(Ver 2.0)  This is now Part 2 of a series of studies about the reality of spiritual laws found in the Bible.   We have covered a lot of information that is not going to be repeated, so if you have not read these lessons from the beginning, I would recommend that you go back and start with “Part 1”.  In the first lesson that I did on this series I gave you 3 basic spiritual laws that I discovered in the Bible.  These were first the spiritual law of faith, the second was the law of the Spirit of Life vs. law of sin and death and third the spiritual law of sowing and reaping.  I know I did not fully cover any of these subjects extensively, but I believe I gave you enough information for you to go further and explore them in your Bible.  I will say upfront that this is an advanced lesson series that is intended only for spiritually mature Christians that have studied the Bible extensively.  If this is not you I would recommend that you go and read a more basic subject to learn things that will help you mature.  It is very much like Paul told the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 3:2 that he was unable to teach them meat because they were still in need of the basic milk from the Word of God.  Please be the judge of yourself before you continue.  I do not want to offend anyone with an advanced Bible subject that they are unable to spiritually chew.

I would like to warn you at the beginning of this lesson that I will primarily be addressing spiritual subject truths as the primary focus.  But in order to understand these advanced spiritual truths we really first need to understand some basic natural truths also.  Therefore, I will be jumping between the subjects of natural marriage and spiritual marriage.  It might appear confusing at first but this is the way Jesus taught using parables.  Jesus would teach very advanced spiritual subject using only simple farming tools and concepts.  So I thank you for your understanding in advance.

Today I want to readdress a Bible subject that I have blogged about before, but it bears repeating for those who have never studied the subject of the law of marriage.  Marriage is a spiritual law found in the Bible from cover to cover.  Often times Bible students only look at the Law of Moses and think that is the only law that God has established in the Bible.  However, when God created man, Adam and Eve, He established a multitude of spiritual laws which have only been revealed after Jesus was resurrected from the dead.  Why do you think that Jesus could not reveal and teach everything that He knew?  It was primarily the fact that God could not let the secrets of the Kingdom of God out of the bag until God had first died and established a Kingdom.  All Satan would have had to do was to not crucify Jesus Christ on the cross and that would have ended God’s plan of salvation and redemption for the human race.  Satan would have had a future and we would have had no hope for any type of future.  You must understand that even though God prophesied the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus hundreds of years before it occurred; Satan did not understand it or he would have not done it.  Here is a verse of scripture that I think is very relevant to this point of my conversation:

Gal 3:23  But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.

You see the Law of faith that I talked about in the first lesson was a spiritual law that existed when God created Adam.  But, God never revealed this law until after Jesus was raised from the dead.  Faith was not a new concept; in fact the law of faith is recorded in every part of the Bible.  If you read Hebrews 11 this chapter is often times called the “Faith Hall of Fame”.  It goes through instance after instance, example after example, of men and women found in the Bible that had faith and used it.  So you can clearly see that just because faith was not revealed like Galatians 3:23 says, faith still played a key role in the life of every Old Testament saint.  They either believed God or they did not and the results that they got were demonstrated for us to learn by.  So the Law of Faith is not a new concept for the New Testament church, it is just one that we are better understanding.

Marriage was also a hidden spiritual Law of God.  However, I have discovered that God has placed great priority on this subject.  Why does God place such emphasis on a subject that modern men and women seem to take so casually today?  Why is the devil trying to pervert the God established institute of marriage between one male and one female into a same sex union?  Why do people get married today and divorced tomorrow like it was normal way of life?  It seems that way over half of the marriages in our world today end in divorce and this is happening even in the church.  I do not feel that these are things that please God.  How many have been married multiple times in our society?  Why is it that when a couple gets divorced that it appears to become the easy way out for the next time something is not going their way in their next marriage?  Do you realize that there are no perfect people in the world?  I think people get married to someone they do not know and eventually find out what they are really like and then realize that they shouldn’t have done that.  So they leave their spouse and go looking for mister wonderful or misses trophy but they will never satisfied because these people do not exist.   Divorce typically breeds more divorces.  Children learn divorce from their parents and the parents pass the curse of divorce down to their children.  Divorce becomes a repeated cycle because some think that just because their parents got divorced so that means it’s OK for me also.  So that was part of my non-popular introduction to a natural problem that I recognize in our society.  We simply do not understand the significance of a Godly marriage covenant contract.  

Many times I find that people do things out of ignorance and they think that ignorance is a valid excuse for why they did what they did.  You will find that this rarely works when you are standing before the judge in a natural court of law.  A judge sees the law, knows the law and sees the actions you took to break the law and then assigns the penalty for your transgressions of that law.   If you disregard the law and do what you want to you will eventually get caught and have to pay the price.  This is the way it is with spiritual laws in the Bible also.  In Hosea 4:6 God says “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge”.   Knowledge is the opposite of ignorance that God says destroys people.  So therefore, knowledge is the power and ability to do the right thing.  If you know speeding in a school zone will get you a huge fine, it is best to slow down and avoid that penalty.  Every law has benefits and every law has punishments or consequences.  This is true whether you are talking about the law of gravity or the law that says thou shalt NOT steal.  The attitude of many people is that they like to push the envelope of how far they can go and get away with violating the laws of nature.   They like the thrill of jumping out of airplanes and free-falling and they do it over and over until their parachute fails to open and then they do not do it anymore.  I wonder why?

So we talked all around a lot of the basics that surround laws.  I hope you can understand the importance of learning about spiritual laws in the Bible from my simple three or four paragraph introduction to today’s subject of the Law of Marriage.  God says many things about the covenant bond of marriage in the Bible and it is inadequate to take just one verse to try to think we understand the whole entire subject.  But I will need to start somewhere so I will look at a verse in Romans 7 first:

Rom 7:2  For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

This is a very easily misunderstood Bible verse?  A spiritual law is a designed principle of God that conveys a cause and effect observable and repeatable reality for all of those that are affected by the law.  In other words God says something and if you follow it you gain the benefits from it and if you ignore or abuse it you suffer the consequences from it if you abide under the jurisdiction of that law.  I do not know if you understood what I just said, but it was important.  In Romans 7:2 God teaches us that when two people are married according to the law of Moses that they were intended to be joined for life.  This verse was actually a two way street and it was not just applicable to only women. 

This verse was written to a covenant woman so that is why the male covenant husband is not directly mentioned.  You may not understand my last statement either, but you should read some of my other blogs and you could be closer to knowing these more advanced truths.  I will briefly try to explain.  You see the nation of Israel was designated to be God’s covenant wife in the Old Testament (Jer 31:32) and this verse here in Romans was written to those who were previously married to God the Father.  If you look at verse 1 of Romans 7 you will find Paul’s target audience to be those that “know” the law.  To “know” the law is a covenant relationship term written to only the Nation of Israel.  Gentiles did not “know” the law and were never in covenant with the Mosaic law or with the living God.  So these next verses in Romans 7 after verse 1 do not apply to ANY Gentile believer. But yet these verses can still teach us all and we all can learn from them.

God is always faithful to His covenants but God will break the marriage covenant if His covenant partner does not keep their part of the marriage agreement.   Like any natural marriage a spiritual marriage covenant takes two willing committed partners.  If only one is willingly committed and the other is not, then what is the other faithful partner supposed to do?  That is a new complicated twist to the equation, isn’t it?  This is what God was faced with in the Old Testament repeatedly.  The nation of Israel left God’s covenant so many times that it is difficult to count them all.  

If you look in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Jeremiah and other places you will soon discover language that called God’s wife Israel a “harlot”, “whore”, “adulteress” and many other very unflattering words.  Many people do not realize that a covenant is a marriage and that a marriage is a covenant.  Learning God’s definitions for words is a vital part of knowing about spiritual laws and we must do this by discovering God’s definitions of the subject.  We will begin with a verse in Malachi:

Mal 2:14  Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.

As you read the Bible you discover that God has placed very important and significant clues in some of the most unlikely spots like this minor prophet book of Malachi.  God says that your wife is the one that you are in covenant with.   Perhaps the problem is that you do not understand what a covenant is?  A covenant is a legally binding eternal contract that is legally divisible by death of one of the covenant partners.  When God makes a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 there are animals that are killed and split down the spine in two bloody pieces.  Then the two covenant parties are supposed to walk between the pieces and this signifies a blood covenant bond and union.  Now if one party breaks the covenant they are saying to the other party that it should be done to me what was done to these animals laying on the ground.  Wow, that gives each covenant partner a very strong motivation to keep the covenant.  If only marriages were done this way today.

God was married and in a blood covenant relationship with the natural nation of Israel in the O.T. but His wife Israel did not take this covenant relationship seriously and this resulted in Israel’s divorce (Isa 50:1 and Jer 3:8).  God ended the covenant marriage with Israel and this is also a pattern for natural divorce.  Anytime a spouse leaves their spouse I believe this is a legal pattern for when divorce is permissible.  Leaving your spouse shows your lack of commitment to the promises made.  God has done all of this however as a pattern to another coming covenant that would be established as an eternal spiritual contract between us the church and Jesus Christ and we’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Mal 2:15  And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.

This next verse in Malachi alludes to a principle that is very important to understand.  It says “Did He not make one?”  Within the context we can surely see that God is speaking to us of the law of marriage found in Genesis 2 when God created Adam and Eve and Adam looked at his wife and said this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh because she was taken from his body.  So reading and understanding Genesis God says that a woman is one with her husband.  You can also say that a man is one with his wife; it is definitely a two way street being referred to.  This was God’s original design and this was God’s original plan.  God took one body and made two and this was the physical and spiritual laws of marriage being defined.  When people get married, God declares that they have become one flesh:

Gen 2:24  Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

When we started reading this lesson we began with a verse found in Romans that said a woman was joined to her husband as long as he was alive.  This verse in Genesis 2 is the reason why God could say this.  This is the law of marriage covenants, the two will be one.  This is why God is writing to the Hebrews in Romans to tell them about this law.  Since Israel was married to God the Father in the O.T. we can therefore conclude that God had become one flesh with his wife Israel.  Do you understand that statement and the importance of understanding the implications behind that statement?   God was joined to a natural nation of people under the law.  Whenever you are one with someone whatever happens to you also happens to your spouse and vice versa.   Whatever you have they also have.  This is just the basis of a sound Biblical marriage.  I can see why Israel would want to join in this relationship, but why would God want to join in this relationship?  God was not under the law, but obviously He chose to join Himself to a woman who was.  That is an amazing question to ponder.  You might recall what Jesus said about this subject, he said “I did not come to do away with the law but to fulfill it”.   You see you probably do not understand the purpose of the law.  I wrote a lesson on this subject called “Understanding the Purpose of the Law of Moses”.  You might want to go read that and it might help you to understand what I’m going to say next.  In order for God to cast Satan into hell, God must first convict Satan of a punishable crime under the law.  Did you know that our courts cannot make up laws to throw you into jail?  Back in our history child pornography use to not be a crime, therefore no one went to jail for that obscene behavior until they passed a law making it a crime.  Did you know that applies to Satan also?  Just because he sinned, there is no punishment for sin until he is in a state that says that he committed a crime.  Even though child pornography has always been sinful and wrong, it was not a crime until the law was passed and you were convicted of it.  I just do not know if you understand what I’m saying or not?  But, it is so important that you try to get what I am teaching to you.

Rom 7:4  Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

The Bible has many difficult and hard sayings in it and this is surely one of them.   The direct implication is being given to us that God died in Jesus Christ.  We obviously understand that it is impossible for God to die and cease to exist.  This is certainly not what this verse is saying to us.  What this verse is saying is that because the Spirit of God was in Christ on the cross, these Hebrew people who this is directed at are now free from their Old Testament covenant marriage with God, so that they can now be legally “married to another”.  To be married to another is a clear reference to becoming the bride of Christ who was raised from the dead, the firstborn from the dead.  This allows Jewish believers to become legally married to our Savior Jesus Christ without becoming an adulteress like this chapter speaks of.  You see you cannot divorce someone and legally marry another because God says you are one flesh.  This is a complex puzzle and a riddle of Biblical proportions being given to us.  God, who is one God, tells us He died to implement a new covenant through Jesus Christ and one of the reasons He died was for the Hebrews sake.  Because of His death on the cross, it is now legal for any Old Testament Hebrew to enter into a new eternal spiritual union with Jesus Christ.  If Jesus hadn’t died then they would have been joined to God the Father and God the Son simultaneously and that would have been adultery according to the law.   Go through this chapter in Romans and read every verse very carefully, it says some things that are very powerful and they do apply to you regardless of who you are.  These verses apply to natural Israel and they apply to us the church.  These verses also apply to natural people being married to other natural people.  All of these are marriage covenant relationships.

From what I can read in the Bible, there are only two legal reasons for getting out of a marriage to marry another, and these are 1) infidelity or 2) death.  If your spouse is unfaithfully sleeping around on you, you should not be married to them.  Then God clearly tells us that marriage is a covenant contract “till death do us part”.   We can of course see our world is more complex than those two simple rules.  There are certainly cases where one spouse can be abusive physically or mentally and that is not a healthy environment for a safe peaceful family.  Recently in the news here a man shot his wife and then killed himself.  Clearly that was a tragedy that should never have happened.  If people knew more about God and the Bible, I believe these things would not ever happen.   People are guilty of making emotional illogical and irrational snap decisions out of anger or other emotions that do not convey the life and love of God.  So we live in a world that contains both good and evil and this is our greatest challenge.  Trying to determine what is right and good vs. what is wrong and evil and this is what we do every day of our life.  We can learn from God how to deal with every situation in life and this gives us hope of a positive outcome for our decisions.  I hope that you can at least begin to see that marriage is something that you should not enter into on a casual whim.  God says that once you are married, in the eyes of God you become one flesh with that person for the rest of your life.  Obviously today in our loose immoral society there are people like rock stars who are joined to hundreds of others and do not know it.

1Co 6:16  What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.

Marriage in the eyes of God is simply having sex with someone whether we believe it or not.  That statement really goes over big in our modern world of casual sex today, doesn’t it?   Please read this verse very carefully.  God only refers to the law of marriage found in Genesis 2:24, four times in the entire New Testament.   These can be found in Matthew   Why is this verse the only reference that is ignored by pastors, teachers and Christians today.  According to God’s Word, He says very plainly that if you go and have sex with a prostitute that you are now one flesh with her and in marriage covenant.  What if a man has had casual sex with 1000 prostitutes, is this still true?  I believe that it is.  Wow, how many times some people have been married in the eyes of God is probably unbelievable!  God is using a natural truth of sex to teach a spiritual truth that is greater.  God does this over and over and over in the Bible and this is just another example of that.

We can use the context of this verse to prove the last statement.  We should be able to learn that God is speaking about a spiritual marriage covenant relationships between Christ and the church.  Back up in verse 15 directly before this verse.  You should find that God is telling the church not to be joined to a harlot.  God teaches us directly in this chapter that we are members of His body and that we are one spirit with Him in verse 17.  Yet according to verse 16 we still have the choice to go make the members of His body to be one with a devil.  These verses are spiritual warnings from God.  But yet since men have been given a freewill by God, they are still capable of making wrong choices.

Natural things were created by God to provide views into unseen spiritual realities. These natural and spiritual things and laws of God were intended by God to be parallel truths with the greater truth always being the spiritual.  I believe that natural sex is equivalent to what the Bible says is spiritual knowledge of God.  Having simultaneous multiple natural sex partners in this world I believe is the equivalent to worshiping God and idols at the same time.  

There is a basic law of Bible interpretation called the “Law of First Mention”.  Using this law we can learn many facts about God’s Law of Marriage.  Adam and Eve were God’s established pattern for marriage and this was between one man and one woman.  God’s design of marriage was for it to last eternally.  If Adam had chosen not to sin and rebel against God, they could have been alive today to demonstrate the plan of God.  But since Adam failed in the natural realm, Jesus came to the natural realm to restore God’s law and plan for marriage in the spiritual realm.  The way it was in the beginning is how it will be in the end.  It should be the goal of every marriage to be patterned after the design of God’s purpose.  However, it still takes two that are committed to each other to fulfill this law.  A marriage with only one covenant member being committed like God to uncommitted natural Israel will always fail.

Please understand that I do not want to sound like I’m being self-righteous or condemning anyone that has been married more than once or that has had sex with multiple partners in this lesson.  The Bible says that to those who are “in-Christ” and walk after the Spirit, there is therefore no condemnation extended towards them (Romans 8:1).  There are many spiritual laws in the Bible and you cannot just teach one and omit all of the others.  In my first lesson on this subject I gave you a key verse that said “The law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has freed us from the Law of Sin and Death” (Romans 8:2).  The Blood of Jesus covers all of our sins that we have committed and we all have sinned (Romans 3:22).  So just because someone has been married to one woman for over 50 years does not make them better than you, even if you have been married 6 times.  The mercy, compassion and love of God are very strong spiritual forces.  The faithfulness of God to forgive us of our past transgressions is one divine trait of God that we should all possess.  God said “I will not remember your sin, as far as the east is from the west I have put it away from me” (Psalm 103:12, Isa 43:15).  If even God does not remember our sin that you have already asked Him for forgiveness for, then the only part left is for you to not condemn yourself for your past.  God only expects us to learn and grow and to use our past mistakes so that we do not fall into them again.  So I do not know if I helped you today or said anything that was truly beneficial to your situation, but I pray that I did so that you will continue to follow after God and to keep trying to know Him better.  God Bless!