They took that from Deuteronomy 24 and they twisted it because in the text of Deuteronomy 24:1-4, Moses does not command divorce. There is only one command in that text, and the command is not to remarry a defiled adulteress. There is no command there to get a divorce.
I told you what Moses said last time. Deuteronomy 24 is the only passage relevant to Moses that gives any definitive statement about divorce.
Outline
- Pharisees’ Crafty Question – 1: Is it lawful to divorce for any reason?
- Lord’s Devastating/Shattering, Authoritative, Majestic Biblical Answer: He gives four reasons why you should not divorce.
- Pharisees’ Twisted Question – 2
- Lord’s Biblical Clarification
- Disciples’ Shocking Application
We should avoid two extremes about the teaching of divorce. One is the belief that whatever happens in any case, at any time, there should never be divorce. That is not what the Bible teaches. The other is the extreme of the Pharisees: divorce for any reason.
The Deception of Romantic Emotion
Nowadays, many worldly marriages result in disappointment because they are totally based on romantic emotion. It is not a real, solid love or true romance, but just emotion—a romantic feeling. All that giddy romantic emotion is what they rely on, and after marriage, it fades. It faded for me. That euphoria of romantic emotion and feeling at the beginning, I honestly do not have that I had before marriage, but it comes once in a while, not regularly. Most marriages happen purely based on that emotion, and when that fades, marriage loses all its glow. They see it as mundane, boring. Many live together only because there is no other way, for the sake of the children or for financial reasons. If they are rich, they think, “Marriage is over. You do not love me anymore,” because they lose that feeling. They go to find that emotion with someone else, and adultery and divorce happen.
Now, that is a strong word, verses 1–12. But you say, “Boy, I got a lot of questions. What if I am divorced or if I am married, or if I have been divorced, or if I am widowed?” You know something? Those are not answered in this text. But there is a commentary on the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament. And so, next Sunday morning we are going to look at the commentary on Jesus’ teaching; it is in I Corinthians Chapter 7. Do not turn to it now, but next Sunday morning, it is going to be our Mother’s Day message. We are going to look at Paul’s commentary on Jesus’ laws of marriage and divorce. What Paul does is this: Jesus lays down the very strong, clear divine pattern, and Paul helps us deal with the mess we are in when we have already messed that thing up. We are going to get into that next time.
💍 Six Divine Reasons for Marriage
But to draw our time to a close today, let me just suggest what I think would be very, very helpful for you. I believe there are six reasons for marriage, and I want to give them to you.
1. Procreation
Have babies. Genesis 1 brought a man and a woman together, married them, and told them to do what? Fill the earth, replenish, have babies, like arrows—blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. Children are a heritage from the Lord. So, marriage is to have children: Procreation.
I tell you, it grieved me when I was doing that CBS interview a couple of years ago, and they told me that 35 percent of all marriage-age, childbearing-age couples today are permanently sterilized. People do not want kids intruding in their life. Why? Because they are in romantic love, and they want to be able to flit from one relationship to another, and kids become a long-lasting problem. But God knows that kids become a binding too. Nothing is more clear than that you two are one when you see yourselves in that one who is born of your union. Marriage is for procreation, and that also means you do not have your children and then shove them off somewhere. We have a place out by us, a big new sign on the wall: “Day Care Center.” It just does something to me to see that: “Shove your kids in this room; we will take care of them all day while you do whatever you do.”
2. Pleasure
It is for pleasure. Hebrews 13:4 says, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed is undefiled.” The bed is undefiled; you cannot do anything in that place that is defiling. Great liberation! 1 Corinthians 7 says, “Your body is not yours, and her body is not hers; they belong to each other.” And the Old Testament, as I read to you from Proverbs, talks about the satisfaction of the physical relationship, the pleasure. Marriage is for pleasure. God knows that.
3. Purity
Thirdly, it is for purity. In 1 Corinthians 7:2, the Bible says that “because of immoralities, let each man have his own wife.” It is for purity.
4. Provision
Fourthly, it is for provision. I love this. Ephesians 5 says that the man is to nourish, cherish, provide for, care for, and be like a savior to his wife. Marriage is to scoop up all these women running around loose and provide for them. One at a time, however.
But that is what the Bible teaches: marriage is a provision of security. It is a provision of carrying and nourishing and cherishing. Providing for, in fact, it says, if a man does not provide for his own household, he is worse than an unbeliever. Marriage is a provision for the care of the weaker vessel so that she may fulfill herself in childbearing and the companionship of marriage.
5. Partnership
Fifth, it is for partnership. When God made Eve, he said he made Adam a what? A helper. Somebody to come alongside and help so you do not do things alone; you do them together. There is strength in that fellowship, is there not? And I confess to you that my wife is strong where I am weak, and I tend to be strong where she is weak, and that is the way it ought to be. She tells me when I need to be told, and if she did not, she would not be strength to my weakness. She has wonderful ways of reminding me of my weaknesses. In fact, I can hear the speech coming before she gives it. I know, “Speech number 8,” you do not have to give it. But there is real partnership, is there not? Real partnership. I mean, I go here, and I work here, and I study, and I do the things I need to do, and she is home providing all the home needs, all that the children need, all that I need to be free to do what I do. It is real partnership. And I provide all the resources that she needs to do what God has ordained for her to do, and so that is partnership.
6. Picture
And then finally, marriage is a picture. And what is it a picture of? It is a picture of Christ and his Church. Ephesians 5 says it is a graphic demonstration in the face of the world that God loves and has an ongoing, unending relationship with the bride whom he loves and for whom he lives and dies. And I dare say that the whole metaphor of marriage as a symbol of Christ and his church has lost its punch because the church is so rife with divorce and fouled-up marriages. It is sad because the marriage metaphor is such a marvelous way to illustrate God’s relationship to his church, and we have, I think, sort of fouled that metaphor up.
God ordained marriage for procreation, pleasure, purity, provision, partnership, and as a picture of his relationship to his church. God ordained that marriage should be life long, and that it should be full of love, and that it should be blessed, and that it should be fulfilling, and that it should be the grace of life. And that is no reason to stay out of it; that is the reason to get in it. But when you get in, make sure you get in for the right reason with the right person, because pretty soon you will forget what you look like, and you will not even hardly be able to tell, but you will know what each other are like in terms of character and values. That goes right on through to the end. And be single if God has made you that way, or if you are that way because of a gift for serving the kingdom. And if you are able to hear this, hear it. And you are only able if Christ is in control of your life.
Some psychologists did a study and came up with a theory that you are what you are because you are adjusting to the most important person in your life. Whoever the most important person is in your life, that is the person you are trying to please. Very simple for the Christian, is it not? Who is the most important person in our life? Christ. That settles the issue, really, because now we can say, “I receive it, if you say it. It is God’s order.”
Let me quote you from some of the Talmudic writings of the Rabbis: “Among those who will never behold the face of hell is he who has had a bad wife. Such a man is safe from hell because he has expiated his sins on earth.”
But, I want you to resist comment, folks, on this, until I get through. But the point is, as you go through life in our society, people look for one emotion after another emotion. They are pursuing romantic feeling, not real romance in the true sense that will always be there, but they are pursuing romantic feeling. And I want you to know that this book shows a series of sociologists did tests and all that kind of thing, surveys, and they call it love—I call it romantic feeling—they call it love. “All love dies,” is the conclusion of their book, and by their definition, it does. All that giddy romantic emotion dies; it all dies; it will always die. I mean, all of us who have been married for a long time realize that we no longer feel about our partner the way we did when we had that euphoria of romantic emotion and feeling at the beginning. Now, from time to time it recurs, I confess, and it is wonderful that it does. It recurs a lot in my wife, and I am happy about that.
But basically speaking, I think that is true romance, the truth of love, but that romantic feeling is that high euphoria, and people make relationships based on romance, and when they lose that feeling, they go to somebody else, so everything is short-lived. So you just hop from one feeling to another, one romantic emotion to another. And you are with a person a while, and the relation starts to settle, and somebody else comes across your path, and something triggers in your mind and in your heart, and you find an attraction, and away those emotions go again. And so you dump this person, and you run over to that one because there is the new emotion, and you go through life doing that, until you finally have burned off everything you ever could have had emotionally of genuine feeling, and you end up alone, with nothing but emptiness. But that is the way the world is, and they will not come to marriage with commitment because they see marriage as commitment. And it has got to be that. They will not see it that way, so they go from one romance to another romance to another romance, and the result of it is just what we see in our society today. The saddest result is that we are producing a generation of disoriented, unloved, lonely, isolated kids who are turning into criminals and misfits because they do not have any meaningful long-term relationships to identify with. Really tragic.
Listen, if you get married for an emotional feeling, you are making a big, big mistake. Now, I am not against that; there should be some of that there, but you better be able to see beyond that to virtue, to character. You better be able to see beyond that to values and understand that you share common values: common spiritual values, common life values. And you better understand that you are making a lifelong, one man, one woman, strong bond, one flesh, God-made, no divorce union—that is God’s plan. And people in our society, I mean, they do not even understand that.
I heard a speaker yesterday; I was watching a little video tape. And he was relating the story of a particular gentleman who had been in the ministry and been married for nearly fifty years. His sons are in the ministry; one of them is a seminary professor, and he was giving the story of the death of this man’s wife, the mother of these sons. They had been married a long, long time, and one morning, and he, by the way, was giving this story at a woman’s group meeting to try to illustrate the difference between true love and true relationship and romance.
And he said, one morning she came down, and they were eating breakfast as they had done for years and years and years. And she ate her breakfast and fell over on the table. He scooped up her body, and his sons were there. He ran out the door, ran to his car without saying anything, put her body delicately in the car, and drove fast to the hospital. And by the time he got there, she was dead. Well, you have to be with somebody that you love nearly fifty years to understand the emptiness. And they had the service, and everyone was there, and the sons were there. And of course, he knew she was with the Lord Jesus Christ, and that is where his, of course, his devotion was as well. And after the service had taken place at the graveside, they got in the car, and they were on the way home, and he said to his son, “Stop, I have to go back.”
And so they stopped the car, and they said, “Look, we don’t want you to go back, Dad, it’s too much for you. You don’t need any more sorrow; we need to just go on.” And he said, “No, I have to go back. I have to go back.” And so, trying to argue him out of it was not successful. They turned around, and they went back, and he went out to the grave. He walked out, and he knelt down, and he patted the grave, stood there for a few moments, and he said, “Now it’s all right, we can go.”
He went back and he got into the car, and he said to his sons, “This is a good day. This is a wonderful day.” And they said, “Well, what do you mean?” And he said, “Oh, I always wanted her to go first, always. And so this is a good day.”
And then this man who was speaking to this women’s group said, “Listen. Anybody who knows the meaning of true love always wants the other person to go first, because they don’t want them to endure the pain and the sorrow and the anxiety of loneliness and the burial of the one they have loved.” And he said, “I dare say your romantic relationships are a far cry from that romantic feeling and that reality.” And he was right. He was right. But you see, people settle for a cheap substitute of the rich, deepening, profound, thrilling, meaningful friendship that two souls knit together in love can experience as years go on.
And the disciples needed to hear what people today need to hear, what you and I need to hear, and that is that marriage is a lifelong commitment. And that is not a reason to avoid it, my friend. That is a reason to get in it. Because in the genuineness of that lifelong friendship, God will bless you in ways you will never experience single, never.
Let me go a step further and say this: I don’t know what some of you people are looking for, but it seems to me that some of you, instead of retreating back from this, you ought to be looking to get into it, and you ought to start having different criteria to evaluate the people. I mean, I look around here, and I see all these lovely single people, and I know there are some people around here, and I don’t know what they are looking for. But I want them to know I’m getting a little upset with all of them.
I guess that needed to be said. I mean, you better see beyond the advertisements, and you better see beyond the Hollywood glamour stuff, and you better be looking for character. And when you find a godly person with whom you share common values in Jesus Christ and with whom you can build a deep, profound, and meaningful companionship of life, you better grab onto that opportunity. And I believe that God will give you some emotions that will make you happy and thrill you, but there better be more than just that.
You see, the disciples missed the point, like so many people today miss the point. I mean, you ought to rush to get into a lifelong relationship, but I tell you they were right in this regard: you don’t want to get in it with the wrong person, right? So when you make that move, you better be sure you are looking for spiritual values, and you better be sure you are getting involved with someone whose spiritual commitments are as deep and as far and as wide as yours are. And if you don’t know that yet, then you better slow the process down. Or otherwise, you may spend your whole life as one person trying to keep a relationship together, and that’s tough. That’s very tough. So, on the one hand, find someone with like precious faith and like values who loves Jesus Christ and has a life goal the same as you do, and look, if God might not bring you together. But on the other hand, if you find someone you want to marry real fast, and they don’t have those values, you better back off.
📜 Moses’ Concession and God’s Grace
We have to understand that. Because God is a gracious God, He did not always enact the death penalty, did He? For example, did David commit adultery? Yes, many, many times. Did he die? No. God was gracious. And many others committed adultery. Solomon, did he commit adultery? Heaven only could record. The point being: there is the grace of God manifest in the Old Testament. And somewhere along the line, God, in His tolerance, spared life and allowed divorce.
And that is illustrated most graphically by our Lord himself in Jeremiah 3:8, where, after 700 years of Israel’s spiritual adultery with idols, he finally says, “I divorce you.” God divorced Israel for spiritual adultery. Now, that doesn’t mean you can divorce your partner for spiritual adultery, for something that they do in their mind. When that filters down to human beings, it’s for the adulterous union itself, the adulterous act itself, and nothing less than that. But God is the illustration of one who divorced on the basis of adultery. But divorce on any other grounds, says our Lord, causes people who remarry after that divorce to turn into adulterers and adulteresses, and you defile them all.
It is because of the entering of sin and hardening of your heart because of sin that Moses permitted this. But this was not the design in creation before the Fall. But because sin made your hearts hard, it was a temporary accommodation to the hardness and sinfulness of heart—to restrain from hasty divorce and to protect women.
Verse 7: The Pharisees were, no doubt, delighted with the Lord’s answer. He had fallen into their trap. Now they pounce: “If the bonds of marriage were to be permanent and never broken, why then did Moses approve of divorce?”
Verse 8: The Lord replies that Deuteronomy does not command divorce, it allows it, and does so only as an accommodation to human sinfulness, not because God intended marriage to be an impermanent arrangement. The mistake that had been made was to elevate a necessary concession into a divine principle. The divine ideal for marriage was permanence and faithfulness. Divorce was a regrettable but necessary provision for cases in which human sinfulness had made impossible the maintaining of that ideal. It is too easy for us to build our expectations on the Lord’s concession to sin and not, as we should, on the divine ideal as it is enshrined in the law of God.
Verse 9: Jesus had already said in 5:32 that remarriage after divorce constituted adultery because it creates a new sexual union besides the one that God had created. In Mark, the Lord is also cited as applying this standard equally. Both men and women may divorce, and both men and women may do it sinfully.
However, the Lord adds an exception: “except for porneia,” that is, except for unchastity, for sexual infidelity. In such cases, the marriage has already been broken, and divorce by the innocent spouse is not the breaking of the marital bond but a recognition of its having been broken by the other. In any case, in God’s universe, it requires a vicious sin to end a marriage. That is the way people come to think about marriage in a culture of easy divorce.
Verse 10: The disciples’ weak response to the Lord’s remarks about the inviolability of marriage indicate something of the thinking about marriage then current in the church: as if a life-long marriage was so difficult that one would be better not even to attempt it.
Verse 11: Some have taken the Lord to be agreeing with his disciples and saying, in effect, that it was better not to marry. That is a very unlikely interpretation, however, given the Lord’s emphasis on the divine institution of marriage in verses 4–6. Rather, by “this word,” the Lord means his previous statement about the sanctity of marriage and its unbreakable bond. Not everyone is called to marriage, he is saying, but most are, and those who are called to it must meet its obligations.
Verse 12: This is then something of a parenthesis, listing the few whose calling it was not to be married. It was unusual not to be married in Jewish society of that time. Jesus was himself a bachelor, and this remark may be something of a defense of his own singleness. Some remain unmarried because of physical defect, and others have renounced it for the sake of the kingdom of God. Paul, you remember, will make this same point in 1 Corinthians 7.
Jesus, in answering the Pharisees’ insincere question, has laid the foundation for all true thinking about marriage. It is here that our own culture has gone so terribly wrong, for it is treating marriage as if it were a human invention and subject to human regulation. But marriage is from God. God made it, and he made us for it. And having made marriage and men and women for marriage, it is to him and to his purposes that we are to look when we have questions about marriage. What did God intend for the life of husbands and wives? What was his purpose? That is what I mean by a theological marriage: a marriage that is understood, that is practiced, and that is reverenced with a view to its being God’s creation, God’s institution, and God’s calling for a man and a woman. When we marry, we are not sovereign. God is our match-maker, and we must be his servants as husbands and wives as surely as we must be his servants in every other aspect of our lives. Thinking this way about marriage changes everything. It also brings immense blessing, happiness, and security. God’s way is always the best way.
💍 The Christian Marriage
And it bears our asking: why is that so? Why do Christians make so much more of a success of their marriages than non-Christians? They live in the same world; they are influenced by the same culture. Why then do they manage to keep their marriages secure and sound when all around them people are getting divorces? The answer is, of course, that their commitment to Christ purifies and protects their commitment to each other. The answer is that they understand what marriage is, where it comes from, what it is for, and why such sanctity and holiness attaches to it. The answer is that they have the same theological view of marriage that Jesus taught here in Matthew 19.
The Bible, you remember me often telling you, is not first a book about what we are to believe or how we are to live. It is that to be sure, but before it is that, it is something else. It is a book that describes what is! It is a book of reality, an introduction to the nature of things. The reason why marriage is practiced everywhere in the world and has always been is because God made marriage to be the fundamental unit and building block of human life. The Creator wove marriage into the fabric of human existence. The reason why, when God’s law for marriage is ignored or flaunted, bad things happen to a culture and a society—and hardly anyone denies nowadays that our culture of easy divorce has been extraordinarily harmful to people, to husbands and wives and to children—is because God made human life to depend upon faithful marriages. He wove the faithful, loving relationship of a man and a woman into the fabric of a happy, fruitful, fulfilling human life. The way of the transgressor is hard, and it is particularly hard here. Defy God in regard to his will for marriage, and everything begins to unravel, and the pain and the heartbreak and the disintegration begin to seep down into the rising generations to do more harm as the years pass.
Serious Christians, of course, are the first to admit that they are sinners, that they are far too often selfish and unloving. They are quick to admit that there is that in their hearts that, left to itself, could ruin any marriage. But for the Christian, it is not left to itself. It is made subject to Christ and his love and his Word. A Christian who loves the Lord Jesus is eager, determined to live in a manner that pleases him. The Holy Spirit is always working that desire in him or her. And any real Christian knows that nothing pleases the Lord more than husbands and wives who truly love one another, who are faithful to one another, who serve one another, and who are committed to living in such a way that reveals their loyalty to Christ. They must forgive one another because Christ has forgiven them. They must love one another because Christ has loved them. They must serve one another as Christ has served them. When Christians are determined to live for Christ, as real Christians are, the result is always a faithful marriage. And that is why serious Christians, no matter what surveys tell you, rarely get divorces.
Their marriage, in their minds and their hearts—where it matters most—is fixed deep in cosmic and eternal realities: God’s creation, his will for the life of human beings, and his blessing upon those who trust in him and trust him to have spoken the truth about the proper way of life. Christians came to Christ not first for his understanding of marriage. They came for the forgiveness of their sins and for the hope of eternal life. They came, indeed, in many cases because they were beset by problems that they could not solve, a sense of alienation from God and the world that they could not themselves overcome, a sense of despair about the future, a sense of deep confusion about the meaning of it all. And in Christ, they found the key. They discovered God’s love, his grace and forgiveness, and a new power in themselves put there by the Holy Spirit. A new world opened up to them that they had not seen or known before.
The wonderful thing that they then discovered was that this new world was the real world. And suddenly everything was new, and many things made sense that had not made sense before. And one of those things, and one of the most important of them, was the love of a man and a woman and this universal human desire for deathless love. All of this comes from God. This pure and wonderful prospect, hope, and longing rises in our hearts because we are made in God’s image—a God of eternal love, whose love within himself, between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the origin and the pattern of all human life and, especially, the love of man and woman. No wonder marriage would be permanent. No wonder it would be a relationship so profound that the life of a new generation could be built upon it. No wonder it should be the source of so much that is happy and holy and life-giving in human existence. It is God’s plan, God’s will, God’s gift. It is God’s love woven into human life. And God’s love is immutable, unchangeable, eternal.
And Christians know this, and that makes all the difference in the world.
I heard recently an exchange between a man who was arguing that being a Christian didn’t make that much difference to the morality of someone’s life and a man who was arguing that, in fact, being a Christian made a world of difference. Since the recent election, as you know, when the media reported that the “moral values” people went heavily for President Bush, there have been a number of people who are eager to argue that being an evangelical Christian doesn’t make you a better person than someone who is not. And, to be sure, real Christians are not likely to argue that they are better people than others. They are, as has often been said, more likely to say that they are beggars too, but have found where to find bread. But obviously it does make a difference to one’s life whether one follows Christ or not. Every Christian knows it. It must make a great difference to know God, to have the love of Christ in one’s heart, to know the truth about life, to have the Holy Spirit within.
Anyway, in reply to the one man’s assertion that it doesn’t make such a difference, the Christian man put his case this way. He asked the man who was dismissing the difference that Christian commitment makes in a person’s life this question: Suppose you were walking by yourself at night downtown in some large city and, as you passed a doorway, five big, burly men came out of that doorway, caught your eye, and began to follow you down the street. That is a situation that would be likely to unnerve almost anyone. Would it make any difference to you, however; would you be any less concerned, he asked, if you knew that those five men were just then leaving a Bible study? And the man was forced to admit that it would change, it would dramatically change his state of mind. He would stop worrying altogether. Men coming out of Bible studies don’t mug strangers on dark streets. Everyone knows that.
Well, it is the same with marriage. When you know that you are married to an earnest, serious, committed follower of Jesus Christ, you don’t worry about being mugged in your marriage. People who live by the Bible think very differently about marriage because they know where it came from, who gave it to them, and what marriage is for. They have a theological marriage, and that is what marriage was always intended to be. Marriage from God, by God, and for God will always be the happiest and the most fruitful marriage for us.
🐍 The Pharisee Trap and God’s Ideal
The Lord, on his way to the cross and meeting people’s needs, had the Pharisees vexing him with the question about divorce. Not to grow in their knowledge of truth, but to test him. I explained how that question was a big trap, but we saw the Lord’s wonderful answer, to their amazement.
We must not treat this passage as the whole teaching of divorce.
- Pharisees’ Crafty Question – 1: Is it lawful to divorce for any reason?
- Lord’s Devastating/Shattering, Authoritative, Majestic Biblical Answer: He gives four reasons why you should not divorce.
- Pharisees’ Twisted Question – 2
- Lord’s Biblical Clarification
- Disciples’ Shocking Application
Their hardness of heart meant that had sin entered, God would never have given that permission. The root cause of the Mosaic legislation was their hardness. The Pharisees used that as a command for divorce. You are thinking wrong in terms of legislation; no, no, you have to think in terms of the sanctity of marriage. Four reasons why you should not divorce: Divorce is contrary to divine institution; it is the breaking of a seal which has been engraved by the hand of God.
📜 Biblical Grounds for Divorce: Adultery
But what are the grounds of divorce? As I said, the only thing we can see is that the grounds of divorce would be adultery. Let me just see if I cannot help you to see this.
Evidence from Ezra
Go back in the Old Testament for a moment to Ezra Chapter 10, verse 3. “Now, therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives and such as are born of them.” Now, here are the people of God saying, “Let’s make a covenant with God to divorce our wives.” “According to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God and let it be done according to the law.” Now, the reason for this is that they had married pagans. God had forbidden them to do this, and they had entered into mixed marriages. They had become spiritual adulterers. They had abandoned God, they had abandoned God’s commandments, they had married these wives of adultery. And there is a real sense in which God doesn’t even recognize these marriages. So, they said: “Let’s get rid of these wives, for this matter belongs unto thee; we shall, we also will be with thee, be of good courage and do it.” “Then arose Ezra, made the chief priests, the Levites and all Israel swear that they should do according to this word, and they swore.” Now, there actually here is an advocating of divorce. They are told that they should divorce. And it is very difficult, at this point, to interpret the passage in specific; but in general, what it is saying is this: They had entered into adulterous unions. It may well have been that they had divorced their Jewish wives to marry these pagans, and God never really saw those as legitimate marriages. But more than that, they had intermarried in a spiritual adultery, and God sees divorce as legitimate in that case.
Now, let me go a step further. Pagans live by adultery. In other words, their pagan worship was adulterous. They had temple prostitutes, both male and female. And when they went to worship, for example, the people who worshiped Baal would go in and actually engage in sex orgies. And I believe the reason that there can be legitimate grounds for divorce here is because their spouses were pagan adulterers and idolaters. And on that basis, God is permitting them to shed those wives, or husbands, who are engaged in that incessant, unceasing worship of false gods connected not only with idolatry but with adultery. And so, you see implied here then that they were to be divorced because of the spiritual intermarriage with idols, and the physical union they were having with the prostitutes who carried on the idolatrous worship. Now this is a hint, then, at the fact that there is legitimate divorce where there is adultery involved, a very important text.
Evidence from the Prophets
Let me take you to another one that is even more significant. Isaiah Chapter 50, verse 1. Now in this particular verse, the Lord is confronting a wayward, disobedient, sinning people. And He is talking to them as their husband: Israel is My wife; I am her husband, is the idea. And so the Lord says: “Where is the bill of your mother’s divorce whom I have divorced?” Where is your divorce certificate, God says. The answer, of course, is they do not have one. In other words, He is saying, “How dare you join yourselves to idols, how dare you commit spiritual adultery, how dare you abandon God and the worship of the true God, how dare you leave Me, your husband, O Israel, how dare you do that, where is your divorce? What gives you a right to do that? Have I divorced you?” And the answer, of course, is that He had not.
But look at Jeremiah 3:8. And now you are later than Isaiah. For 700 years now, God has been calling to Israel. For 700 years, He has been saying, “Stop your idols, stop your idols, stop your spiritual adultery.” For 700 years, Israel has been spiritually adulterous, joining itself to other husbands, other deities. Seven hundred years of incessant spiritual adultery with other gods. And finally, after the 700 years, Chapter 3 of Jeremiah, verse 8, says, “And I saw when for all the causes whereby Israel committed adultery I had divorced her and given her a bill of divorce.”
Now, guess who divorces here? Who does it? God does it. God, after 700 years, divorced Israel. That is what He says. That is the analogy that He uses. And He did it for her committing adultery. Now if you want to know, then, what the basis of a divorce is in the Old Testament, it is adultery, because that is the only way you could break a marriage was through adultery because if you committed adultery, you would be dead, and that would break the marriage and free the partner. But if God was gracious and didn’t take your life, divorce was permitted but only when there was hardness of heart that could never be resolved, you see? And it took God 700 years to get to that place. So, it is a great illustration of patience, isn’t it? You do not say, “My husband did it once; that’s the end of him.” There needs to be an understanding of that. It is for continued hardness of heart. So, even God divorced. That is such an important, important passage because God, my friend, does not do things that are not right, and God doesn’t give us living illustrations of His own behavior that we cannot follow. You understand that? So that is why it grieves me that people will come along and say there is no grounds for divorce; there is. But it is in a prolonged, unrepentant, irreconcilable case of adultery. That is the essence of what even the Lord is indicating.
In Jeremiah 31 and 32: “Behold, the days come, says the Lord, I’ll make a new covenant.” You know what He is going to do? He is going to get married again. You know who He is going to get married to? His first wife, Israel. He is going to get married again with the house of Israel, the house of Jacob. Verse 32, “Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which My covenant, they broke, although I was an husband unto them.” And that affirms that God was no longer their husband. But He will remarry them, and restore that covenant, and make a new covenant. So, there is allowable divorce for adultery.
Why Divorce Replaced Death
Now, somebody might ask at this question: why did divorce replace death? And I have already suggested one reason. Reason number one is that because God is gracious. The same reason maybe the early years of the church when Ananias and Sapphira died for not giving what they promised to the Lord. They died, but a lot of other folks throughout the history of the church have done the same thing and haven’t died. God was establishing examples then. And God is patient to us.
But I also think that maybe the reason death was not enforced was because there was nobody around pure enough to enforce it. Because all of the executioners would have had to kill themselves first, because the nation was so filled with adultery. In fact, do you remember the woman taken in adultery in John 8, and they were all there, and they had their stones. They caught her in the act, and the man just up and took off. The woman is there, and they are ready to stone her. And Jesus looks them right in the eye and says, “Let him that is without,” what? “Sin cast the first stone.” He may have been saying, “You are a whole bunch of adulterers yourselves. How dare you be such hypocrites?”
So, we see then, the Old Testament ideal. Jesus simply restates it. Back to Matthew 19 now. God never intended divorce for any reason. But where there was adultery, God killed the partner. That is how sacred marriage is. He did not want you to commit adultery, you could die. But God was gracious, and men were sinful, and where there was a constant irreconcilable adultery, God permitted divorce. But, the Old Testament permission was only designed to meet unique, practical problems in an imperfect, sinful world. And adultery is the only thing that can break the bond. And if it doesn’t break the bond by death, it may break it by divorce.
Remarriage After Biblical Divorce
And as I said before, if divorce is a merciful concession to the adulterer, do we then say that because God shows mercy to the guilty, He penalizes the innocent? In other words, let us say in the Old Testament your husband commits adultery, he is dead. He has no chance to repent. If he is unredeemed, he is in hell forever. Are you free to remarry? Sure, because death breaks the marriage. If God allows you to divorce, he allows that person to live in order that that person may have time to repent and be restored and even redeemed. Because He is gracious to that person, does He penalize this innocent person over here to a life of celibacy? Hardly, because God doesn’t have to make tradeoffs. He is not gracious to one, and make somebody else pay the price. And so, we believe that where there are grounds for divorce, there must therefore be grounds for remarriage. The purpose of the divorce, after all, was only to show mercy to the guilty, not to sentence the innocent to lifelong singleness, loneliness or misery.
So, the marriage ideal is the same, and Jesus says it, and the only reason Moses even allowed divorce was because your hearts were so hard.
Now, Verse 9: “And I say unto you, whosoever shall divorce his wife not on the grounds of fornication, or adultery,” fornication being the broad term that encompasses adultery—here moicheia and porneia are one and the same, as in Matthew 5, we dealt with it there. “But whosoever shall put away his wife, not on the grounds of fornication, and shall marry another commits adultery. And whosoever marries her who is divorced, commits adultery.” And Jesus says the same thing He said in Matthew 5:31 and 32. The same thing in Deuteronomy 24: when you get a divorce for other than adultery, you proliferate more adultery. That verse is not a new verse, that is not a new thought, that is not a new truth, that is Deuteronomy 24 all over again. That is Matthew Chapter 5, verse 32; the same statement exactly is made there. It is nothing new; it is the same old principle. You see, in Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mount, the Pharisees would say, “We don’t commit adultery, we don’t commit adultery.” And Jesus says to them, “Oh yes you do. You commit adultery two ways: one, when you look on a woman to lust after her you commit it in your heart. Secondly, you commit adultery because you divorce for unbiblical grounds, and when you do that you make adulteries all over the place. So, you are adulterers of the first order.” It is exactly what He is saying.
The key phrase: not on the grounds of fornication, or immorality. It is a commonly used word to encompass adultery. For example, in 1 Corinthians 10:8, it says very clearly: “Nor let us act immorally,” uses the same word, “as some of them acted immorally and 23,000 fell in one day.” Now, people would say, “Well, no, you are only talking about fornication here, not adultery. It is outside of marriage, not including marriage.” They are going to have to explain then that all 23,000 people who were killed by God and recorded in 1 Corinthians 10 were unmarried. That is silly. Obviously, the word encompasses both sex outside of marriage and sex that would be constituted as adultery. He is not just referring only to unmarried Israelites, or unmarried Corinthians. The word encompasses all sexual evil.
Paul’s Clarification on Remarriage
Now, perhaps a word from Paul, 1 Corinthians Chapter 7, will help fill in our thinking. 1 Corinthians 7:10: “Unto the married, I command, yet not I but the Lord, let not the wife depart from her husband.” Now here, Paul reaffirms the same basic truth: don’t leave your husband. “But, if she departs, let’s say you decided to do it, you just pack up and leave: ‘Let her remain,’ what? ‘Unmarried.’ You have got no basis at all to remarry. If you do, what will you become? An adulteress. Or, you have, a second option: be reconciled to your husband.” And then he turns the table: “Now, don’t let the husband divorce his wife.” So, stay married. Very, very important. And we will go back to 1 Corinthians next week when we get into some more things.
So, we have seen Jesus uphold God’s ideal, then. And He silenced the Pharisees. In fact, He made them appear as adulterers. So, when they came to Him, they really walked into a buzz saw. They were trying to discredit Him, and before the conversation is half over, they are standing there, a whole stack of adulterers in public gaze. Divorce is not God’s will for every cause. It is never His will for any cause. It is permitted only in the cases of prolonged and unrepentant adultery; otherwise, it makes defiled people.
Now, let me just draw this to a conclusion with one key thing. People always ask about the right to remarry, and I just want you to know that the Bible affirms that remarriage is okay under certain circumstances.
- Death of a Spouse: Look with me, all right? Romans 7:3: “So then,” it says, “if while her husband lives,” it is talking about a married lady, “if while her husband lives, she be married to another man, she’ll be called an adulteress.” You cannot marry another man, can you, while your husband is still alive? “But, if her husband be dead, she’s free from that law so that she is no adulteress though she be married to another man.” Now, that verse says remarriage is okay. It is okay to remarry somebody, if your husband died. Also 1 Timothy Chapter 5, verse 14: “I will therefore,” Paul says, “that the younger women marry,” (referring to widows) “and bear children, and lead the house, and give no occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.” So, young widows are called on to remarry, so remarriage is okay. 1 Corinthians Chapter 7, verse 8: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows: it is good for them if they abide even as I, but if they cannot have self-control, let them marry.” So, if you are a widow, or a widower, you have a right to remarry. Look at verse 39: “The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband lives, but if her husband be dead, she’s at liberty to be married to whom she will only in the Lord.” So, in all those passages, there is an advocating of remarriage in the case of death.
- Divorce on Biblical Grounds: Now, it seems consequent to all of this to say this: that if God permits remarriage where there is death; then in cases of adultery, if God went by the absolute nature of the law, there would always be the possibility of remarriage, right? And because God allows for divorce, it does not mean that when the person cannot be reconciled, there is no hope for them but to be single all their life. I think that is to confuse the issue. And so, I believe that God would allow remarriage in the case of an adultery that caused a divorce.
Look at 1 Corinthians 7:27 for a moment: “Are you bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Are you loosed from a wife?” What does that mean? Have you been divorced? “Seek not a wife. But if you marry, you have not sinned.” In other words, if you have been loosed from a wife—it does not say how—if you have been loosed from a wife and it is justified, and it is legitimate, and it is according to biblical grounds, if you marry you have not sinned. “Nor a virgin marry, she hath not sinned.” Isn’t that interesting? That it would put a previously married person in the same breath with a virgin? And so, we believe then, that God permits remarriage where divorce is on biblical grounds.
Now, we have worked our way through the whole of the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees, but what is really fascinating about the passage is the reaction of the disciples. And that we are going to look at next week.
Conclusion and Prayer
Let’s have prayer. Father, we know that it is easy to look for justification in the Scripture for our own evil, to look for ways out of following Your will. And we don’t intend to do either. We only want to understand Your truth. We only want to understand that You hate divorce. But You are a merciful, gracious, forgiving God. And in cases of adultery where there cannot be reconciliation, You have not sentenced a person who seeks to do right to a life of abuse or misery. But You have given them a gracious alternative to marry in the Lord. But outside of that, God, You have really set the rules straight: no divorce and no remarriage, or everybody becomes adulterous. Thank You for the clear word from You, and may we never do treacherously against the wife of the covenant of our youth. May we reaffirm in our hearts day after day, the covenant made between the two and You. And may we celebrate with joy what You have put together, the sweet, sweet grace of life, the loving tender companionship of a man and a woman. Lord, we know that when people will keep that covenant, and love each other deeply and truly, and keep You as the focus, You will pour out on that union such blessedness, they will not be able to receive it. But as soon as they violate Your principles, You bring Your just chastening.
And so, Father, we would sanctify marriage, and we would affirm that though You permit divorce and remarriage in extreme cases, from the beginning it was never that way. We pray that You would eliminate divorce from our fellowship in days ahead, that You would restore those who are in the midst of it, that You would bring back those who have already done it. I thank You for the invitation I received this week, Lord, to a wedding of two people who were divorced and are now coming back together. We would not tear apart what You have made. Bless the marriages in this church. We thank You that You have made them all. Fulfill them as they walk in obedience to You.
Some—as was often the case with those who served in the courts of kings in ancient days—were born with the capability, but were later rendered incapable of marriage by men for the fulfillment of their appointed role in court. And some remain physically capable of marriage, but have no need to get married because they have been given a freedom from that need as a gift from God; and such people use that freedom in order to devote themselves to the service of God’s kingdom.
Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Bangalore 