Twilight of the Damned: The Ultimate Peril of Being Unequally Yoked

The "Twilight" books/movies, for teenagers, work to present an argument, like all venues of entertainment, that the morals and thoughts within are normative, i.e., they are the normal or best path to follow in life. There is a scene where the leading character, Bella, states that she would rather choose to be damned in hell in order to love Edward for a temporal time than to choose heaven and a temporal lifetime without him. What the movie should really show is Bella in hell a million years later and have another person ask her if it was worth it. Teenagers can be overly dramatic and lose sight of reality. They tend to have to experience the consequences of stupidity for themselves, so of course, one can make any statement such as the above in an exaggerated display of emotion; but in reality, no temporal relationship is worth losing the ultimate relationship for and toward which our very being has been crafted. And it certainly isn't worth an eternity in hell. Someone should slap that girl upside the head and say, "What are you, an idiot? Why would you trade temporary counterfeit of joy with some creature for an eternal relationship with God who is true joy Himself?" Unfortunately, the smartest of people can be duped into trading jewels that are eternally valuable for temporary costume jewelry. So many choose to trade their joy in a relationship with God for the false pleasure of temporary relationships.

I remember in youth group we played a game where one person stood on a chair and the other person stood below. The person below would try to pull the other down and the person on the chair would attempt to pull the other person up. It always, without exception, ended with the person below pulling the other person down. This was meant as an allegory to teach us that when you bind yourself to someone who is forever descending into the deceptive abyss of the world's system, that person will likely pull you down with them, rather than you who are ascending to the things above being the one who pulls them up.

I was reminded by this by a friend of mine who just finished a study on 1 Kings, specifically giving his last thoughts on the life of Solomon. You can read his comments here: http://www.changedbythegospel.com/2012/08/the-morning-after-down-goes-kingdom-1.html

Solomon is used in Scripture as a primary example of this idea above, simply because, of all of the people who could have been savvy enough to have resisted such influence, he fell to it just the same. His unbelieving wives who wanted to imagine the divine differently than the orthodox Yahwism that God had revealed as the correct path to Himself, eventually turned Solomon's mind away from the true God, and he became a worshiper of other gods.

Samson, another example of this, is the strongest man who ever lived; yet he too fell due to his rejection of his covenant of God by pursuing unbelieving women. Examples are given in Esau, the Israelite who was killed for bringing a Midianite unbeliever to his family for marriage, Ahab, etc. The point is that the smartest man, the strongest man, and everyone in between will be pulled to the deception of their unbelieving spouse, simply because the promise made to God has been broken, and they are now without His help to withstand, and indeed, even may be given over by God to, the schemes of the devil and the world that was already working against them.

Now, you may not think there is any threat to a modern believer, since we are not surrounded by shrines and erected statues everywhere. However, the point isn't that every unbeliever will drag you down to worship Baal; but that he or she will pull you, just by virtue of their own worship, to whatever form of false religion/belief system is prevalent within your particular society.

I've seen it a million times. The believer arrogantly thinks that he is so far above being influenced in such a way that he assumes that he is invincible enough to date or marry whomever he wishes, believer or not. I knew a man married to a Mormon woman once, who seemed very strong in the faith; but the strain of the pull toward that direction eventually led him to attend LDS meetings with her, and eventually, his faith became nominal at best. Another friend of mine was equally strong, but his wife was not a believer. He constantly shared his life as a struggle between two worldviews that battled it out for what would be their daily routine and manner of parenting. Eventually, she won out. He stopped attending the church and was carried away by the tide. I can say the same for many, many women I knew as well. The justification of compromise to marry someone who is either nominally a Christian or not at all is not a small compromise, but a game changer altogether. The Scripture presents it as a denial of Christ, a giving up on the faith. The drifting away from the love of Christ is but the flower of that seed. In our culture, it manifests itself in false Christianities, false religions, agnosticism, atheism, etc. Whatever the worldview and religious or philosophical leaning of the unbelieving spouse might be, that is the direction in which the supposed believer is pulled to his or her own destruction.

Marry an atheist and you will become more atheistic. Marry an agnostic and you will become more agnostic. The two become one flesh and they tend also, therefore, to become one mind as well, since rebellion and a rejection of the faith on the part of the "believer" has already been made. The idea that he or she will not compromise his or her faith once in the relationship is a joke, since the biggest compromise of all has already been made in order to enter that relationship in the first place.

Let the fool become wise by taking note of Solomon's strength to uncover folly, yet his inability to stay the hand of apostasy to which the original rejection of his covenant with God, broken in order to marry an unbeliever, inevitably led to his becoming a complete fool when it came to the most important task any man could ever have in life.

I have seen many a fool justify his decision to date or marry an unbeliever, and it is alway because he scoffs at or ignores, to his own peril, the explicit warnings and examples the Scripture gives to him. Not many souls lay slain by the devil on the battlefield of life through a more powerful weapon than the justifications of a believer that allow him or her to enter into a relationship with a person who, simply by virtue of the influence or his or her worldview as it expresses itself in life and thought, will influence his or her spouse to eventually think like him or her. Since one continually seeks approval by his or her spouse more than any other human, the pull to capitulate and compromise further and further in an effort to be acceptable will eventually erode any remnant of the faith in the truth that may have been held once. If one does not seek acceptance, the mere daily observation of his or her spouse's worldview in thought and practice will convey a certain normativity to that worldview, so that it becomes more palatable and acceptable as truth to the believer who once viewed it as reprehensible.

We weep for Solomon because he was given so much to choose a true, loving relationship with God in the paradise of the palace, but instead he chose exile from God and destruction. How much more should we weep for those who have seen the love of God displayed upon the cross, and yet, have traded their true joy for hell in order to gain a moment of false pleasure?

Maybe viewing unbelievers as vampires is a good analogy afterall. They suck the eternal life right out of you. Choosing that over God who gives and fills with life can only mean that one has never understood what he or she has been given in Christ, and thus the counterfeit life is sought as the real deal. But happily ever after endings in vampire romances are for fictional novels and movies. Their real end is anything but happy.