you right down to succession I learnt it from Jesus, you learnt it from me You must teach others and tell them to teach the rest And that idea of each generation knowing what it's about and being prepared to instruct the others is really important Our young men ought to get well trained in the things of the world But then so should our women, for he wants the aged women here to be competent persons knowing their Bibles, able to give sound advice to the younger women and he asks the young men to be ready to take it too He doesn't ask them to shrug off the advice of the old friendly deadlies, but to accept the wise instruction they can be given, but that too might be passed down through the generations that they may be able to teach their own children So I think that is a model of how each of us, younger or older ought to behave, can't be better And if Titus 2 verses 1 to 4 isn't 5, isn't down in your list, I recommend you put it down, because it's one of the verses you ought to have I know I think we have slightly exceeded our time. I wonder, Fred, could I ask you to come to the meeting with prayer? Whatever will happen time will do us remember the past and we will kindly send it to you call us Bye, students, and good night At the close of this class To thank you, Father, for the opportunity of being part of it being drawn together by my great-grandchildren We went through the work of how we could conduct ourselves, by how we should approach others how we shouldn't and why that would be important, if I will that all things would be done as I need them to be done and I believe it is placed right I find mercy though with that and when we stumble we fail immediately and that would be the way to get us up If I was finished or right we may travel hand in hand on that road that leads to death For Father, Mr. Dr. Fred if I stumble sometimes at an anniversary we may all do it together in the praise and the worship of the Lord when all we do in the way of the Lord is to do it together keep us until that time so that we have the same faith in one Amen Well, thank you for being such nice folks I think you're lovely Thank you