Terry wrote:
have no idea what the Church of Christ might believe.
Well, as I said, they use the Ezra passage to argue that all remarried
people on planet earth should divorce their spouses and all original couples
need to remarry. If one of the original couples will not divorce their new
spouse, then the spouse trying to do the right thing should divorce and
remain single, praying and waiting for the first spouse to do what God
wants, which according to them is divorce and remarry their original spouse
again.
Terry wrote:
I have no problem with a Jewish Christian
wedding a Gentile Christian.
I realize that, but under Torah, this poses a problem. The passage you
brought up would insist in divorce in this case.
Terry wrote:
I have studied Paul's teaching, but do not pretend
to understand what it means. I am not about to speculate
what the Jews of Ezra's day intended to do once they
were divorced.
It is not much of a speculation. The whole idea of divorce is to undo a
marriage and allow a new marriage to take place. If remarriage was not in
view, then a writing of divorce is not necessary. Just leave the spouse
because you can't remarry anyway.
Terry wrote:
I simply see men who wanted to be
obedient at the time.
Yes, I see that too.
Terry wrote:
I do not understand your last sentence. Maybe you
and I do not have the same idea about what the words
interpret and apply mean . I had no idea I was doing
either one.
:-) My last sentence was:
The thrust of what Jesus taught on this is that he
is against divorce, yet his teachings would seem
to create more divorce the way you are interpreting
and applying it.
What I was trying to say is this. From my perspective, the goal of the
teaching of Christ on this subject was to turn men away from divorcing their
wives. His goal was to decrease the divorce rate, ideally to make divorce
non-existent. The way you are interpreting his teachings is that if someone
did divorce and subsequently married again, they had better divorce yet
again if they want to follow Christ in purity. So the effect of your
interpretation of this passage would be to cause MORE DIVORCES, the very
opposite of what I perceive Jesus to be trying to accomplish.
The reason your perspective leads to an opposite result is context. You
take the teaching of Christ out of the context in which it was given. In
the context of men divorcing wives for spoiling their supper or any other
reason under the sun, and reinterpreting Torah in order to do it, Jesus was
carrying a hardline, saying, "you are causing adultery even if you think you
have your hands clean through all these writings of divorcement!" (I really
encourage you to study a little about modern day Roman Catholic Annulments.
It is history repeating itself... a real eye opener to understanding
Christ's teachings here.)
Ask yourself this. Where is the admonition of Jesus Christ for remarried
spouses to divorce? It would be so easy for him to say, "And to the
remarried spouses I say, let them divorce each other." It is not there.
Perhaps it is not there because this is not the mind of Christ, that those
who are remarried must immediately divorce.
Maybe I'm trying too hard to explain this. If so, please forgive me.
Peace be with you.
David Miller.
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"Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you
ought to answer every man." (Colossians 4:6) http://www.InnGlory.org
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