Divorce & Remarriage: A Biblical View

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala. And today we have a very special guest.

Every guest that I have on is special in some way. Everyone's equally special. Yeah, that's right, we're equally special.

Well, when I had Matt Slick on, I said we have a special guest, but there are two types of special.

There's the uppercase S special and the lowercase S special. One is the special and the other one is legitimately special.

So Matt Slick, he can take those sorts of jokes, but I mean special for you in a good way, all right?

So - Not the Matt Slick way, fortunately. Matt Slick can take it. He's special in a completely different kind of way.

But yeah, so my special guest, of course, those who follow Mike Winger's YouTube channel, you obviously will know who he is.

He is a wonderful resource with regards to things that are very pastoral, apologetical, and theological.

And so that's what I appreciate about Mike's YouTube channel. He's got a lot of content that covers a wide variety of things that I think are very useful to people who are engaged in ministry, and of course, which is our focus, apologetics.

So I'm very happy to welcome Mike here today, but he's not going to say anything for another minute or two because I have to make a couple of announcements and then

I'll let you say hi to everyone personally. How does that sound? Perfect. All right, great. Well, there are a couple of guests coming up very shortly.

Next week, I have Dr. Vern Poitras from Reform Theological Seminary to talk about how the

Trinity, how the doctrine of the Trinity impacts everything. And so we're going to be taking a look at how the metaphysics of the triune

God kind of spills into everything that we do and allows us to see the world in a way that makes sense.

And I think we're going to have a really good time with Dr. Poitras. He was very generous in responding to my invitation.

And so he will be coming next Tuesday. Also on July 9th,

I will be having Dr. Hugh Ross on, which is very, very interesting. I had Dr. Jason Lyle on a couple of shows ago, who is a very well -known proponent of young earth creationism.

And as I was speaking with Dr. Ross's secretary or contact person, she told me that Dr.

Ross loves to interact with people. And I was like, you know what? Let me see if I can set up Jason Lyle with Hugh Ross.

And so I reached out to Dr. Lyle and just waiting for a response. So hopefully that will happen.

So I'm going to try to make that happen. Maybe we can have a moderated discussion between the both of them. I think that'd be really great. I'll watch that.

I'm sorry? I'll watch that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so I hope that will happen.

If not, I do apologize, but I am trying to get some guests here that I think people will enjoy and learn a lot from.

So just wanted to get that out of the way. All right, well, our guest today is

Mike Winger. He is a, I'll make him blush. He is a YouTube superstar.

He's like, absolutely not. Actually, he does have a really great YouTube channel.

He's got over 134 ,000 subscribers with over 398 videos or so, a lot of content.

So definitely you're most likely going to know more about Mike Winger than myself.

But if you don't know about Mike Winger, go over to his channel and subscribe. There's so much helpful information there.

And of course, if you're enjoying Revealed Apologetics, greatly appreciate if you subscribe to the Revealed Apologetics channel as well.

Without further ado, let me introduce Mike Winger. Why don't you say hello to everyone who's watching?

Hey, everybody. It's good to be here. Eli, I'm grateful to get to come on. Eli and I are friends, actually.

Even though we totally disagree on a couple of issues, we agree on even more issues.

And the more important ones, I think. So yeah, it's good to be here. And I'm happy to join with you and talk about this issue

I've been studying a lot and teaching on recently, which I actually avoided teaching for years, divorce and remarriage.

Yeah, it's definitely a controversial topic and a very personal topic. It's one of those topics that when you speak to it, people are quick to say, who are you to speak into my private life and my marriage and all those other sorts of things.

So it's definitely a touching topic, but an important one. And that's why I'm very excited to have you on today since I follow your channel.

You have some videos on this topic already and a giant one, I think one over three hours long where you cover a lot of your research in this specific topic.

So very, very excited. All right, well, great. Let's begin then. I want to ask you a few questions and then perhaps you can interact with them and let's see where the conversation goes.

I do want to clarify something. I've received multiple messages from people when I was kind of sharing this on Facebook.

I am not debating Mike Winger. Good luck with your debate. There's no debate. I'm not debating.

It says Mike Winger and Eli. It didn't say Mike Winger versus Eli, all right?

So we're here just talking. I want to learn from him. He's studied this topic far more than I have.

And so I'm here to learn and hopefully you guys will benefit greatly. And of course, Mike has been generous to take some questions in the live chat as well if you have them.

So please send them in. I will go back and share them towards the end and Mike can answer them for you, all right?

All right, well, seeing that this is a topic that you cover personally in great depth on your own channel, how long, if you don't mind me asking, did it take you to study this issue until you were comfortable sharing your thoughts with everyone throughout the interwebs?

Yeah, well, okay, so let me just say I'm uncomfortable with the issue. I think it's a huge issue.

I think there's major consequences in people's real lives. And the truth is that for years,

I was just confused. Like I just go, I don't know the right answer. Life is complicated. Life is hard. I'm worried about giving the wrong advice and people taking my advice.

And I know that when I make a video teaching on a topic saying this is, the Bible says, da, da, da,

I build my case, people are making life choices. And in this case, life choice is about divorce based upon my teaching.

I just feel a lot of trepidation about it. Like very sincerely, I do. And I was, like I said,

I was confused about this. And even pastors that I talked to about it, oftentimes they're just going with their gut.

They're giving advice that's not based oftentimes on scripture, it's just based on their gut. And other times it's based on scripture, but it's only based on like three verses.

And I'm like, well, there's a lot more that the Bible teaches than just those three verses. You know, you quote three verses and you ignore the rest of the teaching on a topic, you can have an unbalanced view.

So what I did was I just did like an isolated study. I said, I'm just gonna focus on this topic. And I've said

I did over 200 hours of research. That's an understatement. I don't know how many hours,

I didn't clock it all. It's just, it was hundreds of hours. And there's a lot of scripture to cover, a lot of various passages to study in depth and then try to see how they all work together to communicate what

God's telling us. There's historical issues, background content that you wanna get into there and you wanna read scholarship on those topics.

There's linguistic issues, the debates about like, what did Jesus mean when he said, except for porneia, sexual immorality?

Well, what does that mean? There's recent scholarship in the past like 20 years, there's been a lot of writing on this topic in particular.

And so I wanted to kind of like get up to date on all that and not just read it and quote it, but understand it.

Like know whether I should side with this or that, what truths are here, what maybe mistakes are here, that kind of thing.

So I think I do have clarity on the issue now largely. And so that's why I went ahead and did my teaching on it, which is why that video is three hours long.

It's a summary of just a thousand issues that I covered in detail. So yeah. Sure, now you said that you had to study the

Bible and of course, linguistic issues, interpretive issues. And I would imagine that cultural issues play a huge role.

How did you come at it? What were the resources you used to kind of learn the cultural context of how they understood marriage, divorce, remarriage within the ancient world?

Well, as soon as you pick up any commentary on the gospels where Jesus is talking about marriage and divorce, they all will say the same thing.

Well, back in the first century, there was this debate between these two schools of Jewish thinking, the Hillelite school and the

Shemite school. And so any commentary will give you access into these people, but when you really wanna understand what were the

Shemites and Hillelites saying, what were they really thinking, you need to go beyond most commentaries, most of the comments that they give.

So I looked up, for instance, David Instone Brewer, who I don't agree with his thesis, his ultimate conclusions, but he does give us tons of access to primary sources.

So I'm looking at the primary sources, reading the debates in the Mishnah between the Shemite and Hillel schools, what they were saying.

And so, yeah, looking at that, looking up scholarly resources, and as well as just reading large portions of the

Mishnah itself, along with like a Jewish divorce text, divorce certificates, and Greco -Roman divorce, and, you know, cause it's very different.

The two very different cultures handled it differently. So in the Jewish context and the gospels, Jesus is speaking in one context.

And we have to understand that in 1 Corinthians 7, when Paul writes about divorce and separation, it's a whole different context, different culture, and different meanings for the word separation.

So this is, yeah, it's just lots of trying to get down to primary sources as much as possible through sort of scholarship.

Basically, it's like checking footnotes, you know, check the footnotes and then go look up that sources is pretty much, we've talked about this before.

I ended up being a footnote fanatic, yeah. All right, very good. Well, before we get into the issue of divorce and remarriage,

I think it's very important that we talk about the biblical view of marriage itself. And I wanna kind of have you emphasize that important aspect of why it's so important to go into the seriousness of divorce and remarriage and how that all works with the backdrop of how important marriage itself is to God.

How would you explain, for example, the biblical conception of marriage and why it's important, both relationally, horizontally, between the man and the woman, and vertically, what this represents before the eyes of God?

Why don't you jump in to that for us, please? Well, you know, it's so important and so valuable that I almost feel like whatever

I say will understate the value and the importance of marriage. It's actually part of the created order.

You know, God makes Adam and Eve and the two become one. And this is part of God, the creation account. This is like our inherent design as male and female.

And, you know, Jesus commenting on this says that God joins us together.

God joins us together and the two become one. There's like an identity connection between the man and woman in marriage.

It's so, you know, theologically between man and woman, it's more than an agreement, like a business deal or something like that.

It's a bigger deal than your allegiance to your country or any of those other things.

So, and it's also a central institution of all society. It's more central, I think, than government itself would be just the actual place of marriage in society.

Now, you know, horizontally, it represents Jesus and his love for the church. Paul talks about this in Ephesians, right?

That the husband love your wives as Christ loved the church. And it just, he draws all these parallels between God's love for us and the husband's love for his wife.

The wife's yielding and submitting to her husband in a godly fashion. And the church is submitting to Christ.

So that any words I say at this point may not give you that amazing wow of marriage, but it's a bigger deal than most people realize, if I could just put it that way.

And you could kind of feel this, right? Does your parents' marriage or divorce, if they were divorced, did that matter? Or look at your friends and your family and the effect of marriage or divorce, you know, either in the wonderfulness of it or the horror of it and how big of a deal it is.

So yeah, I think it's huge. I don't think we cannot overstate the importance and value of marriage.

We can throw a little theological bone to people who are like kind of the theological connections with,

I mean, marriage is theological. Everything is theological for the Christian. But how would you say, and then from here, we're gonna jump into some of the more specifics of why we have you on.

But how would you explain the connection between marriage and the Trinity?

Do you see a connection between the intimacy of that relationship and the inter -Trinitarian love relationship between the persons within the

Trinity? Do you see a connection there? Well, there may be. I'm trying to think of how I would spell that out.

You have to be careful when you're drawing analogies, especially with the Trinity. And so there is a two and a twoness and a oneness that's there.

So we see that. Maybe you could explain what you're thinking there. I don't know if I would have the right answer.

Yeah, well, this is something that I think about often when I think of marriage.

And there's just something about the concept of being in covenant relationship and love.

And I think the love union between the husband and the wife in kind of a lesser degree reflects this inter -Trinitarian love relationship that has been going on from all eternity.

And the amazing thing is, as we're creating the image of God and God creates us to have relationship with us,

He invites us into covenant relationship, into this intimate triune relationship.

So there's this eternal love that God invites us into the midst of. And I always find that marriage in kind of a lesser degree reflects that intimacy that really is related and reflects our intimacy with God.

And that's why you have that imagery in the Bible of the bride and the bridegroom. So I don't know if there's a necessary connection there, but I've always reflected upon that and saw that as an interesting connection if there is one.

Yeah, I think that I would agree. And I think that the connection in my mind though isn't so much about the

Trinity as it is about, just for what it's worth, is about man's joining to God.

So the connection of mankind to God and that we become one with Him in a sense that is different than the nature of the

Trinity, but is connected to the relationship of the Trinity. If I could try to be careful with my terminology here.

All right, very good. Well, what I find interesting now, if we can move, okay, so marriage, obviously it's a very serious issue.

It's very important. There's a theological context there, especially for Christians who are stepping into marriage, understanding its seriousness and its theological and biblical importance.

That should really weigh heavy when you're going through the midst of your marriage, through the difficulties of relationship and considering, well, maybe

I don't wanna be with this person anymore. We always have to remember that backdrop of our commitment and how that relates to God, our covenant between our significant other and the covenant we made before God.

Super important, okay? However, when we're dealing with this issue of divorce and remarriage,

I think Christians tend to, they tend to categorize what they think are important moral issues.

And they will, for example, Christians will say action

A is really, really serious, and we frown upon that. Yet it seems to me, and you could explain if this is your understanding and your experience, when it comes to marriage issues, they tend to fudge up on the seriousness of it.

Now, of course it's serious, but they tend to think, well, it's, even though I don't, the relationship isn't working out, but I think it's the right thing.

We don't love each other as much as we did before. And I think it's just a good time to separate. And they begin to talk as though, it's a bad thing, but it's not as serious as what we understand it to be with regards to what the

Bible has to say about it. So I guess the question to you, if I can kind of ask the question clumsily, in your estimation, how important do you think it is for the average

Christian to be clear and consistent on the issues of divorce and its moral dimensions? You understand what

I'm trying to ask? Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. And I think that we have a parallel with Jesus and the gospels here, because the culture where he's speaking to them, divorce had, nobody likes divorce.

Divorce wasn't considered a good thing. There was a sense of shame associated with it, but it was so much more acceptable than it should be by the people, divorce in general.

And so there was this new school of thought. Well, new school, it came in the first century BC is when it kind of took root as like an official way of thinking about things.

But it was the Hillel school that I was talking about earlier. And they basically had something called any matter divorce. And they basically looked at divorce as like the right of a husband.

It's just, you have a right to divorce if you think that that's what needs to happen.

And Jesus, he directly confronts this with such extreme statements as to say, you divorce someone and I'll add the phrase unjustly here.

And we can talk more about that later, but you divorce someone unjustly and then you marry another, you commit adultery.

And this is something nobody thought back then. I mean, none of the Shemites, the Hillelites, nobody was thinking this, it shocked everybody.

Wait, it's one thing to say the divorce was wrong, but you're saying that you're still morally obligated to your spouse if the divorce was wrong, and that if you marry another, you're actually committing a sin, you're committing adultery.

And that's Jesus's way of waking up, I think, his culture and his community to the importance and value of marriage.

So we can't, as Christians, we can't take Jesus seriously and look at divorce as, well, it's unfortunate, but once it happens, it happens, and then you move on and you just go marry somebody else.

There's more to it than that, but you can't have that view. You can't have that view and be a solid

Christian. And we've also substituted personal happiness as the sort of measure of a marriage, as opposed to the nature of marriage as being, so not just the institution, but the nature of the relationship

God joins together. Instead of focusing on that and the obligations of a husband and a wife to one another, we focus on degrees of personal happiness.

And if the personal happiness goes below some kind of arbitrary point, now

I'm justified in breaking this thing up, because the purpose of this thing is my happiness, instead of happiness being like a secondary, important but secondary issue, yeah.

You ever see the movie, The Wedding Singer with Adam Sandler? Oh, I may have. I feel like I did when it came out a long time ago, but I can't remember very well.

When Adam Sandler stood up at his wedding and he's kind of depressed on his front steps and the woman comes, his fiance comes, and she's like, well, she goes,

I love you, but I'm not in love with you. And she, of course, in that movie, they weren't married, but I think a lot of people have that sort of reasoning.

It's like, I was in love with you, but I'm not in love with you anymore. And I think the right thing to do is to, and of course, the standard, the biblical standards are not being upheld at that point.

It's a very self -centered kind of way of coming about. Now you did say something though that I wanted to ask, but I didn't want to interrupt you.

You said that you have the Hillel school and you have the, what was the other school again? So they're named after two rabbis.

So Hillel was the rabbi who preceded Shemai as like the sort of the leaders, the lead rabbi of the time.

And the Hillel school said, hey, you know, basically, effectively, it's the right of a husband to get a divorce for any reason he wants.

So it was called any matter divorce. He can divorce his wife if he finds in her any matter of issue.

Burns his food. They use these crazy examples to show how liberally they interpret this.

Then the Shemait school, which follows the rabbi Shemai, their view coming to the time of Jesus, their view is you can only divorce if you find an issue of nakedness.

And nakedness, basically they meant some kind of, you know, impurity, some sort of justifying impurity.

And they would relate this to adultery for sure. But they would also say if a woman goes around and she has like her shoulders uncovered and her hair undone, which was like a signal to the world that she was promiscuous and looking for adulterous relationships, then you could divorce her for doing that.

So if she did things that led toward adultery, then that was also considered legitimate. I don't think

Jesus sided with either of these schools, but those were the two schools.

That's where my question was. You said something that I didn't know because I haven't studied this topic in great depth. You said that Jesus had a view that was neither, was not an element of any of those schools of thought.

Was this unique in history? I mean, you study the history of how people understood marriage, divorce, and remarriage.

Is Jesus' position here where he says that if you, you know, unjustifyingly separate in a divorce and you marry another woman, you're committing adultery.

Was that unique to Jesus? Is that not found anywhere else in the ancient world or? Gosh, that's a good question.

I don't know if I can say that nobody thought it, but in my studying, I didn't come across anybody who proclaimed that sort of thing.

Their view of men in particular, so when Jesus says that about a man, their view of men in particular. So at the time, Judaism still was practicing polygamy.

They basically didn't feel like a husband when he, okay, if you were married and you married another woman, that wasn't considered adultery in their view.

Now, I'm not saying that that's a biblical or moral view, but that was their view, that was their culture. So when

Jesus is like, you divorce her, you marry another woman, that's adultery. Like, this is like, wait a minute, what? Like, at what point is a man marrying another woman adultery at all in their culture?

Well, it just, it wasn't. Now there was some pushback against polygamy at the time and they slowly got there eventually where the

Jewish community said, yeah, we reject polygamy, but it took a lot longer than the first century to do that. But yeah,

I don't know if Jesus' view was completely unique, but it definitely wasn't like a mainstream view. Yeah, now you made mention of the multiple wives there and I guess this is not directly related, but now that you mentioned it, that's interesting.

Again, I've never, this isn't something I haven't really looked into. When they took on many wives,

I know it was very much of a cultural thing, but was this against scripture? I mean, a lot of people's understanding of marriage is the union between a man and a woman and that's it.

And when people mention, well, David had many wives, they'll be like, well, that was the culture back then. Well, yeah, but does that conflict with what

God set up at the beginning? Why don't you address that real quick? Yeah, so Jesus' comments on this are actually stronger than most people realize.

And it's in studying the background data that you realize he's not only arguing against any matter or divorcing for whatever reason you think is a good reason.

Although I think there are exceptions, we'll talk about that later. But in general, most divorces don't fall into those exceptions.

So most divorces fall into a sinful act and then the remarriage thereafter was a sinful act.

But when it comes to polygamy, Jesus' comments are actually a lot stronger than people realize.

So they're debating Deuteronomy 24, right? They go, well, why did Moses allow the husband to write a certificate of divorce and divorcer?

And Jesus says, from the beginning, it was not so, right? That God made the male and female. And then he says, the two become one flesh.

Now what's interesting is just by adding the phrase, the two, which it does not appear in the

Genesis verse that Jesus is referring to, but it appears later in Genesis that the two become one flesh.

He's tapping into an ongoing discussion going on in the first century. And we can actually read about this in the

Qumran texts. So in the stuff they've uncovered in the Qumran scrolls, which a lot of people are familiar with, there's a passage where they argue against polygamy.

And one of the ways in which they argue against polygamy is they say, from the very beginning, they don't use that exact terminology, but they say, yeah, in Genesis, God says, male, female, there's one man, one woman, the two become one flesh.

That was a subtle argument against polygamy, just two. Then they tap that into Genesis 7 where they're going into the ark two by two.

And they saw this as like an affirmation of one man, one woman.

And so when you have, there's a lot more to it, probably don't wanna bog down the whole thing today with it, but there's basically an ongoing cultural discussion about polygamy, and those who are pushing against it are using certain terminology.

And Jesus uses that terminology when he's talking against divorce itself.

And so he speaks against polygamy and divorce. That was something I didn't expect as I was doing this study, was to find that Jesus's words were much more strong against polygamy.

Like I said, when he's like, hey, you marry another, you commit adultery. They're like, wait, under no condition do we think that's true.

If it's a divorce, it's a divorce. You marry another, you marry another. We're worried about the divorce. We're not worried about the remarriage, right?

That was not something that was on their mind. And so, yeah, all those things argue against polygamy.

Ask me for clarity if I muddied things up at all there. That makes sense. And I think it's important to understand too that Jesus often in explaining certain laws would kind of not add, but kind of intensify the implications.

For example, when Jesus says, if you look at a woman lustfully, you've committed adultery with her in your heart.

I mean, that seems more strict than just the law, the rule on the face of it.

So I think that's a very interesting thing to see Jesus kind of clarify these debates.

He kind of magnified it just to highlight the importance of the law and how serious it is. That's super important.

Now, this is an interesting topic because it relates to so many other issues, morally, and as you mentioned before, culturally.

How should Christians approach this topic if they wish to study what the Bible has to say with regards to marriage, divorce, remarriage, all those related issues?

Does it simply boil down to reading the portions of scripture that seem to speak to this area? I mean, does the

Bible speak to this topic unambiguously? I mean, this is an area where people disagree.

It's one of the things that I hear skeptics say, you Christians don't agree on anything.

And then they'll list off a whole bunch of things that Christians disagree on. And one of them that pops up is marriage and divorce and all this other stuff.

How should we approach this? So I do think that the key, the number one issue is, yeah, just gathering all the relevant, all, this is the key, all the relevant texts in scripture.

And then you can come up with your interpretation and you can test it against all of those texts.

And if your interpretation doesn't fit with every text that teaches on it, then you don't have the correct biblical view.

And this is something I see a lot. And the people who I think do this the most are the more strict perspective.

They quote Romans 7. If a woman marries another while her husband's alive, she's committing adultery.

You know, this is wrong. And then they quote Jesus in Mark and Luke in particular, where he doesn't offer any qualification.

He says, you divorce your wife and marry another, you commit adultery. You marry a woman who's divorced, you commit adultery.

And there's no other explanation there. But then they ignore Matthew 5, Matthew 19, where Jesus says, except for sexual immorality, right?

Like except if it's sexual immorality and they tend to ignore it or they find really unlikely ways of explaining away those passages or they ignore 1

Corinthians 7, where Paul talks about you have an unbelieving spouse who's unwilling to stay with you.

You're no longer bound or enslaved and you're free. And the implication is you're free to marry.

And there's a whole debate on that. But you also look at Ezra. And Ezra, there's a command to divorce that Ezra gives out.

And he's giving it out as a way of obeying God. I mean, the context seems to imply that there's at least one divorce situation.

They sometimes will ignore Jeremiah 3, where God divorces Israel. So we have to like take all of these and put them all together.

That's important. But then it gets complicated and it gets challenging. And I don't subscribe to the idea that if for Christianity to be true, everything in the

Bible has to be easy to understand. I don't think that's rational. I don't think that view is rational at all.

I know a lot of atheists like to lean on that. And they literally will dismiss Christianity because it's hard to understand.

I mean, and they can't believe in quantum physics either. And they can't believe in a whole host of things.

So, yeah. But there is also relevant background information that does help. And it really helps enlighten us.

And then you can add the background data to see if your view is consistent with that as well. So this helps support good interpretation.

We look at the Jewish debate on divorce at the time. We ask questions like in 1 Corinthians 7, when

Paul talks about a woman separating from her husband or a man divorcing his wife, is separation and divorce, are they the same thing?

Or are they a different thing? Well, we have to look at Roman culture to get the answer to that. It turns out they're the same thing.

There's also language issues like, Jesus, what do you mean by porneia? There's a whole, I have a whole section where I deal with that.

When Paul said that the believing woman or man was not enslaved to a marriage with an unwilling unbeliever, does that mean they're also free to marry someone else?

How would the original audience have taken that phrase, not enslaved? And these are questions that you have to go into history to help enlighten you on those issues, yeah.

So it's not simply going through and giving a survey of the relevant biblical passages.

You need to dig a little deeper for some of that more wider context. Yeah, to be wise, we do.

We do need to. Now, here's the thing. In my opinion, when I've gone through all that background stuff, I then look at it and go,

I could have come to these same conclusions just doing the survey of scripture alone, right?

But the background data serves as a check to make sure I'm interpreting those texts correctly.

That's it, yeah. Right, all right. Very good. I had a question real quick.

It just popped in my mind. Suppose you had an ancient Israelite who has the law of Moses. He kind of backslides and kind of does his own thing.

He kind of falls in love with a woman from the surrounding pagan nations and he marries her. Mm -hmm.

And then a prophet comes along and says, don't marry the, don't take the women of these other surrounding nations around you.

And the person comes to a sense and says, what have I done? Lord, please forgive me. What should that person do?

What would have been expected of that person? Would that person had to divorce his pagan wife in that context, or did the law, given that situation, require him to say, okay, you didn't do what was right, but you're in this situation and still remain in that union?

Yeah, so, okay, I would give an easy answer to this and say, hey, you have a covenant you shouldn't have entered.

Guess what? You entered it. Honor the covenant. You know, we have Joshua with the Gibeonites. He was told not to make any sort of treaty or contract of peace with the people of the land, but the

Gibeonites deceived him. They were like, hey, we're from far away. Remember they got moldy bread and they travel over in the book of Joshua and they're like, look how far, look at our sandals are worn out.

We're from real far away. Let's make a treaty. Joshua does not inquire of the Lord. He makes the treaty and then later finds out who they really are and God requires them to honor the treaty, to honor the deal, the covenant that he made with them, to use the correct term, covenant.

And so I think that there's an element of that. There's also the fact that we don't have these instructions about tearing apart existing marriages.

And it seems like this is in general not something we do in scripture. I have a whole section in the video where I talk about this, but then there's the book of Ezra and the book of Ezra, actually,

Ezra, they're coming back into the land, right? After they've been expelled and they're sort of renewing the covenant with God.

And there's over a hundred marriages that they actually separate and divorce from in the book of Ezra.

And this is a long discussion, but, and I'm gonna deal with this today. I'm going live today and I'm gonna, because I'm dealing with a whole bunch of issues

I didn't cover or push back or questions from my first video. So I'll cover the book of Ezra in detail in today's stream.

But what I'll say in short is that with the book of Ezra, what we have is an exception to the general rule, right?

The general rule, like you get married, even if it was a bad idea, you stay that way. The two have become one and you stay married.

But with Ezra, what we have is a renewal of the people going into the land initially. It's kind of like that first Exodus from Egypt trying to enter the land.

They're coming back into the covenant. And so this is about restoring the people back to Israel. The chief offenders in the book of Ezra, it says were the leading men of Israel.

Cause you had to be more wealthy and attractive probably to these pagan women. So they're like the leading men.

And so this is like a cutting off of all kinds of pagan practices and a revival in the land of Israel.

But it does seem like a one -time deal. And I don't know of any, I haven't heard of any evidence in the say first century time where they would actively break up a marriage like that.

All right. Well, I want to transition into the specific topic of divorce, what the

Bible has to say about that specifically. Cause I know the common idea of most people who have a passing knowledge of this topic, they'll say, well, of course the

Bible says, if your spouse cheats on you, that's good ground for divorce. And I'm sure there's more depth to that whole situation.

So hopefully we can get into that. But before we do that, I do have one question with regards to your personal study on this topic.

What did you find personally, the most challenging part of studying this specific thing?

Was it an emotional challenge? Was there an intellectual challenge, a mixture of both when confronting this topic?

Okay, well, fortunately I have a pretty happy marriage. And I don't have divorce in my own background.

So I didn't have the understandable angst of trying to have to process my own maybe major life decisions, in light of all these things.

So I have the happy marriage in that regard. I'm grateful for that. Thank God for that. I'm really concerned though about the impact it's gonna have on other people emotionally.

Again, cause people make life decisions based on the content I'm teaching and I'm accountable for that. So that's an emotional weight.

But to be honest, the intellectual stuff was the hardest. The intellectual stuff, it was just, there's a variety of views and they are defended by scholars and by people who are respectable theologians who are defending these views.

And I'm trying to read even more from people I don't agree with than people I do agree with on these issues to try to really get a full understanding of their view without straw manning them, without misrepresenting them.

So just kind of like sifting through all of this content was that was the hardest thing.

It was just lots and lots of info. And that's why it took so much time. Reading the same thing over and over again to try to go, okay, ooh, wait, now

I've learned this about the background info. Let me go back and reevaluate this guy's view now that I know that, just that type of stuff was just laborious.

So yeah, the intellectual stuff was the biggest challenge. Now I wanna encourage people cause

I know a lot of people who watch your channel or they follow apologetics in general, there's the great intimidation of having to study and read a bunch of stuff.

Let me tell you something, when you study and dive into a topic, it is hard, but the fruit of it is totally worth it.

You might come out of it with some intellectual turmoil and on some of the topics you have to study, they kind of really challenge you, but it's definitely a worthy journey to take to dive into a topic and be able to share what you found with other people.

And so I do encourage people to, you might not have enough time as Mike has, not that he's sitting around doing nothing, but he's definitely taking the time to look into this.

Hopefully that'll encourage people to really dig into a topic and share with someone else. So real quick guys, just as a quick reminder, if you're enjoying our conversation, enjoying the content, please be sure to subscribe to Revealed Apologetics on iTunes as well as YouTube.

And of course, if you're not familiar with Mike, which I'm sure most people here are, go over to Mike Winger's channel and subscribe and get those notifications.

He always has some really good content, especially we mentioned before, Mike mentioned before that we're friends and we disagree on certain issues.

I'm a low down, dirty Calvinist. Everyone who knows me, I'm a Calvinist, Mike isn't yet.

I love you anyways though. I'm sorry? I love you anyway. That's right, you were predestined to come out. So yeah, we can get along and we benefit from one another and there's a lot to learn from those with whom we disagree.

So I do, I tell people about your channel all the time. I find it a blessing for myself personally and I think you do an excellent job.

So just wanted to throw that out there. All right, well, Mike, why don't you tell us, what does the

Bible say about divorce? And perhaps you can go in a little deeper than just the common, people tend to think they know what it says, like, well, unfaithfulness.

Well, why don't you go through some of those texts? What does the Bible say with regards to this unfaithfulness?

What does that mean? What does sexual immorality mean? Why don't we go into some of those things? Ooh, we can talk about that.

Let me pull up those notes real quick. Sure. You're doing great by the way.

I think you're doing a great job. So in my video, what I did was I surveyed, for instance, okay,

Jesus says in Matthew 5 and 19, if you divorce your spouse effectively for sexual immorality or for any other reason than sexual immorality, then you're committing adultery if you marry another.

So then some of the questions that come up in the text are, does that exception clause apply to divorce and remarriage or does it only apply to divorce?

And that's like a Greek discussion and it gets heady and it gets kind of, there's a lot there.

But I think that the conclusion of the study is it's best to take it in its natural sense, the same way it reads in English.

It's like, yeah, if you divorce and remarry except for this reason, then it's adultery, which implies if you divorce because of sexual immorality and then remarry, then it's okay.

Then that is not adultery. That is an acceptable thing. Now, the question then is what did

Jesus mean when he said sexual immorality? Did he mean adultery? Did he mean, so I'm gonna give you some views.

Okay, so here are five potential views that I surveyed and dug into. There's other views, but here's five.

That pornea means, that's the Greek word for it when Jesus said it. It means, it only refers to having premarital sex sometime before the marriage actually takes place.

So the divorce is basically like Joseph when he finds out that Mary's pregnant and he thinks, oh, before we were married, you've slept with somebody, so now

I can divorce you. And that's one view. So it's only refers to engagement, which means that it wouldn't apply to any marriages.

Even if your spouse commits adultery, you can't get a divorce. This is a view of some individuals, even scholars, who will say you can't have a divorce under any condition.

That's their bottom line. Another view is that it's incest, that pornea is just incest.

And they try to build a case from the Greek, which is incredibly weak. All of the, most of these views are really bad once you start studying into them, in my opinion.

But another one is that it's incest. And they're just saying, look, if you marry someone and you find out that they were your sister, your cousin, some kind of close relative, and maybe you didn't know, maybe you did know, then you need to get a divorce.

So unless you're divorcing because it's an invalid marriage to begin with, so in other words, pretty much no divorce under any conditions.

That's how they would interpret Jesus's statement. Others would say it was adultery, which means natural physical intercourse with another human being, another person of the opposite sex while you're married.

Another view is that it's spiritual adultery. Spiritual adultery is a thing that's used analogously of adultery is used analogously of going after other gods or just carnal ungodly living.

I'm cheating on God, so to speak. Then they would say you could divorce your spouse if they apostatize.

Of course, that's directly refuted in 1 Corinthians 7, where he's like, if you have an unbelieving spouse, stay together, make it work.

So that doesn't work either, but that is a view. Others take it as, and this is a little bit more my view, as porneia is more of an umbrella term.

Porneia is used as an umbrella term, and it could refer to adultery, clearly adultery, and it could also refer to, say there's acts that you commit with another woman that don't amount to intercourse, but it's still porneia.

It's still, okay, but that was still sexual immorality, and let's not be like, well, technically, I didn't do that, but it could still be porneia.

So it has to do with the question of degrees, yeah, umbrella term. So let's see here, I'll run through a couple, if you want some more detail on these,

I'll give you some more detail now. For those who think it only refers to sexual violation during an engagement, such as like sleeping with someone other than the one you're engaged to, the pro side for this, the way they would build this case is they'd say, well,

Matthew is explaining why Joseph was going to divorce Mary. So what Matthew's doing in the

Gospel of Matthew, where the exception clause shows up in Matthew 5 and 19, he's just giving an explanation why

Joseph was a righteous man for planning to divorce Mary. But the problem here is that that connection, it seems arbitrary to me, it just seems arbitrary.

It comes to Jesus in a debate that has nothing to do with Joseph, in a context where they're not dealing with that at all.

They also say Jews did require a divorce to stop an engagement, which is actually true. But this isn't the actual discussion that's happening in Jesus's day.

They asked Jesus about divorce. The debate they're having has nothing to do with engagement, right? It's about divorcing an existing marriage, full marriage.

So to just, it doesn't fit, right? It's a square peg in a round hole to put incest in there, or I'm sorry, to put engagement in there instead of divorce or instead of marriage.

I think that that just doesn't fit at all. There's other reasons too. The word porneia itself is used in a variety of ways in the

New Testament. It does refer to incest in 1 Corinthians 5 .1. If there's a man who's has his father's wife, right?

But the way it's written there, it's not exclusively incest. It's not like porneia just meant incest because Paul writes, and I'll quote it.

He says, it's actually reported that there is sexual immorality, porneia, among you and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans for a man has his father's wife.

So porneia didn't just mean incest. It was rather incest was a kind of porneia, right? Cause it's an umbrella term.

It's used in Jude seven to refer to homosexual relations that they were committing in Sodom and Gomorrah. And that is, even though that's not popular, that's what the text means.

And porneia is used to refer to adultery in the Old Testament in Jeremiah three, verse two and Jeremiah three, verse six.

In other places in the Septuagint, we're talking about the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It's used to refer to adultery.

So the term just is used in an umbrella sense. Yeah, there's a bunch.

I could go on for about 15 minutes on this one topic, but the bottom line is that porneia, it seems is an umbrella term.

And the way we can understand it is it's used in Sirach in this old intertestamental work.

It's actually used in this context. It says that they had committed moikeia, which is adultery by porneia, which is fornication.

So fornication is an umbrella term, but when you do it when you're married to someone else, now it's adultery. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now, okay, so when we speak about grounds for divorce biblically, unfaithfulness can be a kind of sexual immorality, right?

It depends on what it is, right? Well, what do you mean by unfaithfulness? Unfaithfulness, cheating on your spouse.

Yeah, cheating on your spouse is definitely sexual immorality. You can also, so anytime you do something that's sexually immoral, that's porneia, it's sexual immorality.

If you do it while you're married to someone else, it's adulterous. Right, now here's my question because someone asked me this a while back and I don't remember what

I said. It was a long time ago. Someone said, okay, so Jesus said that if you look at a woman and lust after, you've committed adultery with her in your heart.

Yeah. Now, if, suppose your wife or your husband catches the other person lusting after someone, and say, let's suppose it's a visual thing, it's obvious, would that be a ground for divorce or if someone was viewing pornographic material?

Yeah, I actually bring this up because I think what this does is it gives us pause at being overly literal when we interpret

Jesus's words because in Matthew five, it's the same chapter. It's only a few verses later where Jesus, after having said, if you look with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart.

Then he says, if you divorce for any reason other than sexual immorality, then you're committing adultery when you remarry.

So, but wait a minute, based upon what he said a few verses earlier, everyone can get a divorce, everybody.

I mean, who hasn't lusted even while married? Who hasn't lusted after another? This is us, we're sinful human beings.

Every, think of this, if you take, if you go overly literal, every divorce is justified.

That means you shouldn't interpret Jesus overly literally here. And you should go, obviously he doesn't mean that looking with lust is justification for divorce.

So we're misunderstanding him here. That would be my understanding there. It helps us to say, oh, so we have to take

Jesus in context. We have to kind of go, I get what you're saying here. I'm not gonna, you know, your kids do this, right?

I did this when I was a kid. My mom said, when the street light comes on, I want you to come home. And I was out playing with friends and the streetlights popped on, but I noticed that the streetlight directly across the street from my house,

I'm not kidding, it was out and it didn't turn on. And I thought to myself, the one in front of my house didn't turn, so I just kept playing.

And when I got home, and I don't know why I got away with this, but I got home and I was like, well, you know, they're like, why are you home so late?

It's like 8 .30, nine o 'clock or something crazy. And she's like, I told you to be home when the streetlights come on.

And I was like, but look, it didn't come on. I don't know how I got away with that. Like, I should have just gotten total trouble.

Like, you know. You did get away with it, okay. That's the problem with, I wanna know what

Jesus meant, right? But being overly literal doesn't give us what he meant.

It gives us, you know, here's a way of understanding what he said outside the context of his intentions or of how the audience would have understood it or the other things he said.

Let me give some pushback then. If we were to say, okay, looking at a woman lustfully is committing adultery in our heart and adultery is grounds for divorce.

Who's to say that understanding it that way is overly literal?

What's the standard then to say, well, that's overly literal. We know that, well, everyone would get a divorce then.

Okay, then everyone would be justified in getting a divorce. You know, how do we know that we're taking it overly literal as opposed to taking it in its proper context?

I think one of the reasons is because Jesus in the context of his discussion on divorce, he's condemning most divorces.

I mean, that is his point is I'm condemning, I'm saying that it was wrong of you. Most of these divorces should never have taken place.

If we interpret it that way, we can't have that conclusion. We have to have Jesus actually saying, y 'all divorced for wrong reasons, but there were other reasons you weren't paying attention to that made it legitimate.

So, you know, so it's like, I hate them, but, and I want a divorce. So I get a divorce and you're condemning me because it was wrong.

But really it was okay if I had just said they've lusted after other people. So I could, you know, that was my point.

So we end up losing the heart of what Jesus is communicating now. Now you could say, well, adultery of the heart is different than adultery physically.

And maybe that's how you pull those two together. I don't think Jesus was trying to offer us that technical of definitions, but yeah.

Okay, very good. Okay, now let's take some scenarios here because, you know, relationships get really messy, right?

The Bible would be thicker than it is if it qualified every single instance or example of some particular situation.

I do believe that there are black and white issues in the Bible. And then there are principles that we are encouraged to employ in areas that we are unsure of, right?

Keeping that in mind, let's take a look at a common example of people saying that, hey, in this particular instance, we're justified in having a divorce, okay?

So if the man or the woman, let me make sure I say that, because generally people say, well, the man is the one who's abusive all the time.

That's not always the case. The question is, if a husband, I'm sorry, if the man or the woman are physically abusive, whichever it is, does that provide grounds for divorce?

Okay, now abusive is an ambiguous term. So why don't you address physical abuse and mental and emotional abuse?

Yeah, well, I think what you started off by saying that not everything is explicitly answered, so we have to take principles.

And that's how I would start this discussion. I would say, look, the abuse question is never directly addressed in scripture.

The hypothetical of, like if the people of Corinth had said to Paul, what do we do if a man is just beating the tar out of his wife every week?

If they had asked that and then he answered it, we would have an inspired proclamation on the topic. I don't think we have that, but I think that what we do have is biblical principles.

And this was, I think, an important thing to talk about in the study that I did, that do say that ultimately somebody who's suffering, and I'll use the word extreme abuse, can have a justified separation or divorce.

And so let me share a few of the reasons why. Let me try to build a case biblically, okay? So first off, how should we understand

Jesus' statements, except for adultery? Should we say, except for adultery, end of story, there are no other exceptions to this rule.

Or this is the rule, here's a general exception to the rule, there could possibly be other exceptions.

Well, Jesus has a lot of other unqualified statements that did have exceptions. For instance, in Matthew 5 .22,

he says, don't call anyone fool. Don't call anyone fool or you're subject to judgment. So like, you'll be judged, you call someone fool.

Later on, Matthew, same book, 23 verse 17, he uses the same word where he says, don't call anyone fool.

And he calls people fools. He calls the Pharisees fools. So obviously there's some exceptions.

Now, how would I marry that together? I'd be like, well, he's talking about unjustifiably calling them a fool, right? Like you're speaking out of wrath and anger, but Jesus is making a correct judgment when he calls them fools.

And it's proper in that case. He says, don't look with lust in Matthew 5 .28. Don't look at a woman with lust.

But obviously, unless it's your wife, right? Like you should look desirably at your wife. This is a good thing, this is a wonderful thing.

This is something we should promote. Some Christians actually feel guilty about sexually desiring their spouse when they first get married, and they've just misunderstood.

Like, no, this is what it's all for, man. This is what you were saving yourself for. Go for it, man.

Go for it and enjoy that, you know? That's not ungodly at all. But it's an unqualified statement.

Don't look at a woman with lust. He doesn't say, unless it's your wife, but we understand that to be the case. Scripture encourages,

I mean, look at the Song of Solomon. It's encouraging these desires. The marriage bed is undefiled. Now, both of those statements, don't call someone a fool and don't look with lust, they're in the same context as Jesus is teaching on marriage in Matthew five.

So I think that we can start building a case for at least being open to the idea of exceptions. That's all I'm saying. The Jews actually expected exceptions to laws.

When they heard a rule given, a strict rule, they understood it was a strict rule and that it applied in most circumstances, but they expected exceptions under exceptional circumstances.

David and Stone Brewer, he says that they would have just expected some situations to be exceptions. It was normal.

If you look at their discussions of the law while they go way overboard, they deal with these issues as well.

I'll give you some examples of this type of thing. The Old Testament says, do not eat the showbread, right?

Only the priests can eat the showbread in the temple. Yet David, when his life was in danger, that's key. When his life was in danger, he eats the showbread and he's not condemned for it.

And Jesus himself uses this as an example of how like a principle of saving human life can trump a general rule.

So Matthew 12 verses three and four, he says, have you not read what David did when he was hungry? And those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and he ate the bread of the presence, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests.

And the context is he's saying, this is obviously an exception, guys. Don't you get this? You know, you're not to work on the

Sabbath, but look at what Jesus says about, and that is the general rule. Don't work on the Sabbath, at least for those who are under the law.

And Matthew 12 verse five through seven, Jesus is talking and he says, have you not read in the law, how on the

Sabbath, the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless. Because on the

Sabbath, the priest, it's a work day for them. They're working all day on the Sabbath. They're doing sacrifices. They're just doing a lot of work.

It's Monday or Sunday, they're tired, right? Sabbath is Saturday, Friday night, Saturday. So I guess Saturday night, they're like, okay,

I can rest now. They rest after the Sabbath. He says, then he goes on and says, I tell you something greater than the temple is here.

And if you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. I think that applies to certain divorces where someone's fleeing for their life.

I'm not gonna condemn the guiltless. The rule is there, but God desires mercy. And we need to keep that in mind.

Matthew 12 verses 11 through 12. Jesus says, which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the

Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Is that not labor? You try carrying a sheep out of a pit. Is that not labor?

And then he says, of how much more value is the man than the sheep? So it is lawful to do good on the

Sabbath. So the principle we're getting here is that if you're saving or healing life, it may be a proper cause for an exception to a rule.

And I like how you word it, it may be a proper, right? Because people are trying to wiggle out of relationships they don't want, they'll use the word abusive in a very broad sense where it's like, they're trying to qualify for the sort of abuse that would be a justified grounds for divorce.

Yeah, so you would say basically in the case of divorce, it would depend on the situation, but we'd have to take very seriously the nature of the situation and have grace if the person's running for their lives, their lives are in danger.

But it gets a little more challenging when you're talking about someone's mental health. I mean, you could be seriously abused and not ever be physically touched.

And so how would we deal with that emotional, when someone's saying, hey, I can't, I can't take this emotional weight from this kind of abuse that I'm taking.

How would we give suggestions to such a person who's considering divorce?

That's really hard. My thought is this is a really, really hard thing.

This is perhaps why there aren't rules in the scripture about it, but just principles, because these types of scenarios are difficult to apply rules to.

So for instance, let's say that somebody is being truly, truly abused.

The man is, he takes her, these are, now I was a domestic violence counselor for years. So I've dealt with perpetrators actually predominantly in domestic violence counseling.

And, but let's, so I get this, it's on my radar, these issues. And let's say that a man, he takes his wife's keys and he hides them just so that she doesn't get to go to work that day.

She can't go to work because he wants her to stay home and do whatever for him. He's a narcissist. He just stay home and take care of me somehow.

So he hides her keys. Later on, he takes her keys back out and he puts them in some obvious location, just so that when she finds them, he can talk to her about how stupid she is.

See, you're such an idiot. You can't even find your keys. Oh my gosh. I can't believe, you'd be lost without me, right?

I wanna make her dependent on me. And he does this kind of thing all the time to just literally drive her into a weakened, mentally messed up condition.

Okay, but let's say that there's another situation and the man and the woman fight, they argue, and maybe there's even some name calling that goes on.

But knowing that being a victim of abuse justifies divorce, the woman or the man, whichever one of them does this, they decide to exaggerate the effects of the abuse, feed into it.

Oh, he's driving me so crazy. And give you a distorted version of the story, which is really bad and is abusive in a broad sense, but it isn't perhaps justification for divorce.

How do you, as the counselor, even know which one of these scenarios you're dealing with when people are talking with you?

It takes time. It usually takes me talking to the husband and the wife and doing it to some significant extent so that when people offer me, even in my videos, here's my situation, they give me like three sentences and I'm like,

I don't even know if that's true. Like they think it's true, I believe that. I've talked to enough people to know they think it's true, but we have a way, especially when we want out of our marriage, we have a way of distorting the facts and exaggerating all of the things that have happened to us bad, ignoring all the things we're doing wrong.

And so how do you help people to not be that person while not victimizing the person who has legitimate cause to get out of Dodge, right?

To flee, to divorce. And I can only take that as a case by case basis.

And I can't, as a counselor, I can't do that online. I can't just read someone's paragraph and tell them what they should do. There's a lot more work that has to be done there for me, if I'm gonna weigh in on it.

So abuse is too flexible of a word. My principle is radical danger or harm can justify separation and possibly divorce.

And that I think is in principle, we have to have an intact knowing at the same time,

I've seen a number of unjustified divorces where afterwards they go, well, I was verbally abused.

And I go, I don't think it was to that extent. You know what I mean? And so it's a challenge, yeah.

Yeah, and I think just because the Bible gives us guidance and very specific rules in some instances, other instances, principles, that doesn't mean that these issues are easy.

The Bible says, thou shalt not bear false witness. And then of course, the person who's like, well,

I can find a situation where, bearing false witness is a good thing. You know, suppose you're living in Nazi Germany, you know that hiding

Jews scenario. And we'll try to ask these kind of moral dilemmas. The fact that the

Bible gives us these guidelines doesn't mean that it is always easy to respond to the difficulties of life as they happen.

We have to work through these and be patient with one another. Sometimes we're gonna get it wrong. But that's why we move forward in the grace of God.

We do it in community, if this is happening within the context of the church. And it is, I think it's very, very important, but a very difficult topic.

All right, my next question for you is, if a husband and a wife divorced, are they biblically permitted to remarry after they've had an official divorce?

I think they're not only permitted, I think they're actually commanded. And so 1 Corinthians 7, verses 10 through 11 says, to the married,

I give this charge, not I, but the Lord, which means that Paul's quoting Jesus. He's referring to Jesus' teaching in the gospels here.

He says, the wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.

And the husband should not divorce his wife. The general rule, right, that we're not talking about the exceptions to the rule, right,

I think severe abuse, adultery, those are exceptions. But the general rule is, look, you're having marital problems and you separate for some reason, you should get back together.

Work on these issues, get back together. That is the desire, that is the goal. Stay single so that you can get back together.

Now, there are other considerations. You have an unbelieving, unwilling husband or wife, or they're to be treated as an unbeliever because they won't listen to Jesus in the church.

So church discipline comes in and says, okay, we're not saying you're not saved, but we're to treat you governmentally as an unbeliever, as a community.

And so then it could fall into that category as well. We're not saying you're not saved, but here's a track, you know, you need to go.

But if you were to get saved, here's how you'd do it. All right, very good.

Here's my wonky question. And then my wonky question is, it's wonky because it's a random question that is in a very unlikely scenario.

But I think in your answering it, I think it'll be helpful to some people because, you know, relationships are, they're weird.

A lot of random things can happen that put you in a weird situation where, you know, what do we do? Now, I was thinking of the movie

Cast Away. You ever see the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks? Yeah. So the guy's married, right?

He goes off and he gets married. I don't think they were married though. Well, okay. Nobody gets married.

They just sleep together. That's right. Let's pretend he was married though. Let's pretend he was married.

It's been a while. I just, I haven't seen the movie in a while. Suppose they're married, okay? He goes off and plane crash and she thinks he's dead and he's on an island, okay?

Years pass, you know, she finishes in a way mourning and now she needs to restart her life again.

And she meets a wonderful man and they eventually get married.

They are now married for a couple of years. They have a few kids. And all of a sudden the husband who was on the island gets off the island, makes it to civilization and says, honey,

I'm alive. What would be the proper, I guess,

I can't even, I'm afraid to say what's the biblical answer because I don't know if the Bible doesn't address such a scenario. But if you found yourself in that scenario where someone was asking, well, what should be done in this situation based upon your understanding of these biblical concepts?

How would you speak to that situation? Well, it's definitely, there's no win -win answer for this kind of question, right?

So that we have to acknowledge that right away. We are either continuing the ending of a previous marriage that was ended through a physical separation and then the false belief that the person had died.

So the belief that the marriage was over already and or we're ending a current marriage. Like these are both marriages and one of them is not gonna survive this question unless you think polygamy is the solution, right?

So, which I don't. Now, I think the best way maybe to try to answer this is to say that there seems to be a case in scripture we can build for the idea that you don't break up second marriages in general.

You know, I go through this like several points on why I think you shouldn't generally break up a second marriage, that that is generally not what you do.

And for one, we don't have any teaching to break up second marriages. When the scripture does deal with second marriages, it never seems to recommend like where you would expect it to come out.

Oh, here's where you say break up from them and go back to your first spouse. We just don't see that. When Paul's like, oh, you got saved, remain in whatever condition you were when you were saved.

You're free from wife, you have a wife, just stay there. And that's kind of like his recommendation. Well, like here's where with divorce being something that was very much happening in that culture, a lot of the people he's writing to in Corinth would have been on their second or third marriage.

Why doesn't he say break it up? So what we're dealing with here is a ignorantly unjustified first divorce.

It was unjustified, but ignorantly, right, ultimately. And a second marriage that is now ongoing,

I think that you should probably stay with that second marriage. I think that that would be consistent with the rest of the things

I read in the scripture on that. It is challenging. And someone would say, well, Romans 7,

Romans 7. Oh yeah, he says, the wife was abandoned, so marriage is okay. Tom Hanks. That was a great, that was great.

However, however, I'm gonna say that in general, the rule that we can apply is even an unjustified divorce, that where a remarriage has taken place, you are now committed to that spouse, stay in that marriage, make it work.

I think that that's the principle that we can apply here. I had one more question, but I'm going to stop the questions now and we're going to go to the live chat on the side here.

And this is where I usually ask a bunch of questions that people are asking on their,

I ask on their behalf, of course, and our guest has an opportunity to answer.

So we're gonna go through a bunch of these and whenever you feel fatigued, you could just let me know, we'll stop.

So let's see here. Let's see here, you gotta go through some of the comments.

Someone says, Mike Winger is awesome. Okay, agree, agreed. Let me see, here's a question here.

If your wife leaves you for another person, can you remarry and not be committing adultery? Wait, wait, let me read that again.

If your wife leaves you for another person, can you remarry or not? Yes. I mean, so this is except for sexual immorality.

So if after the departure of a spouse, that person sleeps with somebody, gets married to somebody else, that has now added the sexual violation of the marriage to the mix.

So even if the separation itself was unjustified initially, now you're free to marry another at that point.

Yeah, that'd be my understanding of it. Okay, I like this one here. Who to prefer? Eli has the best theology.

He must be a Calvinist, but Winger has the better bookcase and he's got cats. That is a hard one.

Cats, they're pretty awesome. I think he would take issue. Who has the better theology?

I mean, okay. But we could actually talk for hours about presuppositional apologetics, which we have on the phone.

When I was studying for a debate on the topic, Eli was one of the guys I was talking to because I was like, I wanna talk to intelligent presupp guys and Eli's one of those.

And so - Afterwards, afterwards, I'm like, I hope I was helpful. So I hope you lose. I know,

I hope you lose. You just gave me a bunch of misinformation. That's right. All right, so Juan has a question.

If you have a kid with someone you're not married to, do you have to marry the woman you impregnated?

P .S. I'm just wondering. Maybe the jessie's not the one in the situation. There's no little

Juan out there that you're worried about. I hope not. If you have a kid with somebody you're not married to, should you marry them?

Unless you're already married, probably yes. Like, it doesn't seem, I'm just, as a general rule, and you could say, well, what if this?

And what if that? You could do what if all day, but in general, I think you sleep with someone, you have a kid with them, you should marry them.

What if we're not happy? Well, you slept with them, you had a kid with them, go make the best of it.

Like, honor the Lord in that marriage. And again, let's not elevate personal pleasure over covenant commitment.

Very good. All right, here's a question. What defines a biblical marriage?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm gonna deal with this today in more detail in my stream, but the question is like, yeah, well, what point is someone actually married?

Adam and Eve, some people say Adam and Eve just, they slept together, they were married. But it was more than that, though, wasn't it?

Adam and Eve had an official joining, not just a physical joining, right?

There was like an official joining of man and woman with Adam and Eve. And even later down the road, someone say, well,

Isaac and Rebecca, they didn't have like a marriage ceremony. Well, first off, you don't know that they didn't have a marriage ceremony, that the narrative is not entire and complete.

But if you don't think them sending, you know, his dad sending out the servant to go to this land to get a wife, wasn't the contracting of a covenant between the two, then you're not paying attention to the text.

So marriage seems to involve, it does involve a physical relationship, right? But it also involves an acknowledgement of fidelity, you and me for life, you and me are committed, the two of us are becoming one, there's an acknowledgement of that reality.

So that two people who just live together and sleep together and who think, well, we're like married. I'm thinking probably not, that probably not.

Now, Jesus may have affirmed this because in his discussion with the woman at the well in John chapter four, he says to her, you've had five husbands and the man you are with right now is not your husband.

Which the implication is she's living with a man and they're not married. And so yeah, marriage is a covenant commitment that's acknowledged by the community.

Now you can do it with a big wedding or you could do it with a little piece of paper at the courthouse and you just post on Facebook. That's fine.

But the point is that that is a decision. And I've actually in the domestic violence program, the vast majority of those guys are not married to their significant others, their girlfriends, right?

They're not married. And I had a whole thing where I was like, I have a theory. And they're like, what is it?

And I said, my theory is that the reason you guys aren't married is because you're cowards. Which may not be the smartest thing to say to a bunch of domestic violence guys, but we had built a relationship because it's 52 weeks, two hours a week of counseling.

So you get to know each other well. And so I said, I got a whiteboard and I wrote up on the whiteboard, give me all the reasons you're not married.

Why you haven't married this girl? You're sleeping with her. She's got two kids with you. Why aren't you guys married?

And then they were like, well, what if she leaves me? Or what if I leave her? They wanna make it easier to leave.

Okay, so you're a coward. Then you won't commit. Or they say, well, we're concerned about the money.

My money and my belongings and stuff would belong to her. So if she does leave, then I'm gonna lose out. Like she could actually, I could owe her and all that kind of thing.

And like all these things are basically ways of saying, I'm not committed to you. I'm not committed to you.

And so I would consider that not to be a marriage at that point, yeah. Very good. Here, I was married and divorced before I became a

Christian. So would I go against God by getting married again? I've had mixed answers on this. Thank you so much for your ministry,

Mike. Really grateful. Well, Sally, take this as just two cents. I'm not making a proclamation on your scenario because I don't know your whole scenario.

But some of the principles I would apply is what is the status of that other guy?

Is there a chance to restore that relationship? Are they willing? Have they been sleeping around and been with other women?

Are they married to somebody else? Then that's gonna give you reason to cut that path off and move on and go get married to someone else.

If you can restore that thing, if there hasn't been violations that would justify that separation, then you may seek to restore that.

Now, if there has been those violations or if there's no willingness there, if that doesn't seem to be like a path that can be trod, then

I think you're free to marry someone else. We have Doug from Pine Creek.

He says, multiple lives is a terrible idea unless you have a ton of closet space for shoes. Yes, that is a very profound truth.

Very, very good. Thank you, Doug. Let's see. That's from Pine Creek, man. He's one of the biggest trolls, actually.

Oh, man. Okay, let's see here. We've got a couple here. I gotta get through some comments here.

Okay. Is it against God to be married without governmental marriage license?

Ooh, that's a good question. Is it against God to be married without a governmental marriage license? So here's the thing.

In my online ministry, I very much want the things that I share to be applied to people who live in different countries, not just the

United States of America. So let's say, hypothetically, you live in a country where two people can't get married for some horribly dumb reason.

Like, you're of a different caste. You can't marry, these two people can't marry because they're different castes.

And we have a caste -based society, so then they can't be married. So you can't get government approval. In a situation like that,

I would seek to get community involvement, right? Because it's not like I need the government exactly to validate, although I want that.

I wanna do that if at all possible. But I think I would, in that situation, look for a community involvement, the families, right?

Hey, we're making this covenant. You wanna have a public covenant is the idea. Now, but if someone's like, well, who cares what the government says?

They just kind of like cast off those things. I think there's a problem there. I would start to wanna ask, why don't you care about the government license?

Oh, well, it's gonna, I won't be able to get my welfare check anymore, or those types of things. And here,

I feel like that is an unjustified compromise. Coward, just call him coward. Since divorce was issued by God because of the hardness of people's hearts, are divorced people in hard hardness?

And does this grieve God? I don't know if you understand the question there. It depends on what you mean by hard heartedness, because you could be like, they're hard to the gospel, right?

There's a hardness of heart, you've been hardened to the gospel itself. I wouldn't say that about a divorced person at all.

But the debate here, the question is, when Jesus says, Moses permitted you to divorce because of the hardness of your hearts, what did he mean?

Did he mean that if your spouse shows hard heartedness in their continual sin, then you're permitted to divorce them?

That's how David and Stone Brewer, I think, interprets that passage. But what I noticed when I read the passage is they said,

Jesus says, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of your hardness of hearts.

The implication here is that it's our, not our justified divorces, but our unjustified bitterness in our heart towards our spouse.

And this, I think, relates to marriage a lot. When you just, you build up that bitterness that I don't care about them anymore,

I just don't value them, I don't love them, I'm bitter toward them. And as that ramps up, that bitterness ramps up, divorce becomes more and more something you're just committed to do regardless of its justness.

And so Ephesians tells us to put away all anger, wrath, malice, bitterness. If you have to divorce, it should never be because you're bitter.

That should never be the reason. That, I think, is a good rule for life. So I think that's how it relates to the issue of hardness of hearts, is that God permitted, there's certain things in the law

God regulated or allowed that aren't necessarily approved of by God. And I think Jesus is giving us, that's the principle.

He's telling us sinful people, he's basically limiting the harm of their continual sinful acts, right?

It's regulating or limiting it. He requires that a woman gets a certificate in Deuteronomy 24, right?

This is where he writes that. So in the ancient Near Eastern culture, this is kind of interesting. Like say for the

Code of Hammurabi that kind of dates back to that same Mosaic type era, the rule was if a man sent his wife away, she could go away.

And if she married another man, the original husband still had authority over her. So he could literally at any time, five, 10 years later, he could just go and take her back against her will.

Like this is part of their codes or their laws. In the Mosaic law, he says, when you divorce your wife, you got to write her a certificate of divorce.

And this gave her the right to marry another and it severed all authority the man had over her. So what

God is doing is he's regulating an ungodly practice to make it, it elevated the woman's rights in that culture.

And nobody else was doing that at the time. This was unique to the law of Moses. Huh, interesting.

Just to let you know, I'm learning. This is not a topic I've delved into and your answers are very helpful.

So I like this here. Calvinist unsubscribed. And then the next one here, just kidding,

I wasn't even. Well, thank you, whoever that was.

I know he's just playing with you, but you get those comments when you're like, oh yeah, you think that I'm unsubscribing.

And I'm just, I'm honestly, I'm just like, I'm amazed that anybody subscribed, you know, in the first place, so.

I'm amazed someone who's unsubscribed is just here watching. That's great. I don't mind at all.

Okay, we have a question here. Where is the explicit permission to remarry in the New Testament?

Yeah, so Tatiana Joseph has commented like probably 200 comments on the previous video.

So I've dealt with it. We've gone back and forth a little bit and I'm gonna be dealing with a couple of her questions or her comments in today's live stream video.

But she's a sister, she loves the Lord. And this is just, this is an in -house agreement, but it's a heated one.

And so we get a lot of back and forth. I think that in the New Testament, the, to the culture of people who are reading it at the time, the explicit permission to divorce is it's a justified, or to remarry is it's a justified divorce.

I think a justified divorce equals a remarriage. They thought every divorce meant you could remarry.

There was no limit, right? If you're divorced, you can remarry. That was their culture, their view. Jesus adapts this, corrects this by saying, no, no, no, no.

If it's an unjustified divorce, you can't remarry, right? But when Jesus says in Matthew 5 and 19, except for sexual immorality, that phrase applies to the divorce and the remarriage.

I think this is explicit permission to divorce and remarry under that condition. Paul, in 1

Corinthians 7, 15, when he says that the believing, the believer is not under bondage in such situations, he's referring to when you have an unwilling unbeliever.

They won't listen to Jesus or the church and they don't want to stay married. He says, you're not under bondage. That phrase bondage means slavery.

He says, you're not enslaved. In their culture, if you tell someone they're no longer enslaved, they're thinking, okay, so I'm free to remarry.

That's like how they would have interpreted that. And I've spent a lot of time on this and dealt with it in detail in my video, how we interpret that word bondage, does it mean freedom to remarry and that kind of thing.

And I build a point by point case for why I think that's the case. And I've even looked in my content from individuals like say

Tatiana or other believers who love the Lord for pushback, but not pushback where it's just like,

Mike, you're wrong. I wanna push back that says, no, here's why you've made an error in your exegesis of the passage.

And that has been pretty thin in the responses, unfortunately. All right, here's a, it's kind of a rhetorical question,

I think, but I think someone thinks that you are perhaps dodging an issue with regards to Jesus saying that if you look at a woman and lust in her heart, lust in your heart, you've committed adultery.

And then I asked you, how do we differentiate kind of an over literal interpretation of that, as opposed to kind of acknowledging a broader context there.

So the person says here, did Mike just say that taking Jesus in context is overly literal and we can't take

Jesus at his word. Maybe if taking him literally results in something you don't like, you're misinterpreting the exception.

Maybe if you wanna respond to that, if not, I can skip over as well. I thought that was an interesting point there, which

I don't agree with. Let me give you an example of taking Jesus overly literally, because, well, first I'll respond to this. So we can't take

Jesus at his word. Is that, Eli, is that what you thought I said? You can't take

Jesus at his word? Is that my philosophy of interpretation? Don't take Jesus at his word? Honestly, I don't think it's intentional, but it is definitely ridiculous to say such a thing about my interpretation.

Go watch my video or any of my videos. I care very much about biblical interpretation and accurately and rightly understanding the text.

And I may interpret something wrong, but my philosophy has never been, don't take Jesus at his word.

But let's give you an example of overly literal. Jesus says, if you wanna come after him, you have to hate your father and mother.

There we go. I have to hate my parents or I'm not taking Jesus at his word. I'm just saying, no, read it in context of everything

Jesus says. The context of Jesus giving the, hate your father and mother statement is also where Jesus says, honor your father and mother in the same book.

He also says in Luke, honor your father and mother. And so honor them. But yet when it comes to deciding between Jesus and your parents, you will follow

Jesus even over them, which is a big deal in that culture, by the way. And so we take the full context of Jesus's statement.

Jesus in the, if you look with lust, you commit adultery. He says in your heart, but the context of his later statement right after that about if you divorce, except for sexual immorality, then you've committed adultery.

His context is to reject a lot of the divorces that are going on. So if you were to interpret the first statement as applying to the second statement, it would justify every divorce and undo what

Jesus is accomplishing in his teaching. Very good. And yeah, I mean, people say this all the time.

You have the debates between the young earth and old earth creationist, right? If you're not a young earth creationist, you're not taking the

Bible at its word. Well, no, we need to interpret. We need to consider context. And you might disagree with someone's interpretation, but it's not an issue of simply just not taking what the

Bible says at face value or whatever. We want to know what the Bible means in its context. And that takes work, right?

So I think you provided a good response and people who know you know that you would never promote not taking

Jesus's word. You just want to make sure what it is you're saying. That's right. I'd be in a lot of trouble if I did.

That's right. Doug asked another question here, or I guess, I don't know if he asked a question before. I think he made a comment. He says, if you separate adultery of the heart from actual adultery, so the issue of the heart and physical act, right?

Then isn't Jesus saying that adultery of the heart isn't as bad as say, adultery of the flesh?

Yeah, I would actually agree with that. So I think that, okay, when one commits adultery of the heart, they lust.

They've committed adultery in the heart. And I think what Jesus wants us to do is realize that's a lot worse than we've realized.

That's a much worse sin than we've given it credit for. I mean, it's a very serious issue. But when one goes out and commits physical adultery, starts a relationship, has a sexual encounter with someone other than their spouse, they're doing both, adultery of the heart and adultery of the flesh.

So of course it's worse, it's more. It's an addition too. So it's not like it's one or the other.

Physical adultery is both heart and flesh, whereas in the heart, it's just the heart.

But that is of course, Jesus's whole point there isn't to say that's not a big deal. His whole point is to say it is a big deal.

It's just not the same thing, yeah. All right, by the way, you're doing an excellent job. This is the last question, because as I'm going through, people are sending more and you can't go forever.

But you're doing a good job and I really do appreciate it, it's helpful. Here's a question. I would like to know if John the

Baptist died for preaching against an adulterous remarriage or not. I was actually studying that just the other day.

So John, I was trying to figure out like what was John saying about Herod? So I'll grant this, like John the

Baptist was killed not only because he had a public following and because he was preaching righteousness, because he was a messenger of God and an ungodly culture, but also because he specifically came against Herod.

So Herod had an ungodly relationship with his stepsister. His brother had married this woman

Herodias and there's lots of people named Herod in that family. That's the way it works. And so Herod had married her,

Herod Antipas had married Herodias after she against Jewish law and custom just left her husband, his brother, right?

And just joins to him. So what is John getting at when he says what you're doing is wrong?

Is he saying it's wrong to remarry after divorce? Actually, what

John seems to be getting at is that the problem is their physical relationship, their, I should say, their familial relationship.

So Herod marries his stepsister while his stepbrother's alive. There's only one condition in Jewish culture where you could marry someone who had married a brother of yours.

And that was a Levite marriage when that man dies and you marry her just for the purpose of preserving his family line.

The first child that is born, the first male that's born, he carries that man's name and then inherits his land.

That's Levite marriage. Outside of that, nobody could marry someone who had previously been married to a close relative at all.

Like even if they had a justified divorce, didn't matter. They couldn't do it. So John says it is, and if you look at what

John the Baptist says about it, he says, it's unlawful for you to have your brother's wife. It was the fact that it was his brother's wife.

So it wasn't just an unjustified divorce and then a marriage. It was the relationship that was just shocking to people as well, yeah.

All right, well, very good, man. I, you did an excellent job. I'm definitely, I tell people this all the time.

I'm the guy who goes back and listens to his own show. There's so many things I'm multitasking that I need to go back and listen to some things.

There's a lot of helpful information here. Of course, you go into greater depth on your own channel and people can go and check that out.

Definitely, if you don't know who Mike Winger is, which you probably do, but if you don't, get over to his

YouTube channel and subscribe. He's got some great content that will challenge you and encourage you at the same time.

Also, you can subscribe to the Revealed Apologetics YouTube channel as well and keep an ear open for upcoming interesting and really good interviews

I'm looking forward to having. And of course, you can always look at some past discussions that we had, mostly centering on the topic of presuppositional apologetics.

So once again, real quick, on the 23rd, which is next

Tuesday, I'll be having Vern Poythress on to discuss how the Trinity impacts everything within the

Christian worldview. And I will be having Dr. Hugh Ross on, on July 9th, which is,

I believe is a Thursday, to talk about old earth creationism, but hopefully we can kind of nab Dr.

Jason Lyle as well, maybe have them on for a discussion. So looking forward to those things. For everyone else who has been watching and listening,

I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your questions. And once again, Mike, thank you so much for coming on and giving of your time.

It's greatly appreciated. It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me. And I know we've talked kind of about random things a little bit.

So if you, there's a bunch of gaps there. And if you guys want, you can go watch my three hour long video where I deal with it and give you 16 biblical principles that we can conclude from all of the various survey of scripture and history and language and all that.

And then just real quick before I end here, and I think this is important. I'm glad you mentioned that, is that you're, as a viewer, your study cannot merely be comprised of watching

YouTube videos. There's so much more that is required of you to get into some of these details.

Don't just listen to what Mike says or something that I say and say, oh, well, they didn't address this, that, or the other thing.

You know, this is just, you know, it's ridiculous. You need to go and do some of the homework yourself. I mean,

Mike has done us a great service in studying this topic and sharing what he had to offer there.

And the rest is to use this as a platform for deeper study. So I encourage you guys to do that. But other than that, thank you guys for listening.