Divorce and Remarriage — David Pawson

The Neglected Christian Teaching on Divorce and Remarriage

Dear me, after preaching that long I should be able to do it better than I do it, but there we are. Tonight we're moving from the subject of Christian belief to the subject of Christian behaviour because that's just as important as Christian belief.

And I'm singling out one particular aspect of Christian behaviour because it's the one most widely neglected in the Church today. The accepted pattern for marriage in our society is consecutive polygamy.

Simultaneous polygamy says you can have as many wives or husbands as you like at the same time, but consecutive polygamy is you can have as many wives or husbands as you like, provided you have them one at a time.

And that is now happening widely. The film actress Elizabeth Taylor died recently. I forget how many marriages she had, but I can't count them. And we follow our celebrities and celebrities' marriages are breaking up all over the place.

And divorce in my country has now reached record levels, higher than any other country in Europe. That's so-called Christian England. But I've been growingly concerned and finally I had to write a book about it, which I wrote very recently.

It's just been published. But I'm sorry to tell you there isn't one copy on the bookstall. They've all been snatched up and they're all gone. So I'm sorry you'll have to get it another way. But that book took me 40 years to write.

I've been working on it for 40 years. Like many Christian families, this issue of divorce and remarriage has affected close relatives and dear friends. And therefore I know something of the pain and anguish that can be caused by this issue.

And I realise that some of you will find this evening's study quite difficult because you too have been involved. Nevertheless, Jesus said quite a bit on the subject. Jesus said nothing about abortion.

He said nothing about homosexuality. But all over the world, Christians are outspoken on those two subjects and yet strangely quiet about divorce not just because it's happening outside the church, it is now almost as common inside the church as it used to be outside, and even among evangelical churches.

In this country, a pastor of an evangelical church pinned me against the wall, physically, and said, Apologise to my congregation for saying what you did about their subject. I think he was on his third wife and a lot of his congregation were on their first or second or third.

And he was very, very angry because I quoted Jesus Christ, and that was all. And essentially, a Christian follows Christ, and I will major on his teaching on this issue because he taught quite a lot, but later.

I'm going to take you very quickly through the book and give you a taste of what I've written there because in an hour and a half we're certainly not going to be able to deal with all the aspects of this issue.

My chapter headings are all similar what somebody said about this topic. We begin with what God said, then we go on to what Moses said, then what the prophets said, then what the scribes said, and that will lay a foundation for what Jesus said, and then what Paul said.

If we've time, we shall look briefly at what the church said over the last two thousand years, but then finally and I hope we'll get to this tonight what we should say and when we should say it. Because it's so common in the church, it's quite rare for preachers to deal with this subject.

And alas, many pastors only deal with it when a personal crisis has arisen in the church and then it's usually too late. And I urge every pastor here to be teaching on this now before you face a personal crisis when emotions are high and you're involved in a situation that's not easy to resolve.

God's Design for Marriage in Genesis

So let me begin by asking, what has God said? And here I must begin by looking at what he said about marriage. It's interesting that the first scripture on godly behaviour occurs in the story of creation and it's about marriage.

And we begin with that. What did God say about marriage? And you'll find it in Genesis 2, right at the beginning of your Bible. After he'd created Eve for Adam, we then hear God's intention for marriage.

And I'll just single out three or four aspects of what God's intention for marriage would be. And the first thing, it was heterosexual. Marriage in God's sight is between male and female, between a man and a woman.

We now have in England legalised homosexual marriage and we have marriages between two men and two women which are totally legal in my country but they're not legal in God's sight. God's clear intention was that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman, male and female.

Secondly, for God, marriage was intended to be monogamous one man and one woman. Polygamy of any sort, whether consecutive or simultaneous, is not God's will for marriage. One man and one woman make a marriage.

The third thing he clearly intends is that marriage is permanent until death. As it's put in Genesis 2, a man shall leave his parents and cleave to his wife. That word cleave is now a bit old-fashioned, but it's a Hebrew word for glue, for sticking together.

Or to put it quite bluntly, when you marry you're stuck with her for life until death do you part. And that's been embodied in the marriage service with the words, till death do us part. Marriage is permanent and young people here who are not married, I say to you, just think of that very carefully.

Do not rush into something that's lifelong. You are tied together for the rest of your lives on earth, so be very careful who you choose. Marriage is a covenant and not a contract. In God's sight, in human terms, it's a contract.

And if one breaks the terms of the contract, the other's free to make another contract with someone else. And we now have prenuptial contracts. That means you agree before you marry how to divide your money and house when you divorce.

Fancy going into marriage having agreed what will happen if you divorce. That's contract. But marriage is a covenant and God makes covenants and he always sticks with a covenant. If he makes a promise, he keeps it.

And whenever God makes a covenant in the Bible, he seals it with two little words I will. And those are the two words that seal a marriage. Not I feel like it or I think I will, but I will. It's an act of the will.

It's a promise which you are intended to keep and in a marriage it's a vow before God, whether it's in the church or a registry office or a hotel and now whether it's at the bottom of the sea in diving suits or up in the air in a kite, God is there.

He witnesses it and he sees it as a covenant. I will is the longest sentence in the English language. I'm waiting for you to get that, isn't it? It's a lifelong promise for the rest of your life. Now that's what God intended and he intended it to be a unifying experience whereby two people become one.

And that little word, one, is very important. It's not just that they have the same surname from then on. It's not just that their bodies join together. At a very profound level, God has joined every married couple together in their first marriage in a way that unites them which they can never forget.

The only thing that can break that unity between them is death, and that does break the union. In God's sight, when a partner dies, the other partner is totally free to marry again. I've conducted a number of second marriages, one within three months of the death of a partner which some seemed upset by, but it was such a beautiful union, the second one, that in fact the first wife told her husband on her deathbed, as soon as I'm gone, marry her.

And she was the granddaughter of the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, whom I'm sure some of you have heard of. Her name was Spurgeon and I conducted the marriage only a month or two after he lost his first wife.

It's been a lovely, happy marriage. But it was death that ended the union, and therefore that unity he had with his first wife was broken, was ended. Marriage does not go on in the next life. That's a very important point.

I've had widows ask me, will I be reunited with my husband in heaven? And I've had to say, not as your husband. Marriage is only until death. It's an earthly relationship. It's a temporary relationship, permanent until death and then temporary.

That's important to know. They asked Jesus about a hypothetical case where a lady had had seven husbands because each husband had died, and they asked him, whose wife will she be in heaven? And Jesus said, that's an ignorant question.

Don't you know the scriptures? They don't marry and they're not married in heaven. They will be as the angels. We shall be one big happy family in heaven. I won't be married to my wife, she won't be married to me.

We shall be brother and sister in heaven in a close relationship but no closer than with any other of God's people. Marriage is permanent until death and then it is ended. And that should teach us something.

Don't pin all your hopes on marriage. That's a mistake that so many make. They think that if they can find the perfect partner they'll be happy forever afterwards. You will never find a partner who is 100 right for you.

In fact, every marriage I've conducted, I've told the couple, you are incompatible and you'd better face that now before you find out later. If you squeeze, the husband squeezes the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube, she will squeeze the toothpaste from the middle.

You are incompatible and you will very quickly find out that you've lived separate, different lives until now. Part of the fun of marriage is adjusting to that, coming to some compromise. The best compromise in the case I mentioned is to have two toothpaste tubes.

But that's what marriage is all about. That's adapting to the person, coming to compromise, learning how to live together though you're different. It's not a case of, well, I wanted to marry who squeezed the toothpaste the same way I did.

No, we are incompatibles from the beginning, but it's how you deal with that that makes a good marriage. I think perhaps I have told you that my wife was asked in New Zealand, what's the secret of being happily married for fifty years?

We were in a small meeting and like lightning she said, it's very simple, we're both in love with the same man. And they all thought she meant Jesus. And they said, oh, what a lovely answer. And when I got her outside I said, I was the only one in that room that knew who you meant.

Adultery and the Seventh Commandment

But then I said to her, behind every great man there's a very surprised woman, which is true. Well now, let's move on. God not only spoke at creation, God spoke in the Ten Commandments. He wrote them with his finger, and among those Ten Commandments, the most important things he told men about their behaviour was the seventh commandment you shall not commit adultery.

And that's the second word of God about marriage, that betraying your marriage with a sexual relationship outside it is against the will of God. And he simply said, you don't do that. It's a categorical imperative as we call it.

It's an unconditional command you don't do it. And in this way he was upholding the sacredness of marriage because all the commandments are upholding the sacredness of things, or put it simply, all the commandments are about respect respecting God's name, respecting his day, respecting your parents, respecting life, respecting marriage, respecting property, respecting reputation.

And if there's one thing that is characteristic of our society, it is the loss of respect, particularly respect for God-ordained authorities. But when you lose respect, a society will crumble. And so God in the Ten Commandments put respect at the heart of godly behaviour, not just for God's sake but for our sake, for community's sake.

Those respects are absolutely vital. Well now, that's starting with what God said, what he said about marriage and what he said about betraying marriage with adultery. And the word adultery is only applied to illegitimate sin of a married person or with a married person.

It's a word that I want to underline as something that purely applies to married people. God uses other words for sexual sins outside marriage, but that's the serious one because it betrays a covenant that you have made in God's sight.

Moses, Deuteronomy, and the Divorce Certificate

Let me move on to what Moses said. There is one passage in the Bible in which Moses talks about divorce and remarriage. It's in Deuteronomy 24, and still Christians argue about this passage because it's considered to apply to Christians, but I don't believe it does.

Nevertheless, Deuteronomy 24 shows that Moses allowed divorce and remarriage. He accepted it for the Israelites and he legislated for it. He told them, if you divorce your wife, you write out a bill of divorce and you give it to her, and that gives her the freedom to find another partner.

This was quoted to Jesus by people when they were discussing it with him, and they quoted Deuteronomy. It's part of the law of Moses. It's part of the Israeli culture. So there has been a big debate about Deuteronomy 24.

When you read it carefully, it doesn't forbid divorce and it doesn't forbid second or even third marriages. What it does prohibit is that if a woman is divorced, marries another and is divorced again, she must not return to her first husband and marry him again.

That's all that's prohibited in Moses' law. That's the only legislation he made and he said it will defile the land if you go back to your first husband and remarry him. Now this is still in Deuteronomy and I want to emphasise that I don't believe I'm under Moses' laws.

If I was, I'm breaking them at this moment. He said you must never wear cloth that is mixed material. I got this in a modern shop that mixes cotton and wool with polystyrene and I don't know what else, but I'm wearing a mixture of material.

I'm disobeying Moses' law. But I believe the New Testament tells us clearly we're not under Moses' law. Therefore, we're not under Deuteronomy law. Therefore, this law of divorce and remarriage doesn't apply to me.

But still people argue about on what ground Moses allowed divorce and therefore remarriage. And here we're up against a problem because the first divorce the Lady has in this passage is for an indecent thing and we don't know what that indecent thing was.

It's a word associated with nakedness but we just don't know and therefore we can't use that now. We don't know what it is. And later I'll show you that the Jewish scribes were arguing about the meaning of that indecent thing.

The one thing that is absolutely clear is that it wasn't adultery because that was a crime that was punishable by death. They stoned adulterers to death. I remember standing on the balcony of a building in the Middle East with a friend and we looked down and in the dusty road below I saw a group of Arabs hauling a girl by the hair in the dust and she was totally naked.

I said to my friend, what are they doing to that girl? I was new to the Middle East. I said, what are they doing to that girl? He said, they're going to stone her. I said, why? Because she's committed adultery.

They've found her in the act. Boy, that brought one passage in the New Testament home to me, but I could do nothing to stop it and we had to stand. He said, don't interfere if you do. You're interfering with the law because that is the law of Sharia and it was also the law of Moses that anybody guilty of adultery was stoned to death.

So the reason of an indecent thing for the first divorce of the woman in Deuteronomy 24 was certainly not adultery. I don't know what it was. What we do know is the reason for her second divorce from her second husband, which is simply said to be he disliked her.

So Moses allowed divorce for this indecent thing which was not adultery and for being disliked by her husband. The one thing Moses forbade was she doesn't go back to her first husband. That would be offensive to God.

Well that's what Moses said. And Moses in Deuteronomy 22 said another thing which is very relevant. In Jewish culture, in Israeli law, in the law of Moses, a girl was required to be a virgin when she married.

And indeed, if the husband, the bridegroom, found that she wasn't, he could demand her death penalty. He could certainly send her back to her family, second-hand goods. And so the lack of virginity at the marriage was punishable by death.

Now that's a relevant subject. It will come up later this evening when we get to Jesus' teaching. But it's an interesting insight into Jewish culture. Jewish culture was very much favoured the male. He was not required to be a virgin, but she was.

And so if she was accused of not being, her father had to produce proof in the forms of a bloody sheet that proved she was a virgin when she married. If he couldn't produce that proof, then the marriage ended, and she was lucky if she wasn't stoned to death.

Now that's what Moses said, but I am not under Moses' law. I'm so glad about that. One day I was telephoned from Israel where some Israeli believers and some Palestinian Arab believers were together. But they were having endless trouble getting peace, and they said, we need somebody from outside to come in and knock our heads together.

And the one name that was acceptable to both was my name. So they telephoned and said, will you come out please and bring us peace? And I made an enquiry and the British Airways said it will cost £800 sterling.

And I hadn't got that and I couldn't expect them to raise it, so I thought I couldn't go. So I went to another airport, Luton airport, and said, would you have a plane going to Israel? And they said, we've got one leaving today.

Oh, I said, could I get on to it? They said, no, every seat is booked. I said, well, I really need to get out there urgently. And finally they said, well, would you mind sitting on a crew seat? You know those upright tip-up seats facing backwards?

And I said, I don't care if I have to lie on the floor if you let me go. But I sat on a tip-up seat and I said, how much would you charge me for that? And they said, £120. Meanwhile, I didn't know out in Israel the young people had pooled the money they had and they'd come to £120 in shekels, and they had it waiting for me when I got out.

Well, I sat on the seat and I'm facing three rabbis, and I realised I'm the only gentile on the plane. So I began a conversation with these three rabbis and I said, excuse me, do you mind if I ask you, do you keep the law of Moses?

Of course I do. I said, well, what about this one? Oh, he said, no, we don't keep that one. I said to the second, do you keep the law of Moses? Sure. I said, what about this one? Well, we can't keep that one because we don't have a temple now.

Oh, I said to the third one, do you keep the law of Moses? Same thing happened. I said, well, three rabbis, none of you keeping the law of Moses. And they said, what are you, reformed, orthodox? What are you?

And I said, none of those. And one of them looked into my eyes and said, you're a Christian. And he said, you think because Jesus died you don't need to keep the law of Moses. I said, that's right, and I'm so relieved because you three can't keep it.

And I thought, I could never keep the law. Well, we had a great discussion and a kosher meal but the plane landed all too soon. I'm not under the law of Moses. The New Testament says it's now obsolete.

It was temporary until Christ came, and I do rejoice in that. I'm under the new covenant and the Mosaic was the old one, and it's out of date. It's passed its sell by date. So really, discussing what Moses said about divorce and remarriage is interesting but irrelevant.

The Prophets: Hosea, Jeremiah, and Malachi

So we move on to what the prophets said about divorce and remarriage, and there are three prophets who did say quite a bit. One was Hosea. What a man Hosea was! One day God said to Hosea, I want you to go and get married.

Well, that quite pleased him, but then God added, I want you to marry a prostitute. Preacher marries prostitutes headlines! But he married her, and God said, you'll have three children but I'm afraid they won't all be yours.

And one day she's going to go back on the streets and leave you, and you ought to go after her and find her again and buy her back from the pimp controlling her, bring her back to the house, discipline her, and then love her again.

And then what, Lord? Then you can go and tell Israel, that's how I feel about her. It's an amazing little prophecy. What a thing that the prophet was called to do to demonstrate God's feelings. But it tells you something.

Go and get her back again, discipline her, forgive her, and love her all over again. That's how I feel. And then we turn to Jeremiah, and in Jeremiah 8 God says, relating to Israel's awful sin, I'm divorcing you.

I'm going to write out a Bill of Divorcement and you're to get out of this land, you're to go to Babylon because I'm finished with you. But that's not the last word. If it were, then people who argue that if God can divorce, they can, would be wrong.

Because later in Jeremiah God says, but I'm going to bring you back. What Hosea did, God said, I'll do with Israel. I'll bring you back from Babylon. So he wasn't splitting with her forever, it was a temporary divorce.

And he would bring her back and he would not marry another, and he made her a promise that they would live together again, which is not the kind of divorce that we're thinking of. And then Malachi. When we read the Bible right through aloud in our church, it takes eighty-four hours, and we had two thousand people came to listen, and we sold half a tonne of Bibles.

It was a great time. But one lady who put her name down to read for fifteen minutes did not tell us that immediately after she'd read, she was going to the lawyer to start divorce proceedings against her husband.

Now nobody knew what part of the Bible they would be reading because they just had to pick up the Bible when somebody stopped and read on for a hour, and she picked up Malachi. Guess what she read? I hate divorce, says the Lord.

And she never got to that lawyer, and her marriage held, and she stayed with her husband just as a result of reading the Bible. Well, I could tell you more stories about that, but that was a lovely one.

The Scribes and the Debate over Grounds for Divorce

Let's move on to what the scribes said. When God stopped speaking to Israel for three hundred years between the Old and the New Testament, they had no prophets, no word from the Lord. What they could do was examine what God had already said in other words, work through the scriptures, take the words of the prophets that they'd got already and minutely examine them and apply them.

And therefore they were called scribes the people who virtually wrote out the laws so that people understood them. And there was a huge debate among the scribes about what Moses meant by that indecent thing.

And there were three leading scribes with three different views. I mention this because when Jesus came they asked him which of these scribes he lined up with, and the answer was none of them. Nevertheless, there was a hot debate about divorce and remarriage at the time of Jesus between these scribes.

One of them, who was a narrow-minded scribe, a conservative scribe, was called Shammai. And Shammai said there was only one possible ground for divorce and that was adultery. But Hillel, his rival scribe, who was more broadly minded, he said, anything that offends the husband is a ground for divorce, for divorce was a male thing.

It was the husband who divorced the wife invariably in their situation. And he said, a husband can divorce his wife for overcooking the meal and burning it, for talking to men in the street, for shouting too loud.

In other words, whatever offended the husband was a valid ground for divorce. Later there came another rabbi called Akiba. Actually, he was after the time of Jesus, but he took it one stage further. He said, you can divorce for any reason you like, or even none at all.

If you're just tired of being married, divorce her and find someone else. Now it's interesting the progression of thought, starting with adultery only of Shammai, then to anything that offended the husband in Hillel's teaching, and finally to any reason or none at all.

Anybody could just freely divorce. That is the situation now in England. We began with divorce for adultery, it then became divorce for a number of reasons, and now legally in Britain you don't even need to have a reason.

If two people want to divorce, they can do so after two years' notice. If only one of them wants the divorce, they have to wait five years, but they don't have to have a reason for divorce at all. That's one reason why it's become so common in my country.

Jesus' Teaching on Divorce and Remarriage

Now when Jesus came, he came right into the middle of that debate. So it was inevitable that he would be asked about it, what do you think about divorce and remarriage? And he answered and gave his answer, and we're going to look at that now.

It is no wonder that he was asked because everybody was discussing it. It was a common debate, and it was usually the Pharisees who asked him for his opinion because they were well into divorce. They were very religious, they were very wealthy usually, and therefore they were changing their wives for a later model, and that was quite frequent among the Pharisees.

So they came to Jesus and said, what do you think? And they usually asked him when he was on the east bank of the Jordan River. Did you realise the significance of that? That was in the realm governed by Herod Junior, and John the Baptist had said, you are not legally married in God's sight for his second marriage.

For that, John the Baptist paid with his life. He had his head chopped off and brought in to King Herod on a plate. It was in Herod's territory that they asked Jesus, what do you think about divorce and remarriage?

Perhaps hoping that Jesus would say something that would get him imprisoned and have his head chopped off. So when these questions were asked, it's interesting to look at where they were asked, and the Bible tells us where.

It was a trick question, really, to get Jesus into trouble. But they were also interested in, is he going to take the strict line adultery only, like Shammai? Or will he take a more liberal line like Hillel?

Or will he take his own line? So let's begin to look at what Jesus said, because for the Christian, I believe that is the most important question. We are followers of Jesus, and what he said on this subject should go for every Christian.

Now there's no doubt about it that Jesus was against divorce and remarriage. But I want to look at three aspects of this. First, I want to look at his explanation for that negative attitude which he gives us in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Mark.

Then having looked at his explanation for his attitude, I want to look at the exception he made to his rule, for he did make one exception, and that's the centre of Christian discussion today. I'm sorry that people, when they discuss what Jesus said about divorce, go straight for the exception and try and enlarge the loophole to include most divorces and remarriages.

But an exception always refers to a minority of cases, otherwise it would be the rule. But we shall look at the exception which occurs in Matthew. So the explanation is in Mark and Luke, the exception is in Matthew, and then we shall look thirdly at the example of Jesus which you find in John.

So that's our little structured outline for what Jesus said. First of all, his explanation why was he against divorce and remarriage? The answer is really very simple. You find it most plainly stated in Luke where he said to the Pharisees, anyone who divorces his wife and marries another is committing adultery, and anyone who marries a divorcee is committing adultery.

Now the interesting thing about that simple statement in Luke is this. He called remarriage after divorce adultery. He said remarrying after divorce is breaking the seventh commandment. But the significance of that is this.

If adultery can only be committed by a married person, then a person who is divorced and remarried is still married to the first partner in God's sight. Now that's so important, I want you to really grasp that.

If getting divorced and marrying someone else is adultery, it means that in God's sight the divorce is not valid. That person is still married and therefore when they have sex with another partner in a remarriage, they are committing adultery against the first partner.

That's his explanation of why he was so strong about divorce and remarriage. He said it's breaking the fundamental commandment of God not to commit adultery. It's the sin of a married person. So divorce has not dissolved the marriage, it has not ended the first marriage.

That's a very important thing to realise. In Jesus' sight and therefore in God's sight, a divorce does not end a marriage. The person is still married and therefore remarriage becomes adultery for that reason.

Now that's the rule of Jesus. That is general rule before he made an exception, but that's the rule that we need to get a hold of. Remarriage is adultery. That's why I've called my book, Remarriage is Adultery Unless, and the unless allows for an exception.

And Jesus didn't make an exception. Let's turn to that now in Matthew. In Matthew 5 and Matthew 19 there's a little clause, except in the case of. In both passages he is saying the same basic thing, remarriage after divorce is adultery except in the case of.

This is where we run into deep waters and this is where Christians are divided and there's an awful lot of discussion. I have about twenty-five books on divorce and remarriage on my shelves, all holding different views and all written by evangelical Christians.

The confusion on this issue is widespread, and that means that you can always find an evangelical pastor who will agree with your remarriage. You just need to shop around. Because there's such a variety in understanding Jesus' words, just go round the pastors until you find one who will agree with you and remarry you, or at least accept you into church membership after you're remarried.

That's the result of today. And I'm afraid now with cars, automobiles, every Christian has a choice of at least forty churches, if not more. And you've got a thousand churches, I gather, in Kansas City and District.

You can just shop around and change churches when you don't like one. That's made church discipline impossible because you just shop around until you find a church that will accept you. I wish churches would get together and discipline their members together so that what one church does, the other churches will back up.

But that's not the case now. We've got this huge variety of opinion, and if you are divorced and want to remarry, you won't have any difficulty finding a church that will do it for you. But it's Jesus we're dealing with, not pastors, and Jesus made one exception to his rule that remarriage after divorce is adultery.

The Meaning of Fornication in Matthew's Exception

It's about that exception that we have so much variety of opinion and so much discussion. Excuse me. The real problem at the basis of this exception is that Jesus didn't use the word adultery. He used a quite different word, a word that is translated in the King James Version as fornication.

It's not the word adultery, and yet many modern versions have assumed that he made the exception of adultery. The New International Version, the NIV, the Nearly Infallible Version I call it, that actually has except for marital infidelity, which is simply another way of saying adultery.

This is now a widely accepted meaning of that word. But why didn't Jesus use the word? Because he does use it in the very next sentence. Whoever marries the divorced person is committing adultery, so he knew the word.

But he didn't make that word the exception. To give you the Greek version, in case you want to look it up, the word for adultery, the sin of a married person, is moikaia. The word that Jesus used for the exception is pornaia, from which we get our word pornography.

The word pornaia has about it a kind of commercial sense sex for money. It was used of prostitution, it was used of brothels, and it really meant sex for money. But it was a wider word than that. Now there are three different possibilities for treating that word pornaia or fornication, and that's where all the problems arise.

The three possibilities I'm going to be quite honest with you and give you all three possible interpretations and then tell you which one convinces me. The first possibility is that pornaia and moikaia fornication and adultery mean the same thing.

They are synonyms, words that have the same meaning. Jesus simply used another word as a normal literary device. When I'm writing a book, I often want another word of the same meaning, just to give a bit of variety to my writing.

So I have a book of synonyms that I look up. Now that's the first possibility, that when Jesus said pornaia, fornication, he meant adultery. That's a very common opinion, even though it isn't the same word.

The second possibility, which is the wider interpretation adopted by many evangelicals, including IHOP, which you will find, is this that fornication is a wide word including adultery but including other sexual sins.

It's a very wide word so that it includes adultery as just one example of fornication. Others would be homosexuality, buggery, a whole lot of things, including possibly masturbation. So that's the second view of this word exception fornication, that it's a wide word, meaning any sexual sin.