- When people look at the Bible and they see
cases of polygamy, they're not distinguishing between
what God commands from the history
of how He treated His people and how His people treated Him.
And His people were not faithful.
God is the one who designs marriage.
God is the one who invents marriage.
Marriage is not something invented by humans.
God is the one who gives the first woman to the first man.
God is the one who presides over that marriage ceremony.
And then when Moses tells us this,
he makes a comment.
"Therefore, a man,
"a man shall leave his father and mother
"and cling to his wife", in the singular,
"and the two shall be one flesh".
So that's God's standard.
That's what the Bible is teaching.
We should distinguish that from the Bible as
a divine history of God's relationships with his people.
These relationships are called covenants.
A covenant is like a marriage,
where two parties make a commitment
to be devoted to each other,
to be loyal, to be faithful.
We see that God creates that kind of a relationship
with Adam and Eve, but they are disloyal.
They do not believe His Word.
They do not obey Him and they plunge humanity
into chaos and evil.
God makes a new start with Noah,
and then that also goes down the tubes.
God makes a new start with Abraham and his family.
Then God makes a covenant with Israel,
the family of Abraham.
And the whole history of the Old Testament
is a history of how human partners are unfaithful,
human partners are disloyal.
They do not believe what God says.
They do not obey his royal rule and kingship
and they rebel and they want to establish
what is right and wrong for themselves.
And so in that history,
we see a constant violation of the original standard.
And so that's what we're seeing.
We see that with Abraham.
God promises him a child.
He doesn't trust God.
He doesn't wait for God.
He tries to do it on his own strength
and he has a relationship with Sarah's female servant.
Jacob also has two wives.
Is that a wonderful relationship?
No, it's not a wonderful relationship.
The Bible is showing that this brings in
all kinds of trouble.
In the book of Judges,
it tells us that these judges had many wives.
Why?
Because they were aspiring to be king.
So most people in the ancient near east only had one wife.
Only kings could afford to have many wives.
So when you read the Bible,
the Bible is not promoting polygamy.
It's showing us that only royal figures had many wives,
and it's also showing us that this is not ideal;
that this caused all kinds of difficulty
and hardship and trouble
and the fighting among the wives,
and it's not a satisfactory relationship.
We see that in the case of David.
Nathan the prophet came to him and spoke to him
and gave a parable.
A parable about a guy who had many sheep
and a poor man who had only one sheep.
And when someone came and he had to show hospitality,
instead of slaughtering one of his many sheep,
he stole the one sheep that this poor man had.
And all that that is saying is,
you have many wives and still you're not satisfied.
So it shows that having many wives is not
a satisfactory relationship.
You have many wives and you're not satisfied,
and you have to go and steal the one woman
that this one person has.
We see that in the case of Solomon.
Solomon is a tragic figure because he did not practice
what he preached.
So you have the wisdom of Solomon in what he wrote,
but we don't see the wisdom of Solomon
in the way he lived.
He disregarded his own wise principles.
He multiplied wives, which is expressly forbidden
for kings in Deuteronomy 17.
The king is not to multiply wives,
not to multiply gold, not to multiply horses,
because who is a king going to marry?
He's going to marry a princess from another country
and it's going to create a political alliance
and they're going to trust in that alliance
and they're not going to trust in the Lord.
He's not to multiply horses because he's not
to rely on chariots and military hardware.
He's not to multiply gold because he's not to trust
in his ability to pay other kings to deliver him.
He's to put his trust in Yahweh.
So the history of the Bible shows,
even though these were men of faith,
they're not men of morality.
Not everything they did was moral.
If you look at the New Testament
and look at what Jesus says in the New Testament
and look at what the apostles say.
They never hold up anyone from the Old Testament
as a moral example.
They hold them up as examples of faith,
but not as examples of morality.
So there's a very clear difference between
what God commands and instructs us to do in marriage,
and how his people actually behaved
in the history that's recorded for us.
Just because these things happened in the Old Testament,
we have to listen to what the narrator is saying.
The narrator is not saying this is a good thing,
he's showing that it's a bad thing.
It creates all kinds of problems
and it doesn't create a satisfactory way to live,
because it's abandoning the creation standard.
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