Marriage and Divorce, part 1

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Marriage is our only link with the Paradise of Eden

Marriage is the basis for bringing forth human life on planet Earth. Human life is very special to God as the human soul has the ability to believe in God and His ways. That is a great responsibility as we must ultimately answer to God depending on whether the soul was filled with faith in God's Word or unbelief (obsessed with self-will and the ways of man). Life comes from God alone.

Eden was meant for eternity until sin entered.

God's original plan was one man and one woman united together in marriage forever.

Satan can only rule the world if he gets us away from God's original plan. Thus Satan targets marriage in order to stop one man and one woman from being married together forever.

Scientists cannot create life as life is a non-physical spirit and scientists can only work in the realm of physical atoms and physical energy. The realm of the spirit involves things like love, hope, emotions, conscience, memory, imagination, reason, etc. which cannot be analyzed in terms of the physical things of scientific analysis because they are properties of the mind.

Scientists know many properties of atoms and energy but they still do not really know what energy actually is nor do they really know what an atom actually is.

How much less do they know what the spirit of life is!

So God has strict rules about how He wants human life produced on earth.

The pattern or blueprint was established by Adam and Eve. The relationship is marriage.

This remains almost our only link with the original Eden. Your marriage indicates how keen you are on God’s idea of a Paradise. Defy God’s plan of marriage and do it differently and then you must not be surprised if God does not include you in His future Paradise when He sets up the new Heaven and the new Earth.

The blueprint from Eden is:

A man is allowed to have one wife only and she must be a virgin when she gets married.

Eve sinned by committing adultery with the serpent who was not a snake but the highest mammal, between ape and man. But her husband Adam never divorced her.  Once legally married, that marriage vow cannot be broken for any reason other than the death of either the husband or wife.

Originally in Eden there was no death until sin entered. The original marriage vow was forever.

A man can separate from his wife but he remains married to her. There is no such thing as divorce and re-marriage.

If a woman is not a virgin when she marries and does not confess this to the man before they marry, then she has taken a false vow and the marriage vow is not valid. When the man discovers this, if he wants to, he may divorce her as a false vow is not legally binding but then he has to marry a virgin. This is not actually re-marriage as the first vow was invalid and they actually were not married in the first place. However, the man is free to forgive her for her past, and if he then chooses to stay with her, the marriage vow is then valid as there is no secret sin involved to invalidate it.

These are the ground rules for bringing forth human life on earth. Let us see if we can track them down in the Bible and try to uncover why God made these rules.

In this first part of marriage and divorce,  let us start by seeing how God put human life on planet earth.

In the beginning, God had to first create earth to put human life on.

Earth is not a closed, self-sustaining system. It needs help from outside, so God first had to create a natural heaven that we call space. Space contained the sun to provide light and warmth as well as the concept of a day.  Earth needed the moon to stir up the ocean tides and also to give us the concept of a month. The stars are needed to enable people to navigate and discern the seasons of the year as different constellations of stars appear at different times of the year.

The wonders of deep space display God’s endless and awesome creative abilities. If He created such a vast, seemingly unending realm of space then He alone is able to control the long passage of time as it rolls on until it finally ends by fading into eternity. Only God can handle eternity.

REVELATION 10:6

And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein,

that there should be time no longer: 

(So time will end).

But God needs to provide humans with eternal life in order for them to live in eternity.

So the first three Chapters of Genesis tell us how God was intending to put humans on earth and give humans eternal life.  Then Adam and Eve messed up this plan in Eden.

We know little about energy and atoms and life

So our time on earth is really just to prepare us for eternity. Only the Bible can show us how to do this.

Creation is to make something out of nothing.

Genesis Chapter 1 uses the word “create” in this sense as there was nothing physical, made of atoms, to begin with. God is a Spirit and He had to create the earth and its atmosphere. Also the sun and the moon and the planets and stars and galaxies (deep space that we call heaven).

GENESIS 1:1

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

He created the heaven (deep space) and earth out of nothing, because there were no physical atoms there at the beginning for Him to use.

This word “create” (make out of nothing) is used three times in Genesis Chapter 1.

Science cannot solve this creation problem.

The most important law of Physics is the conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Energy is simply transferred from one system to another. Atoms in the sun disappear as they turn into energy because atoms are little more than highly compressed energy. Releasing this energy in the sun makes part of the sun's matter (atoms) disappear. This energy travels as sunlight to the earth and gets absorbed by plants to make food. We eat this food and use this energy to stay alive. The air around us gets a little hotter as a result of the food getting burnt up inside us.

Nowhere is energy created from nothing.

This is the fallacy of the Big Bang theory. There was nothing in the beginning.

Then something (no-one knows what) exploded and all the energy in the universe was somehow created.

But we do not know what energy is so we certainly do not know how it can be created.

This Big Bang is a complete contradiction of the Law of conservation of energy that no energy can be created.

Evolution has a similar problem. Only an enzyme can make a protein. But an enzyme is made of proteins itself.

So how was the first enzyme made when there were no proteins around?

Making one enzyme would not be enough. Each protein requires its own enzyme and the minimum number of proteins, so far, that are found in a living organism is about 387.  So 387 separate enzymes had to somehow appear to make 387 proteins (not to mention all the other complex parts of a living cell) to produce the first living organism. And then what would it do for food?

There is no such thing as a “simple cell”.

Cancer researchers now describe the living cell as “a bottomless pit of complexity” despite knowing so much about its DNA, etc. The more we find out about a cell, the more complicated it gets.

Can you see how very little we actually understand about life?

Seeing as we understand so little about life, it is even more important that we obey God’s laws that He made on how life should be produced on planet earth. He alone understands the complexities of life. His rules are essential to produce a worthwhile life. Our lives are only worthwhile if we receive eternal life and a place in heaven and we cannot achieve that unless our lives line up with His Word. The alternative is a brief life of doing your own thing followed by death and being lost and …

A king can use the word US to describe himself

Day 6 saw land animals being made and then God's highest creation was brought forth, humanity.

GENESIS 1:24

And God said,

Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,

cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

GENESIS 1:25

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Creation from nothing was not necessary to bring forth land life as the bodies of the land animals were already laid out in the dust. God simply took these elements from the dust and formed the creatures. Thus He made the land-based animals from the dust and breathed life into them.

Kings use the word Us to describe their majesty

One word is accurate but insufficient to describe a king's power and majesty

So kings say "us" or "we" when speaking about themselves. This is called the Plural of Majesty.

The plural denotes the many attributes of a king's power and glory.

When God came to create man, He wanted to indicate that man was the crowning achievement of the whole creation.

GENESIS 1:26

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

The dictionary also defines “make” as “achieve” or “arrive at”. (For example: make a success).

God, wanting man to be the summit of His creation, deliberated with Himself instead of just quickly creating man the way He had done with the rest of the creation.

This deliberate thought process before He acted would give a man dignity, worth, and value.

God decided to set out on a plan that would arrive at achieving a man who was the very image of God. There could be no higher compliment to a man.

“Let us”.

The "royal we" that is used by kings, popes, cardinals, even bishops.

EZRA 4:11

This is the copy of the letter that they sent unto him, even unto Artaxerxes the king; Thy servants the men on this side the river, and at such a time.

EZRA 4:18

The letter which ye sent unto us hath been plainly read before me.

This is referred to as the "plural of majesty". No one word can fully describe a king. His attributes are too many.

The plural "us", when used by a single king, is to show the fullness of his glory and power.

The saints were in the mind of God at the beginning

What is the image of God?

JOHN 4:24

God is a Spirit:

So the image of the infinite Spirit must be another spirit, a lesser spirit.

The body of Adam was made from the dust. This was not a creation from nothing.

But after much deliberation God decided to create a spirit man who would be a limited version of God Himself, the very image of the Spirit of God. The rest of the creation was physical, but the man was special. He was so like God that he could only be created as a spirit.

God regards His true church as His Bride.  The spirits of the people who form His Bride were always in Him, in His mind.

JOB 38:4

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.;

JOB 38:7

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

When God created the earth, the sons of God (His future church) were in Him and rejoiced, even though they cannot remember doing so. Once the earth, their future home, was created then they knew it would only be a matter of time before they were manifest in human bodies on the earth.

After the battle of the kings, Abraham, the victor, paid tithes to Melchizadek who was God walking around in a Body of a Man that he had created for Himself.

HEBREWS 7:4

 Now consider how great this man (Melchizadek) was, unto whom even the patriarch Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils.

HEBREWS 7:9

 And as I may so say, Levi also, who receiveth tithes, payed tithes in Abraham.

Levi was the son of Jacob who was the son of Isaac who was the son of Abraham. Levi, as the great-grandson of Abraham, was a tiny speck of life in Abraham’s loins and yet he was so stirred by this act of paying tithes that when he was finally manifest in the flesh as a man, God allowed him to collect the tithes.

God’s Bride was always in Him as far back as you care to go.

The woman was in Adam when he was a spirit man

So God created a masculine spirit called Adam and inside this masculine spirit were feminine attributes that would make up Adam’s bride.

GENESIS 5:1

This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;

Created means a spirit being made from nothing physical.

GENESIS 5:2

Male and female created he them; and blessed them,

and called their name Adam,

in the day when they were created.

"Their name".

This was a spirit being, predominantly masculine but with feminine attributes in him.

Masculine and feminine were two different attributes of the same spirit.

Male and female were one spirit at the beginning. They shared one name. Adam.

They were part of each other even though the woman was not consciously aware of what was happening.

The Bride of Jesus, His future saints, were in Him when He walked around on earth. Even though we were not consciously aware of what was happening.

Throughout 2000 years of church history all the saints would become manifest as separate people in separate physical bodies.

So the invisible spirit of the man Adam was on the earth and could commune with the Spirit of God.

As a spirit, Adam could not age or grow old.

But how was man to multiply?

Animals were physical and could multiply by sex until they had filled up the earth and then God could switch off their sex instinct. Female animals have no desire for sex until they briefly “come on heat” and then go with the male until pregnated. Then the desire is switched off again. Their reproduction cycle works by instinct, not by self-will.

But this plan could not work for humans who have self-will.

If humans have free-will then their sex desire cannot be switched off and they can thus have sex when they want to. Thus there would be no end to the number of humans born and the world would be overpopulated before too long.

In 1804 there were about 1 billion people on planet earth. By 1927 population had risen to 2 billion.

So the population of humans took 120 years to increase by 1 billion people.

Now it only takes about 12 or 13 years to add a billion extra people. In 2012 there were  7 billion people on planet earth. Obviously, the earth cannot maintain this population growth for much longer.

In 2022 there were 8 billion people on earth.

Today half the world’s population lives in cities.

There are more people living in cities today than what the total population of the world was when John F Kennedy was elected President of America in 1960.

The growth of city slums since the 1960s has been frightening. The surface area of slums is the biggest growth area that the earth experienced in the last hundred years. One billion people now live in about 200,000 slums which means that poverty can only increase. Multiplication by sex was obviously not God’s original plan for humans as it has become a recipe for escalating misery.

The earth no longer has sufficient resources to give this exploding population a comfortable life. Science and technology are doing their best to cope but with about 80 million new humans arriving every year, the problem of providing for everyone is getting more and more difficult.

So what was God’s original plan?

Tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes sex

It is impossible for eternal life to be passed on through the sex act.

The sex act produces people who accept Christ as Saviour which is good but also produces Christ-rejecting people, which is evil. Few human actions are good and evil.

Sex certainly is: it is good when it happens after a man and woman have been married and it is evil when it happens before they have been married. It is good within marriage but evil outside marriage. Same-sex marriage is also evil.

GENESIS 1:28

And God blessed them, and God said unto them,

Be fruitful, and multiply,

and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth

When God gave this instruction, Adam was still a spirit being.

God was also talking about eternal life. Adam and the feminine attributes of woman that were within him were to produce humans who had eternal life.

Death came in because of sin. Before sin, there was no death. How could humans arrive on earth who had eternal life? That is what is meant by spiritual multiplication.

The clue lay in the word "fruitful". A fruit tree bears fruit that has the seed of life within the fruit.

GENESIS 1:12

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind,

and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind:

and God saw that it was good.

So God was going to put Adam into a human body which would happen in Genesis Chapter 2.

Then He would separate the feminine spirit into a separate body of a woman. Then the Holy Ghost would overshadow this virgin woman (the fruit tree) and she would give birth to the baby Jesus Christ (the fruit of her womb).

Jesus would have the fullness of God’s Word within Himself. The Word is the Seed of eternal Life.

Jesus would grow up and when He came of age because there was no sin to die for, He would speak all His saints out of the dust of the earth and thus populate the earth with the right number of Holy Ghost-filled people who had eternal life. There would be no spares to burn in hell. There would be no overpopulation of a finite earth.

GENESIS 2:7

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

God formed a body of flesh from the dust. This body was not a creation from nothing. Then God breathed the spirit of Adam into this body. Adam was then alive inside a human body that could live on planet earth. Once a person's spirit is inside a human body, we say that the person is alive.

GENESIS 2:9

And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

In Genesis Chapter 1, Adam was a spirit-being so he could not be fooled by the spirit of Satan.

All the natural trees were good. Please do not think that there was one bad fruit tree.

There was no mention of evil in Chapter 1.

But now that he was placed into a body of flesh he had to be careful about sin.

Chapter 2 has the first mention of evil.

But eating fruit is not a sin

There was no "bad" fruit tree that could cause sin.

All fruit trees were classified as good.
GENESIS 1:12   And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

What you eat comes from outside your body and passes through the digestive system which is a natural process and thus is not sinful.
MATTHEW 15:17   Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?

MARK 7:18   And he saith unto them, Are ye so without understanding also? Do ye not perceive,

that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him;

:19   Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?

The belly is not the source of sin.

The thoughts of the heart are where sin starts and these come out of the mouth as unbelief and lies that contradict God's Word.

MATTHEW 15:18   But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart;

and they defile the man.

Sin is not caused by eating but by thinking unscriptural thoughts. That is the basis of unbelief.

Unbelief is the real sin.

JOHN 16:9   Of sin, because they believe not on me;

MATTHEW 26:41

Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

The Tree of Life symbolizes the Spirit of Christ

The Tree of Life was not a natural tree. No natural tree can give a person eternal life.

GENESIS 3:22

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand,

and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

The Tree of Life could give Adam eternal life.

Thus the Tree of Life was the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

I JOHN 5:11

And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

There are not two sources of eternal life. Christ is the only source.

Then "the tree of knowledge" symbolizes the spirit of Satan. The sex act is defined as "carnal knowledge".

Once Adam and his bride were in two separate bodies, the spirit of Satan could fool them into producing life through sex in the same way that the animals did. This would be natural multiplication, not spiritual multiplication. It would produce life, but it would be a life that had to die.

GENESIS 2:17

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:

for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Produce life through sex and you will die. No person born of sex can live for one of God’s Days which is 1000 years.

II Peter 3:8   But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day

GENESIS 5:27

And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

The world’s oldest man was Methuselah and he only made it to 969, not 1000 years.

GENESIS 2:18

And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

When Adam was a spirit being in Chapter 1 it was good that he had those feminine attributes within himself. But now that he was in the fleshly body of a man it was not good that there should be feminine attributes in him. So God took out the feminine attributes and put them into a separate body of a woman.

GENESIS 2:25

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

They were both naked but were unaware of it. They were clothed with holiness because God did not want them to have sex. Why not? He needed Adam’s bride to be a virgin so that she could bring forth the virgin-born Baby Jesus.

GENESIS 2:17

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
thou shalt not eat of it:

for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Eating can symbolize sex as eating puts food into the stomach which can cause the abdomen to enlarge as we put on weight. Sex can also make the abdomen of a woman enlarge as her uterus expands when she is pregnant.

PROVERBS 30:20

Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith,

I have done no wickedness.

Eve never realized what she had done wrong. God never said "because" when He sentenced Eve. She had been totally fooled.

GENESIS 4:1

And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

“Knew”.  Carnal knowledge means sex. Adam and Eve produced life through sex. One act and the first of her twins were born.

Eve said she had done no wrong, “I have gotten a man from the LORD”. She had been deceived or beguiled. She had sinned but was blind to her sin.

GENESIS 4:2

And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

The second twin was born.

One act of conception can only produce monozygotic identical twins.

But Cain and Abel were not identical twins.

What about her conception in Eden from the serpent? She was already pregnant when God judged her.

GENESIS 3:16   Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception;

Eve was punished for being pregnant before she ever left Eden.

Her conception was her sin.

Adam was not the father of this conception because God could not punish Eve if her husband made her pregnant.

Notice, God does not say "because" of what Eve had done wrong, since Eve (like today's churches), was convinced that she had done no wrong.

What was Eve’s big mistake. There was no longer a virgin womb to bring forth the baby Jesus.

Now everyone would have to be born of sex with one exception, Jesus.

That is why God said "multiply" in Chapter 1 and "greatly multiply" in Chapter 2.

Originally, the woman would have had one conception and Jesus would be born.

Then Jesus would grow up and there would be no sin to die for. He would then have created all the righteous out of the dust by speaking, as He will do in the future on the day of the resurrection.

Sex is the permissive will of God

Now women would have to conceive all the righteous through sex (with the exception of the virgin born Jesus) as well as all the unrighteous who would be conceived and born because of human free-will.

"Greatly multiply" means that far more unrighteous will be born than those who repent and accept Jesus.

God would have to wait 4000 years before Jesus would be conceived. Then God would have to wait another 2000 years before Jesus could speak all His New Testament saints from the dust to form His Bride at His Second Coming. But the original plan of God will eventually happen.

Because Adam and Eve had followed the multiplication rules of animals where there is one male and many females in a herd, God made humans follow this same pattern of polygamy in the Old Testament.

But then Jesus, in the New Testament, came to bring us back to the original pattern of the garden of Eden, one man and one wife.

The virgin birth was God's perfect will.

God permitted sex as His permissive will but made strict rules concerning it.

A legal wedding vow is until death.

There is no divorce and remarriage for anyone who is legally married.

Marriage is between a man and a woman. Male and female. God does not recognize transgender or bisexual.

MATTHEW 19:4

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read,

that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,

     :5    And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

God made male and female. Today's same-sex relationships are not part of His Word.

God hates divorce

MATTHEW 19:6

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

     :7    They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?

     :8    He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives:

but from the beginning it was not so.

God made Adam and his bride as one spirit in the beginning before he separated them into two physical bodies. Thus He never meant them to be separated.

Divorce is bad news. It had no place in God’s original Eden.

Divorce means putting away.

MALACHI 2:16
For the LORD, the God of Israel,

saith that he hateth putting away:

for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the LORD of hosts: therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously.

We should all be striving to get back to the beginning. Women should realize the sacredness of being a virgin when they are to marry.

The first woman, not being a virgin, was the open door that allowed sin in.

Today we still die as a result of being born of sex and childbirth is still difficult, to make us realize that God has not forgotten nor changed His mind on this issue.

GENESIS 3:16

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception;

in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;

and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

The first woman chose the wrong way to bring forth human life and difficulty in childbirth is a continual reminder that this is not God's original will.

The umbilical cord leaves a scar on the belly, called a belly button. This is the mark of the beast on our bodies. It condemns us to eventually die.

Our bodies must change before we are caught up to meet the Lord in the air. In our changed bodies we will be free from sin so there will be no belly button.

When you have no belly button, you will be in an eternal body. That is when, for you, there will be time no longer. You will have stepped into eternity.