We have been covenantally unfaithful. In other words, we have not walked in faithfulness to the law of the Lord. And of course, what has the law of the Lord taught [the people] going all the way back to Moses? Do not intermarry with the foreign women of the land (Deuteronomy 7:2–3). God was absolutely clear: if you go in and you start to take their daughters for wives for your sons, and to give your sons as husbands to their daughters, something will happen. It has nothing to do with race, it has nothing to do with ethnicity; it has everything to do with truth—and that is: they are going to pull you and your children away from God. In other words, contrary to conventional evangelical wisdom, we do not date and marry evangelistically [marrying someone with the idea of bringing them to faith through the marriage]. We do not do that.

You know, the thing is that there are always such good reasons to date that unbeliever, like, I am in love! But understand that God knows exactly what he is doing. In fact, [I] coined a phrase in a sermon on Genesis 6: depravity-gravity. What happens is that the unbeliever pulls the believer down far more frequently than the believer ever pulls the unbeliever up. That is the way that it works nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And I have to tell you, I resent it when it turns out the other way. Now, I am happy for the person that get to go to heaven, but I resent it because it sets a bad precedent for our young people. It worked for so and so. Do not do that. Do not think that way. What you have to live on is the revealed Word of God, not anecdotal evidence in the lives of Tom, Dick, and Harry. You go with the written Word of God. You stick with the principle of the written Word of God which says, we are not to be unequally yoked, which means believers are not to be yoked together with unbelievers, period. That is the rule.¹

Brian Borgman