Matthew 5:31-32

We have a little bit of time this morning where we get to talk about um divorce and remarriage.

It's just two verses, so it works because um we are gonna wrap up here and then we have a Thanksgiving meal that we can um share together over in the Compassion Center.

So I will not preach as long as normal.

Um, but this is in line, this is a part of the teaching that is found in uh Matthew chapter five.

If you're new with us, we've been in the Sermon on the Mount, and um we're looking in the Sermon on the Mount at this kind of um formula where Jesus uh would say, You've heard it said, and then Jesus intensifies the command.

He gives an ethical standard.

And you recall that um 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, right?

And he's going into synagogues and he's just proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven has come near.

And um 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 gonna read this morning presumes that the audience, the listener, has made a decision to follow Jesus as and to be an apprentice of Jesus, to be dedicated to Jesus.

So 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 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 5, verse 31.

Matthew 5:31

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, um, 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 uh hear from you what your spirit would be speaking to us this morning, whether we're married, divorced, 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.

All right, so we do.

We have people from all kinds of backgrounds in here.

We have people who um would love to be married.

We have people who grew up uh in a you know two-parent family, some in a one-parent family, some with a guardian, a grandparent, or an aunt or an uncle.

We've got a whole mix of people in here, divorced, remarried.

And um 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 gonna go back, we're gonna look at it in its context, and what we're gonna 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.

Um 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 4.

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 Shimei and Heliel.

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 4.

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, hand it to her, and send 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 um original husband was pimping out the wife.

And um this basically limits any form of like prostitution dynamic.

There is also a um culturally, there was the dowry that was offered.

Um and so the exchange of dowries by limiting the first husband from remarrying her as a in a third marriage with somebody in between, that limits um and disincentivizes the fine the financial gain that could come from marrying her again.

The interesting thing though is that this 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 Hiliel and Shimei.

This is recorded for us in a Jewish text that was written 150 years after the time of Christ called the Mishnah.

Can you say the Mishnah?

Mishnah, 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 uh 150 to 200 um A.D.

that this uh Mishnah was written.

And in the Mishnah, it records this debate between the school of Shimei and the house of Hiliel, which would have been the contemporary debate at the time of Jesus.

Are you tracking with me?

So Mishnah written after Jesus, but reflecting back on what would have been contemporary to the time of Jesus.

The school of Shimei held to a strict interpretation of Deuteronomy 24.

And the issue really was around this text where it says in verse 1, if this wife becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her.

And really the the um house of Hiliel was focused in on um, or Shimei was focused in on this word indecent.

And they had a strict view.

It was only sexual immorality that would allow for divorce.

Uh this text could only be applied or walked out and used if the husband found the wife to have uh been unfaithful.

The house of Hiliel, on the other hand, uh held a liberal view and said that look, something indecent could have been, you know, she doesn't cook well, I don't find her uh looking good.

Yeah, there could have been a mess, right?

Um and there's actually a third camp called the House of uh or the School of Akibah, which was a liberal view, which was like it was like divorce without cause.

Like, you know, 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 Shemi interpretation, which was not written.

It was just again an oral tradition of here's generally what that school uh taught.

And Jesus says that it's there's not to be a divorce except in the case of sexual immorality.

That's it.

Sexual immorality.

Um and then he has this interesting clause about you know, 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 um 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.

This is especially Jewish law, not so much Roman law.

A divorced woman faced social stigma and economic hardship as she might have been, depended 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 um ladies cannot have your husbands.

They're not gonna just 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, um, I think with the Patels, and how, yeah, they're arranged, but the, you know, the guy and the girl are kind of tipping the scales a little bit.

It's a documentary that's somewhere on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

I can't remember where I saw it.

But so there is some say that's going on in these, or there, depending on the family you come from, but it it's 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 marry the people that we fall in love with.

And emotions are factored in heavily to the marriage decision, right?

And um, and then from the emotions comes in the conversation around compatibility, right?

Are you sexually compatible?

Are you socially compatible?

Is this marriage going to do something for you within society?

Is it gonna help you, you know, 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, it's you don't get to just say, Ah, 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, all right, you know, who are you gonna marry?

Who's gonna take you now that you've been with somebody else?

It was a mess.

And so Jesus is here giving the this limiting um to divorce, and it's inherently protecting women.

This is not something that um any man who was not a follower of Jesus would have been like, oh yeah, that's great.

This was a this was directed right at uh men who wanted to divorce their wives.

So there's a number of questions that come up around this, and we're gonna actually spend more time when we get to Matthew 19 talking maybe a little bit more about the technicalities of marriage and divorce.

But um, 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 indissolvable.

It and they make the argument that it's ontologically irr um 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' 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 is that's how it appears, right?

Um, and and Jesus is saying, hey, that um uh going out and getting an unmerited uh 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 um there is no grounds ever to be divorced.

But they don't like Matthew.

That camp does not like this uh 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, 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 like dealt with in your own hearts.

Lust is equivalent to adultery, right?

Jesus is intensifying it.

And then yet here, as he's really giving a strict view of divorce, he's giving an exception.

Just think about the um issue with anger from a couple weeks ago.

Jesus said, look, you can't call, like calling your brother a fool is equivalent to murder.

But then if you go over to Matthew 23, 17, Jesus speaking to the Pharisees says, you guys are blind fools.

Matthew 23, 17.

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 um 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 um the case of sexual immorality.

Now, this is one exception.

The Bible teaches there are two other exceptions to um where divorce is appropriate.

Divorce is allowed, not mandated, but divorce is allowed.

And those are found in 1 Corinthians chapter 7.

1 Corinthians 7 · chapter mention

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're no longer bound.

That's the language.

You in your marriage are no longer bound.

Now he Paul says in those cases, plural.

So he says, abuse, and in those cases, and so the um 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, um, where um re remarriage is forbidden.

Based off of text like this, if she um goes and she gets married, she's gonna commit adultery.

If you have the MIV version, it's gonna say she's a victim of adultery, um, which is probable.

It seems like God's saying, I'm gonna lay to your feet uh this indictment to the to the man's feet.

I'm gonna lay to your feet the indictment of adultery.

So um there's an assumption of remarriage within this within the culture.

Um there is an assumption of remarriage in Deuteronomy 24, and um here Jesus is doing the same thing.

Um there is in this text, I I think to 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.

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, right?

Our culture says, yeah, tough it out, maybe for the kids, but if it's not Working, you know, get rid of that one, move on to the next one.

And it's important that we're 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.

Like God's Jesus is calling followers to come in line with the ethics of his kingdom.

We're not perfect yet, right?

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 but you 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 the um foster desires of our heart.

And um that lusting and giving a place for lust in our heart is an act of adultery.

It violates the marriage covenant.

Here um Jesus is saying, listen, marriage is that thing that needs to be protected.

So sexual immorality, abandonment, abuse, protection for the vulnerable.

Um just kind of making sure I covered everything that we have here in my notes.

I I do want to just encourage you that marriage is a furnace, right?

It brings up all this stuff in your own life.

Relationships are, right?

God's created relationships to surface just our weirdness, like in our brokenness.

And it comes to the surface in our life, and it's like, yeah, you know what?

I really um 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 a uh 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, you know, do I have grounds to get a divorce?

Can I get out of this?

And I was like, I don't know.

I you 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 um um 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 um 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 um 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, um I think what I want to close with on this is um that there is a um if you're in a difficult marriage, you're in if you're in a difficult space in your marriage, there are some people who know you, and those people um 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 kind of 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.

What what you what if so your marriage, both getting married and getting divorced are some of the most critical decisions you will 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 gonna get a divorce, this is one of my I used to say, hey, you know, work with the church.

Church is kind of, 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.

Uh there's like some of you I've only known for like a couple of years or a year, right?

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 gonna bear witness and where your kids are gonna support you in that decision, and it's gonna be like, yeah, yep.

Because at the end of the day, so I've been through a divorce and I'm remarried.

Crystal and I are are 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 because 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 because it's weird to be a pastor and have 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's that is like so, so important in the process.

And your kids, my kids, like as I walk through it, I my kids um 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 the open door for that kind of relationship with your kids where they're allowed to kind of speak into your life.

Uh, because they know us, they know how screwed up we are, right?

So this is Jesus' 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, right?

Or you may be, he's maybe protecting you as a man.

It it's like when you're in a company and you're like, got you, 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 gonna 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.

Uh, if you follow him, you try to obey, you're gonna end up, I believe, in a place where you're growing and you're at peace and have a clean conscience about where you're heading.

Amen.

Um, 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.

Um, almost every one of us, divorces affected.

And um, Lord, from the brokenness of our culture and broken relationships and people that have hurt us, um, God, I pray that you would um that you would give us integrity and that we would um honor you.

We want to be those that obey, and that you would see in us that sincere desire for um 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.

Um, I pray, Lord, for each person here, if they're struggling in their marriage, that you would um 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 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 um give them a hope?

Would you encourage them?

Um, would you provide them with a godly spouse?

Um, Lord, marriage seems to be really important to you, and yet, Lord, we're living in the midst of so much broken relationships and pain.

Some of it we cause ourselves, but a lot of it's inflicted upon us.

Lord, you are like that doctor.

You're the good shepherd.

Come and be a good shepherd in our midst.

And I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.