When Vows Break: The Hard Truth About Divorce and Remarriage

Hey, welcome to That's a Good Question, the podcast where we answer questions about the Christian faith in plain language. We are a podcast of Rezao Media, a place you can trust to find great resources for the Christian life and church leadership. You can always submit questions that we answer on this show to resoundmedia.cc. If you find this resource helpful, please rate and review the podcast so more people

can encounter the life-changing truth of God's Word. Also, if you know somebody who can benefit from today's topic or has questions like the ones that we're answering, please share this episode with them.

My name's Jon, I get to serve as a pastor,

I'm here also with Pastor Mitch. Yeah, and I'm really excited for this episode. It's a heavy one, but we're gonna jump into it. Jon, what is the biblical, or what does the Bible say about divorce and remarriage? Yeah, it is a very heavy topic.

I imagine people are asking this question and are maybe listening today because they, well, it could be in any one of a number of situations, right? Maybe they've already been through a divorce and are asking questions now about what does the Bible actually say about that, this thing that they've been through in the past. Unfortunately, maybe some are even considering divorce right now. Maybe it's somebody who's got parents who are divorced, a friend, a family member, something like that. Unfortunately, I think in our world

divorce is something that touches almost all of us, right? I think everybody's got somebody connected to them or themselves that have been touched by divorce. It's a painful, brutal thing, but we want to talk about what the Bible says about it. We want to talk about the gospel and how the good news of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection speaks to it. And so, yeah, we want to lay out the Bible does say some things about in what situations the Bible permits a divorce, how that relates to remarriage,

all those kind of things. So let me just say a couple of things to get us started here. First and foremost, God loves marriage. God hates divorce.

Yeah.

God designed for men and women to be united forever, exclusively, together, unbreakable covenant relationship, Genesis 224. The man and the woman become one flesh. That's when God institutes marriage at the very beginning of the Bible. So that's God's design, that they would come together forever in a covenant relationship, and the divorce is the breaking of that. So even though we are going to talk about some verses in the Bible where Scripture talks about permissible situations in which divorce can happen, it's never recommended, right? It's not what God wants to happen. The other thing I want to say right away is that divorce is not the unforgivable sin. So again, if you're listening to this and

wondering about maybe a divorce that you've already had and you're listening for, you know, was that biblically permissible? Was it not? If you find out that the divorce that you had was sin, it wasn't within the bounds of what God allows, what we want you to know is that the gospel of Jesus, faith in Jesus, repentance, coming to Jesus covers all sin. Divorce is not the unforgivable sin. So even if you find out that hard news today, I want you to know, and we're going to remind you again at the end of the episode, that the blood of Jesus covers all sin.

Yeah, let's jump into that first part. Where does the Bible talk about divorce? How does the Bible talk about divorce? When is it permissible? Yeah, let me just start by reading, yeah, probably one of the most key passages for this topic comes from Matthew 19, verses, let's see here, 1 and going on through 9.

So let me just read some of that. Now, when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, and large crowds followed him and he healed them there. And Pharisees came to him and tested him by asking,

is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? He answered, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female 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.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. They said to him, why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away? 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. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality and marries another, commits adultery. And then, get this, this is actually right after the passage

but verse 10, right after verse nine, the disciples said to him, if such is the case of a man with his wife, is it better not to marry?

What a verse.

That's crazy. Jesus just says some things about how much God does not want us to get divorced. And the disciples' conclusion is, well, then maybe we shouldn't get married at all.

Yeah. Like if you can't leave your wife,

yeah, might as well not do it at all. You know, I mean, unfortunately, that's a terrible way to think about it. Right. But at the same time, it kind of, I feel like the disciples kind of grasp the gravity of marriage, right? They're getting like, oh, you know, if this isn't something we can get out of, we should be pretty thoughtful when we're getting into it. It is also funny to think about that in the context of all of the disciples,

except for Peter, weren't married. Like all of them were just single guys. And so they hear this and they're like, I don't know if I want this actually.

If there's no escape hatch for me, I'm out.

Yeah.

Just it's a pretty wild moment. But it is like a normal conversation with a bunch of single guys who are, you know, you know, early twenties or teens, whatever.

Sure.

It's kind of a funny, I don't know. Yeah. That's my sanctified imagination of how the conversation went down.

I know, right? Yeah, totally. So if we kind of break this down and think about what Jesus is trying to say, okay, remember the Pharisees come to Jesus and they're asking the question,

is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? Okay, and Jesus is sort of saying like, no, you know, for any cause, nope, that's not it. God made marriage in the beginning. He designs for us to be married and to stay married. And then they're going to talk about another key passage, which is Deuteronomy chapter 24,

verses one through four. Okay. So that's the Old Testament passage. They're talking about really important passage in the Old Testament. You got to understand if you're going to talk about this topic. Let me just real quick, read those four verses. Moses writes in Deuteronomy, when a man takes a wife and marries her, if he finds, if 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. And if she goes and becomes another man's wife, 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, 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 has given you for an inheritance. All right, so lots going on there. Yeah, connect the dots for me. Yeah, totally, right. So, and this is why I'm reading these passages, just because I think we gotta understand

what's actually being said in scripture and what the context is before we jump to some conclusions. So, in the book of Deuteronomy, essentially what's going on is God, speaking through Moses, is laying down some laws, some rules to protect women. So, a woman in the ancient world,

she depended entirely upon her husband, right, to provide for her, to provide her a home, to provide her security, all those kind of things. And so, a woman could find herself in this really tough situation where if she's being very mistreated by her husband, and if he leaves her, if they get divorced,

then she's in this tough spot where, okay, now she has no one to provide for her. So there's a few different bad things that could happen. He could hold that over her head. He could say, if you get out of line, then I'm gonna divorce you, and then you're gonna be stuck,

and you won't be able to provide for yourself, and that'd be a terrible situation. Or you could see the situation where they do have a divorce. She gets remarried and then she essentially just gets in this tough spot where she's kind of getting almost like traded back and forth between between men because she has no legal

protection for herself. So this certificate of divorce as scripture names it, is created in order to give her some freedom in order to give her something to be able to say, yeah, I'm out of this marriage. I now have a certificate that says that I can remarry somebody else.

And then Moses, of course, gives the law that she can't, after remarrying to somebody else, go back to the former husband. So one of the things you hear pastors say is that, even if you've been divorced, you can reconcile. And that's absolutely true.

But not if you've already married somebody else and then been divorced again to that person, you don't go back to the first person. That's specifically what Deuteronomy 24 is talking about. And again, in order to protect the woman from this bad situation.

Yeah, absolutely.

So when we go to Matthew 19, and Jesus and the Pharisees are talking about this, we gotta understand, and this is what Jesus is pointing out, is that Moses is not giving a command, a recommendation, you all should do this. What he's saying is here's a terrible situation,

and we created this concession, this stipulation to try to protect women in the middle of a bad situation. Yeah. That's the short answer of what Jesus is doing in Matthew 19. So he goes on from there and then he goes at the very end is kind of the key part that I think a lot of people latch onto and have questions about, right?

Is in verse 9 he says, I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery. Okay, so we've got some principles, right? God designed man and woman to be together. Divorce is not something we want. In the Old Testament, there were some protections for women

that did permit divorce and at least protected the woman in the situation of divorce. Okay, and so now Jesus adds or further clarifies and explains, all right, he lays out at least one exception in which divorce can happen. He says, in the case of sexual immorality. The Greek word is porneia, which could be translated kind of,

you know, to talk about any sexual immoral sin as laid out in Levitical law in the Old Testament. Yeah. What would you say to people who say things like

there is no biblical justification for divorce?

Yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear their argument. What have you heard them argue based on this passage?

It's usually not based on that passage, but saying things like, you know, this is a covenant and that it's never meant to be broken, that this is something that God has instituted and that this is a forever kind of thing, that there's no justification for it.

Well, hearing that, I mean, I'd say they're mostly right. I mean, God did design it to be lifelong. It is supposed to be unbreakable. Divorce is not the recommended out thing. So they're right about that. But then I think you've got to look at a few passages like Matthew 19, 1 Corinthians 7, which we'll look at in a few minutes,

Deuteronomy 24 that we've already looked at. Look at some of these passages and say, okay, God did allow, it's not recommended, but God did allow for divorce in some terrible situations.

I think that's on one end. What about on the other end where there are some churches, some Christians who don't see this as a command that is relevant for today in the 21st century that this is kind of one of those passages we put away and that the verse really isn't that bad.

Right.

What would you say to that?

Yeah, well, they're missing what the Bible has to say to us. Right? Jesus calls us to a higher standard. I think about actually, so a parallel to what's going on in Matthew 19 here is in Mark chapter 10. I won't read it, but the context of Mark chapter 10

is actually Jesus talking about how difficult it is to be one of his disciples. He's talking about suffering, he's talking about servanthood and in the midst of suffering and servanthood, he talks about marriage. Yeah.

And it becomes kind of an example. And that's really, I mean, if you're listening to this and you're married, right, you're married to an imperfect person. You never tell them that, right, but it's true. And so you know that marriage is not the easiest thing in the world.

Right, it can be difficult, can be painful.

Yeah, if it's not difficult and painful for you,

that means that your spouse thinks that about you. That's right, if it's not difficult and painful for you, it probably is for somebody else. It definitely is for your spouse then. Or by God's grace, you've been growing and this has been getting a lot better, right?

I don't know any people like that. So, that's the thing. God calls his disciples to a higher standard. Yes, the world accepts no fault divorce. Divorce in any situation, for any reason, have at it. Jesus' followers, they don't.

We just don't do that. Yeah, it's something that we've talked about with our kids even, like, you know, this is God's good design for families, right? I remember talking to my son, my eight year old, and saying, imagine if I could just leave

whenever I wanted and just not come back. That would be an awful thing. And you know, how sad would you be if you never saw me again? But the truth is, I've made not just a promise, but a covenant with your mom, my wife, that I'm never going to leave,

that I'm always going to be here, not just for you guys, but for her too. There's a beautiful aspect of this idea of this covenant that you're never walking away from. Yeah, you know, looking at culturally if we fight, you know, we fight as, as people who are married, we disagree with our spouse. But the beautiful thing about marriage is that it's bigger than fights, it's bigger

than disagreements.

It's a covenant.

And that's, that's a beautiful thing to say, hey, I'm sticking through this, even when someone wrongs me, even when I feel like, you know, I'm not being treated well or whatever. I mean you can throw everything at that. But Jesus gives us two things. A couple things to say.

This is why, these are the only reasons that are allowable to leave. Right. So, you know, when we finish hearing what Jesus says in that passage, then I think we've got to ask the question, alright, so adultery. So adultery is, you know, what we'd say is a permissible situation in which divorce can happen again. The first recommendation is that you work through it, that there's reconciliation, that there's forgiveness, that there's repentance on the person. The person who committed adultery comes back repentant, that hopefully that can be worked

through, reconciliation can be had, all those beautiful things. You know, that's the number one desire, right? You think of, I mean, that's even how God handles his covenant with us.

Yeah. Right.

Hosea, the prophet, is a great example of that. But, you know, we sin against God and we come back in repentance and we receive his forgiveness and grace, which is amazing. Yeah. Can I ask, why is adultery on this list of permissible reasons for divorce? Yeah, I remember asking that earlier in my life. But I feel like that's probably a question some listeners have right now.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, I think the reason is because adultery kind of gets to the heart of breaking the covenant. You know, I mean, sex is, you know, we call it consummation, right? It's consummating the marriage covenant. It's like essential and central

to what it means to be married. Yeah. Right, it's an expression of that, to becoming one flesh. Yeah, in Jewish culture, it wasn't official until they had sex.

Right, so I think that's the reason is that adultery is just like it tears at the very heart of the covenant. Yeah. So then that raises the question, Jesus gives that exception. Is that the only exception? You know, what does this now mean? Yeah. And so that's where we have to then look at the rest of Scripture and see what it says. And so actually another, what I would say is another exception comes in 1 Corinthians chapter 7.

So the Apostle Paul writing in a letter. So this is 1 Corinthians 7, 12 to 16. I'll read it real quick.

We'll talk about it.

All right.

So Paul says, to the rest I say, 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 she consents, or 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 will be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 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?

All right, so Paul's writing a letter to the Corinthian church, and he teases out the situation where you've got a husband or a wife, you know, one member of the couple becomes a Christian, gets saved, becomes a follower of Jesus, but the other one hasn't. And so now what do you do? Because that's a huge difference in your marriage, right? I mean, if one of you is trying to follow Jesus and the other one's not, that's a massive difference. So what do you do? And what Paul says is, if you're the Christian, if you're the believer, you should stay married.

This is still a covenant. You should stay married. Hopefully the unbelieving spouse is in it too. But he says, if the unbelieving spouse leaves, abandons you, even though you're striving to have a healthy marriage, if they can't do it and they walk away, he says, quote, you're not enslaved.

Okay.

Or we would, I mean, what we take that to mean is that then you're not bound any longer to that covenant. You don't have to consider yourself married if that person has, you know, essentially divorced you, has abandoned you and walked away. Yeah.

So we look at that, that term as abandonment. How do you define that? What does that mean? Yeah, you know if I go away on a weekend trip with you know my brother right is that abandonment or right?

No, no, and that's the thing is you know scripture doesn't give us some super clear exact Parameters on it, so I think just to be clear with in trips with the boys. That's good, right? You should ask your wife before that you could really take her off. That's true. Yeah, it could end up badly for you.

Yeah.

It's not abandonment.

Right, right. Now, I don't think we have any exact parameters on it, but I mean, using wisdom and discernment and thinking also about Matthew 19, right? It's, you know, if adultery was the situation, a radical, total, breaking, forsaking of the

covenant.

Yeah. You know, I think this would have to be that.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah, so which is another extreme situation, right? So I think, you know, they've, you know,

especially in the case of a husband to a wife,

you know, he's no longer providing, protecting, all those things that he's called to do as a husband. Yeah. Yeah, if those things have been given up, then yeah, we would say that you've been abandoned by an unbelieving spouse.

Okay. What if it is someone who professes to be a Christian? Does that change anything? Yeah. Yeah, I think it does. Well, I think then you got to ask the question is, is this person a Christian?

Right. If you're willing to just walk away from your marriage and abandon your spouse, then I think that's the question of even though you say you're a Christian, are you really? Because you're not living like Ephesians 5 describes marriage. So we have a couple like this, two people claiming to be Christians, one person separates. You know, you've said that the person who leaves, we would consider a non-Christian, an unbeliever. How do we get to that conclusion?

I mean, really, what would the church do in that situation? Yeah, yeah, I mean, we wouldn't come to that conclusion lightly, right? Like you said, this is an extreme situation, you know, however exactly, you spell that out, but this is an extreme situation

that we find ourselves in, right? And yeah, I mean, like for me, if I were to just walk away from my family, praise the Lord, I have some brothers in my life that I think would track me down, whether they had to get on a plane

or whatever they had to do, they would come and find me and punch me in the face. Pull up with a white van and put a hood over your head. And duct tape and drag me back. Yeah, and remind me of what Jesus has called me to do and who he's called me to be.

So yeah, I mean, this is, yeah, if you're in the church, if you got brothers and sisters in the Lord, then they're gonna come after you and not let this happen, God-willingly, hopefully. But yeah, you could end up in a situation

where despite those calls to return, you're what we would call unrepentant, right? You refuse to repent of your sin and come back. Yeah. I think even like the role of the church, a good healthy church should walk alongside, should call a husband or wife, whoever has left, back to their spouse to say,

you know, you're being unfaithful here, you're walking away from your covenant, come back, and if they refuse to, I think that's where we see even the role of church discipline come in, right? They're, like what you said, being unrepentant and yeah, yeah. What about in cases of abuse? I know that a lot of churches have that clause in when they talk about divorce being permissible.

How does abuse fit into this category as being permissible? We don't see that expressively written in scripture.

So how do we get to that conclusion?

Right. I would say we get to it in, I mean, one of two ways. We can look at it either coming from, yeah, I think anything you're going to say that's besides adultery or abandonment by an unbelieving spouse, you basically got to, it's got to kind of fit into one of those categories. I think those are the categories that Scripture gives us. So I would say, you know, that Jesus and Paul have not given us a blank check to say that there's all kinds of exceptions now. You can get divorced.

I think it's got to fit into one of those categories. So I think what you could say is that abuse is tantamount to abandoning your spouse and acting like an unbeliever. Yeah. You know, you could say that, yeah, you've totally failed the marriage covenant. You've broken the marriage covenant by doing that.

Yeah. You know, by abusing your spouse, you have essentially abandoned them and become as an unbeliever. Yeah. Because of just what a radical, awful thing that is. Yeah. I've heard some pastors even talk about it like you've become an outsider in the marriage.

You're acting as if you no longer belong in this marriage. You're acting like a stranger who's an enemy coming off the street who would come in and abuse people.

I think that's an interesting thing.

come in and abuse people. I think that's an interesting way to think. I mean, for a follower of Jesus, it should be unthinkable to abuse your spouse. Yeah, even Ephesians talks about that, like no one hated their own flesh, right?

That he nourished his spouse. I think that's a huge part of it too, but yeah. You talked about blank checks earlier. Is this stipulation for adultery a blank check And so they commit adultery in order to get out of the marriage,

so they can get remarried.

Great question. Well, so I think that brings us around. Is that the loophole? No, no. Nice try though. That's inventive. I've heard people say that before. Totally. I know. Yeah, I have as well. So let's think. So let me maybe like circle up these, these three categories. You know,

so we've talked about is actually, they all happen to start with A, so adultery, abandonment, and abuse. So traditionally, that's what I would say are the three exceptions that the Bible permits, allows, again, not recommended, but permits. It's the AAA you don't want to pay a monthly subscription to.

That's right, that's for sure. So again, the recommendation from Scripture is always to reconcile. Hopefully there's repentance on the behalf of the spouse who's living in sin. They repent, they come back, you guys can reconcile, forgiveness happens, work it out. Hopefully you get some help from your

church, your brothers and sisters, all those kind of things. So to go to your example and to talk about, I think that brings us around to then, when is it permissible to get remarried after divorce? So then now I think you got to talk about, is the divorce permissible or not permissible? And then which side of it are you on? Are you the person who violated the marriage covenant and led to the divorce or are you

not? And of course it always takes two people. It's not just one. So it does get messy and complicated. But to give you the short answer, no, you can't go and commit adultery. So then you have a quote unquote biblically permissible divorce.

Yeah. It doesn't work that way. I mean, to be fair, your spouse, yes, they have biblical permission to divorce you, but no. Yeah. So what would you say to people who maybe are hearing this and feeling like, wow, that's really unloving or this, you know, this is the church, you know, preaching forgiveness, but not actually living it out?

What would you say to that?

Great question. Yeah. So like I said, the beginning divorce is not the unforgivable sin. So yeah, you can absolutely find forgiveness with Jesus. It's up to your spouse, but hopefully you can find some forgiveness from your spouse. But that doesn't mean that there aren't also

consequences for your actions. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think in all of society this is true too. Just because you do something doesn't mean that you can't be forgiven, right? The Bible says that all sins and all utterances out of the mouth of man is forgivable except for the unforgivable sin,

blaspheming the Holy Spirit. We won't get into that. We've got another episode on this. So everything can be forgiven, yet that doesn't mean that there aren't consequences for that, right? That there aren't things that then you're disqualified from, right? If you've committed some sort of sexually heinous act, broken a law, you've sinned sexually against a minor or against somebody else, there are rules on things

that you cannot then participate in. There are jobs that you cannot have, and we don't see that as unloving. We think that those are our good things. And so, right, I think in the same way, it's not a question of forgiveness at that point. It's a question of just of wisdom and of just, yeah, there are some consequences when you do things in life. Yeah. Same for like, you know, we've talked about this, I know, as pastors, but

pastors who commit these types of sins, pastors who committed altery or have a moral failure. We've said, you know, there's forgiveness for that, but that doesn't mean that you get to hop back up in the pulpit, right? There are things that you're disqualified from, and that's an okay thing.

And I think that's also something that we need to think about when we're being tempted by these things, that there are serious, serious consequences here. This isn't something that we can just brush aside and that we'll go back to life as normal. There's something really significant on the line for us to break these types of things.

Right.

Yep.

So to talk about it practically, so if you are the party in the relationship that committed adultery that then led to divorce. that spouse or former spouse as long as is possible, which essentially means until they pass away or they become married to somebody else. So you don't get to go and marry somebody else. You should continue to pursue them,

again, until either they pass away or until they marry somebody else. And then if they've married somebody else, then now your opportunity has ended to reconcile the marriage, to restore the marriage. And so then you're at a point where then you should think

and talk and pray with a pastor and think about what does that mean? Where are we at? Yeah, I think this is a big thing. Like this is a significant thing. And this is something that we talk about

when we do premarital counseling, the idea of covenant, right, the original idea of covenant comes to us spelled out when God makes a covenant with Abraham and he splits the animals and he walks through them, kind of signifying if one of us breaks this covenant, this is what's going to happen to us. And I think that there's something beautiful in that. I've actually, I know some people who, they signed a prenup before they got married.

And it was this, I don't recommend prenups, but I think this was a neat idea. This is the only prenup that I would ever be like, okay. Before they had kids, before they had any sort of wealth, before they had anything, they signed a prenup that says, if I cheat, if I abandon you, you get everything.

All the rights to the kids, the house, the bank accounts, the cars, everything. And the idea was, and they said, in talking with them, they said, the idea is I want a legal document saying that if I break this covenant, my life is torn to shreds. Sure.

Again, I don't think prenups are a great idea, but I think that there's something neat about that. And that's how we should enter into marriage. That's how we should think about marriages that we're in, that if I leave this thing, my life should be torn to shreds.

If I abandon my wife, if I cheat on her, I hope my best friends come and beat me up. I hope that they teach me a lesson. This is one of the worst things that you can do to another person, a person that you've promised that you're gonna love them until you die.

It's a really significant thing. So we've talked about adultery. Does this apply to the other two areas that we've talked about before, both with abuse and abandonment? Yeah, that's the general principle I think carries across all three. But if you are the party that has been offended against, then essentially it's on you to be able to pray and think with the Lord. You can offer forgiveness and reconciliation or yeah, you are not enslaved

as 1 Corinthians 7 says and can move on and become remarried.

Yeah.

Last thing, last question. Is this a command or is this an allowance? Is this something that if your spouse has done this, you have to do or is this something that then you are allowed to do? No, it's an allowance, it's an exception,

it's a concession, it's not a recommendation, not a command to get divorced in these situations. And again, one of the things I always want to say when we talk about this topic too, is that we talk about how much divorce is not prescribed in the Bible,

and also we never want to encourage anybody who's in an abusive relationship to stay in that relationship. We want you to get help, get out. Seek authorities, yeah. I think this is a topic that we're going to have to revisit

because there's so much that we could talk about in this episode. And I think it's good for us to save some of that and talk about it later. But I think that's a great place for us to leave off. Yeah, yeah, great questions, heavy questions.

Feel free to ask more questions along those lines. I'd be happy to dive into it further in a future episode. Everybody, thanks for listening.

We hope you have an awesome week.

Do us a favor and like, subscribe, follow, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. Have an awesome week, everybody.

♪♪ ♪♪ Bye!