He’s definitely not part of the Pentecostal movement… but I turned on the radio yesterday and heard John MacArthur talking about marriage and the latter part of I Corinthians 7.Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve heard that chapter taught on in church except from my own mouth. It seems like the celibacy thing just doesn’t get much airtime in Pentecostal (or Evangelical, or Protestant) churches. Something he said bothered me. He spoke of fathers having __vowed__ to keep their daughters celibate, if the daughter was telling her dad she wanted to marry, then to let her marry. Other than the vow part, it seemed a feasible interpretation. But he said if the father vowed that his daughter not married, and then let her marry, he had not sinned.There are levels of commitment. If we say we will do something, then we are to do it. We are to let our yes be yes and our no be no. But this teaching is in the context of not swearing oaths and vows lest you sin. If a father literally __vows___ that his daughter will not marry, especially a vow to the Lord or something that counts as a vow to the Lord (Christ addressed various attempted work-arounds like swearing by the temple or the earth), then lets her marry, he has sinned by breaking his vow. And making such a vow would be incredibly foolish. I shared years ago that I turned down the one job I had left lined up (which led to a year of unemployment except for a bit of small business activity) at ORU because of a required long vow and promise to the Lord (and a foolish vow since it was easy to break with no expiration date and included a vow of obedience to the administrations future rules). Out of deference to Christ, I wasn’t going to vow to the Lord, but especially not something like that.
You wrote:If a father literally __vows___ that his daughter will not marry, especially a vow to the Lord or something that counts as a vow to the Lord (Christ addressed various attempted work-arounds like swearing by the temple or the earth), then lets her marry, he has sinned by breaking his vow.And making such a vow would be incredibly foolish.Man do I ever agree with you! ________________Some facts but mostly just my [email protected]/
There are some vows like pledge of allegiance or the oath you take when you join the military I feel are conditional. I will keep my allegiance to the USA as long as the USA does not try to limit my religious freedom – one could argue that it the USA did so, it would no longer be the USA. When I joined the military, that is enlisted (I did ask if I could affirm instead of swear), but after serving my time I was discharged from that oath. Currently I have come to see the marriage vows (with their origins in the Book of Common Prayer) and a farce, and often a lie. Really, do they really mean until death do us part?