Marriage, Authority in

Martin Collins, referring to a recent study reported by Psychology Today, stating that cohabitation has led to increased divorce, marital violence, and lack of fidelity after marriage, points out that mass media has shamelessly used sex to promote materialism. Sex has been characterized as the cornerstone of mass persuasion. Consequently, faithful marriage is endangered as the flames of lust, encouraged by mass media, have caused individuals to sin against their own bodies. God invented marriage to typify the union between Christ and the church, designing male and female (not the 58 genders proposed by one major media network) to meld into one complementary union-a single organism. The world mocks marriage, ignoring the rules instituted by God Almighty which would guarantee its success, body-body, soul-soul, and spirit-spirit. God asks Christians to marry another Christian in order to avoid the pain, lack of compatibility, and heartache of being unequally yoked. Compartmentalization is not an option in a Godly Marriage. In the Ephesians 5:22 formula, wives subject themselves to their husbands as to Christ, but husbands are mandated to love their wives as Christ loved the church, being willing to sacrifice their lives for them. God will not answer the prayers of husbands who do not love their wives. As both husband and wife yield to Jesus Christ, their love can be perpetually rekindled.

John Ritenbaugh focuses on the apostle Paul's response to the bitter altercation between Euodia and Syntyche, women church leaders at Philippi, who succeeded in polarizing the congregation by their contentious pride, placing their obsessive desire to be right over unity. Paul urges them to follow the example of Christ, who emptied Himself of His divinity, assuming the role of a bond servant, exalting others over Himself, prompting God the Father to exalt Him above all others. Godly leadership is a function of submitting to the covenants God has made with us, including the marriage covenant, setting the proper pattern of all forms of institutions, including educational, governmental, medical, and religious institutions. Secular, progressive humanists, inspired by Satan, in their hatred toward God's covenants, through their endorsement of moral relativity and the new morality, fostering adultery, fornication, as well as feminism, homosexuality, polygamy, and transgender aberrations, have savagely attacked God's marriage covenant. Progressive humanists over the years have succeeded in making divorce as easy as falling off a log, and murder on demand (abortion) a convenience attended with no longer any trace of resistance. Paradoxically, hedonism, a philosophy which holds that pleasure is the highest aim in life, can never lead to real pleasure, but seeking to please God by serving others brings maximum pleasure. The marriage relationship, becoming totally one with one another as God the Father and Jesus Christ are at one with one another, provides the pattern of the true meaning of love—not feelings, but actions (consisting of serving and caring). Keeping God's Commandments demonstrates the highest form of love. Along with all the other gifts in the universal Edenic Covenant, identifying God as our benevolent Creator, who designed this earth for mankind to tend and keep, providing the marriage covenant as a God-plane relationship, the Sabbath Day educates us for service in God's Kingdom.

Martin Collins, cautioning us that radical feminism has deteriorated and compromised all human institutions—from governmental, educational, corporate, religious (including certain segments of the greater church of God) right down to the family structure—charges that men have abdicated their God-ordained leadership roles, producing chaos and confusion in the wake of this abandonment. The family structure, with assigned orders of responsibility (not orders of importance implying superiority or inferiority), is paramount to God's plan. The Bible contains the domestic history of the family, receiving blessings or cursing according to the success or failure of the father's leadership. The family structure was intended to mirror the Divine spiritual structure with Christ submitting to God the Father and the Church submitting to Christ. In the family, the husband submits to Christ and the wife submits to her husband. As Christ loves the Church, the husband is commanded to love his wife as he loves his own body, sacrificing for her and protecting her, regarding her as co-regent and chief counselor, delegating essential complementary duties to her. He is prohibited from being a pompous tyrant (intimidating her and provoking his children to wrath), but he is enjoined to provide leadership and make decisions, mirroring Christ's relationship to the Church. As men assume their roles as leaders of families, this also extends into the church and into the community. As men abdicate this responsibility, women have been forced to fill the leadership vacuum, contrary to God's intention. As we fulfill our God-ordained family roles, we qualify to become joint heirs with Jesus Christ, ruling over the entire universe.

Richard Ritenbaugh, referring to himself as an armchair conservationist, maintains that conservationists and environmentalists do not have the same goals or objectives. Conservationists want to manage the environment for people; environmentalists want to maintain the environment at the expense of people, looking at humans as the "enemy" of the earth. We have been commissioned by Almighty God to tend and keep the environment. Mankind has severely damaged the earth through industrial pollution, wrong methods of agriculture, genetic modification, and poisonous chemicals. Tending our garden is fraught with complications and difficulties. The Dust Bowl of the 1930's was caused by irresponsible farming methods, tearing up virgin prairie soil, formerly verdant with buffalo grass covering the High Plains. This mismanagement caused much of the topsoil to blow across the nation into the Atlantic Ocean. Farmers had to be retrained to think of their land as part of a greater whole, requiring rotation, land Sabbaths, and natural symbiosis of nature's components. God does things in a sequential order, establishing a hierarchy of order in the family, the church, the entirety of nature, as well as the entire universe. Men and women (converted husbands and wives) are in this symbiotic process together as parts of an interdependent single entity working toward the same goals. If we make the same mistakes as our original parents, trusting our own senses, blaming others, and glomming onto Satan's deception, we will reap similar consequences. Adam sinned willfully, having abdicated his leadership position. Sin is failure to do what God has commanded us. Because of this sin, posterity has been cursed with overwhelming toil just to stay ahead, paradoxically for our ultimate benefit. We are perfected in trials, suffering, privations, hardship, and hard work, all of which we can consider a blessing and gift from God.

Richard T. Ritenbaugh:  In the United States, marriage has been under assault for many years, at least for the last five or six decades. ...

Richard Ritenbaugh, in reflecting upon biblically ordained marriage roles, realizes they are at odds or in conflict with cultural expectations, especially the influences of radical feminism and postmodernism, which viciously militate against the truths of the Bible. This message focuses upon the characteristics and attributes of the perfect wife, designed to be a comparable aide, companion, or helper, to complete a "one-flesh" unit. If either the husband or wife steps outside their prescribed, ordained roles, automatic friction and strife will occur. Biblical instructions concerning marriage roles'submitting and loving (not always the easiest to fulfill)'are intended to bring us back to the perfect state that existed before sin entered the picture. Fulfilling our roles reverses the curse placed upon our parents Adam and Eve. Marriage could be likened to a school enabling us to learn God-plane behavior.

Should women wear hats to church? What is the correct hair length for men and women? Earl Henn expounds on Paul's teaching on these subjects in I Corinthians 11.