Matthew 5:31-32 - October 13, 2024

Mount Zion Community Church

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So the, one of the interesting things about this style of preaching where we go verse by verse through the

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Bible, maybe it's a drawback, but actually it's probably really a benefit.

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But when we take a faithful approach to look at everything that God says in his word, we ultimately wind up dealing with whatever topics that scripture deals with.

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And as it turns out, the topics that scripture deals with are basically everything that would ever come up in the course of your life in one way or another.

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But there's a challenge to that. And the challenge to that is that we have to talk about things that make people uncomfortable.

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We have to talk about things that we don't want to talk about. We have to talk about things that are potentially offensive.

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We have to deal with things that you aren't supposed to talk about in polite society.

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Again, things that offend people, things that might hurt feelings. And the draw or the pull to avoid topics like this can be very powerful.

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I was reading a book on preaching from a pastor named Sinclair Ferguson. And he mentioned, and this is particularly relevant for today, that until he started preaching verse by verse, you know, over the course of many years, he realized that he had never touched on the topic of divorce because he didn't know about it personally.

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And he didn't want to talk about it. Nobody wants to face this kind of thing. But expository preaching, going through every word of the scripture requires this.

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And in fact, we need this even when it's uncomfortable, because the fact is that we have to subject ourselves to what scripture has to say.

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And beyond that, we have to subordinate ourselves to what scripture has to say, not what we think about what it has to say.

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And that is one of the uncomfortable topics that we find ourselves dealing with today as we discuss the first of two teachings that Jesus does on the topic of divorce.

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And like a lot of sensitive topics, divorce and remarriage is something that's caused a tremendous amount of hurt and a tremendous amount of confusion in the church for basically all of church history.

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And as we get started in this, we are going to talk, you know, a lot about marriage and a lot about divorce, and it's not going to apply to everybody.

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Is marriage a command in the Bible? It's not. Some people have been given the gift of singleness.

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And that doesn't make that person less, and it doesn't make somebody who's married more.

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God has ordained different things for different people's lives. And again, the gift of singleness is given to some to serve the

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Lord better, to serve the Lord better than a married couple with a family ever could, because there's not anywhere near as much time.

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So as I discuss marriage, please know that that is not the only godly path for any one individual's life.

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But that said, we are going to continue on this topic today. So again, marriage and particularly divorce and remarriage is something that has been very difficult for the church to discuss for a long time.

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And now the current state of our culture is just vehemently anti -family.

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It's anti -anything that promotes a healthy family, if I'm being honest. And why wouldn't the culture be this way?

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Because strong, healthy families would eliminate the necessity of a lot of programs, particularly government programs.

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Not only that, it would eliminate the need for the agencies that support those programs, and it would eliminate the ability of these kind of parasitic sort of lobbyist groups that surround these industries that use them to make their millions and millions of dollars.

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I mean, how else would you explain welfare policies that reward women for not marrying the father of their children?

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And that's just one very common example. But this agenda, this sort of anti -family idea is all over the place.

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I saw this article from 2020. It's just one of those weird things that pops up. But the headline said this, we can't have a feminist future without abolishing the family.

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And that's true. There's not a thing you can do with feminism that involves a family. Because the strong, close -knit family that we're talking about is absolutely the enemy of any group from the government to an individual to a philosophy that is trying to exert greater control over more aspects of your life than they should.

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The family is actually a tremendous protection against that. And so the vast majority of our society promotes and glorifies things that ultimately weaken the family.

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I think this is particularly true in the entertainment industry. Things like fornication of every kind are glorified.

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Divorce is normalized. Homosexuality is normalized. Motherhood is denigrated.

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Motherhood is equated with slavery, while the idea of working outside the home is elevated as some kind of tremendous blessing.

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It's celebrated as freedom. Imagine that. Having someone else as your boss is celebrated as freedom.

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That's closer to slavery than the family. And lots of states have laws to make divorce easier on whichever party has decided that they would like to end their marriage.

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But I would argue that there are few things that are more harmful to society than divorce.

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Because ultimately, easy divorce or just divorce in general, their promotion of divorce undermines the concept of the family.

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It devastates the importance of the family. And on a more local level, it damages everyone who's involved.

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It damages that husband and the wife that are now separated. It damages the relationships in the extended family.

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And even worse, it damages the children. And I know,

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I know there are a wide variety of circumstances that lead people to get divorced. And that for everything that I say this morning, someone could come up with kind of a counterpoint or an example or some kind of reason that I'm wrong.

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But I'll say this much before we get into the words of Jesus on the topic. And ultimately His words are the only ones that matter.

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But I think that a big part of the issue that we have with divorce in our culture today is that we take a less than biblical view of marriage.

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That is, what we fail to consider is that marriage is not a social construct.

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It's not a societal construct. It's not a legal construct. Man did not invent marriage.

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God invented marriage. So marriage is an institution created and ordained by God.

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And beyond that, marriage is an institution created and ordained by God for His glory.

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So we take a less than biblical view of marriage. And instead what we do is we enter into marriage based on these feelings, these intense feelings of love.

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You know, the kind of warm, fuzzy butterflies in your stomach. I miss that person, you know, as soon as they leave the room kind of thing.

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Or we enter into marriage based on feelings of intense lust. And let me just,

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I'll take the opportunity to say right now, I feel like I'm full of disclaimers this morning, right? I know a lot of this stuff is irrelevant to a lot of you.

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But it's not irrelevant to everybody in this room. This is one of the greatest dangers of premarital sex.

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All the kind of dopamine and endorphins and stuff that you get from engaging in this kind of activity leads you to this false sense that you love this person.

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It's a temporary, fleeting feeling caused by chemical reactions, changes in your hormones and all kinds of other stuff that's going on that's not actually love.

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But we think that it is. And now we think we have a special connection to a person.

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And there is a connection made, a connection that can't be undone. But it's not the connection that you think it is.

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So when we enter into it based on those kind of feelings, and they go away, and marriage, as it inevitably does, gets really hard and really complicated and difficult, then sometimes people feel as though punching out is the best option.

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So there's that. But some people get married because they're afraid to be alone. People get married because they're afraid they just won't find somebody else.

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And there's probably lots of other reasons that people get married. People get married for a lifestyle.

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People get married for money, for comfort. None of these things are biblical reasons to get married.

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But I also think that this is because the church bears some responsibility for this. The church fails to take steps to adequately prepare young or old

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Christians for marriage. And they bless unions that are less than biblical, or even clearly unbiblical, just so that we don't offend people.

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And in the same church that couldn't properly handle the preliminary steps of marriage, then has to deal with the fallout of marital strife and tension, and sometimes ultimately divorce.

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And then that same church is confused about those issues as well. And there are four ways that a church can look at divorce and remarriage.

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So the first one is that divorce is never permitted in any circumstance. The second is that divorce is permitted in any circumstance.

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The third is that divorce is permitted, but remarriage is not permitted.

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And then the fourth is that divorce and remarriage are fine under any circumstance.

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It doesn't matter. Now, if you go into enough churches, you will find every single one of these views represented at some point.

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And this is likely because of confusion over what the Bible teaches on divorce.

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And my goal today is to demonstrate that what the Bible teaches on divorce is clear. It's plain.

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But our sinful nature often pushes us to obscure it in a way that, you know, helps comfort us in our own situation, or helps us excuse our own situation.

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So our passage today is Matthew chapter 5, verses 31 and 32.

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So let's read those verses before we move on. Starting in verse 31.

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Now it was said, whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce.

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But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.

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And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. So briefly, as we get started here, we'll look at some of the structural aspects of this, just to sort of reset our minds some.

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But we see Jesus employing the same kind of format of the teaching here as he did the last couple of sections.

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So in verse 31, he says, now it was said. So this is his way of saying, this is what you were taught.

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This is what you heard from your teachers, from the scribes, from the Pharisees. And he's introducing the faulty teaching when he says this.

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So as usual, the true teaching of the

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Pharisees is kind of partly true, but not completely true.

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And what we see here in this idea is two things. So the first thing that we have to look at in order to understand this is the teaching of Moses that the

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Pharisees are referring to. So that's first. And then second, we'll see how that teaching was being distorted by the

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Pharisees. So let's start out with what Moses taught. So in order to understand what's happening in the world of Jesus' audience, we have to go back to the source of the teaching.

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We have to go back to what they based their entire lives around, which is their Holy Scripture.

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But remember, there's always a grain of truth in false teaching. There's always enough to make it seem plausible, or there's an aspect of it that is in fact correct.

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But once again, this comes down to our whole idea of adherence to the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

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So in order to figure out where they're coming from, we have to go back to the book of Deuteronomy. In chapter 24, we'll read verses one through four to see where this idea of the certificate of divorce comes from.

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So Deuteronomy 24, verses one through four. ...turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house.

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Or if the latter husband dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, is not allowed to take her again to be his wife, since she has been defiled.

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For that is an abomination before Yahweh, and you shall not bring sin on the land which

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Yahweh your God gives you as an inheritance. So that's

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Deuteronomy 24, one through four. Now when we read this passage, it's important for us to gain a little bit of a proper understanding of what's going on here.

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It takes a little bit of kind of the historical context to understand this. Now, we also have to understand what it is and what it's not.

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So first, it's not a command to divorce. And it's not even prescribing or recommending divorce.

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But by and large, what this passage is, is something of a concession by God to people whose sin has led them to just completely run amok in abusing

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God's design for marriage. Martin Lloyd -Jones said that the whole object of the Mosaic legislation is that the matter was simply to control divorce.

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But what does this mean? So going back to the cultural context that I mentioned a second ago. Like, you may all be aware, the culture at this time was a very patriarchal culture.

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And I don't say patriarchal as a pejorative. I don't say patriarchal as something negative because patriarchy is not negative.

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However, abuse of this concept is a negative thing.

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And what was happening in this society was that people were taking the headship that they had been given and abusing it in order to mistreat the women in the culture.

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And it was very damaging to the women of the culture because men were allowed to divorce their wives for whatever reason they wanted.

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It didn't matter. They could do whatever and cast them out.

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And as we will see in just a bit, this is very much against what God's design for marriage was, but it was still occurring.

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So the idea of this piece of the Mosaic law was designed to kind of regulate or control what was going on in that situation.

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Again, just because he's given a process for divorce, please understand that this is in no way promotion of divorce.

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It's in no way recommendation of divorce, but a way to protect the women who were being treated unfairly.

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So what we see in this passage is that the law here did three things. And the first one is that it limited divorce to certain cases.

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Now, what he uses here is the word indecency. If she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her.

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And it's not exactly clear what this means. We know that this doesn't mean adultery. And the reason that we know it doesn't mean adultery is because the punishment for adultery in this time was death.

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So if someone committed adultery, the marriage was over because that person didn't exist anymore. So it's not about adultery.

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But the best kind of definition that anybody has come up with is it's some sort of impropriety or a poor reputation.

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Maybe it was something that was hidden from the husband before marriage, but it has to be at least somewhat of a legitimate reason.

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And it had to be in front of witnesses, which we'll talk about here as well. So the first thing was it limited divorce to these certain cases, that idea of indecency, whatever specifically that meant.

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Second, it required a certificate of divorce. And again, this was to protect the women in the relationship.

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Because what this did was it demonstrated that there was no unfaithfulness, no adultery.

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Because what would happen is a man could decide just to divorce his wife, send her out, and people could assume that she had committed adultery and killed her that way too.

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So this was to protect her. And again, now the witnesses are important because the certificate had to be given in front of witnesses so that she could invoke those witnesses in case this ever came up or it ever came to be that she needed to defend herself.

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And third, it also dictated that a man who gave his wife that certificate of divorce was not allowed to marry her again.

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And what this did was this served to highlight the seriousness of marriage and to let people know that you couldn't just get into a marriage, get out of it, get back into it whenever you wanted.

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You couldn't just go back and forth. So that's kind of a brief summary of the Mosaic legislation that the

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Pharisees were basing their teachings on. So now we look at what the

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Pharisees were teaching. Like what was going on in Jewish society at the time? And you have to keep in mind that there was something in the neighborhood of a thousand years between the time of Moses and the time of Jesus.

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Yet, things were very much the same in this time with the Pharisees as they were several hundred years before.

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So divorce was something that was still rampant and men were still taking the opportunity to divorce their wives for just whatever they felt like.

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There were stories about men divorcing their wives because they burned their dinner and of course because they decided they wanted to marry someone else instead.

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So they could just put the woman out for whatever reason. So the state of marriage had basically reverted, even though we're hundreds, maybe even a thousand years later, the state of marriage had reverted all the way back to what it was when

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God had to give Moses a special law to deal with the sinfulness of people. And it's like, it's almost like people don't actually change, right?

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This is still going on. But what it came back to is in the other cases that we looked at is an issue of obedience to the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.

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So what the Pharisees were doing was they were laser focused in on this idea of giving her a certificate of divorce.

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And as a result, what they taught was that as long as you got the certificate, then everything's fine.

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It doesn't matter what it's for. As long as you have the certificate, you're good before the law.

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The paperwork is the thing that matters the most. And of course, as we discussed already, this wasn't the point of the law.

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This wasn't the point of what God had given to Moses. And this is why Jesus is specifically correcting them.

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But not only correcting them, in this case, he's also providing one of the only legitimate biblical reasons for pursuing a divorce.

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So now let's take a closer look at the correction that Jesus is making here. And we see this in verse 32.

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But I say to you, this is Jesus' correction, 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.

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Now this is the first of two teachings that Jesus gives on divorce. And this one is less detailed than the other one, which comes in Matthew chapter 19, verses three through nine.

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We're gonna read that too. Matthew chapter 19, verses three through nine is the other time that Jesus talks about divorce.

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And some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and saying, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

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And he answered and said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

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And for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

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So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

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And they said to him, why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?

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He said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives.

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But from the beginning, it has not been this way. And I say to you that whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another woman, commits adultery.

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Now, maybe our passage today, maybe all

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Matthew recorded here was this short part because he knew that the detailed teaching was coming later. Or maybe this was all

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Jesus shared here, but then he had to go more in depth later because they still didn't get it. Regardless, you know, context is important.

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So we have to look at what was going on in the actual verse itself. But on a basic level, we see a couple of things here.

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The first thing we see is exactly what we talked about earlier. This Mosaic legislation and the idea of the certificate of divorce.

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The purpose was not to promote or suggest or clear a legal path to divorce.

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Because if we look again at what Jesus says in Matthew 19, 8, he says, because of your hardness of heart,

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Moses permitted it, but it has not always been this way. So again, first idea, the point of legislation was not for people to get divorced.

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Now, second, we see something else. We see the idea that anyone who divorces his wife for any reason other than for sexual immorality is causing her to be an adulterer.

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And then if that person goes on to get married, they're an adulterer. Why is this the case?

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And it's because any other reason for divorce that's not in Scripture is not biblically justifiable.

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Now from here, the only way that we can fully make sense of this whole concept is to do what

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Jesus does. And that's to take it back to God's original design for marriage. And to do that, we obviously go all the way back to Genesis.

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That's what Jesus models for us. So, the most logical, the most obvious place for us to go is

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Genesis chapter two, verse 24. Way, way back in the beginning.

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And that says this, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

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Jesus quoted that in that part of Matthew 19. So we have to understand something here.

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And that is what God designed marriage to be. Like we already said, marriage is not a social construct.

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It's not a legal construct. It's not even a sacrament that the church controls.

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It's something much deeper than all of those things. Properly understood, marriage is an institution, an institution divinely created by God himself, designed to connect two people physically and spiritually.

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The idea of cleaving, what the word means is essentially to glue two things together.

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It's to take two people and make them so closely and so tightly into one thing that they're indistinguishable from what they were before.

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You take one man and one woman and that's how

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God created marriage. Now another important thing about this, if we wanna get even more uncomfortable than we already are, is to point out that God designed sex to be the ultimate expression of this bond.

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And he designed sex to be an expression of depth of love and physical oneness.

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That's where the one flesh idea comes in. And for this reason, sex is not something that was intended by God to be practiced casually.

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It's not something that was intended to be practiced outside of the bond of marriage.

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And to do that before or God forbid, during marriage, ultimately degrades both the individual and the institution of marriage.

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And just how casually we treat this idea now, culturally, is an illustration of how far society has shifted from God's design for sex and God's design for marriage.

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And sadly, even the church has dropped the ball on this as well to the point where sexual purity is no longer really properly taught.

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I would say that in a lot of cases, it's not really even expected. We don't approach this idea of purity the right way, the way

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God intended it to be. Because if you are my age or the parent of someone my age, you might remember the idea of purity culture from a few decades ago.

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And this idea was that you didn't have sex before marriage because it deprived your future spouse of something.

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And that may be true. But ultimately, it's an affront to God's design for sex and God's design for marriage.

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We're to maintain purity because that's what God says, not for another person.

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Again, I'm not trying to downplay the importance of another person or the importance of your spouse. But remember, all of this is for God's glory.

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So again, the church has kind of dropped the ball there. Either we teach it improperly or we just back off because we don't want to confront anybody about this.

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We want to say, oh, we can't expect people not to have sex before marriage. It's just unreasonable.

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They're young. Their hormones are raging. It's gonna happen. But that's the wrong attitude.

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And that's especially the wrong attitude for a church. That's the attitude society takes, which has no place here.

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And when we return to marriage, getting back to the topic of marriage, we see that one flesh concept.

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And we see it show up in other places in Scripture as well. Another one is in 1 Corinthians 6, 16.

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Paul uses one flesh discussing the idea of sexual immorality. He says this, or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her?

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For he says the two shall become one flesh. And then here he's talking about how the believer denigrates their body as something that God has bought by uniting it with a prostitute.

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So we see that this is something that God takes very seriously. And to see how seriously, we look at what the penalty for adultery is in the

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Old Testament. I already said this, but if you want the verse, it's Leviticus 20, verses 10 through 14.

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That shows that adultery is punishable by death under the Mosaic law. And it's also worthy of note that two of the 10 commandments deal with the issue of adultery.

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One is a clear statement, Exodus 20, 14, thou shalt not commit adultery. And the other is a command prohibiting one from coveting his neighbor's wife.

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Now, step back. A week or two ago, however long it was, and we know that looking at someone to lust for them is adultery.

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So two commandments that deal with this issue, both of them very strongly addressing the sanctity of marriage.

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And speaking of the sanctity of marriage, I'm gonna suggest to you today that it is never

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God's intention for anyone to get divorced. The strongest statement that we have about this is in Malachi chapter two.

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So it's in verses 13 through 16. Verse 10 doesn't really deal with this specifically, but it's kind of part of the same section.

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I'm just gonna read verse 13. Malachi 2, 13 through 16. And this is the second thing you do.

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You cover the altar of Yahweh with tears, with weeping, and with groaning, because he no longer regards the offering or receives it as acceptable from your hand.

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But you say, for what reason? Because Yahweh has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.

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But not one has done so, even one who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did that one do while he was seeking a godly seed?

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Be careful then to keep your spirit and let no one deal treacherously against the wife of your youth.

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For I hate divorce, says Yahweh, the God of Israel, and him who covers his garment with wrong, says

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Yahweh of hosts. Be careful then to keep your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously.

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Now I also realize that life's not always perfect. Things happen, decisions are made, people get divorced.

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But one thing that I want to say clearly is that we can be sure that the

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Lord doesn't tell people to get divorced. The Lord doesn't lead people to get divorced.

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It would directly contradict the words in Scripture. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

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And I think I say this because I've heard things like this. I've heard stories of people that we know, you know, somebody who said, the

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Lord told me to divorce my husband and marry this other person who just so happened to have a lot more money and a completely different lifestyle.

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The Lord did not tell that person that. But if marriage is

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God's perfect design, if he instituted it, how do we explain all the challenges and all the difficulties with it?

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How do we explain the fact that divorce is a reality? It happens, it happens to Christians.

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Thankfully, we don't have to come up with our own explanation because if we did, it would probably revolve around what somebody else did, how bad another person was.

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But sadly, God's flawless design, which only lasted a short while before it was marred, was by sin.

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One of the consequences of the fall of Adam and Eve was its effect on marriage. So what started as a perfectly balanced relationship of Adam's loving, tender headship of his wife and Eve's similar loving support and submission to her husband and these things, our culture looks down on these as well, but these things, they came from total and complete and perfect submission to God on the part of both

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Adam and Eve before sin. But as we all know, they chose sin.

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They chose to change that. And the penalty for that is laid out in Genesis 3. In verse 16, he addresses the woman.

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To the woman, he says, I will greatly multiply your pain and conception. In pain, you will bear children.

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And then this part, especially leads to divorce in a lot of cases. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.

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And then he addresses the men in 17. Then to Adam, he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which

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I commanded you, saying you shall not eat from it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain, you will eat of it all the days of your life.

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And he goes to talk about how much labor will be difficult. Physical labor, not childbearing labor.

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And I know I'm not telling anyone anything that you don't already know, that you don't already know from hard earned experience.

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But when you put two centers together in a relationship, it's gonna result in some challenging times.

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No matter how nice and sweet and good the people seem to be on the outside, you're gonna have trouble.

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And therefore it takes a tremendous amount of grace and forgiveness all the way around. The grace and forgiveness that God models with his people, with his people in Israel.

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Now there's nowhere that this is more clear than the book of Hosea. And if you haven't read Hosea, you should.

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It's very interesting. Hosea is a prophet.

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God commands him to marry a prostitute named Gomer. And just long story short,

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Gomer betrays Hosea in every way possible, including physically.

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And Yahweh continues to command Hosea to forgive, to return.

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What this is is a symbol of God's relationship with his people of Israel. The Israelites were constantly unfaithful in every way to God.

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Yet God still ultimately forgave. Again, you should read

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Hosea. The forgiveness that God models is constant because he said it himself.

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He said it. We can say this clearly. God hates divorce. And returning to what

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Jesus is teaching, this also highlights the fact that adultery is listed as the sole justification for divorce.

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Now, you have to take the totality of the things that we've talked about this morning. We talked about God's design for marriage.

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We talked about what it means to be one flesh. And the idea of adultery, sex outside of marriage, is basically to violate that whole one flesh part of the marriage.

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Because to do that basically renders the marriage void. There are a couple of other passages in Mark and Luke where Jesus talks about divorce.

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And he doesn't mention adultery. So some people have taken that to mean that there is an absolute prohibition against divorce under any circumstance.

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That's where some churches get that idea. But the context is that the people at the time would assume because of the nature of this that if adultery was committed, the marriage was basically over anyway.

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It had been completely violated. So it wasn't even something that needed to be said because you can't be one flesh with more than one person.

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And this also, just as an aside that we're not going into, this tears down the idea of polygamy as well.

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That's not biblical either. Now in the interest of being thorough,

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Paul does provide one additional justification for divorce later. It's not related to adultery, but we should include it in our discussion today.

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So this is in 1 Corinthians 7, verse 15. There's a lot of instruction for marriage here.

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But this verse says this, yet if the unbelieving one leaves, the unbelieving spouse, if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave.

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The brother or sister is not enslaved in such cases, but God has called us to peace. And this verse doesn't tell the whole story, but this is very instructive for us in a lot of cases because here's what was happening in the church at the time.

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In the church in Corinth, all these people were learning about Jesus. They were learning about what he had done through the gospel that Paul was preaching.

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And they were being converted. They were becoming Christians. And as they become Christians, their spouses are not.

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So they find themselves married to unbelievers and they don't know what to do because you're not supposed to be unequally yoked, right?

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That's one of the things we didn't even talk about this morning. You're not supposed to be unequally yoked. You're not supposed to have anything to do with unbelievers, but they're married to them.

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So should they divorce? Some people were getting divorced like crazy. Some people were asking about it, but Paul tells them not to divorce.

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This is not a reason to divorce, being married to an unbeliever, if that is a decision that you make. But he tells them that if the unbeliever wants to leave, to let them, that would leave them not to be considered an adulterer.

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That would be a biblically justified reason for getting divorced, because an unbelieving spouse wants to walk away.

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The believing spouse doesn't have that liberty because they should be following what

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Jesus said. So again, there's two reasons, adultery, unbeliever wants to leave.

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Now, because marriage is so under attack and so misunderstood, I'd like to talk about it a lot more than we already have, but there'll be opportunities for that in the future.

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So what I will do, just because I like it a lot, is to read these verses from Ephesians.

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I'll read Ephesians chapter five, verses 25 through 33.

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Now, I will say this. Now, let me read it first. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her, so that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.

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So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of his body.

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For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

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This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife, even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.

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Now, I didn't read the verses ahead of that. Those verses apply every bit as much.

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But men have to understand something. If you want your wife to be submissive, it is a duty in Scripture.

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She should be submissive. But if you're rebelling against God by not treating your wife in a way that matches that,

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I don't know why you would expect her to be submissive. There's two parties to this thing.

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Everybody reads the wives submit to your husband command and stops, not everybody. Anybody who reads the whole

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Bible, or anybody who truly cares about marriage will go there. But men have a duty to love their wives as themselves, to love their wives as Christ loved the church.

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So like I said, if you're rebelling against God, don't be surprised when your wife rebels against you. So how can we sum all this up?

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There's a few points. The first one is God hates divorce.

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It says it in his word. There's no way around that.

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The intention of God's design for marriage is that it is permanent, but our sin gets in the way of that.

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Number two, there are basically two biblically justified provisions for divorce.

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One is adultery, either party, and two is an unbelieving spouse that insists on walking away.

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Any other justification for divorce we have to acknowledge is sin. And there may be enough sin on everybody's part to go around, and you may truly have been sinned against in an awful way.

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I'm not discounting that. But is that a justification for divorce in the eyes of God?

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Now, we also have to address the idea of remarriage because we really didn't talk about that. But the implication here, when we talk about spouse being an adulterer or not being an adulterer, is that remarriage is possible in the case of biblically justified divorces.

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A spouse who commits adultery on their spouse and is divorced as a result, shouldn't get remarried.

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They're not biblically justified on their divorce, but their spouse is. These are the difficult things that we have to deal with, that we have to talk about.

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Third, third point, is we have to acknowledge that Scripture absolutely speaks about divorce and the message is clear.

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We've seen the reasons for divorce. We've seen what God says about divorce. We've seen what Jesus says about divorce and then what

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Paul adds about divorce to God's word. And this is an area where we have to be careful as though Scripture provides us some kind of wiggle room for an exception for our circumstance.

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Because often what we're trying to do is justify our special case, justify why we should be allowed to do this.

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Now, this leads me to the fourth point. And that is because marriage is taken so seriously by God, we should also take it seriously.

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And what that means is that marriage should not be entered into flippantly or entered into impulsively.

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As I was writing this, I realized there are a lot of cases people want to be the exception.

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And it makes sense, like logically it's hard to argue against it. Like especially in the case of something like abuse, where a spouse is abusive.

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I don't think anybody should physically stay in a situation that's dangerous.

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You should probably physically separate yourself. But I can't go so far as to say that that justifies divorce right then and there.

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And I know that you may want to argue with me about that, and that's fine. But at the risk of coming across insensitive, how this relates to the point is this.

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People don't often,

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I won't say ever, people don't often change in that way. Someone doesn't go from being the beatitude loving

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Christian to the physically abusive spouse. Usually there was something of that in them before.

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But people chose not to ignore it, for whatever reason. Sex, love, loneliness, desire to have a partner.

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Again, unless somebody is a true sociopath, people don't change their personality in that way.

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You have to pay attention. So the point here is that you have to be prayerful about your choice of a husband or wife.

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And again, acknowledging that this is irrelevant for a lot of people in the room, but I'm addressing young people.

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Listen to the godly counsel of the people that are around you. Listen to the godly counsel of your parents, of your grandparents, of the people that know you and the people that know them.

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Sometimes they'll tell you something that you don't want to hear. But they might be right. They might be wrong, but they might be right.

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Get premarital counseling from your pastor. There's no way to prepare for marriage.

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Something's always gonna come up that you weren't expecting. The only way to know what's gonna happen is to do it. But you can be prepared for certain things.

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You can have certain conversations. You can discuss certain expectations to the extent that you know they need to be discussed.

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But again, have premarital counseling. I would not conduct a wedding for anyone that I did not have premarital counseling sessions with because I'm not gonna bless off a union that I'm not convinced is biblical.

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I'm not gonna allow this church to be used for a wedding that I'm not convinced is biblical.

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It doesn't mean I have to do it or that I have to be the one that did the counseling, but we're not just gonna rent

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God's house to any kind of marriage that we don't know what's going on. So please understand that.

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And none of us is perfect. Your spouse won't be perfect, and you definitely won't be perfect. But the thing you can do with the help of the people around you, your church family, is do your best to figure out if they share the same common dedication to God that you do because that's the only thing that's ultimately gonna matter.

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A sub -point of this is that society's view of sex and marriage is completely against and in opposition to God's view of marriage.

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You see it everywhere. Think about this next time you're watching a TV show or a movie or a play or a

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YouTube video. Does it depict marriage the way God would? Does it depict sex the way

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God would? Does it depict divorce the way God would? It probably doesn't. So you gotta be careful what you're taking in, and you have to stand up against these influences in the culture.

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Point number five. Divorce is not the unforgivable sin. So I know that I've said a bunch of things that sound really mean, some things that sound harsh, and some things that some people won't appreciate.

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And I know that this message is a few years, a few decades too late for some of you. But hear me when

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I say this. That doesn't make the sin involved in your situation any less sinful, but that doesn't mean it's all over for you.

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There is no unforgivable sin in this case. God remains faithful, even when we are not faithful.

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If you're truly repentant for your part in whatever it was, if you had a part,

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God no longer sees your sin. And I'll tell you this too.

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Even if you were the adulterous spouse, if you've truly repented, if you've truly placed your faith in Christ by the grace of the

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Holy Spirit, that's in the past. God is not holding that against you. God does not see that.

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That doesn't mean other people aren't holding it against you, but where the work of Christ is concerned, you have been justified.

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Again, it doesn't matter if you're divorced, if you are repentant of what happened.

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God has forgiven you because you are justified before him because of the work of Jesus.

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And I'll say this too. If you're divorced and you refuse to forgive yourself for it, when you've repented and God has forgiven you, that's every bit as much of a sin as anything else that you've done.

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Who are you to ignore God's forgiveness? Sixth and final point.

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Marriage is about God's glory. Everything that we've talked about this morning comes back to this.

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This is the primary truth that we have to recognize. I haven't plugged the Beatitude lifestyle that much today, but I'll do it now.

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Living according to the Beatitudes will help you realize this, and it'll change the way you interact with your spouse.

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It'll change the way you interact with your husband or with your wife. Recognizing who you are and recognizing that your marriage was given to you by God and it is for his glory will change that.

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It has some other important meanings too, though, that marriage is for God's glory because some of you may say, well, all those ideas about not getting married flippantly or doing this before you get married is great, but it's too late, right?

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I'm already married. God can redeem any marriage at any point, anytime.

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It's never too late. It's just on you to recognize that marriage is for God's glory, to live like marriage is for God's glory, to live like a true believer of Christ.

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And when you live this way, you realize that there's absolutely no situation that's beyond redemption, absolutely none.

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So I'll close with this quote from Albert Moeller. He said this, marriage is about our happiness, our holiness, and our wholeness, but it is supremely about the glory of God.

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And that's why Jesus says this, what therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

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Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you again for your word.

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We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. We thank you for marriage. We thank you for family.

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We thank you for the variety of ways that we can take part in these institutions. But most of all, we thank you for the grace and the mercy that you've shown us in sending

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Jesus, not only for our sins, but also to clarify our wrong understandings, to teach us the things that we need to know, to tell us the things that we need to hear, and in particular, when we don't wanna hear them.

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So God, I know this was a difficult day, a difficult subject, a difficult topic, but I pray that our hearts would remain open to you.

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Lord, I pray that we would continue to take in what you have to say, to filter it through our lives and see where we're faithful and where we're not, and where we're not faithful to you, to change it.

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God, we thank you that you've sent Jesus again. We thank you that no matter what it is, none of us are too far to be redeemed.

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We thank you that the Holy Spirit graciously grants us the ability to have faith in Christ and to return to you.

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Lord, we thank you for your love, and we love you, and we pray all these things in your son's name, amen.