Comments on: Godly, crunchy marriage. https://pukeko.net.nz/blog/2016/01/godly-crunchy-marriage/ Bleak Theology: Hopeful Science Sat, 22 Apr 2017 20:36:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.4 By: Sven Svensen https://pukeko.net.nz/blog/2016/01/godly-crunchy-marriage/comment-page-1/#comment-6616 Sun, 31 Jan 2016 15:31:44 +0000 https://pukeko.net.nz/blog/?p=8788#comment-6616 Yes, you don’t need to set boundaries with perfectly healthy people. In practice, the other 99.9+% of women need them very badly. A few will respect the boundaries set in the Bible. The rest need them set in the home by their husband.

I don’t see any evidence that God wants 99.9% marriages to fail due to husbands abdicating their responsibility in obedience to your interpretation of Scripture. According to Him, He wants us to lead, and the people He wants us to lead are our real wives who actually exist.

If God tells you to make a grilled cheese sandwich, He’s not telling you to make up an excuse to char the thing and blame it on the bread. He’s telling you to take real bread, real cheese, and real butter, and make a good sandwich. And that means paying attention to the actual properties of the ingredients you’ve got (PS He created them the way they are), not the ideal ingredients you wish you had.

YOU are at the end of the day responsible for making the best possible marriage with the actual woman you married. YOU, the leader. If she’s far from ideal, that’s no excuse to go limp and blame it on her. You are commanded to be an active, engaged participant, in a *leadership role*. Leadership doesn’t mean sitting around mute and passive, waiting for people to do what some third party said they ought to. It means picking a course and getting everybody moving as a team in that direction.

It’s a poor workman who blames his tools. Jesus isn’t your magic boyfriend who makes your dreams come true.

Of course, our culture systematically demonizes all the interpersonal tools men must use (and have always used) to do this job with the actual women God created for us, and tells him to use a completely different set that don’t work at all. And some folks think it’s forbidden to pick up the tools that *do* work, because some of the people who understand them are misusing them.

What would Jesus say to somebody who came to Him with pedantic quibbles about etymology as excuses not to do as he was commanded? He would see through it in an instant and cut through the nonsense.

How often does Jesus cut through the nonsense? I don’t see how anybody can read the Gospels and conclude that Jesus commanded us to worry more about etymology than about the substance of things themselves. If nuances of etymology are so critical, how can His words be understood properly other than by a contemporary native speaker of Aramaic?

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