Mark 10:1-12
Date: March 26th 2023
Speaker: Samuel Crites
Scripture: Mark 10:1-12
Mark 10:1-12
Exegetical Outline
MIT: Jesus confronts the Pharisees’ challenge about marriage and teaches about divorce.
1: Jesus leaves Capernaum and travels into the wilderness where he meets and teaches a crowd of people.
2-9: Jesus teaches that divorce is wrong, because man should not attempt to separate what God has joined together.
2-5: Jesus discusses the contemporary Jewish understanding of divorce and concludes that they have the right to divorce because they have hard hearts.
2: The Pharisees attempt to test Jesus by asking a question about divorce.
3: Jesus turns the question back on them.
4: The Pharisees say that Moses gave them the right to write their wives a certificate of divorce.
5: Jesus says that they only have this luxury because their hearts are hard.
6-9: Jesus returns to marriage as a creation ordinance, ruling out divorce.
6-8: Jesus defines marriage as a creation ordinance where God joins men and women together in marriage.
9: Jesus concludes that, since God joins them together, no one is allowed to separate them thereby outlawing divorce.
10-12: Jesus strengthens his teaching on divorce by implying that remarriage is adultery, because the original marriage is not severed by man’s legal formalities.
10: The disciples ask Jesus for further clarification on the matter of divorce.
11-12: Jesus furthers his previous teaching on divorce by explaining that remarriage is adultery, implying that the original marriage is not severed by man’s legal formalities.
Homiletical Outline
MIS: Marriage is an ordinance of God, established at creation, that cannot be ended by the legal formalities of man, therefore, no one should get divorced.
Jesus’s teaching on marriage.
The Pharisees had a deficient understanding of marriage.
Christ teaches that marriage is not founded on the law, but is an act of God established at creation
Christ’s teaching on remarriage reinforces marriage as an act of God established at creation.Potential
Exceptions
Sexual Immorality
Abandonment
Introduction
Part of being committed to expositional preaching means that I do not have the freedom to avoid the difficult passages in Scripture. As we progress through a book of the Bible, the next sermon text is whatever follows last week’s sermon text. This is hard for the preacher, but good for the body. It forces us to deal with passages of Scripture that we might otherwise avoid because they are hard.
I have not been looking forward to this sermon. Divorce is something that has affected almost every life in this room, directly or indirectly. If we had the time, many people in this room could stand up and testify to the pain and heartache that divorce has caused in their lives and in the lives of those that they love.
As your pastor, I am aware that this sermon today is going to be difficult for many of you. It was difficult for me to prepare. For some of you, it is going to make you question your past decisions and feel guilt for mistakes that have been made. For others of you, it could make you resent certain in your life. Maybe a spouse that divorced you or parents who did not stay together.
As we study what Jesus teaches about divorce and remarriage, remember this, divorce, remarriage, and adultery are not the unforgivable sins. Paul tells us in Romans 8:1 that:
Romans 8:1
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Whatever sin is in your past has been washed away.
For those that have divorce in their past, you do not need to carry the guilt anymore. All our sin was nailed to the cross with Christ. His blood is more valuable than all of your offenses and completely sufficient to satisfy the wrath of God against your sin. Your past is not defined by your former sins. It is defined by your death to those sins, and your future is defined by the hope that he is coming for you again. He has robed you in a righteousness that you do not deserve and one day he will make your inner purity visible with his external glory. If you are in Christ, your past is over and done with and your future is certain, so do not allow your past to way you down with a pain and a guilt from which Christ has already set you free.
For those that have been injured by someone else’s divorce, consider the forgiveness that you have received. Consider the debts that were in your account that were canceled at the cross. You can find the power to forgive those that have hurt you by meditating on the grace that God has shown you.
Keep this reminder of the Gospel in your mind as we approach our difficult sermon text today. Let’s read Mark 10:1-12:
Mark 10:1-12
And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.
2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
The main idea of our sermon today is this: Marriage is an ordinance of God, established at creation, that cannot be ended by the legal formalities of man, therefore, men should not get divorced. Our sermon will proceed in two parts. First, we will restrict our focus to Mark 10:1-12, to understand the logic of Christ’s teaching on marriage in the Gospel of Mark on its own terms. This first part of the sermon will have three points. Point one, the Pharisees had a deficient understanding of marriage. Their understanding of marriage is founded on the Law, a caretaker for God’s people during a period of time in which the majority of God’s people were unregenerate. Point two, Christ teaches that marriage is not founded on the law but is an act of God established at creation. Not only is it an institution of Creation, but every individual marriage is an act of God that joins two individuals together in such a way that only he can separate them. The legal formalities of man cannot undo the spiritual union that takes place in marriage. Finally, point three, Christ’s teaching on remarriage reinforces marriage as an act of God established at creation. The second marriage can only be considered adultery if the divorce does not dissolve the first marriage. It cannot dissolve the first marriage, because the acts of men cannot undo the acts of God.
Once we have a firm footing in the Gospel of Mark, we will expand our field of vision and consider other texts in Scripture that seem to offer exceptions to the Christ’s teaching on divorce found in Mark 10. The first exception is sexual immorality, or more commonly thought of as adultery. This exception is found in Matthew 19:7-12. Ultimately, I am going to argue that adultery is not what Christ is teaching and the exception is not about divorce but is about remarriage. Divorce is always a sin, otherwise, the disciples’ response does not make sense. The second exception is abandonment. This exception is argued from 1 Corinthians 7:12-16. We will see that this is not an exception for divorce. Rather, it is instruction to the one being divorced by an unbeliever to let that unbeliever go in peace.
Ultimately, my goal is to demonstrate that there is no scenario in Scripture where divorce is not a sin and there are very limited instances where remarriage is not adultery. My hope is not that we leave today feeling that Christ’s teaching on divorce is harsh, but that his teaching on marriage is beautiful. One of our problems is that we are too much like the Pharisees. We have lost a godly perspective on what marriage is. Frankly, we see it like the world sees it, a social contract. Marriage is not a social contract. Marriage is an ordinance of God, established at creation, that cannot be ended by the legal formalities of man, therefore, no one should get divorced.
Part One: Christ’s teaching on marriage and divorce in Mark 10:1-12.
So let’s focus in on Mark 10:1-12 and learn what we can from Mark before we expand our perspective to other places in Scripture. Let’s reread Mark 10:1-12:
Mark 10:1-12
10 And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them. 2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Last week, Jesus was in Capernaum for a brief stop at his home base before he began the journey to Jerusalem. In the last three weeks, he has prophesied, twice, to all the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, be rejected by the chief priest and elders, suffer, die, and rise from the dead three days later. This is his path. If they want to be his disciples, they cannot stand in front of him. They must follow him along the same path of suffering in order to enter the kingdom of God.
At the beginning of our sermon text, we see him head out into the wilderness, on his way to Jerusalem. When he gets out there, he is met by a large crowd and some Pharisees. After teaching the crowd, the Pharisees attempt to trap Jesus by asking him a question on divorce. At App Grid Breakfast, Max brought up the idea that perhaps the reason is that Jesus has officially crossed over into the political territory of Herod. Remember, in Mark 6, Herod murdered John the Baptist. His reason for murdering John was that John spoke out against Herod for taking his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias. It is assumed that Philip and Herodias had been divorced, as that was the Jewish custom, which freed Herod to marry her. So, John was likely speaking out against divorce and remarriage in general as he was confronting the specific situation with Herod and Herodias. You can see the wheels turning in the Pharisees’ minds. If Jesus agrees with John’s teaching, and that teaching got John killed, maybe we can trap Jesus and Herod will kill him too. It is an interesting observation, although the text is not explicit on the motivation of the Pharisees, other than that they were trying to test Jesus.
The conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees follows a pretty straight forward logic. The Pharisees try to trap Jesus on the topic of divorce. They ask him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Instead of stepping into the trap, Jesus turns the question back on them. “You guys are the experts on the law, what did Moses command you?” The Pharisees reference Deuteronomy 24 where Moses teaches the nation of Israel the circumstances under which a man may divorce his wife and gives further instruction about what happens if the wife remarries. The point is that, according to the Law, men were allowed to write their wives a certificate of divorce.
Jesus’s response reveals the first point of our exposition of Mark 10:1-12. He says, in verse 5,
Mark 10:5
“Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.”
The Pharisees have a deficient view of marriage because they have a deficient foundation. Christ says that this ordinance was given to them because of the hardness of their hearts. Jesus is not saying that Moses wrote this law for these specific Pharisees. Yes their hearts are hard, but Christ is making a comment about all those that have lived underneath the Law. The people of God under the Law are not a homogeneous group. There are two kinds of people that live under the Law: regenerate and unregenerate. The Law was designed to steward God’s people through a time where the majority of them had hard hearts and were unregenerate. Paul talks about this in Romans 11: not all of Israel is Israel. There were those under the Law that were spiritual Israel, but the majority of the people were only ethnic Israel.
Therefore, the Law made provisions for things, such as divorce, that were a mercy to those that were unregenerate, that had hard hearts. It lowered the bar so that the nation of Israel could function in the intermediate period where belonging to God’s ethnic people did not mean that you also belonged to God’s spiritual people. It was a temporary, inferior system holding God’s people until the day that the Messiah would come and bring a new and better way.
The good news is that this day had arrived. No longer would provisions such as the divorce that Moses allowed be necessary, because all of God’s people would be regenerate. In the new covenant, there would no longer be regenerate and unregenerate. Only those that have put their faith in Jesus and followed him will enter the kingdom of God. So, Jesus’s first point is that the Pharisees start on a deficient foundation, so they have a deficient perspective on marriage and divorce.
He continues by defining marriage in its original context. Read with me starting in verse 6:
Mark 10:6-9
6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
According to Christ, marriage is not an institution created by Moses. The roots of marriage are much deeper than the roots of the law. Marriage predates even the Fall. As we saw this morning in our sermonette from Genesis 2, marriage is an ordinance of creation established by God in the moment when he made Eve from Adam’s rib. This is the moment that Christ is referring to. Marriage is an institution established by God prior to the Fall. It is a fundamental good that God gave to all of mankind to define the relationship between men and women. It is the structure in which mankind would complement and propagate itself.
As a creation ordinance, marriage is for all men. It is not a uniquely Christian institution. We think of it that way, because the Scriptures have so much to say about marriage in the Christian life. However, since marriage is an institution given by God at creation to all of mankind then it is a generic grace of God to all people. This is why the building block of all of civilization is marriage. No matter what culture you study, every single civilization has had the concept of marriage. It might take different forms, but it forms the structure of all human interaction. If a civilization is going to flourish and grow, it must have healthy marriages and healthy family units. This is the way God has set it up from the beginning.
Not only is marriage a general good for all people, but marriage is also an act of God. When a man and a wife are united in marriage, it is not merely a civic union. Every marriage is a spiritual union between two people to the degree that from God’s perspective they become one united entity. Certainly this refers to the physical union of a man and a wife, but that is a physical representation of something much deeper that takes place. On a spiritual level, they are knitted together by God.
This is Christ’s point against the Pharisees. They can only conceive of marriage in legal terms. For them it is something that is established by men and can be undone by men. But Jesus tells them that it is not an act of men, but an act of God. As such, men cannot undo it. No matter what certificate you give to your wife in front of other men, according to God, that marriage is still valid and in effect. The husband and wife are two complementary halves of a unified whole before God until he separates them. There is only one way that God separates marriages and that is through death.
So, if marriage is a creation ordinance and every marriage is an act of God and Moses only gave an option for divorce to Israel because they were in a period where the people of God were unregenerate and had hard hearts, then under the New Covenant, when all of God’s people are regenerate, no Christian should get divorced. Every divorce is in contradiction to the will of God. He has united men and women together and no Christian should get divorced.
This is a hard teaching. It is so hard that the disciples ask Jesus about it when they return to the house they are staying at that night. We do not get to hear their question, but we can infer their question based on the answer that Jesus gives. They probably asked something like: if the original marriage is still active, what happens when someone gets remarried? Jesus responds in verse 11 and 12. Read it with me:
Mark 10:11-12
11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Why would the second marriage be considered adultery? Adultery is a very specific sin. Of the many sexual sins, adultery only makes sense in the context of a marriage or an engagement to be married. The same sexual act outside of marriage is not considered adultery. Christ’s teaching only makes sense if the original marriage is still valid and in effect.
So his teaching to the disciples reinforces what he said to the Pharisees. Marriage is an act of God. It cannot be undone by men. Even if you give your wife a certificate of divorce, and follow all the rules of the Law, it does not undo your original marriage. It is still valid and in effect to the point that if you get remarried, you become an adulterer and you make your new spouse an adulterer.
In the first half of our sermon, we have seen that Marriage is an ordinance of God, established at creation, that cannot be ended by the legal formalities of man, therefore, men should not get divorced. This is the clear teaching of Mark 10:1-12. I know this weighs heavily on many of you. It weighs heavily on me.
But we must attempt to change our perspective on this text. Instead of feeling burdened by what seems a harsh teaching, think about the beauty and the importance of marriage.
After God had made man, he saw that it was not good for man to be alone. Out of man’s loneliness, God created the woman to be his complement and helper. But men and women are not alike. They were made to complement each other anatomically, but they were also made to be connected to each other at a deeper level. So God created them to be connected spiritually through the gift of marriage. He gave them to each other, but he did not leave them alone to figure it out on their own. He gave them a special relationship within which to relate to each other in a way that would allow them to flourish and benefit from all the good things he made them to share. That relationship is marriage. One of the greatest gifts that God gave to men from the very beginning. A generic good for all people in all places, wherever they are found in God’s creation, and something that the people of God should cherish and protect.
The problem is not that the prohibition on divorce is too hard for us. The problem is that we do not value marriage enough.
Exceptions
In the second half of our sermon, I want to take up what many would consider to be the two exceptions to divorce that are found in Scripture: adultery and abandonment. We will examine adultery first in Matthew 19:7-12, you can go ahead and turn there, and then we will look at abandonment from 1 Corinthians 7:12-16.
First, let’s look at adultery. Christ’s teaching on marriage, divorce, and remarriage is found in all three of the synoptic Gospels. In Luke and Mark, there is no qualification to Jesus’s teaching. Marriage is a creation ordinance so if you divorce your wife and remarry it is adultery. However, in Matthew 19:7-12, it appears that Jesus qualifies his teaching. Let’s read it together:
Matthew 19:7-12
7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”
10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” 11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”
Everything that led up to this moment in Matthew is very similar to how we saw it take place in Mark 10. The Pharisees challenge Jesus. Jesus claims that marriage is a creation ordinance, and as we saw in verse 7, Jesus deals with the rebuttal of the Pharisees. What is unique to Matthew is the way that Jesus qualifies his teaching and the response of the disciples when they get back to the house that they are staying at for the night. So we will deal with them each, one at a time.
First, the way that Jesus qualifies his teaching. Let’s read verse 9 carefully:
Matthew 19:9
9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”
Before we deal with what sexual immorality is, let’s pay attention to the grammar of the sentence. Christ does not say, if your spouse commits sexual immorality then you are free to divorce your spouse. He says, if yourdivorce your spouse because they have committed sexual immorality, and you marry another, the second marriage is not adultery. The exception has nothing to do with the divorce. It has to do with the remarriage. God hates divorce, period. But in this special instance, the remarriage is not considered adultery.
Now, we have already said that the second marriage is adultery, because the first marriage is still in effect, that a certificate of men cannot undo the union that God has enacted in marriage. So, why would it not be adultery in this special instance? Does sexual immorality nullify the original marriage?
To answer this question, we must first answer the question, what is sexual immorality? The Greek word is porneia from which we derive the word pornography. Porneia is a very broad, catch all word for any sexual deviance. It is an umbrella term that includes fornication, adultery, homosexuality, etc. It is actually an odd word for Christ to use in this context, because any sexual misconduct in the context of marriage would be considered adultery. There is a more precise word that he could have used to describe sexual impropriety in the context of marriage. He could have used the word morchaō, which literally means adultery. Especially because Jesus has already demonstrated that he has a much more comprehensive understanding of what adultery is than the common Jew would have had. Remember in Matthew 5:27 and following, Christ said:
Matthew 5:27-28
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
So, in the context of marriage, Jesus says that adultery does not have to be physical. Adultery is merely the lustful desire that one feels in their heart for a woman that is not their wife. So why does Jesus use the term porneia when morchaō would have been a better word to describe sexual deviance in the context of a marriage?
Let me give you two reasons. First, Jesus is not merely talking about consummated marriages. He definitely is talking about marriage that have been fully consummated, but he is also talking about marriages that have not been fully consummated. At this time, engagements are not seen as a separate phase of the relationship like they are today. The engagement was a marriage that had not been fully consummated. We can see an example of this earlier in Matthew. Turn with me to Matthew 1:18:
Matthew 1:18-19
18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.
You can see that Mary and Joseph had a formal relationship that Matthew refers to as betrothal. They both knew that they were promised to each other, but the Scripture is clear that they were not actually together yet. Before they could consummate their marriage, Mary was found to be with child. Until this moment, Mary could only be with child if she had been sexually immoral. There would have been no other explanation. Since Joseph was a good man, he decided to put her away quietly, but notice the word that is used to separate their engagement. The Scriptures use the term divorce, the same Greek word used by Christ in Mark 10 and Matthew 19. So, Christ is teaching that if one party of a betrothal is found to have been sexually immoral, they may get divorced and the second marriage, or in this case betrothal, is not adultery. The marriage was not fully consummated and there is not a union that is still binding from the original marriage.
Now, some of you might be thinking that this is a fairly nuanced interpretation of what Christ is saying. What reason would Christ have to teach such a thing? This brings us to our second point about this exception: Christ taught this because he was accused of being a child of sexual immorality. We read this in John 8:39-41:
John 8:39-41
39 They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, 40 but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. 41 You are doing the works your father did.” They said to him, “We were not born of sexual immorality. We have one Father—even God.”
Jesus goes on to claim that their father is the devil but notice how they respond. They claim that their father is God himself, and they imply that Jesus was born out of sexual immorality. Jesus said what he did to defend himself against the accusation that he was born out of sexual immorality. Joseph would have been justified in putting Mary away in divorce and remarrying if it was true that he had been the product of sexual immorality, but he wasn’t the product of sexual immorality. He was a product of the power of the Holy Spirit. So, the fact that Joseph did not exercise what many would have seen to be his right to divorce Mary is proof that he understood how special the conception of Jesus truly was. That it was not sexual immorality.
So to wrap up our first exception. Sexual immorality, most commonly thought of as adultery, is not an exception for divorce. Matthew 19 makes it clear that the exception is not an exception for divorce, but an exception for remarriage. If sexual immorality was an exception to allow Christians to get divorced, it becomes really difficult to imagine a point at which every marriage has not been put in jeopardy by a sexual thought or desire. Sexual immorality or adultery is not an exception that allows Christians to get divorced.
The second exception that is commonly referred to in evangelical circles is abandonment. The idea is that if your spouse abandons you physically or sometimes even emotionally for long enough, you are justified in divorcing them. Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 7:12-16 and let’s read it together:
1 Corinthians 7:12-16
12 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. 16 For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
This passage comes at the end of a long discourse on principles that should govern Christian marriage and Christian singleness. We do not have time to discuss those, but I encourage you to go back and read what Paul teaches here so that you will have a broader understanding of what he is saying in this passage.
For our purposes, Paul gives instruction to Christians regarding divorce under a very specific scenario, namely, when the Christian’s spouse is not a Christian and decides to leave the Christian spouse. This was typical in the early Church, because becoming a Christian was a new phenomenon. One spouse would hear the Gospel and convert to Christianity, but the other spouse would not. In this scenario, if the unregenerate spouse pursues divorce because of the faith of the other spouse, then the Christian is to allow it to happen. There are a couple very important things to observe about this situation.
First, divorce is a one-way street. There is a divorcing party and an abandoned party. At the end of the day, one person files to divorce the other person. In some instances, this might be a technicality. Meaning, both spouses might desire that divorce and agree to have one of them file. However, in the case of Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians, it is clear that the Christian spouse is the party that is being divorced, and they are being divorced specifically because of their belief in the Gospel. Therefore, abandonment cannot be a justification to divorce your spouse, because to be abandoned is to be the party that has been divorced. What Paul is teaching is that the abandoned party is free to live in peace.
The second thing to notice is that the reason the abandoned party is free to be at peace with the divorce is grounded in the reality that you cannot save your spouse. Look at verse 15:
1 Corinthians 7:15-16
But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. 16 For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
The Christian is to be at peace with the divorce because they do not have the power to save their spouse who is leaving them because of their faith. Only God can save them. What kind of witness is it if the believing spouse makes the unbelieving spouse’s life miserable? By being at peace, the believing spouse gets the opportunity to live out their faith in front of the unbelieving spouse.
Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 is not a justification for Christian’s to sin by divorcing their spouses. It is the justification for a Christian to live at peace when they are being sinned against by their unbelieving spouse.
Neither one of these two exceptions can give a Christian permission to divorce their spouse. The sad thing is that this is a very common teaching in churches today. We have seen that the actual texts where people argue these exceptions exist are actually very narrow situations that do not actually speak to divorce at all. Matthew 19 speaks to remarriage and 1 Corinthians 7 speaks to being on the receiving end of divorce. Based on Scripture, I see no justifiable reason that Christians should ever contemplate divorce. Which has me echoing the disciples in Matthew 19 when they said:
Matthew 19:10-11
10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” 11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.
Marriage is not a small thing. It is not something that we should enter flippantly or recklessly. Christians should be careful and slow before they rush into marriage. They should receive counsel from those that are more mature than them, and they should not marry people that are not Christians. We need a higher and richer understanding of the importance and seriousness of marriage.
But the things that are the most serious in life also bring us the most joy. While we should be careful about entering into the covenant of marriage, we should also not be afraid of it. Marriage is hard. I don’t know how non-Christians do it. But there is also great joy in marriage. When man fell, sin broke all the interpersonal relationship that we have. We are forever separated in this life from the intimacy that we could have achieved in the Garden. Marriage is the one relationship that allows you to be truly known by another human being. It is possible for the relationship between a husband and a wife to recover a small glimpse of the joy that we used to have in the Garden. Marriage is a beautiful and good thing that we should cherish and protect in the Church. Instead of seeking exceptions to end marriage, we should be seeking ways to elevate, preserve, and strengthen marriage in the church.
The goal of the Church is always reconciliation. When members of the church have difficulties in their marriage, we need to know about it. We must resist the fear of being looked down upon or thought less of. The importance of marriage means that the Enemy is always looking to weaken the church by weakening the marriages in the Church. The Church cannot counteract the attack of the Enemy if we do not know who is struggling.
As members, we need to rally around struggling marriages and help them heal. Struggling marriages tend to be some of the most numerous pastoral issues in the church, and the elders are meant to lead and care for marriages when they are struggling. However, do not discount the value of your fellow brothers and sisters in the Church. Member to member care is one of the primary means of ministry in the Church. As members, we need to be ready and willing to care for and strengthen marriages in our body so that the Church can flourish.
Also, we have resources set aside to provide counseling and pastoral care for all of our members and especially married couples. The church is ready and willing to use those resources to get members the biblical counseling and pastoral care that they might need. Divorce is not an option, so we need to care for each other so that we all make it to the end together.
Conclusion
In this sermon, we have seen that: Marriage is an ordinance of God, established at creation, that cannot be ended by the legal formalities of man, therefore, men should not get divorced. There are not exceptions in Scripture that justify Christians divorcing their spouse. The church in America has been getting this wrong for too many years. We need to elevate the importance of marriage in the church and pray that God would give us the mercy and the grace required to have healthy marriages.
I would like to close by putting an exclamation point on why marriage is so important. During our pastoral prayer, we read about marriage in Ephesians 5. In Ephesians 5, Paul reveals something about marriage. In verse 32 he says:
Ephesians 5: 32-33
This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Marriage is so important, and divorce is so abhorrent, because every single marriage gives us an imperfect glimpse at the way Christ loves his church. No matter how imperfect the marriage, it somehow images Christ’s relationship with his people. We should never give up on our spouse because Christ is never going to give up on us.
Let’s pray.