“In Jesus Christ dwells all the fullness of the Divine bodily.” - Colossians 2:6, 9
Kempton New Church

Week 6
Day 2

    Listen:

Weddings

If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love.... These things I have spoken to you that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:9-11)

The Nature of the Marriage Covenant

Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matt. 19:6)

I say to you that whoever shall send away his wife, except for whoredom, and shall marry another, commits adultery; and he who marries her who is sent away commits adultery. (Matt. 19:9)

Adultery is grounds for divorce.... From the light of reason, it may be seen that marriages are sacred and adulterous affairs profane; consequently that marriages and adulterous relationships are diametrically opposed to each other; and that when opposite acts upon opposite, one destroys the other even to the last spark of its life. This is what happens with conjugial love when a married man deliberately and thus purposefully commits acts of adultery. (CL 255)

By divorce is meant the abolition of the conjugial covenant and thus plenary separation and entire liberty thereafter to take another wife. The one only cause of this total separation or divorce is whoredom, according to the Lord's precept in Matthew 19:9. Referable to the same cause are also manifest obscenities which banish modesty and fill and infest the house with shameful panderings, from which arises a scortatory shamelessness into which the whole mind is dissolved. To these causes is added malicious desertion which involves whoredom and causes the wife to commit adultery and thus to be put away (Matt. 5:32) .... That whoredom is the one only cause of divorce is because it is diametrically opposite to the life of conjugial love and destroys it even to the point of extermination. (CL 468)

Marriages in the world are to continue to the end of life.... Since the marriage covenant is accordingly a covenant for life, it follows that appearances of love and friendship between married partners are necessary. The principle that marriages once contracted are to continue on to the end of life in the world is based on Divine law, and being based on this, it is a matter also of rational law and therefore of civil law. (CL 276)

People who are in a state of truly conjugial love look to eternity in their marriage because eternity is inherent in this love.

Married partners who love each other tenderly think of eternity in regard to the marriage covenant and not at all of its being terminated by death. (CL 216:1, 4)

Those who have lived in love truly conjugial... are not separated by the death of the one, since the spirit of the deceased partner dwells continually with the spirit of the one not yet deceased, and this until the death of the latter, when they meet again and reunite and love each other more tenderly than before because in the spiritual world. (CL 321)

Questions
  1. Why is it important that wedding vows are viewed as lasting to the end of life on this earth?
  2. Why is adultery the sole ground for divorce?
  3. In the General Church, priests are not permitted to officiate at a wedding when one of the parties is divorced and the former spouse of that party has not committed adultery. Likewise, a wedding is not allowed when one of the parties has committed adultery. Do you think this practice is faithful to the Word and the Heavenly Doctrine?
  4. If a person is sure he or she is not married in spirit to his or her conjugial partner, why shouldn’t they get divorced?
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