Show of hands: Who wants more than 1 wife?

“Hey!” I said to my wife the other day with a smile on my face. “There’s this pastor in Ohio who’s had two wives for three years. He says it’s actually unbiblical for a guy to have only one wife.”

In case you missed the story, Israel Ford, who in 2009 co-founded LifeWorks Church in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife, Lydia, told his congregation last week that he has been living with two wives for the past few years and that God OK’s it.

“How about that?” I asked my bride.

My wife and I have been married for 27 years, plenty of time for me to learn not to knowingly place myself in harm's way. But it was early, and I wasn’t fully awake, so mistakes happen.

“Do you want another wife?” she asked with a deadpan expression.

Husbands universally know that, during their marriage, they will be asked questions by their wives that have only one right answer. Get it wrong, and you’ve made a career decision that will forever follow you through this life and perhaps even into the next, even though Jesus implied there will be no marriage in Heaven (Matt. 22:30).

“No! Heck no! God save me! I mean, no!” I replied.

“Well, why did you bring it up then?” she asked. Thankfully, at that moment, our Welsh Corgi indicated she needed to go out, so I was able to flee the conversation and re-enter our house through another door.

There are some things portrayed in the Bible that everyone knows whether they believe in God or not. Polygamy is one of those things.  

The practice is found in various places in the Old Testament. The first recorded act is by a guy named Lamech, who had two wives and boasted to them about a murder he committed (Gen. 4:19-24).

But much higher-profile examples include Abraham with Sarah and Hagar (Genesis 16), Jacob with Leah and Rachel (Genesis 29–30), David with multiple wives (2 Samuel 5:13), and then Solomon, who really went off the deep end with 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).

With all those heroes of the faith sporting multiple spouses, surely Israel Ford has some kind of biblical ground to stand on when it comes to his polygamy. Or does he?

[Only] the two become one flesh

When it comes to the science of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), there are general guidelines to adhere to, and some specific principles to keep in mind when it comes to the Old Testament.

One of those common rules applies in this case, and counters critics who decry various other things that are portrayed in Scripture, such as rape and additional violent acts. It’s this:

The Bible does not approve of everything it records.  

Just because certain behaviors or acts are chronicled within the Bible’s pages doesn’t mean God signs off on them. Even when they are carried out by those whom God uses mightily.

And I believe there’s good biblical evidence that shows polygamy is one of those things.

You see God's original design being established in Gen. 2:24 as one man and one woman becoming one flesh. There are also direct commands by God against multiplying wives; for example, Deut. 17:17 specifically warns Israel's kings against taking many wives because they could turn their hearts away from God.

Jesus reaffirms monogamy in the New Testament in Matthew 19:4–6 and Mark 10:6–9, highlighting God’s original model of marriage rather than polygamy. Moreover, church leadership requires marital faithfulness: 1 Tim. 3:2, 12 and Titus 1:6 establish the qualification of being the husband of one wife. Marriage is also shown to be reciprocal: 1 Cor. 7:2–4 describes a mutually exclusive marital relationship in which each man has his own wife and each woman her own husband.

So, with all that, and the fact that Scripture doesn’t OK everything that’s within its pages, how could Israel Ford claim that a man having multiple wives is biblical?

According to a few sources, Ford justifies his polygamy with a verse from the Old Testament that provides instructions for the handling of Hebrew indentured servants: “If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights” (Ex. 21:10).

Evidently, Ford’s thinking is that we have a verse where the Bible explicitly addresses a situation in which a man takes another wife, establishes obligations toward the first wife, including food, clothing, and marital rights, and thus voila, the practice of having multiple wives is approved in God's law.

Except it’s not.

Part of Old Testament hermeneutics is the careful bifurcation of God’s universal moral laws and then the ceremonial and societal laws given exclusively to the nation of Israel. One way of recognizing the distinctiveness of the moral laws found in the Pentateuch vs. the other two is that 1. you see them applied to nations outside of Israel and 2. carried forward into the New Testament.  

The same isn’t true of the ceremonial and societal commands that applied only to theocratically-ruled Israel — one of them being the directive Ford is using to defend his polygamy.

Further, some of those commands were accommodation-based directives given to put protective guardrails around behavior that was outside God’s prescriptive will. For example, the Bible clearly says in both the Old and New Testaments that divorce is not God’s will (Mal. 2:16, Matt. 19:4-6). But yet Deut. 24:1-4 talks about a man giving his wife a certificate of divorce.

We see how such was an accommodation-based command for Israel, though, when the verse is brought up to Jesus by the Pharisees, and He replies: “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery” (Matt. 19:8-9).

I’d say the Ex. 21:10 verse falls into the same category.  

Further, when it comes to moral behavior that we’re to follow based “from the beginning,” nothing could be clearer than marriage being one man/one woman.

I told all this to my wife in hopes of getting out of the doghouse, but I’m not entirely sure I’m in the clear yet. Which means I’ll be sleeping with one eye open for the rest of the week.