What Jesus said about marriage is that it is a lifelong covenant that no one should break. Some people will shatter the bond through abandonment and/or adultery, to their shame, but no one is given the grounds by which they can take the initiative to break it because they want it broken. Those that are the victims of a marriage broken by abandonment and/or adultery have some leeway to remarry, those who remarry apart from those exceptions commit adultery.
If a supposed Christian has abandoned a spouse, that one should be rebuked and commanded to return to the care his or her spouse. If that one will not return, he or she has proven not only his or her infidelity to a spouse, but to God. Their unwillingness to provide (what marriage is supposed to provide) for their spouse before God makes them worse than an infidel. According to the Word, the Christian abandoned by an infidel, or unbeliever, is free of the bond and can marry again as long as they do so with a believer.
If a supposed Christian has abandoned a spouse, that one should be rebuked and commanded to return to the care his or her spouse. If that one will not return, he or she has proven not only his or her infidelity to a spouse, but to God. Their unwillingness to provide (what marriage is supposed to provide) for their spouse before God makes them worse than an infidel. According to the Word, the Christian abandoned by an infidel, or unbeliever, is free of the bond and can marry again as long as they do so with a believer.
If a supposed Christian has entered into a sexual relationship with someone in addition to his or her spouse, that one should be rebuked and commanded to cease the adultery. If he or she will not, that one should be excommunicated. The faithful spouse would have the ability to remarry and not be considered an adulterer, nor the cause of adultery. The wronged party, in effect, is given an exception to the adultery clause for remarriage rather than a positive ground for divorce.
The effect of these allowances is an exception to the Lord's adultery clause rather than a ground given to initiate divorce.
If a Christian marriage is broken out of acrimony, or because of irreconcilable differences, or loss of interest, or anything other than abandonment and/or adultery, the parties do not have the right to remarry. To do so would be adultery. We are grown ups with God dwelling inside of us. If we're actually saved we should be able to find the means of getting along with someone else we're going to spend eternity with. Laying down our lives one for another is the stuff of the kingdom, it's certainly the stuff of marriage as well.
I live and am licensed to drive in Pennsylvania. Our traffic laws do not assign anyone the right of way on our roads. Instead, our laws are framed as to whom must yield right of way in any circumstance. So in a mishap, no one can claim they had the right of way; one can only be assigned blame for failure to yield such. I see the Bible approaching divorce in a similar fashion: it doesn't give anyone the right to divorce a spouse, it gives an exception to the adultery clause for remarriage for those for whom there was a failure by a spouse to yield to the marriage bond.
So, although there are grounds for remarriage, there really are no grounds for divorce.
8 comments:
i am divorced and remaired.
neither husband a believer in Christ as the Son of God.
my hope is in God's mercy through Jesus.
i do not know much about what the right thing to do in my case is.
but, it is not easy to have these different beliefs.
so i advise anyone with plans of marriage to have enough courage to talk plainly about faith and to take it as a serious matter.
Nanc,
I'll be talking more about this, of course, but the Apostle Paul said (1 Corinth 7:12-14) that if one is already married to an unbeliever, that one should stay married to the unbeliever as long as the unbeliever is willing to stay married and live with the believer believing.
Your advise is solid, and I would take it a step further and say that those contemplating marriage should be on the same page spiritually. Transparency is not enough, what is needed is agreement.
The best thing to remember about the water under the bridge we cannot go back and change is that God is kind and merciful, and capable of doing amazing things with the messes we bring him.
Although I may disagree a bit on your stance regarding remarriage (and I fully agree that you have ample Scriptural support for your view), I definately agree with the main point! Ironically, I believe there is more 'grounds' for divorce under law than under grace, and we have already decided we would never recommend divorce (except where it may be necessary for legal protection,though we would seperation in certain situations) because in our understanding of grace we now know that what is impossible for man is not impossible for God! He can do amazing miracles in the most horrible of situations. But neither would be condemn anyone for making a decision we don't agree with...
So what is Jesus saying when He says "I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness..."
Is He still not saying anything about divorce? I would've thought that the paraphrasing of that comment would be "divorce only because of marital unfaithfulness".
Hello Truth, welcome to the Sound.
He is speaking about divorce, but his intent is not to give grounds for it but to deal with its sinful (adulterous) consequences. Only in the passage in Matthew 19 does Jesus speak of remarriage in terms of an adultery exclusion if the divorce was due to adultery in the first place. In the other gospel passages, the principle of remarriage being adultery is not given an exclusion at all! There he merely says, that one cannot make an adulterer an adulterer by divorcing her (i.e. if she already is one, forcing her into a remarriage won't be what makes her so). We like to think, I think, that if our mate commits adultery, that's it, we have an excuse to divorce him or her. I don't think that is quite so simple.
Jul,
I'm actually not unsympathetic to your view. In the case of physical abuse, there are several commands from scripture that can be invoked as a rebuke to the injuring party. If that one will repent, separation will likely be part of the restoration process for the safety and protection of the victim(s). The ultimate aim in that process would be restoring a family to togetherness in care and safety. If that one will not repent and work through process, in effect, forcing the injured spouse to flee for safety, the abuser has become worse than an infidel and the situation may best be viewed through the lens of abandonment.
God wants us to live in peace. If the church was told to flee to another town in the face of persecution, I think we can reasonably extrapolate that God does not sentence us to remain in harmful and threatening situations.
Hiya SLW,
Thanks for the welcome and thanks for your comment=)
When you say "There he merely says, that one cannot make an adulterer an adulterer by divorcing her", it is contrary to what Jesus says in Matthew 5:32 by stating that "But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress". So, please explain your statement, because to a lay-person like myself, it seems clear that Jesus says the husband causes his wife to become an adulteress when he divorces her other than for marital unfaithfulness.
Please understand that I'm not looking for a reason to leave my wife - she is my Queen from the Lord and I love her so=) It's just that I couldn't help but put up my initial post because of what I see in the word.
God bless you and you're doing a great job sir=)
Truth,
You have it right, we're just addressing slightly different points in the full picture. :-)
What I was addressing with my response to you was the exclusion Jesus gave to divorce itself causing adultery (the divorced spouse is forced into adultery when her or she remarries). If one has cheated on his or her spouse thereby causing the divorce, then the cheating spouse is an adulterer already in his or her own right. The divorce which follows has nothing to do with making them such. So, Jesus said when someone divorces their spouse they force them into adultery, unless they already are an adulterer.
So between Matthew 19 (which says the divorcer becomes an adulterer when he remarries, unless the divorce was caused by the spouse's adultery) and the passages in Matthew 5, Luke 16 and Mark 10 (which say that the divorced party is forced to become an adulterer when she remarries, unless she is already an adulterer) Jesus never says you can get a divorce if...
What he says instead is that one can remarry after a divorce without becoming an adulterer, or without forcing the former spouse into adultery, only if the former spouse's adultery caused the divorce.
I hope that's clearer.
Post a Comment