faith for faith

Fire is the most ravenous force in nature. Its very existence is contingent upon that which is feeds, and it feeds upon its prey until it is brought to nothing. And when its prey is exhausted, the fire, as powerful as it might have been at one point, is exhausted as well and disappears into nonexistence.

When it is controlled, fire is to men a useful tool to eliminate that which is waste so as to free up space for that which is not. When it is not controlled, it is a decimating force that feeds and feeds until all of its resources are spent and all that is left in its wake is in utter ruin. It is a force to be harnessed, and it is a force to be feared when it is untamed.

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From observation and experience, I believe it is safe to presume that ingrained in every human being is a desire to do something great with our lives–to make our short stint in this world count for something. Perhaps greater than the fear of death is this fear that we would have finished our lives unnoticed by the world and that our very existence would be forgotten by most soon after we die. For while we all know that we are mortal and that we shall all die (be it ten years or sixty years from now), many, if not all, of us feel that if we can be remembered for something after we die, we will achieve some sort of immortality in this world.

And while we who are Christians profess our immortality to be vested Elsewhere, we are certainly not exempt from this desire to be remembered in this age. And while our ambitions might be sanctified to some degree when compared to those of the world, the underlying desire is the same—to be remembered on this earth after we have passed from it.

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When the offices of the church are spoken of, there is hardly more debate surrounding their discussion than there is about the phrase of the apostle Paul in 1Timothy, namely, “He must be the husband of one wife” (cf. 1Tim. 3:2, 12). Many have interpreted the apostle’s meaning to be that an elder or deacon must be married in order to serve the church in those offices hence fulfilling their interpretation of the “husband of one wife” requirement.” Others yet have taken the phrase to mean that an elder or deacon cannot have been divorced and remarried, for that person would in some way be the husband of two wives (though he be technically married to one). Others have combined the two to disallow divorced men from serving as an elder or deacon altogether, for they say that a man must be married (hence fulfilling the first interpretation) and since a divorced single man is not married, he cannot fulfill that requirement, and, furthermore, a divorced remarried man cannot fulfill that requirement, because he is the husband of multiple wives (from the second interpretation).

These interpretations, coupled with a fundamentalist conception that divorce is at all times unacceptable irrespective of circumstance, have essentially disqualified all divorced men from having leadership and service roles in the church, even those whose divorces took place before they believed in Christ. And though divorce should certainly be taken into consideration when reviewing the qualifications of leader or servant of the church (as should a plethora of other factors), I think that a different interpretation in light of the apostle’s context will show that the apostle did not have the subject of divorce in mind when he penned his letter two millennia ago.

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