“The Shack Up” – Part 2
Lyndon Unger
In the previous post, I introduced the topic of professing Christians “shacking up”, or cohabiting before marriage. I brought up a few common arguments for why professing believers may think about “the shack up”, and then I laid the foundation on which there can be some sort of positive resolution to the issue: the authoritative word of God.
So if we can meet on that foundation, let’s spend a little time in the scripture. We’re going to address some specific questions that will fence us in for arriving at an answer to the question of whether or not Christians should we move in together.
Q 1 – Does the Bible mention cohabitation?
A 1 – Not in the contemporary sense, no.
If we’re being honest, we don’t want to read anything into or out of the silence of the Bible on the issue, since arguments from silence aren’t actually arguments.
Now one could attempt to stretch the text in some places to attempt to speak to the issue, like Ruth 3:13. In Ruth 3:13, when Boaz wakes up and finds Ruth at his feet, he tells her to stay the night. Still, in Ruth 3:14 it reads “So she lay at his feet until the morning, but arose before one could recognize another. And he said, ‘Let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor.’ ” So, if one were trying to stretch that passage, one cannot miss that both Ruth and Boaz knew how it would look if she was seen coming out of his threshing floor early in the morning. That recognition of appearances is, in itself, suggestive, but not exactly a firm statement on the topic at hand.
There are a few other texts that a person could attempt to stretch, but the result is the same. The harder you stretch a text, the more the text is disfigured.
When you’re looking for a biblical position on an issue, it’s best to look at the passages of Scripture that directly address the topic, or the issues, at hand.
This brings us to the next question.
Question 2 – Does the Bible mention sexual morality?