Everything in this series is abstract unless it lands in real stories. Mine is one of them.
In The People of the Sign I describe how my parents’ divorce became a vortex that pulled all of us in: kidnapping, transport of children across international borders, my “undocumented” little sister traveling on an expired passport, and an international custody battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Sweden.
For two years we were separated from both parents, living with different aunts and uncles in Sweden; then another half‑year passed before we were reunited even with our mother. The Swedish Supreme Court’s ruling—intended as “justice”—produced horrific unintended consequences. That is what “putting asunder” looks like in real time. The tearing of one flesh does not remain neatly between two adults; it rips through children, extended family, legal systems, even nations.
The legal and societal ping‑pong did not end there. After the collapse of my mother’s second marriage—and shortly thereafter her ability in any way to care for us—everything unraveled again. At age 13, my older sister ran away to live with friends of the family in Canada. My younger sister and I went into a temporary foster situation. Eventually, American courts intervened and returned the two of us to our father—eighteen months after the Swedish Supreme Court ruling.
From Eden’s ideal of “one flesh” to this cross‑border chaos is a very long fall, measured not in doctrine but in human tears.
By the time of the Swedish hearing, my father was newly baptized into the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). The WCG took its theology seriously—very seriously. It taught that marriage was for life in a way that all but erased Moses’ concession: divorce might be tolerated as a civil fact, but remarriage was forbidden so long as the original spouse lived. In some cases, the Church even forced legally married couples to separate if one had a prior surviving mate.
That theology stood behind my father’s extraordinary statement to the Supreme Court: he had no plans to remarry to provide us a two‑parent home, because the woman who appeared there with a new husband—a man she (an alcoholic) had met in a bar—was still considered his wife in the sight of God.
The “Edenic ideal” of indissoluble marriage, combined with a rigid reading of Jesus’ words, had become so absolute that even the possibility of a stable, loving step‑family for three traumatized children was sacrificed on its altar.
This is how theology, mishandled, can magnify hardness instead of healing it. We upheld an ideal of lifelong covenant, but without integrating the deeper inner and philosophical layers we’ve explored in this series—hardness of heart, conceptual golden calves, body and soul at war. The result was a theology that could condemn divorce and forbid remarriage, but could not:
- Heal the wounds that led to the divorce.
- Reckon wisely with the shattered realities left in its wake.
- Ask whether our concepts themselves had become idols.
This rigid stance did not remain unchallenged. About three years after we were returned to my father, the WCG—precisely because it took Scripture seriously and was willing to learn and change—discovered that God’s Word had in fact clarified what we had misunderstood.
In 1 Corinthians 7:15, Paul writes:
“But if the unbeliever leaves, let it be so.
The brother or the sister is not bound in such circumstances;
God has called us to live in peace.”
Paul was addressing exactly the kind of situation my father was in: an abandoned spouse, left by someone who had chosen another life. The Church came to see that, in such cases, the abandoned one is “not bound”—that remarriage could be permissible without betrayal of God’s intention.
In other words, the Word of God itself provided a hermeneutic correction—a more harmonious reading that held together:
- Jesus’ appeal to “the beginning” (indissoluble covenant as the ideal), and
- God’s merciful concession in a hard‑hearted world (freedom for the abandoned to live in peace).
Yet even this doctrinal course correction, rooted in Scripture, was not enough to save the WCG from its own “divorce.” Over other doctrinal disagreements—Sabbath, law, grace, Trinitarian issues—the church eventually split apart. A small but substantial global body, with congregations in over 120 countries, tore in two.
Here again, a failure of Hermeneutics of Harmony played a role. The same pattern we’ve traced with marriage repeated at the institutional level:
- Absolutizing certain concepts.
- Reacting against real errors, but sometimes over‑correcting.
- Treating our understanding as final, rather than continuing to bring the “lab data” of experience back under the full counsel of Revelation.
In The Hardness of the Heart, I had to face all of this:
- My parents’ divorce and its international fallout.
- My father’s rigid but sincere stance, shaped by WCG teaching.
- My own later divorce, despite years of preaching that “God hates divorce.”
- The WCG’s doctrinal “divorce” and the fracture of a community I had given my life to.
We had defended an ideal, but our hermeneutic was tested and found wanting. We were strong on “from the beginning it was not so,” but weak on “because of the hardness of your hearts.” We used Scripture to patrol the boundaries of behavior, but not deeply enough to expose and heal the hardness inside our own hearts, relationships, and institutions.
Yet God did not leave me—or us—there. As He did in Eden, He responded to our substandard choices by restructuring the relationship. Not by pretending nothing had happened, but by meeting me in the consequences:
- Exposing where my soul had listened to the serpent of attachment—career, reputation, being “right.”
- Revealing how my concepts of God, church, and family had become golden calves.
- Leading me through a painful unlearning, back toward the living God who speaks both “from the beginning” and into our broken now.
Out of that severe mercy came, in time, what I share in the opening of The Rod of Iron: a remarriage on a profoundly different foundation, and an “amazing new family life” that reflects God’s intention of oneness far more deeply than anything I had known before. Not perfection, but genuine restoration—a movement back toward “the beginning” from the rubble of very real failure.
So when I speak now about divorce, covenant, and restoration, I do so:
- As a child of divorce who lived its extremes.
- As a minister who preached a rigid anti‑remarriage message inside a flawed framework.
- As a man who went through divorce himself, and walked through the “divorce” of a church.
- As a husband and father now experiencing, by grace, a renewed pattern of covenantal oneness.
From Eden to Sweden to Corinth to the WCG schism, the pattern is consistent:
- God’s ideal has not changed. From the beginning, He intended oneness—between man and woman, within the person, between creation and Creator.
- Our hardness has not vanished. We still reach for concepts and attachments, still construct golden calves out of doctrine, identity, and fear.
- God’s mercy has not failed. He meets us in our substandard choices, restructures the relationship, and invites us—again—to walk toward His original intention from wherever we now stand.
“From the beginning it was not so” is therefore not a club to beat the broken; it is a compass for the lost. Whether you are single, married, divorced, or remarried, deeply religious or wary of religion, the question is:
From where you stand now, will you continue to normalize hardness—personally, familially, institutionally—or will you let God use even your failures as the starting point for a journey back toward covenantal oneness?
As you look at your own story, do you see more clearly the impact of rigid concepts, or of permissive culture—and what would it mean, practically, to let God begin “restructuring the relationship” with you in this area?
