Greetings;
We live in a time when people’s lives can become extremely complicated and challenging. We live in societies and environments where iniquities of the heart are being accepted as issues of normal life. What happens when people find themselves in complicated situations due to the iniquities of their hearts? Iniquities are not sins, they are weaknesses that lead to transgression and end up in the entrapments of sin. Sin is an issue of finding love and life in something less than God and therefore becoming bound to situations that are something less than God’s perfect will. When people become wounded in places that should be safe, they respond with a defense of and for their own lives. They look for safe places, or seemingly safe places, to retreat and hide. They look for those same safe places to find what they believe to be love. They end up in relationships that are based upon getting their own needs met. This would be true for heterosexual or homosexual ones. Many people enter into relationships through sin. This could be the sin of fornication, adultery, homosexuality, self-gratification, drunkenness, or just plain selfish greed. The result is complicated situations based upon carnal human need, or their own perception of human need. God never endorsed any marriage that was based upon mere carnal human need. The need of partnership for human destiny is surely legitimate, but personal gratification is not. To get married for what we believe is our true need is a wrong foundation, but to trust God for what He gives for our need is legitimate. God formed Eve and presented her to Adam, she was fashioned, as God knew Adam needed her to be to partner with him and fulfill the will of God in the earth. This was not the personal will of Adam. God authored a relationship of destiny that would reveal the likeness and image of Him in the earth fulfilling His family purpose and destiny in the earth. That likeness and image would be seen in the masculine and feminine character, nature, way, power, and authority of God made manifest in and through a one-flesh union of one man and one woman. The woman was not to be the helper of the man but the helpmate with the man fulfilling the will of God in the earth to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and have dominion. Marriage was to be a testimony of the activation, facilitation, and release of God’s life in the earth. This was never to be a multiple partnership or a contract for human need. It was to be a covenant of life-giving love that would fill the earth with God’s glory. It was to be the exact representation of Jesus and the Church, a covenant of destiny filling the earth with the Father’s glory!
God never authorized a man to take more than one wife, but we have many examples of men with multiple wives in the Bible. The consequence was something less than the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven upon the earth. God never authorized more than one wife, but He never condemned it either. He never desired for husbands to rule over wives, but He made it a consequence to living according to the knowledge of good and evil. Many, often most, marriages display the consequence of the curse of the fall as the expected normal relationship of marriage before God. The religious do it even worse than the unknowing. These types of mindsets are an error in the truth for how God intends for things to be. They propagate the growth of cells in the human community that are contrary to the true life of community that God desires for us all to have. There are many cancers in the body of humanity and cancers in the body of Christ. Cancer cells are cells that live for their own purpose, growth, and destiny. Those cancer cells rob from other cells in the corporate body of purpose for their own existence. We accept many things in our own lives that are the result of wrong food consumption or the ingestion of some carcinogenic substance that causes cancerous cells within us to destroy the identity of our true destinies in God. I deal with men, and even pastors, in Africa who have multiple wives. I don’t tell them to put away their wives. I teach them that they must apply the same principle of one husband to one wife for each of their wives and then to teach their children a more perfect way. I inspire them to teach their children that God’s desires a marriage to be one man and one woman so that all that is in the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven can be made known in the future generations of their family. I believe that we must all come as we are, but then personally assess the dysfunctions that caused us to be as we are. This is an intrinsic and very personal thing. It may take others to help, but the journey of discovery is through the desire and initiative of the individual and not others around them. God doesn’t want us to destroy more lives in the process of our journey in life. He doesn’t want us to form God in our own likeness and image, but to discover the likeness and the image of God to be manifested as the truth in a world filled with lies. He wants for each of us to embrace His change for our own lives in a life-giving and life-revealing way, then He wants us to embrace His perfect will for our children and our children’s children. God’s way was intended to be a man and a woman as one flesh before Him bearing the fruit of destiny in the generations that proceed from within them.
Perhaps there are many things that God doesn’t authorize; yet He does not condemn. Perhaps those things receive His mercy for salvation to heaven, but they lack the power of His grace to bring the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven upon the earth. Each of us must assess whether we want salvation to be an issue that meets our needs when we die or a salvation that brings about the restoration of God’s glory upon the earth. Does salvation simply give me mercy for my present situation or does it bring His grace to my dysfunctions of today to be transformed to unlock the destiny of the generations of my family for tomorrow? Can I embrace God’s grace that empowers the generations of my descendants to possess the gates of their enemies? Can my children and my children’s children know the greatness of the testimony of one man and one woman that lives for the glory of God in being fruitful, multiplying, filling, subduing, and having dominion in the earth? Can this be true for any relationship that was birthed in sin? Can this be true for any marriage that was conceived through the dysfunction of suppressed truth? These are not questions that can be answered by others. These are questions that can only be answered by those who find themselves in the realities of their own dysfunction. We all have dysfunctions of our own and we are all being called into a path of greater destiny. The Law was never given for us to measure others. It was given to measure each of us in our need for Christ. Grace is not given for us to measure others. It is given to empower each of us to become more for the sake of all that follows us in this world. When we receive mercy we can show mercy to others. When we receive grace we become gracious to others because of our own journey of grace. These are not measuring tools in the church, but empowering substances of life within each one who believes.
Food For Thought,
Ted J. Hanson
Very good
Some good stuff here.