Tina Rae Collins

Ever long for the good old days? Maybe you never even lived in them but you just heard about them or read about them, and you long for an era when life seemed to be fair and just and a person could survive without undue hardship.

Well, I certainly long for the good old days. I long for the days of Moses when a woman did not have to worry about being left alone with no way to have a husband to care for her. Unfortunately, we no longer live under the Law of Moses but are now under something new called grace. And, I have to tell you, I am not sure I like grace very much.

Why would I prefer a system of law to a system of grace? I know it sounds bizarre, but let me explain. It seems to me that God cared more about women and children under the Law of Moses than He does today. Under the Law, God protected women and children when men had hard hearts and tried to treat them treacherously. Read on and you will see what I mean.

Under Moses, if a man enticed a woman and defiled her he had to marry her--or, if her father refused to let him have her, he had to pay her father the dowry of virgins (Ex. 22:16-17). Think about that. If a man seduced a woman he had to marry her. Wouldn't that be nice, ladies? Or, if the man was too sorry to make a good husband, then he had to pay monetarily for what he had done. I like that idea. It seems fair and just.

But don't get too excited. As I said, those days are gone forever. Under this new system of grace, a man can defile as many women as he likes and marry none of them and pay nothing for their dowry; and then, when he takes a notion, he can go marry whomever he chooses. And all those women he has defiled? Oh well, boys will be boys; suck it up, girls.

Under Moses, if a man divorced his wife, she was allowed to get another husband to take care of her (Dt. 24:1-3). Boy, that would set the tongues a-wagging today, wouldn't it? As we know, under grace, a man may have his fun, defiling as many women as he can convince to be with him, and then, when he is ready to settle down, go out and find a pure young virgin to bear his children. Then, if he gets tired of the one he finally chooses, he might divorce her and grace will not allow her to marry anyone else to take care of her.

And wait, that is not all. Under the Law of Moses, the man who divorced his wife was not allowed to take her back again after she had married the second husband. That was an abomination before the Lord (Dt. 24:4). We can understand that, can't we? I mean, talk about gross! To go back to a first husband after being with a second would turn most women's stomachs.

But under grace, what do you know? Lo and behold, God did a flipflop and now He is quite joyous when a divorced woman who is married to her second husband is forced to leave that husband and go back to the one who dumped her. It is not an abomination to Him any longer for a woman to have to crawl back to the man who stripped her of her dignity and left her to fend for herself.

Under Moses God thought about the needs of women and children and made laws to protect us. But apparently, under grace, God forgot about us. So, yes, I long for the good old days--the days when God made allowances for the hardheartedness of men and protected us women. I like the law of sin and death. Grace stinks!

Am I being facetious? Well, yeah, sure. But isn't everything I said above true if those who promote the traditional view on divorce and remarriage are right? ("Let all the people say amen!") If indeed under the system of grace a man can divorce his wife and leave her all alone in the world with no one to support her or comfort her or if he can divorce her and she has to go back and he can divorce her again and she has to go back again ad nauseam, then the law of sin and death is preferable to the law of grace. Who can deny it? Who would even have the gall to try?

Tina Rae Collins
September 19, 2006