Divorce
Notes
Transcript
Divorce
Divorce
Difficult verses we are going to discuss tonight. Difficult from the application standpoint of them and difficult from the cut and dry truth that we see.
I realize all too well that divorce is a topic that is much debated in Christian circles. It is a topic that I would honestly like to just skip over and pretend like it wasn’t here in this sermon on the mount. But it is, and we can’t skip it.
I realized this week at work that just because something is hard, doesn’t mean that you avoid it. It doesn’t mean that it will make it any easier, but it does mean that God has ordained that sometimes we walk a difficult path that requires us to rely on God’s grace and strength more than we would otherwise.
Something else that you learn when you read the Bible is that the same things that are controversial now, were controversial then also. Sometimes we begin to think that we have “new” problems. They aren’t new. We just forget to look back into history and realize that we are repeating the same problems over and over in each new generation.
Also - it’s important to note that the Bible isn’t a buffet line that we can pick and choose from. The Bible is either the complete, authoritative, infallible, sufficient Word of God or it isn’t. There is no middle ground. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say - “I want all the comfort, and reassurance, and feel-good passages, but I’ll pass on the confrontive and difficult passages like this one.”
We have to take the Word of God for what it is and we have to take it in it’s entirety. Even when we don’t like what it says. So if you are going to argue with this tonight, then argue with God and not me, OK LOL??
31 “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Why divorce immediately following our discussion last week on adultery?
Well it is pretty obvious if you see the connection, because a large part of divorces are due to adultery or the discussion of divorce by a married couple is brought on by adultery.
v.31) Where did Jesus pull this from?
1 “When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then 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 of his house, and she departs out of his house, 2 and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, 3 and the latter man hates 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 man dies, who took her to be his wife, 4 then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.
What is the context for this? Why was Jesus making a big deal out of this?
Well - as usual the Pharisee’s were taking every loophole that they could see and exploiting it for their own benefit.
The Pharisee’s were using this “certificate of divorce” in Deuteronomy 24 as a license to divorce anyone for any reason.
There were two prominent Pharisee’s who had two differing interpretations of these verses in Deuteronomy and they were these:
Pharisee Hillel: permitted a man to put away his wife for “any good cause” which included but not limited to burning his dinner, looking at him wrong, not ironing his robe correctly, using a harsh tone of voice with him, etc etc.
Pharisee Shammai: permitted a man to divorce his wife based on adultery as the only legitimate grounds.
So they had these two camps of people who followed very different rules for divorce and there were people getting divorced all the time for all kinds of reasons. Sound familiar to today?
This week I was driving on the interstate and on one of the digital billboards, I saw an advertisement for a Dr. Phil episode that read “My wife tricked me into a divorce”. I didn’t watch the episode, and I’m sure you can imagine the craziness behind all of it.
But the world is full of this kind of thing. And I’ve heard all kinds of crazy statistics when it comes to divorce and Christians vs Non-Christians and divorce.
I pulled an article from Focus on the family and here are some highlights:
So, it would seem that a “religious appearance” without the actual practice makes for a worse divorce rate than those who are actually devoted to the faith. Again, does that sound familiar to what we see in the Pharisee’s?? They wanted the “appearance of being righteous” without having to change their heart. And that’s the same thing we see today.
Don’t make the exception the rule!
3 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.”
The main issue I want to discuss in these verses revolves around verse 8.
The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Volume 8: Matthew, Mark, Luke 1. Marriage and Divorce (19:3–12)
Therefore any view of divorce and remarriage (taught in either Testament) that sees the problem only in terms of what may or may not be done has already overlooked a basic fact—divorce is never to be thought of as a God-ordained, morally neutral option but as evidence of sin, of hardness of heart. The fundamental attitude of the Pharisees to the question was wrong.
Moses gave the option of divorce in the OT as a protection to the divorce victims (still happens today) and to slow down the process a little bit.
The people of this time were so rebellious and flippant in their attitude toward marriage and divorce that they were changing wives for any and every reason.
But we see that that wasn’t God’s initial intention for marriage in the last half of verse 8.
Matthew, vols. 1-4 (The MacArthur New Testament Commentary) The Affirmation
Hardness of heart suggests the condition where adultery was prolonged and the sinning spouse was unrepentant, making reconciliation and a normal marriage relationship impossible. When an adulterous husband or wife became totally insensitive to marital fidelity, God through Moses indirectly and reluctantly permitted … divorce.
Reminding His adversaries again of the Genesis teaching about God’s plan for marriage, Jesus then declared that from the beginning it has not been this way. Divorce was never in God’s original, ideal design for mankind and will never be.
God’s ideal plan for marriage has always been and always will be - one man and one woman for life. Nothing short of that.
Just because man has messed up God’s ideal with sin, doesn’t mean that the ideal plan doesn’t still exist.
Our society treats marriage like a “ball and chain”. Like something that is a hindrance and a barrier to having fun and enjoying yourself.
But the exact opposite is true. Only in a loving marriage can we see a small picture of how Christ loves the church. Only in a marriage can we get the fulfillment that God desires for us in a physical union created by God.
Marriage is to be held in the highest honor, not decimated with a simple piece of paper and a cheap attorney for any reason.