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Reading Matthew 5:31-32 where Jesus addressed a law about divorce and remarriage and gives the correct understanding of that law, according to what God intended. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!
Marriage can be a messy thing because it's made up of two sinful people, but marriage can also be a wonderful thing that honors the Lord. And God has given us instructions in His Word when we understand the text.
Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is committed to teaching sound doctrine and rebuking those who contradict it. Visit our website at www .utt .com.
Here once again is Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. We're back to our study in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5. And I'm going to pick up reading here in verse 31 and go through verse 32. This is the next portion of Jesus' sermon, which I'm reading from the Legacy Standard Bible.
Hear the word of the Lord. Now it was said, whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife except for the reason of sexual immorality makes her commit adultery.
And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Today we are going to consider what Jesus taught about marriage, divorce, and remarriage. Now this particular episode, like most, is just 20 minutes long, so this isn't going to be terribly exhaustive.
But I think we'll give a good understanding of what Jesus teaches here and then later on in Matthew 19 as well. First let's get very basic. What is marriage? Marriage is a covenant union between one man and one woman for life.
That's how God created it. That's what he intended from the very beginning, as Jesus also says in Matthew 19. It's there in response to the Pharisees concerning a question they had about divorce that Jesus said, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?
And said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined 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 no man separate. And then the Pharisees go on to say, Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and to send her away? And Jesus said, Because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been this way.
And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another woman commits adultery. Similar sort of a statement that Jesus makes here in the Sermon on the Mount. So we understand the definition of marriage, a covenant union between one man and one woman for life.
What is divorce? Well in its simplest terms, divorce is the end of a marriage. Now the dictionary defines divorce as, Judicial declaration dissolving a marriage, in whole or in part, especially one that releases the marriage partners from all matrimonial obligations.
We as Christians hold to a biblical definition of marriage, also the true definition of marriage as God has created it. A marriage is the covenant union of one man and one woman for life. Therefore we must also have a biblical definition of divorce, which is to break that covenant between a husband and a wife.
There are some 30 passages in the Bible addressing divorce and none of them, not one, speaks of divorce as a good thing. It is regarded as grievous as death, because that's what a divorce is. Divorce is the death of a marriage.
Whenever I have counseled couples that are in trouble, marriages that are on the rocks, and one of them brings up something about divorce, or I have to address the fact that they've talked about divorce between them, I am sure to inform them that God hates it.
God hates divorce, as it says in Malachi 2 .16, and divorce is the death of a marriage. But we believe in a God who raises the dead, amen? And he can also revive a dead marriage. And if you live in a bad marriage, trust in the God who saves.
Maybe your spouse has already abandoned you. Or maybe your spouse hasn't physically left you, but they've divorced from you emotionally. They're more dedicated to their friends, or to video games, or looking at things on the computer that they shouldn't be looking at.
Maybe you have a spouse that's more dedicated to a career, or just has no emotional desire to be with you at all. Maybe your spouse has been unfaithful. Maybe your parents got divorced, and the effects of that, you feel like you've never actually recovered from that.
I tell you to trust in the God who is always faithful, who will never leave you, and never forsake you. Maybe you have been through a divorce, and I hope that you humble yourself before the Lord. Jesus died on the cross even for the sin of divorce.
Turn to him for repentance, and he will forgive you. Desire to walk in the way of Christ, on the path of righteousness and holiness, but never think of the grace of God as permission for you to get a divorce.
Now here in these two verses, Jesus gives an exception clause. Verse 32, I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of sexual immorality. And we'll come to understand that further here as we go.
Whenever we start talking about the subject of divorce, in our American context especially, you almost always hear this statistic, 50 of all marriages in America end in divorce. Right? You've heard that stat before?
Well, that statistic is not true. It's based on an inflated number that came out in the 80s, when the divorce rate peaked. And boomers, I hate to break it to you, but that was y 'all. The worst divorce rate in America was in the 80s, and it was the baby boomer splits.
And by the way, the first president to endorse no-fault divorce was a conservative, a quote unquote conservative. It was Ronald Reagan. When he was governor of California, he passed the no-fault divorce law.
And then that, of course, it was just a matter of time before it infected all of America. Divorce is rampant in this country. I don't say the 50 statistic is false to make you think, see, divorce really isn't all that bad.
No, it's so bad, it's its own cottage industry. It's a $50 billion a year industry in America. Of course, you've got lawyers that make a lucrative living out of divorce litigation, but you've also got divorce party favors that you can buy.
If you go on Amazon .com, you can find decorations for your divorce party. And this is not in the dark corner of the culture. It's right there in the middle of pop culture. Tabloid newspapers wouldn't exist if it wasn't for superstar divorces and high-profile marriages that get dissolved and things like that.
But for all the culture's attempts to dress this up or celebrate it or even make divorce into something fun, no one truly thinks this is fun. Does anybody ever get married thinking, meh, I can always get a divorce later?
No, people get married thinking their love is the greatest love that's ever been loved and no one's ever loved anybody as much as I've loved you. No one gets married wanting to get a divorce. There was a song that came out years ago.
This came out when I was in college. It was by the artist John Mayer. He had a song called Home Life in which he sang, I can tell you this much, I will marry just once. And if it doesn't work out, give her half of my stuff.
It's fine with me. We said eternity. Now excusing the nonchalant line, it's fine with me. I believe Mayer recognizes that marriage is supposed to be a lifelong covenant, an oath bound relationship between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.
That is why marriage ceremonies almost universally include the giving of an oath or the exchange of vows. Now there are some that write their own vows, but the traditional vows, and I would encourage you to stick with the traditional vows, the traditional vows declare this, you and no other, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.
That is God's intention for marriage. And dare I say, it's even bound up in human nature. He made us to understand this concept. There are people who are unbelievers who don't believe the Bible that understand the concept of till death do us part.
We should be able to understand through general revelation the lifelong commitment that marriage is supposed to be. We were not meant for serial relationships, jumping in and out of a relationship with this person and then with that person, and then jumping into this bed and into that bed.
That is nothing but selfish. It is nothing but hedonism, feeding the appetites of the flesh. Humanity cannot survive that kind of carelessness, and we're seeing how it's tearing apart our culture, tears apart families, ruins people's lives.
Marriage is the solid foundation of a solid family. And you know that without me having to tell you. Families are families for better or for worse. Without families, we don't have community. Without community, we don't have society.
The family is still the basic building block of a civilization. We get this. We just don't want to. When I say we, I'm talking collectively as a culture. We should understand how this is supposed to work.
We just don't want to make it work. So then, it's through special revelation, when we come to God's word, that we are cut to the heart when we read about God's intention for marriage and we realize that we have not held to that standard.
In Genesis 1 .27, God creates man in his own image, male and female, he created them. And then in Genesis 2 .18, the Lord said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.
So the Lord caused him to fall into a deep sleep. He took one of his ribs, closed up the place with flesh, and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
And the man said, this is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Now, those are words that Jesus doesn't repeat here in Matthew 5 .31 and 32, but he does repeat them later on in Matthew 19. We're going to come at this subject again, as we continue our study through the gospel of Matthew, we will eventually get to Matthew 19 and this will come up again.
So we'll have another opportunity to go into this in a little bit more depth than just the couple of verses that we're looking at today. And by the way, this subject affects everybody, lest you saw the title or heard me read the opening passage in this devotional and you thought, well, this doesn't pertain to me today.
I'm not even married yet. Hebrews 13 .4 says, let marriage be held in honor among all and let the marriage bed be undefiled for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. So yes, this concerns you too.
You as a brother or sister in the Lord have an obligation to see to it that your brothers and sisters in the Lord remain true to their vows and where you see a marriage, you better not do anything to infringe upon that marriage, to try to break it up or do anything that would come between those vows and that covenant for the Lord will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.
You need to understand that and you need to recognize that sex is made for marriage. We are not made to jump in and out of each other's beds. And you also need to consider, because of what Jesus says here, if you're going to get married someday, you need to think about who it is you're going to marry.
For once again, Jesus said, I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
So you need to think about that before you get married. In verse 31, Jesus mentions here a certificate of divorce. And we read about that in Deuteronomy 24, one through four. 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. So this is the only Old Testament law about divorce. And it in no way condones, suggests, or encourages divorce.
But that's exactly the way that the Pharisees were using it. They were twisting that instruction in Deuteronomy 24 to give permission for divorce, to let men divorce their wives who didn't really like their wives very much.
So Jesus quotes the law exactly and he explains it. He was explaining Deuteronomy 24, 1 through 4, which the Jews were using as an excuse to divorce for any reason as long as they gave a certificate of divorce.
And Jesus said, no, you've missed the point of the law. Divorce is unloving, it is destructive, and it makes adulterers out of one another. You have caused your wife to commit adultery and you have caused the man she married to commit adultery.
Just as the law said, you have brought sin upon the land God gave you as an inheritance. I mean, in just these two verses, in just verse 32 here, Jesus demonstrates how divorce tears people up. And it's not just the person that goes through a divorce.
It's other people down the line. It's kids, it's families, it's communities, it's societies, it's entire cultures can come crumbling down because of unfaithful marriages. You want to destroy a society, destroy marriage.
It brings sin upon the land. Now with regards to verse 32 here, where Jesus gives an exception clause, we have to be very careful lest we commit the same error that the Pharisees made. You might be tempted to throw anything under the label of sexual immorality and justify divorce for any reason.
Well, I caught my husband looking at porn, and so I can divorce him now because that's sexual immorality. Is that how we're supposed to understand this? You could say something as foolish as, well, because a husband and a wife are sexual partners, then any kind of sin he commits against her would be sexual immorality, and she is justified in divorcing him.
Sexual immorality in this case is adultery. If a man has sex with another woman outside of marriage, he's committed adultery, and she is justified in divorcing him. Or if the shoe is on the other foot, he is justified in divorcing her if she's the one who has committed adultery.
There's no wrongdoing on the part of the person who did not commit this sin. Remember that marriage is a covenant between two people. The adulterer has broken the covenant, and this sin, the sin of adultery, is so great it is as if the adulterer has died, bringing to an end the covenant.
Because what would have happened to that adulterer in Israel if the law had been carried out? He would have been put to death. Consider these words from the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 24, of Marriage and Divorce, Paragraph 5.
Adultery or fornication committed after a contract being detected before marriage—so in other words, it would be adultery that would happen during an engagement—giveth just occasion to the innocent party to dissolve that contract.
In the cause of adultery after marriage, it is lawful. For the innocent party to sue out a divorce, and after the divorce to marry another, as if the offending party were dead. And I agree with that. I think the Westminster Confession of Faith is exactly right on that.
Before I met Becky, I had been engaged to another woman, and that woman was unfaithful to me. Adultery was committed after a contract being detected before marriage, and the engagement was dissolved. Before Becky and me, she was married to another man, and he committed adultery after marriage.
Becky sued out a divorce, and after the divorce, she was free to marry another, as if the offending party were dead. We've both been through exactly this. Becky and I investigated this thoroughly before we got married.
We went through marriage counseling. We received counsel from four different pastors from two different denominations. All four pastors were in unwavering agreement. We had just reasons for our separations, and our marriage was pleasing in the sight of God.
When Becky walked down the aisle to me on the day of our wedding, dressed in white, she was a pure bride, with nothing against her, and she brought nothing against me. Our efforts were not an attempt to find someone who would tell us what we wanted to hear.
We wanted to do what honored one another, and what honored God. But there were people that didn't agree with our wedding. I had some very fundamentalist family members who emailed me and tried to oppose the marriage.
One of such persons I managed to convince that everything that we were doing was pleasing in the sight of God, and he ended up coming to the wedding. I was very thankful for that. Becky and I have been a picture of how the grace of God covers over our sin and brings something beautiful out of it.
We were both in terrible relationships before we met each other. We have a great marriage, but that is against our natures. It's not like we're just naturally kind, happy people, and so therefore we have a great marriage.
We can show you from our previous relationships exactly what kind of people we are. Even in those failed relationships, we can't say that we did everything right. Yet God had mercy on us, he showed us his grace, and we exercised that grace between one another so that we have the kind of marriage that we have today.
We become a testament to say that if God can bring us up out of the ashes, if he can turn us into the beautiful family that we are now, he can redeem you as well. Even if a happy marriage is not in your future, that breaks my heart, but even if that's not what's going to happen for you on this side of heaven, you can still know with confidence that you are forgiven your sins, you are a bride of Christ, and we'll be united together with him forever in glory.
That's the eternal marriage we should be looking forward to. See, marriage on this side of heaven is a picture of that marriage, when the church is with Christ forever in glory. God will be faithful to his promises, even though people are not.
You must confess your sins to God, be cleansed of all unrighteousness, walk in holiness before him. If you are in a marriage that's in a bad place, do what you need to do to make it right with your spouse.
Ask that God would forgive you, forgive you both, and make your marriage into something that honors him. It's not going to be easy, and it doesn't happen overnight, but if you believe in a God who raises the dead, he will also raise your dead marriage back to life.
In all things that we do, friends, let us honor Christ with our whole lives, knowing that he forgives us, he makes us new, knowing that he is promising us an eternal kingdom for those who endure to the end.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for this gift of marriage that has been given to us to be a picture of the relationship that Christ has with his church. But of course, marriages are made up of two sinful people, and we don't always get it right.
So have mercy on us and teach us to have mercy on each other, to be selfless in our marriages, for Christ was selfless toward us, giving his own self, dying on the cross for our sins, rising again from the grave, so that whoever believes in him, our sins can be forgiven and we have eternal life.
That same grace that he shows to us, teach us to show it to one another, and help us to live lives of holiness that honor each other and honor the Lord. It's in Jesus' name that we pray, amen.
Thank you for listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com, and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page.
Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study when we understand the text.