Divorce and Remarriage, Pt. 1
Matthew 5:31‑32
Tonight as I'm sure you're aware we're going to be continuing our series in Matthew's Gospel, and so I invite you to take your Bible if you will and look with me at chapter 5 verses 31 and 32, Matthew chapter 5 verses 31 and 32. We've been having a tremendous time studying the Book of Matthew and we've found that it touches on so many vital areas of life. In our day and age perhaps none anymore central than the issue we'll be speaking to tonight from verses 31 and 32. In these two verses we read, "It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement; But I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, except for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery; and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery."
Let's ask the Lord's blessing as we study this together. Our Father we thank You tonight that we can approach a difficult portion of the Word of God and a difficult subject in our day, with the Conti_ confidence that the Spirit of God is our teacher. And we pray Lord that You would give us clear understanding in Your Word, as to what it is that You say, and how we apply it in our own lives. Make this especially meaningful to the many who are in the midst of situations related to the problem of divorce. But to all of us Father may we have a greater understanding of Your heart and mind, because we've shared these truths, in Jesus name, Amen.
Let me say at the very beginning that if there's any confusion about the subject of divorce it is not due to the fact that God has given us a confused picture in the Bible it is due to the fact that so much sin has entered into the world that it has confused the simplicity of what God has said. God is very clear in the Bible about the issue of divorce. And I think you're going to find in our study tonight and next week and then perhaps on a third week as well, that it is very simple to understand what God says in the Bible. The confusion comes when you try to fit the standard of God into the lack of standards of our own society. The difficulty is not with God, the difficulty is with man, and we want to understand that from the very beginning.
Now as we look at these two verses it's not enough really for us just to talk about the two verses, uhm, we, we've gotta open up the whole subject because introducing the subject would create a great amount of confusion if we didn't cover all of it and so that's why we're going to spend several weeks doing it, we want to cover all that the Bible has to say about this so that we can get a full grasp of what our Lord is saying.
Now in a book entitled, The Death Of The Family, a British physician has recently suggested that the best thing we could do in human society is to do away with the family altogether. He advocates ah, total extinguishing of the family unit as we know it. He says, "The family is the primary conditioning device for a Western Imperalistic world view, and we have to get rid of that." Kate Mil let, who is a well known women's liber, has written a book called, Sexual Politics, and in this book she writes, "That the family unit must go, because it is the family that has oppressed and enslaved women."
Now you know that in our own city and in our own state and around the country homosexuality is on an incredible rise. Our own city council has passed a gay rights bill which is only the beginning of what we're about to see in the city of Los Angeles. What has occurred in the city of San Francisco with an almost 50% homosexual popo...population began with a gay rights bill. And once the door is open the flood begins, another attack upon the family. It doesn't take much of a, of a hard look at the world, even a cursory glance will reveal that Satan is doing everything he can to attack the family. And he does it in many, many ways.
Recently in this last edition of Christianity Today Magazine, there is an article by a Doctor Armond Nicoli the Second, who is a psychiatrist, a Medical Doctor on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Doctor Nicoli says this, and I want to read you some excerpts from his article. "Certain trends prevalent today will incapacitate the family, destroy its integrity and cause its members to suffer such crippling emotional conflicts that they will become an intolerable burden to society. If any one factor influences the character development and emotional stability an individual, it is the quality of the relationship he or she experiences as a child with both parents." And he underlines the word both. "Conversely if people suffering from severe non‑organic emotional illness have one experience in common, it is the absence of a parent through death, divorce, etc. A parent's inaccessibility either physically, emotionally or both can profoundly influence a child's emotional health." And I want to stop right there to say this, what this eminent psychiatrist is saying is, that most people who have non‑organic, that is they're not physically uh, induced illness, but who have emotionally induced illness have in common a common denominator and that is a wrong relationship in their childhood to their parents. And Nicoli goes on to suggest that if we come up with a society without families, we will have such mental and emotional monsters in the next generation that there will be no Way possible for society to cope with them. He further says, quote, "What has been shown to contribute most to the emotional development of the child is a close, warm, sustained and continuous relationship with both parents. Yet, certain trends in our society make this most difficult." End quote.
Now he goes on to suggest what these trends are, and I want you to notice what he says, and I don't think he's been listening to my sermons lately. But it amazed me how he agreed with what I said. Now when just the average preacher likes ... like me says it, everybody gets upset, when an eminent psychiatrist from Harvard says it everybody listens. But listen to what he says, he lists the trends that are causing the destruction of the family, the trends that are going to cause a generation of emotional cripples. Number one, in the list that I want to give you, married women with children working outside the home. Interesting. Married women with children working outside the home. Nicoli says, and I quote, "My clinical experience indicates clearly that no women with young children can do both at the same time, without sacrificing either the quality of work or the quality of child care." End quote. That's essentially what I was saying, wasn't I, in Ephesians chapter 5.
Another tendency, he says, in our society that is going to cripple the next generation is the tendency for families to move frequently. He says 50% of the U. S. population lived at a different address 5 years ago. Consequently young people have no sense of roots, have no concept of extended friendships." Another one, he says, "Another trend that is going to destroy the family as we know it and cause emotional cripples is the invasion of television into the home. One fifth of the lifetime of the next generation will be spent watching television." If you live to be 80 years of age and you're average, you will have watched television a total of four thousand days of your life. Creating a tremendous impact, and since as we know television is part of the system and the system is to tear down the family, you will have a total of four thousand days of anti‑family propaganda at one level or another.
Another, Nicoli says, there is another trend that has the same effect and it is, "The lack of controls in our society." And what he means by this is that we don't have any moral standards. And when a society has no moral standards what invariably results is deep moral confusion. And when you have deep moral confusion in the life of an individual you will have a tremendous amount of guilt, and a tremendous amount of guilt leads people to, to compensate for it by aberrant behavior. He further points out that no standards in a society will cause people to be unable to control their impulses, there will be a rise in violent crimes, there will be a wildness to our sex activities, homosexuality and perversion will literally go crazy in the next generation.
Further, he says, "Another trend that is doing the same thing is a lack of communication in the home." A study in a small town in the United States indicated that the average father spent an average of 37 seconds a day with his young sons. No communication. Well there are some trends that Nicoli pointed out. Married women with children working outside the home, the tendencies for families to move frequently, the invasion of television, the lack of controls in our society, a lack of communication in the home, all of those contribute to the break down of the family which will create a generation of emotionally misfit people.
But the first one in his list I haven't mentioned yet. The number one cause of emotional problems in the lives of the next generation is divorce, divorce. Nicoli says this, "The trend toward quick and easy divorce, and the ever increasing divorce rate subjects more and more children to physically and emotionally absent parents. The divorce rate has risen 700% in this century, and it continues to rise. There is now one divorce for every 1 point 8 marriages. Over 1 million children a year are involved in divorce cases, and 13 million children under 18 now have one or (borth) both parents missing." End quote. He sees divorce as the first problem in his list.
And he goes on to conclude this, what about the future, what can we expect if these trends continue? And here's his answer, "First, the quality of family life will continue to deteriorate, producing a society with a higher incidence of mental illness than ever before. 95% of our hospital beds will be taken up by mentally ill people. This illness will be characterized primarily by a lack of self‑control. We can expect the assassination of people in authority to be frequent occurrences. Crimes of violence will increase, even those within the family, the suicide rate will rise. As sexuality becomes more unlimited more separated from family and emotionally commitment the deadening effect will cause more bizarre experimenting and widespread perversion." End quote.
Now I don't know about you but that's a frightening picture to me, but that's where we're going. And divorce is the major contributor, now what can we do about this? What is the answer? How do we get a handle on all of this disaster that faces us? Well most importantly, and you know I would say this, we must return to the principles of the Word of God. What does God say? People are defending divorce on all kinds of grounds. People are trying to defend the working mother with children in the home on all kinds of grounds. People are defending television, people are defending the mobility of our society, people want to live the way they want to live, so they do anything they can to justify that manner. But if you go back to the Bible as we've been trying to in the last few months and you see how the family is to be ordered as God lays it out, it is the only way we'll solve our problems.
Now it's fine to be concerned about divorce because of its societal effects, and that's what Nicoli is saying, he's saying we've got to do something about divorce, because look what it does. Now as important as that is it isn't the most important reason. And I'm not here to tell you we need to do something about divorce because it messes up the next generation, it does do that, but I'm here to tell you we have to do something about divorce because it violates God's Word. That's why it messes us the next generation. The bottom line on this is not how it affects society; the bottom line is not a relativistic morality. We don't say it's wrong because it does this, it's wrong because God says it's wrong, see? And so we don't want to get into a societal argument, we don't want to get into sociological ah, structure and sociological factors, we believe that this is something that must be dealt with at the very core with the Word of God. And unfortunately that's not what the church is doing in the most, in the most cases today.
Churches today give little or no or even wrong guidelines for marriage and divorce. There are many churches and pastors who will marry anybody, anybody who comes along. I remember when I first came to Grace Church 10 years ago; the first thing I ever faced in this church was a...people who were rather leading folks in the church, a very wonderful family who wanted me to marry their daughter to an unsaved person. That was the first crisis I ever faced in the ministry here. I wouldn't do it, so the suggestion came, all right uh, you don't have to do it if it's against your conscience, we'll have it in the church and have somebody else do it, and I said, if it's wrong, it's wrong and I won't do it and it shouldn't be done in the church, if this is Christ's Church. But not all churches are like that, and the elders took a stand on that, and they've taken a stand like that all along. But not all churches do that, there are plenty of churches and plenty of pastors who'll marry anybody to anybody under any circumstances. They are many young people who marry the wrong people for the fulfillment of fleshly desire with little or no thought about its real consequence. And lust for the forbidden partner, I heard recently about a church not far from here where two elders uh, were involved with their oth...each other's wives, and they decided to do nothing about it because it might disturb people in the church. Flippancy about sex, sex is a topic of discussion in the pulpit and, and in the pew and around the church in a very flippant way that is less than the dignified manner in which God speaks of it in the Bible and I think this kind of flippancy in the name of honesty simply creates a bigger problem than it ever solves. So it is not a problem that's being dealt with honestly and objectively in, in many churches, some are and I thank God for the ones that are.
But where you have self-centered, where you have sinful carnal people who cannot sustain right relationships, and where you have a society with toleration for divorce you're gonna have divorce on a rampant pandemic level, and that's what we have in our society. Frankly, I'll tell ya it would be a welcome day when I didn't have to at least one time hear about some kind of marital problems, some kind of divorce situation, you know I didn't have to be embroiled in some complications associated with divorce, separation or remarriage. It goes on adinfinitum, adnauseam, it is incessant in the church.
Now we're not saying that ah, we reject all the people in these circumstances, we're simply saying it is something we must deal with from the Word of God. And I don't believe there's much reason for confusion, I don't think God has a tough time getting His point across, I just don't think people look for it, rather they want to justify what they do so they try to find something to support that.
But I want us to go to the Word of God in these studies and I want us to see what God really has to say. Now I hate divorce, I hate it, and that's okay for me to hate it because the Bible says God hates it, so I'm in agreement with Him. And I, I hate divorce for what it does to society, I hate to think of the next generation of, of emotionally imbalanced people, I hate to think of all of these little children in broken homes that are going to grow up and have no sense of security, no concept of authority, no sense of morality, no standards to live by, etc, etc. I hate to think of the societal effects of divorce. But that's down the line for me, what I really hate to think of is the fact that divorce and remarriage is a violation in many cases of the Word of God, and that's even a more important issue to me.
Now let me go a step further in just introducing this, many people apparently are needlessly confused as to what the Bible teaches, and I hope when we're done that you won't need to be confused anymore. Let me give you the options. Some people are teaching no divorce for any reason, under any circumstances, for anything at all. Now that's what some people teach, no divorce at all for anybody under any circumstance. Other people teach, yes, divorce under certain circumstances but no remarriage, no time, never, ever for anything. And then another group says, yes, divorce and remarriage anytime for anything at all. And others are saying, divorce and remarriage, yes, but not for anything at all only under certain circumstances. So there you have the four views. No divorce ever. Two, divorce but no remarriage ever. Three, divorce and remarriage whatever and whenever. Four, divorce and remarriage possibly only under certain limited circumstances. Those are the few views there are, there are no more than that, that's it. And people sort of land here, there and everywhere in those four.
Now the question we want to find out is which is Biblical. There are people going around the country saying the Bible teaches no divorce, there are other people going around the country saying the Bible teaches divorce but no remarriage, and others are saying the Bible teaches divorce and remarriage and you're free to do as you will and so forth, and others the fourth view, we must find out what the Bible says.
Now by the way, in trying to discover what the Bible really says we find ourselves exactly where the Pharisees are in Matthew 5:31, this is exactly where they are. They had trumped up an erroneous view of divorce and remarriage, and Jesus confronts them with their error and sets the record straight. So that in these two verses, just takes two verses, that's how simple it is, Jesus Christ sets the whole record straight, and I want you to see that. "It hath been said, (verse 31) Whosoever shall put away his wife, (or divorce his wife) let him give her a writing of divorcement; But I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, except for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery; and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery."
Now let me set the context for you, and I want you to stay with me because this is really important. Jesus is still facing the sins of the Pharisees, and He is unmasking their hypocrisy. You see here's what they did, they believed that you could be righteous by your works, but they couldn't keep God's standard so they invented their own and then called it God's standard. Now God had a very high view of marriage, God had a very clear command regarding marriage and divorce, the attitude of God was never in question about it but they couldn't live by that standard, so they invented a new standard, called it God's standard and said, look we can keep this one, we're alright. They dragged God down to their level, they invented their own code of ethics, and He unmasks them, and then to make it worse they misinterpreted the Bible to fit their own view. Which is what anybody does who wants to do that, you make up your own view and you find a verse to go with it. And it's exactly what they did, they decided that you ought to be able to shed your wife whenever you want, you ought to be able to have a divorce whenever you got the whim and the will to do it, and so they just twisted around the scripture to fit that. And the scripture they twisted around was Deuteronomy 24:1 to 4 and we'll get to that later tonight. They invented their view to justify their sin and then they misinterpreted a verse to fit their, their justification. And so what you have in verse 31 is their view and what you have in verse 32 is His view. Verse 31, "It has been said." Verse 32, "But I say." Now, it has been said, beloved, does not refer to the Old Testament law, it refers to what these people had been taught by the rabbis. And if you go back to verse 21, "You have heard that it was said by them of old." In other words it was the, it was the traditional Jewish view passed down by certain rabbinical teachers, not the view of God, not the Old Testament, not the Pentateuch, but their own misinterpretation of it, and that's what Jesus is presenting in this entire section here. So He says, you have heard, but I'm telling you, in other words what you have heard is wrong, what I'm telling you is right. He is correcting their traditional misinterpretation.
It's exactly what he did in verse 21, go back to it, "You have heard that it was said by them of old," and then He quotes that problem, verse 22, "But I say unto you." Verse 27, "You have heard that it was said," verse 28, "But I say unto you." Verse 33, "You have heard that it was said," verse 34, "But I say unto you." In other words, in the Sermon on the Mount in order to lay these people bare and naked as sinners before God He says to them, your interpretations of God's Truth are all wrong, they are biased, they are opinionated, they are self‑justifications that twist and pervert the Word of God, and I want to set the record straight. And you see in so doing He forces them to recognize their sinfulness, they can't get by with the game they're playing, they can't get by with reducing the law of God to a level that they can attain, and saying they are therefore just.
Now, basically what verse 31 is saying is that they tolerated divorce for any reason. Jesus then says, I'm just the opposite, I don't tolerate it for any reason. And these are the two truths that I want you to see. They tolerated divorce for any and all reasons, and tolerated remarriage for any and all reasons, and on the other hand Jesus did not. And by the way what He said here is still in view right now today in 1979. So we have to come to scripture then for our answer.
Now let me add a footnote at this point. We've got to be honest with the Bible. Sometimes people say to me, you know uhm, we've got to stop divorce in America. Somebody said this to me recently. We must stop divorce, in America, especially in the churches, we must stop Christians from being divorced, we've got to put a halt to it, what would be the best way to do that? And I would answer ... simply this, I answered, well the best way to do it would be to say the Bible teaches no divorce, no time, for no reason. Never allowed, if you could just find a verse that said that we'd be okay. Do you want to know something? It doesn't say that. Now it'd be very comfortable to take that view, and there are some who do, and they say that we must deny divorce and remarriage because of what it leads to. If we can just stop divorce and remarriage we can clean up the church, if we allow divorce and remarriage we got problems, social problems, guilt problems, the floodgates of sin open up and all this. And that's right, and it does do that. But you cannot invent a viewpoint in the Bible to solve a social problem; you have to deal with it as the Bible deals with it. Sure it would be convenient if the Bible just said no divorce and no remarriage under any condition. But no one yet has been able to find that verse. People say, well we've got to stop it because of what it leads to, to, we must have an absolute moral standard not a relative one, if we start making up new doctrine to fit the problems that come in our world we're going to be inventing another Bible. We must deal with what the scripture says as it says it.
Now to understand this, and, and I know you're wondering when we're going to get to these two verses, just relax. By the time you're done I'll promise you'll understand what these two verses mean. But to begin with I want you to go back to Genesis, and let's see it how it all began. And don't be in a hurry anywhere ... to go anywhere tonight cause it's really hot out there. And this is the coolest place in town believe me. But I want you to see what the Bible says and my heart is really exercised over this issue, because there is so much confusion about it.
Now in Genesis 2:23 we find that God has made Adam and Eve, first making Adam and then Eve, putting them together in this wonderful union, and this is what happens, Adam meets his wife and said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh."
Now this is where you have the beginning of God's view of divorce, in God's view of marriage. You cannot understand divorce unless you understand marriage; you will never understand how God views a separation until you understand how He defines the union itself.
Now here we find that God has brought together a man and a woman, and it is definitely God who does this. I believe that since marriage is an institution of God any marriage is in a sense God bringing two people together. It doesn't have to be spiritual it can only be physical but nonetheless it is in the purview and the plan of God. So it is God who brings man and woman together, the two become one. In what sense? Well, it is a physical oneness, and I think the sexual physical part is true ah, and, and maybe the truest form of oneness because when the two come together in a physical relationship it issues in one life, the life of that child manifesting the marvelous oneness of that physical union. And so there is that element of the physical oneness, but beyond that there is certainly also a spiritual oneness, and by that I mean there is the blending together of the spirits of these two people.
Now what God is ordaining here, and you have to know this, the very beginning is monogamous, that is one partner in a female and one partner male, monogamous life long marriage between a man and a woman. Notice it, "A man shall leave his father and his mother, cleave unto his wife; they shall be one flesh." There is no termination to that, there is no ending to that, they continue to be that one flesh.
Now notice the words, "cleave unto," "he shall cleave unto his wife." These are very important words because they reveal I think the nature of the marriage bond, the way God intended it to be. And the term has the idea of being glued to something. A man and a woman become stuck, as it were. Not in the sense that you say, I'm stuck with her, but in the sense that God has stuck you together, you are glued. When two people are glued together they become one single individual, and so it says, "they shall be one flesh." And surely that refers to the sexual union but much more. He unites a man and a woman in a unique and profound biological and spiritual bond that reaches to the very depths of their soul. And so marriage as God designed it is to be the perfect welding of two people together into one, they're not just two anymore they're one, they're one, and one is an indivisible number. They are one. It is the commitment of two wills, it is the blending of two minds, it is the mutual expression of two sets of God given emotions, so that the two become one, and the goal is a perfect oneness, both in the intimacy of the physical and the intimacy of the spiritual and the sharing of those things in life that cannot be shared and are not shared with any other human being. God created sex and God created procreation to be the fullness of expression of that oneness. But, if all there is there is the sexual and there's not the oneness of spirit then believe me the physical act is meaningless, self‑centered and exploitative.
A woman said to George C. Scott, in an interview, the actor, "To you sex means very little, so you don't participate very often. To me it means very much, so it doesn't matter with whom I indulge in it." Now that's a woman who doesn't have any conception of what God ever intended in the two becoming one. In God's definition there were only two and the two became one, in every sense. And when husbands and wives realize that this is God's definition of marriage they would realize that a divorce would be like a man cutting off his leg because he had a splinter in it. Instead of dealing somehow to get the splinter out he amputates the whole leg. Husbands and wives who realize that God has joined them into a single entity wouldn't be so foolish as to hurt the other because they know they hurt themselves. And so when God brings a man and a woman together it is to be in a permanent relationship.
Now that is why Matthew 19:6 says this, "No man may divorce what God has joined together." You may remember it as, "What God hath joined together, let no man (what?) put asunder." The word is divorce.
END SIDE ONE.
SIDE TWO.
The word is, "put asunder," chōrizō it's the very same word translated in First Co