Sister Wives

[Alabaster]

What we call incest today was not in Adam's day.

 

[Lewis]

No Jason I am not comparing then to now. I am talking about in Adams day.

 

[jasoncran]

No Jason I am not comparing then to now. I am talking about in Adams day.

lewis i love yah and i dont mind contraversies, but honestly polygamy and incest are now wrong and that is where i come from. we wont know how he God did it when it comes to creation.

i remain a creationist but those that believe in theistic evolution cant be held as less of christian then those that are like us creationists.

what is the difference of what we are talking about then what the other evolutionists do with the creation account

 

[kimberlie]

Jason the Torah includes Genesis too. But Adam and Eve had other children than just Cain Able and Seth. They had girls too and incest did take place.

Hi, Lewis! :waving

About the incest thing ... here's my take as a science teacher and a Christian.

Marrying a close relative and having sex with them as your spouse was not a sin until the Law. So you can't really call it incest as we understand incest today. From the Levitical Law forward, it is a sin and is a crime in most countries today whether they base it on the Bible or not.

Well, why were these relationships OK with God back then and not OK now?

Eve is called "the mother of all the living". There was no other race of people who had another mother.

Cain's wife was either a sister or a niece. I don't have a problem with that. Even Abraham, many years later married his half-sister.

Because the children of Adam and Eve had DNA that was virtually untainted (99.99999% perfect and without mutations), there was almost literally no opportunity for recessive mutations, which blood relatives share today, to pass on to the next generation because they HAD no recessive mutations.

Not all recessive genes or mutations are harmful. Some are very benign and even desirable. Blond hair is a mutation.

But if someone today carried a recessive genetic trait for Huntington's Disease and married a sibling who also carried the gene, then their offspring would stand a MUCH greater chance of actually exhibiting Huntington's Disease than if they married someone who is not a blood sibling.

Restrictions on marrying close (immediate family) blood relatives (Leviticus 18-20) came much later in the Law (about 2500 years later) as humanity's DNA deteriorated (because of Adam's sin.)

You can see this in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in terms of entropy.

As a believer in the Word of God, I take God AT His word when He says that He created the heavens and the earth. And from the beginning, the sun that He created has been losing mass and energy and will one day (not in our lifetimes) burnout. Adam and Eve, even before the Fall, ate fruit that was NOT forbidden. Their digestive systems broke down the food into fuels for their bodies and waste products were eliminated. Entropy - a state of things becoming less and less efficient has been around before the Fall of man. Grass died. Leaves fell. Banana peels rotted.

After the Fall, mankind began to die, just as God said. Romans 5:12 says that Adam’s sin brought death to all of humanity. Since the birth of Adam and Eve’s children – human DNA has made copies of itself over and over and over again literally billions of times. We don’t have the original DNA anymore. Only Adam and Eve did. It’s like making a copy on a copy machine and using THAT copy to make the next one and so on millions of times. Eventually the copies become much less in quality than the original. That’s why God had to provide Laws in the Old Testament to stop people from marrying immediate family members. If a brother and sister both possessed a genetic mutation for an illness or for something harmful, then if they married, their children were more likely to have this mutation.

Entropy - science tell us is increasing.

The Bible says that, too, in a manner of speaking.

Romans 8:18-22 “I am sure that what we are suffering now cannot compare with the glory that will be shown to us. In fact, all creation is eagerly waiting for God to show who his children are. Meanwhile, creation is confused, but not because it wants to be confused. God made it this way in the hope that creation would be set free from decay and would share in the glorious freedom of his children. We know that all creation is still groaning and is in pain, like a woman about to give birth.”

From the brilliant super-giant star, who beauty is too great to be ignored – yet is dying moment by moment and losing mass and energy to the smallest of insects that lives out the entirety of it’s life in only 24 hours and spends that 24 hours breaking down genetically - all of creation is in a state of entropy. ALL matter. That's why evolution is only a theory. In actuality, everything according to scienctific law is devolving. It's observable and provable.

Because incest wasn't a sin until God said it was - we cannot call what Cain, Abraham, and other did as incest.

 

[Alabaster]

Great post, kimberlie!

 

[Lewis]

Hi, Lewis! :waving

About the incest thing ... here's my take as a science teacher and a Christian.

Marrying a close relative and having sex with them as your spouse was not a sin until the Law. So you can't really call it incest as we understand incest today. From the Levitical Law forward, it is a sin and is a crime in most countries today whether they base it on the Bible or not.

Well, why were these relationships OK with God back then and not OK now?

Eve is called "the mother of all the living". There was no other race of people who had another mother.

Cain's wife was either a sister or a niece. I don't have a problem with that. Even Abraham, many years later married his half-sister.

Because the children of Adam and Eve had DNA that was virtually untainted (99.99999% perfect and without mutations), there was almost literally no opportunity for recessive mutations, which blood relatives share today, to pass on to the next generation because they HAD no recessive mutations.

Not all recessive genes or mutations are harmful. Some are very benign and even desirable. Blond hair is a mutation.

But if someone today carried a recessive genetic trait for Huntington's Disease and married a sibling who also carried the gene, then their offspring would stand a MUCH greater chance of actually exhibiting Huntington's Disease than if they married someone who is not a blood sibling.

Restrictions on marrying close (immediate family) blood relatives (Leviticus 18-20) came much later in the Law (about 2500 years later) as humanity's DNA deteriorated (because of Adam's sin.)

You can see this in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in terms of entropy.

As a believer in the Word of God, I take God AT His word when He says that He created the heavens and the earth. And from the beginning, the sun that He created has been losing mass and energy and will one day (not in our lifetimes) burnout. Adam and Eve, even before the Fall, ate fruit that was NOT forbidden. Their digestive systems broke down the food into fuels for their bodies and waste products were eliminated. Entropy - a state of things becoming less and less efficient has been around before the Fall of man. Grass died. Leaves fell. Banana peels rotted.

After the Fall, mankind began to die, just as God said. Romans 5:12 says that Adam’s sin brought death to all of humanity. Since the birth of Adam and Eve’s children – human DNA has made copies of itself over and over and over again literally billions of times. We don’t have the original DNA anymore. Only Adam and Eve did. It’s like making a copy on a copy machine and using THAT copy to make the next one and so on millions of times. Eventually the copies become much less in quality than the original. That’s why God had to provide Laws in the Old Testament to stop people from marrying immediate family members. If a brother and sister both possessed a genetic mutation for an illness or for something harmful, then if they married, their children were more likely to have this mutation.

Entropy - science tell us is increasing.

The Bible says that, too, in a manner of speaking.

Romans 8:18-22 “I am sure that what we are suffering now cannot compare with the glory that will be shown to us. In fact, all creation is eagerly waiting for God to show who his children are. Meanwhile, creation is confused, but not because it wants to be confused. God made it this way in the hope that creation would be set free from decay and would share in the glorious freedom of his children. We know that all creation is still groaning and is in pain, like a woman about to give birth.â€

From the brilliant super-giant star, who beauty is too great to be ignored – yet is dying moment by moment and losing mass and energy to the smallest of insects that lives out the entirety of it’s life in only 24 hours and spends that 24 hours breaking down genetically - all of creation is in a state of entropy. ALL matter. That's why evolution is only a theory. In actuality, everything according to scienctific law is devolving. It's observable and provable.

Because incest wasn't a sin until God said it was - we cannot call what Cain, Abraham, and other did as incest.

Good stuff you said some stuff that I have not heard in years, like the blood of Adam. Because after the fall the breakdown set in, and the gradual decay just kept coming. Yes and you are right incest was not incest then.

 

[roger_dodger]

Quite frankly, I can't find any place in the Bible (mebbe im wrong) where polygamy is condemned in a blanket fashion (what I mean to say is that the NT says elders and deacons and such should be husband of only one wife, but not all Christians). So...why is this "wrong" or "twisted"?

Don't get me wrong. I consider any man who would want to be married to more than one woman a glutton for punishment. ;)

Now, on the other hand, we live in a country where the abomination of homosexual "marriage" is being forced upon us by the government. Why would such a government be opposed to polygamy - unless it ruffled feminist feathers?

 

[kimberlie]

Good stuff you said some stuff that I have not heard in years, like the blood of Adam. Because after the fall the breakdown set in, and the gradual decay just kept coming. Yes and you are right incest was not incest then.

Lewis, if you'll be patient with me, let me tell you what I believe about the polygamy thing.​

I've watched a couple of episodes about the Sister Wives. I've come to the conclusion that Kody Brown has a high sex drive. It's possible that this is the reason that he practices what he calls "his own brand of Mormonism". I think in his own twisted way, he "cares" about them. But these women have confessed a jealously amongst themselves even before the lastest addition and already this new "wife" has expressed sorrow that the other "wives" don't give her credit for her worth to the family. I think you have narcissistic man living with four enabling co-dependents. ​

And God did condemn multiple wives (including concubines) for the Kings of Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:17) They disobeyed God (2 Samuel 5:13, 1 Kings 11:1-7) and it cost the entire nation it's place in the world. The nation of Israel, for multiple generations, paid a price that King Solomon never could have dreamed of.​

King Solomon because a spiritual adulterer and worshiped other gods and even built altars to them. After his death the nation was never the same and was torn asunder.​

​

​

1 Kings 11:4-7 - "As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father had been. He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech [a] the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the LORD; he did not follow the LORD completely, as David his father had done. On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molech the detestable god of the Ammonites."


And there is NO place in the bible that I can find where a man had concubines or multiple wives where life was not miserable for the women and for the husband.

~Abraham and Sarah = Inviting Hagar into the marriage and producing a son that was NOT the son of the promise, condemning an entire group of people to hell, who did not believe in the God of their own father. Hagar was not his only concubine and he had other children whom he sent "away" from his son, Isaac.

~Jacob and Rachel = She should have been his only wife and her child his first born; he, in showing extreme partiality to Joseph, Rachel's son, devastated his other children's lives and caused them much misery. He wouldn't even NAME his own children that were born to his other wife.

~Jacob and Leah = The bible says twice that he hated her; can you imagine being unattractive, hated, and your husband having sex with you only to have more children; I can't imagine what is was like for her to have a man touch her who hated her so.

~Jacob and the concubines = These women were brought in only to appease Leah and Rachel in their contest to bear the most children and Rueben, Jacob's own son, slept with one of these women just to spite his father and his inheritance was ruined even though he wanted to spare Joseph from being killed by the other brothers.


~Hannah and her husband = Hannah couldn't have children, so her husband spent a fortune on her in sacrifices. More than he spent on the sacrifices of his other wife and her children. The other wife was hurt and took it out on Hannah. The bible says that the two women were adversaries. Hannah was in such grief that she was emotional unstable. Even her husband could not comfort her. And he loved her very, very much. He only had the other woman for children's sake.

~David and Michal = The Bible says that Michal loved David, but doesn't say that he loved her. She risks her own life to save his by pretending that he is in bed while she sneaks him out of the window. The next time she sees him, he has other wives. She is naturally hurt and becomes bitter about it. She should have found contentment in some other part of her life, but she could not. She ended up despising David and was punished for her own pain and the wrong way that she dealt with it. She should have behaved like Leah and found solace in God.




~Absolam and his father's concubines = 2 Samuel 16:21-22 says that King David's son, Absolam, wanted to make his father look weak and so he was advised to take his father's concubines into a public place and have sex with them so that he could show everyone how much he abhorred his own father.

~King Solomon and his 700 wives and 300 concubines = Deuteronomy 17:17 said for future kings NOT to multiply their horses nor their wives. Multiplying their horses meant depending on their own military might and multiplying their wives and concubines to themselves, as the Bible says, meant a heart strayed from God. King Solomon didn't even know most of these women. He married them out of treaties made with other nations and villages to show solidarity together. They were foreign women and brought their gods and pagan worship practices with them into his house and into his kingdom. He didn't care and his own heart strayed from God because of the pagan practices that he sometimes participated in. And when he died, the nation of Israel split in two - Judah and Israel - and Israel suffered for hundreds of years under the rule of wicked, wicked kings who continued pagan practices and would not give them up. The two nations finally were captured and went into exile.)

I do not believe that God condoned concubines, multiple marriages, preferred them, required them for human population, nor ignored them. If multiple wives were for procreation the why didn’t Adam , Noah, Ham, Shem, or Japheth have multiple wives. They only had one each.

Some people say, "God didn't punish these people for concubines or multiple marriages so polygamy was OK and not that big of a deal in the Old Testament."

I think He did punish them in a way - or at least didn't intervene to help them. He allowed misery to run its course.

Just ask Leah, who lived as a hated woman and Hannah, who could not be consoled.
And just ask King Solomon, who in his writing of the book of Ecclesiastes, looked back over his own mistakes and was utterly miserable.

 

[Lewis]

God stuff again.

 

[Nicole L. Sattler]

I had to watch that show to see their perspective on plural marriage. Personally, it gives me a "yucky" feeling inside.

I have to wonder, though, what if he (or any polygamist) converted to Christianity? Would he have to send all of his wives away except for the first one?

Does God view now him as married to all of the women? Is he sinning by living a polygamous lifestyle?

I know God's plan for marriage, but is it a sin if someone does not follow that plan?

 

[handy]

I've not watched the show, but I've read several testimonies of women who were in plural marriages, and have talked with some kids who were raised in that lifestyle...

I'm sure the TV show is very non-judgmental and tries to make it look all good. But, more often than not the reality is pretty ugly.

Nicole, to answer your question...I think if he became a Christian, he would need to stop living with and sleeping with all the wives except for the one he is legally married to. Bigamy is against the law in this country and sleeping with someone one is not married to is against God's law.

 

[Nicole L. Sattler]

I've not watched the show, but I've read several testimonies of women who were in plural marriages, and have talked with some kids who were raised in that lifestyle...

I'm sure the TV show is very non-judgmental and tries to make it look all good. But, more often than not the reality is pretty ugly.

Nicole, to answer your question...I think if he became a Christian, he would need to stop living with and sleeping with all the wives except for the one he is legally married to. Bigamy is against the law in this country and sleeping with someone one is not married to is against God's law.

Hmm... even though I do not agree with their beliefs, I would feel bad for them just for the fact they believe what they are doing is right. Imagine if he did convert... "Yeah, sorry, umm, the 3 of you have to leave now."

Do you think God views the man as married to all of the wives now?

And 2 more... (sorry!)

Where did they get the idea that plural marriage is necessary to be together as a family in heaven? Why do they think God blesses plural marriage?

 

[Johnny916]

Many people would distaste for supporting polygamy. But I see this as better then people who marry, might have children together, and have an open sexual relationship with other people. Why is it so bad to see a man with more then one wife who has a stable family? At least the families are happy and have the same personal beliefs. I would hate to be unfaithful to my spouse, see my spouse as nothing more then a sex object, and even bringing children up in a ungodly life style. Polygamy is not for every person. You have to money and so much more. I believe polygamy should be practice by people who are adults and like minded. Even if you don't have children with each spouse. You would have to have room for everyone in the home.

 

[kimberlie]

Why is it so bad to see a man with more then one wife who has a stable family? At least the families are happy and have the same personal beliefs.

Stable families?

Go back and read post #28.

 

[Johnny916]

Stable families?

Go back and read post #28.

I understand. Of course I'm a believer in the bible. I wouldn't be surprised if many families did make polygamy work even if it was on a small scale I'm not doubting it would work. Heck! I have seen many young couples or new couples who have numerous problems and I don't see why polygamy has to be all that bad.

 

[Nicole L. Sattler]

I understand. Of course I'm a believer in the bible. I wouldn't be surprised if many families did make polygamy work even if it was on a small scale I'm not doubting it would work. Heck! I have seen many young couples or new couples who have numerous problems and I don't see why polygamy has to be all that bad.

Every documentary I have watched on Polygamy showed that there was always some problem within the relationship... usually jealousy. I remember watching one where the women had a punching bag in the basement and had to go down there when the husband was with another wife. I really find this sad, and I could never imagine being in the situation that they are in.

Also, in some of the bigger families there are abuse and incest problems. I am not sure how common this is, but I do know that it happens.

Of course to the public they usually act like everything is fine.

 

[Johnny916]

Every documentary I have watched on Polygamy showed that there was always some problem within the relationship... usually jealousy. I remember watching one where the women had a punching bag in the basement and had to go down there when the husband was with another wife. I really find this sad, and I could never imagine being in the situation that they are in.

Also, in some of the bigger families there are abuse and incest problems. I am not sure how common this is, but I do know that it happens.

Of course to the public they usually act like everything is fine.

That is terrible. Maybe it is how some are brought. People lived or knew people who were polygamist. Of course this doesn't only affect people in a polygamist relationship. Some men and women cheat on one another even if their is just two of them. It's how all the pieces come together.