FIVE HUSBANDS AND TWO MEN: Christian Divorce and Re-Marriage? (Part 12 of 18)

21. Called to Peace

Despite the concession made, Paul was quick to add a caution: “but God hath called us to peace,” implying that the ‘believing’ partner should endeavour to seek an amicable resolution.  In other words, going or letting go should not be a hurried consideration, because your patience could save the other (v.16).  Paul’s caution implicitly stresses the place and power of individual choices (or commitment) in staying or leaving a marriage even when the grounds for divorce might have been present.

To the extreme conservative, who is persuaded that there is no place for any kind of divorce in the Bible, when Paul says, “but God hath called us to peace,” he meant enduring every marriage at all costs, no matter the grounds to separate, because divorce is essentially a contradiction to peace.  It is doubtful that that was Paul’s definition of peace in that passage; that making peace means staying in every marriage, even when it is dangerously abusive, marked with brutal daily battles, and where it might not even have been God that ‘joined’ them together.

It is not true that staying in every marriage is a purer and nobler expression of godliness and peace than peacefully going or letting the other go.  The family should be protected, and marriage must be defended as much as possible, but there may be a limit to how far some forbearance can safely go, especially if someone has packed their bags and is at the door to depart, but you are resisting them; or their soul has left the marriage, but you are still holding down their decaying flesh.  Your very life could be the ultimate sacrifice on such a raving altar that devours peace.  There will be no marriage to defend when life is ultimately forfeited to that condition.

Someone can be entreated to stay, but they cannot be forced.  Paul does not provide us the Christly means for forcefully chaining down the other partner to the home or tying up their mouth with duct tape, against their wish.  In marriage, force does not win romance, and all quietness is not peace.  Some is the silence of the graveyard, the quietness of killed souls.

There can be little peace with someone who doesn’t want it.  The Bible says, “IF it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:18).  That means that making peace does not entirely ‘lie’ with one party; and “if it is possible” is a conditional clause which means that peace in certain situations might not be possible, otherwise we should never have had a verse like Revelation 12:7 in the Bible: “And there was war in heaven.”  May God bless the merry tellers and their very holy homes that have never known a war.  And may He help those who honestly call out to Him for help.

Every conflict is not the result of bad management.  Even heaven had a war.  That some are cleverer at hiding their bruises does not mean that they have none.  Truth screams from beneath their unreachable, gleaming makeups.  Their tales of paradisical bliss might not be reliable maps for every other traveller. Some peace comes only by war, and the ‘peace’ secured by unreasonable concessions is not peace but sorry submission to brutal enslavement.  It is possible to be firm without a fight.

There are two ways to consider Paul’s call to peace.  On one hand, he encourages couples to do everything in their power to reconcile instead of breaking up the home. On the other hand, he submits that if the only way to peace is to let the other go, or to go, it should not be resisted.  It is therefore implied that peace is preferable to war when one partner insists, by whatever means, that they must go, or you should go.  We have been called to peace, but true peace today should not become the seed for future wars.  God has called us to peace, but peace cannot be forced, although it can be enforced.  Peace may not be negotiated at the expense of the life of God that the other so strongly resists.

Clear as this might sound, one unfortunate loophole here is the apparently nebulous definition of peace, which can be exploited by someone seeking an excuse to have their way.  For instance, what is peace?  Who defines the peace?  Whose peace?  How much disruption of life amounts to such a state as warrants the deployment of Paul’s divorce clause?  Someone might claim that their partner’s snoring threatens their peace, or not kissing them twice a day in the marketplace gives them trouble, or requesting them to brush their teeth amounts to a terrible harassment.  Anybody looking for an excuse will usually find one.  It is a Bible principle: “seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7).

Peace may be relative, but peace is imperative.  Truth may be unpleasant, which does not mean that it is not true.  Someone wishing to have their way might unleash a dishonest ‘definition’ of peace, yet the possibility of such abuse does not deny the truth about the imperative of peace in deciding to flee to the safer haven of a harsh wilderness or to remain in a lethally belligerent “wide house”; a place of external beauty with its hidden dungeons of death (Proverbs 21:9, 19).

Better to live alone in a tumbledown shack

than share a mansion with a nagging spouse (Proverbs 21:9, The Message Bible).

Better to dwell in a corner of a housetop,

Than in a house shared with a contentious woman (Proverbs 21:9, New King James Version).

It might be argued that the passage above addresses separation without divorce, true, but that can well apply.  The same Bible that says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (mark “not good”) (Genesis 2:18), says in two successive verses, that it is “better” to be alone and safe without a kind of spouse than with them (Proverbs 21:9, 19); mark the repeated word “better.”  It might not be the best, but it is a better state, a better choice.  One state is “not good” (and “not good” does not necessarily mean ‘bad’ or ‘sinful’), but another similar state is “better.”  I remember my primary school English lessons on adjectives and “parts of speech”: good, better, best.  Unfortunately, some would judge as very bad or even worse, what Solomon says is “better.”  If “not good” means bad or sinful, then Jesus and Paul are guilty for being in the bad ‘not good’ state of wifelessness.

A non-believer who does what it takes to keep their home is more of a ‘believer’ in marriage than the religious partner committed to breaking away, who cannot be restrained unless at the cost of wars that threaten the peace.  When life or “peace” is threatened; when keeping the marriage becomes dangerously averse to the marriage itself; when insistence to go (or the signs of insistence to go) would not heed sincere entreaties of peace, they should be allowed; then the receiver of the actions is not bound to remain unmarried if they acted on the provisions of Paul.

To say the same thing in many more words, if it must take continual strife to keep a union, it might be safer to go or let go.  “God has CALLED you to a life of peace” – enjoy the peace (1 Corinthians 7:15, Complete Jewish Bible).  We may say from that passage that peace is a ‘call,’ therefore whatever significantly threatens peace threatens that ‘call’ of God.  While it is true that every marriage has its share of turbulence, persistent fierce storms could be a sign that a certain Jonah should leave the boat, sooner, before other endangered passengers throw them out into the watery wilderness with its predatory whales (Jonah 1:11-16).  Peace of mind from peace at home, according to Paul, is crucial to keeping the marriage.  This might seem like a trivialization of the very serious subject of marriage, but it is truth and balance all the same.

A young woman called some time ago.  She was married to a pastor.  There was conflict with her husband in their young marriage because she merely advised him that he was getting too close to a certain female at church, and he wouldn’t tell her where he was going to, and if she called him to check on him when he was out, he wouldn’t take her calls.  He had left the house, demanding that she go.  Apparently, he had become fed up with her.  Unknowing to her, she had begun to threaten his peace.  The man was feeling harassed and threatened, so he fled the home.  She had become a monitoring spirit. I described their home to her as if I lived with them.  She realized that she had work to do.  If he had begun to flee the home, I said, he might soon be gone for long, or be gone forever, or could go into wrong hands.  She was to change her image in his eyes, not change him.  No matter how well you think you have been speaking, when what you are saying is not what the other is hearing, Tower of Babel might be about to repeat in the home.

Solomon repeatedly advised that where one partner makes the home constantly unconducive, the other should seek asylum elsewhere in a faraway wilderness or (if they wish to remain in the same house, then) in a separated corner of the house not generally easily reachable: the rooftop.  In other words, a spouse’s contentious anti-peace lifestyle typically drives their partner out of or away from the house and away from themselves, either into the distant and physically separated wilderness or (where they wish to maintain the name and appearance of marriage) into the emotionally and physically separate “corner of the housetop” – same house, different worlds (Proverbs 21:9, 19; 25:24).

This is how Solomon puts it: he says in one verse that “It is better to be living in an angle of the house-top, than with a bitter-tongued woman in a wide house,” and in the next, that a barren wilderness or “‎a waste land” is preferable to habitation with that kind of “bitter-tongued and angry woman” (Proverbs 21:9, 19, Bible in Basic English).  The New Living Translation describes the alternative refugee camp to which the husband is driven as “desert,” and the “wide house” from which he flees as “lovely home.”  Verse 19 has amazing translations in other Bible versions.  It describes the woman as “a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife” (New International Version); “a quarrelsome, complaining woman” (The Living Bible); “a nagging, complaining wife” (Good New Translation); “a quick-tempered wife who loves to argue” (Easy-to-Read Version); “a quarreling and angry woman” (God’s Word); “a nagging and hot-tempered wife” (Holman Christian Standard Bible).  The New King James Version says she is “a contentious and angry woman.”  According to notes in the New English Translation Bible, “The Hebrew noun su^K^ ‎(ka’as) means “vexation; anger.” The woman is not only characterized by a quarrelsome spirit, but also anger – she is “easily vexed.”  The point is that what threatens peace in the home threatens the marriage, and when one partner begins to flee for good reasons, they might soon be gone for good.  This might seem like too strong a male perspective, even though the roles can be reversed, where the woman is the brutal victim.  Don’t blame Solomon.  He was speaking from the experience of having a thousand women in his life.

Solomon doesn’t say for how long the flight from home might last, but it will be understood to be for as long as the other person remains in that condition that forced the flight from home in the first place.  Even in the New Testament, the Scripture says it is safer to cut off an offending hand or leg than be damned in hell (Matthew 5:30), and severed limbs do not grow back.  That means much.

Peace and safety are preferable to toxic companionship.  Besides divine inspiration, Solomon, with his 300 wives and 700 concubines, may have been speaking from profound experience when he advised that it is better to be single and safe in a dry wilderness than be husbanded or wifed in a mad “wide house” with its killing bounties of food and wine, gold and silver.  If someone keeps creating a condition that significantly threatens peace, they provide the grounds for Paul’s clause to be activated by the one who might choose to do so.

From The Preacher’s diary, 

July 20, 2021. 

• A link to the e-book version of these posts shall be provided in the last three ‘Parts’ of this series.
• A collection of all remarks to these posts (received online/offline) shall be the last ‘Part’ of the series.

Watch out for:

• Obeying Paul or Christ?
• Resolving The Samaritan Puzzle
• The Old Testament of Jesus
• God Hates Divorce
• Hardness of Heart
• What God has Joined Together
• The Pre-Eminence of Grace over Law