unSituational Truth

It is all very well to rail against the warping of doctrine under the heat of a difficult situation. But it is equally important to set in place guidelines, procedures, and tactics that govern how we deal with these uncomfortable disturbances. And since my principal example in the previous post was that of a woman who is not married and who is tempted to denigrate the incredible importance of marriage and children, I thought I would start there.

Sin

I’m going to start out with what I believe is the second most offensive, but first most important reaction to this situation: sin. It seems as if almost the very first expression out of the unmarried woman’s mouth, and certainly the very first expression out of her friends and supporters, is: she did everything right.

This is not at all limited to this subject! The family that ends with a disobedient child, a Sodomite son, or a transgender teen is over very quickly to say: We did our best. And their friends and supporters immediately declaim: they were a model Christian family.

Well, I have some bad news for them: they weren’t. You aren’t. None of us is. Even ignoring the overall backdrop of “For all have sinned….”, we have example after example of men and women in Scripture, often Godly men and women, whose sin devastated their family. ¹

So when it comes time for us to look at our situation, when we realize that there’s a way that God hasn’t blessed us, it should always be our first step to ask ourselves, in what way have I sinned, or am I sinning? Let me be very specific. In the area of marriage, I have almost never seen anyone who was unmarried and frustrated about it who questioned the method that they were using to get married. (footnote: publically)

If someone is struggling with their payer life, if someone believes that they have an inadequate grasp of Scripture, if they are bombarded with temptations… the almost automatic response of the Christian preacher and counselor is: you are doing something wrong. To propose a new focus for their prayers, a new method of Bible study, or an accountability group for their sin.

But when we look out into our church pews and see dozens of unmarried young men and women, almost no one says, “We’re doing something wrong.” Almost never is a Bible study group proposed to search the Scripture to see how we should be getting our young people married. Rarely do we see calls for repentance and revival.

Sins of Others

So now we come to the most offensive² and second most important issue in dealing with unmarried young men and women: the sins of others. We have already started that discussion: our families and churches are not diligently seeking what they are doing wrong.

I believe that is the proximate cause of our current lack of marriages. Families and churches have either deliberately or ignorantly divorced themselves from what the Scripture says about how to get married, and the results are clear. However, that does not mean that it is the root cause. That does not meant there there are no societal sins which have led up to this result.

When Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites go, that was the proximate cause of some pretty awful consequences for Egypt. But the root cause was Pharaoh’s hard-hearted rejection of God. Any idiot could see that the whole ‘not letting Israel go’ thing wasn’t working out very well for Egypt. But because of Pharaoh’s hard heart, God further blinded his eyes. And so all Egypt’s firstborn died to an easily discernible and easily fixable cause.

In our day, even those people who seem to have been able to notice that our young men and women aren’t getting married, and have the eyesight to observe into the not-so-distant future the catastrophic demographic consequences, still seem unable to open their mouths and say, “We’re doing this wrong.”

And is it any wonder when we live in a society where even those who call themselves Christians think it is possible for two men to be married? Is it any wonder that the judgement of God would blind them to their sin in the area of marriage??

And the Rest

When Gilligan’s Island was first produced, its famous theme song ended with, “… and the rest, here on Gilligan’s Isle!” Relegating the professor and Mary Anne (two of my favourite characters) to second-class status. In later seasons, they corrected this appalling deficit.

However, I would like to relegate two classes of reasons for our marriage deficit to second-class status. Not because I think they are unimportant (after all, the professor and Mary Anne were my favourite characters!), but because I believe that whenever a young man or woman (especially women) is unmarried these days the immediate and instinctive reaction of Christians in their group is to say, “Well, I guess God is calling you to a period of singleness.” They do not typically say this after a long period of examination of the methodology and potential sin; instead, they use this statement to forestall or prevent any such examination.

So, especially for women, the size of the group that the modern church puts into the category of ‘Called to singleness’ is extraordinarily large, and the size of the group, “Should be married, but someone is doing something wrong,” is almost infinitely small.³

There are a certain number of people, and none of us know how many, for whom God has singled out a righteous and a profitable path outside of marriage and childbearing. However, for the purposes of this article, I believe that my readers should follow the instructions on the bottle of shampoo, “Rinse and repeat.”. I believe they should read and act upon the two previous sections multiple times before they even begin to wonder if they fall into the category to whom God is calling an alternate path.

Throughout history, God has called vanishingly few men and women to a life outside of marriage and childbearing,⁴ to the extent that the New Testament says, “Let every man have his own wife,”⁵ and ‘She shall be saved in childbearing’.⁶

Not a Binary

Let me make something very clear: The sin issues are not binary. It is not that either the individual woman is sinning or their family or church is sinning. It may very well be… both. Perhaps the church has been teaching falsely (or failing to teach at all), and the family has not been correcting this. Perhaps the church and the family are behaving badly, and the individual herself doesn’t take action, then she is sinning.

But if all three are sinning… all three are sinning. And that sin needs to be repented of, and changed, for our marriage and fertility rates to recover.

Conclusion

This post only covered the one unSituational truth: the importance of marriage and childbearing in God’s economy, and how a Godly Christian woman (or man) should behave when they find themselves in the situation of not being married.

But a similar treatment is needed for any of the other situations that may occur where a Christian finds themselves faced with situations that challenge the obvious Biblical understanding in a given area. God’s Word is truth. It is God’s Word that should challenge our circumstances, and not our circumstances that should challenge His Word.

Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!

Being ‘restacked’ and mentioned in ‘notes’ is very important for lesser-known stacks so… feel free! I’m semi-retired and write as a ministry (and for fun) so you don’t need to feel guilty you aren’t paying for anything, but if you enjoy my writing (even if you dramatically disagree with it), then restack, please! Or mention me in one of your own posts.

If I don’t write you back it is almost certain that I didn’t see it, so please feel free to comment and link to your post. Or if you just think I would be interested in your post!

If you get lost, check out my ‘Table of Contents’ which I try to keep up to date.

Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,

Von

1. For example: David, Eli, Samuel, Solomon

2. One reason why I state that this is the ‘most offensive’ topic is that in our modern day, getting married is considered an individualistic and private process, not to be inquired into, let alone interfered with by any outsider. So the idea that our lack of marriages might be cause by a group failure is to attack this idea at its root, not just to accuse the group of failure more generally.

3. Indeed even the ability of the modern to make constructive criticism seems lacking. Telling your daughter that that dress is ugly, or that she needs to lose weight seems to be a bridge too far for modern fathers.

4. Try this thought experiment: name a Godly Biblical character where, at the end of their life, you say ‘They were never married, and they had no children”. Be careful, this is not ‘we don’t hear about their wife or children” but “Scripture tells us that they died unmarried and childless”. Feel free to include your list in the comments, and I’m pretty sure I can name more than one dozen of counter examples. (Oh, and before you go there, no, Christ doesn’t count, and neither does Paul. But feel free to start that discussion.)

5. I Corinthians 7:2

6. I Timothy 2:15