Divorce and Remarriage, Part 3

Let's bow in a word of prayer together. Father, we thank you for today, all the things you do, and truly, Lord, you are a great God, and we are grateful that we can be here this evening. Thank you that we have a facility that we can gather in in the middle of the week to study your word.

Thank you, Lord, that you have given us your word, that we can open it and study it together. Thank you, Lord, for just the overwhelming amount of information that you have put on the pages of scripture that tell us about who you are and what you do. We are such a blessed people, and we are grateful.

And so, Lord, tonight, as we gather, open our hearts and minds to behold the beauty of the Lord. Help us to understand what your word says when it comes to divorce and remarriage, that we might be obedient to your word, understand how to help others and counsel others who are going through a divorce or have been divorced, that we might walk them through the scriptures and help them understand what it is you have to say about it, and then help them understand the beauty of your grace and the forgiveness that you offer. So, Lord, we thank you, in Jesus' name, amen.

If you got your Bible, turn to Matthew chapter 5. Matthew chapter 5 is our text this evening. As you're turning there, please understand that whatever Jesus says in Matthew 5, 6, and 7 is something that truly is a blessing to you.

Why? Because he begins with blessedness, true joy, true contentment, true blissfulness. The essence of joy comes from understanding Matthew 5, 6, and 7. It comes from understanding what it means to be a child of the king and to live like a child of the king. And so, whatever Jesus has to say, it's the best for us to understand because it brings us into a relationship with himself that we might experience the joy that only Christ himself can give.

And so, if you have been with us for the last several months, you know that he begins by helping you understand, in verses 1 to 14, your biblical identity. And then from there, he talks about your scriptural authority. That's in verses 15 to 20.

And then he talks about your relational civility. Then he talks about your personal purity. And then, where we are tonight, your marital fidelity.

And then we move on, we'll talk about your verbal integrity. But Christ is trying to help us understand true blessing, true joy. So, whatever he says about divorce and remarriage, understanding what he has to say is going to bring you joy.

And that's very important for us to understand because Christ is truly concerned about your spiritual condition. And so, he wants you to walk with the Lord. He wants you to honor the Lord.

He wants you to serve the Lord. He wants you to understand how it is you can have a right relationship with him, how you can be a part of his kingdom and experience what it means to live like a child of the king. You can't do that unless you understand your identity.

You can't do that unless you understand your authority. You can't do that unless you truly understand your civility. And of course, without purity, you can't do that.

And without marital fidelity, you can't do that. And so, he is explaining to people on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee what it means to truly live like a child of the king. So, Matthew 5:31 and 32 are our verses.

They read as follows. It was said, and that's the same phraseology he uses with each of these six illustrations he gives. It was said, whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce.

But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Throughout these illustrations, we give you three points. One is always the rabbinical tradition. For he says, you've heard that it was said. This is how you've been taught. This is what the rabbis have told you. So, it's important to understand the rabbinical tradition.

And then we always move from there to the biblical teaching that Christ gives.\

Having heard the biblical teaching, you embark on personal transformation. So, the illustrations that Christ gives all fall under three main points. What did the rabbis teach? What am I gonna teach you? What is really true in line with the law of Moses? Because he came to fulfill the law of Moses. Didn't come to abolish the law, but fulfill it. He's already made that very clear.

On top of that, what does it mean to be transformed in your own personal life? And so, that's what we look at as we look at each of these illustrations.

So, it begins with the rabbinical tradition. And we told you there were two points to this. One is that they disbelieved what God had to say.

They disbelieved God's divine plan for marriage. How do we know that? Well, that's because we had you turn to Matthew chapter 19 because Matthew chapter 19 gives you a better understanding of a conversation that Christ has with the Pharisees to help you understand what it is they believed and why. So, in Matthew chapter 19, it says, some Pharisees in verse three came to Jesus, testing him and asking, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? They're trying to test him.

They're trying to entrap him. Because they know what they believe. They know what the rabbinical tradition is.

And they wanna see if they can trap Jesus into disagreeing with Moses. But they can't because Christ came to fulfill the law. He didn't come to abolish the law.

And so, in their effort to trap him, he gives them the divine plan. Why? Because they disbelieved it. Here was the divine plan.

He says, have you not read? Now, I love it when he says that because he brings into question their ability to read the truth of the word of God. You should have read. You should know.

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? What is the divine plan? Well, the divine plan, we told you, was a purposeful union. Male and female created he them. And for this cause, what cause is that? Genesis 2:18, that a man should not be alone.

So, God had a purpose behind the union. Very purposeful. He says, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife.

Cleave to his wife. It's a permanent union. You've disregarded the divine plan.

He said this, and the two shall become one flesh. A very precious union. So, they are no longer two, but one.

But therefore, God has joined together, let no man separate. A predetermined union. This is God's divine plan.

This is the way he's designed it. He is the creator of marriage. The institution of marriage is God's design.

This is what God's plan was. But they, in their own mind, would completely and totally disregard what God says in his word. So, they would disregard the divine plan.

This is what we've already covered. And then number two, they distorted the Deuteronomy passage. Why is that important? Because there's only one passage in the Old Testament that teaches anything about divorce.

It's Deuteronomy 24, verses 1 to 4. So, get your Bible, turn back to Deuteronomy 24. This is the only verses of scripture that do any teaching about divorce and remarriage in the Old Testament.

But this is what they distorted, okay? If you disregard and disbelieve what God says, you do that because you want to have another plan. And so, you distort what God says to make it say what you want it to say.

People do this all the time, right? To affirm my sinful condition and to think that I'm doing okay, to appease my conscience, I'm gonna twist the scriptures. I'm gonna turn the scriptures in my favor to make them say what I want them to say so that I can be comfortable living in my sin. That was the rabbinical tradition. That's what they taught.

I'm gonna read to you the four verses and then we'll talk about them, okay? Deuteronomy 24, verse number 1. When a man takes a wife and marries her, it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her. And he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out from his house.

And she leaves his house and goes and becomes another man's wife. And if the latter husband turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies who took her to be his wife, then her former husband who sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife since she has been defiled. For that is an abomination before the Lord and you should not bring sin on the land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance.

Now, I just read that to you in the New American Standard. The New American Standard has the interpretation correct.

The old King James only enforced the old rabbinical tradition. And that is it put the command at the beginning instead of at the end.

But let me talk to you about the word indecency, okay? Nowhere is that used to refer to adultery. It's a word translated nakedness or uncleanness. The Jewish Talmud would translate it obnoxiousness. So you could divorce your wife for anything that she did that was obnoxious in your eyes. That was the rabbinical tradition.

So if your wife was to burn your food, she was obnoxious, she's gone. If your wife embarrassed you in public, that was something that was indecent, obnoxious, you could divorce your wife. That's why they asked the question, did not Moses teach that you could divorce your wife for any cause? Because that's what they believed.

Because they believed that Moses had given them a command to divorce their wives based on some kind of indecency, some kind of nakedness, and that nakedness is not a physical nakedness, but a shamefulness, okay? Because that's another way the word is translated. So whether it's translated nakedness or indecency or obnoxiousness or uncleanness, right? But it's never translated adultery. That's very important to understand in the text.

And so they would say this. When a man takes a wife and marries her and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, then let him write her a bill of divorce. But that's not what it says.

The New America Standard got the translation correct. Why? What was the penalty for adultery? Death.

So if the penalty for adultery was death, that's why indecency is not adultery. Because if she committed adultery, she would have died. She'd have been stoned to death.

She'd be killed. So you have to realize that that's not what it meant. And therefore, you must understand that when they took what Moses was saying in Deuteronomy 24, they misappropriated the text and put the command at the beginning instead of the end.

Moses does give a command. Here's the command. You can't, once you let your wife go for any reason, whether some indecency, something that was obnoxious, something that you did not like, and you let her go and she goes and marries another man and that man dies, you can't take her back again.

That's the command. If that man decides to divorce her, you can't take her back again. That's the command.

He commands you cannot remarry the person you divorced for any cause at all. Because there's only one cause for divorce and that was immorality or adultery on behalf of the partner. And so what they did was they took it as a command that Moses had commanded them that he could divorce or they could divorce the wife for any cause at all.

If they found some kind of indecency in her, they could just let her go and that was it. And they were free to remarry. But that was not the case.

Because Jesus says, from the beginning, that was not so. That's not the way it is. You see, you must ask the question, if it's commanded, then why can't the first husband take her back once she's been divorced by the second husband? You see, if Moses commanded that you could divorce your wife for any cause, then why is it you could not take her back? The reason or the answer is you could not take her back because she was defiled.

It was an abomination to the Lord. And so the word for defile in the Hebrew is disqualifying. She was disqualified to be married.

So what they did was they disregarded God's divine plan and they distorted the Deuteronomy passage. That was their rabbinical tradition. That's how they could get away with having multiple wives and always divorcing their wives for any cause.

Because they wanted to live the life they wanted to live. And we do this all the time in modern day Christianity. We misinterpret, we reinterpret, we misdirect, we scripture twist everything that we think will give us the opportunity to live in our sin.

And that's exactly what was happening with these men. Earlier he says, you have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. And they were like, oh yeah, you can't commit adultery.

But not knowing that all of them were committing adultery because they were divorcing their wife for any cause. But Moses only permitted divorce because of the hardness of their hearts. And the only reason was for immorality.

So you go back to Matthew chapter 19 and what you have is the biblical teaching that Christ gives. He gives, number one, a confrontation. Number two, the repercussions. Number three, the exception. Number four, what was number four? You guys got it right. Yeah, the desertion. And number three or number five, the conversion.

So let me give it to you this way. First of all, the confrontation.

Know this, that the only way the Bible ever handles a problem is one way. The Bible doesn't give you multiple ways to handle a problem. Only gives you one way to handle a problem.

And that's to confront it head on. That's the only way to handle a problem biblically. Confront it head on.

No other way. And so what does Jesus do? He confronts them. He confronts them on what it is they believed and why it was wrong.

Because you see, he came to fulfill the law of the prophets. He didn't come to speak against what Moses already said. He's gonna reemphasize all that Moses taught.

But you see, they're trying to entrap him to get him to speak against Moses, but instead he's going to accurately interpret the law of Moses because they had so misinterpreted the law of Moses. Remember, they believed they were righteous. Christ would say earlier in verse 20 of Matthew 5, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven.

But you see, they believed they were righteous because they had developed a tradition that would allow them to disobey the law of God but keep their own laws. And they would say this was how you could be righteous because it was a righteousness that was all based on personal achievement, something that they could accomplish. And so how do you do that? You gotta lower the standard of the law so that you can accomplish it, so you can achieve it.

And that's exactly what they did. So Christ confronts it head on. And so he confronts their sinful mindset because it was against God's ideal.

So Christ speaks to them and tells them, listen, you guys are wrong. I'm gonna tell you exactly what it says. So Christ says, when they say in verse seven, they said to him, why then did Moses command to give her a certificate, a divorce, and send her away? The answer is he never did.

He never commanded it. What he commanded in Deuteronomy 24 was that you cannot take her back. He didn't command you to divorce her.

He commanded you not to take her back. That was the command. And so Christ says, because of the hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives but from the beginning, it has not been this way.

This is never what God intended. This was never what God wanted. We know that Malachi 2 tells us that God hates divorce.

That's God's own commentary on divorce. He hates it, right? But Moses permitted it because of the hardness of their hearts. And so you move from Christ's confrontation to the repercussions.

What's the repercussion? When you divorce for any cause at all, all you do is multiply adultery over and over and over again. That's exactly what he says in Matthew 19 when he says these words. He says, and I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for immorality and marries another woman commits adultery.

In other words, if you divorce for any reason outside of what the Bible says, you commit adultery. And the one you marry is committing adultery. So therefore, the repercussion is this, that when you don't follow God's standard, all it does is multiply immoral behavior over and over and over again.

So he's trying to get them back on track. He's trying to help them understand the high view of marriage. He wants them to understand the emphasis on purity and holiness in the lives of people.

He's trying to bring them back to the standard that God had already ordained from the very beginning to help them understand that they were way off base.

And so he goes from the confrontation to the repercussion to the exception, because there is an exception. And that is for porneia.

It's where we get our word pornography. It deals with any kind of sexual sin outside of the marriage union, whether it's homosexuality, lesbianism, any kind of sexual sin, incest, anything that's outside the realm of marriage. So if you divorce your wife, except for this cause, all you're gonna do is multiply adultery over and over and over again.

And Moses permitted it because of the hardness of their hearts. And what does that mean? It's that unrepentant attitude. It's that uncaring attitude. It's no concern for marital fidelity whatsoever.

And then that person gets in that mode of wanting to sleep with other people and violate the marriage vow, violate the marriage bond, violate the marriage oneness. Moses permitted it because it was everywhere because of your hard hearts.

Therefore, you need to understand that if you divorce your wife for any cause outside of that, it just multiplies adultery over and over and over again. So he gives an exception, which leads to one more, which is the desertion. And that's in 1 Corinthians chapter seven.

So if you got your Bible, turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 7. 1 Corinthians chapter 7. And the Bible says these words, 1 Corinthians 7, verse number 12.

But to the rest I say, not the Lord. Now stop right there. Someone's saying, well, what does that mean? Paul's saying something, but not the Lord's not saying it? No, he's saying, what I'm gonna tell you, the Lord did not comment on.

The Lord made no reference to. The Lord did not talk about. But through the inspiration of scripture, which it is inspired, God is speaking through the words of the apostle Paul.

And so it is inspired. So this is another way in which someone can divorce. He says, but to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her.

And the woman who has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, he must not send her husband away. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband. For otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.

Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave. The brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us to peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife? So in this case, in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is talking about desertion.

You have a believing and an unbelieving couple, okay? Someone is saved. Paul says, if the unbeliever wants to stay with you, stay with them. Why? Because the unbeliever is sanctified by you.

Now that means, it doesn't mean they are saved or they are holy, but they are under the umbrella of what God's grace and God's mercy does for you. They are the recipients and the benefits of that because you are saved, all right? So he is saying, look, if you are a believing husband and you have an unbelieving wife, don't leave her. If she wants to stay, let her stay.

Or if you are a believing wife and you have an unbelieving husband and he wants to stay with you, let them stay. Why? Because they are sanctified because of that. Like your children are sanctified because they're in your house.

God gives special graces and special blessings to his children and that they are under the umbrella of your sanctification and they get special blessings because of you. But then he says, if they want to leave, he gives a command, let them leave. Don't coerce them to stay.

Don't beg them to stay. Don't manipulate them to stay. If they wanna leave, the command is let them leave.

Let them go. Why? Because, because God allows the unbeliever to leave that relationship and divorce you and that's biblically okay. It's not the ideal.

Why? Because how do you know, oh wife or oh husband, that this other one might be saved because of your testimony, right? So he tells the believing husband or the believing wife to stay with the unbelieving husband or unbelieving wife because they might get saved. They might come to know Christ. So you can't divorce them.

You can't leave them. But if they wanna leave, let them leave. But you stay. Why? Because you don't wanna divorce them because you don't know how God will use you to influence them for the sake of the gospel.

Which leads to point number five, which is the conversion. If you were divorced and remarried before you were saved, okay, and then you get saved and you marry someone else, all that's taking care of the fact that you were a new creation.

So if you were divorced as an unbeliever and you get married or you become saved and you marry someone else, because you have new life in Christ, because you are a new creation, all things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.

God is a God of grace and forgiveness. And when God saves you and you become a child of the king, God does not expect you to go back to someone because you are a new creation, which I would add point six to this, and that is confession. It's always important to realize that when we confess our sins, God's faithful and just to forgive us our sins. We serve a God of grace.

We serve a God of mercy. And we need to be able to rest in his grace and mercy, recognizing that no matter what has happened in the past, and you can't change the past, please understand this, whatever has happened in your past cannot be changed. You can only change this moment going forward.

And so if you have done things that are in a violation of the word of God, you need to just confess your sins. You need to repent of your sins and God who is gracious and forgiving will forgive you of all your sins. That's what God does.

And so Christ is trying to get the people on this side of the mountain, there on the Mount of Beatitudes, to help them understand God's very serious about divorce and remarriage. God's very serious about marriage. And so we've spent the last couple of weeks looking at what God says about marriage and the value of that and why it's so important that you follow God's guidelines because Christ is gonna take you back to the beginning, take you back to the way it's supposed to be, take you back to the ideal.

And although that's the ideal, we live in the realm of the real. And in the realm of the real, there's all kinds of sin that takes place. And so he wants to set the record straight when it comes to divorce and remarriage, let them know, listen, Moses did not command you to divorce your wife for any cause.

You have misinterpreted Deuteronomy 24, 1 to 4. The command is you can't take the woman back that you divorced for any cause. Why? Because of the hardness of your heart, Moses permitted divorce because of fornication, because of adultery, because of immorality.

And so he wants them to understand the clear teaching of that so that they are not confused.

[The question-and-answer portion of the message is included in the recording but not in the transcript. That section has been edited for brevity and clarity.]

Let me pray with you before you leave, all right? Father, thank you for tonight. Lord, you are a good God. There are many questions about divorce and remarriage.

Some of them we can easily answer. Others are more difficult, especially when there's multiple divorces involved, and multiple children involved, and multiple family units involved. It becomes very convoluted.

And yet, Lord, you can work through all those things. You can sort out all those things. And I just pray for the men and women in the room this evening, that Lord, you bless them immensely.

Bless their marriages, bless their families, and pray that they would be committed and devoted to one another, and that they would really realize the importance of marriage and the marriage union, and what it stands for. Husbands will love their wives as Christ loved the church, and they would truly seek to honor their wives as the most precious possession that they have. All of us need to be reminded of that, Lord.

So we thank you for this night. Give us that as we go home, in Jesus' name, amen.