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How did you come to understand about Polygamy?

rockfox

rockfox

Seasoned Member
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I am interested in hearing from everyone about how they came to believe that Polygyny was not sinful but a valid form of Biblical marriage. For strategic reasons I am curious to see if there are any common threads.

I'll go first.

I was a young Christian in a church that took the scriptures fairly seriously. I was doing a deep study of the issue of divorce to try and come to grasp with what the scriptures taught as this was a point of controversy with many contradictory and confusing points of view. It was almost impossible to understand.

During this study I came to realize two things that cleared the confusion and made just about everything fall into place:
  1. The scriptures did not speak from the perspective of equality about marriage. Verses written to/about men were to men and verses to women were to women. You couldn't apply a command to one equally to the other.
  2. Polygamy wasn't sinful.
So for me, it was kind of a theological discovery I tripped over. I didn't really struggle with it as my approach is to look to the scriptures to establish my beliefs, not worldly culture or blind tradition.

So how did you find out about this idea? What first put this issue on your radar?
 
I use blueletterbible to search and study, and I blow up verses and check out the greek or hebrew every so often to see if the original language has anything to say that the english doesn't adequately convey. I was in 1 Cor 7:2 and saw there was a difference between 'his own' and 'her own' that was suspicious. My and my buddy tracked down all the uses of the words and mapped them out and it was pretty obvious that monogamy was not what was being commanded. Since this was the only part in the bible that to me explicitly commanded men to only have one wife, I was left with the fact that there had been no change at all in this matter since the old testament.
 
I grew up Baptist and accepted the party line, but in my 40’s had some friends that were into end-times and they brought up Isaiah 4:1 (7 women take 1 husband) that will happen.
That blew the party line out of the water because that would be too changeable of a god for me.
So I started studying it for myself. And voila!
 
I’ve always wondered about it, even as a young child. I didn’t understand how there could be folks in the Old Testament that had more than one wife and were called holy, but that couldn’t be true in the New Testament. Despite putting that on the back burner for many years, I still strongly believed in patriarchy. After some time something spurred my curiosity again, and I researched it as much as I could in the Bible and online (eventually finding BF), coming to the conclusion that it is a rock solid belief. I further have come to believe that one of the strongest fights of the enemy is against the order the Father established in the world.
 
I was raised from the age of 9 outside a church environment, reading scripture to find theology for myself. And it was just obvious. Can't say when I figured it out, because I think I worked it out too early to remember. It's just what the Bible says plainly.

Sarah's explained our story from when she came on the scene here.
 
Basically, God hit me over the head.

Long story short, while working one day the Father clearly told me that I would marry a co-worker and my heart was immediately connected. My first reaction was fear of losing my bride. Over the following months the Father began to show me some things in Scripture until I became fully convinced of this unassailable truth. That was four years ago. He hasn't finished His work in us, but we walk by faith as He challenges us to follow.
 
I copied and pasted mine from my other post in another thread.
At the age of 15, I witnessed the pastor of my small church ask a polygamist man and his wives and children not to come back to the church. They had came by to attend a service in hopes of finding a place them and their children could attend. I Began to research if the man and his family were indeed living in sin as the pastor preached from the pulpit. To my surprise they were not, when I scoured through scripture after scripture. I realized the pastor like society had abandoned Gods law. Then I decided to pursue it later, I just felt A pull to defend Gods law.
 
I wanted to have an ungodly experience and looked to see if I could get away with it. Or possibly I was surfing porn (I had a horrible and oppressive addiction to it at the time) and came across an old Duke of Marshall website instead. It may have been a confluence of the two event. I can't really remember except that I know I was a basket case on a whole host of issues and the discovery of poly launched me on a journey of both creative destruction, or rather destructive creation.

I also seem to remember so very stupid and ungodly website that purported to be Christian teachings on sex. It was a ridiculous website that was wrong on everything and promoted a lot of unbiblical behavior. The sections tangentially related to polygyny (and I mean only barely related) seem to set me off to search scripture. It might have been then that I found the old Duke of Marshall website. Suffice it to say that I was very lost.
 
I was witnessing to an atheist that worked for me and he asked why couldn’t he have two wives. I kind of blew it off with a remark about Adam and Eve. He introduced me to the idea of Lilith (right or wrong, true or false). After that, there were times where I’d hear about polygamist off and on, always either Mormon or Muslim. A couple of years ago, my pastor, out of the blue, asked me what I believed about polygamy. My response was that I don’t know but I know Christ has two brides. That started me thinking about how I should be able to answer that question intelligently. I began studying Islam and Mormonism so that if I ever needed to, I could be able to witness to them intelligently (I hoped). In the course of studying, my wife and I began watching Sister Wives and a couple of other shows like that for entertainment and general knowledge of how they operated. At some point, being the analytical, problem solving guy that I am, I started making comments about how it could work if they did it this way or whatever. This was all academic to me though because Christians didnt believe in Polygamy. Then the Browns went to Missouri to meet a Christian Polygamist family, the Richards. It blew my mind. I began looking online to find out if there really were fundamental type Christian believers who actually believed it was acceptable. I found Bib Families shortly thereafter and the rest is history.
 
I was answering some questions in an online Christian forum and I got asked why a certain study Bible had a note about Lamech, in Gen. 4:19, saying he was in sin for bigamy for marrying two wives when God doesn't say anything against him. That started me on a search where I was initially trying to find evidence for the (false) doctrine of monogamy, a doctrine had I wrongly (to my shame) taught from the pulpit. It didn't take me too many months to discover that God never says having more than one wife is wrong in any way. The more I studied the more I discovered that polygyny is right and then I had to deal with a certain woman wanting to be my second wife... . It all sort of came together in a cataclysmic eruption; polygyny is a godly state and I had two wives. :eek::):):bible: My world imploded but God brought me to BF and I thank Him for everyone here holding me up and being such a blessing in the midst of the turmoil. It was through the people and the resources here that everything came into greater clarity regarding polygyny.
 
About seven years ago we decided to watch some TV and found on Netflix a series called How the West Was Won and started watching it. It lasted for a week I think. In that series they talked about how the Indians were persecuted by the US government. Knowing that they were innocent but suffered greatly was distributing to watch. Then they started talking about the mormons and it appeared the same abuse was being dealt to them, and for what, polygamy? Why was the US government so concerned about the idea about plural marriage? That was the beginning of the question in my mind that would not go away but yet I had no idea about it before that, or even cared. The following weekend, after the series, we sat down to watch TV again and not knowing what to watch we came across the sister wives show. The description talked about polygamy and since that was a question now in my mind, we decided to watch. At that time you could watch a bunch of the seasons at one time and we did. We watched a few that night, didn't say much to each other. Went to sleep, got up the next day, no big deal, then that night we were going to watch TV again and we both sort of timidly asked what do we want to watch. Both sort of wanting to watch more of the sisterwives show, but also kind of embarrassed. We eventually did, and then we couldn't stop. WE WATCHED ALL OF THEM. It was a Friday night, after it was all over we sat on the couch and just talked. We talked all night, all day the next day, then all night. Never moved from the couch, just talked. We knew our life had just changed. Then as the weeks went by we each started to see little signs that something was happening. We would call each other during the day and know exactly what the other was thinking about the subject. It was like we were totally in sync and everything flowed together. Random things would all come together and we would know that what we just learned was real. Finding it in the Word was easy, it was just the practicality of all that seemed to be the question. Found stuff on the internet, different sites that helped, then found BF and things really started to move fast. Met Andrew and his family and it was sealed, polygamy was right. Spent the next years understanding and accepting the principle, but the actuality of it all seemed far off. Which was ok because it had already strengthened my marriage and bought us to heights I didn't think possible. Then the reality of PM hit and life became a hurricane, but yet our marriage became much more deeper, and our relationship with God reached levels unimaginable. In all it has been a wonderful journey and it's not over yet.

If there is a common theme that I have heard from others that matches our journey, is that God uses PM to create a relationship with Him that is much deeper and more genuine than can be had within any monogamous relationship. And I know of no other life experience that can bring such dependence on God, besides death, and sometimes it feels like death is not even a match.
 
Ancient Paths said:
@rockfox I'm not seeing a shot group here which lend strong support to the idea that it is the Father, by His Spirit, awakening people.
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Ancient Paths, if by no shot group you mean the answers people give are not showing certain distinctive elements and themes in common, in my view that distribution is itself a shot pattern that suits perfectly the breadth of the matter.
 
I had an interest in it and started looking into it about the same time that the TV show "Big Love" came on TV. I can not remember if my interest came from the TV show, or the interest in the TV show came because I was already interested in the subject.

For a long time I had thought it was an oddity, an anachronism in the Bible. Then it dawned on me one day that the Bible was right and I was wrong.
 
Ancient Paths said:
@rockfox I'm not seeing a shot group here which lend strong support to the idea that it is the Father, by His Spirit, awakening people.
Click to expand...

That was one of my motives for asking this. Another was if people are finding out about this via certain outlets or when studying certain subjects that would allow us to create content tailored to those subjects.

But I don't necessarily agree.

Quite a few found out by studying scripture... that can be the Spirit moving and the result is usually dependent on them having ears to hear.

One guy on this thread, and another in an intro (since deleted) found out via a dream. That could very well be due to God, depending on the details of the dream and their exposure to media.

People finding out via TV (i.e. Big Love, Sisterwives)... thats probably NOT God. That's likely blow-back from Satan's attempts to destroy the institution of marriage by undermining monogamy via media propaganda. Most people won't pull off polygyny; they'll just sleep around. So its a measured risk, especially since it associates polygyny with Mormonism, unless the Spirit of God lights a Christian polygyny movement fire. The sisterwives thing is still ongoing but a lot of this strategy shifted to polyamory. They're not yet pulling out all the stops on the propaganda though.

Too soon to say though. And given this is an online forum, it tends to appeal to the kind of people (and personality types) who study and debate scripture. So no surprise many here found out that way; thats just selection bias at work.
 
God works through all sorts of means. The very fact that there are so many different ways that people have come to realise this, including TV, shows God is behind it. If there was a consistent pattern, it would suggest that a particular set of influences in the right order brainwashed people to come to this conclusion. Ie, not God. But this variety is exactly what you'd expect from God. God can even take what Satan intends for evil and use it for good, such as the secular marriage-redefinition trend causing Christians to ask "so what is marriage anyway?" and search scripture for the answer.
 
My story, re-posted from a similar thread started in 2015:

Out of the blue and with some drama, my brother told me he was pursuing polygamy. This project of his was fractious and dysfunctional and involved several women and large distances.

I was in my early forties. We’d both dissimilated ourselves from the Morg several years earlier. He told me he’d since figured out that straight-up polygamy has nothing to do with Mormonism and that it's alive and well, particularly in the non-Westernized world.

We discussed various matters related to polygamy: confidences, discretion, and loss of face; the absorption of Rome and its monogamism into Christianity; polygamy's tribalism versus the West's essential anti-tribalism; God's blessing of Abraham who had managed household discord; problems of the "one big, happy family" ideal; and more.

My brother's project didn't work out for him — those connections ceased; everyone moved on — but our talk remained with me, and within a couple of years I realized that my worldview had shifted. Dedication to monogamy and its baggage is no longer my path: I'm a polygamist.
 
I was in the same room as Steve when the friends he describes in his post above mentioned Isa 4, and that scripture was the "hook in my jaw" that I couldn't get away from. Then, I was in Baghdad for three years, and being in a culture where poly was no big deal, as well as living amongst Christian Ugandans (who were either in a plural relationship themselves or were the product of their parents being in poly) set me up for an encounter with the Lord when I was all by myself in bed. This is exactly what I was doing when I became born again in 1970, laying in bed, praying, and this revelation was as deep of a commitment as getting saved was. I knew there was no going back. I felt led of the Lord to spend a portion of the next day and many days afterward researching Christian polygyny online. Steve was back in the States, and we would research together, compare notes, and blow up Private Messaging back in the dinosaur days of social media. The rest, as they say, is history...
 
rockfox said:
People finding out via TV (i.e. Big Love, Sisterwives)... thats probably NOT God. That's likely blow-back from Satan's attempts to destroy the institution of marriage by undermining monogamy via media propaganda. Most people won't pull off polygyny; they'll just sleep around. So its a measured risk, especially since it associates polygyny with Mormonism, unless the Spirit of God lights a Christian polygyny movement fire. The sisterwives thing is still ongoing but a lot of this strategy shifted to polyamory. They're not yet pulling out all the stops on the propaganda though.
Click to expand...

I find this to be an inaccurate thought. Besides all the other stuff in there, Mormonism deserves a lot of respect for their contribution in helping make PM a thing in the current world.
 
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