Sermon Tone Analysis

What God Has Joined Together, Let Not Man Separate, Part 2

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By John Piper July 1, 2007

 

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*Matthew 19:3-12*

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two but one flesh.

What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

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.

I said last time that there are two ways to be compassionate and caring in relation to divorce—not at all meaning that you choose between them, but that we must pursue both.

One is to come along side divorced persons while they grieve and (wherever necessary) repent, and to stay by them through the painful transitions, and to fold them into our lives, and to help them find a way to enjoy the forgiveness and the strength for new kinds of obedience that Christ has already obtained for them when he died and rose again.

That’s one way to love.

And I pray we will all pursue it.

The other way to respond with care and compassion is to articulate a hatred for divorce, and why it is against the will of God, and to do all we can biblically to keep it from happening.

Keeping an Eternal Perspective

One of the reasons in the past few weeks that I preached twice on the dignity and worth and Christ-exalting potential of singleness is because I know that divorce throws thousands of people into that situation, many of them against their will.

If we are going to stand for marriage as /the life-long commitment to one living spouse/, then we must be prepared to love single, divorced people with all our hearts and homes and families.

And we must keep a clear, biblical, eternal perspective, and remind ourselves repeatedly that compared to eternal life with God, this earthly life—single or married, divorced or not—is very short.

James says, “You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14).

If a person is going to remain single to honor his or her marriage vows, that perspective will be crucial.

God Makes and God Breaks

Last week I took the stand that if the most ultimate meaning of marriage is to represent the unbreakable covenant-love between Christ and his church (Ephesians 5:22-33), then no human being has a right to break a marriage covenant.

When the impossible day comes that Christ breaks his vow, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20), then, on that day, a human being may break his marriage covenant.

This explains why Jesus does not settle for the divorce provision of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 (Mark 10:3-9), but says, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mark 10:9).

In other words, since God is the one who decisively /makes /every marriage, only God has the right to /break/ a marriage.

And he does it by death.

Which is why the traditional and biblical marriage vows have one and only one limitation: “till death do us part,” or, “as long as we both shall live.”

Four Crucial Questions

As you know, when a person takes such a stand on the inviolability and sacredness of marriage, and the illegitimacy of divorce and remarriage while the spouses are alive, there are many questions, both biblical and practical, that have to be answered.

So what I want to do in this message is to try to answer some of the more pressing ones.

*1.

First, does death end a marriage in such a way that it is legitimate for a spouse to remarry?*

The answer is yes, and no one has seriously questioned it.

One key text is Romans 7:1-3:

Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives?

For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage.

Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive.

But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.

(See below on 1 Corinthians 7:39)

In other words, Paul says that to divorce and remarry while your spouse is living is adulterous, but to remarry after the death of a spouse is not.

I think the reason for this is that Jesus made plain that in the resurrection there is no marriage (Matthew 22:30).

So if a person said it was wrong to remarry after the death of a spouse, it would seem to imply that marriage is meant to be valid beyond death and in the resurrection.

But it’s not.

Death is the decisive and eternal end of marriage.

The spouse who has died has moved out of the earthly sphere where marriage happens, and is no longer married.

And therefore the spouse on earth is no longer married.

Therefore remarriage after the death of a spouse is not only legitimate, but speaks a clear biblical truth—after death there is no marriage.

*2.

Second, if a divorced person has already married again, should he or she leave the later marriage?*

The reason this question comes with such force is that Jesus speaks of the second marriage as committing adultery.

Luke 16:18, “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.”

My answer is that remarriage, while a divorced spouse is still living, is an act of unfaithfulness to the marriage covenant.

In that sense, to remarry is adultery.

We promised, “till death do us part” because that is what God says marriage is, and even if our spouse breaks his or her covenant vows, we will not break ours.

But I do not think that a person who remarries against God’s will, and thus commits adultery in this way, should later break the second marriage.

The marriage should not have been done, but now that it is done, it should not be undone by man.

It is a real marriage.

Real vows have been made and sexual union has happened.

And that real covenant of marriage may be purified by the blood of Jesus and set apart for God.

In other words, I don’t think that a couple who repents and seeks God’s forgiveness, and receives his cleansing, should think of their lives as ongoing adultery, even though, in the eyes of Jesus, that’s how the relationship started.

There are several reasons for why I believe this:

1) First, back in Deuteronomy 24:1-4, where the permission for divorce was given in the law of Moses, it speaks of the divorced woman being “defiled” in the second marriage so that it would be an abomination for her to return to her first husband, even if her second husband died.

This language of defilement is similar to Jesus’ language of adultery.

And yet the second marriage stood.

It was defiling in some sense, yet it was valid.

2) Another reason I think remarried couples should stay together is that when Jesus met the woman of Samaria, he said to her, “You have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband” (John 4:18).

When Jesus says, “The one you have now is not your husband,” he seems to imply that the other five /were/.

Not that it’s right to divorce and marry five times.

But the way Jesus speaks of it, it sounds as though he saw them as real marriages.

Illicit.

Adulterous to enter into, but real.

Valid.

3) And the third reason I think remarried couples should stay together is that even vows that should not be made, once they are made, should generally be kept.

I don’t want to make that absolute, but there are passages in the Bible that speak of vows being made that should /not/ have been made, but were right to keep (like Joshua’s vow to the Gibeonites in Joshua 9).

God puts a very high value on keeping our word, even where it gets us in trouble (“[The godly man] swears /to his own hurt/ and does not change,” Psalm 15:4).

In other words, it would have been more in keeping with God’s revealed will not to remarry, but adding the sin of another covenant breaking does not please God more.1

There are marriages in this church that are second marriages for one or both partners which, in my view should not have happened, and are today godly marriages—marriages which are clean and holy, and in which forgiven, justified husbands and wives please God by the way they relate to each other.

As forgiven, cleansed, Spirit-led followers of Jesus, they are not committing adultery in their marriage.

It began as it should not have, and has become holy.

*3.

Third, if an unbelieving spouse insists on leaving a believing spouse, what should the believing spouse do?*

Paul’s answer in 1 Corinthians 7:12-16 goes like this:

To the rest I say (I, not the Lord [/which I think means, I don’t have a specific command from the historical teachings of Jesus, but I am led by his Spirit/]) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her.

If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.

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.

[/Which I take to mean that marriage is such a holy union in God’s eyes that a believer, a child of God, is not defiled by having sexual relations with an enemy of the cross; and the children are not born with any kind of special contamination because the father or mother is an enemy of Christ.

They’re not saved by being married to a believer or born to a believer, but they are set apart for proper and holy use in the marriage/.]2

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.

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 the answer of this passage is that if divorce is forced on a believer by an unbeliever, the believer should not make war on the unbeliever to make the unbeliever stay.

The reason Paul gives for this is in verse 15b, “God has called you to peace.”

I do not believe this text teaches that we are free to remarry when this happens.

Some take the words, “In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved,” to mean: “is free to remarry.”

There are several reasons why I don’t think it means that:

1) When Paul says in verse 15, “In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved (or bound),” I think he means, “not enslaved to stay married when the unbeliever over time insists on leaving and sues for divorce.”