MARRIAGE-UNEQUALLY YOKED
Second
Corinthians 6:14-15 warns [Christians], “Do not be unequally yoked with
unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what
fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what
portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?” This, like all of God’s
other commands, is not a cruel barrier to our happiness, but a loving
restriction that preserves us for God’s blessing. The blessings that we are
hoping for come from God alone. Therefore, we must start with obedience to His
Word. Only a relationship in which both partners are Christians can possibly
result in the kind of love that only God can give.
Richard D. Phillips
and Sharon L. Phillips
Holding
Hands and Holding Hearts, P&R, 2006, p. 56. Used by Permission.
When we claim
to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and then
willfully choose to unite ourselves with an unbeliever in the most intimate
personal union on earth we profane the holiness of God. We act as though our
emotional drive for human intimacy is more important than affirming the
preciousness of God's holiness and nearness.
Let None be
Faithless to the Wife of his Youth, Sermon, Nov. 22, 1987, www.DesiringGod.org, Used by
Permission.
Do not
incorporate into the society of the wicked, or be too much familiar with them. The
wicked are God haters; and “shouldest thou join with
them that hate the Lord?” (2 Chronicles 19:2). A Christian is bound, by virtue
of his oath of allegiance to God in baptism, not to have intimate converse with
such as are God’s sworn enemies…The bad will sooner corrupt the good, than the
good will convert the bad. Pharaoh
taught Joseph to swear, but Joseph did not teach Pharaoh to pray.
Thomas Watson
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 115.
God does not
countenance the marriage of a believer to an unbeliever. In 1 Corinthians 7:39,
Paul says that Christians must marry only “in the Lord.” That phrase means within
the common faith that Christians hold toward Jesus Christ, that faith which
identifies them as a part of the body of Christ. Thus they can be said to be
“in Christ,” or “in the Lord” together. Nothing in
Scripture in any way relaxes the clear-cut commandment that believers must not
be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Christians may marry only in the Lord;
that is, only within the faith.
Christian Living in the Home, P&R
Publishing, 1972, p. 7, Used by Permission.
In the one
thing that matters most of all, the believer and the unbeliever are tragically
divided. No marriage can paper over that division! If they marry, it will
always be like a canyon between them. The more the believing spouse grows in
the love of Christ, the wider and deeper the canyon will grow.
J. Budziszewski
Copied
from How to Stay Christian in College by J. Budziszewski copyright 2004, p.116. Used
by permission of NavPress (Think Books) - www.navpress.com. All
rights reserved.
Brownlow
North, the Scottish lay evangelist of the 19th century, has a sermon on this
subject in which he calls this sin, the sin of
spiritual intermarriage, the worst sin, the most catastrophic sin of all the
sins identified in the Bible that can be committed by a Christian man or woman.
In his own words: “in reading my Bible I find no sin there recorded, if we except
the sin of our first parents, which has brought greater curse upon the earth,
or which is more positively forbidden, both in the Old and New Testament” (Wilt
Thou Go with This man? p. 112). For, you see, that sin
corrupts the stream of believing life and may lead to the damnation of
thousands, as it did many times in the Bible.
Robert Rayburn
Studies in Malachi, number 7, sermon,
March 2, 2003.
Mixed
marriages violate the nature of the intimate relationship that marriage
creates. Marriage creates a family and God’s people are to serve Him in their
families. Families are the primary unit of spiritual nurture in the covenant of
God because they are the instrument by which and the setting in which children
are not only born but raised. Families have a great deal to do, in the economy
of God’s grace, with the transmission of the faith from one generation to
another. They must because of the nature of the relationship between parents
and children: the intimacy, the constancy, the dependence, the trust, the
example, the instruction that happens in a family and, especially, in a godly
family. To take an unbeliever to wife, to bring into that family circle, in the
key role of wife and mother, a woman who does not love God or know his
salvation, who does not reverence his Word and law, is to violate the very
purpose of a family and render it incapable of being and doing what it has been
created for... He made the family, the godly family the instrument of his grace
in the children’s lives. But a spiritually mixed marriage injects poison into
the children’s milk.
Robert Rayburn
Studies in Malachi, number 7, sermon,
March 2, 2003.