Divorce
When you walk through Scripture verse by verse, it causes you to cover all of Scripture. And that’s a good thing! All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for us (2 Tim 3:16). It also causes you to cover some things that you likely wouldn’t cover otherwise—things that may be difficult or awkward. Today is one of those. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches with authority on a topic that was as heated and contested in His day as it is in ours. Today we’re going to learn what Jesus has to say about divorce.
God designed marriage.
Before we can understand what Jesus says about divorce, we need to first understand what God’s Word says about marriage. Marriage is not a human invention. It was created and instituted by God. In Genesis 2:18–25, we see that God saw it was not good for man to be alone, and He made a helper suitable for him—a helpmeet. He then does something incredible. He joins the man and woman together and declares that “the two shall become one flesh.”
From the very beginning, marriage was designed to be a covenantal, exclusive, lifelong union between one man and one woman. Jesus affirms God’s original design in Matthew 19:3-9, adding to the two becoming one flesh, “Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
It’s so crystal clear. The joining of one man and one woman is God’s act. He does it. And no human being has the ultimate authority to undo it. D.A. Carson helps us realize, “initially, all divorce was inconceivable; when God made men and women, no allowance was made for it.”[1] Marriage is more than a legal arrangement. The state of Tennessee doesn’t have the ultimate right to pronounce you married or not. Marriage is a holy covenant. When I did weddings in the past, I used to say, “By the power vested in me as a minister of the gospel and by the great state of Tennessee,” but now I just say, “By the power vested in me as a minister of the gospel.” Marriage is God’s doing. It is a covenant between God and man.
I want you to think about this covenant. It’s so important. We must grasp this before we can understand the strictness of which Jesus speaks of divorce. The covenant of marriage mirrors God’s covenant love for His people. Marriage is meant to be a visible display of God’s faithfulness. His forgiveness. His sacrificial love. Ephesians 5 shows us this so clearly. The Apostle Paul explains there that the mystery of marriage is that it points us to Christ and His church. Jesus is the faithful bridegroom who loves His bride to the end. And praise God He does! Praise God He doesn’t divorce His bride! Praise God He doesn’t abandon us! Praise God He takes the covenant seriously!
God defines marriage.
Since God designed marriage, He alone has the prerogative to define it. Our culture doesn’t define it. Our preferences don’t define it. God defines marriage, and He defines it as one man and one woman, joined together as one flesh, until separated by death. This is God’s blueprint. If we don’t start here—if we don’t first grasp God’s beautiful and binding design for marriage—we will never rightly understand what Jesus says about divorce.
This also means God not only defines who can be married, but what constitutes grounds for divorce. If God defines marriage, then He also defines its parameters of annulment. God’s design is clear: one man and one woman become one flesh (Gen. 2:24). God is the one who joins them together. What is 1+1? We all should know the answer is two—God’s matrimonial mathematics is 1+1=1. God’s design and definition is that two become one. And I want you to note who does the “oneing.” It’s God—“What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” You can’t undo what God has done.
This is why Moses wrote about divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1–4. And this gets to the heart of what Jesus is referencing here in the Sermon on the Mount. We need to realize something here: Moses wasn’t commanding divorce. He was regulating it. He was allowing it. He was making concessions for it. Jesus makes this clear in Matthew 19:8, as we’ll see in a minute, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” John Stott tells us, “The Pharisees called Moses’ provision for divorce a command; Jesus called it a concession to the hardness of human hearts. It was not a divine instruction, but only a divine concession to human weakness.”[2]
And the debate that followed all the years later up until the time of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount reveals the softening of God’s instruction and God’s design that hardness of heart brings. The Jews took Moses’ teaching and made it mean so many different things.
Jesus was teaching not only from the Jewish Torah but from Jewish tradition. This is the whole reason He keeps repeating, “You have heard it said” rather than “You have read.” Around AD 200, a collection of oral traditions from Judaism were compiled in written form in what’s called the Mishnah. In all likelihood, the traditions that were written down in the Mishnah are the same oral traditions Jesus is interacting with in His Sermon on the Mount.
The Mishnah shows us just how far the rabbis took the issue. As you read through it, you will notice a continual pattern of “Rabbi so-and-so said…” As we read one section, I want you to not only note that different voices are being expressed, but I want you to note the different views of divorce that were being taught within the Jewish tradition Jesus’ disciples were accustomed to.
“Beit Shammai say: A man may not divorce his wife unless he finds out about her having engaged in a matter of forbidden sexual intercourse [devar erva], i.e., she committed adultery or is suspected of doing so, as it is stated: “Because he has found some unseemly matter [ervat davar] in her, and he writes her a scroll of severance” (Deuteronomy 24:1). And Beit Hillel say: He may divorce her even due to a minor issue, e.g., because she burned or over-salted his dish, as it is stated: “Because he has found some unseemly matter in her,” meaning that he found any type of shortcoming in her. Rabbi Akiva says: He may divorce her even if he found another woman who is better looking than her and wishes to marry her, as it is stated in that verse: “And it comes to pass, if she finds no favor in his eyes” (Deuteronomy 24:1).”[3]
The school of Shammai taught that a man could not divorce his wife unless she committed sexual immorality. The school of Hillel taught that a man could divorce his wife for almost any trivial reason, even burning a meal. Rabbi Akiva went further, saying a man could divorce his wife simply if he found another woman more attractive. By Jesus’s day, Hillel’s view was most popular—very similar to today’s no-fault-divorce culture. Divorce had become easy and common. This is the context in which Jesus is teaching on divorce. As emotional and hotly contested as it is today, it was for Jesus on that mount.
Divorce is the result of hard, sinful hearts.
In Matthew 19:8, Jesus explained to the Pharisees why divorce was permitted under Moses: “Because of your hardness of heart.” Divorce exists because of sin. Think about it this way: If we lived out the Beatitudes, divorce would be unheard of. Chrysostom said, “For he that is meek, and a peacemaker, and poor in spirit, and merciful, how shall he cast out his wife? He that is used to reconcile others, how shall he be at variance with her that is his own?”[4]
Biblically, as we saw earlier, divorce is never commanded. Even in the cases where divorce is permitted, though, reconciliation is always God’s preferred outcome (see 1 Cor. 7:10–11). Danny Akin explains, “Our God is a God of reconciliation. He would always prefer that partners in even the most troubled marriage would pursue and find reconciliation and restoration.”[5] Isn’t that in itself a picture of the gospel?! But because of hard, sinful hearts, there are biblical grounds for divorce.
Jesus names one ground for divorce in Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9—sexual immorality. The word Matthew uses is porneia, a broad word [that I’m sure sounds familiar to you] that can refer to adultery, fornication, incest, prostitution, and other sexual sins. Paul adds another reason in 1 Corinthians 7:15: if an unbelieving spouse abandons/deserts a believing spouse, the believer “is not enslaved.” This is often called the “Pauline privilege.” While Scripture never explicitly mentions abuse, many pastors and theologians argue that abuse is a form of desertion and permits divorce on the same grounds. But it’s important to note this: divorce is permitted in these cases, not commanded. Reconciliation is always the better path when true repentance and change are possible. But reconciliation always goes both ways.
Since there are biblical grounds for divorce, we need to ask the question about church offices. When giving the qualifications for deacons and elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, Paul says that they should be “the husband of one wife,” which literally means “a one-woman man.” So, what do we make of that? Does a divorce automatically disqualify someone from serving in one of these roles? It’s not black and white, and because there is nuance and biblical grounds for divorce, we must weigh each case separately. The phrase “one woman man” points to a man’s faithfulness, character, and reputation, so each case must be weighed carefully according to Scripture. Was the divorce biblical? Has there been repentance? Is the man proven faithful now? To make a hard-and-fast rule that any divorced man is forever disqualified goes beyond what Scripture explicitly states. Regardless, though, divorce is an aberration and not part of God’s good design. Just like death is.
Divorce is a kind of death.
In Jewish law, adultery carried the death penalty (Lev. 20:10), as we saw last week. If that penalty was carried out, the marriage was ended. By Jesus’ day, under Roman rule, the death penalty wasn’t applied for adultery. But Jesus’s teaching seems to assume the same principle, that adultery breaks the covenant, and the innocent party is free.[6] And Jesus says that apart from marital unfaithfulness, divorce leads to adultery (Matt. 5:32). That’s because the covenant is still intact before God. Divorce rips apart what God joined together. In that sense, divorce is a kind of death. We literally say in our vows, “till death do us part.” Divorce is like a living death—a death without a funeral. The singer Jason Gray has a song about divorce called “Death Without a Funeral.” Divorce feels like something has died, but there’s no closure. No burial. No way to truly grieve. Marriage is meant to end only by death. Divorce, then, is a distortion of God’s design. BUT…
God brings life out of death.
The gospel reminds us that even the worst sins are not beyond God’s grace. Martyn Lloyd-Jones says, “Even adultery is not the unforgivable sin. It is a terrible sin, but God forbid that there should be anyone who feels that he or she has sinned himself or herself outside the love of God or outside His kingdom because of adultery.”[7] If someone here has divorced wrongly or remarried wrongly, you know what? That sin can be forgiven. God can bring beauty out of those ashes.
I love how Danny Akin, the president of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary states it, bringing home application:
“Divorced Christians who have remarried on unbiblical grounds should ask for God’s forgiveness. They should also ask for forgiveness from their prior spouse who they wronged and make reconciliation and restoration to the fullest degree that they possibly can. What they should not do is divorce their current spouse and try to get back with their previous spouse. Blomberg is right, “[they] should begin afresh to observe God’s standards by remaining faithful to their current partner” (Matthew, NAC, 111). Bottom-line: do the right thing now, today and tomorrow, before God and in relation to your current spouse. Be a faithful spouse today and in the future til separated by death. Commit daily to life-long faithfulness and fidelity. Model today the difference the gospel makes in a marriage. Do not excuse your past sin and failures. Acknowledge them, confess them, repent of them, and then move forward in the grace and forgiveness and mercy of God doing the right thing to all!”[8]
So, what should you take from all of this? You came to church today expecting to get a pick-me-up, and you got a sermon on divorce. Here’s the thing: God’s Word does not return void. You are here today by God’s design—for His purposes. Take these things to heart.
Take marriage seriously. Jesus takes marriage seriously, so we must too. Marriage is a covenant before God, not a contract we can walk away from. So, pursue reconciliation. That means even in cases of infidelity or abandonment, God’s preference is reconciliation…if there is repentance. True repentance. Don’t take divorce lightly. No-fault, or little-fault divorce was common in Jesus’s day just like it is in ours. But Jesus very clearly condemns it. But also remember God’s grace. No matter your past—whether you’ve sinned in divorce, remarriage, or unfaithfulness—the cross of Jesus Christ offers forgiveness and new life. God can redeem broken lives and broken marriages.
Marriage isn’t easy. It’s not a fairytale. It’s hard work. Very hard work. But it’s worth it. God designed marriage as a covenant to display His love for His people. Christ is the groom who will never abandon His bride. He is faithful even when we are unfaithful. Every one of us has failed in relationships. Every one of us has broken promises. But Christ has never failed His bride. On the cross, He bore the penalty for our unfaithfulness, and in His resurrection He offers us new life.
If you carry the shame of divorce or the guilt of unfaithfulness, hear this: there is grace at the foot of the cross. There is no sin so deep that the blood of Jesus cannot cover it. Run to Him. Rest in Him. Receive His forgiveness. And let His faithful love empower you to live faithfully today and tomorrow. In Jesus, there is hope for broken marriages. There’s healing for broken hearts. And there’s life even amidst death.
[1] D.A. Carson, The Sermon on the Mount: An Evangelical Exposition of Matthew 5-7 (Baker Book House, 1978), 45.
[2] John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (IVP Academic, 1978), 74-75.
[3] https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Gittin.9.10?lang=bi
[4] Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, 78.
[5] https://www.danielakin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Matthew-5.31-32-19.3-9-What-Did-Jesus-Say-About-Divorce.-manuscript.pdf
[6] Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Sermon on the Mount: Kingdom Life in a Fallen World (Banner of Truth, 1987), 91.
[7] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1959), 261.
[8] https://www.danielakin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Matthew-5.31-32-19.3-9-What-Did-Jesus-Say-About-Divorce.-manuscript.pdf
