The Need for Jesus

Over and over I feel brought back to face the central issue of what is behind failure and success in marriage, and I cannot escape the fact that at the root of every divorce is selfishness, unfaithfulness, arrogance, deceit, abuse, and sin.

So often people fall into the most cruel of all errors and that is the sin of laying the blame for marital breakup at the hands of the faithful spouse who has wept before God countless hours crying out for help. So often people in the church have behaved with the utmost arrogance and cruelty toward those who suffer. Pastors perform adulterous weddings sometimes out of cowardice, but always with utmost irresponsibility and indecency lying to God, calling "holy matrimony" that which Jesus Himself has called unholy and adulterous.

On the one hand, people cry out, "thou shalt not judge" as they judge God wholly unworthy of respect, trust, and obedience and judge the children and the faithful unworthy of faithfulness.

For some reason some people seem to feel that God's Word needs to be filtered, corrected, brought into greater enlightenment through what they regard to be a higher form of education. And all this time, the victims of adultery and divorce suffer. Not only must these victims suffer loss as a widow suffers, but they suffer the utmost rejection and betrayal from the one on earth to whom they trusted their heart most. As these victims of adultery and divorce spent years praying for their families and their marriages putting up with abuse, praying for it to be overcome, living out lives of the utmost faithfulness, upon the breakup of the family, they are forced to suffer the utmost shame, slander, abuse, belittling, all from an unfaithful spouse who seeks to justify his or her unfaithfulness somehow hoping to shed some of his or her share of the responsibility for the failure in marriage.

My pastor in an American Baptist church in Moraga Hills told me that I must have done something wrong to cause my wife to leave me for an affair with another man. Then the man who followed him in ministry at that church after he retired pronounced the re-marriage of my ex-wife to another man. By then, I had no desire to receive her back and the man she eventually married was not the man with whom she had her affair. But, he lied to God and to his congregation and to the public when he performed the wedding ceremony as though to tell this world that this union is indeed holy when in fact Jesus Christ Himself calls it adulterous. Now this may seem a bit harsh, but how harsh is it to put a victim of adultery through the torment the church and state both put them through these days? What cowardice. What shame. What indecency. What a lie to call a nation great which destroys the families of little children for money and kills little children in the womb before they can even take their first breath. It's not my place to make a judgment and bring any curses upon anyone or any nation or leadership, and it is not my desire to do anything of that sort. But when sin is taking place in this way, it is the obligation of every minister and every person who wishes to be an honest Christian to speak out against such things and take a stand. At the root of divorce is the root of sin, selfishness, the very thing that takes people into hell. I would be surprised if there were a single person ending up in hell who is not surprised upon arriving there -- either surprised that they had arrived at hell or surprised to find it so much worse than expected. I do not expect to find one single adulterer or adultress there, though I expect to find many ex-adulterers there. I do not expect to find one arrogant and careless abuser of the faithful and their children, and I expect to find many of them in hell who had attended church all their lives. But, in heaven I expect to find those who had repented from such arrogance and abuse just as I expect to find many ex-slave owners, ex-rapists, ex-murderers, and ex-child molesters. I don't expect the amount of God's grace required to save such people to be much different at all. But, the problem today with divorce and adultery is that people have a false sense of security thinking they can grab their ticket to heaven and parade around like proud turkeys while Satan licks his chops. What about you and me? Will we rise above this or be the turkeys Satan licks his chops over?