Families – Threats – Divorce

From our Introductory Post:

“The righteous have sat back and allowed the wicked to take over our relationships to God, families, churches, governments, schools and colleges, journalism, entertainment, sports, sciences, and a whole litany of other endeavors in our society.”

Families – Threats – Divorce

In our previous post we considered the topic of Threats to Families, specifically the End of Child Bearing. We will now take a look at another threat to the family, Divorce. This will likely be a most painful blog post for me since my parents divorced when I was 10 years old. From my perspective there is no such thing as an “amicable” divorce, and the children of divorce are always damaged, probably for the rest of their lives.

Taking a look at the statistics reveals that we do have a problem with the divorce rate running at about ½ the marriage rate. See: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm

•Number of marriages: 2,162,000
•Marriage rate: 7.1 per 1,000 total population
•Divorce rate: 3.5 per 1,000 population (44 reporting States and D.C.)
Source: Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2008, table A

Googling “divorce” yields a number of Page 1 hits of websites devoted to the subject:
www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsUS.shtml, www.divorcestatistics.org/, www.divorceandlife.com/, www.divorcerate.org/, www.divorcereform.org/stats.html
The organization, Focus on the Family, is a major player providing Biblical teaching and resources to help families understand their responsibilities before God to maintain the family as the fundamental unit of society. See: http://www.focusonthefamily.com/lifechallenges/relationship_challenges/divorce.aspx

The Old Testament passage, Deuteronomy 24:1 – 4, deals with divorce not by way of command but as a form of regulation. The implication is that divorce was being practiced. Moses sought to bring some degree of justice to the practice by providing contractual protection to a woman and allowing her to remarry.

Jesus in the New Testament built upon the Old Testament law and restricted it to allow adultery as the only justifiable reason for divorce (Matthew 5:32). Again, He is not commanding divorce but attempting to regulate its practice with divine law.

How should the church deal with divorce? We must continue to teach that God hates it just as He hates any other sin. We cannot water down the teaching of one man married to one woman with children for life. However, we cannot single out divorced people as some kind of pariahs to be avoided. We are all (i.e. true believers) sinners saved by grace. God will use us after He saves us from sin. If He required perfection, none of us would be qualified to serve. We must advocate changing the laws of our culture to make divorce more difficult and preserve families. One positive change in this regard is to do away with “no fault” statutes. See the book, The Natural Family, by Carlson and Mero.

Summary

This post has examined Divorce as a major threat to families. We discovered that the divorce rate is running about one half the marriage rate. There are many resources devoted to the topic of divorce. Biblical teaching on divorce provides for ways of dealing with the practice as well as proscribing it. Our next post will take a look at another threat to families, Negative Influences from the Media.

I remain yours in the name of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Name above every name.

“Mr. Phil”