Hard Objects, Hard Hearts & Hard Thinking

Let us begin with the principle. In a fallen world anything that is hard, or that has a hard edge, can be used as a weapon. We don’t know what Cain used to murder Abel, but it could have been something as simple as a rock.

Complications set in when we realize that many good things are hard — and hence can be weaponized. Anything hard can be diverted from its intended use, and turned into something destructive in the lives of others. This is true of wedding vows, and it is true of the poker by the fireplace. It is true of the rules of evidence, and it is true of many of the sayings of Jesus.

Speaking of the sayings of Jesus, He is the one who made it most plain that marriage vows are hard and fast. His clarity on the point is the reason that the sinful heart is able to weaponize that wonderful phrase “for better, for worse.”

I am not — obviously — blaming Jesus for anything. Jesus created hard wood too, which can be made into the shaft of a spear. Sin is always the contribution of sinners, but the instruments of our sin in this created world are always gifts that have been turned aside from their intended purpose. God gave us iron so that we could have plow shares, but we have figured out how to beat them into other uses.

I begin with this point because of one of the ways we set ourselves up for making hard situations harder than they needed to be. We do this is by allowing ourselves to be wafted along by trends, not knowing that when we are confronted with hard hearts using hard weapons, we need to do some hard thinking. And trendy-thot has never been the friend of hard thinking. There is a certain kind of Christian that wants to be known as a “Jesus follower,” but there is an unspoken proviso that there be no actual following of the hard sayings of Jesus. In this scenario, Jesus followers are to Christians what caregivers are to babysitters. There is a certain kind of Christian that is less a Jesus follower and more or less just a follower.

The trendiness in this instance follows the logic of attacking senseless murders by attacking guns. Instead of going after the culprit, the murderous heart of man, we go after the manufacturer of the weapon the murderer used. The unspoken culprit in a hard marriage is increasingly the teaching of Scripture about headship and submission in marriage, coupled with the teaching of Scripture on the permanence of marriage. I said “unspoken culprit,” but we are now entering the phase where it is the named and identified culprit — along with any Christians who dare to defend what Scripture plainly teaches.

Jesus is the one who taught some very tough things about marriage. He is the reason why the Christian church has always taken a very dim view of divorce and remarriage. As C.S. Lewis points out somewhere, Christians view divorce — even those of us who hold it to be sometimes lawful and/or required — to be more like an amputation than anything else. It is not like the dissolving of a business partnership, or a change of neighbors. Jesus is the one who taught us to be –at a minimum — very cautious about allowing for divorce.

To review, Jesus said that if you divorce and remarry, apart from a very express set of conditions, you are guilty of adultery in the sight of God. Christians, at least those who are actual Jesus followers, don’t ever want to be found guilty of adultery in the eyes of God. This means that when a marriage starts to go bad, Christians are very cautious about considering divorce as an option. This is, in my mind, good and right and healthy. Difficulty in obtaining a divorce is a tall fence around a very high cliff. No fault divorce was one of the worst calamities to befall our nation within my lifetime.

That said, strict divorce laws or customs do give wicked men a great deal of leverage. The strength of the marriage bond is what makes it such a help to ordinary sinners, forgiven by grace, trying to make it through the tough patches. Here is a fixed reality. Here is something that is not going to move — and so we must adjust. It will not change, and so we had better change. But that same hard strength, designed to hold sinners together, can be turned around and used on a victimized spouse.

Living with a malicious spouse is hard. Having the kids grow up without that same spouse is also hard. Making that kind of decision is hard. And hard hearts know just what to do with hard things.

Marriage is supposed to be hard for our sake. Some behave in such a way as to make it hard on us. Instead of being hard for his wife, a man is hard on his wife. More specifically, one spouse behaves in such a way as to make life unendurable for the other. And when it gets near the breaking point, he helpfully appeals to the hard words of Jesus. “We don’t believe in divorce.” And in some cases, in churches where the hard saying of Jesus on marriage is held as the adamantine saying of Jesus, the church picks up abusing the victimized spouse wherever the abusive spouse left off — clobbering her with the words of Jesus. But they were already hard enough. Why make them impossible?

An abusive, selfish husband is in a position to make life miserable for a lot of people. He can do this successfully for some length of time, if he has a will, using every hard thing he can find.

In counseling, here are some things — given to us by God for our good — that I have seen weaponized. The permanence of marriage. The need that kids have for two parents, a mom and a dad. The duty of forgiveness. The rules of evidence. Headship and submission. The duty of financial provision. Pastoral confidentiality. The moral agency of both partners. Godly counsel given to one spouse used by the other as an accusation. The reality of having been sinned against.

And of course, this is just talking about hard counseling cases limited to the principals, when everybody is still in the same room. Once a decade has passed, and the Internet social justice trolls — I speak of that special breed, the ones with telepathic powers — get hold of the hard facts, they can all lay about them, hip and thigh.