Biblical Eldership Church Leadership

Notes

and so must be taken seriously, it is in disharmony with the overall bibli cal teaching regarding marriage for several reasons:

(1) The Bible unequivocally teaches that death dissolves the mar riage bond and frees the living spouse to remarry without sinning (1 Cor. 7:39; Rom. 722,3). (2) From the biblical perspective, remarriage after the death of a spouse is not reproachful. Those who hold the married-only-once view cannot identify the shame or defect in remarriage that disqualifies a man from eldership or deaconship. This is especially true of deacons. Since deacons are not the spiritual overseers of the church, it is close to impos sible to understand the reproach a deacon would face if he remarried following the death of his spouse. In fact, those who try to show the re proach of a second marriage do little more than raise serious questions about the first marriage as well. This interpretation smacks of false asceticism, the very thing Paul condemns in 1 Timothy 423. Of the false teachers at Ephesus, Paul says they are “men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods.” Yet this interpretation portrays Paul as forbidding church leaders and needy widows to remarry. (3) This interpretation creates two standards for two grades of saints. For some bewildering reason, elders, deacons, and needy widows cannot remarry following the death of a spouse, but other saints can. Such divi sion in the family of God is incongruous with the rest of the New Testa ment. “To postulate grades of official sanctity,” E.K. Simpson writes, “among members of the same spiritual body may be orthodox clerical ism, but it is heterodox Christianity” (The Pastoral Epistles [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954], p. 50). (4) In the context of instruction on marriage, singleness, and remar riage, Paul says to the Corinthians, “And this I say for your own benefit; not to put a restraint upon you” (1 Cor. 7:35). This interpretation of the phrase “the husband of one wife,” however, restrains an innocent man, penalizing him for not having the gift of singleness. (5) First Timothy 529 lists the qualifications for widows whom the local church is obligated to support: “Let a widow be put on the list only if she is not less than sixty years old, having been the wife of one man.” If the phrase “the wife of one man” means having only one husband in a lifetime, then Paul’s later counsel to younger widows to remarry is very

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