Now of course, tragically, a marriage may be broken by unfaithfulness, adultery, fornication, terrible violence. But it may also be that a man or a woman is not be willing to live with his or her spouse in a proper and a reasonable manner. No Christian, unless there is some terrible extreme dare ever say, ‘I do not want to be married to him anymore, I do not want to be married to her anymore. I will dream of a divorce’, even if it is only because you are very angry. If the thought comes into the mind, ‘Wouldn’t I be better off if I were divorced?’, beware that you are trampling on a sacred boundary. Do not dare let yourself even think it for a moment, because you will be contending with God and he will punish you for that.
Some people say, and I think we have to think about this, that the nation state is such a boundary. You have to be very careful with nation states with rushing into foolish political unions which would destroy the nation state. That is quite controversial but it is important.
Certainly individual churches have boundaries. We say, God has constituted us as a church and given us elders and given us governance. When somebody comes along and says why do you not give all that up and be part of a denomination? That is a boundary we cannot cross.
The family is another. Sometimes people want to break up the boundaries of families. The communists used to do it in the old days and so you would get collectives, particularly in China for example where they knew better than the ancient divisions and society and God’s order and God’s word. We will have collectives, more efficient. But you are abolishing sacred boundaries, the family unit.
The so-called patriarchal system within the family is in great danger of transgressing God’s boundaries. You get various groups of Christians in America, on the continent, and grandpa is the chief and he rules, and every member of the family, his children, his children’s children, and if he is still alive, his children’s children ultimately are under his direction. It is an abuse of the family as God has said each husband and wife, the husband is the head of the home, and they are accountable before God, and their parents must not think they are little children and push that family around and impose their will. It is a sacred boundary; it is a family unit.