When Did the Church Get Comfortable with Stealing: Part 2
Jesus looked at the people in God’s house and said, “You are thieves, and you have made my temple your hideout” (Matt 21:13). How could people gathered to worship God break such a basic commandment as “Thou shalt not steal”? What had happened to these believers to transform their faith from offering a lamb to God into using religion to fleece other people?
This is the second installment of a series that looks at theft in the Church. In this series anyone who declares their faith in Christ to their neighbors and peers is included in “the Church,” regardless of their participation in organized religion. “The Church” is a group label akin to the term “Christendom,” but without the sense in Christendom of state power.
In the first installment of this series, the asset taken was financial benefit and the ploy used to steal it was “crisis.” This installment will look at the theft of sexual purity by Christians. Since the charge is theft, it will not look at sexual behavior the Church already acknowledges as sin, i.e., adultery and pornography. The type of theft under consideration does not include any form of sexual assault. The particular surrender of sexual purity that this article is addressing is not related to coercion or intimidation. It is the theft of purity that occurs between consenting participants. Among willing individuals, “delay” is the grift used to justify the heist. This unlawful redistribution ploy works particularly well on Americans because we are an impatient race. In the “delay” grift, the agent of the heist is after a benefit (or blessing) that would be theirs in the future (within the conditions set by God) without any further action if this person would just wait on God’s timing. The unspoken assertion of the swindle is that God is slow in dispensing his blessings, and the thief is merely speeding things up.
Jesus told his disciples, “”At the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’ (Mark 10:6–8). Jesus made it clear that sexual relations is an integral part of heterosexual marriage. This is the foundation that undergirds Hebrews 13:4, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.” This admonition is a New Testament translation of Exodus 20:14 “”Do not break wedlock.” The Church understands that this means not entering the marriage bed with someone other than their spouse once a person is married. What some in the Church have lost is a sense that the marriage bed exists for a believer long before they are married. If a person never marries, their marriage bed is to stay pristine. There is no clause that says, “The bed is available if some condition exists that delays or makes marriage impractical.”
Christians delay marriage for various secular reasons. There is nothing wrong with delaying marriage until the time is right if no sexual contact is occurring. However, such celibacy is the exception rather than the rule in American culture. The most common justifications for delay are college graduation or some other chronological mile marker, and the protection of pensions and social security benefits. In this waiting period, sexual intimacy which occurs with the expectation of a future marriage is still sin, and both parties lose “property” in the transaction. Instead of their physical union being a sacrament and a sweet fragrance in God’s nostrils, their intimacy is an offscouring to God. And in the case where no marriage occurs and the couple separates, it compounds the felony. The rupture makes both parties into thieves who hold intimate experiences and memories that God intended as gifts for the spouses of their former bedmate. There is no way to return these gifts.
The theft of sexual purity affects not only those who participate in the physical aspect of the crime, but the heist also makes co-conspirators out of those who know of the crime and yet say nothing. Friends and family, especially parents, are most often drawn into this conspiracy. As co-conspirators, many parents are like the Adullamite in Genesis 38 who was left to cover up the mess from Judah’s illicit encounter with Tamar (Gen 38:20). Sometimes this takes the form of co-habitation under the parent’s roof, but even where the physical union is done at the couples domicile, this illicit behavior always involves the parent’s loss of righteousness in the public square.
An increasingly common form of sexual purity theft in the church is remarriage after divorce. Jesus set the parameters when remarriage after divorce was not sin- if there was fornication during the marriage by the other spouse (Matt 5:32). The heist under consideration here is remarriage after a divorce on grounds other than adultery. Remarriage after divorce is not a new problem. It was a problem in Jesus’ day. When Jesus taught his disciples, “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery,” the disciples responded, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry” (Matt 19:9–10). Jesus acknowledged that many people would not accept this standard for the purity of the marriage bed.
To understand how remarriage after divorce is theft, it is necessary to examine Luke 16:1–8 which is the parable of the Dishonest Manager. In this parable the manager gives away property that belongs to someone else to gain favor for himself. This is what a divorced person is doing when they share their body with someone other than their divorced spouse. As it says in 1 Corinthians 7:4 “A wife’s body belongs to her husband instead of to herself, and a husband’s body belongs to his wife instead of to himself.” Thus in second marriage, the new person receives gifts from the marriage bed of their partner’s previous union that God designated to the first spouse. This giving away of property that belongs to another is what makes remarriage theft.
Jesus’ words about remarriage still find little acceptance in the Church of the Twenty-first century. If his words were taken seriously, there might be more people willing to give their vows a second chance rather than practice celibacy for the rest of their life. Either practice, celibacy or restoration, would glorify God in our culture of instant gratification. Restoration of a broken marriage would give God the greater glory while proving that the Church was capable of the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18–19).
