Hysterical! I love it! Sending it out to my email list...

I appreciate all your comments, but I feel I must correct my mistake above on the name: it is Ted Haggard, not Jim. Sometimes I am too careless about thinking I have the name right and am then embarrassed to have led others astray.

Also, I find the comments on covenant vs. contract marriage interesting. As a believer in God's Word, I must conclude that marriage is indeed a covenant before God, and Scripture says that God holds us accountable to our promises and our words. There is no more important covenant for us to make than marriage, aside from any covenant to serve God.

I have been interested in the teaching of a book I have read about how to make sense of whether one is free to marry in this day of sky-rocketing divorce rates. This pastor believes that the vow between eligible candidates (for lack of a better word) should be honored. In other words, if I have made a valid commitment to a man who has never been married or whose first wife has died, the covenant marriage is in place. For a person to divorce and remarry, even with "grounds" of adultery, etc. is not taught in the Bible. The remarrying part breaks the first covenant, and so (this pastor says) there cannot be a new covenant without damaging the first. The biblical example is Hosea, who went after his adulterous wife to restore their marriage.

Some things are clear. The Bible is most clear on not committing sexual immorality:
1) Since our bodies belong to Christ, we are not free to commit sexual immorality; to join to a harlot, since we are joined to Christ; to say we own our bodies, because we belong to Him; or to say our bodies are the temple of God and yet ignore how we use or abuse our temples.
(See 1 Corinthians 6:15-20)

2) The Bible is clear on respecting the marriage vows:
We may need to separate for safety's sake in a marriage where there is physical abuse, threatening of such abuse, or extreme mental torture (such as when God would let you know it is endangering you or your children.) But God does not say divorce, and he certainly says that the reason for separation is to bring about healing and to pray for future reconciliation.
"A wife is not to depart from her husband, but even if she does depart, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband. And a husband is not to divorce his wife." (1 Corinthians 6:11)

3) Jesus did not believe in divorce, even though rabbis of His day made many exceptions. Why? It goes back to how He created marriage to be.

Jesus told the Pharisees: "Because of the hardness of your hearts, Moses wrote you this [precept of divorce]. But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate." (Mark 10:5-9)

Our modern "no fault divorce" laws have encouraged and created tremendous complications in family life, as well as promoted greater incidence of split families. I think we will learn that God's way is best. And all the more as society crumbles. It is better to marry than "burn." When you marry, your body belongs to your spouse, too. Don't depart from your spouse, if at all possible for peace. If you must depart, work at reconciling the marriage. Do not marry someone who has a living spouse, unless that spouse was not validly eligible to marry in the first place. These are the concepts the Bible seems to teach. They worked for the most part very well during the first 150 years of our country's existence.