Your marriage is in trouble. You know God hates divorce, but… should you call a lawyer just in case? Or perhaps you're getting married and blissfully in love, but … should you draft that prenuptial agreement to make sure your bases are covered? Or, your friends' marriage is hurting... should you hand over your lawyer's contact information or suggest another kind of counsel?

As Christians, we often face difficult personal decisions that have legal implications. How can we maintain our fidelity to Christ and his Word while protecting our legal interests? Lawyer Stephen Bloom recognizes this tension between faith and the law. In response to his own struggles to reconcile his faith with his profession, Bloom wrote an easy-to-read guide for fellow Christians called The Believer's Guide to Legal Issues (Living Ink). Stephen sat down with Crosswalk to discuss his book and to answer some specific questions on family law and the culture of divorce.

CW:  What inspired you to write about legal issues from a Christian perspective, and what do you hope to offer readers with this book?   

SB: Well, I started practicing law before I became a born-again believer in Christ. So, I graduated law school, and I had totally bought into this secular mindset that is taught in law school. 

A couple years out of law school, I had an experience where I understood for the first time what grace was.  I understood what the Cross was about, and I understood what it meant for me to confess that I was a sinner, repent, believe in Christ, and be born again.  When that happened, I found myself in an awkward spot.  I was in the middle of a profession that has values that tend to be very contrary to the values that Christ teaches in the Bible.  So, I began a personal journey of reconciling. How can I even continue to be a lawyer and still actually claim to be a Christian? I struggled for years.   

The book is really the fruit of my struggle, in that I found so much biblical wisdom on the legal issues that people confront everyday.  I was amazed, and I came to a conclusion that I could stay in the profession. I could be an attorney and simply bring in the counsel of Christ on these issues. 

The world is selling a destructive, hurtful, damaging view of the law.  "It's all about ME.  It's all about getting what I deserve, and who cares about the other guy?"  It's essentially the opposite of what Christ would teach, and I feel like there is a place for the kind of peace that can come from following God's wishes and God's ideals for us.  

CW: You cover a lot of topics in this book - bankruptcy, Medicaid, living wills - offering scriptural examples as well as professional insights.  I would like to focus on marriage and family law today.  A significant chunk of the legal industry is dedicated to helping couples divorce. Can you give your professional perspective on divorce?

SB: Divorce, first of all, is being sold by the legal profession as a quick, easy, simple, life-improving alternative. I have an ad that a client handed to me recently, just in the last couple of weeks. It is a typical attorney's ad for divorce. It says, "Divorce. Simple. No Fault. No Office Visit Necessary."  That's the kind of idea that the legal profession is selling people. 

There is a billboard that was on all the news channels a couple months back that advertised divorce, and it had a picture of a scantily clad woman, [saying] "Life is short. Get a divorce." It had the law firm telephone number. It's so disrespectful of the holy covenant that God intended marriage to be.   

I feel like divorce is being sold as a product. We are forgetting first the damage to the couple, which is huge, long lasting, and everyone is kind of aware of that. There is also damage to the children. I personally grew up in a family where my parents got divorced when I was in elementary school. I experienced some of that pain myself, my brother and I did. We still experience it to this day, the fact that our parents are not together, and there are so many awkward occasions. Everything is complicated because of that divorce, more difficult. 

Even more so, [divorce] affects the church family. I have actually seen where one divorce in a church will start almost a chain reaction of other couples. Their marriages crumble. I don't know why it is, but it's the sense of "nothing is permanent."  All these marriage relationships [feel] temporary, and there is just a sense of a snowball rolling down a hill effect.  The more divorces there are, it seems to promulgate more divorces around that couple. 

So, I see the pain being not just in that relationship, but also much, much farther beyond that.  It hurts God too because, again, it's a holy covenant that has just been trampled on. 

CW:  Do you think our laws make it too easy to get married or divorced? 

SB: You know, Sarah, I am not really a big proponent of changing the laws. I think the laws are what they are in most cases. They have their flaws and their difficulties. It may be "too easy" to get divorced, but I don't think that is where the problem is. I think the problem is people's adoption of the worldly mindset that says marriage is just a contract.  [That] it's just a transaction between two people, and it doesn't really matter. I think it's a spiritual problem, not a legal problem. It's the condition of our hearts that is the problem.   

I think the legal profession contributes to the problem. When they… get a call from one spouse saying, "I might need some legal help. My marriage is suffering," too many attorneys are throwing gasoline on that fire instead of trying to help get that couple into solid Christian counseling. The first thing they do is hire a private investigator to find out what other dirt they can dig up and make the situation worse and start a psychological process of getting the couple into an adversarial position with each other.