Trinity Baptist Church

 

Matthew chapter 5 verses 31 and 32.

 

As I began to consider how to approach these two verses, I realized that it is probably not enough to just talk about the two verses. Divorce is an extremely important subject, and gets quite a lot of space in the Bible. And I really desire to cover all that the Bible has to say about this so that we can get a full grasp of what our Lord is saying.

 

As you know, divorce is now rampant in our society. 

 

The divorce rate has risen 700% in this century, and it continues to rise. There is now one divorce for every 1.8 marriages. Over 1 million children a year are involved in divorce cases, and 13 million children under 18 now have one or both parents missing."

 

Thirty years ago an author named Dr. Armond Nicoli II, who is a psychiatrist, a Medical Doctor on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, wrote about the attacks on modern marriage. He wrote:

 

"Certain trends prevalent today will incapacitate the family, destroy its integrity and cause its members to suffer such crippling emotional conflicts that they will become an intolerable burden to society.

 

He then identified

 

1.      Married women with children working outside the home. Nicoli says, and I quote, "My clinical experience indicates clearly that no women with young children can do both at the same time, without sacrificing either the quality of work or the quality of child care."

 

2.      the tendency for families to move frequently.

 

3.      the invasion of television into the home

 

4.      The lack of controls (moral standards) in our society.

 

5.      a lack of communication in the home

 

6.      divorce

 

Doctor Nicoli goes on to conclude this, what about the future, what can we expect if these trends continue? And here's his answer, "First, the quality of family life will continue to deteriorate, producing a society with a higher incidence of mental illness than ever before. 95% of our hospital beds will be taken up by mentally ill people.

 

This illness will be characterized primarily by a lack of self‑control. We can expect the assassination of people in authority to be frequent occurrences. Crimes of violence will increase, even those within the family, the suicide rate will rise. As sexuality becomes more unlimited more separated from family and emotionally commitment the deadening effect will cause more bizarre experimenting and widespread perversion." 

 

Well, here we are thirty years later, and we are there. 

And divorce is the major contributor. Now what can we do about this? What is the answer? How do we get a handle on all of this disaster that faces us?

 

Well most importantly, and you know I would say this, we must return to the principles of the Word of God. What does God say? People are defending divorce on all kinds of grounds. People are trying to defend the working mother with children in the home on all kinds of grounds. People are defending television, people are defending the mobility of our society, people want to live the way they want to live, so they do anything they can to justify that manner.

 

But only when we go back to the Bible and discover and follow how the family is to be ordered as God lays it out, will the problems be solved.

 

Now it's fine to be concerned about divorce because of its societal effects, and that's what Nicoli is saying, he's saying we've got to do something about divorce, because look what it does.

 

Now as important as that is it isn't the most important reason. And I'm not here to tell you we need to do something about divorce because it messes up the next generation. It does do that. But I'm here to tell you we have to do something about divorce because it violates God's Word. That's why it messes us the next generation.

 

The bottom line on this is not how it affects society; the bottom line is morality. We don't say it's wrong because it does this, it's wrong because God says it's wrong. 

 

Churches today are providing little or no or even wrong guidelines for marriage and divorce. There are many churches and pastors who will marry anybody, anybody who comes along.

 

There are plenty of churches and plenty of pastors who'll marry anybody to anybody under any circumstances. They are many young people who marry the wrong people for the fulfillment of fleshly desire with little or no thought about its real consequence.

 

So it is not a problem that's being dealt with honestly and objectively in, in many churches. Some are and I thank God for the ones that are.

 

But where you have self-centered, where you have sinful carnal people who cannot sustain right relationships, and where you have a society with toleration for divorce you're going to have divorce on a rampant pandemic level, and that's what we have in our society.

 

Something must be done about the problem, and the only thing that will work is dealing with the problem from the Word of God. Now unfortunately, God’s Word is disregarded anymore. No one much wants to hear it or regard it, and certainly not out in the mainstream of society. 

 

And that’s unfortunate, because I don't believe there's much reason for confusion. I don't think God has a tough time getting His point across. I just don't think people look for it. Rather they want to justify what they do so they try to find something to support that.

 

But I want us to go to the Word of God in these studies and I want us to see what God really has to say.

 

Now I hate divorce, I hate it, and that's okay for me to hate it because the Bible says God hates it, so I'm in agreement with Him. And I, I hate divorce for what it does to society, I hate to think of the next generation of, of emotionally imbalanced people, I hate to think of all of these little children in broken homes that are going to grow up and have no sense of security, no concept of authority, no sense of morality, no standards to live by, etc, etc.

 

I hate to think of the societal effects of divorce. But that's down the line for me, what I really hate to think of is the fact that divorce and remarriage is a violation in many cases of the Word of God, and that's even a more important issue to me.

 

Now let me go a step further in just introducing this: many people apparently are needlessly confused as to what the Bible teaches, and I hope when we're done that you won't need to be confused anymore.

 

Let me give you the options. There are basically four views in the church regarding divorce:

 

Some teach no divorce for any reason, under any circumstances, for anything at all.

 

Others teach divorce under certain circumstances but no remarriage.  

 

And then another group says, divorce and remarriage anytime for anything at all.

And others are saying, divorce and remarriage, yes, but not for anything at all only under certain circumstances.

 

Now the question we want to find out is which is Biblical. 

 

Now by the way, in trying to discover what the Bible really says we find ourselves exactly where the Pharisees are in Matthew 5:31. They had trumped up an erroneous view of divorce and remarriage, and Jesus confronts them with their error and sets the record straight.

 

So that in these two verses, just takes two verses, that's how simple it is, Jesus Christ sets the whole record straight, and I want you to see that.

 

Verse 31-32

 

Now let me set the context for you, and I want you to stay with me because this is really important. Jesus is still facing the sins of the Pharisees, and He is unmasking their hypocrisy. You see here's what they did, they believed that you could be righteous by your works, but they couldn't keep God's standard so they invented their own and then called it God's standard.

 

Now God had a very high view of marriage, God had a very clear command regarding marriage and divorce. The attitude of God was never in question about it but they couldn't live by that standard, so they invented a new standard, called it God's standard and said, look we can keep this one, we're alright.

 

They dragged God down to their level, they invented their own code of ethics, and He unmasks them, and then to make it worse they misinterpreted the Bible to fit their own view.

 

They decided that you ought to be able to shed your wife whenever you want. You ought to be able to have a divorce whenever you got the whim and the will to do it, and so they just twisted around the Scripture to fit that.

 

Now the Scripture they twisted around was Deuteronomy 24:1 to 4 and we'll get to that later tonight. They invented their view to justify their sin and then they misinterpreted a verse to fit their, their justification.

 

And so what you have in verse 31 is their view and what you have in verse 32 is His view. Verse 31, "It has been said." Verse 32, "But I say."

 

Now, it has been said, beloved, does not refer to the Old Testament law, it refers to what these people had been taught by the rabbis. Jesus is following the same pattern He established beginning in verse 21.

 

It was the traditional Jewish view passed down by certain rabbinical teachers, not the view of God, not the Old Testament, not the Pentateuch, but their own misinterpretation of it, and that's what Jesus is presenting in this entire section here.

 

So He says, you have heard, but I'm telling you, in other words what you have heard is wrong, what I'm telling you is right. He is correcting their traditional misinterpretation.

 

And in so doing He forces them to recognize their sinfulness. They can't get by with the game they're playing, they can't get by with reducing the law of God to a level that they can attain, and say­ing they are therefore just.

 

Now, basically what verse 31 is saying is that they tolerated divorce for any reason. Jesus then says, I'm just the opposite, I don't tolerate it for just any reason. And these are the two truths that I want you to see. They tolerated divorce for any and all reasons, and tolerated remarriage for any and all reasons, and on the other hand Jesus did not. And by the way what He said here is still in affect right now today in 2009. So we have to come to Scripture then for our answer.

 

I know you're wondering when we're going to get to these two verses, just relax. By the time you're done I'll promise you'll understand what these two verses mean. But to begin with I want you to go back to Genesis, and let's see it how it all began.

 

Now in Genesis 2:23 we find that God has made Adam and Eve, first making Adam and then Eve, putting them together in this wonderful union, and this is what happens, Adam meets his wife and said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh."

 

Now this is where you have the beginning of God's view of divorce, in God's view of marriage.

 

You cannot understand divorce unless you understand marriage; you will never understand how God views a separation until you understand how He defines the union itself.

 

Now here we find that God has brought together a man and a woman, and it is definitely God who does this. I believe that since marriage is an institution of God any marriage is in a sense God bringing two people together.

 

It doesn't have to be spiritual it can only be physical but nonetheless it is God’s design for a man and woman to come together, and therefore, God has an interest in and claim to that marriage. 

 

So it is God who brings man and woman together, the two become one. In what sense? We covered this the other day, physically, emotionally and spiritually. 

 

Now what God is ordaining here from the very beginning is a monogamous, that is one partner in a female and one partner male, monogamous life-long marriage between a man and a woman. Notice it, "A man shall leave his father and his mother, cleave unto his wife; they shall be one flesh." There is no termination to that, there is no ending to that, they continue to be that one flesh.

 

Now notice the words, "cleave unto," "he shall cleave unto his wife." These are very important words because they reveal I think the nature of the marriage bond, the way God intended it to be. And the term has the idea of being glued to something. A man and a woman become stuck, as it were.

 

Not in the sense that you say, I'm stuck with her, but in the sense that God has stuck you together, you are glued. When two people are glued together they become one single individual, and so it says, "they shall be one flesh."

 

And so marriage as God designed it is to be the perfect welding of two people together into one, they're not just two anymore they're one, they're one, and one is an indivisible number.

 

They are one. It is the commitment of two wills, it is the blending of two minds, it is the mutual expression of two sets of God given emotions, so that the two become one, and the goal is a perfect oneness, both in the intimacy of the physical and the intimacy of the spiritual and the sharing of those things in life that cannot be shared and are not shared with any other human being.

 

In God's definition there were only two and the two became one, in every sense. And when husbands and wives realize that this is God's definition of marriage they would realize what a serious subject marriage and divorce are. 

 

Husbands and wives who realize that God has joined them into a single entity wouldn't be so foolish as to hurt the other because they know they hurt themselves. And so when God brings a man and a woman together it is to be in a permanent relationship.

 

Now that is why Matthew 19:6 says this, "No man may divorce what God has joined together."

You may remember it as, "What God hath joined together, let no man (what?) put asunder or separate." But the word is divorce.

 

Jesus says in Matthew 19, that's the way it was from the beginning. And since marriage is an institution of God, then any marriage is of God in that sense of joining two people. Therefore, any marriage is a default against God's law when divorce enters in

 

I believe that every marriage is God joining those two people together. It isn't always a spiritual union if they're not Christians but it is always the institution of God, for marriage is God's invention, and "What God has joined together, let no man divorce."

 

Therefore, God never intended for divorce. Yet people enter into a marriage today with the idea if it doesn't work out we'll end it. If it doesn't make it we'll forget it. And they look at people who work hard at their marriage and they wonder why they invest so much time and effort into making a right relationship and they figure it'd be so much easier to just call it quits, walk out and find somebody else, and that's the way it is in our world today.

 

But if we see marriage the way God sees it, we know that it is a monogamous life long oneness that God has desired and divorce never in God’s plan. 

 

So sacred is marriage, that any violation of that marriage union was so serious that the penalty for it was death. And the seventh commandment says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." And adultery is a sexual involvement outside marriage. Disobedience to that by the way was punishable by death.

And that was the initial institution that God gave to show the sacredness of it.

 

In Leviticus 20 verse 10, "The man who commits adultery with another man's wife, even he who commits adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death."

 

Listen, God so hated anything that defiled marriage that the penalty was death, in those early years, in those early times when God was establishing the highest possible law for the instruction of man. And God's attitude hasn't changed. Did you know this?

 

Last week we talked about adultery. Specifically, adultery is sexual activity with a married person.

 

Fornication, in the Old Testament sense was sexual activity not involving a married person, and fornication is an evil thing, fornication is a sin. Illicit sexual relationships apart from marriage, that is two single people who aren't married, that's a sin and it's a defiling thing, and it's an evil thing, but do you know that the Old Testament did not require the death penalty for that?

 

For fornication there was less than the death penalty. In fact in Leviticus 19:20, "Whosoever lies carnally with a woman, shall be scourged." It says. So when marriage wasn’t involved, even though the woman apparently was engaged at that time, when there wasn't a marriage involved there was a scourging, but boy when you defiled a marriage it was death.

 

And so this gives us some insight into how God feels about marriage. You know something? God had such a high view of this marriage that in the, the last of the Ten Commandments He said, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife." And what He meant there was even for a married person to desire another partner was so evil that it was one of the ten major sins.

 

You want to know how concerned God was about this? He wanted to remove even any temptation so that people wouldn't even be tempted to have these thoughts toward persons they were not married to, and God went to great lengths, for example just an illustration, in Exodus 20:26 it seems so very obscure and let ... yet to me it's profound.

 

It talks about coming to make a sacrifice, coming to make an offering. Now it appears that with the pagan altars, you had to ascend up a series of steps to get to the altar. But God says, when you approach My altar, (Exodus 20:26), "Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto my altar." God says, I don't want any steps up to My altar, why? "That thy nakedness be not exposed thereon."

 

It would be indiscreet for somebody standing at the bottom to see any exposure of a person ascending the steps to an offering to the Lord.

 

God says the pagans may do it that way; I want My altar on flat ground. Amazing. A far cry from the way that we conduct ourselves today. But that was the way they did then.

 

 

 

Ever once in awhile you hear some ding bat come along and say he belongs to a nudist colony because that's the way God made us. Listen, I want you to know that when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden the first thing the Lord did was cover them up. Man is meant to be covered up, because once sin had entered the world the temptation or the perversion of the marriage relationship could be induced in many ways by how people dress.

 

God says, you violate your marriage vows in a sexual way, death is the penalty, you desire another person and you've broken the 10th Commandment. In order to help prevent this I want bodily covering to be employed in such a way that no one will be indecently exposed.

 

Now the point of all of this is to show you beyond a shadow of a doubt that God established marriage as a spiritual, sexual, social union for one man and one woman never to be violated in deed and never to be violated in thought, and He condemned in a wholesale manner every violation of it. 

 

God’s view of marriage is that it is a monogamous, life long, permanent union between two people. It is an indivisible oneness.

 

And that is exactly what Jesus says when you get to the New Testament, look at Matthew 19 verse 8,

 

"He said unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to put away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so."

 

This is never God's intention. No place in the Bible is divorce ever commanded.

And this is where they were out of line. In verse 7 they said to Jesus, Matthew 19, "Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement."

 

You want to know something? Moses never did command it, that's how twisted they were. And Jesus says, "Moses, because of the hardness of your heart's permitted it." But never did he command it.

 

So the first truth, in our study, the first reality we must be committed to is the uniqueness and permanence of marriage, two becoming one for life, never violating that oneness in thought or in deed.

 

In fact, God is so committed to this ideal, that in Malachi 2:16, we are told that God hates divorce.  

 

Divorce is sin, and God hates it. If there had never been a fall there would have been a curse, if there had never been a curse there would have never been a divorce. So we can say divorce is a result of sin, which is a result of the fall, which is all apart of the curse. Therefore, God hates divorce.

 

You say, has God always hated it? Yeah, that's what I've been trying to show you, from Genesis 2 right on. You say, well if God hates it so much how did it get to be so prevalent?

 

Go back to Genesis 3, let's review and I'll close. Next time, we're going to interpret Deuteronomy 24 and our text, and then in the time after we'll go on to some other New Testament text.

 

But I want you to see this, and I’ll just review is it briefly because it fits in this and, and it'll tie together.

Genesis 3:16, man and woman have sinned and they have fallen, now as soon as they have fallen into sin marriage is going to be cursed, like every other human relationship you're going to have trouble, because you have two vile sinners separated from God. Therefore, everything is going to be chaotic. 

 

And so here comes the curse.

 

verses 16-19

 

Now backing up verse 16 is what I want you to see.

 

There were several elements to the curse, separation from God, a separation from man and nature, and a separation from man and his wife.

 

And you'll notice at the end of verse 16 the statement, "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

 

In that one statement you have the basic problem in marriage. Here are two cursed sinners trying to get along. God's design originally was an indissoluble union, that's the way it was from the beginning. God's design was two together as one through all of life, but when sin entered in and passed on the human race it resulted in a terrible conflict in marriage. The marriage ideal was shattered, chaos enters the home and divorce inevitably becomes the result.

 

Now prior to the fall marriage was pure bliss, the man was the head, the woman was the help meet. The man's headship was a loving, caring provision of understanding.

The woman brought a suitable, loving, caring submissiveness to the one who was given as her leader.

 

It was beautiful, her heart was totally devoted to him, his heart was totally devoted to her, and according to Genesis 1:27 and 28, they ruled together.

 

But that ended. And you'll notice what happened, at the end of verse 16: woman is cursed and her desire is to her husband, her desire is to her husband, and he shall rule over thee.

 

What does that phrase mean?

 

Let's take that second phrase. The word rule here means “to be set in an elevated position or an elevated office”, and literally what happened was in the fall man was elevated to rule in the house, to rule in the home.

 

He'd had a soft kind of dominance before, he’d had a loving, caring approach before but now he is set in a place of ruling with authority.

 

It is a different word than the word for rule in Genesis 1:28, completely different word, completely different concept. A new dimension of his rule has come about. The woman then is made immediately subordinate to the man.

 

People say, oh there's too much male chauvinism in the world, and they're exactly right and this is why. Because of the curse and because woman led in the sin God set man over her to control her, to subdue her as it were, to be her head.

And frankly without Jesus Christ it can be very abusive, I agree, sinful man has been chauvinistic, I'm the first one to agree, only in Christ, only in the Spirit can a right kind of headship be restored and that's the meaning of Ephesians chapter 5.

 

Only in Christ. Apart from that there will be oppressiveness. On the other hand, man is installed in this case as a ruler and woman. 

 

Then it says, her desire shall be to her husband.

 

Now what does this mean? Many commentators who don’t understand their Bible take the easy interpretation. They say this means that she will desire, her husband physically, this means that she will desire him to be the head emotionally.

 

The problem with that is that just isn't true. Of the two in the marriage the male has the stronger sex drive, and frankly women today don't desire the headship of a man at all for the most part they despise it. That's not what it means at all.

 

In fact, that phrase would be more descriptive of woman prior to the fall, not after the fall. Prior to the fall and prior to the curse, woman was submissive, woman's desire in a sense was to her husband, so how can this be a curse, unless we understand it in a different way?.

 

The key is in understanding the word “desire”. It is used only one other time in the Pentateuch, just one other time, 15 verses later in the 4th chapter verse 7.

 

Genesis 4:7

it is the same construction in Hebrew. It is a parallel to verse 16 of chapter 3. "Your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you." Sin desired Cain but he had the rule over it.

 

And the point of the word is this, that sin desired to dominate Cain and he had to suppress it, and that is exactly what the curse was. The curse was this, woman would desire to usurp the role of a man and take the authority and man would have to suppress it. And so from Genesis 3:16 on you have the battle of the sexes.

 

Why is there a woman's lib movement? There has been since Genesis 3:16. Why is there male chauvinism? There has been since Genesis 3:16.

 

Listen, this desire does not mean some kind of an exciting desire, some kind of a loving romantic desire. It comes from an Arabic root that means a desire or an urge or an impelling to accomplish something.

 

And so woman desires to control man, just like sin desires to control Cain. And in a sense, when Adam let Eve lead him into sin he was stuck with having to fight her leadership the rest of his days. And so we have the battle of the sexes, woman seeking supremacy, man trying to stay on the throne and marriage turns out to be king of the mountain.

 

That's why we have problems. In Eve's sin she took over the leadership, and that became the sinful tendency of woman ever since. In Adam's sin he abandoned his leadership and that he has to struggle to maintain for the rest of the time that man lives on earth.

So marital conflict exists all around us, because of the curse, and it's king of the mountain in most homes, and people fight it one way or another.

 

What does it lead to? Far too often, divorce. And so naturally Moses says, because of the hardness of your heart we have to face the fact that divorce is a reality. It doesn't change God's view; it doesn't change how God feels. It's apart of the curse, it's apart of sin, and God hates the curse and God hates sin and God hates divorce. It is a symptom of man's vile sinfulness.

 

The conclusion then for tonight, divorce is a destructive element, never a righteous act under any circumstance, under any, and we'll get to the circumstances next time. It hurts everybody involved; it does irreparable damage to everybody. But most of all it goes against God, who never ever planned that as apart of human life.

 

Now the question is as we close, does the rest of Scripture uphold this same perspective? People say, what about the exception clause in Matthew 5, what about the exception clause in Matthew 19, what about the exception in First Corinthians 7, does the rest of the Bible uphold this view? For the answer to that you'll have to come next time.

 

Let's bow together in prayer.