Old Laws

I saw this picture on Pinterest a couple weeks ago, and it made me incredibly angry. Apparently someone decided to go through the Old Testament and find all the examples of strange allowances for marriage and then put them together and somehow use that to prove that gay marriage is okay. No, wait, I think maybe it was sarcastic: "Look, the Bible is crazy. It says a woman has to marry a rapist and that a man can also marry his wife's slave or just three random women, but a man can't marry a man? Crazy. Look how clever I am to find this."
Oh yes, you're brilliant. It's like you completely forgot about the New Testament. "The what?" The New Testament. The one that came after the Old Testament. Duh.

See, here's my theory. (Actually, I'm 90% sure that it's not just my theory, that it's actually written somewhere in the Bible, because I definitely didn't think this up on my own. I know I read it somewhere, just can't remember where). My theory is that God didn't necessarily want the people in the Old Testament to have multiple wives or have to marry a rapist, just like he didn't originally want them to get divorced. But, just like people nowadays, people in the Old Testament ran around trying to sin as much as possible (it has to do with the fact that they were still human and humans like sinning), so he had to make allowances. For instance, women who fornicated were supposed to die. But obviously he wasn't going to kill a woman for being raped. But he also couldn't have her running around single cause then all the other virgins would get jealous and nobody wants to have a stampede of jealous women on their hands (trust me). So he made it so that she would marry her rapist. And then this funny thing happened a couple thousand years later: He sent His Son to Earth and He spent a lot of time preaching and clearing things up, and one of things he cleared up was: one man, one woman. That's how marriage works.

So these people who run around citing the Old Testament where the Old Testament is no longer the final word on a subject make me angry. It's kind of like this: when I was little my brother and I used to play this game, where we cut up paper and put it in a trash can and pretended it was macaroni (yeah, we were real smart). And one time I leaned over the bucket right as Josh cut. So, snip, there goes a lock of hair, and little Karis is running around with a crazy spiky haircut for the next few weeks. So my mom made a new rule: every time I used the scissors I had to put my hair in a ponytail, so my brother's rogue scissors wouldn't give me another wacky cut. This lasted for a few years until I was old enough to use scissors responsibly, and the rule was gone.
And I think that sometimes the Old Testament was like that. The ancient Israelites were in a sense like children; they'd just been initiated into a whole new way of life and didn't know what to do with it. They were showered with a boatload of new rules and sometimes they couldn't keep them straight. So God was merciful and made some allowances (yes, you can divorce your wife. For now) because they were still struggling to adapt. A couple thousand years later, however, they were used to being God's people and being different from everyone else. So when Jesus came to Earth to save everyone's souls and die a gruesome death on the cross He made a few changes: one man, one woman. Not one man, three women; not one rapist, one woman; not one woman, one man, he dies, his brothers.

Sometimes the rules change. So if you're gonna try and make a clever statement and defend gay marriage by using crazy example from the Old Testament, don't. Those rules aren't in place anymore, and instead of looking all brilliant, you'll just look stupid and ignorant.