My current reading queue after I finish a book on IT consulting:
Eliyahu ben DavidI’ll try to let you know what I think.
Mark Niwot posted a great article showing a biblical understanding of marriage and polygyny at Helium.
Scripture repeatedly commands (Deut. 4:2 and 12:32, Rev. 22:18-19, etc) that man is not to “add to” nor “subtract from” the Written Word of God. Our Savior was likewise critical (Matthew 23 is just one obvious example) of those “Hypocrites!” who took it upon themselves to insert their own “traditions” into “law” and thus make His commandments “of no effect”. (Matt. 15:6, Mark 7:13, etc.) But there is perhaps no better example of a false doctrine elevated by tradition alone to the status of unquestioned “Law” than the false idol of Monogamy….
I frequently hear people say that God allowed this or that sinful behavior because people are weak.
Buzzzz. Try again.
God does not allow sin. He never says, “Don’t ever do this, but if you do, here’s how I want you to go about it…” He just says, “Don’t do that.”
So, if, in the course of your Bible reading, you see that God said, “If you are going to [insert activity here], then do it like this,” you can safely conclude that the given activity is not sinful. It might not be the best thing for you, but it’s not a sin to make choices where God has given you liberty.
I disagree with one thing Pastor Mark said in the podcast I linked to in my last post. Kathryn Kuhlman’s decision to remain unmarried should not be considered a pattern for other women to follow. She married a man who apparently left his wife for her, and when that marriage ended in disaster, she concluded that marriage would only interfere with her ministry. She was wrong. She made a mistake and learned the wrong lesson from it.
There might be extraordinary circumstances in which God doesn’t want a particular woman to marry. There is no specific command in scripture that all women must marry, so I’m not going to say otherwise. However, I will say that the universal scriptural example is that a woman should marry, and if she has a ministry independent of her husband’s then it must be conducted within the context of her primary roles as wife and mother. See, for example, Deborah, who was not simply Deborah, a prophetess, but “Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth”. (Judges 4:4)