Context and Separation

No other human has the authority to decide for you what is the will of God.

People do have the authority to exclude you from things He has placed in their hands, by whatever means necessary. The only question, then, is discerning the boundaries of dominion. We rightly reject the notions of justice and dominion that arise from traditional European and American custom as arising from a heathen background. All divine justice is rooted in Ancient Near Eastern feudal law and custom because that was God’s Law ever since the Garden of Eden. Once you understand that ancient system, it’s not hard to discern where your boundaries end and those of another person begin.

So long as you respect the boundaries as God revealed them, the worst someone can do is ostracize you. That ends up being the sum total of New Testament church discipline, as well. That’s because the earthly legal authority vested in the Covenant of Moses ended at the Cross. It was forever afterward a record of the peculiar expression of divine justice, a critical source in understanding God and what eventually made the Cross necessary. The Covenant was meant to fail in a certain sense, but it did embody a reflection of God’s moral character.

Under the Law of Moses, the community could carry out various forms of punishment, up to and including capital penalties executed in various ways. But even then, the execution rested on the violator remaining in physical custody of the covenant community. Should the perpetrator flee the jurisdiction of that community, pursuit was generally prohibited. An awful lot of Mosaic penalties depended entirely on the violator trying to stay within the dominion of the covenant. A great many penalties consisted of withdrawing covenant covering, treating the violator as outside the covenant protections. It meant they were no longer regarded as family. The idea was the protect and promote the stability of the covenant community.

Very few violations were such a serious threat as to justify execution. It was not a question of some threat to “law and order” as the phrase is used today, but a threat to the fragile human unity of a tribal community. Everyone under the covenant was considered the same as blood kin in one degree or another. All covenant members were your covenant family, and the closer their kinship, the greater their liberties in your human existence. Close kin could make demands distant relatives could not. Someone who could hear you snore at night knew you better than someone who rarely saw you. They were more likely to be merciful where you needed it and strict when you crossed the line. Everyone understood this instinctively.

One of the biggest threats to a stable tribal society was adultery. The expectation of not having to share sexual intimacy outside the marriage partnership was powerful. It helped to create a level of trust wholly necessary for a stable society. In a close-knit tribal society, the greatest threat of sexual rivalry came from your nearest neighbors, who were your closest kin. The sense of betrayal would create an intolerable emotional pressure cooker. The Law of Moses granted the women some ownership over her husband’s sexual fidelity, something quite new in that part of the world. Either husband or wife as the wronged party could forgive and the community was required to abide by it; this was frankly the most common outcome. However, either wronged party could also demand stoning as the penalty for catching his/her spouse in the act. The difference depended on whether the spouse had worked much to develop that level of trust in the first place.

And what of divorce? Jesus said it was not really the way God intended things to be, but that Moses granted a man the power to divorce a wife who simply didn’t please him. However, the restrictions on divorce were pretty high, much higher than with surrounding nations. That’s because the context placed an awful lot of power in the husband’s hands. He gets rid of a woman and it means darned little, but for his ex-wife it could mean the end of her hopes for any kind of normal life. The man had to insure that she could at least survive and not simply toss her out on the street. Further, he had to give her a certificate of divorce that allowed her to remarry. She was a fellow member of the covenant.

And what of this other form of marital separation called “putting away” (Ezra 10)? This is simply the practice of separation, typically without a proper certificate. While a Hebrew man could elect to use this when his spouse was an adulteress, in Ezra it applied to women who had not converted, and thus remained “foreign.” These women were not protected by the Covenant. Try to remember that an awful lot of translation from Hebrew and Greek Scripture into English was guided by the Western church based on all kinds of non-biblical moral concepts. Western Christians try to assert their heathen legal traditions on a par with Moses. When God said in Malachi that He hated “divorce” it was actually the practice of removing a woman from her covenant privileges — a mere separation without that certificate of divorce. God cared about the fate of the woman.

While a legal divorce still wasn’t what God had in mind, it was better than what many other Ancient Near Eastern nations did. Our problem today is that we are utterly lacking in any of the context that goes with Jesus’ teaching and with Moses’ Law. We don’t have a cultural background that takes marriage anywhere near as seriously as did the Hebrew people. (Note in passing: Hebrew culture didn’t idolize virginity the way Western Christian culture seems to do.) What we have is a legalistic tradition that raises some imaginary objective standard to the place of God. It’s the same as idolatry, because it worships a god who doesn’t actually exist.

When Jesus referred to worshiping Mammon (such as in Matthew 6), it wasn’t just a throw-away line about greed. It was an established rabbinical reference from ancient times, well before the Hellenized perversion He faced every day. The ancient concept that comes to us under the name of Mammon is materialism, a much broader false philosophical orientation. It includes the kind of legalism that arises from materialistic assumptions. Thus, Jesus was using that ancient nickname for the very core of Pharisaical teaching that was little more than Aristotelian logic, a worldview that said if we can’t test it with our senses and our reason, it wasn’t important. Pharisaical legalism tried to make written Law into something that could be tested that way. Their teaching was the direct result of Moses’ Law perverted by non-Hebrew philosophical assumptions about reality. Hebrew intellectual traditions were inherently mystical; proof was written by the finger of God in the soul that heard His truth. Legalism about divorce is just as much a worship of Mammon as greed is.

Apostle Paul offered dire warnings about spreading your sexual favors around, too. If you have sex once, you are bound to that partner in some unique moral sense. Your life doesn’t end if you can’t carry through on all the moral implications of sexual union, but you have certainly lost something you can’t get back. He also advised his church members to allow a pagan spouse to leave or stay in the marriage, but it was not a legalistic ruling. He also knew that at some point, it could become impossible to continue in a really bad marriage, and that Ezra wasn’t just being a legalistic butthead, though English translations make it seem that way. Those foreign spouses who converted could stay. Paul was trusting God for the power of mercy to awaken pagan hearts. He also worried that this new Christian religion would become known for threatening social stability by breaking up marriages. How many different nasty rumors can you imagine starting from that sort of thing?

So if your spouse hinders your divine calling, how much distance is enough to please God? You are obliged to consider ways to tolerate some level of tension between what you know ought to be and what you can actually do. How many different ways can you disengage and still keep the social structure running along? If you aren’t already led by the heart, you cannot possibly know anything about any of it in the first place. You cannot know the will of God unless your heart rules over your life because God doesn’t speak to the intellect, only to the heart. You cannot defer to someone else’s judgment for what God requires when you stand before Him.

And if you obey the heart, no human on earth has any business telling you it’s not the voice of God.