Transcription
We have a little bit of time this morning where we get to talk about divorce and remarriage. It's just two verses. So it works because we are going to wrap up here and then we have a Thanksgiving meal that we can share together over in the compassion center. So I will not preach as long as normal, but this is in line. This is a part of the teaching that is found in Matthew chapter five. If you're new with us, we've been in the Sermon on the Mount and we are looking in the Sermon on the Mount at this formula where Jesus would say, you've heard it said, and then Jesus intensifies the command. He gives an ethical standard. And you recall that right before this sermon is recorded, Matthew has said that Jesus is doing ministry all around the region of the Galilee. He's preaching from town to town. These are common people and he's going into synagogues and he's just proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven has come near.
So this is a part of that teaching, but this is a teaching that he's specifically giving to his disciples. So what we're going to read this morning presumes that the audience, the listener, has made a decision to follow Jesus and to be an apprentice of Jesus, to be dedicated to Jesus. As you're listening to these instructions, you need to understand that this is not the instructions on how to become a follower of Jesus. These are instructions for those who've decided they want to be a follower of Jesus and they want to be in the community of faith. So it's a description of the kingdom that's important. If you're here this morning and you're like, I don't know where I'm at spiritually, I don't know where I am at in terms of my relationship with God, that is a really simple matter where you have a conversation with God and you say, God, I'm ready to surrender my life to you.
Use your language and you can use all kinds of language to talk to God, to just say, God, I'm ready to turn my life over to you. I want to be a follower of you. I want to place my life in your hands and I want to be reconciled back to you through Jesus. That's the beginning. That's how you become a follower of Jesus. And then a series of decisions, a relationship plays itself out. So let's look at this together starting in Matthew chapter. Matthew chapter five, verse 31. It says this, it was also said, whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. So those are our two verses. Let's go before, let's pray that God would speak to us through this text.
God, we ask that you would speak to us through this teaching of Jesus about marriage. Marriage is a very real part of our lives and our society, and we pray that God, we would hear from you what your spirit would be speaking to us this morning, whether we're married, divorce, remarried, considering a future being married. Lord, for each of us, we pray that you would speak into our lives as our Lord and Savior, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Alright, so we do. We have people from all kinds of backgrounds in here. We have people who would love to be married. We have people who grew up in a two parent family, some in a one parent family, some with a guardian or a grandparent or an aunt or an uncle. But we've got a whole mix of people in here, divorced, remarried, and what I want you and what we've been seeing is that Jesus is heralding and setting up the ethics of his kingdom.
And it's easy to hear this divorce, teaching divorce and remarriage teaching and in our culture just to take it outside of the context in which it's found, but we're going to go back, we're going to look at it in its context. And what we're going to see over and over again is that while this may, let's say you're in a bad marriage and you're like, I want a divorce. And you may read this and go, well, Jesus, I want to be a follower of Jesus too and this doesn't give me permission to get the divorce I want. And you may feel like Jesus is limiting your freedom and you may be mad at him. That's possible.
What I want you to see though is that this teaching of Jesus is protecting the vulnerable. Jesus is establishing an ethical code that not only upholds the commitment of marriage, but it protects the most vulnerable within society. So Jewish law, Jewish law on divorce in Jesus' time, divorce was governed by Jewish law primarily based on Deuteronomy 24, 1 through four. I'm going to show you that in just a second. The interpretation of what constituted valid grounds for divorce was a matter of debate among Jewish scholars, notably between the schools of Shiai and Hellel. So at the time of Jesus, there were two camps. We're not talking about. Pharisees and Sadducees we're primarily talking actually about a camp that was within the Pharisees. And they're debating over what Deuteronomy 24 meant. So let's look at Deuteronomy 24, 1 through four. It says this, if a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, he may write her a divorce certificate handed to her and sent her away from his house.
If after leaving his house she goes and becomes another man's wife and the second man hates her, writes her a divorce certificate, hands it to her, sends her away from his house, or if he dies, the first husband who sent her away may not marry her again after she has been defiled because that would be detestable to the Lord. You must not bring guilt on the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. So within the law, only men could issue a letter of divorce. This is an interesting stipulation here about you can't get remarried after a remarriage and then go back to the first husband. The question is why? There's a few different reasons why this may have been the case. One, it could have been that the original husband was pimping out the wife, and this basically limits any form of prostitution dynamic.
There is also a culturally, there was the dowry that was offered. And so the exchange of doerries by limiting the first husband from remarrying her in a third marriage with somebody in between that limits and disincentivizes the financial gain that could come from marrying her again. The interesting thing though is that these four verses assume remarriage. Do you see that? We don't necessarily know exactly why God through Moses created the law in the way that he did here, but it assumes remarriage. And so this was the matter of debate. How do we handle this? And you have the School of Hillel and Shiai. This is recorded for us in a Jewish text that was written 150 years after the time of Christ called the Mishna. Can you say the Mishna Mishna? That's right. So a Jewish scholar came along and took the oral tradition of the Jews and codified it, put it in writing, and it became a significant text for Judaism moving forward in the century.
So we're talking about one 50 to 200 AD that this mishna was written. And in the Mishna it records this debate between the school of Shiai and the House of Hillel, which would've been the contemporary debate at the time of Jesus. Are you tracking with me? So mishna written after Jesus, but reflecting back on what would've been contemporary to the time of Jesus, the school of Shiai held to a strict interpretation of Deuteronomy 24. And the issue really was around this text where it says in verse one, if this wife becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and really the House of Hillel was focused in on, or shiia was focused in on this word indecent, and they had a strict view. It was only sexual immorality that would allow for divorce. This text could only be applied or walked out and used if the husband found the wife to have been unfaithful.
The house of Hillel, on the other hand, held a liberal view and said that, look, something indecent could have been. She doesn't cook. Well, I don't find her looking good. Yeah, there could have been a mess, right? And there's actually a third camp called the House of or the school of Uba, which was a liberal view, which was like, it was like divorce without cause. Just when you guys are done, you're done. And you don't even have to give cause to defend the divorce. So this was the debate, is it a strict view that's supposed to be applied to Deuteronomy 24 or is it this liberal view? And so Jesus engages and speaks into this debate. He supports the shiai interpretation which was not written. It was just again, an oral tradition of here's generally what that school taught. And Jesus says that there's not to be a divorce except in the case of sexual immorality.
That's it, sexual immorality. And then he has this interesting clause about if you go and get divorced without this exception, you're causing her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. So it is important to know as you're reading this, that in this culture we have a male dominated society that Jesus is giving these instructions to. The society was patriarchal. Typically, only men had the right to initiate divorces, especially Jewish law, not so much Roman law. A divorced woman faced social stigma and economic hardship as she might have been dependent on her husband for sustenance and social standing. So what Jesus is doing here by restricting and limiting divorce is he's protecting all of these women. He's saying, listen, you ladies cannot have your husbands. I don't give permission for them to just drop you because you burnt their toast in the morning.
Now again, remember these were marriages that were arranged. Now there's a social dance to this. There's a really cute movie about arranged marriages in the Indian culture, I think with the Patels and how yeah, they're arranged, but the guy and the girl are kind of tipping the scales a little bit. It is a documentary that's somewhere on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I can't remember where I saw it. So there is some say that's going on in these or depending on the family you come from, but it is generally arranged. So like when Mary was betrothed to Joseph, that was her parents put that together. So we have this framework in America where we, Mary, the people that we fall in love with and emotions are factored in heavily to the marriage decision.
And then from the emotions comes in the conversation around compatibility. Are you sexually compatible? Are you socially compatible? Is this marriage going to do something for you within society? Is it going to help you have more money or increase your status within society? That's kind of the framework that our culture has. But here, Jesus is speaking into a culture where you kind of were set up this is who it is and Jesus is saying, no, no, no. Even in that setting, you don't get to just say, I don't really like you and dump the person. Now, there was no welfare program. There was no social safety net that existed. There was no government programs for these women that got married. So the husband, the men were the only ones that could issue a divorce decree. If the woman got divorced, she was stuck. She was expected that she would go and get remarried.
So it's a matter of, alright, who are you going to marry? Who's going to take you now that you've been with somebody else? It was a mess. And so Jesus is here giving this limiting to divorce and it's inherently protecting women. This not something that any man who was not a follower of Jesus would've been like, oh yeah, that's great. This was directed right at men who wanted to divorce their wives. So there's a number of questions that come up around this and we are going to actually spend more time when we get to Matthew 19 talking maybe a little bit more about the technicalities of marriage and divorce. But there are Christians who have a view of marriage that you can never get divorced if you grew up in the Catholic church. You know that the Catholic teaching based on Augustine was that marriage to your first spouse is insolvable and they make the argument that it's ontologically impossible for you to have a second marriage until that first person dies because you're married.
Once you're married, you're in it. And those views come from Luke and Mark similar material to what we're looking at. But I want to show you Luke, this is Jesus's teaching out of Luke on marriage and divorce. Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery. Everyone who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery. So there you don't see any exception, right in Mark, you have something similar. Mark 10, 10 through 12 when they were in the house again, and there's a broader context if you want to go look this up in Mark 10, there's more teaching there. When they were in the house, again, the disciples questioned him about this matter. He said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And also if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. So there is in those two texts, it seems as if God looks at that first marriage as like, yeah, you may have gotten some legal document, but you're not in my eyes, you're not divorced.
That's how it appears. And Jesus is saying, Hey, that going out and getting a unmerited divorce or getting a divorce that doesn't have grounds and then getting remarried in God's eyes constitutes adultery. So you do have the Catholic camp, you have some Protestants that hold this view that there is no grounds ever to be divorced, but they don't like Matthew. That camp does not like this passage in Matthew because Jesus comes along and he gives an exception or he gives grounds for a divorce. He says, I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife's wife, except in the case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. So why are there exceptions to the rule here? Jesus, we're in a section where Jesus in the sermon on the Mount is laying out the law of the land. He's intensifying the command against murder, right? Saying even anger is a sin that needs to be dealt with in your own hearts.
Lust is equivalent to adultery, right? Jesus is intensifying it. And then yet here has, he's really giving a strict view of divorce. He's giving an exception. Just think about the issue with anger from a couple of weeks ago. Jesus said, look, you can't call calling your brother a fool is equivalent to murder. But then if you go over to Matthew 2317, Jesus speaking to the fairies, he says, you guys are blind fools. Matthew 2317. And what we saw when I taught two weeks ago on this is that Jesus is not saying anger is bad. He's saying that anger that is just harbored in your heart and carried out to malicious in a malicious way, that is not a part of my kingdom. What about this whole mandate against lust, right? Jesus says, Hey, you lust against somebody who's not your wife. That's adultery. What about to the engaged couple?
What happens there? Are you not supposed to sexually desire the person you're engaged to? No, there are exceptions. Jesus is giving parameters where there's obviously exceptions. And so here when he gets to divorce, he says there's an exception where the marriage covenant can be broken. It's with the case of sexual immorality. Now, this is one exception the Bible teaches. There are two other exceptions to where divorce is appropriate. Divorce is allowed, not mandated, but divorce is allowed. And those are found in one Corinthians chapter seven. The first is the case of abandonment. When a spouse abandons their partner that covenant is, Paul says, that person is free to go. You are no longer bound. That's the language you in your marriage are no longer bound. Now Paul says in those cases plural, so he says abuse. And in those cases, and so the more moderate view on divorce would look at that text and say, there are cases where the spouse has so violated the marital covenant that there are grounds similar to what abandonment would be.
So that's where we put abuse in. Abuse is equivalent to just totally violating that marital covenant. So there are grounds where divorce is allowed, and then you have a group which we'll talk about at some time in the future where remarriage is forbidden based off of like this. If she goes and she gets married, she's going to commit adultery. If you have the NIV version, it's going to say she's a victim of adultery, which is probable. It seems like God's saying, I'm going to lay to your feet this indictment to the man's feet. I'm going to lay to your feet the indictment of adultery. So there's an assumption of remarriage within the culture. There is an assumption of remarriage and Deuteronomy 24, and here Jesus is doing the same thing.
There is in this text, I think to see this text and what Jesus is trying to teach. He's teaching into a cultural debate and he's saying marriage is special marriage. The marriage covenant is special. You don't get to just go throw away your marriage because it's hard. Now our culture says something different. Our culture says, yeah, tough it out maybe for the kids, but if it's not working, get rid of that one. Move on to the next one. And it's important that we are followers of Jesus. Now, you may be listening to this as a follower of Jesus. Maybe you got some other teaching and there's grace. Jesus is calling followers to come in line with the ethics of his kingdom. We're not perfect yet. You may be at some place in this, but what you need to hear is the Lord Jesus, the king is saying, this is what lining up the marriage covenant with my kingdom looks like it is this special relationship that cannot be violated or thrown away.
There needs to be substantive ground for a divorce. So here he gives sexual immorality as a cause. So I don't know what framework you come from with marriage, but we talked last week about our sexuality and that our sexuality starts in our heart. It's not just a bodily behavior, but that God cares about the foster desires of our heart. And that lusting and giving a place for lust in our heart is a act of adultery. It violates the marriage covenant. Here Jesus is saying, listen, marriage is that thing that needs to be protected. So sexual immorality, abandonment, abuse, protection for the vulnerable.
I'm just kind of making sure I covered everything that we have here in my notes. I do want to just encourage you that marriage is a furnace, right? It brings up all this stuff in your own life. Your relationships are right. God's created relationships to surface just our weirdness in our brokenness, and it comes to the surface in our life and it's like, yeah, you know what? I really, I've got some things that need to be worked out in my own life. So rather than responding to a difficult marriage, looking and seeing, do I have grounds to get out of it, do I have grounds? I would encourage you, unless it's clear abuse or abandonment or sexual immorality, respond to the difficulty of your marriage by saying, okay, God, how can I milk this difficult moment for my own personal growth as much as possible?
I have kind of an acquaintance that I was talking to and he was calling me to try to see, he was kind of trying to see, do I have grounds to get a divorce? Can I get out of this? And I was like, I don't know. I don't have your wife here in front of me. We're just talking on the phone. I don't know whether you have grounds or not. And ultimately you need to make that decision with integrity before the Lord. But I do know this, that today you can use your difficult marriage for your own personal growth until you get to a point where the decision is made, whether you should get a divorce or not. So if you happen to be in a difficult setting, I'd encourage all of us, we want to grow, right? We are called to be followers of Jesus with a common horizon, which is to be shaped into the image of Christ, and marriage is the best setting for that.
We're helping each other reach that common horizon together. We're helping in that growth process. Sometimes we're like, I don't want that help, but it's good God has a good purpose for your difficult marriage. Now, I think what I want to close with on this is that there is, if you're in a difficult marriage, if you're in a difficult space in your marriage, there are some people who know you and those people hopefully know your marriage and you do not want to make a decision that you've milked out of people where you've been able to get people to agree with you. You want to make sure that you have friends around you. I hear a phone. Somebody's got a phone.
Does anybody have a phone?
Oh, oh, we got it. Okay.
So your marriage, both getting married and getting divorced are some of the most critical decisions you'll make. And you need to be walking with people who give you the truth. You need as much truth as possible. Your kids know you, your family hopefully knows you, and you need to make sure, man, if you're going to get a divorce, this is one of my, I used to say, Hey, work with the church. Church is, it depends on what church you're in. You really need to, oftentimes people move around from church to church, and so there's not a legacy. Some of you, I've only known for a couple years or a year, and you came to me and you're like, yeah, my marriage is broken. I might not know that. You've got some weird issues in your own life that makes you difficult to be married to, and you actually are not responding to the sanctification prompting that God wants for you in your marriage.
So have around you people who are going to bear witness and where your kids are going to support you in that decision. And it's going to be like, yeah, because at the end of the day, so I've been through a divorce and I'm remarried, crystal and I have both been through our own divorces and then remarriage and I can look at this text and I am so grateful for it. I'm grateful for our testimony. I feel like we've walked in what the Bible teaches. But I remember as I went through that process myself feeling like I don't really care about ministry or being a pastor as I was going through, I thought, I probably won't be a pastor. It's weird to be a pastor and having been divorced, but I care most about my kids looking into my life and feeling like, yeah, that's the kind of Christian I want to be.
So your personal integrity and the witness that you give to your kids, that is so, so important in the process. And your kids, my kids, as I walked through it, my kids spoke more truth to me than probably anybody else. And I think this is not just in divorce. Hopefully you have that kind of, you're working at least giving the open door for that kind of relationship with your kids where they're allowed to speak into your life. They know us, they know how screwed up we are. So this is Jesus's teaching. You may be in this place where you're like, I don't like the fact that Jesus is limiting my options on divorce. Sorry. I mean, Jesus is actually protecting a bunch of women, or he's maybe protecting you as a man.
It is like when you're in a company and you're like, it's a good policy that's made, but you end up on the bad side of the policy. It's like, well, no, it's the right decision that's made, but God's going to be faithful to you. He knows where you're at. If you're stuck and you're in a hard place, he knows exactly where you're at. He's got you. He's got a purpose for these things in your life. If you follow him, you try to obey. You're going to end up. I believe in a place where you are growing and you're at peace and have a clean conscience about where you're heading. Amen. Let's thank the Lord for his grace. God, we thank you for your grace in these things. I pray, Lord, for us as a church, I feel like divorce is so pervasive. Almost every one of us divorce is affected.
And Lord, from the brokenness of our culture and broken relationships and people that have hurt us, God, I pray that you would give us integrity and that we would honor you. We want to be those that obey and that you would see in us, that sincere desire for just obedience to you, that we would love you through our obedience. And God, I pray that you would use marriage in our lives toward your good. I pray, Lord, for each person here, if they're struggling in their marriage, that truth, your truth would just wash over them, that they would have a self-awareness, whether they're the cause of the problem or their spouse is the cause of the problem, or there's just both are heavily contributing to the issues that are there. God, I pray, let truth just wash over each person here. I pray for those who have been divorced, God and who would love to be remarried, would you give them a hope? Would you encourage them? Would you provide them with a Godly spouse? Lord, marriage seems to be really important to you. And yet, Lord, we're living in the midst of so much broken relationships in pain. Some of it we cause ourself, but a lot of it's in inflicted upon us. Lord, you are like that, doctor. You're the good shepherd. Come and be a good shepherd in our midst. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.