7:13
The same rule applies whether the man is a believer and the woman not, or whether the woman is a believer and the man not. Throughout the teaching here there is a remarkable symmetry between the man and the woman. The instructions apply equally to men and women. In the society of the time this was amazing, for the man usually had a lot more rights than the woman. Those who accuse Paul of being a misogynist really haven’t a clue what they are talking about.
7:14
Those who were suggesting that divorce was the right course of action may have looked back to the Old Testament, where in general if an unclean thing touched a clean thing, the clean thing became defiled. And Ezra's instructions in Ezra 9 may have seemed to support divorce. However, in Ezra the Jews had chosen to marry non-Jews. A Christian should not marry a non-Christian, but here we are speaking about the situation where the couple were already married when one became a believer. And Paul says that in this situation the believer sanctifies the unbeliever for the purpose of the marriage. Paul is not saying that the unbelieving partner is automatically saved by the believer’s faith, he is talking about the temporal situation. Likewise, any children proceeding from the marriage are sanctified.
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