The Wedding Ceremony as designed by God
No doubt more than a few Bible College students will get their panties in a wad reading this, but the truth is like that: sometimes it hurts. There is only one question you need to answer: Do you fear God? That really is the only question.
If you don’t fear God, that raises the question of why. If it’s because you “don’t believe” in God, that’s OK. Everyone has the right to be stupid and I’ll confess, I’ve been there. Once upon a time I drank enough tequila that I thought I was bulletproof, so I do understand. This post isn’t for you because you’re dealing with other issues. Stupidity is like that.
If you have faith that you have nothing to fear from God because your boyfriend Jesus will forgive you no matter what you do, this post is probably going to upset you but you need to hear it. Because Jesus isn’t your boyfriend and there are no rainbow-farting unicorns.
If you are one of those who claims to be a Christian but still worries about going to hell, keep reading. Your theology is off, but hopefully your mind is open.
For any of you professional churchians or students at seminary or Bible college who are training to be professional churchians, this is important:
Just because you believe the lies you were taught doesn’t make them true.
Religion Is the Original Power and Control Racket
Controlling a persons sexuality is to control the person, the family and the culture.
If you look at the Bible, the major sin of the Old Testament was idolatry.
The major “gods” of idolatry were Baal, Asharoth and Molech. Baal and Asharoth were fertility gods and part of the worship was sex.
We get a glimpse into this in
Genesis 38 with the story of Judah and Tamar, his daughter-in-law. Tamar had been married to Er, who did evil in the sight of the Lord and was killed for it. Tamar was given to Onan, Er’s brother, in order to fulfill his duty to give her a son so that Er’s name might continue. Onan didn’t like that so when having sex with Tamar he pulled out and “spilled his seed upon the ground” in order that she might not get pregnant. This angered the Lord and He killed Onan for that. Judah was left with one other son, Shelah. He told Tamar to go wait in her father’s house and later she would be given to Shelah when he was grown up.
When Shelah had grown up Tamar saw that Judah had not given her to Shelah, so after Judah’s wife died, she put on a veil and pretended to be a temple prostitute on the side of the road. Judah came along and had sex with her, she conceived and he became the father of her twins. She became part of the genealogy of Christ with that act. What did Judah think he was doing?
When Judah saw her, he thought she
wasa harlot, for she had covered her face.
There are a lot of nuances to that story, but what I want to point out is that she hid her face with a veil and because of this everyone believed her to be a temple prostitute. From this we get the idea that ordinary women, wives and daughters, could hide their face with a veil and have sex with strange men as part of the worship of Baal and Asharoth. Worship involves offerings and the women accepted payment (offerings) from the men in return for the act of providing their body. They were temple prostitutes or cult prostitutes as a matter of function, but otherwise they were ordinary women. Wives, mothers and daughters. Look at verses 20-22:
When Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite, to receive the pledge from the woman’s hand, he did not find her.
He asked the men of her place, saying, “Where is the
temple prostitute who was by the road at Enaim?” But they said, “There has been no
temple prostitute here.”
So he returned to Judah, and said, “I did not find her; and furthermore, the men of the place said, ‘There has been no
temple prostitute here.’
Notice what was said of Tamar when her pregnancy became apparent:
“Your daughter-in-law Tamar has played the harlot, and behold, she is also with child
by harlotry.”
What Was Judah’s Sin? What Was Tamar’s Sin?
15. “for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation. ”
13. “for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.”
Centuries before the Law,
neither Judah or Tamar sinned in their actions. Over and over again the reader will encounter pastors and others who claim that Judah and Tamar committed adultery (
Deuteronomy 22:22-24Tamar was betrothed to Shelah) and incest (
Leviticus 18:15Judah was Tamar’s father-in-law) without bothering to note that the Law was not given to the people until some 400 years later. As it is written,
“sin is not imputed when there is no law.”If we were to apply the Law, it gets even more interesting. From the context, we see that “playing the harlot” is cult prostitution and the sin would be idolatry, not sex outside of marriage. The reason is while idolatry is forbidden by God, sex outside of marriage is not. Tamar was twice a widow, then betrothed to Shelah, but her father-in-law violated her betrothal agreement, a violation of
Numbers 30:2. While churchians hold that the “sin” of Tamar was incest, she committed no sin. Even though she violated the cultural mores, as Judah said of her,
“she is more righteous than I am.”As to having sex with whores, all this occurred about two millennia prior to the regulation forbidding such a thing and that applied only to Christian men (
1st Corinthians 6:15-16). We see that Samson, a Nazarite, used prostitutes and did not violate his
Nazarite vow to be Holy to the Lord. Now I realize that you boys and girls from Millar Bible College will be outraged at that, the very idea of remaining Holy to the Lord while banging whores is just something you can’t handle. And I know that you’ll fire up Google and find others who agree with you, but there’s one problem with that, which is the text of
Judges 16:1.
The word translated as “harlot” is “zanah” of which
I’ve written before and in this sense it means she was a whore. A prostitute. A woman who spread her legs and provided sex for payment. She was not described as a
“qadesh” (cult prostitute or a temple prostitute) but rather as a simple prostitute. You should know that in
Deuteronomy 23:17 the men and women were forbidden to be a “qadesh” but the “zanah” prostitution was never forbidden.
Many have a hard time with this because “zanah” is translated as adultery, idolatry, sexual idolatry and ordinary prostitution. Adultery and idolatry are forbidden, ordinary prostitution is not forbidden. Therefore, according to the Apostle Paul, while adultery and idolatry are sins, ordinary prostitution is not a sin.
I must presume you boys and girls in Bible College don’t have much experience with whores, which is a good thing, but you need to understand that there is only one reason a man goes to see a whore and that’s to get his dick wet. He wants sex and she provides sex for payment. The context of the word “bo” (
Strong’s 935) that is translated as
“went in to her” is indicated by the fact the woman in question is a common prostitute.
Some churchians try hard to claim Samson didn’t have sex with her, that in that day the only boarding houses were with prostitutes. Implied is that when people were traveling they went to the local whores for a place to stay, using Joshua 2:1 as an example. Except that they didn’t. They went to the village or town and expected to be given hospitality by someone at the gate or in the square (
Genesis 19:2-3;
Judges 19:15). Churchians also claim the word “bo” means that he entered her house, not that he entered her body. Except that we see the word “bo” is associated with or used to mean sexual intercourse frequently. Some examples:
- Adam and Eve: Genesis 2:22
- Abraham and Hagar: Genesis 16:2, 16:4
- Lot and his daughters: Genesis 19:33, 34
- Jacob and Leah: Genesis 29:23
- Jacob and Rachel: Genesis 29:30
- Jacob and Bilhah: Genesis 30:3
- Judah and his wife: Genesis 38:2
- Onan and Tamar: Genesis 38:9
- Judah and Tamar: Genesis 38:16, 18
So not only does God not make a prohibition against banging whores in the Law, we see Samson the Judge, a member of the Hebrews “hall of fame” having sex with whores and not violating his Nazerite vow to be Holy to the Lord. And since I mentioned the Hebrews Hall of Fame, who else do we see there but the harlot Rahab? Being a legitimate prostitute is not a sin because nowhere in Scripture did God forbid any woman, Christian or non-Christian, from being a prostitute. That, however, is ordinary prostitution.
Idolatry and Ordinary Women “Playing the Harlot”
The other type of prostitution was being a temple whore, which is kind of what women do nowadays in terms of sexual promiscuity and adultery. Keep in mind that no-one was forcing women to do this, the religious/idolatry system provided women with a cultural excuse to exercise their hypergamy. This appealed to both men and women in different ways but the end result was idolatry. That system of idolatry gave power to the priests and leaders. By taking part in that system, the system became part of people’s lives and established the morality of their actions.
Interestingly, we see in
Leviticus 21:9 that if the daughter of a priest engaged in temple prostitution she was to be burned with fire because she not only profaned herself, she profaned her father as well. Knowing that a woman who gave her virginity to a man was married to him, it follows that the daughter who goes out, hides her face and acts as a temple prostitute is married to the first man and commits adultery with every subsequent man. Which is more or less what the women of today are doing, temple prostitutes for feminism.
Keep in mind that the root of “culture” is the word “cult” and it describes a common belief system. Once a system of cultural mores involving sexuality was in place, God’s solution was to wipe the people out. All through the Old Testament we see that idolatry is synonymous with sexual immorality. The question is whether the sexual immorality was because it was a violation of God’s Law concerning sexuality or God’s Law concerning idolatry. Often times it was both, but the aspect of idolatry could and did convert any lawful sexual activity into sin.
People have a desire to know that what they are doing is right and this is especially important when it comes to that most intimate of activities, sexual relations. By invoking God’s name religious leaders create a moral paradigm when it comes to sex, even if God never said whatever it is they claim He said. And if lies are taught as truth long enough, people believe the lies.
People will believe a lie because they either fear it to be true or because they want it to be true. People are stupid and leaders take advantage of this. Sheep are stupid and shepherds know this.
The Churchian Idolatry of Marriage
Genesis 2:24 is a grant of authority from God to the man. “For this cause a man…( 1 ).” According to God, the individual man has the authority to begin marriage and he does so by right, because God granted him that authority. He has no need to seek the approval or permission of anyone else, he has the right to begin marriage. This follows from the fact that woman was created from man, for man, to be under his authority as his wife and the mother of his children.
The virgin is married when she is taken by a man and penetrated in the act of marriage, which is sexual intercourse. The virgin’s consent is not necessary, the act of penetration is sufficient to marry her whether she agrees or not( 2 ). For you anklebiters, the man and the virgin have to be eligible to marry in order to form a marriage so cases of incest or situations in which the virgin is already betrothed do not count. However, these exceptions so seldom occur that we can say “As a rule, all women are virgins when they marry.”
The question to ask any professional churchian is “By what right do you claim the authority to ‘preside’ over a marriage?”
Typically there is always trouble with pointing this out because everyone wants to turn it into a Catholic vs Protestant fight, but the fact is that all of this was done long, long before the great schism that split east from west and centuries before the protestant reformation that only curbed the worst of the excesses without addressing the root problems.
The Nicolaitans won and they instituted a clerical caste that lorded it over the laity in the same way that the Gentile rulers do. This began early enough that Christ stated twice that He hated the
Nicolaitans and
their works, and it was solidified when Christianity became the official religion of Rome. As time went by the bishops became defacto rulers in the Roman empire and wielded power as members of the government. This profoundly changed the culture of the church and there was a profound emphasis on submission to authority.
Others, from time to time, have had interesting things to say about the Nicolaitans.
H.A. Ironside wrote:
“…we have the introduction of wrong principles within — the teaching of the Nicolaitanes. Others have often pointed out that this is an untranslated Greek word meaning, ‘rulers over the people.’ Nicolaitanism is really clerisy* — the subjugation of those who were contemptuously styled ‘the laity’ by a heirarchical order who lorded it over them as their own possessions, forgetting that it is written, ‘One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren.’ In the letter to Ephesus the Lord commended them for hating the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, those who, like Diotrephes, loved to have the preeminence among them. But, in the Pergamos letter, we have Nicolaitanism designated as a distinct system of teaching. It was then that clerisy was accepted as of divine origin, and therefore something that must be bowed to.”
*Webster defines “clerisy” as: The literati, or well-educated class. *Webster defines “literati” as: Men of letters. This may only mean those who had the ability to read and write. Or, it could also include those who not only could read and write but were advancedly educated in fields of literature and possibly here in theological disciplines, whether doctrinally biblical or unbiblical.
The Sins of the Nicolaitans
After Rome fell the church was (for the most part) the last man standing in Western Europe and the change to the culture was such that the leaders were determined that the church become a large and powerful monolithic organization. Their primary enemy for hundreds of years was the landed nobility. The primary weapon the church used to bring the nobility under their power was the control of sexuality, primarily marriage.
First, they claimed that God ordained a “superior” clergy in authority over the laity. Then they claimed that the power to “bind and loose” gave them the authority to elevate the “teachings and traditions of the church” over Scripture. Not only that, they claimed the Eater Bunny was infallible… and then it really got crazy. They ignored the prohibition of Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32, re-writing the Bible as they went along.
God has two separate standards of sexual morality, one for men and one for women. This should not be difficult to understand, because men and women are not equal and certainly not the same. The root of all this crap from the church was the profoundly gnostic orientation of the patristic writers. Gnosticism, the belief that those things of the spirit are good and those things of the flesh are bad. Two of the worst infiltrators of the early church, Augustine and Jerome, were both gnostics. Augustine of Hippo was raised in the Manichean belief (Persian gnosticism) and Jerome was an adherent of the Stoic philosophy of the Romans. This is well-known to historians and the following quotes are from “Sex, Law and Christian Society in Medieval Europe” by James Brundage.
The Church Fathers’ views of sex were dominated by ascetic values, for most of the Fathers were, at one time or another in their careers, monks or hermits. The most important patristic authority on sexual matters, the one whose views have most fundamentally influenced subsequent ideas about sexuality in the West, was St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Augustine held strong, deep seated convictions about sexual relationships and the role of sex in human history, convictions that flowed from his own experience and his reflections upon it, convictions that brooked neither denial nor dissent.
Sexual desire, Augustine believed, was the most foul and unclean of human wickednesses, the most pervasive manifestation of man’s disobedience to God’s designs. Other bodily desires and pleasures, Augustine felt, did not overwhelm reason and disarm the will: one can be sensible while enjoying a good meal, one can discuss matters reasonably over a bottle of wine. But sex, Augustine argued, was more powerful than other sensual attractions; it could overcome reason and free will altogether. Married people, who ought to have sex only in order to beget children, can be overwhelmed by lubricious desires that blot out reason and restraint; they tumble into bed together simply in order to enjoy the pleasure of each other’s body. This, Augustine thought, was not only irrational but sinful. Augustine’s underlying belief in the intrinsic sinfulness of carnal desire and the sensual delight that accompanied sexual union became a standard premise of Western beliefs about sexuality during the Middle Ages and beyond.
Augustine wrote eloquently on the theology of sex, but he was by no means the only patristic writer to deal with the subject. His contemporaries by and large shared Augustine’s negative attitudes toward the role of sex in Christian life. A few were even more certain than he that sex was a root cause of sin and corruption. St. Jerome (ca. 347-419/20), for example, maintained that sex and salvation were contradictions. Even in marriage, coitus was evil and unclean, Jerome thought, and married Christians should avoid sexual contact whenever possible. St. Gregory of Nyssa was still more emphatic: he taught that only those who renounced sex completely and led lives of unblemished virginity could attain spiritual perfection.
Such views as these owed as much to philosophy, particularly to Stoicism, as to religious teaching, and St. Jerome explicitly acknowledged in his treatise against Jovinian that he was drawing upon Stoic sources. But although fourth-hand fifth-century patristic writers borrowed heavily from pagan sexual ethics, they nevertheless sought to legitimize their borrowings by finding support for their conclusions in the Scriptures. This sometimes required ingenious feats of imaginative interpretation, but a Scriptural foundation for their ideas about sexuality seemed essential.
God created sex and God called it good. These perverts lied and called it wicked and sinful. God created a double-standard, one for men and one for women. The gnostic perverts simplified things and required men and women to adhere to the same standard of sexual morality: sex is evil, wicked and sinful, don’t do it. This created a conflict, of course, because God gave the command to be fruitful and multiply. The result of all this was that sex within marriage was a venal sin, so obviously sex under any other condition was a mortal sin.
The problem was that wasn’t what the Bible said at all, and as professor Brundage observed, it required “ingenious feats of imaginative interpretation” to claim that’s what the Bible said. One might think this would be easy to spot, but interpretation is the key word. The pervert Jerome was chosen to make the official translation of the Bible and his choices in how specific portions of Scripture were translated continues to have a major impact, even today.
This completely anti-God view of sex caused a problem, because God commanded that mankind be fruitful and multiply. Obviously God would not command people to commit sin, so this was neatly handled with the idea that sex purely for the purpose of procreation was good, but sex for any other reason (even within marriage) was a venial sin. And, of course, if it was a venial sin within marriage then obviously it was a mortal sin if it occurred outside marriage.
In the church’s war on the nobility, several things occurred. Priests were commanded to be celibate in order that they could devote all of their time and energy to spreading the lies the Church was promulgating. They claimed that marriage, rather than being initiated by sex (as the Bible says), was only formed with the approval and consent of the church by a ceremony in which the man and woman publicly consented and committed to the marriage in public before witnesses under the authority of the church. The sex was then considered the “consummation” of the wedding and could only take place after the church had given its blessing in a ceremony.
Premarital Sex and Fornication
This created the requirement of claiming that “sex before marriage” was a sin. It should be noted that the clergy could state that “premarital sex” was a sin without lying because by definition, it is a sin.
Did you hear that boys? By definition, premarital sex is a sin. Not only that, but in cases of premarital sex, the sex won’t make you married because you must have the ceremony before you’re married.
The problem is you boys don’t know the definition of premarital sex.
The Bible does not forbid voluntary agreements and if a man give his word he is required to keep it (
Numbers 30:2 and
Deuteronomy 23:21-23). While it is true that when a man takes an eligible woman’s virginity they are married, the emphasis in this case is on the word “eligible”. If a man and woman engage to be married and have a specific engagement period with a wedding ceremony scheduled at the end of that engagement period, they have agreed that they won’t have sex during that period and they won’t be married until the date and time set certain.
So, if they do have sex during their engagement period prior to the wedding they are literally having “premarital sex” and by virtue of their agreement the woman is not eligible to be married until the date and time set certain, so the sex will not marry them. They have sinned (the man has) by violating their agreement. Because they have given their word, only the ceremony followed by the sex (the “consummation”) will make them married.
This is because they voluntarily agreed to these conditions, not because the Bible requires it.
Without a voluntary agreement the process defaults to the basic rules of Scripture and the man who takes the eligible woman’s virginity is married to her.
You boys from Millar Bible College recently tossed around the Greek word “porneia” which is often translated into English as “fornication”. Jordan Winsby lied about it, claiming the definition of the term “porneia” included “sex before marriage” and as such the Bible forbids “fornication”. We hear this a lot from sophisticated morons who don’t know what these words mean.
In the last post I listed exactly what the Bible defines as sexual immorality.
The only thing that could be added to that list from the New Testament is the prohibition that forbids a Christian man to have sex with a prostitute.
1st Corinthians 6:15-16 does not create a new facet of sexual immorality, it’s a regulation that applies only to Christian men and the violation of that regulation is willful disobedience to Christ’s instruction. As such it is a sin. The question is, can a Christian man marry a prostitute?
Boys, I’ve stated before that you should be able to refute me if you’re correct because that would mean I’m wrong. So far the only “correction” I’ve received cited the Urban Dictionary as being authoritative. Jordan Winsby, I’m still waiting on your expert response demonstrating from Scripture that God prohibited “sex outside marriage.”
Benjamin, you should take the advice I gave Jordan. Life is hard when you’re a short ginger and you probably need a workout partner. This might give you some ideas:
Footnotes
(1). We see that God said it was not good for man to be alone, so he fashioned out of man the woman. Woman was created by God, from man, for man, to assist man with his mission. To be a helper suitable for him. To Man was given the command “Be fruitful and multiply…” and in order to multiply the man needs a mate. It is in taking this mate that man initiates marriage.
(2). Genesis 2:24 contains no mention of any requirement for consent by the woman. We know the consent of the woman is not required because a father can sell his daughter to be another man’s wife (concubine) as described in Exodus 21:7-10. The woman captured in battle becomes the man’s wife (Deuteronomy 23:10-14). The eligible virgin becomes the man’s wife due to being raped by him if they are discovered (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). The eligible virgin could consent to have sex (she was seduced) which resulted in her marriage, her father had the authority to forbid her agreement (consent) thereby annulling the marriage that resulted from the act of marriage that followed her agreement (Exodus 22:17). Because a virgin can be raped into marriage against her will and over her objections and she can agree to be married only to have her marriage annulled, we conclude that the virgin has no agency.
