Matthew 5:31-32
Introduction
Everyone is connected to divorce somehow. You may be a child of divorce. Maybe you have been divorced. And almost everyone knows someone who has been divorced. This is not a subject that we can easily avoid.
I want to start this morning by acknowledging that the Christian church has hurt many people in this conversation. People have been shamed. People have been left in abusive marriages and not protected by the church. If that is or was you, I am so sorry. Regardless of the understanding one has about marriage and divorce, like any other issue we tackle as Christians, we must remember first and foremost that each of us are image bearers of God and we should want to provide honor, care, and love for each person we meet and know regardless of the situation they are going through or the struggles they have in their life—including in their marriages.
This conversation this morning, about divorce and remarriage, is not one we are picking out of the blue. As we have said, we teach expository sermons (exposing the text) going straight through books of the bible because it forces us to care about what Jesus cared about. We can’t avoid what he talks about. And what we see this morning is Jesus talks about and cares about divorce.
Our passage this morning is the continuation of what Jesus is teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:31–32:
It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 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.
(Matthew 5:31–32, ESV)
This is not a conversation we can sufficiently cover in one sermon. In fact, you will still leave this morning with many questions that start with, “What about…” or “But what if…”. I can tell you right now we don’t have enough time, nor likely patience, to answer all those questions in this sermon.
My goal today is to lay a broad foundation for our view on divorce and remarriage from Scripture, but it won’t answer many of the specifics you may want to know. We want you to know that all your elders are open for additional conversations with you after this sermon if that would be helpful. We have talked a lot about this. We have read much about this. We have written about this. We are happy to spend more time with anyone as needed. I would be happy to talk more with you.
And we want to admit that there is a debate on this topic amongst God-honoring Christians. We hold our understanding with grace and humility, but also with conviction that we are doing the best we can to understand Scripture and care well for God’s people.
Now, I don’t want you to listen to this sermon and be wondering at each and every turn what we will end up saying about divorce and remarriage, so I am going to start straight away with our position and then walk everyone through our position and how we come to that understanding and the heart that we try hold this position with.
This is our position on divorce and remarriage as the elders of Main Street Church:
We are most convinced that the breadth of Scripture from the Old Testament to the New Testament allows for divorce for adultery, abandonment, and abuse, where the categories of abandonment and abuse includes sexual, emotional, or material neglect, abuse, or abandonment.
We believe that individuals are permitted to remarry when their spouse has died, when they have exercised their permission to divorce under these circumstances, or when an unbelieving or unrepentant spouse has divorced them improperly and remains unrepentant.
For some of you, that position is too strict and doesn’t allow for enough reasons for divorce. For some of you, that position seems too lax and allows for divorce in situations you may not agree with. I pray I can adequately show you today, from Scripture, why this is our position.
That said, we think there is a right attitude that we want to have when we approach the topic of divorce and remarriage today:
Divorce is not the unforgivable sin, and sometimes it is not a sin at all, but it is serious. Many churches and Christians need to work hard at removing the stigmas they too often attach to singles or divorcées, while others need to recognize more deeply how wide-ranging and insidious the effects of divorce are so that they might work much harder at preserving marriages.
Craig Blomberg, “Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, and Celibacy,” 196.
That is the needle I am going to try to carefully thread this morning.
Confusing Background
There is a reason why there are so many opinions on divorce and remarriage: the Scriptures that talk about divorce are somewhat confusing. Here are some of the main passages that deal with divorce in Scripture:
Main Divorce Passages in Scripture
Exodus 21:10–11
Deuteronomy 24:1–4
Mark 10:2–12 & Luke 16:18
Matthew 5:31–32 19:3–12
1 Corinthians 7:15
In Exodus we have a section that talks about a slave wife, and what would happen if her husband doesn’t treat her right. God’s law seems to allow for her to go free if she wasn’t properly being provided for.
“If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.”
(Exodus 21:10–11, ESV)
Again in Deuteronomy, God also seems to be regulating divorces in general.
When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the LORD.
(Deuteronomy 24:1–4a, ESV)
Even though divorce is not mentioned as something God’s people “should” do, it seems to be a fair assumption from these passages that it was happening, and God’s first concern was to regulate divorce so it wasn’t done wrongly and allowed divorce when necessary.
Then we come to the New Testament. In Mark 10 and Luke 16, Jesus makes these statements:
And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
(Mark 10:2–12, ESV)
Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.
(Luke 16:18, ESV)
Jesus gives us some insight into these Old Testament passages and says it was because of the hardness of people’s hearts that Moses allowed for divorce. Yet here, Jesus doesn’t seem to give any exceptions. Jesus uses the phrases “whoever” and “everyone” in these passages. That doesn’t seem to give any exceptions for divorce, and here he says that no one should divorce, and anyone who divorces and remarries commits adultery.
Yet when we come to our passage in Matthew 5:31–32 and a comment Jesus makes later in Matthew 19:3–12, we see something different:
It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 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.
(Matthew 5:31–32, ESV)
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 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’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but 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.” (Matthew 19:3–9)
This time, Jesus says something similar but gives us an exception: adultery. That is weird. If there is an exception, why wouldn’t he say that every time? Why leave it out in the other discussions?
To make it even more confusing, we get to Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:12–16 where he says:
To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
(1 Corinthians 7:12–16, ESV)
Paul here gives us another exception: abandonment. His specific case is when an unbeliever leaves a believer, but we have to wonder if that is only for that case but for believers as well.
This topic makes it clear that God wasn’t having his saints write Scripture to give us a concise list of rules. In this instance, a clear list of reasons you can and cannot divorce would be much easier that what we were given. Clearly God is teaching us through the story of Scripture and the story of his people, which means we will have to examine the larger story of Scripture if we want to better understand this topic.
We believe that all Scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching (2 Timothy 3:16), so we believe each of these sections are the word of God and reveal his heart to us. Yet we clearly need to do some work to harmonize and make sense of all this.
Perspectives
It is out of these passages that there emerge several distinct views on divorce and remarriage in the Church throughout history and up to today:
Divorce
No divorce
They take this passage to be talking about the breaking up of an engagement.
Divorce only for adultery
They follow this passage but believe 1 Cor 7 is only about an unbeliever married with a believer.
Divorce for adultery & abandonment
Divorce for adultery & abandonment and “such cases”, usually meaning abuse of all different sorts
Divorce for many reasons
Remarriage
No remarriage
Remarriage for a Scripturally sanctioned divorce
Each one of these positions is trying to harmonize and make sense of all these different verses we have just looked at.
First, there is a group of Christians who believe that there is no allowing for divorce at all in Scripture. They take Jesus’s statements in Mark 10 and Luke 16 as his main heart on divorce: it should not happen for any reason. They understand Jesus’s statements about the exception of adultery to be about people who cheat during their engagement and not about problems during marriage. They believe Jesus was allowing for the ending of an engagement. They also understand 1 Corinthians 7 as only providing clarity for believers married to unbelievers, so it isn’t pertinent to most discussions about Christians. They would also say that the passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy are superseded by Jesus’s teachings, especially those with no exceptions.
To be honest, this may have some popular level support in certain circles because of some well known pastors who share this view, but from an academic perspective there are very few people who support this position based upon the evidence of Scripture and the language that Jesus, Paul, and Moses are using. We don’t find this position persuasive especially because it makes the phrase “adultery” mean something it doesn’t mean other places and it doesn’t really engage well the other passages throughout Scripture that talk about divorce.
Similarly, on the other end of this spectrum—point 5—we do not find it persuasive to simply say God allows for divorce for many if not most any reason. Even the passages in the Old Testament that were trying to regulate divorces seemed to have in mind very specific instances of the breaking of the marriage covenant in very specific ways. We would want to show how the exceptions we see are in the Scriptures and to be careful not to go beyond those. And we see too many regulations in Scripture to open it up to any reason. This feels like (and actually is) the kind of argument the Pharisees would make.
We will talk about these other three positions as we go along and I explain more about our position. Each one allows for an exception, and we want to show you why we see all the exceptions we have stated: adultery, abandonment, and forms of abuse.
Again, we believe these are God-loving brothers and sisters who hold these other positions. This is not an issue that determines if you will be accepted by God in your faith in Jesus but rather an issue of wisdom and, we believe, one that should matter to the members of a church to know how their elders will encourage and exhort them.
I also want to admit we will also not spend much time on the remarriage idea today. That is because usually every perspective other than the first one here believes that if a person has been wrongly divorced by their spouse or has divorced their spouse for allowable reasons, then they are also allowed to remarry. That is our position as well. And, it is quite complicated to talk about the rights of the one who wrongly divorced someone or who broke the marriage covenant and were divorced. That will definitely be a topic for another sermon.
But since our passage this morning includes the idea of remarriage, I want to make a quick statement. We understand the end of Matthew 5:32 here not to be forbidding remarriage but rather talking about the implications of an improper divorce (an improper divorce CAUSES someone to commit adultery since they would need to remarry). It is talking about who is to blame for that remarriage (the one who MADE the improper divorce, not the one who was harmed). And it is a warning not to use an improper divorce for your own benefit (don’t marry a woman divorced if it was improper and there is still a chance for reconciliation). Those ideas matter but they are also secondary to our main goal this morning of laying out the main foundation of how we understand divorce and remarriage.
The Marriage Covenant
To begin to examine our perspective we need to start with a larger story of Scripture as I said previously. We believe that God is the one who created marriage in Genesis 2:18–25, and therefore he is the only one can tell us how it should work. We believe that God ordained marriage as a covenant relationship between one man and one woman meant to be for life. That word covenant is important. As the prophet Malachi says:
Because the LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth…she is your companion and your wife by covenant.
(Malachi 2:14, ESV)
Even though Genesis doesn’t have the word covenant when God marries Adam and Eve together, Malachi says that God is the one who is the witness to our covenant of marriage. Still to this day most people—Christians and non-Christians—believe that our marriages are a covenant: an agreement or a legally binding relational commitment between two people.
A Covenant God
This is an important starting point because our God is a covenantal God. One of the main storylines we see in Scripture is that our God has chosen to rebuild his Kingdom with his Kingdom people (the Kingdom Jesus has been explaining in the Sermon on the Mount), and he is doing it through covenants. Binding legal relational agreements between God and his people. God makes a covenant with creation and Adam and Eve in Genesis, a covenant with Noah after the flood, a covenant with Abraham, a covenant through Moses with his people Israel, a covenant with David, and a New Covenant with his kingdom people through faith in Jesus.
One of the main things we see about covenants in Scripture is that they are not meant to be broken, but they usually contain stipulations as to what will happen if they are broken. We can see this in Genesis 2:15–17:
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
(Genesis 2:15–17, ESV)
We see similar stipulations in most of the other covenants, most famously with Abraham in Genesis 12 & 15. Sadly, we can’t spend this morning talking about all of God’s covenants and how they work. But it is important to recognize that God is a God of covenants, that covenants are not meant to be broken, but they usually have stipulations of what will happen if they are broken. That is important because we see the same thing with the marriage covenant. It is not meant to be broken, but there are stipulations about what will/can happen if it is broken.
God’s Marriage Covenant
What is even more amazing is that God doesn’t just make covenants with his people, he also uses the image of the covenant of marriage for his relationship with his people. God says that he has made a marriage covenant with his people!
Betrothed: Ex 20:3–5
Sexually Pure: Ex 19:15
Covenant: Ezekiel 16:60 37:26; Jer 11:10–15, 31–32.
Husband & Wife: Isa 54:5–6; Hos 2:16
In Exodus 20:3–5 we see that God says he is betrothed to his people, Israel. He calls Israel to be sexually pure in Exodus 19:15 before they come before him and receive his law to walk back in relationship with him, just like he asks us to stay sexually pure before our marriages. He says that he makes a marriage covenant with his people in Ezekiel 16 and 37 and Jeremiah 11. He even uses the phrase husband and wife to describe himself with his people in Isaiah 54 and Hosea 2.
Paul tells us in Ephesians that the mystery of all marriages is that they are all meant to image God’s love for us in Jesus Christ!
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
(Ephesians 5:31–32, ESV)
Our marriages are mean to give a visible representation of what it looks like for God to be joined to his people (the church) through Jesus Christ. It is meant to image his covenantal relationship with HIS people.
Application: Marriages To God’s Glory
Friends, this means we want our marriages to demonstrate the kind of love that God gives us in Jesus Christ. Where spouses love one another with sacrificial love. Where we only ever think of the other first. Where we are unwavering in our devotion to each other. Where we only act and love like God would act and love us in Jesus Christ. That is what our marriages are meant to show. That means, first and foremost, we want to exhort one another to care deeply about our marriages and fight for them to look like God’s love for us in Jesus. That others might see in our marriages a glimpse of God’s love and covenantal relationship with his church.
Our first application points this morning are that:
Application
Our life is one of covenants: with God and with other people
Marriage is meant to be a life-long covenant between one man and one woman that images God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.
What an amazing call to all of those who are married! Our marriages are one of the ways we get to witness the amazing love of our God to a world that is watching.
Covenant Breakers & God’s Divorce
But sadly, this also leads to our third application point:
Scripture says we are all covenant breakers.
The major storyline of Scripture shows us that we are all covenant breakers. Adam and Eve disobey the covenant God gave them and ate the fruit. Noah, immediately after the flood, sins against God by getting drunk and exposing himself to his family. Israel, while Moses is still on the mountain receiving God’s law, is building a golden calf to worship it. Abraham tries to pawn off his wife as his sister to gain favor with other leaders (twice!). David sleeps with Bathsheba and kills her husband Uriah. We do not see a single covenant keeper in Scripture except our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
You and I are covenant breakers. And we are covenant breakers against our God. God talks about this in depth throughout Scripture. God not only has a marriage covenant with his people, but they also break that covenant with God.
The unrepentant adultery of Israel: Isa 1:21, 2:20; Jer 3:6–10, 31:31–32; Ezek 16, 23; Hos 4:12–14; Mic 1:5–7.
God divorces Israel: Ezek 16:34–59; Jer 3:6–25; Hos 2:10–13
Gives a certificate of divorce: Isa 50:1; Jer 3:8
God talks about the covenant breaking of his people in sexual terms. He says his people have committed adultery against him by following other gods. In fact, God says in Ezekial, Jeremiah, and Hosea that he divorces his people because of their infidelity to him. Israel being taken into captivity in Babylon is a picture of the consequence of God divorcing them. God even says he gives a certificate of divorce to his people in Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Application: Covenant Breakers and Restoration
This brings us to several additional application points this morning:
Scripture says we are all covenant breakers.
All sin within marriage breaks the marriage covenant.
Just like we talked about last week, we are all guilty of lust in our heart both against one another and against our God. Similarly, all those who are married will break our marriage covenant. There is no one here who promised in their wedding vows to love and cherish one another who does not break those vows at some point. And even if we didn’t say THOSE words in a vow, we all have all fallen short of imaging God’s perfect love for us in Jesus rightly with one another in many, many ways. We know this is true because we all know we don’t follow and love God rightly, therefore we can’t live out our marriage covenant perfectly.
All sin within a marriage breaks the marriage covenant and the picture of God’s love towards us in Jesus because God’s love for us is perfect and without sin. He has perfectly loved us in Jesus Christ. God’s love for us is a sweet thing and therefore it is a sad reality it is that none of us can love like that perfectly in our marriages.
The breaking of the marriage covenant does not happen when a separation or divorce occurs, it happens when we don’t rightly love our spouse as God loves us.
In that way, all married couples have broken their marriage covenants.
That means, what everyone who is married should first pursue what we should all desire and long for, is marriages that ALSO model our God who chooses to renew the relationship at great cost to himself.
We should all look first to restore/renew covenants like God
That is one of the most beautiful pictures of all of Scripture! God has chosen to take people who ultimately break our covenantal relationship with him, and he chooses, in his own power, to renew that covenant with us through Jesus Christ at the cross.
That means, our first inclination in marriage should be to seek to be as forgiving towards one another as God has been with us. To overlook the many ways we all break our marriage covenant. To forgive one another often, likely even daily, in our marriages. We should realize that we all have broken our covenant with each other in marriage in many ways and we should desire to extend forgiveness and reconciliation with each other as often as possible that we might also image God’s forgiving love towards us in Jesus.
An Exception With Permission
But even if we believe we will all break our marriage covenants, that isn’t an excuse for divorce. In most situations we are commanded to find forgiveness and reconciliation in God’s power. In this way all marriages sanctify us because we all get to experience a piece of what God experiences—brokenness that we meet with forgiveness. But it is also this grand storyline of God’s divorce that leads us to believe that Jesus’s exception of divorce for adultery is appropriate. We need to realize that:
All sin breaks the marriage covenant, not all sin breaks the covenant the same way.
If God at some point decides that the relationship and covenant is so broken that it no longer images what it should image and HE breaks off the relationship with HIS people, we think it also makes sense that in our lifetime a marriage can become so broken by certain actions that there is permission to divorce.
And the first instance we see of a sin that would seem to allow for a divorce would seem to be adultery. Jesus says this in Matthew 5 and 19, and in the biblical storyline God’s rational for divorcing his people was adultery. Our infidelity to one another seems to allow for an aggrieved spouse to believe that the covenant has been so broken that it can no longer image the love of Jesus for his people. And yet:
Again, we should always first look to restore/renew covenants where possible, but divorce is allowed in these instances.
We say again that we should look to restore or renew covenants because that is what our God does—even amid our continual unfaithfulness to him (adultery). But, we also don’t want to withhold from God’s people something God himself does: divorce. This is how we get to the first step of believing the exception clause for adultery is real in addition to seeing it in Matthew 5 and 19.
And even then, I want to highlight something Jesus doesn’t say in Matthew 5 and 19. He doesn’t say you MUST divorce in this instance. He says “whoever” divorces. This means he is giving permission for divorce—he is allowing it—but not commanding it. As your elders, that is all we will ever say as well. We will try to affirm for you where you may have permission to divorce, but we will never tell you to divorce. There may be instances where even if you have permission to divorce that the best way to image Christ and his love to the world is to act through forgiveness. We image God not only in the many ways we will all sin and break our marriage covenants regularly and show forgiveness, but even in showing forgiveness for the sins that allow for divorce. That is something you will have to hold before God, in your conscience, and trust where he leads you.
Reconciling the Conflict
Additionally, we still must ask how we can reconcile the other passages we have seen in Scripture and how or if they apply to us today. When we look at these other passages, we feel there are two different ways to reconcile them that both end up in a similar place, and we find both these lines of arguments compelling.
Instone-Brewer
The first method of reconciling these other passages is held by many scholars and pastors and is best explained by a scholar and pastor David Instone-Brewer. This is how this particular explanation goes:
They note that almost all scholars today agree that there was a debate going on within the Pharisees as to what kind of divorce was allowed. There were two main divisions—a group who followed a Pharisee named Hillel and a group who followed a Pharisee named Shammai. These two groups disagreed on the extent of what would constitute a just divorce.
The first thing to note is that both groups agreed divorce could happen. They both seem to agree that the categories from Exodus 21 constituted the baseline for divorce. If a slave wife was able to leave her husband if he didn’t provide her with sex, food, or clothing then the Pharisees seemed to extrapolate that anyone (an argument from the lesser to the greater) would be allowed to leave their spouse on grounds of adultery (sex) and abandonment or abuse (imaged by withholding food or clothing). In addition to adultery and misusing sex, withholding food and clothing seems to be so damaging to the relationship that it was a form of abuse or abandonment of the covenant and therefore released the spouse.
This argument would say that it then makes sense that Paul would reiterate that abandonment by an unbelieving spouse is grounds for a just divorce in 1 Corinthians 7 because that was always the understanding from Exodus 21 even for believers. They would also say that Paul is using that same framework in 1 Corinthians 7 when he says earlier that a husband’s and wives’ body is not their own and they need to care for each other physically and sexually. He is echoing the same requirements of Exodus 21 again for Christians, reaffirming that Exodus 21 is still valid for us today.
It is within this context that the Pharisees were debating. The problem happened when they both went to Deuteronomy 24:1 where it says:
When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house,
(Deuteronomy 24:1, ESV)
The school of Shammai looked at this verse and said that the phrase “she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her” and said that indecency only includes the original ideas of adultery or abandonment or abuse as in Exodus 21. The Hillel school said that the phrase was “some” matter AND “indecency.” They split the phrase apart.
By this they meant divorce could happen because of the original Exodus 21 categories AND any matter the person might also find as a problem with their spouse. We know this was a real perspective because there is evidence of some Pharisees teaching that a husband could divorce their wife for even burning his food. This was the “some thing” they meant. This was basically allowing divorce for any reason.
This argument would then say that when Jesus told certain Pharisees they couldn’t divorce at all (Mark 10, Luke 16), it was because he knew it was the Hillel group and they were trying to get him to agree that they could divorce for any reason. To that argument Jesus would say no, you can’t divorce for any reason.
They also would say that when Jesus gives the exception of “adultery,” in other instances he was talking to a broader group of Pharisees or the disciples and that phrase “adultery” was a shorthand way of saying “adultery and the categories you already have like abandonment and abuse.” This is an argument from silence (we don’t know for sure this is happening there), but it does make sense of the confusing texts.
And Jesus using the word “adultery” as a shorthand is something that happens often in Scripture. Often Jewish leaders would say the law, or they say the law and prophets, to refer to the whole Old Testament and the law, the prophets, and the Pslams. It was normal to use shortened expressions to relate to a larger idea, so that can make sense here as well.
This argument also helps explain why Jesus adds a section about divorce in the Sermon on the Mount just after lust in our section of Matthew 5. If Jesus had just said lust was like adultery of the heart, you can imagine how the Pharisees of the school of Hillel would hear that and think, “He agrees with us! Heart issues should now let us divorce for basically any reason.” Hence why immediately after talking about lust Jesus goes to the topic of divorce and clarifies that it was the original issues of adultery and its accompanying points of abuse and abandonment from Exodus 21 that are the only areas of permission (again, using the word adultery as a shortened way to say the whole phrase).
As elders we find that argument to be helpful. It explains why some passages say no divorce and some have an exception clause. It also connects Paul and 1 Corinthians 7 with Exodus 21 and gives reasons for the breadth of exceptions that we see in the rest of Scripture as well.
But we are also helped that there is another path to get to basically the same answer.
Wayne Grudem
This second path is best explained by the scholar and pastor Wayne Grudem. He goes to 1 Corinthians 7:15 and has done an extensive study on the phrase “in such cases.”
But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace.
(1 Corinthians 7:15, ESV)
In examining all the records of Greek literature that we have (tens of thousands), Grudem shows that this phrase “in such cases,” can’t mean “in such cases of abandonment by an unbeliever” as some take it to mean, but rather Paul is saying that there is a larger category than just abandonment that breaks the marriage covenant and where God would not want us to feel “enslaved” to someone who is not repenting or rightly living out the marriage covenant.
This argument says that God wants us to be at peace, and a marriage where someone is not living rightly in that marriage in unrepentant or egregious sin is a type of enslavement that damages the image of marriage in irreparable ways.
This argument would say that even if Jesus only gave us the exception of adultery in Matthew 5 and 19, Paul is saying that we miss Jesus’s point if we don’t see that his exception for adultery is also pointing us to other similar categories that can irreparably break the marriage covenant just like adultery. This argument would say that when Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:12:
To the rest I say (I, not the Lord)
(1 Corinthians 7:12, ESV)
Paul is admitting you won’t read this in Jesus’s words, but this is the heart we should be seeing in Jesus’s words. Paul is pointing us beyond Jesus’s words to the heart—that sounds a lot like the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount, doesn’t it!
We also find this explanation compelling, and it leads to similar conclusions. This argument would say that issues like:
Abuse of Spouse
Abuse of Children
Extreme and prolonged verbal and relational cruelty
Credible threats of serious harm or murder
Incorrigible (which means unrepentant) drug or alcohol addiction
Incorrigible addiction to pornography
These would all be acceptable reasons for a just divorce in this argument. You can see how these would also fall into the same categories from Exodus 21 and the previous argument. Both end up in a similar place.
Main Street Position
Both of these understandings provide basically the same framework of what constitutes allowable grounds for divorce. We summarize this position as I said before:
We are most convinced that the breadth of Scripture from the Old Testament to the New Testament allows for divorce for adultery, abandonment, and abuse, where the categories of abandonment and abuse includes sexual, emotional, or material neglect, abuse, or abandonment.
We believe that individuals are permitted to remarry when their spouse has died, when they have exercised their permission to divorce under these circumstances, or when an unbelieving or unrepentant spouse has divorced them improperly and remains unrepentant.
We would reiterate that there is permission to divorce in these types of situations, but not a command, and our first disposition should always be to seek repentance and reconciliation where possible. But we don’t want to put restrictions on people greater than what we can see in Scripture. That was the sin of the Pharisees that Jesus was consistently preaching against here in the Sermon on the Mount. We don’t want to hedge the permissible ways for divorce simply to make it easier or cleaner.
And we also don’t want to accidentally relax a law where we shouldn’t. That means we would be considered “the least of the kingdom” (Matt 5:19). We are trying to show you where we get this from in Scripture and why we think we are honoring God with this position. We hope you can see we are not just trying to be extra broad to please people nor more limiting to please people, but rather we think this is the best reading of Scripture on this topic for several reasons.
We also want to honor those who may have a more broad or more narrow definition than us, but we (as elders) will counsel consistent with this position and hold our partners accountable consistent with this position. We ask all elders to allow for this breadth of reasons for divorce and to counsel consistently with this. Elders may have a personal conviction that is nuanced within this breadth of possibilities, but we ask them to counsel within this whole sphere. We will not affirm an elder to the board who has no category for divorce nor who would allow for divorce for any reason. Both seem clearly contrary to Scripture.
Honorable Marriages
We want you to know that as elders we tackle this question because we want all of us to have marriages that demonstrate Christ-like love and sacrifice for one another and point others to God. This is our first goal and greatest desire regarding marriages—that our marriages would make us all see God and his love more. That happens often through our constant forgiveness of each other when we don’t rightly live out our covenant as it should be lived out to God’s glory. Sometimes, there are covenant breaking issues that we believe allow for divorce. You have the freedom in those instances to decide if it would most honor God to still pursue forgiveness and reconciliation, or divorce if you feel the marriage has been too marred by that sin.
Importantly, we want you to know we are here to help you—especially if you are in a marriage where one of these types of issues are occurring. If you have a marriage today that has any of the types of abandonment or abuse we mentioned, we want to first and foremost protect you. We want to remind you that adultery, abandonment, or abuse is not God’s heart towards you, and adultery, abandonment, and abuse should not be in your marriage. We are happy to help you work towards reconciliation and find health in your marriage however we can. Or, as you walk in the freedom God gives, to walk with you as you may decide a divorce is permissible and the best way to honor God and the image of marriage.
As a reminder, here is what we would say are the applications we should take away from this section:
Application
Our life is one of covenants: with God and with other people
Marriage is meant to be a life-long covenant between one man and one woman that images God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.
Scripture says we are all covenant breakers.
All sin within marriage breaks the marriage covenant.
We should all look first to restore/renew covenants like God
All sin breaks the marriage covenant but not all sins break the covenant in the same way.
We are most convinced that the breadth of Scripture from the Old Testament to the New Testament allows for divorce for adultery, abandonment, and abuse, where the categories of abandonment and abuse includes sexual, emotional, or material neglect, abuse, or abandonment.
Again, we should always first look to restore/renew covenants where possible, but divorce is allowed in these instances.
Your elders will try to counsel you in these instances, but we will not add a command of what you should do. We want you to walk this out with fear and trembling before God while caring for you.
And again, I want to end with this quote that we began with:
Divorce is not the unforgivable sin, and sometimes it is not a sin at all, but it is serious. Many churches and Christians need to work hard at removing the stigmas they too often attach to singles or divorcées, while others need to recognize more deeply how wide-ranging and insidious the effects of divorce are so that they might work much harder at preserving marriages.
Craig Blomberg, “Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, and Celibacy,” 196.
Benediction
“Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure”— for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.””
(Revelation 19:6–9, ESV)
