- 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. - [Announcer] Thanks for
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