Adult Sunday School - Marriage and the Eternal State

Please be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this morning that you've given us, for this day that you've given us to worship you. I pray that you would bless this whole day, but most especially this hour that we're about to have, that you would help us to think clearly about your word, about marriage, about the afterlife, and about anything else that you draw to attention.

Pray also that you would bless the children's Sunday schools during this time, that they would learn much that would stick with them for the rest of their lives. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so we've been going through the Historia Salutis, which means the history of salvation, and taking to heart what it says in Ephesians 5, that husband and wife, that relationship, should be modeled on the relationship between Christ and the church, and specifically that relationship as it exists in salvation.

And so looking at every aspect of salvation and seeing how does this apply to marriage, and so we're at a final session. We've done, I think it's about 12 sessions, going all the way from election, and then here past the final judgment, the consummation, and now the eternal state.

So this is the state that we will be in forever after that wedding feast. Okay, and in a lot of ways, that's not the end, but the beginning of everything that is to come after. All right, so first of all, let's talk about inheritance.

The Bible speaks of Christians being co-heirs with Christ. Through our union with Christ, we enjoy the same rewards that he enjoys. Romans 8, 16 says, the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ.

If indeed that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him. So those who suffer along with Christ are also joint heirs with Christ. What does he inherit? He inherits everything. He is the heir of all things, and so we likewise become heir of all things with him.

So that union between Christ and the church, this notion of an inheritance, has implications, once again, for marriage, for the relationship between husband and wife, and particularly, as you think of inheritances, to finances.

So first of all, financial accounting, how does this apply? One, the fact that we are counted as co-heirs with Christ does not negate the fact that he is the heir. So his status, the same thing with being a son of God.

We're sons of God, but he's the only begotten son, so he has the primary status, and it's in him that we secondarily share a status with him through our union with him, right? That is how we're counted as sons of God.

So that inheritance is ours, we are joint heirs with him, but this is true in a secondary sense, right? He is the primary heir. Likewise, a wife shares all her possessions with her husband, they're all hers, but they're hers in a secondary sense.

Yeah, the husband's possessions are his own, and he is the ultimate say in their direction, but they are fully the wife's. Just as head and body are one, husband and wife are one in their possessions of their own assets.

If 1 Corinthians 7 says that you have authority over your spouse's body, how much more true is that of all that pertains to the body, your possessions? So there are a lot of couples that will keep their finances separate, right?

And this is not just for different bank accounts, not just for accounting convenience or anything like that, but to make sure that resources are intentionally unshared. You know, this is your money, this is my money.

They don't think of their expenditures as being something that is for the good of each one. You know, we've talked about that in the past, that all of a husband's and wife's actions should really be with the other mind, even things that you're spending on yourself should be an understanding that, you know, if you are connected to the other, then, you know, your good is the other's good.

And so those things don't have to be divorced where this is for you and that's for me, and if we, you know, if you spend this on you, well, then I need to be able to spend this on me or anything like that.

So yeah, the kinds of things that couples often do to make sure their resources stay unshared would be contrary to what we have indicated by the relationship between Christ and the church. All right, now that being said, of course, in a fallen world, it can be the case that one's spouse is excessively wasteful, right?

And in such cases, it might be necessary to set up barriers to make that, to mitigate against that. And this is especially the case if it's the wife that's wasteful, given the husband, the possessions are primarily the husband's.

However, yeah, in ideal situations, that doesn't promote fairness so much as it promotes division, okay? So in general, you know, separate bank accounts, bad idea, that kind of thing. Any questions on that?

Okay.

All right, now when we talk about inheritances, a lot of times we're thinking of children in mind, right? Inheritances, extended children. While the church shares Christ's possessions with him, the children of Zion share those as well.

So we've talked about this analogy before. I know there's some people here, new here, might not have heard this, but in that analogy between Christ and church, it is the church that is married to Christ, not us individually as believers married to Christ.

What we are individually in that analogy is the children of Zion, right? That is frequently said, we're the children of the church. And so the children enjoy those possessions, right? The children are co-heirs in a sense because through Christ, through the church, we enjoy those possessions.

So wives and husbands' possessions should be passed off to their children. It says in Proverbs 13, 22, a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, but the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the righteous.

All right, so when should that wealth be handed off to children? So you notice a couple of things. First of all, in the case of the father, the father is passing these things off to his son. These things are enjoyed by the church apart from any kind of death of the father, right?

So there's a sense in which that kind of, there's a way in which inheritance should be passed on even while the father is alive, a human father is alive. But it's also the case that something special is happening through the death of Christ.

Hebrews 9, 16 says, for where a testament is, or will, for where will is, and in Greek, the words will and covenant are the same words. There's kind of a pun going on here in Greek. For where a testament is, there must of necessity be the death of him that made it.

For a testament is enforced when there has been a death, for it has no power while he who made it lives. So there's a special way that inheritance is being passed on through death. So yes, during your living life, you should pass off things to your children, but also at death, things should be passed on.

Also, I'll add this. There are some people who claim that Hebrews was originally written in Hebrew and not originally written in Greek. This verse is the best proof that it was originally written in Greek because this whole pun where he's talking about covenants and then treats them as a will where someone needs to die in order for it to take effect, that pun that he's making there, that rhetorical observation, only works in Greek.

It doesn't work in Hebrew. So yeah, there are certain Hebrew roots movements or basically modern Judaizers who will, as part of their arguments, they will say that Hebrews was originally written in Hebrew.

A lot of times what they're trying to do is make the passages that talk about the deity of the sun less clear. They say, oh, well, if this were written in Hebrew, it wouldn't say that so clearly. A lot of times they're doing things like that.

But anyway, this verse shows that it must have been originally written in Greek. All right, so yeah, a lot of couples live for themselves. They do not live with having in mind passing off an inheritance to their children.

They consider this to be primarily their children's own task that they need to learn to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps. There are some wealthy celebrities that have pledged away all their money so they don't have to give it to their children.

Yeah, it's kind of like Corbyn in the New Testament, right, where the son is pledging away all his money so he doesn't have to help his parents. It's kind of like that today. I think the Zuckerbergs have made statements to that end and there are other wealthy celebrities that I can't pull to mind who have said that they've pledged all their wealth away to charity so that their children have to build it up for themselves.

And this is considered virtuous, right? In this world where you've got this socialist ideology as the ideal, that would be unequitable. It would be unfair for parents to give their children some particular advantage.

You look at successful people who started off with a million or two and built that into something more, and that's considered cheating by a lot of people, right? Like, oh, he doesn't, yeah, but his wealth wasn't really built up by him.

He started off with a couple million or something like that because his father passed it on to him. That mindset that wants some kind of fairness, some kind of equity across people in that way is slavery to a socialist ideology.

And yeah, and it is good for parents to pass on things to their children to make sure their children have as good a start as they can, not just a start that brings them up to average. And if you wanna teach your children the value of hard work, you can do that without depriving them of anything, right?

You teach them while you're raising them. You don't spoil them. You don't give them more than what's good for them, and you teach them hard work. Then when they are adults and they're imbued with a lot of self-control, then you can trust them with larger things and pass off a large inheritance to them, and then they can use it well.

And that's something very good. And we see that in the death of Christ, which establishes an inheritance for us that he's willing to give us a very great inheritance. He's not limiting it for us so that it's not too much or something.

Yeah, so a lot of parents, like I said, live for themselves and live for their own comfort. They retire and spend excessively on themselves. I know a number of people who are parents who are doing this late in life, right?

They're spending a lot on themselves because that's what they save that money up. It's not really for their children. Maybe their children will get the house or something, right? But what they saved up for was to blow it all in their later years and enjoy it.

Yeah, or some people will even get a reverse mortgage, right? So that the equity in the house slowly dwindles so that finally on their last day, they have absolutely nothing. And yeah, a prodigal parent is as bad as a prodigal son, if not worse.

It is the duty of parents to save up for their children, as it says in 1 Corinthians 14. Yeah, and consider also the man who built barns for himself, right? He built larger barns and then he told his soul, now I'm going to enjoy it all.

And it says, you fool, this night, your soul is required of you. That man was a fool even if his soul hadn't been required of him that night, right? Even if he had been able to live much longer, he would have still been a fool.

And so someone who acts this way, who lives just to enjoy their own wealth and not to do something greater with it, to pass it on, et cetera, is acting as a fool. And they're the wicked person of Proverbs 13, 22, right?

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children and the wealth of the sinner is just laid up for the righteous. What does the sinner do? The sinner passes off as, everybody else gets to enjoy it after he's dead, right?

Not his children's children, not some line of godly people. All right, any questions on children and inheritance?

Yes.

Yeah, so that's a good question. Like, if you know that they're going to be wasteful with it or something. I mean, hopefully you've raised them well regardless of whether or not they're a believer so that, you know, the self-control issue is not the main issue.

I don't believe that parents owe it to their children to evenly split it up among all of them, right? You do see, you know, in scripture that it was divided unequally. And at a time where currency is not so clean, right?

It's not like today where it's really easy to liquidate almost everything and turn it into dollars that can be evenly split. Like, if you have a family business that's being passed on, you know, that's passed on to one in particular.

It can't be passed off to all of them. So I don't, you look at the pattern in scripture, I don't think that parents have an obligation to split things evenly. So if you've got, if you have one son who is less trustworthy with things, I think it would make sense possibly to reproportion it so that it's a better investment in your legacy.

But as far as just withholding it completely, it is the duty of parents to do this, yeah. Okay, any other questions? All right, let's move on and talk about concubinage.

Yes, for disinheritance.

I mean, so what about like someone disinheriting, right? Like, what if you reproportion it so someone gets none?

What are your thoughts?

Right, yeah, his father's wife is a Reuben, that's right. Yeah, and then so he receives a different kind of blessing. You know, it's, yeah.

He still receives them.

A category for removing that entirely. Right, right, yeah, so that's what I was about to say is that it's an equivalent question to is there a time where a father should ever disown his son? And I think it is possible for someone to be so dishonorable that you would, yeah, you would not want any part in what they're doing.

You know, if they're, yeah, if they've killed the rest of your family members, right, and you're the only two standing or something. Like, there's all kinds of really crazy situations that you can imagine.

If those crazy situations, that's the case that you would disown him. Then it would, yeah, exactly, right, yeah. Right, there's no death penalty being enforced, that kind of thing. And so you have this one who has, you know, earned in God's eyes a justice that would be death even in this life.

Yeah, I think that would make sense. All right, concubinage. Yes, was that a question? No, okay.

Okay.

I do.

Okay, so, okay, so today that word can refer to a situation where a woman lives with a man even though not having married. In the Bible, that's not really what it's talking about. Who knows what it's talking about in the Bible when it talks about a concubine?

Yes.

Okay, so Solomon has like 1 ,000 wives and he's got, you know, 600 concubines or whatever it is. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but he's got, it's not just first and second. There's something more going on there.

Anybody else?

Yes, right, right.

So it is a different status, but there's something very concrete about what makes that status different. Okay, it is the inheritance, right? They don't have the same rights of inheritance. And you'll see in scripture that concubines, they are wives, they are called wives.

So for example, let me read Genesis 25, one through, yeah, one through six. And Abraham took another wife and her name was Keturah. So he's calling, it's calling her a wife. And she bore him Zimran and Jokshin and Midian and Midian, Ishbak and Shua.

And Jokshin fathered Sheba and Dedan and the sons of Dedan were Asheram and Lechashim and Leomin and the sons of Midian, Ephah, Epher and Hanak and Abida and Eldah. All these were the children of Keturah.

And Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac, but to the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts and he sent them away from Isaac, his son, while he yet lived eastward to the east country.

So he gives gifts to the children of the concubines, but they aren't heirs of all things, right? You know, he's just being kind to them, but the wives, you know, if he were to die, they would receive all the things.

And the, yeah, and the children of the concubines don't receive anything inherently. First Chronicles 132 follows up on this and say, and the sons of Keturah, Abraham's concubine, she bore Zimran and Jokshin and Midian and Ishbak and Shua.

And the sons of Jokshin, Sheba and Dedan. And the sons of Midian, Ephah and Ephor and Hanak and Abida and Eldah. All these were the sons of Keturah. So Keturah is called a wife in Genesis. She's called a concubine in First Chronicles.

So concubines are a kind of wife. It's a wife without inheritance rights for herself or her children. Okay, so that is the difference. All right, so if the model of marriage is, if it should be modeled after the union between Christ and the church, what does that say for this sort of thing?

All this, if there is an obligation for a parent to save up for his children, that would proscribe, that would forbid concubinage. You can't really redefine marriage so that it has less obligations. Now, this is tolerated in the Old Testament, but that doesn't mean that it was a good thing.

This is what happens when you, yeah, when you accrue a number of wives, right, and then you don't want to pass off your things to many of them because you just don't have enough resources to pass around to every single one, right?

So you start deciding which ones are going to get inheritances and which ones aren't. So this is kind of a, this is a feature of polygamy that you have to start limiting how well you fulfill your duties to some of the wives.

Yeah, and marriage is defined by God. You can't redefine it and make it your own thing, and so trying to remove some of the peripheral duties of marriage is not appropriate and doesn't reflect the union between Christ and the church.

All right, any questions about concubines? Now you all know. If you were thinking, well, I was gonna go get a concubine, but now I'm not, I know these aren't, like, a lot of very common modern problems, not in our culture anyway, but hopefully that gives you some clarity on what's going on because a lot of people read this and never totally know what a concubine is.

All right, prenuptial agreements. Okay, implications for prenuptial agreements. You cannot change marital obligations just by mutual agreement. You know, once again, if there's implications for concubinage, if you can't just change your peripheral duties to your children, to your wife, that's true even without, you know, thinking of the second wife situations.

It's true with prenuptial agreements where you would decide, you know, in the case where we divorce or on inheritance, or et cetera, like where you limit your duties to this other person. Those things would be, likewise, an attempt to redefine the obligations of marriage.

Now, that being said, our modern legal system does not actually really enforce a lot of justice when it comes to marriage with innocent parties. And so I could see a situation where a prenuptial agreement establishes a more just form of marriage than what our government currently enforces, right?

So you could imagine that, like a prenuptial agreement not designed to pervert justice, but designed to uphold justice, right? That could be appropriate. However, it would have to be really low effort in order for it to not violate other principles of marriage.

Like, it'd have to be something already set up and real easy to do. Otherwise, you'd be essentially expending substantial energy in preparing for, you know, typically divorce. I guess a prenuptial agreement could affect other situations like death, but yeah.

Yeah, you wanna enter marriage with the trust and commitment that marriage requires of it, not something less. So I'm describing a hypothetical case where a prenuptial agreement could be a good thing where it reestablishes justice and it's not a lot of effort to bring it about.

Any questions there?

Yes.

Accountability? Okay, sure. So right now, it's the case that if a, there's no-fault divorce, right? Like, things aren't really decided based on fault. It's based on, you know, notions, like more ostensibly compassionate notions of who deserves what, et cetera, right?

Not based on biblical notions of right and wrong. And it would be good, should you find yourself in the situation where, if you are being divorced, that justice would be upheld and not whatever, you know, the government says is equitable, right?

But something else. And so if you wanted to have a prenuptial agreement between you that should one ever, you know, commit adultery, et cetera, this is how, you know, the property would be divided, et cetera, in the case of divorce.

That would, once again, you'd want to go into the relationship with a commitment without the anticipation of, you know, each other cheating on each other. But if it were something very common that, you know, like, you could imagine the world going so crazy that the church, that churches have just, like, a real easy way for people to do this as they're entering marriage to uphold justice.

And then, you know, you just sign it as you get married and it's really not, like, a lot of effort spent into, you know, hedging your bets or whatever. Yeah, okay.

All right, yes.

An example?

So I don't know a lot about how the law works. I just know that a lot of times, guys especially, will get the wrong end of the stick because a lot of, because there's a lot of compassion given to women regardless of whether or not, right, she was the one who cheated or something like that, right?

And so there's not, and so that, I may be speaking legally ignorant, but if you imagine a situation where it doesn't matter who committed adultery on who, the wife always gets, you know, 50 of the property, right?

Having a prenuptial agreement that says, in the case of a divorce where the wife has committed adultery, she does not get any of the property, right? That would be more just, right? Because it's her who has brought this on herself, not something where, oh, they just couldn't get along, you know, and that would, yeah, it would be more just to recognize guilt in the situation.

Maybe not zero, I'm not sure what exactly would be just. I'm just saying that the guilt has to be accounted for.

And typically it is not, okay? Individual's trust should be rethought, you know?

Right, right.

Because of the beast right now.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, so if it is true, like if they're describing that to you.

Right.

It's figuring it out.

Providing a way for you to enter into an agreement that reestablishes what the obligations are. Right, negotiating what their marriage is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, cool.

Oh, that'd be interesting. I'm not sure that would be necessarily a good situation either, but I suppose you could arrange that, right? Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah. Churches are good, but you don't wanna just like trust a church indefinitely that 20 years from now they'll still be, you know, as trustworthy or whatever.

Right, like it's a, that's a, yeah, it'd be good to. Just have as many terms as you can, you know, set up correctly either in the law or in something contractual that amends the law.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, that's unjust. That's very unjust. Right, right. Okay, let's move on to talking about the presence of God. So before we were, all that was related to inheritance, to the inheritance that we enjoy in the eternal state.

So now let's talk about the presence of God that we enjoy in the eternal state. Yeah, glorification ushers in a blessed state of continually dwelling together with the Lord. Revelation 21, three says, and I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

So this is the fullness of that name, Emmanuel, God with us, right? So of course that's going to have implications, right? The church is finally with the bridegroom. This has implications for husband and wife.

They should be with each other. So the first one is cohabitation. One obvious implication of this is that husband and wife should dwell together. In the words of William Gouge, who's one of the main guys who I'm reading on all these things on marriage, he says, body and soul must be severed one from another before husband and wife.

In other words, people should die before they're severed from, before wife and husband are severed from one another. I thought that was an interesting way of saying it. Body and soul must be severed one from another before husband and wife.

First Peter three, seven says, you husbands likewise dwell with your wives according to knowledge. So there's a, of course that's not the part that we're usually focused on, but husbands are supposed to dwell with their wives.

And this is why it is said that husband, that the husband, and by implication the wife, is to leave father and mother behind and cleave to his wife, right? Otherwise, why bother leaving father and mother behind?

Yeah, so husband and wife should not depart from each other without cause, and they should not depart without some kind of plan to reunite. And although this is, this should be obvious, like there's a lot of passages that would strongly imply this and make this clear, including the one I just read about husbands dwell with your wives according to knowledge.

It's manifestly biblical, but this is a distinctly Protestant doctrine. This is, during the Reformation, this was one of the contention points between Protestants and Rome. Let me quote from the Council of Trent.

This is 24 .2 .8 in the Council of Trent. If anyone saith that the church heirs and that she declares that for many causes a separation may take place between husband and wife in regard of bed or in regard of cohabitation for a determinate or for an indeterminate period, let him be anathema.

So Rome anathematizes this view that husband and wife should dwell together and always have a plan to reunite. They anathematize that. Isn't that crazy? You know, their view is that, you know, there's a lot of reasons why you could just indefinitely, and, you know, for things like becoming a monk or whatever, right, and just leave your wife and never show up again, or whatever it is.

Yeah, now there are several reasons to forego living together for a season. Some of them are kind of obvious, right? Someone's imprisoned, someone's banished. If there's a severe contagious sickness, right, like Ebola or something.

Seasonal work that requires travel, civil duty or military service. Let me read another quote from Gogue. When Reuben Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh passed over Jordan to help their brethren in battle against the Canaanites, they left their wives behind them and their families.

When Uriah went to war, he left his wife at home. When Moses was to bring Israel out of Egypt, his wife remained at her father's house.

All right.

So a few points should be made regarding these exceptions, like how do you determine whether or not dwelling apart is acceptable? First, involuntary reasons of absence are more justified than voluntary reasons, right?

You cannot opt out of being imprisoned or captivity. Matters like contagious sickness would require wisdom to determine whether or not it truly warrants an absence, but that would also be something that has less of a degree of voluntariness to it.

People might look at their professions as being something that's involuntary. Oh, I have to do this for work. But husbands should consider whether or not they should change professions if they really are required to be away for long periods of time.

Maybe it's not a job that is appropriate for marriage. Right, and a lot of people will do this for legal reasons regarding immigration or any sort of thing, and you have to ask yourself at what point it goes beyond a period of time that is to the, where you are trading one thing for another and you are trading the health of your marriage for something that is not worth the exchange.

All these issues have to be balanced out in wisdom. Okay, so second thing to consider involuntary circumstances. It must be with the consent of both parties. Okay, so involuntary circumstances, obviously, you're not gonna have the consent of both parties if one is imprisoned.

But if it is voluntary, there should be the consent of both parties. If man and wife may not even give themselves to fasting and prayer without consent, like it says in First Corinthians 7 .5, then, yeah, then they can't live apart for lesser things without consent.

Even, the Bible says that even to devote yourself to God and fasting and prayer, you have to do that with consent before you depart from your wife. Okay, third, they must not enjoy living apart. So this is another thing you can use to discern whether or not the absence is warranted.

Can't enjoy living apart. It should only be done with appropriate grief and longing to be reunited. That doesn't mean you can't have the joy of the spirit while you are away. But yeah, they shouldn't particularly enjoy their absence from one another.

All right, fourth, if one is able to visit the other, they should make frequent use of this opportunity. This applies especially to communication, right? In our era where it's so easy to even video chat with people.

This is something that wasn't even enjoyed by people, you know, 15 years ago, right? It was pretty uncommon to video chat 15 years ago. Now this is something we have all the time, and it's very easy to access.

This is something that should be made frequent use of. Your life situation should not be an excuse not to communicate with one another as you are able. Fifth, shorter periods of absence are more easily justified than longer periods of absence.

Yeah, shorter periods of absence are more easily justified than longer periods. So someone has to go on a week-long work trip, that's much easier to justify than a month-long work trip. Someone has to go on a month-long work trip, that's a lot easier to justify than a year-long work trip or deployment, et cetera, right?

Not saying that any of these are necessarily in themselves unjustifiable, but that it requires more to justify longer things. Once again, don't just say, oh, well, it's just my job. You have to, if you're committed to your spouse, it's something that requires serious evaluation whether or not you're fulfilling your obligations to one another.

All right, six, while these matters are important at every stage of marriage, they're most important during the early stages of marriage when that fledgling bond of unity must be nurtured carefully. So consider Israel had laws about this.

Deuteronomy 24, five, when a man takes a new wife, he will not go out in the army, neither will he be charged with any business. He will be free at home for one year and will cheer his wife whom he has taken.

Okay, so more important even in the early years of marriage. All right, yeah, our egalitarian times have ways of justifying husbands and wives not cohabitating. And it might seem like this is something that started recently, but it's really not.

You look through church history and even, gosh, even people, saints who are praised often really neglected this aspect of their life. One I am aware of, or that I had in mind to be able to write down, because I can't remember the names of some of the others I've read about, but Fanny Crosby, her and her husband began living apart after 22 years of marriage.

They were like, you know, we're good friends. We're still married, but this is, they just enjoyed their time apart more than they enjoyed their time together and stopped living together. That's, this is not a really upholding marriage.

Yeah, there's a number of people who had, who are praised by the church, but have really terrible marriage. John Wesley was another one. His marriage was very poor. Okay, now we talked about cohabitation, you know, dwelling in the same house.

Narrowing that down, dwelling in the same rooms, yeah, the point isn't about being in the same house. The point is about, you know, having a nearness with each other. Another quote from Gouge. Too near to the forenamed kind of unlawful separation do they come, who though they live both in one house, yet make that house by their estranging themselves one from another as two houses, the man abiding in one end thereof and the wife in another.

And this, this is pretty common in the homes of the wealthy that, where they're large enough, right, where the wife has her own space and she spends all her time in that, the husband has his own space, they spend all their time in that, he spends all his time in that, and they don't actually spend time together.

So they're living in a single house, but effectively it operates as two homes. This is not really them spending time together. So a husband and wife are to enjoy their time together, not tolerating prolonged separation, even within the home.

That could still be a separation in a way. And if someone finds their spouse's presence irritating, they need to work on their heart with that rather than just deal with it by going elsewhere and then calling it a win because you're living in the same house.

Yes.

Yeah, you can if it is, I mean, these are things that are not, like where the line is is kind of hard to determine, right? But if he has his own office space and that is where he is never talking to his wife ever, not just using it for a little bit of focus as needed, but yeah, really trying to avoid his wife.

And so that's something you have to evaluate.

All right.

Sharing a bed. Narrowing from various rooms to specifically, yeah, the bedroom and on the bed. Yeah, if husband and wife are supposed to be married, they should share a marriage bed. Hebrews 13, four says, "'Let marriage be had in honor among all "'and let the bed be undefiled "'for fornicators and adulterers God will judge.'".

So marriage and the marriage bed is supposed to be held in honor. That requires that one actually exist for it to be held in honor. And the concern here goes beyond mere sexual intercourse. Two couples that have committed to being one flesh are not one flesh if they remain apart and try to stay apart as much as possible.