Yeah, this is his next one. This is what I wouldn't want to, I'm glad you're answering the questions. A question regarding marriage. If during the engagement period, someone made a covenant with his fiance before God, an oral pledge to never, ever separate, does this constitute a marriage before God? They never got married and the engagement was broken through fornication. Okay, it's, yeah, an interesting question.
Now, at this point, like I said, as I started off with my first question tonight, in my books, what I'm trying to teach is the historic faith, what the early Christians taught, and leave as much of myself out of it. I mean, my personal opinion doesn't carry very much weight. In a question like this, what you're gonna have is my personal opinion.
I mean, obviously, I've been studying the Bible my entire life, and I've been reading and studying the early Christians for the last 35 years, most of my adult life, studying them. But something like this is never discussed among the early Christians. So I can't give you an answer from there. Just from a biblical answer, I would say, no, that's not a marriage. I mean, and I would think of the example of Joseph and Mary. Now they got betrothed, and that was a very serious thing in the Judaic community.
Normally, the parents on both sides would enter into a written contract. There would be a marriage contract. And if the parents weren't living on both sides, normally the girls' parents, the man would often be older because he was having to accept the responsibility of supporting his wife and the children that would come. And often as a young man, he would not have the funds to be able to do that. So, often he was older.
His parents might have died by that, by the time he's marrying, which would have been, well, in the case of Jesus, his father would have died. The girl usually would have been younger. So usually her parents would have been around if she wasn't an orphan. And so like I said, usually there's a marriage contract, a very formal thing. And that's why Joseph, when he thought Mary had committed fornication, yeah, he couldn't just walk away or that. It says he was going to divorce her. That Greek word can mean put away.
He was going to have to take some steps to just end it. He couldn't just, you know, write her a letter. There probably had been a contract, a binding legal contract. But yeah, fornication would have been grounds to break it. So I do see in the Bible, yeah, there is a distinction between marriage and betrothal. The Bible doesn't set out all the specifics that have to happen for a marriage. I mean, as you go from Genesis to the New Testament, it seems to be a little different in different periods of time.
But there is that understanding we have become man and wife. And in an engagement, the understanding is we plan to become man and wife. It's like Joseph and Mary. Yeah, we're intending to. But then something happened, or he was going to break it because it looked like she had been unfaithful, had committed fornication. So in this, I would say, no, that was not a marriage. Now, there was a pledge there that perhaps I would say this person, I don't know if you were writing about yourself or about somebody else.
I think God is merciful enough that that pledge could be released from God. But I think illustrates why it's not a good idea to be making pledges and vows to God unless it's something totally within your own power. And yeah, you're going to you know follow through with it. So like a vow, I'm never going to get married. People made those vows. Reading Paul, it sounds like people made those vows in the period of the New Testament, but then keep it if you're going to make that vow.
But when you're talking about a vow of getting married, it's not just you involved, it's another person. And so to me, it's just not something appropriate. You can pledge you know with God, you know that before God, you know we pledge we will get married to show that you're taking it seriously and you know that God is witnessing what you are doing. But the whole reason why there is a betrothal period or an engagement period is because things do happen.
And often the course of wisdom is to not follow through and get married. And in this case, it sounds like that's what happened. So no, I don't think this person, whether it's you or someone else is now, it's married and cannot get married. But yeah, there is that pledge that I guess I would go before God and ask before Him to be released and perhaps the leaders of your church as well to be released from that. But like I said, I think the lesson is just be careful in making pledges and vows.
I mean, there is a time to make them. I mean, it's not wrong to make a vow, and we make a vow at the time of our baptism. But yeah, then keep that. It's not a light thing that God expects us to keep our vows.
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