By John Moyibi Amoda
IN this exposition it should be clear that no demand on Man made by God is to be idealised or moralised.  Every demand of God is for a purpose.

And it takes Man without sin to obey any demand of God.  This applies to the law given to Adam to keep before the Fall and to the laws given to Israel by the hand of Moses.  This point is to be kept in mind when we read the teachings of the Lord and Paul’s on marriage against the backdrop of Moses’s law on divorce.

The question to be answered in the exposition of all demands of God, is, what was the condition of Man did God have in mind when he commanded Man to do this or that?  He had in mind a pre-Fall Adam.  When Adam fell through sin, he became a Man in need of deliverance from the bondage to sin.

The post-Fall Law of God was to lead Man to the Cross of Calvary, for no Man under sin can keep any of the laws of God.  The teaching of the Lord Jesus replicated by Paul was to make Israel know that the law could not be kept.

Paul portrayed the dilemma of one who sincerely seeks to keep the law.  What Paul discovered is what any man who sincerely seeks to keep the law, then, now and in the future will discover – namely “that apart from” (Jesus of Nazareth) we can do nothing (John 15:5).  Paul’s experience is every sincere man’s experience.

“I find then a law, that when I would do good evil is present with me.  For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.  O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:21-24).

Whatever the area of human endeavour addressed by the law, be the man, Jew or Christian in his attempt to be right with God, he will find Paul’s experience to be his.  The Law is not an ideal of a moral duty; it is the revelator of sin dwelling in the flesh.  Legalistic Pentecostals stumble at this truth – namely that the law was not given to the justified before God but to the condemned in the sight of God.  In the Epistle to the Galatians we learn this truth.

Moses’ law permitted the dissolution of such coupling.  But the Lord taught what became of couples after sexual consummation of their cohabitation; they become one flesh and whether conscious of this fact or not, sexual intimacy makes of two one; one flesh, or one spirit.  The sexual intimacy of two sin-dwelt man and woman produces the union of one flesh; each has become members of the other; that is why this union is not dissoluble.

But this union is not “glorified” or “idolized”, it is just a fact.  This is why Paul taught celibacy as the antidote to adultery according to the teaching of the Lord.  Calvary, however, brings the reign of sin to an end, for all that are dead are freed from sin (Romans 6:7).

The union of sinners suffered the same fate at the Cross as the celibacy of the unmarried sinner “for we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead” (2Cor 5:14b).

The marriage that counts in Christ is not that of couples, but that of members of the same body.  The action of the Redeemed Christian Church of God when it removed the pastor because as one separated from his wife he was to remain unmarried or be reconciled to his wife was in defence of the union of two under bondage to sin – the legalistic union.

This is their fundamental error.  This is the conclusion argued for in the text to which this is an introduction.
Most Christian couples need the instruction in righteousness provided to the Corithian and Galatians churches – both churches were troubled by spiritual immaturity.

The Epistle to the Ephesians takes the instruction in righteousness to its logical conclusion, namely how the Holy Spirit builds up the Body of Christ constituted of saints to be grown into maturity.  It is within the Ephesian Church (See Chapters 4 and 5) that the members characterised with blemishes of sin are transformed into members without such blemishes.

This is why Chapter 5 teaches on how a Christ-informed marriage is developed after the manner of Christ’s redemptive love for His Body, the Church.  The relevance of this for the Church of God that are in Christ Jesus is that congregants are taken as they are – those who have been divorced and are now re-married as well as those who are newly married, were saved while they were yet sinners and ungodly and have been adopted as sons and daughters of God on the basis of the redemption (Galatians 4:1-7).

It is as sinners that they are saved by grace through faith.  It is as members of the Church, the Body of Christ that they are transformed from sinners into saints and all this entirely on the basis of grace through faith.  The Christian marriage is only possible through membership of the Body of Christ. The wife is the body of the husband, not an individual wedded to another individual, the husband;

“He that loveth his wife loveth himself.  For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church” (Ephesians 5:28-29).

It took the exposition of scriptures to arrive at this conclusion stated as the introduction.  May your reading of the exposition be facilitated by this introduction.  It was not easy going through the scriptures to garner its light.  So invest the effort.  God bless you as you read and reflect on these scriptures.

The Fall of Adam

Recently the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God was reported to have removed the pastor of one its high profile parishes from the office of pastor on account of his re-marriage after a long period of being separated from his wife.

Continues next week.