Is marrying a nonbeliever a sin?

First we need to define a few words. What is sin?

Sin is anything that does not glorify God. 

Under this there are two things we can do to not glorify God. One is to disobey a direct command from God. Another is to be rebellious against God and believe you know better than Him.

So onto the first point: disobeying a direct command of God. The first command is found in 1 Corinthians 7:39.

“A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.”

I know others translations have “only in the Lord” and people just say that it only implies that the marriage is done in the presence of the Lord (I don’t know…at a church?) but that is a very big stretch. The other passage in 2 Corinthians is stronger:

“Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.” Therefore“Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.” And, I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

Do not be yoked. Yoked in historical context usually means a business partnership but can be extrapolated into a romantic relationship aka marriage. Take a closer look at the analogy. The imagery is supposed to be an oxen and a horse pulling the same plow, but there are differences in height, differences in strength, and differences in endurance that will severely hinder the work and eventually cause the plow to tip over. Biblically speaking, the imagery we should have in context of marriage is trying to carry a cart/box with a corpse. You will be trying to lift a load with someone who is spiritually dead. Continue to look at the juxtaposition in the passage. Righteous vs wickedness. Light vs darkness. Christ vs Belial. Believer vs unbeliever. Temple of God vs idols. God’s people vs not God’s people. Clean vs unclean. Sons and daughters vs children of the Devil.

Now define what nonbeliever. 

What is a nonbeliever?

 A nonbeliever as defined as the Bible are the wicked, children of the Devil, and an enemy of God. I’m being blunt but I also have to admit I was once wicked, a children of the Devil, and an enemy of God. This is reality. But I am now no longer, bought by the blood Christ and have the promise of inheritance through Christ in me. Now we have defined what a nonbeliever is, a slew of more verses are available about how we are supposed to interact with our enemies and the wicked. Proverbs anyone?

Hold on. There are passages governing a marriage between a believer and a nonbeliever aren’t there? 1 Corinthians 7:12-14 says this:

If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

Makes it now very likely that it is okay to marry a nonbeliever if the act can be sanctifying right? Missionary dating ftw! Not quite. Most modern scholars will look at the context of this passage in the early church and say this: the reason why Paul puts this clause in 1 Corinthians is due to the rapid growth of the early church. Many people were becoming believers, and a lot of them were already married, but their spouse have not believed yet. So now that they were believers, and they know culturally they are not yoked with an unbeliever, they started asking Paul if the right thing to do was divorce (which they also know is a sin). Paul writes this to exemplify God’s grace in these kinds of union, but that doesn’t mean he is justifying future marriages between believers and nonbelievers (else he would be directly contracting himself in this letter and his next one to the church of Corinth).

So we now have direct commands from God (Paul’s words empowered by the Holy Spirit are equal to God’s Word), and to disobey them is sin. This is the same with homosexual marriages. This is the same with avoiding pre-marital sex and not sleeping/cohabiting with someone who is not your wife (1 Cor 6:18 flee sexual immorality, the only temptation God says to not stand our ground against). Let us not forget the marriage chapter in scripture aka Ephesians 5. Here Paul is only addressing marriages made in the Lord. He characterizes these marriages as those in reverence or fear in Christ. How can a nonbeliever have a reverence in Christ? The entire covenant falls apart without Christ, and it is not something that glorifies God or points to God nor preaches the Gospel in any kind of way.

Time to define another word.

What is pride?

Pride is the idolatry of self. What this means is we believe that me as a human being is deserving of more glory and worship than God. Something along the lines of believing that we know what is best for us better than God falls into the category of God. This especially applies to who we should marry. Through scripture, God repetitively tells us to pursue holiness/Godliness. We ought to pursue that in a spouse as well. As a guy, we have all heard to find the Proverbs 31 woman. Now given, no girl will meet those standards presented (if such a woman exist, then the only man worthy of marrying her is Jesus). As guys we are to be like Jesus to our wife. Both impossible standards but both something we are to realistically work towards in our walk as followers of Christ. To marry a nonbeliever throws all of this out the window. Because of our pride. We couldn’t wait for God’s providence. We didn’t trust God to bring a Godly man or woman into our lives to co-work in our ministry.

This leads to my next point and word defining.

What is marriage?

Well the biblical marriage is this: a covenant union between a man and woman that preaches the Gospel and glorifies God by pointing to the mystery that is Christ and the Church. Bam! Two birds with one stone. Fulfills the both the purpose to bring the good news to the ends of the world and the fact that we were created to give God glory.

Now, does a union between a believer and nonbeliever do that? You can argue that under God’s sovereignty it may. Hosea and Gomer is one example. But I don’t think you are a prophet like Hosea (and I will seek help for you if you are Gomer…seriously). If you argue that the action can’t really be a sin, then that’s fine. Let us look at the heart of one doing the act. Most likely it is full of pride and selfishness. Since both of those are sins, then by attribution the act is the result of sin. It has been brought to my attention there can be exceptions to this, namely reasons for marriage are for compatibility, security, prosperity, and comfort. Fine, but this leads to the prosperity Gospel, which is arguably the most damaging false message in the history of human civilization. And at the core is still basically selfishness.

Our marriages are supposed to the purest form of preaching the Gospel. No manipulation required. No pressuring required. Just the showing of supernatural, inhuman, unconditional love to our spouse is enough to get those in the world thinking. But this unconditional love has to be mutual or else our marriage will just be “conforming to the world.”

God intended our marriages for good, let us not use them for our own selfishness and desires.

Evidence of the mortal consequences of sin.

We know from scripture that evidence of disobedience to sin occurred in the lives of Biblical characters. We know the consequences of sin due to Jacob having two wives. We know the consequences of sin of Abraham producing an heir with Hagar. We know the consequences of sin due to David laying with Bathsheba. We know the consequences of sin due to Solomon having multiple (nonbelieving) wives.

This is also evident in our own lives. We have all heard the stories of families with one parent being a Christian and the other one who isn’t. Stress from decisions over money and time and priorities. Confusion in the faith of their children. Many tears have been dropped over the ages in many of these stories I’ve heard. Decades of pain. We see there is a reasonable correlation with causation in a majority of these cases. The act of marrying a nonbeliever led to these unnecessary trials and suffering.

There are always exceptions though. Through God’s grace and mercy, quite a few of these marriages do end up with the conversion of the nonbelieving spouse, fulfilling 1 Corinthians 7:12-14 in a modern context. Sometimes the new believer becomes even stronger in faith than the more seasoned believer. God can make good come out of a bad decision. This is the power of the Holy Spirit and cannot be attributed to the “okayness” of the original marriage and the original intents of pursuing a nonbeliever.

We as believers have a duty to the Body of Christ, our community/accountability partners, and our posterity to find a spouse who loves God and wants to do His will. To not do so is an act of rebellion and that is sin.

Personally I think the 1^st argument I gave is enough to show that marrying a nonbeliever is a sin, but when all 4 arguments stand together the truth is very apparent. You will either have to have different definitions of the terms I defined or different interpretations of the scripture I used. I will then ask you to read those passages out loud and then do inductive Bible study on them. Context, author, audience, cross-reference.

Like all sin, there is repentance and redemption. I am not saying marrying a nonbeliever is going to doom you to eternal wrath. I am not saying it is a worse sin than any other sin. I am not saying there cannot be grace following the sin. God is good. But I am trying to challenge believers into really wrestling with the severity of sin in our lives and how to identify it in this depraved world. What really is sin? How do we die to ourselves for His sake? How do we glorify God in our relationship? We are way too quick to say something is a bad idea but not call it a sin. This is undermining the severity of sin. A pastor once said it wasn’t a sin to put a lawn mower to your face but it was just plain stupid, but I would say it is a sin because you are self-mutilating yourself and there are (many) scriptures against that. It is a sin to commit bad stewardship of your body. It is not loving and properly caring for what God has given you. This is the same with relationships. This is the same with your emotions and the Godly desire for a wife. By defining a sin as really a sin, then according to scripture we are responsible as Christians to address sin in our brothers and sisters through rebuke out of love and care. Let us not baby them but telling them it isn’t a sin.

I write this for my brothers and sisters and even more for myself because I really have a tendency to want to pursue this sin. I have in the past, justified my reasons, and if I am not careful I may try to pursue it again, engaging in a dating process full of sin leading to a marriage done out of a prideful and selfish heart. I hope I haven’t been too harsh or snarky in this essay, and I want to leave you with the message that a Godly man or a Godly woman (or someone who is working towards that goal) is extremely beautiful to witness.