IVoter Guide On Family Values

What does the Bible say about marriage and family? 

Many people think this question is irrelevant. But as a Judeo-Christian voter, you understand that God’s Word reveals how He designed the world, including the family. Although not always lived out in this fallen world, God’s design is still the basis for developing the beliefs on which you vote. And your votes influence how our government values and treats marriage and the family.

This is mostly true.   However, God’s design is more rightly to be understood as God’s moral will, Just because God created people male & female, it does not therefore follow that God’s decretal will provides a moral template for sexual ethics. 

What is the purpose of the Created Order?According to Romans 1, the Created Order exists to reflect God’s existence, attributes, & authority.  

What does “natural” mean in Romans 1:27?  It most certainly does NOT refer to heterosexuality/heteronormativity.  It cannot do so, because God does not have sexual characteristics.  It refers to the natural moral teleology of the Created Order.    If it refers to human anatomy & physiology and/or psychosocial characteristics, then that results in multiple exegetical, logical, & epistemic fallacies - Is/Ought, Vicious Circularity, Overspecification, Category Mistake/Error, & Special Pleading.

In other words, in the view of the Adherents to the Repeated Meme (those who follow after the Traditional View on Human Sexuality, gay men are in sin based not on whether or not they love God & neighbor perfectly - even though Matthew 22 & Romans 13 state that perfect love (of God & neighbor) fulfills the Law & 1 John 4 teaches that perfect love drives out guilt.   Instead, they are in sin because human anatomy & physiology is obviously heterosexual.   That’s just the Is-Ought Fallacy & has no place in Christian Ethics.  

 If Is-Ought reasoning obtains as a positive  roadmap to God’s moral will, then, since God creates our souls (Zech 12) without the ability to do any good accompanying our own regeneration & justification (John 6:44, Romans 8:7), there is no moral obligation to exercise saving repentance & faith - but the Bible explicitly teaches otherwise. 

With that in mind, what does the Bible say about the institution whose health can make or break our society?

Is marriage a man-made institution or a God-created institution?

Jesus, referencing the book of Genesis, made it clear. “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6) 

 The author quotes  Matthew 19: 4 - 6 without expositing the passage.  The passage is an answer to a specific question - a question about divorce, not a question about whether or not marriage is a heteronormative affair.   This is classic prooftexting that ultimately doesn’t reflect the way God models the rules of sound reasoning for us.   

Only God can reason properly from Is to Ought Why? Because God is the living, infinite, eternal, & unchangeable Exemplar of His attributes.   

Human beings did not invent marriage. 

That’s true, but at no point did God issue a command to maintain & execute marriage as a heteronormative affair any more that He limited the observance of the feasts in the Penteteuch to those feasts so that Hannukah & Purim are forbidden. 

God created this union of one man and one woman—both in His image—who become one flesh, for one lifetime. 

Men & Women are created in God’s image,  but the text doesn’t state that this confines marriage to males & females in heteronormative fashion.  That depends on her interpretation of Genesis 2 & the validity of using God’s decretal will as a positive roadmap to God’s moral will.  

Moreover, her supporting text in Matthew doesn’t confine itself to Genesis 2 in order to make its point.  Yeshua draws the moral will of God out of Deuteronomy- not Genesis.    The author is conflating God’s decretal will & God’s moral will - a classic Category Error. 

What is the purpose of marriage?

After describing God’s creation of male and female, Genesis 1:28a explains, “And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth …” Marriage is the context in which God intended children to be created and raised.

That is not what the text of Genesis states.  If marriage is the context in which God intended children to be created & reared, then it also follows that it is the context in / from which dominion is exercised. 

The author truncated Genesis 1:28. 

Genesis 1:28 (ESV): And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

One wonders if the author heard herself when she wrote this.  On her view, single people are unable to properly exercise dominion.   Both heterosexual & homosexual singles are in sin because they are single- after all, it’s a sin fail to discharge the terms of the Creation Covenant without perfectly loving God & Neighbor.  On her view, it is impossible for single people  - and she clearly opposes homosexual marriage - to abide by the terms of the covenant.  Only heterosexual married people can properly fulfill the command to be fruitful & multiply, which presumably includes adoption, & care for the environment & animals, build a civilization, and so on.  God did not command us all to marry.  He did command us to be fruitful & multiply.  

There’s another purpose to marriage, however.

Ephesians 5:22-33 and Revelation 19:7-9 reveal that marriage is a picture of the spiritual relationship between Jesus Christ and His church—the body of individuals who have trusted in Him as their Lord and Savior.

“’Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”(Ephesians 5:31-32) 

The rest of Ephesians 5 also states that men are the kephale of women in marriage, & the text of 1 Peter calls them co-equal.  Men are to love their spouses as Christ loved the church. All of this cuts both ways.  Women are kephale to men too.   Men are to submit to women too. That’s how the Inter-Trinitarian Covenant operates.   

The only women prohibited from leadership in the Bible are women who are prostitutes & witches.   If they meet the overall moral qualifications, there is no problem.    

 The Bible teaches the 3 uses of the Law & Gospel.  If women are denied leadership in one sphere, they are to be denied in the other 2.  A disruption in the 3 uses logically reflects disharmony between the the 3 Persons of the Godhead.   

Ironically, the author of the article’s perspective undermines public morality & results in the failure of moral government in one or more spheres.   This is how you wind up with court decisions allowing Christians to flout the civil law related to the Civil Rights of LGBTQ People, Women, & others on the basis of religion, & to do the same relative to Matthew 5:41.  

Co-habitation, polygamy, and same-sex unions cannot reflect the spiritual union of Christ and His church. 

 Only if the people involved in these relationships do not love God over & above everyone & everything else & their neighbors before themselves.    Why? At its root sin is a failure to perfectly love (Romans 13).    There is no command to be married to not cohabitate, be married to only one person, & to refrain from homosexual behavior/marriage.  

 In the Bible, polygamy is seen to be destructive & unwise insofar as it amplifies the competition between men & women who are able to sin that began in the Fall. Sarah & Hagar, Rachel & Leah, Solomon’s wives, & others are seen to constantly combat each other for the love & attention of their men, & their men played favorites or otherwise dragged down the nation. 

1 Corinthians was written to people using the Greco-Roman temple as a religious, business, & sexual playground.  Paul encourages monogamy as a matter of wisdom & honor as a means to stabilize the local church & to help people focus on learning how monotheism itself is supposed to operate.   Monogamy, like marriage & singleness, is presented as a species of harm reduction to grow the churches & adorn the Law & Gospel.  

On her view, the Bible mandates us to be monogamous in a manner that suggests that polyamory, polygamy, & polyandry are sins based on the number of spouses a person has.  That would be Situational Ethics. 

This is only accomplished by God’s design for marriage. With its symbolic nature and the potential for creating new life, marriage has enormous spiritual and societal significance. 

As we have seen, the author has no idea what she’s talking about.  In the end, she’s just a cipher for unbiblical, worldly thinking that is designed to destroy LGBTQ people & others.  God prohibits women from holding co-equal authority in the home because of their genetics or general psychology.  It’s a sin to bake the cake because of the identity of your clients & the meaning of the cake.  This just Situational Ethicd writ large.

Why should the government care?

Public servants may not care what Jesus said about marriage, but they should care about the well-being of the citizens they serve.

They ought to understand the principles of Biblical Theonomy properly.   Dominionism & Theonomy are not convertible. 

God created civil government to serve society (Romans 13:4). 

Romans 13:8–10 (ESV): Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.  God created us to live in community, & that means we serve Government & Government serves us.

The basic building block of society is the family, and the foundation of the family is marriage. Therefore, government can serve society well through policies that strengthen marriage.

Without destroying people in the process. 

For children—the most vulnerable members of our society—studies consistently show that being raised by their biological parents in a faithful, life-long marriage is best for their success. 

 What studies? It’s for the children too! 

Even a secular country should be compelled by social science to support monogamous one-man-one-woman marriages. How much more should a country that was founded on Judeo-Christian principles!

Since when did Social Science become our rule of faith? 

Why should I care?

Family-strengthening policies (e.g., eliminating the marriage penalty in taxes, encouraging childbearing and adoption, reforming welfare laws so they don’t discourage marriage, and more) depend on the people who make the laws . . . and those who vote for them.

Which according to her own reasoning eliminates single heterosexuals as well as LGBTQ people.  Where does the Bible limit adoption to heterosexual married people? Nowhere. 

You, through your votes, support the protection of children, the stability of your community, and the future of our country through the people you vote for and the policies they support.

In every election season, defenders and destroyers of marriage and family will vie for your vote. iVoterGuide is working to equip you with knowledge of what the Bible and your candidates say about this and other issues that deeply impact our culture. With so much at stake, we must commit to vote wisely. 

As a reminder, the author of the article is pushing an agenda that runs through a party whose presumptive nominee was just found guilty of 34 felony charges.  This is what purports to be Christian discernment in the United States.