• Dr. John M. Asquith
  https://conta.cc/3LluPvw
• • 3 days ago
  • 5 min read

Marriage in the Present Upheavals Marriage in the Present Upheavals (purecambridgetext.com)
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If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?, Psalms 11:3.

One of the great foundations of a godly society is marriage. To be married is to partake in a grace from God experienced by Adam and Eve before their sin and expulsion from paradise. Therefore it is no surprise that the institution of marriage is under attack. For pastors who still seek to carve out a people for Jesus Christ out of the real world, the general mess that people make of their lives can be vexing. The mess made of marriages is a big part of that vexation.

Never before in Western culture have so many people done so much permanent damage to themselves before turning 25. Getting saved and joining a bible believing church will not remove their tattoos. It will not erase the word “bastard” from their children. It will not erase a criminal record. It will not undo a failed marriage that was abandoned for a new one. As I often tell my people, if you wrote a bad check yesterday, and you get saved today, it will still bounce tomorrow.

What will change is how you react to bouncing a check. As a pastor, I spend much time with people who have grievously entangled their lives. There are no instant cures. A man saved behind bars for a crime will still serve his time. If he is truly saved (a big if nowadays), he will serve his time differently. Other inmates will notice. Likewise, the single mother, the person scarred with tattoos, the couple with the confusing marriage record, the person wounded by the sexual habits of our deviant culture, and the man crippled by a felony record will live their lives differently.

All too often, bible believing churches are full of make-believe. The pulpit is used to mock those wounded by the excesses of our day. When the church doors close and the world is out of sight, what is left of the once burgeoning congregation is all too often people kidding themselves. Whereas they think of their church as pure, their immediate and extended families show the same proportion of busted marriages, tattooed children, drugs and alcohol, sexual deviancy, and whatever else miseries our culture has brought us.

A family that has preserved a truly bible believing lifestyle without hypocrisy and has successfully passed that lifestyle down to another generation is so rare that I rejoice greatly when I see one, and I do know one or two. It is simply impossible to go out into a standard community in our day, carve out a people for Jesus Christ who will come into the house of God lifting up holy hands without wrath or doubting, and not bring in the plagues of this world.

A pastor who cannot compassionately open his King James Bible and guide this new person or family into a joyful life in Christ while exhibiting patience is no pastor at all.

Jude 1:22 And of some have compassion, making a difference:

Jude 1:23 And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.

Being a pastor to a broken nation has forced me to study subjects that I would have never considered before. I read books on prescription drugs, porn addiction, ADHD, addiction to electronics, and many other topics wherein my people have been snared. I judge what these books say by the words of my King James Bible. I find that for every medical or psychological discipline out there, there is a body of literature by men and women who decry the abuse within those fields.

Remarkably, when these various professionals have critically dissected the errors of their profession, they are more often than not in line with the word of God even though I can find nothing in their professional or personal biographies that identify them as bible believing. In fact some of these people are outright liberals. Being a liberal does not necessarily blind someone to the the overreaches of their profession. Authors such as Irving Kirsch, author of The Emperor’s New Drugs, or Dr. Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift and Girls on the Edge are by no means conservative, but they see through the folly of our day.

It often takes a while to explain to people that a doctor that is $300,000 in debt for his education and an office overhead of $250.00 an hour can not spend much time on a patient for whom he will be given $35.00 by medicaid. That doctor is perfectly safe in prescribing any of a wide range of drugs. He can’t be sued because he followed the drug guidelines. He can’t afford to spend any quality time with his patients, and his finances demand that he spend as few minutes as possible, write a prescription and see his next patient.

The poor of this nation and increasingly the middle class (as medicine becomes more socialized) are the victims of this system. We never override a doctor’s orders but we do show people a better lifestyle. As they learn a less destructive lifestyle free of adultery, alcohol, and recreational drugs we encourage them to work with their doctor to get off the prescriptions. Most doctors are thrilled. Our people who have been successful at this love the changes.

The institution that has suffered the most from these upheavals is marriage. There is nothing I love more than to see a couple who have lived a committed and healthy relationship with one spouse. I am not so blind as to think that I can build a church with only such people.

Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge, Hebrews 13:4. I have had to make some difficult calls as a pastor to a broken society. I am not asking anyone to agree with my decisions. I am not callous to the opinions of my brethren, but neither am I subject to them. Very few of my fellows work among such people. When they do work with them, they administer a superficial prayer that they call a prayer of faith for salvation. The supplicant offers monopoly money for faith, and receives monopoly money for salvation.

The pastor then assures them that they are truly saved and tries to get them to change. It doesn’t work. We have countless people in the Black Creek Baptist Church who once lived depraved lives of addiction, uncleanness, adultery, alcoholism, and the like. Their lives are irrevocably changed. They love being in church. They love singing the old hymns. They give glory to Jesus Christ by whom they have found salvation, hope and an inward witness.

I find it strange that pastors who keep flogging a dead horse and can show no visible results to their soul winning take time to criticize what works. We have a saying here, “They love our cake, but they hate our recipe”. Come and visit. Privately interview our people. Follow them to their homes. See if you don’t find person after person living a new life in Christ Jesus. Surprise them in the market place, catch them unawares, see if their lives are not consistent from the pew to the public, and to home.

Now try to make sense out of the entangled marital lives they have sown for themselves in the lives they lived prior to the gospel. In my next post, I hope to give some advice that has worked here. Many times I have had to look at the people sitting in our services and cried out along with King Hezekiah, The good LORD pardon every one That prepareth his heart to seek God, the LORD God of his fathers, though he be not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary, 2nd Chronicles 30:18,19. Doctrine John Asquith

Defining Marriage (purecambridgetext.com)

• Dr. John M. Asquith
• • 2 days ago
  • 4 min read

Defining Marriage

Updated: 24 hours ago

Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant, Malachi 2:14.

Sooner or later, every pastor needs to settle in his own mind; what is a marriage? I suppose that if you are in a large enough urban area, and you have been there for some time, you may draw enough “like minded people” so that you never need to dirty your hands with the riff raff. You can smugly quote words like “old fashioned” and not worry about it. But, what if you had to go out into a general population and create a congregation of born again believers out of typical 21st century people?

Since that is a skill almost unknown today, most pastors will never need to train the wounded of our day to be bible believing christians. They just keep reshuffling a smaller and smaller cadre of like minded people and shutting their eyes to the degenerating standards and convictions in that shrinking crowd. For those of us who labor among the broken, being able to define the relationships these people have and God’s attitude to those relationships becomes crucial.

What is marriage? What is a concubine? What is a whore? What is a whoremonger? Occasionally, I council with a couple who are tentatively attending services. It is not unusual to find out that they have a committed relationship, cohabit, but have never consented to marriage. I explain to the woman that she is a concubine. Quickly, I let her know that I am not insulting her. Solomon and David had concubines and no one would have dared insult any of those women.

For the purposes of the Black Creek Baptist Church, and in harmony with a King James Bible, I label committed sexual relationships that cohabit, a husband and concubine relationship. I explain that they have come to a Baptist pastor for council and that if they want to continue in that council they must get used to bible terms. After all, there are plenty of other councilors out there they can go see. In order to understand the next step, it is important to understand how I see marriage.

Marriage is above all things a covenant between two willing people. Early in my study of the Bible, I was taught that marriage was flesh joining flesh. The verse used for that was 1st Corinthians 6:16; What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. The problem with that verse is that it does not say that being one flesh is marriage. It certainly wasn’t for the woman at the well. For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly, John 4:14.

In Genesis, a woman did not become a wife by becoming one flesh. A man took his wife and then became one flesh. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh, Genesis 2:24. She was his wife first, then became one flesh. I have had people use the example of Isaac taking Rebecca to bed without ceremony as an illustration of flesh joining flesh being all that is necessary. Isaac and Rebecca’s marriage is a good place to prove that marriage is a covenant between a consenting man and woman.

Laban expressly asked Rebecca if she would go with Abraham’s servant. And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go with this man? And she said, I will go, Genesis 24:58. She knew exactly what she was getting into and she consented. What about Isaac? Did he just see her and whisk her off to bed? No, he did not. He did not take her into his tent. He took her into his mother’s tent. And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death, Genesis 24:6. He made her the queen. He gave her his mother’s place. There is a covenant there.

What the couple I am counseling lacks is a clear cut covenant that they intend to be husband and wife. I then ask them if they consider themselves to have a covenant. The most common arrangement I see among such couples is two people who swap DNA, share an abode, eat together, are monogamous, but keep separate checking accounts and finances. All the things they share just kind of developed. Each holds out his or her separate finances as their last vestige of independence from the other one.

They get embarrassed when asked if a covenant exists. They aren’t ashamed of their sexual relationship. They are embarrassed because the relationship catapulted quickly after they began swapping DNA, but they never or rarely use the “M” word, marriage. I push the “M” word. Are they wasting time in their lives with a sexual and emotional addiction to someone with who they could never form a lasting covenant, or is this person the only person that they would ever want to make such a covenant with? Often they are afraid to discuss it between themselves. I make it my job to push for an answer one way or another.

For the purposes of the Black Creek Baptist Church and in harmony with the King James Bible, we define marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman, made legal in the jurisdiction wherein they dwell, and consummated where physically possible. Whether that marriage is made by two Indians following tribal customs in the Amazon River Basin, two star struck bar hoppers at a magistrate’s office, or two christians who come together for the first time after wedding in their home church, it makes no difference. It is a marriage. It is sacred in the eyes of God and must be held sacred by men.

In a further post we will look at divorce, second marriages, adultery and fornication. I hope this helps. I live and work in a real world with a real bible and a real God. Pious platitudes and textbook definitions all too often fall flat when a pastor leaves the security of his church property and wades out into a sea of real people.

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• Dr. John M. Asquith
• • 1 day ago
  • 6 min read

When Marriage Goes Awry

When Marriage Goes Awry (purecambridgetext.com)

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God, 1st Corinthians 6:11.

In their groundbreaking book Hooked: The Brain Science on How Casual Sex Affects Human Development, Drs. Joe S. McIlhaney Jr. and Freda McKissic, explain the devastating effects of how promiscuity and sexual abuse in adolescence affect the entire lives of those involved. They demonstrate through statistical evidence that promiscuous girls have a very small chance of keeping a stable marriage.

Because of the intricate way in which the brain is constructed, humans are a mammalian species which releases chemicals in the brain upon the activation of the libido when a woman pairs to the male who has caused that libido to be aroused. Whether a person is an evolutionist or a creationist, the brilliance of that chemical reaction is seen in the instinctive attraction and bonding that a female has for her mate.

McIlhaney and McKissic who are both practicing gynecologists, never mention God in the entire book. They work from science. Yet, the bible believer sees that wisdom of his bible over and over as they publish their findings. They relate how that by nature a female bonds to her mate by chemical reactions in the brain. Whether that mating was done in a honeymoon suite or in the back seat of a car makes no difference. She has bonded.

When that bonding breaks through death, divorce, or in the case of most adolescent sex when the mate grows bored and moves on, the female is overwhelmed with depression. The authors observe that the only depression greater than divorce is from death. A young 15 year old girl whose first sexual partner leaves her, suffers through a depression equal to that of a woman going through divorce. It’s how God made her.

Whereas the divorced woman often has a support structure to help her through her catastrophe, the young girl only has other 15 year olds. There is no condom for the brain. More often than not, she will bond again with some other promiscuous young man before she is fully healed. She is unable to bond as deeply because she never healed. After a few such encounters, the authors liken her to a piece of tape that has been used so many times that it can no longer stick to anything. The Apostle Paul called it, without natural affection, Romans 1:31, 2nd Timothy 3:3.

Males suffer their own way. The bonding is just as real but the effects are different. A male bonded to a woman by a sexual encounter will have a protective spirit towards her. He becomes like a bull in a pasture who will charge anyone he suspects of threatening his mate. Like a lion in the wild, he wants to drag home food. All of this is destroyed by modern thinking. He is called sick and possessive.

After a few sexual encounters he is cured of his possessiveness. He can share his woman with anyone. He can walk away even if they cry after him. He can abandon children. He can laugh if she necks with another woman at the bar.

Surprise Mr. Pastor! these are the people who you will find when you seek to carve out a people for Jesus Christ from out of the neighborhoods near you. The same process that causes a woman to bond to her mate in a sexual encounter is what God designed to bond a woman to her children. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world, John 16:21.

The brain releases chemicals when a child is in the birth canal that cause the woman to bond to her child. The same thing happens during lactation. The authors find that women who wounded their natural ability to bond through promiscuous sexual activity, has also lost their ability to bond with their children. Sit in a doctors office for a half hour or stand in line in Walmart. women don’t like their children. They will do anything to get them into daycare, leave them with grandma, or glue them to some electronic device.

When most of these people come into your church (if you have any clue of how to do that), they have already ruined any chance of having one husband or wife for the rest of their lives. When a woman comes into your church with children by multiple men and is pregnant by her current live-in, and her husband to whom she is still legally married has long ago abandoned her and shacked up elsewhere, can your theology handle that?

You say to me, “If she divorces and remarries, she will be in adultery”. Wow! what a revelation! She has been in adultery for years now. If her latest husband divorces her, she is in adultery, if she stays as she is she is in adultery, if she marries her current paramour she is in adultery. Is there any hope for taking this person and stabilizing her life so that her unborn child can have a decent home, her children by other men can have stability, and she can sit in the house of God with any honor?

If you have a God, a King James Bible and a compassion for the utterly destroyed people of your land, there is hope. Never mind what your goody-two-shoes fundamentalist buddies think. Fanny Crosby had better sense about such people than the average fundamentalist. “Deep in the human heart, touched by the tempter, feeling lied buried that grace can restore”. “Strings that are broken can vibrate once more”.

We have people in The Black Creek Baptist Church who have suffered deeply from the excesses of our day. Many of them were born with two strikes against them by means of their parentage and circumstances of their upbringing. About the first time they ever got to make their own decisions, they heard the world cry out, “Strike three you’re out”.

Their children are now being raised in holiness. They are free from the depths of depression. Some have a mate who loves them and is pledged to them for life and understands what that means. They have broken the bondage of drugs and alcohol. We have seen drug and alcohol sotted marriages rescued from destruction. We have seen mates who despised each other fall in love.

I say all of this to say, “I hate divorce”, but I don’t hate it as much as people who have been through it. I hate what the devil has done to our society. I wish that the idiots in their high towers who vote for such destruction and advocate the tearing down of godly foundations could spend some time with me as I go house to house and hold the wretched hearts of those so bruised and hurting from their disastrous policies.

A preacher who seeks to reach people through their consciences (as might have worked a half century ago), will find that consciences don’t work in the 21st century. There is too much damage. God has a fall back plan. These people hurt.

Isaiah 1:4 Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.

Isaiah 1:5 Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.

Isaiah 1:6 From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.

Isaiah 1:7 Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.

The people who you encounter in public hurt. They are like the horse that got loose in the grain bin. Their bowels are in agony but there is no ability or sense to stop eating. You have a bible that can show them how to find healing in the little things in their lives that hurt them so. When you have to counsel a young couple that if the wife would kick her ex-boyfriend out of the house and not allow him to sleep on the couch any more, they might not have the same marital troubles, you begin to understand the depths to which our culture has sunk. Any other generation would have instinctively understood that. Don’t expect such common sense today.

My people are not bible believers because they understood the translating process or because I taught them manuscript evidence. They believe a King James Bible because it works like the owners manual written by whoever created them. What they try works. It stops the pain. They crowd into church. They weep at the altar. They play the songs of Zion at home. They dress different. They educate their children differently. They change their forms of entertainment.

There is hope if they have a pastor with any sense who can get over his preconceived ideas.

• John Asquith
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• Doctrine