Single or selfish?

There is a meme — it is too disorganized to call a movement — among contemporary men. It’s called going your own way. (MGTOW). Instead of getting involved in the dating scene, the marital stakes and the family court, one builds one’s life without relationships, and concentrates on what interests you.

Most men who can budget can live cheaply — they do not need a big house for the kids and the school zones, but can have a small flat or apartment. The big bucks can go into their hobbies, their trips, their experiences.

They can go and be shock troops for the gospel, or workers in emergencies, or be the core of our armed forces and emergency response, or they get the best gaming laptop money can buy.

For they can live quietly. Now, the gospel says that this, done properly, is a life of great honour. If you can control your desires, and you are prepared to care for the gospel — being single for Christ is most worthy.

Paul advocated a single life, for he saw marriage as involving a series of compromises, considering the feelings of the other, of the children. And he is right. If you are not thinking of your wife and your kids, you are not doing the job of being a husband. If you are not thinking of your husband and kids, you are not being a wife. Marriage is not a place for individuation, but mutual dependence.

1 Corinthians 7:32-40

32I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; 33but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, 34and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband. 35I say this for your own benefit, not to put any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and unhindered devotion to the Lord.

36If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his fiancee, if his passions are strong, and so it has to be, let him marry as he wishes; it is no sin. Let them marry. 37But if someone stands firm in his resolve, being under no necessity but having his own desire under control, and has determined in his own mind to keep her as his fiancee, he will do well. 38So then, he who marries his fiancee does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.

39A wife is bound as long as her husband lives. But if the husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, only in the Lord. 40But in my judgment she is more blessed if she remains as she is. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.

I need to also say that there is nothing wrong with marriage. And at this point I will deviate onto how the reformed allow divorced to remarry. It relates to death. If the guilty spouse (for the reformed only allow two means of divorce — adultery and abandonment — it is the duty of elders to preach reconciliation whenever possible) has left, he is to be accounted as dead.

And then remarriage is allowed. Now Paul would say that any such person should seriously consider being as a widow or widower for the remainder of their days. But marriage is licit if the spouse is dead.

And he was saying this to the Corinthians, who would have made Hollywood or Las Vegas look remarkably tame. It was a place of institutionalized religious prostitution, and a byword for corruption in a corrupt empire.

Paul’s solution for those who do have lust as a besetting sin was to let the marriage bed tame it. If you are going to be single, you need to be able to deal with this — or your life will be even more complicated with managing multiple partners, with multiple diseases, most of whom you now share.

If the entire subject of sex bores you then God needs his shock troops. There is a need for young men as witnesses in the hard to reach areas — and young women in service and care, under some level of protection: but both are at risk. Yesterday some cowardly scum executed students while they slept in the name of that false God Allah, at a university, in a place that should have been under protection.

But for those of us with families, our duties have to include providing hospitality and respite for those who are single, who go and place their lives and health on the line, in unpleasant, to save the souls of the anti-christian and the pagan. For that is a life of honour.

Pleasing yourself, being selfish, however, is never honourable, single, married or in any variation thereof.