The Filling of the Law #3: Divorce

I want to give you just a short list of reasons you can find for people getting divorced: Poor posture; thinning hair; a uni-brow; laziness; she’s a bad cook; an injury or illness has made my partner unattractive or a burden; we’re not intimate often enough; there’s someone else; we don’t like each other anymore;

Or how about this one: Her parents moved into the city to be closer to us

You’re probably telling me that these are old news, and you’re right. What if I told you that these are just some of the reasons that the ancient scribes and Pharisees gave as legitimate cause for divorce? We think of the modern age as the age of the no-fault divorce, but there’s nothing new under the sun.

But this is not the way things are supposed to be. I think I can say without exaggeration that most people hate divorce. When people consider the consequences of divorce on children, on finances, on well-being, on career, on the economy, people would probably agree with the statement: Healthy marriages are better than bad marriages that end in divorce.

Hillel’s grandson, a famous rabbi named Gamaliel, was an important member of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin in the early days of Christianity - he cautions restraint against the Christians in and later, Paul reveals that Gamaliel was his own teacher in childhood. The Talmud, the most important book in the Jewish interpretation of Scripture, refers to Gamaliel as the last great Rabbi. Hillel’s understanding of divorce was already the preferred view in Jesus’ day.

It’s the dominant view today, too. People get divorced for all kinds of reasons. Some of them sound understandable, and some of them don’t.

God hates divorce, too.

There’s no controversy in saying that Jesus takes a much more stringent view of marriage and divorce than our culture. But do you know why?

There’s actually hope tucked away in for you and me, whether you’re single, or struggling in a hard marriage, or enjoying a great one, or divorced and wondering what to do next, or married again.

But in order to get to the hope, we have to face facts first. False hope is useless, and the hope Jesus brings starts with a strong contrast between the hard-heartedness of fallen people and the blessing that He offers in the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Did you ever see a dad and a little kid playing basketball with one of those blue and yellow Fisher Price basketball hoops? Six foot tall dad somehow misses every shot on the 4 foot hoop, his son somehow makes it around him to score again and again,

In order to understand what Jesus says in , we’re going to dive into the text he quotes, the tradition that grew up around it, and Jesus’s own statements about divorce. Then we’re going to consider how we should think about marriage and divorce.

Proposition: We must think about marriage and divorce like Jesus does

I. Where we go wrong in marriage, divorce, and remarriage (v31 - the tradition)

You probably notice that this is a much shorter passage than the passages we’ve looked at in the last couple of weeks.

You probably notice that this is a much shorter passage than the passages we’ve looked at in the last couple of weeks. He doesn’t spend a lot of time here

You probably notice that this is a much shorter passage than the passages we’ve looked at in the last couple of weeks. He doesn’t spend a lot of time here. No “you have heard,” no lengthy application - briefer intro, short quotation from , and Jesus’s very short response.

One reason - covered in more detail in . Jesus taught on things more than once. Sometimes used similar parables in different contexts, too. He addressed the topic of marriage and divorce on more than one occasion, and that later conversation puts things in context. The tradition that Jesus challenges in is the kind of permissive idea of divorce & remarriage that dominated the conversation then and now.

addressed the topic of marriage and divorce on more than one occasion,

And that later conversation puts things in context. The tradition that Jesus challenges in is the kind of permissive idea of divorce & remarriage that dominated the conversation then and now.

says that the Pharisees came up to test him by asking “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” They’re not asking if there’s any cause, but whether just any or every cause is acceptable. They’re saying, “Do you agree that laziness, warts, missing teeth, eyes too far apart, in-laws to close together, and any other reason are all lawful reasons to divorce?” If they’ve heard his teaching on the topic, they know what he’s going to say, and they have a trap laid in store.

But Jesus doesn’t answer the way they want. Instead of going to the commandments of the Law about divorce, he goes to the starting point, before the Law was ever given - what God says about marriage.

Matthew 19:4–6 ESV

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

mat 19.4

Man and woman were created by God, and so was marriage. It wasn’t a social contract, a cultural construct, a convention, an invention. It wasn’t first of all a legal relationship governed by law. It was, and is, first of all, something that God does. Every legitimate marriage is a covenantal relationship, entered by a husband and a wife, with God as the party with the most authority and investment.

And that’s true whether the wedding happened in a church, or a courthouse, or a backyard. It’s true whether one, both, or neither spouse believes that their marriage was instituted by God.

And when a man and woman join together in marriage, even if they’ve never heard of the Bible, even if they’re both entering the marriage intending to leave it the next morning, Jesus says, God is the one who actually joins them together. And what God has joined together, man must not separate.

And that’s true whether you believe it or not. An individual’s belief or lack of belief in doesn’t change whether it’s true. And every single time you name something, you’re expressing part of the nature that God has made in you. No matter how much someone hates God, every time they open their mouths and call something by name they testify to the fact that they are made in His image.

We go wrong on marriage, divorce, and remarriage, when we miss the nature of marriage as something that God does and instead think about it only or even primarily as something people do.

So when Jesus says this, the Pharisees go ahead and try to spring their trap. “Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”

They’re paraphrasing , the same text Jesus quotes in . “Jesus, you said back on that mountain that you came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. So, we’ve gotcha - Moses commanded divorce. Game, set, match.”

Jesus says they’ve misunderstood the Law completely. Moses did not command divorce. says that the Law of Moses was given because of sins. It speaks into a world that is already broken. And in that world, tragically, divorces happen. In Jesus says, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives.” He did not command divorce, and in a fallen world, there are some things that we allow but never approve. The Law regulates divorce, mitigates its destructiveness. Marriages will fall apart, and was one way God’s Law answers that reality.

Actually, says that IF a man gets married, and then she finds no favor in his eyes because he discovers some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and sends here away, and she becomes another man’s wife, and then he also divorces her, or even if he dies, THEN and here’s the commandment - the first husband is not permitted to marry her again.

The scribes and Pharisees jumped on the word “indecency” in and built everything on their interpretation of that one word. The majority said, “Anything can be indecency - if she burns my dinner, that’s indecent, and I can divorce her.” The minority said, “Only sexual offenses are indecency - this law only permits divorce for sexual sin.” Jesus sounds at first like he’s agreeing with the minority, but he actually goes way beyond them.

Now Jesus has pointed all this out - once again, you took the Law and divorced it from its intention.

There’s a practice in Islam called “temporary marriage,” and it’s considered completely legitimate in different ways in both Sunni and Shia Islam, that two people can enter into a deliberately temporary marriage contract, as short as three days, and their behavior is not adulterous according to Islam, and their divorce is totally legit, too. It’s the kind of manipulative use of the Law that seems to lie behind .

Now Jesus has pointed all this out - once again, you took the Law and divorced it from its intention.

When we looked at , we saw that the Torah, what we call the Law, is the story and standard of God’s covenant with Israel. The heart of the Covenant, the heart of the Law, is reconciled relationships. Shalom. Peace with God and peace with man.

With all the brokenness around us and in us, our inclination is to get Legalistic. Atomistic. Instead of looking for wholeness, we think in terms of checklists and technicalities.

The scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day had built a system they thought they could keep. But the result missed the point completely. When you divorce God’s Law from God Himself, you just end up with more brokenness.

The scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day had built a system they thought they could keep. By building up extra teachings and laws around God’s Law, they thought they could protect themselves from breaking it.

Now turn back with me to . We go wrong in marriage, divorce, and remarriage when we divorce marriage from God, and then try to figure things out for ourselves.

First, just like the majority of the Pharisees, when we read , or even , many of us see them as escape clauses.

If a spouse does something indecent, we stand up and throw a flag on the play and kick them out. The Bible becomes a weapon to use against another.

Second, just like the stricter Pharisees, many of us read the Law and primarily as bear traps.

But the result missed the point completely. When you divorce God’s Law from God Himself, you just end up with more brokenness.

Many Christians look at this text and say “This proves that unless a spouse has committed adultery, you must not divorce them.” The Bible becomes a weapon to use against another.

But the starting point is all wrong in both cases, because it divorces the Law from its context. We go wrong because we divorce marriage from God, and then try to figure things out for ourselves.

The result is a never-ending list of reasons to separate what God has joined.

Even more tragic, when we divorce marriage from God, we rob ourselves of the One who loves our marriages more than anyone else, including ourselves.

Trying to make marriage work without God is like trying to win a football game without an offensive line. It’s possible, but it’s pretty dumb. And it makes a hard thing unnecessarily harder.

Look, marriage is hard. Everyone knows that. But marriage is also glorious. And it can be hard and glorious at the same time.

APPLY: The most obvious way for you to avoid the tragic error of the no-fault divorce worldview is to remember that your marriage isn’t about you, it’s a covenant between husband and wife, but God is the one who married you, it’s a picture designed to proclaim God’s love for His people in the Gospel, and no matter how broken your marriage is, no matter how hard things get, you have the best lineman in the world. He sees the holes and guards them, he knows your weaknesses and how to help you, he never gets tired of protecting you and your spouse from the enemy.

And the way for you to tap into His strategy is to think about marriage the way He does. And that takes us to our second point, from verse 32.

II. How Jesus calls us back to a right view of marriage, divorce, and remarriage (v32)

Here Jesus says,

On the other hand, if my parents say “No candy before dinner, but if you eat chocolate

Matthew 5:32 ESV

32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

If we remember how Jesus elaborates on this idea in , we’ll see really quick that the purpose of this verse isn’t to start giving us escape clauses for marriage.

There’s no

So Jesus takes them back to the whole point in - the Law was added because of sins - exists because of hard-heartedness - and in this broken world, some marriages will not survive - “but,” Jesus says, “from the beginning it was not so, and I say to you: Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

What’s going on here? We’ve already said that marriage is a covenant established by God, it’s intended by God to be a life-long union of two people - a husband and a wife - consummated and sealed by the covenantal act of sexual union. That’s what it’s meant to be.

Every divorce means that somewhere along the way, a departure from God’s calling and command has happened. Divorce is a relational rupture - and that is proof that it doesn’t belong in the Kingdom of God, where reconciliation is the starting point. Wholeness, restoration, peace, shalom - these are the starting points for us as Kingdom People. In the old way of doing things, under the Law, the existence of divorce was a foregone conclusion. It’s no wonder selfish people figured out how to justify their divorces from the Bible and make themselves feel good about it. That’s the kind of darkness that Jesus has rescued us from.

But our starting point is not the inevitability of divorce. Our starting point is the reality of reconciliation. Jesus came to reconcile us to God, and to reconcile us to one another, through His death and resurrection.

Because of what He’s done for us, we can have hope, even in the midst of broken relationships, because if Jesus can restore you to a right relationship with God, then He can restore your marriage, too. That’s the starting point. Hope for relationships.

And that means when we walk away from marriage, even when it’s broken beyond our hope of repair, it’s a tragedy. And even worse - Jesus says that a man who divorces a faithful wife sins against her. Verse 32 says he makes her commit adultery.

Here Jesus says that a man who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.

Jesus knows that most divorced people aren’t going to stay single. In fact, the certificate of divorce mentioned in verse 31 was specifically written so that the divorced people could get remarried without anyone claiming it was adultery. But Jesus says that certificate of divorce or not, every divorce and remarriage involves breaking a covenant. The word “sexual immorality” is a very broad word that here refers to any sexual sin that violates a marriage. If sexual sin is present, then the partner can legitimately claim that the covenant has been broken. If a divorce and remarriage happens in that case, then no one can claim it was adulterous, because the adultery that broke the marriage already happened. But if there’s no such sin, he says, divorce results in adultery for both the man and the woman.

In , the Lord speaks a prophetic judgment against the people of Judah. Some of the men had divorced their wives in order to marry younger women, and the Lord says this is a sin against their wives and against God. He says they’re faithless to their covenants. And he says that a man who does this “covers his garment with violence.”

The picture we see in both the Old and New Testaments is that God hates divorce because He loves marriage.

Before we start asking the question, “Is divorce ever ok,” or “Is remarriage ever acceptable to God,” we have to start by wiping away the disposable marriage worldview that we’ve inherited and start cultivating an obsession with the Kingdom of God, where the Prince of Peace reigns, and hoping against hope is the norm, and Jesus brings life where there was only death.

APPLY: So before you start listing exceptions, start with the Kingdom charter. Go back to the Beatitudes.

APPLY:

When you came to Jesus, poor in spirit, spiritual beggars, your only hope was that someone else would pay your debt, and He promised you His Kingdom.

You mourned for your sin, and He promised comfort. To the meek, who trust in the LORD and His timing, he promises the earth itself. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness - who know they have neither on their own - are promised satisfaction in Jesus.

And He says “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

What if you took that Kingdom charter into your marriage? What if you said, “I will be merciful, because God was merciful to me.” What if you said, “My marriage is really, really hard. It would be easy to pack it in. But Jesus made peace with God for me. So I’m going to make peace with my spouse.”

The starting point often makes all the difference. The world has done an amazing job of replacing God’s vision for marriage with a sad, depressing, weak, brittle version of marriage. But we can start today, praying for wholeness, for healing, for peace, seeking God’s vision for your marriage to reflect His love for His people.

In this, I believe there’s no substitute for praying for your husband or your wife. The more I pray for my wife, the more I love her. When I celebrate the things I love about her before the Lord, I love those things even more. When I think of her needs and take them to God, I’m reminded of ways I can serve her.

Jesus calls us back to a right view of marriage, a strong view of marriage. To God’s vision for marriage.

III. Hard words for hardened hearts, and sweet comfort for broken ones

But He also knows that in the here-and-now, there’s still a lot of brokenness in the world He’s redeeming. And this brings us to our final point - hard words for hardened hearts, and sweet comfort for broken ones.

There aren’t many good reasons for divorce according to Scripture. There’s some disagreement among faithful, Bible-believing Christians whether Scripture allows for divorce and remarriage in the case of sexual immorality and spousal abandonment, or if even then remarriage is off the table. I have a friend back in Illinois whose wife left him and his family twenty years ago, and he was convinced that Scripture forbade him from remarrying, and he still hopes she’ll return. I have another friend who loves the Scriptures just as much, and when her husband abandoned her, she was counseled that remarriage was acceptable. But in any case, no one can look at the Bible and faithfully conclude that there’s an endless list of reasons to divorce. Hardened hearts need hard words, because we're very good at justifying ourselves.

I also know a woman who left her husband and then justified it by saying that the Holy Spirit told her to do it. She said that the man she met was her soul mate, and God wanted her to be with this man instead of her husband. But she was wrong - the Holy Spirit never tells us to break God’s Word.

One couple was struggling because the husband got saved and decided he was called to be a missionary, and the wife was not interested, and he thought this qualified for divorce according to Paul’s words in . After all, he said, if he moved to another country for missions, she wouldn’t come, and therefore she had abandoned him, right?

I hope these examples seem silly, because they are. This is how even Christians are tempted to twist the Law around like the Pharisees in order to justify themselves.

Here in , and in , Jesus and Paul give us reason to believe that a Christian is not violating a marriage covenant if they remarry after their spouse commits adultery, or if their spouse abandons them. If we start with the hard-hearted escape hatch mentality, we’re likely to try to find all kinds of other exceptions there and we’re right back where the Pharisees landed. To that, Jesus has hard words - beware justifying adultery.

But Jesus also has words of sweet comfort to the broken-hearted.

Some of you here today have been through divorce and have remarried. And perhaps you’ve looked at this passage and wondered, “Does this make me an adulterer forever? Do I have a scarlet letter in God’s eyes?” People have read these verses and come to some really confusing conclusions. So here’s a few answers to help you sort through it.

First, if you’re divorced and remarried, your marriage is a real marriage. The act of divorce and remarriage really did dissolve your previous marriage. That’s why says that the divorced woman is able to marry the second guy in the first place, and why she can’t go remarry the first guy. If she was still married to the first guy, it wouldn’t make sense for her to be forbidden to go back to him after her second husband divorces her.

Second, if you divorced without Biblical warrant, and then remarried, Jesus says you entered your second marriage wrongly. But the phrase in verse 32 “commits adultery” refers to the act of marrying, not the marriage. One writer says such a marriage is “adulterous originally, not continually.” If you know you were wrong to divorce and remarry, then you should confess that to God and trust in His forgiveness in Christ.

Third, I’ve known people who divorced, and then remarried, and years later were caught in the grip of tremendous remorse and guilt. They wondered if they should now file for divorce and try to get back together with their first spouse. This only makes sense if they think they’re really still married to their first spouse in God’s eyes and that their second marriage is fake. But God doesn’t say that, not at all. Your first marriage, however it ended, really ended. You can’t please God by ending another one in order to try to remake the first one.

But there is something else you can do. God is in the business of redemption. And His Kingdom is one where flourishing often blossoms in the most unlikely places. Whatever you’ve got in your past, Jesus can bring the light of life to shine in your home.

So to all those who are divorced and remarried here, I want to call you to Kingdom hope. Call upon the Lord to do mighty things in your marriage and through it. I guarantee that He would rather you see the Kingdom potential of your second marriage than dwell upon the way you entered it.

Some of you have struggled and suffered in a difficult marriage, maybe you’ve put up with more than you should have to, and the primary feeling you get here in is “I’m stuck.” Maybe you believe you don’t have Biblical grounds for divorce, and you look at the Christians who left their spouses for much less cause and you envy them. Some marriages are so much more difficult than others. But I know that Jesus understands your sorrow, and He weeps for you. says he was despised and afflicted by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And says

Hebrews 2:18 ESV

18 For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

And in says,

2 Corinthians 1:3–5 ESV

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

2 cor 1.

Jesus knows the depth of your hurt, your sorrow, your grief, and even your temptations to leave, to envy others, to hate your spouse. You can admit this to Him without fear. But He’s also given you a church to help you, to comfort you, to walk with you. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Finally, someone here may be at the end of their marriage. Things are already falling apart. Your heart responds to this whole thing with two words: “Too late.”

I don’t know your situation, but I know that Jesus is in the resurrection business. There’s this strange phenomenon that happens in a lot of marriages, where you spend so much time taking care of the kids that you forget to prioritize your marriage. And then the kids grow up and leave the house, and you realize that over the course of 20 or 25 years you became strangers to one another. You don’t know what to say to each other. It’s not too late to recommit to one another. To rediscover this person God has joined to you. I believe that Jesus can restore what’s been lost, but you have to be honest with one another about it, and take your marriage to Him, and ask for help.

I want to leave you with this one last thing - the absolute best thing you can do for your marriage is know the Lord Jesus.

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