“Matthew 19
1 When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. 3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.” 11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
1 Corinthians 7
10 To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. 11 But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.
12 To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. 13And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.
15 But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace. 16 How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
”
“I got the call today that I didn’t want to hear, but I knew that it would come. An old true friend of ours was talking on the phone; she said you found someone, and I thought of all the bad luck and the struggles we went through, and how I lost me, and you lost you. What are these voices outside love’s open door that make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more? I’m learning to live without you now, but I miss you sometimes. The more I know, the less I understand. All the things I thought I knew, I’m learning again. I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak, and my thoughts seem to scatter, but I think it’s about forgiveness, even if you don’t love me anymore.” That’s from The Heart of the Matter by Don Henley.
Divorce is the end of a marriage, but it isn’t the end of your ex. That’s relevant in regard to any number of areas—childrearing, finances, friendship circles, but this morning we are going to consider it in regard to remarriage.
Scripture’s teaching on remarriage does have to do with your ex but it isn’t about holding the past against them or having the past held against you; it is about finding the God-honoring path forward. That’s the claim of this sermon: looking for the God-honoring path forward is what considering remarriage is all about.
We will study this in two points. First: positions. Second: particularities. First, we will study the major positions on how divorce relates to remarriage. Second: we will look at some of the particularities having to do with divorce and remarriage.
First: positions. My hope in this series is that we are learning a consistent sexual ethic. An inconsistent sexual ethic heaps scorn on those with a different story from yours while ignoring God’s word for your situation. An inconsistent sexual ethic feels comfortable condemning homosexual behavior but turns a blind eye to premarital sex. An inconsistent sexual ethic leads to judging what’s “out there” and ignoring what’s “in here.”
It does you no good to study what the Bible says about situations that aren’t in while you ignore what the Bible says about a situation you are in. Remember, the hardest place for any of us to obey is the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s easy to live other people’s lives because we don’t need to live them. It’s hard to live our lives because that’s where we actually need to obey.
The words we read from Matthew and 1 Corinthians on divorce and remarriage need to be understood and obeyed because they are for our good. They are from God. That isn’t always how we treat these words though Gordon Fee is right to say that, “Some find [these words of] Paul and Jesus too harsh and try to find ways around the plain sense of the text. Others turn the text into law and make divorce the worst of all sins in the church. Neither of these seems an appropriate response.” These words, like so many texts we’ve studied, are confusing, in part, because we’ve been trained to think of romance as a highly personalized affair that is really only between us and the person of our choosing rather than as an expression of our creatureliness and our obligations to our Creator. Remember, this is much more about you and God than it is about you and another person.
We want to understand what God’s will is for each of us in our own circumstance and how to carry that out. That’s what we’ve been considering when it comes to dating and singleness and being a husband and being a wife and being a parent and a child. Now we want to see the relationship between divorce, which we studied last time, and remarriage. It might be uncomfortable to do so, but if we don’t we do a disservice to people who have been divorced because we do a disservice to people who want answers.
We are calling this point “positions” because we will consider four major positions on the relationship between divorce and remarriage. We don’t have time to do anything near justice to any of these positions, but I do want you to know that there are proponents of each of these views who struggle mightily to make sense of the Scriptures and love people well. There are also proponents of each of them who don’t. I say that because I don’t want you to judge those who hold any of these views as, by definition, “graceless” or as “not caring about obedience.” To do so is to make ham-fisted judgments, which is what we are trying to avoid with each of these topics. None of this, however, is to say that each of these positions on divorce and remarriage is equally correct.
So, here are the views: first, there is the permanence view of marriage which states that the one flesh union cannot be dissolved by anything other than death. Proponents of this view would focus on the fact that neither Mark nor Luke include an exception clause about divorcing for unfaithfulness and argue that Matthew’s words about “marital unfaithfulness” in “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery” refers not to adultery after marriage but unfaithfulness during an engagement. This view says that once you are married, you are bound to that person for life.
Second, is the Roman Catholic, sacramental view of marriage which states that the one flesh union cannot be dissolved by anything other than death or an annulment. An annulment is a declaration, for a few specific reasons, that the marriage was never valid to begin with. So this doesn’t say anything about what happened during the marriage, but only that it was invalid to begin with.
Third, is the divorce-but-no-remarriage view which states that there are situations in which divorce is the just way forward—unrepentant adultery, unrepentant abandonment—but that in those situations the injured party should remain single waiting for repentance rather than marry another.
Now, remember each of these views is trying to do justice to Jesus’ words, “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery”, and Paul’s words, “If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him.” No one is trying to make rules for the sake of rules. They are trying to do justice to what God has said because God’s will is for our good.
Fourth, is the just-divorce-just-remarriage view. This is what I would argue for, and I wish we had time to explain why I think it is superior to the previous views. The “just-divorce-just-remarriage” requires an understanding of a just-divorce, which is one of the reasons we spent out last study considering just-divorce as a category. I would argue that Jesus said that “marital unfaithfulness”, porniea in the Greek, was a just cause for divorce because, as we saw, one flesh behavior outside of the one flesh union dissolves the union and unrepentant sexual unfaithfulness makes reconciliation not only impossible but unwise.
We want to be wise with the category of porneia because it isn’t limited to adultery. A man who unrepentantly sexually harasses women falls within this category. Unrepentant consumption of pornography falls within this category.
The second category for just-divorce is abandonment by an unbeliever as we saw last time. The apostle Paul expects that Christians married to Christians will remain married, but he doesn’t have the same moral expectations of an unbelieving spouse; that’s what lies behind 1 Corinthians 7:15, “But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances.” It’s impossible to stay married if an unbeliever won’t remain married.
We want to be wise with this category because sometimes a spouse will make life truly intolerable to force the other to abandon the marriage. Sometimes a husband will abuse his wife and then cry “abandonment” rather begin his hard work of repentance when she wisely finds a safe place to live.
We also want to be wise with this category of abandonment because it can be unjustifiably widened. Having a workaholic husband who is almost never home certainly isn’t right on his part, but neither is it abandonment. Your wife telling her friends everything on her heart and tells you next to nothing isn’t right on her part, but neither is abandonment.
We didn’t consider the relationship between capital crimes and divorce last week. Under the Old Covenant, certain sins warranted the death penalty—murder, kidnapping, incest, child sacrifice, perjury in a trial when someone’s life is on the line, homosexual behavior, and others. The practice of the death penalty would certainly end the marriage so even though we are in the New Covenant and under a completely different judicial system, it stands to reason that sins deserving death dissolve the one flesh union.
Now we need to be careful, it is easy to mishandle this category. After all, someone might say, “the wages of any sin is death”; that’s not the point of this category though. The point is that certain sins were so heinous and damaging to society under the Old Covenant that they demanded immediate execution. The goal with any of these categories is never to find a reason to leave the one flesh union. The goal is to see where the one flesh union has already dissolved. That’s crucial to this position because if the divorce is just, it is just to get remarried.
This matters to God. He considered Himself justly divorced. He considered His one flesh union with the northern kingdom of Israel dissolved. After her repeated and unrepentant unfaithfulness, He sent His prophet to tell Israel that, “she is not my wife, and I am not her husband.” Later though, He promised to give Israel new hearts to keep a new covenant because He loves reconciliation. That’s crucial to understanding remarriage. We will see where reconciliation is and is not possible in our second point which moves us from divorce to remarriage. That’s our second point: particularities.
This point is called particularities because we will look at particular scenarios. Now practical theology professor Jim Newheiser wrote a 300-page book on marriage, divorce, and remarriage, and said, “it is virtually impossible to address every conceivable scenario, or even every situation I have ever seen personally, in the space allotted in this book”, so don’t be surprised if you have questions that aren’t answered in one sermon.
We’ve already seen that if the divorce was just, it is just to get remarried, but what if you’ve divorced your ex without just cause? The call now is reconciliation or remaining single; 1 Corinthians 7:10-11, “A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.”
Paul, following Jesus, gave a caution to anyone considering divorce without just cause. The caution was that unless you have just cause for divorce, don’t get divorced and if you do get divorced recognize that you now have a choice to remain single or to reconcile with your ex. That’s the caution behind Jesus’ words, “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery,” and Paul’s words, “A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.”
Now singleness often looks better than a difficult marriage, but the message here is that once you’ve been divorced long enough you will most likely want the sort of intimacy that only marriage should supply, and that marriage is the marriage you left. That’s the call to reconciliation. Reconciliation is what it is all about because marriage is a picture of God’s reconciling love—two becoming one. As Gordon Fee put it, “If the Christian husband and wife cannot be reconciled to one another, then how can they expect to become models of reconciliation before a fractured and broken world?” This is why we delight in stories about exes reconciling. This is why kids of divorced parents are always hoping that their parents will make the appropriate changes—also called repentance—and get back together. If you are not willing to reconcile, remain unmarried; “A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.” Being willing to reconcile is part of obedience after an unjust divorce.
But now what if you would be willing to reconcile but your ex is not willing? The question now becomes, “why not?” If your ex will not reconcile because God’s command, “A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband”, is irrelevant to them, you have to ask yourself about the genuineness of your ex’s faith just as you need to ask yourself about the genuineness of your faith if God’s word is honestly irrelevant to your decision making process. We live in a culture of great hypocrisy in which any number of people claim to be Christian but will not follow Christ’s commands. Is your ex actually a disciple of Jesus? If not—if you would be willing to reconcile because Christ commanded but your spouse will not because they truly do not care about Christ’s commands—Paul’s words enter in because your unbelieving spouse has now taken reconciliation off the table; “if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances.”
What if you are divorced without just cause, but your ex has been living in porneia—some sexual sin that would have broken the marriage if you were still married? What would have broken the bond of marriage can also break the call to reconcile the marriage. You aren’t bound if your ex is hooking up. Now again, though, this is about the heart. The goal is not to look for fault in your ex so that you can marry someone else. The goal is to live as one flesh and one flesh behavior outside of the one flesh union breaks that union and the call to reconcile that union.
You can’t reconcile that union if your ex has already remarried. “I got the call today that I didn’t want to hear, but I knew that it would come. An old true friend of ours was talking on the phone; she said you found someone.” If your ex has remarried, you can’t reconcile the marriage. The call now is to obey God in what’s in front of you by obeying Him as a single if you want or obeying him in a new marriage with another Christian.
What if, and this is our last one, you’ve come to see that you’ve been unjustly divorced, you were unwilling to reconcile, but you’re already remarried someone else? Well, then do what any of us do when we find out we’ve sinned: confess and obey in what’s in front of you now. Confess where you fell short in divorcing without cause. Confess where you fell short in not being willing to reconcile. Obey God by being an obedient spouse in this new marriage.
Again, we can’t cover every particularity, but what I hope you’ve seen is that each of these particularities is about what obedience looks like today with what’s in front of you. This isn’t about your past haunting you. It is about seeking to obey God in this situation in which you now find yourself now. You are called to do what each of us is called to do—put right what you can and recognize what you can’t. That’s the tension Don Henley sang about in an incomplete way, “I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak, and my thoughts seem to scatter, but I think it’s about forgiveness, even if you don’t love me anymore.”
That’s incomplete because the heart of the matter goes deeper than forgiveness; it’s about reconciliation and it isn’t finally about exes; it’s about us and God. This is about God reconciling with us and telling us to do the same wherever truly feasible. It is about treating others the way God treats us. That’s what we see in Jesus. That’s what us becoming more like him involves. Amen.