Text: Matthew 5:31–32
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Marriage, Divorce, & Moses
Virtually every one of us, every single person in this room, sitting in a pew this morning, maybe listening to this sermon later online—all of us have felt the deep, violent malevolence of what happens when the subject of our passage this morning goes wrong.
Every single one of us understands—at least in some capacity—the forceful centrality of what it is that the Lord Jesus would teach us this morning. This morning, our text invites us to sit at Jesus’ feet at the foot of his mountain and learn from him about marriage and divorce.
Marriage, we will see, is either a builder or destroyer of men, women, and children; of churches, cities, states, nations, and civilizations. It has the potential for some of the purest glories in God’s good creation, as well as the potential for some of the deepest places of inglorious despair and death.
Marriage is many things, but one thing it is not and cannot be is a thing to be trifled with. My prayer is that the words of the Lord to us this morning would root down deeply in our souls and therefore in our households and families, and that it would spring up and produce a harvest of glorious, intergenerational fruit.
Look with me, if you would, at Matthew 5:30. This is the Word of the Living God:
“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
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word; may he write it on our hearts by faith.
A Deuteronomic Controversy
So far in this section of Jesus’ sermon, he’s been giving us the correct interpretation of God’s Law given through Moses, in order that his Kingdom might be a Kingdom of citizens whose righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. We should understand him to be doing the same thing here.
Against the Liberalizing of Scripture.
As he did with the sixth and seventh command, so he is doing with a command of God found in Deuteronomy 24. Let’s take a look at that passage, Deuteronomy 24:1–4, the passage Jesus cites:
“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. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.”
-Deuteronomy 24:1–4
This passage is a fairly straightforward requirement in the Mosaic Law, forbidding remarriage to a divorced spouse after they have remarried someone else. But there was a controversy in Jesus’ day about one part of the passage, a controversy that fundamentally centered around what we might call “liberalizing” of the Scriptures.
Jesus rebukes this idea in our text this morning, rebukes those who would liberalize the law. What does it mean to liberalize the Scriptures?
This liberalizing instinct is a perennial temptation and tendency of fallen humanity. To liberalize the Scriptures is to relax or soften its requirements by obscuring, avoiding, studying arguments, antinomianism, and any other means of pretending we don’t understand the Bible or that it doesn’t require what it requires.
The controversy surrounding this passage in Deuteronomy had to do with exactly this liberalizing tendency when it came to marriage and divorce. We know about it from an exchange Jesus has with the Pharisees later in the book, in Matthew 19,
“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
There were two basic directions the Jewish leaders of the day went in interpreting the command of Deuteronomy 24. Each way centers around the word “uncleanness” in the Mosaic Law. The conservative side said that only adultery constituted this kind of uncleanness. The other side responded that, since adultery was already a capital crime, it couldn’t mean that. So they allowed for “uncleanness” to be very broad; functionally allowing a husband to divorce his wife for virtually any reason he found to be uncleanness.
So Jesus, both in our text and in Matthew 19, teaches the correct understanding of the law, of Deuteronomy 24. He rebukes the liberal interpretation—the one allowing for almost any reason, and says rather that “uncleanness” that allowed for divorce is only sexual immorality.
He says, “… everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” The word translated “sexual immorality” in this passage is the Greek word porneia.
So what is porneia?
It’s obviously very important, then, that we understand what this word “porneia” means. The word is a big bucket word, one that means “sexual immorality.”
I’d say (and it’s important for me to say that there is some degree of disagreement surrounding exactly what it can encompass; some think it is only physical adultery)—but I’d say the following would fall under porneia and the possible grounds for divorce.
Adultery.
Obstinate, unrepentant refusal of marital rights.
Unrepentant, serious sexual sin, such as ongoing enslavement to pornography after serious attempts have been made to call the spouse to repentance.
Abandonment. In 1 Corinthians 7, after commanding Christians not to divorce their spouse merely if they aren’t a Christian, Paul says that if an unbelieving spouse abandons a believing spouse, that the believing spouse is free.
I take the view that Paul is not giving a totally separate category of grounds for divorce, but that the abandonment by an unbelieving spouse is a sin that falls under the umbrella of porneia. Why?
Because Jesus says that divorce can only be lawful for porneia, and Paul doesn’t contradict the Lord. And because abandonment is a refusal of marital rights—a sexual sin. Further, abandonment of this kind rarely remains mere abandonment, but nearly always results in further sexual infidelity. Sins are like grapes in the Bible—they grow in clusters. Sin usually begets more sin.
So the marriage covenant can, in hardness of heart, be so violated and broken, that divorce is permissible. Especially in the case of a spouse in the situation where they are married to an adulterer, but the civil government refuses to enforce the death penalty for it. In that case, the offended spouse is free to divorce.
If a man marries a women divorced unbiblically, Jesus says that he commits adultery. And if a man divorces his wife unbiblically, Jesus says that he makes her commit adultery. Especially in this time, it would have been very difficult for a divorced woman to support herself without remarrying. So his sinful divorcing of her is forcing her to remarry unbiblically.
It is important to note that you should seek serious pastoral counsel before taking a drastic step like divorce. We would be glad to help you think through these things and be obedient to the Lord. Also, it is important that you understand that...
This law does not require divorce for sexual immorality, but rather permits it in very limited circumstances.
You are free to forgive your repentant spouse in the Lord and reconcile to them in the marriage. You are not required to divorce your spouse just because you can. This is a great and glorious display of a gospel which proclaims the glory of a God who saves an adulterous people from their sin by his sheer and unmitigated grace.
However, there is a tragic, sinful thing that can happen in churches, where the victim of adulterous spouses are looked down on for divorcing the offending spouse. This ought not be. You are laying on them a requirement the Scriptures do not. The Lord allows for divorce in this case, so we also must allow for it, and not punish the one who is really the victim.
The marriage covenant is a serious, weighty thing. It is not to be taken lightly. Now, it’s important that we understand why marriage is so strongly protected in the Scriptures.
We can begin to see why when we answer questions like: What goes wrong when marriage goes wrong? What happens if we throw of Jesus’ teaching and head off into our own direction? Let’s answer that line of questioning in two ways:
First, we need to see the goodness of what marriage is.
Then, we need to see what else goes wrong when marriage does.
On The Goodness of Marriage
To understand Jesus’ teaching on marriage and divorce, we need to do some spade work in our doctrine of marriage. What is marriage? Why is divorce bad?
To that end, I’d like to do something similar to what we did last week in taking up Jesus’ teaching on sex. Remember, one of the first things we need do in the fight that the Lord called us to against the sin of adulterous lust, is to understand why it is that lust can send you to Hell.
We needed to recognize that one of the reasons lust is so dangerous is because of the massive goodness of sex—that sex is such a glorious thing, such a glorious gift of God, that to mar it with lust is to commit high treason. It is worthy of Hell.
In the same way, in order to see why the Lord takes marriage so seriously, we need to understand and see the glory of marriage, so that we can see and understand the inglorious sinfulness of unrighteous divorce.
Why is marriage such a good gift that violating its sanctity through unrighteous divorce creates conditions that put people in danger of capital crimes?
1. Marriage is good because God made it.
Remember that in Matthew 19, Jesus refers back to the creational math of marriage—namely, that 1+1=1, that one man and one woman equals one flesh—and teaches that this covenantal oneness, this covenantal union, is something that God did.
God made marriage. We have to start there, in Genesis—not in Deuteronomy 24—if we want to understand marriage. Deuteronomy 24 exists because sin exists, because of hardness of heart. You can’t even rightly understand Deuteronomy 24 until you understand the creational nature of marriage from Genesis.
So just as Jesus taught us last week and the week before how to properly obey the sixth and seventh commandments, this week he teaches us how to properly understand and obey God’s design and his commands for marriage. And his main point in Matthew 19—his main point about what we learn in Genesis about the creational design for marriage as God made it—is that marriage is not just something God made, but something God does.
Every time a marriage happens, Jesus teaches us that the husband and wife becoming one flesh is something God does—he says, “Let not what God has joined together men separate.” God made marriage—the actual institution. And God makes all marriages—he is the one uniting husband and wife.
God made the institution of marriage.
God is the one who makes two into one in marriage.
Therefore, marriage is radically good.
Therefore, any teaching—even teaching in the law concerning lawful divorce—is given to guard against the worst effects of sin, not to condone or promote divorce as a positive good. Because of the hardness of men’s hearts, which leads to adultery and sexual uncleanness, divorce exists.
2. Marriage is good because of what it is aimed at doing and how it is aimed at doing that.
Marriage is a thing to be taken seriously, a thing to be protected and guarded, because of what it is aimed at doing and how it is aimed at doing that.
So what is marriage aimed at doing? Lots of things, but certainly one of them is covering the earth in God’s glory by covering it in his image bearers. Marriage multiplies image bearers. As such, marriage is the foundation of human civilization.
And how is it aimed at doing that? By means of a living parable of the gospel. That a man leaves the house of is father to win a bride, and that fruitfulness happens at the one-flesh union of that man and his bride.
So just as with sex, one of the reasons that sinning against your covenant partner in marriage is such a damnable sin is because of how good marriage is—to mar it with sin is to mar a glory.
What Goes Wrong When Marriage Does
Another reason for Jesus’ strong teaching on marriage is what goes wrong when marriage does.
When marriage goes wrong, something God made is going wrong—and not just something peripheral that God made. When marriage goes wrong, so does civilization.
Wrecking marriage is wrecking something God made—and that by itself is always a damnable thing.
But not only are we wrecking something God made, we’re wrecking something central, not something peripheral. Sin is always damnable, but not all sin is equal before God, or in its effect in the world God made. For example, lying about your favorite color isn’t as culturally harmful as genocide. God doesn’t treat those two sins equally, though both would make you a lawbreaker.
Wrecking marriage is wrecking something at the foundation-level of creation. Marriage is not just where God designed for people to be made, but also where people are formed. Marriage isn’t just responsible to b the nursery where children are born, but the schoolhouse in which they will are raised up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
So when marriage goes wrong, so does civilization. So does civilization, because you’ve just thrown sand into the gearbox of the formation of human beings. You can’t do that without bringing dysfunction and misery into everything those human beings go on to do.
So wrecking marriage wrecks art, science, music, technology, entertainment, education, commerce, worship… everything people do is affected, because marriage is at the heart of where people are made and formed.
Just over 50 years ago, the state of California instituted the first of what are known as “no-fault divorce” laws. These laws allow for divorce without showing fault, or a violation of the marriage covenant. I know most of us grew up with that as totally normal, but you need to know that it is radical, historically speaking.
And the effects in our world have been nothing short of devastating. No-fault divorce cracks the door on the dissolution of civilization, and that is not an overstatement. There is a reason that actually the first no-fault divorce law on the books in modern times came about—guess where—in Soviet Russia in 1917. It was an intentional part of their plan to destroy so-called “traditional” culture—another name for the civilization built in the West on the expansion and victory of the Christian faith.
Believe it or not, Stalin actually reversed the law a decade later, because it was too harmful to society in his estimation. We are literally more radical than Stalin on this issue.
By the way, do you know who signed this no-fault divorce idea into law in California in 1969? Ronald Reagan. The result was a more than doubling of the divorce rate almost immediately.
And we should care, and care deeply, about this, because what we’re talking about when we talk about human culture and civilization isn’t some mere abstraction. It’s not just a kind of subject you could learn about in a school somewhere. No, civilization is people.
When civilization goes wrong, that means that people are going to face tremendous suffering. Sin doesn’t just destroy human civilization, it also breeds misery. It destroys children. It offends a holy and righteous God.
Do you see why adultery is, in the Scriptures, not just a sin, but also a crime? And specifically, a capital crime? Do you see why Jesus takes marriage so seriously and puts walls around it?
How Then Shall We Live?
Let me leave you with three words of exhortation, if I may.
1. Do not marry a fool.
To the single men and women in our midst, let me urge you not to marry lightly. Examine the fruit of a man or a woman before you enter this covenant with them. I have seen careless marriages lead to devastation time and time again, for both the parties involved and their children.
2. Fight to stay in fellowship with your spouse.
Whatever sin would threaten your marriage, kill it with zeal. Whatever disagreement would drive a wedge between you, deal with it before the sun goes down. Whatever steps you have taken towards any kind of adultery—whether of the sort we looked at last week, adulterous lust, or of the “innocent” flirting at work—whatever it is, run hard the other way.
And if there is sin you need to stop holding against your spouse and extend forgiveness, do it today. Before the sun goes down. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
Fight for the covenant you made. Don’t give up. Fight as if civilization and your soul are at stake.
3. If you have sinfully divorced a spouse, repent, ask for forgiveness from all involved, and do everything you can to make restitution.
The Lord forgives. Don’t think that you can’t be saved, that God can’t redeem you from any mess that you have made. The story of the gospel is the story of God, the cosmic Bridegroom, coming down to rescue an adulterous, wicked, sinful, unclean bride. God is slow to anger. He is eager to forgive you if you will confess your sin and turn in repentance.
But the Lord would call you to repent, to walk in humility, and to pursue peace with God and man if you have sinned in this way.
This means confessing your sin to all parties involved without blame-shifting or downplaying or hiding or self-justifying or excusing your sin. This doing all that is in your power to reconcile and be at peace with all men. This means making restitution insofar as it may be made.
If this is you, seek pastoral counsel, and let us help you walk through it. God is good. He can make gardens in deserts, and he can certainly bring glory, even through your shame, if you will but bring it to him in faith.