Installment Two:
This has already been articulated by others,
@Cap, but the supposed dividing line between the 'Old' and the 'New' Testaments is
entirely artificial, one of the many abominations that can be laid at the feet of Constantine, the so-called Early Church Fathers and the distorted, paganized Roman Catholic religion that arose from their machinations, supported by Talmudic scholars who were comfortable with anything that created separation from their religion and that of anyone who wanted to believe that something significant happened at Golgotha and the tomb of Christ's Resurrection.
It is all one Book, and it is our Scripture. We're all still in the process of discerning which parts of it apply and to which people and in what circumstances, but there is no truth to the notion that there was some kind of total reset at the birth of Christ, at his crucifixion or at his Resurrection that would justify having to rearticulate every detail covered in previous scripture in order to provide some kind of new legitimacy to what was covered earlier. When God, through His Own Voice or through the voices of His prophets or His Son, deemed it necessary to provide correction or clarification, He did so. Even Christ's ministry went through multiple stages of such correction and/or clarification, including at least two post-Ascension phases when His ministry was conducted through Paul. No need existed to rearticulate what tithing meant, as it was made clear in the Torah (the subsequent organized Christianity religions took it upon
themselves to create their
own 'clarification' of tithing, bastardizing it into a form of coerced funding of the churches they established that had no scriptural justification). What you're introducing by demanding that some New Testament scriptural proof text has to be submitted in order to justify current-day polygamy qualifies as a red herring. It's a non-issue because, simply put, it's just not an issue. If it were an issue to our Father, He would have ensured that someone said something about it in the scriptures He divinely inspired. That He
didn't by definition means that the ongoing understanding of polygamy remains in force, just as tithing should still be something associated with having gatherings to celebrate the love and mightiness of our LORD, or just as guidelines for proper treatment of strangers remain in effect. Or even, as, in a secular context, the latest Congress isn't required to pass all new laws each session in order to make it clear that murder and mayhem are against the law.
You may have fallen into a trap of false logic, and it is one that is so ubiquitously promoted by the Culture of Destruction (and fully supported by Condemnation Christianity) that it becomes invisible because of being the water in which we swim: those intent on remaking our world in
their own images assert philosophies that have no empirical justification but demand of their adversaries that they provide rock-solid proof of
their philosophies to avoid being condemned. They now have on their side not only the mainstream news media and the public education system from Kindergarten to graduate school but also the frontline Christian churches and even the American Catholic Church in most regards.
It's probably more likely that the Left will one day recognize that they have an unfair advantage in the media and schools -- and offer to turn over half of them to the Right -- than it makes sense to hold our breath for the churches to operate against their own self-interest and end their hammerlock on the ability to create their exclusive clubs to get people to tithe away their income in exchange for official reassurances about salvation.
Hey, who knows, though: maybe leprechauns will build us a new superhighway to Candyland, too!
Darwinian Evolutionary theory is one of our very best examples of what I wrote above. It is based on a legitimate bedrock of the science of natural selection, but Darwin's theory, offered over 100 years ago and asserted by Darwin himself to be in full danger of failing as a theory if solid fossil evidence weren't discovered within 50 or 100 years, was created in his imagination and supported by nothing more than pencil drawings of so-called evolutionary shifts (of horses, primates, etc.) that are used to this day to hypnotize students into thinking Darwin's theory has become settled science, but as of yet not one bit of solid fossil evidence has been discovered, despite the last century being characterized by
major archaeological digs worldwide.
And yet those who want to demand that the New Testament include a major press release on polygamy in most cases don't even question Darwinian Evolutionary theory.
Doing the right thing has very often been not only unpopular and uncomfortable but downright dangerous. If one is looking for something obvious, it likely would only exist among the realm of the non-controversial.
Just look at how our country has reacted to covid. Hysteria. Destruction of economies. Personal isolation. Whole populations cowed into wearing useless face diapers through a manufactured terror campaign intended to scare us all to death. If one is looking for the obvious, then it would be easy to conclude that covid surely has to be the worst threat the world has ever faced -- just look at the evidence of how people are behaving in response to it.
Often, though, it is exactly the
non-obvious that one should pay attention to rather than expecting that the truth would be obvious. In regard to covid, the non-obvious is represented by what is actually
missing that would definitely be not only present but
obviously present if it were the threat that the farcical Fauci has brainwashed our country into thinking it is: people would be dropping dead all around us. That's in fact one of the things that was articulated by Fauci, his minions and the media in the early months: oh, no, we better get all these hospitals up and running or we won't be able to stop children from having to walk over dead bodies. But, no, despite it being such a grave danger that we all have to wear face diapers to prevent people from dying with covid and an average of 2.5 comorbidities, no matter where I go I never see people collapsing or expiring with covid symptoms. If it were a real pandemic, as in pandemics of the past, we should be seeing some rotting corpses being carted off. Instead of the ridiculous over-reaction of closing schools for fear that one student might die of covid, we would instead at least see what happened in 2009, when many high schools in America had to shut down because over half of their students were horribly ill with H1N1 swine flu.
Sorry about the rant, but the same is true of polygamy. What is the
non-obvious about polygamy? Well, we can start with the total absence of concern for the legions of widows who are out there and who are simply
expected to gut up and accept that the rest of their lives will be bereft of deep intimacy, of significant companionship, and of a loneliness that their family members will mostly fail to recognize because they're making all the wrong assumptions. God explained all this through Moses over a thousand years before Christ. Why do we let anyone get away with expecting that He had to explain it all over again in the wake of allowing His only begotten Son to be crucified on our behalf? Especially when His Son articulated the distillation of the Commandments to come down to two, one of them being the requirement to love everyone with whom we associate as we would have them love us. Doesn't that really address polygamy right there? Doesn't it really fall into the need for us to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)? Are we going to have the hubris to assert that we can choose to challenge God's Word on any given matter just because it wasn't rearticulated in our arbitrarily-segmented second-'half' of Scripture?
And, I might add, women would continue to make deliberate efforts to poach men away from their husbands.
Amen, brother.
I am so very thankful for the fellowship I find here.
