Building on the Foundation

Marriage is many things, but unlike the way it is practiced today, it is not a legal contract between two parties that can be nullified on a whim simply by filing the right piece of paperwork. In fact, marriage as practiced in the Bible really has no paperwork at all.  If you’re a Christian, you’ve probably heard it said many times that marriage is a covenant and perhaps assumed that covenant is simply the Biblical word for an agreement or a contract of some type.  A covenant is a little more than that, however, when you consider that, for a covenant you are putting something forward to guarantee the fulfillment of the contract.  You have to put up collateral, and the collateral of a covenant is your own life.   In a covenant, one party offers the covenant, and they can either offer terms with the covenant, or, as God did with Abraham, the offering party can leave all of the requirements on their own end to perform.  The accepting party either agrees to the...

  It’s one of the more puzzling passages we find in Scripture. As war loomed between Israel and her oppressors, God’s Spirit came upon the Israelite commander, Jephthah (Judg. 11:29). In the very next verse, we read, “And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD, and said, ‘If You will indeed deliver the people of Ammon into my hands, then it will be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the people of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD’s, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering’” (Judg. 11:30-31). So Jephthah and Israel crushed the Ammonites “with a very great slaughter” (v. 33). But when Jephthah returned home in triumph, “there was his daughter, coming out to meet him with timbrels and dancing; and she was his only child. Besides her he had neither son nor daughter. And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he tore his clothes, and said, ‘Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low! You are among those who trouble me! For I have give...