“For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts.”
Abandoning natural biblical marriage either by never entering into it or by ending it for unjust causes result in both outward expressions of violence and inner desires to see violence done. We often restrict our thoughts of violence to the use of fist or firearm, but what if there are more deadly forms of violence? What if those forms of violence are not seen as violence at all, but instead are seen as acceptable cultural choices?
Let’s dig in here a little bit. We hear the question, “what does it matter whom I love?” asked on social media and at protests against those who teach natural biblical sexuality. Of course generally speaking they don’t mean love. The real question should be stated, “what does it matter whom I have sex with?” This question is a double edged sword and cuts two ways. The heterosexual edge of the blade we dealt with in our last post as we looked at the children produced by promiscuous sexuality, and their tendency toward violence, imprisonment, addictions, and who often also grow up in unnecessary poverty. But the other edge of the blade is the homosexual edge. Just as heterosexual sin results in violence and is in itself a form of violence, so also is homosexual sin. How? How could this possibly be the case since it does not produce the resultant effects on children discussed in our previous post since children cannot be conceived in the act.
The first command of the second table of the moral law, the table that deals with our responsibilities to our fellow man is, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12) The reality is that there were people that were here before us. We live upon their labor. They built, learned skills and trades, sacrificed their lives, time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears in order to give to us the lives and resources that we now enjoy. The greatest violence that we can do to their work is to choose, merely for selfish short term sexual pleasure, to engage in acts that destroy their work by not engaging in the natural biblical marriage necessary for its maintenance. Two people, choosing short term non-procreative sexual pleasure can destroy the work of thousands of years and thousands of people, by choosing to neglect in the few short years that they can reproduce, to pursue natural biblical marriage. In one act they do violence to both the past and the future. This is what the Apostle Paul means when he writes,
“For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. ” (Romans 1:26-27)
The due penalty of their error is that they vanish. All their work, labor, intelligence, skills, graces, wonders, imagination, and laudable human love completely come to an end. And their ultimate end destroys all the same things from all the people that ever lived and worked to make them who they were. It is a pernicious form of violence that murders both the past and future. When one prays for the restoration of natural biblical marriage one is praying for the honoring of the past, the flourishing of their neighbor, and for the continued flourishing of their neighbor well into the future. Far from being bigotry or hatred it is truly loving your neighbor and desiring to see them avoid the self inflicted violence and the terrible vanishing judgment that is produced by unnatural affections.
Moreover the violence produced by unnatural affections can have national ramifications if enough people choose to live in them. The command to “honor your father and mother” comes with the promise, “that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Natural biblical marriage, living according to the created order and design, leads to the stability necessary for human flourishing. Without it unspiritually healthy people and population decline are inevitable. The nation either breaks up from within due to immorality and the dissolution of societal trust, or the population declines and is replaced by other people groups who engage in natural biblical marriage. Consider the dissolution of societal trust in our own nation today and that it has come on the heels of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s. The terrible vanishing judgment that attends unnatural affections combined with the actual violence produced by heterosexual promiscuity are the twin dangers that have contributed to the destruction of every nation and empire that has ever existed.
The seriousness of the need for a return to natural and biblical marriage cannot be overestimated when we observe the effects it has upon the way we feel about children. We’re going to delve further into the violence of sexual immorality in our next blog, especially the violence done against the most innocent among us, human babies. Please be in prayer this month as we focus on this pressing need.
For additional reading on some of the content put forward by this article as taught in the Scripture, see the non-Christian secular anthropologists J. D. Unwinn’s book “Sex and Culture”