Sunday School | Divorce

Introduction

Fist over there are what? Not so good. Okay. Hey, a couple maybe one announcement before we get started. In this winter wonderland— Is Bob here? There he is. Bob Blacksmith. You guys know Bob? Bob is going to begin a new teaching series during the Sunday School hour in about, what is it, like a month, six weeks, something like that.

So I asked Bob earlier this week if he would be willing to lead a ten-week class that's at the same time as this class. I'll still be in here teaching this, but I'm hoping that, like, a whole slew of you leave, go over there. And what Bob is going to do is, for ten weeks, he's going to do a series on basically the foundations of the Christian faith organized by the Anglican Catechism, which was written, overseen, generally written by J. I. Packer. It's brilliant. It's a fantastic document. We're going to print up a whole ton of them and give you guys a copy of this book.

It was actually what started this class six or seven years ago was a series that we did on this catechism. So Bob is going to do a ten-week series. And the way it'll work and the reason you might want to jump into it is, one, because Bob's a fantastic teacher; I think it'll be fantastic discussions. But if you want to get grounded in these kind of basics of the Christian faith over a ten-week span, it'll be a great conversation.

And then at the conclusion of it, there's an opportunity to be confirmed. And what we mean by confirmed is, in kind of an Anglican structure, we create an opportunity for you to stand up and say, Yeah, you know what? I'm in. Officially. Like, I want to stand up in front of my friends and say, I am a follower of Christ, and have Quig, have the bishop look back at you in the eye and say, It's true. It's official. You're with us.

It's not a moment of conversion. You would be already a Christian before you're confirmed, but it's an opportunity to mark, to drive a stake into the ground. You might think of it a little bit analogous to what baptism is for some. Some are baptized as adults when they become believers, and they say, I identify with him in his death and his resurrection. But others were baptized as children, which we think is completely legitimate. We baptize children for the same reason that Jews would circumcise children, not because of the faith they had, but in anticipation of the faith that they would have.

And confirmation is an opportunity to say, Yeah, it took. It was real. And so if you want to come and do this thing for ten weeks with Bob, it'll be, I think, we're going to do the first Sunday is January fifteenth, and we'll be somewhere probably over there. We haven't figured out where we're going to be yet. But I really hope that a whole slew of you go and enjoy that conversation. And then on the eleventh week, come back, and we'll continue what we're doing in here. Cool? All right. So that's coming up January 15.

The Topic: Divorce

Today, what we're going to do is continue our series on what they were calling Red Letters Stuff Jesus Said. And I told you guys when we started this a few weeks ago that I would solicit from you different texts that you have questions about. We'd process through things. But we'd also—I wanted to make sure that we talk about the confusing things, some of the things that Jesus said are genuinely hard to understand. We would talk about the most important things that He said, which is hard because everything He said is important, but I think some things really rise to the top.

But then we would also talk about the uncomfortable things that Jesus said. And this Sunday, this morning, is gonna be in that third category, I think, perhaps for many of you. We're gonna talk about the topic of divorce. We got a couple of questions about divorce, and we had several folks that upvoted those. Those questions, just in general, talk about divorce and remarriage.

There were some that pointed out specifically Moses allowing divorce because of the hardness of heart and wondering kind of where we go with that. And then this, and I think this was maybe the most poignant statement that really captures the theological concerns as well as the pastoral concerns. The question was this: I am on my second and hopefully last marriage. Am I in the continual, unrepentant sin of adultery?

There's tender ground here. Right? This is a topic that is often, for many people, very painful, very fraught. And when we're in those sorts of spaces, talking about the tender things, I think it is not all of us possible, but where possible, I think it's valuable to talk to people rather than about people. Right?

So I don't want to talk about divorce, about this thing that has no pertinence to you, but I want to talk to you about your situation, your story, the particular things that you've lived through, experienced, and perhaps suffered through. And as I do that, there's a ton of people in the room. Right?

My assumption is that in this room, there are lots of different people that have had many different experiences with divorce. Right? Some in this room. Some of you have endured difficult marriages, but you've chosen not to divorce because of what you understand Jesus said about that.

Some of you had marriages that were dissolved against your will, against your wishes. There are some people who chose to get a divorce. You were the initiator of the divorce, believing that you had Biblical grounds, that you had permission to do that. And you were right.

There are some perhaps that wanted to get a divorce, and you did get a divorce, but at that time in your life, the idea of Biblical grounds wasn't really a question that you asked. You just did what you did, and you weren't really all that particularly concerned with what Jesus said about it.

There are some people whose spouse committed adultery, and you had grounds for divorce, but you didn't. You chose not to. Right? And you reconciled, and you're glad that you did. Perhaps some of you chose, you didn't choose divorce, but divorce was chosen for you in the sense that your parents got a divorce, and you lived through the loss of that.

And for some of you, perhaps that divorce was ruinous, the most painful experience of your childhood. There may be others whose parents divorced, and you found that it actually brought some peace to a very painful, difficult situation.

Some of you have divorced and not remarried. Some of you have divorced and remarried, and perhaps more than once. And perhaps, I think it likely could be the case, that some of you are contemplating divorce right now or at least wishing it was an option because your situation is fraught and difficult.

All of which is to say that there is an awfully broad variety of experiences, and I think probably a broad variety of pains in this. And so what I hope to do, I hope—and we'll see, give me an hour—is to really let you see what Jesus said about this topic. It's a little bit—it's a little tender, is it not?

And there is the risk that I could say things that are biblically inaccurate in an effort to just be gentle and kind, and there is the risk that I could treasure the accuracy of God's Word in a way that you walk out feeling injured by it. And I really don't want to do either one of those things. I want to try to be, let's be faithful. Let's just look at what Jesus said because He loves you and He is good.

So we're gonna be honest. We're gonna look at what the text is, but not from any position of some supposed self-righteousness. Right? I mean, who are we to look down our noses at anybody? Life is hard. But Jesus loves you, and He has invited you to live in joyful submission to Him. His ways are good. He loves you. And He loves you even when, and maybe especially when, He's contradicting you.

We do not have some cut-out Jesus, some little sock puppet Jesus that we can make Him say what we want Him to say. I'm not a ventriloquist. Right? Jesus speaks for Himself. And so we're going to look at the major passages in Scripture, particularly in the Gospels, where Jesus addresses this.

There are chiefly four in the Gospels. Okay? We're going to stay in the Gospels, but when we look in the Gospels, we're going to start with what Jesus says, because that's the purpose of our time here. But we will probably at some point in the discussion look back to the Old Testament passages from which Jesus is drawing, and we may also go forward to other New Testament passages in the Epistles that are reflections of what Jesus said.

But ground zero for us is going to be the red letters. We're going to look at the words of Jesus. Okay? How's that for a preamble? You ready? Strap in.

And as we do, but before we're done here, I really do want to come back to this question. I'm not going to begin here. We'll end here once we see what Jesus has said. But I want you to have this ringing in your ears: I am on my second and hopefully last marriage. Am I in the continual unrepentant sin of adultery?

I want to try to get to that. And by the way, if we run out of time and we need to do this next week, we can do that too.

The Texts on Divorce

So here's how it works. Jesus' the four primary texts that Jesus that we get are going to be in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We're going to start in Luke.

Go to Luke sixteen eighteen. This is the simplest, most concise statement that we have from Jesus on divorce, and it has basically no context. Right?

If you can look it up, it's gonna be Luke sixteen eighteen, and there Luke records Jesus saying this:
Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

That's it. And if you look at the verse before that or the verse after that, you're not gonna get a whole lot of, like, anchoring. It's just air dropped. Okay?

That's Luke. Luke sixteen eighteen. We're going to have the same statement. If you go to Mark chapter 10, you're gonna get a very similar statement, but this time Mark gives us a little bit more of the adjacent content.

So the first one, if you're writing these down, is Luke sixteen eighteen. Mark's version of that is ten:two and following. And it goes like this:

Some Pharisees came and tested him. That's Jesus, obviously. Some Pharisees came and tested Jesus by asking, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?' what did Moses command you?' He replied. And they said, 'Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.'

Jesus replies, it was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law, but at the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.

And then, this is all publicly, then privately with the disciples, verse 10, When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this, and he answered,

‘Anyone who divorces his wife marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.’

You can hear the Luke passage right there at the very end of the Mark passage. What Luke is giving us is essentially what he was saying with his disciples, but the broader context of it is what you just heard above.

So far, so good? We're going to walk through all four, and then we'll talk about them all. I want you to see how this so we get the very simple version of Luke. You get the same thing with a little more context in Mark.

And then something is going to change in Matthew. You're gonna see in Matthew 19 and then also in chapter five. We're gonna start with 19. I'm going a little bit out of order on purpose.

In 19, there is a change. Something is different in Matthew 19 that has no echo in Luke or Mark. So here's how this goes. This is Matthew 19 starting in verse three.

Some Pharisees came to him to test him, and they asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?' 'Haven't you read,' he replied, 'that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female and said, 'For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother, be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.'

Well, why then, they asked, did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away? Jesus replied,

‘Moses permitted you to divorce your wives and commanded, because your hearts were hard, but it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality and marries another woman, commits adultery.’

Did you hear the change? It's different. What changed there? Exception. There is an exception clause. There is an exception clause that is not present in Luke, it is not present in Mark, it is only present in Matthew, where it says like this,

‘I tell you this is verse nine again that anyone who divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another woman commits adultery.’

Okay? So we'll talk about why is there an exception clause in Matthew that's absent in Mark and Luke. And then the disciples, this feels pretty weighty to them.

Look at their response in verse 10. The disciples said to him,

‘Well, if this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.’

And you could take that in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, but I think it's actually a pretty wise observation.

And Jesus replies and this is going to only make it harder and more complicated. Jesus replied,

‘Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who are born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.’

Okay? And then, one more, and then we can start to have a conversation about it.

Go back to Matthew five, verse 31. This will be the last of the four places where Jesus directly addresses divorce, although there are several other places that Jesus says things that are pertinent that we'll probably end up looking at.

But these are your four, like the core of the thing. The Luke, the Mark, and the two in Matthew.

So Matthew 5:31, Jesus says,

‘It has been said, anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and there's the exception clause again in Matthew, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.’

Now, some of you don't have ‘makes her a victim of adultery.’ Right? Some of you have your verse. Anybody in the front, verse 32 in the ESV? Lily, read verse 32 really loud for me.

‘But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the grounds of sexual morality, makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.’

So what I read in the NIV, it says that it makes her the victim of adultery. ESV says it makes her commit adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Okay? We'll have to unpack that because those are very different things. Right? Those are very different. What's that going on with that?

And then you could—and we'll include this—you could say that in Matthew 5 verse 33, we've moved on to a new topic. Or you could say, actually, this seems strangely relevant.

So Matthew 5:33, coming right out of this divorce and adultery remark, says,

'Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.'

But I tell you, do not swear on an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is God's throne, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king.

And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to simply say is, yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. And the reason I say that, we might or might not consider that part of Jesus' teaching on Matthew 5, is that he could be saying, Just do what you said you would do. If you stood at the altar and you made a lifelong commitment, keep it. Right? It could be saying, like, Why are we having this conversation? You made a promise. We keep all of our promises. Maybe. Or you could say, Well, no, he's moving on to a different topic, and that's fine. It's not necessarily one or the other, but I think it's relevant to look at it.

Alright, so that's our body of data, and then we'll let you guys—we've got a whole bunch of places we can go with that. But that's if you want to understand, what did Jesus say about divorce? Those are your four texts that you'd want to understand and study.

Summary and Reflection

So put it all together. What does Jesus say about divorce? Don't do it. Says don't, right? Jesus' teaching on divorce is that don't do it. You're not supposed to do it, that you shouldn't do it.

And then in Matthew, you say, Okay, hang on. But there is something so grievous that it is grounds for divorce, and that is if your spouse commits adultery. Well, that's probably—
it doesn't say adultery. The word here, when he says except for sexual immorality, is porneia. We generally believe that that means adultery, but he doesn't use the word for adultery there. He uses the word for sexual immorality.

So it doesn't say except in the case of adultery. He says, except in the case of sexual immorality. So according to Jesus, in Luke, don't get a divorce. It's a lifelong commitment. You can't break it. In Mark, don't get a divorce. It's a lifelong commitment. You can't break it.

In Matthew, don't get a divorce is a lifelong commitment unless your partner has done something so egregious, namely, something sexually immoral, which we generally take to be adultery, in which case then it's not required, but it's permitted. You never have to, but you can.

And then in Matthew five, it's a similar kind of view. That's the basic Jesus' answer on divorce.

How are you doing? Is that surprising? Is that new? Okay. The Bible does add, not in Jesus' words, but one other ground for divorce that’s not here in Matthew, but that Paul picks up in 1 Corinthians 7. Does anybody know what it is? Suzanne, what you got?

If the unbeliever leaves, let them go.

That's right. Suzanne says, if the unbeliever leaves, let them go. If you want, we're focusing on Jesus' words, but I just feel like it's kind of hanging out there, so let me read you this: 1 Corinthians 7:15.

We'll pick it up like this. 12. 1 Corinthians 7:12. To the rest I say this, I, not the Lord, which we're not going to get into that right now. Okay? If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she will live with him, he must not divorce her.

And if a woman has a husband— I think my batteries are failing. One second. Did I call in her? You sure did. You have a good intuition on this. So bear with me, friends. One second. Alright. Is it on? Very good. Usually Bob has them in his pocket next to his Swiss Army knife, but this time Susan's got our batteries here.

Okay. So Jesus—this is what Paul says in verse thirteen, 1 Corinthians 7:13. And if a woman has a husband who's not a believer and he's willing to live with her, she must not divorce him.

For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise, your children will be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

Here it is, verse 15. But if the unbeliever leaves, let it be so, the brother or the sister is not bound in such circumstances. God has called us to live in peace.

How do you know a wife whether you'll save your husband, or how do you know a husband whether you'll save your wife? Okay?

So Paul is adding a clause. You may not get a divorce unless sexual immorality on the part of your spouse, or another ground is they leave you. If they leave, we would generally say it's adultery and desertion are the two biblical grounds for divorce.

And if you have experienced one of those things, then according to the New Testament, you are not obligated to divorce, but that you are free to divorce. And along—and this is important—along with the freedom to divorce comes what? The freedom to remarry.

That's right. And that's really the question—is may you marry another subsequent to that? That is the base case for the Biblical grounding of divorce. You may not.

You made a lifelong commitment, and it's a commitment that pictures something. Marriage is not merely a contract between two people who are looking to live together and share a bank account and a bed. Marriage is a picture of God's union to his church, that husbands are cast in the role of Christ, wives are cast in the role of the church, and just as there is an indissoluble link between Jesus and his church, so there should be an indissoluble link between a husband and his wife.

However, we are weak and frail people, and there are some causes that we would say, yeah, that's so bad that you—you have permission and you can let the thing go. And then you have this actual universe in which we live, where life is hard. And lots and lots of people make a commitment in their youth and foolishness or in their age and foolishness.

It's not just the children that are idiots. We stay dumb for a long, long time. Right? And it's very often the case. It's been—I mean, how many divorces have taken place in the United States? I mean, so, so many. How many in this room? So, so many. The people find themselves in a circumstance where like, I just can't do it. I can't remain, and I won't remain. And so relationship is broken.

And when we do, when we violate what God has said, maybe for reasons that seem very, very good to us, does that leave us in a place of trapped in a place of continual unrepentant sin? That's, at the end of the day, that's the chief question that we want to address today.

Addressing Practical and Pastoral Concerns

Now, I can keep talking, and maybe you'd rather I did, or maybe you'd rather I didn't. But does anybody need to jump in? Anybody sitting on attack? We've already said too much, and you want to be able to jump in either to clarify a question or go somewhere. Brad?

Unbeliever leaves. What if a believer leaves?

Yes. Okay. So Brad's question back on 1 Corinthians 7 is: it says that if an unbeliever leaves, you know, they're free to go. But what if a believer does leave?

So what's going on in 1 Corinthians 7 is not meant to be really a dissertation on divorce and remarriage as much as it is a dissertation on now that Christianity is brand new, how does that change my marriage? So he's not so much anticipating real questions about marriage as much as he's anticipating questions about living life in this new life-changing transformation of being in Christ.

So Paul, frankly, is not—I don't think Paul is envisioning that two married people would divorce because, why would they? As he's writing this, he's specifically addressing, now that you're a Christian, what does that change? And it's plausible—that people could be like, I got married. I'm Greek, and I married this Greek person, and now I've come to know Jesus, but my spouse hasn't. Am I supposed to leave that? Am I supposed to, like, go become—come out from them and be separate?

Should a Christian maybe a Christian not only that they can divorce a non-Christian, but that they must divorce a non-Christian? That's kind of his starting point—that if somebody becomes a Christian, they know that you're not supposed to have Christian-non-Christian weddings, you know, like, don't do that. But I already did that, and now I became a Christian. Should I leave?

He's like, No, no, no. Don't go anywhere. First of all, if they're willing to stay with you, you stay with them. Stay. But then he's like, But if they leave, what are you going to do? There's nothing you can do.

So he's coming at it from a different starting point than we have a tendency to. So then the question becomes, if an unbeliever leaves, then you're free to go. But what if a believer does leave you? I would say this is more pastoral than theological because we don't have a specific text.

I would say, in practical purposes, if your spouse divorces you, what are you—what are you gonna do? Like, move next door to them? Like, what are you gonna do? So I think that there's—I think that we can extrapolate from 1 Corinthians 7 and say more broadly that not only adultery but desertion in all cases is legitimate and authentic and that you are free to remarry.

But I say that without—that seems to be an implication of this, and I don't have chapter and verse I can prove that. Does that satisfy that? Okay. Questions? Lily?

So I recently heard that Wayne Grudem had changed his opinion about what makes for a legitimate cause for divorce based on 1 Corinthians 7:15 and where it talks about when an unbelieving spouse leaves, the phrase is used in such cases. Have you heard this?

No. I don't know. This—this phrase is not used anywhere else in the scriptures, but he got an itch after seeing a lot of marriages where people were stuck on abuse, but there wasn't sexual immorality. And he, like, just doesn't feel right. In such cases, he found in—I think it was 52 other contemporary Greek examples of the usage of it, and it doesn't mean what it means in English.

In such cases, as in cases that are very much like this, it actually means something much broader.

So, for instance, was it Philo? One of the early writers said, used the same phrase in reference to the tenth plague.

In such cases, when the firstborn is killed, well, can't mean that specific, but only happened one time ever.

Oh, okay. Examining all of these kinda actually is very broad. It has a very broad sense to it.

So just to say then that in cases that are like desertion or of that similar—oh, I see. With that extreme gravity. Okay. Actually, he changed his belief to say, actually, these are biblical reasons for divorce.

Just to throw up—That's interesting. Let me try to recap. This is new to me, but what Lily is saying is there's a guy named Wayne Grudem. He wrote a systematic theology. He's a seminary professor. He also started an organization called the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

He's given an enormous amount of thought and done a great deal of teaching in the space of men and women, masculinity, femininity, marriage, sex. He's kind of developed an expertise in this. And he's very well respected.

Apparently, what Lily is saying is that he used to have a more narrow sense of what is biblical grounds for divorce, adultery and desertion. But based on a kind of in-depth study, he thinks that 1 Corinthians 7:15 is broader than just those two specifics. And he's essentially saying that in adultery or desertion or things like that, there is grounds for divorce.

Is that an apt summary of what you're saying? That's apt. And that was only as of 2019. Okay, so that's all brand new. I've never read any of this stuff.

And what Grudem thinks doesn't necessarily matter, but he's pretty knowledgeable about the Scriptures, right? So that might be—you can see a little bit in the same way, what you're seeing is a development from—in Luke, it's just no divorce, full stop. And then in Matthew, it's like, no divorce, oh, except for this clause. And then in 1 Corinthians 7, no divorce except in this clause, oh, and 1 other situation.

You do see some sense of development of there may be some other exceptions. Life often has exceptions. That could be the case. Although, that's scary to say because then it's like, all right, game on. Now you can just stretch it out, except I don't want to stay married anymore. Right? And the thing gets kind of crazy loosey-goosey.

So we want to be thoughtful about not going there. And I would say the opposite side, as long as we're trying to be faithful. If we pick one of Grudem's partners when he started CBMW was John Piper, who many of you know.

Piper would be in the opposite camp. Piper is in the camp that if hear this—if husbands have an obligation to love their wives as Christ loves the Church, then frankly it would be impossible for a husband to fulfill that obligation unless his wife cheats on her and he stays with her. Right?

We are a wayward, faithless bride, and yet Jesus is committed to us. And so Piper would be in the camp of like, no, even in the case of divorce, if you love your wife like Christ loves the church, even in our faithlessness, he remains faithful. Right? And so there's this spectrum, this range of things.

Okay, I've too many hands. I've got to stop talking. Katherine.

Are there cases like emotional abuse, physical abuse, like sometimes just pure neglect, like a husband perhaps just living on his own and has nothing to do with her, but they're still there and they're stuck?

About those?

Yeah. Catherine is saying, we've these clear spots of adultery, you've got a clear spot around desertion, but then we've everything else. What often comes up, she mentions, so you've got like, not physical desertion, but emotional desertion, or you've got physical abuse or emotional abuse.

What do we do with those things? And Jesus doesn't address them. So again, coming back to our text, we're trying to be red letter. What did Jesus say? There's no mention of those things explicitly. There's no comment on that.

So that puts us into a little bit more of—we got to go to kind of secondary and tertiary texts to get things. I would say things that are clear, in a world that is not clear, in situations that are really difficult, because the world is horribly broken, and you get to the point where it's like, There is no good solution. Right?

You know this. Sometimes in life, it's like, Well, I don't know because we're so far past the idea that I don't know. But I think that in a situation of abuse, if your spouse committing a crime, and abuse is a crime, then all legal remedies are available to you. Right?

It may not be that the first thing you reach for is divorce, but the first thing you reach for perhaps is calling the police. Right? There's no restriction on those sorts of things. The other things of like, what constitutes emotional abuse and how do we do that? I wouldn't want to be slow to say, like, as soon as we say, unless you're emotionally abused, as soon as you say, emotional abuse is grounds for divorce, well, like, I mean, everything can be categorized as emotional abuse.

So we've got to be thoughtful. Are we honestly recognizing that life in a broken world is terribly difficult, and sometimes you just have to make very difficult choices, and depend upon the richness of the grace of God? Or are we making excuses for ourselves?

Every situation is difficult, but the whole thing is terribly, terribly fraught. It's incredibly difficult. We are so far past the ideal that we're doing our best in light of what God has said, who we know is good, what are the range of options, what's limited to us?

Robin.

In the statement that you read at the end, she was saying, is she in a perpetual state of unforgiveness?

Yeah. The way I understand that, if that—that there is no sense, you break that, you can't do this. There's nothing that His blood will wash away. Our with repentance comes forgiveness. Does that not apply in the same situation?

Yeah. So, okay, I've got about ten minutes. We can let me—there's so many things that we could say, but let me respond to that, and we'll come back to that specific question, okay?

So if you marry, then you divorce illegitimately, meaning there's no adultery, there's no, like, I just didn't like him anymore, or whatever. I mean, forgive that. That's flipping. There's all kinds of reasons we get there.

But if you can't say there was biblical grounds, it was just we had irreconcilable differences, or whatever the language might be used to get to that, and then you remarry, are you living in unrepentant sin? Here's the answer to that. The answer is, well, it depends. Maybe. Right?

But not necessarily. It is not necessarily the case that you are. And in fact, I go further than that to say that if you divorce and remarry, not only can you remain remarried, but you must remain remarried. Right?

And I think what's behind the question is the maybe— is the sense that in normal sin, well, what's normal sin? In many situations, repentance requires restitution. This is gonna be a minute, John. I'm gonna unpack this, so hang on.

Repentance requires restitution. If you steal from me and then you say, ‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ but I’m keeping your stuff, then we're like, Well, you don't seem that sorry. Right?

There's kind of this implication that repentance requires restitution. But in this situation, what does restitution look like? Do I need to get another divorce and then go back to the original? How do I fix this? We're so far into this. It's like, how do I get out of this now? You get it?

Right? And so it's possible, could be the case, that you are living in unrepentant sin, but that would not be—it’s not necessarily true. Right?

You don't have to make restitution in the sense of divorcing again and going back. I think that's just gonna compound your sin. It's just going to add to it. But the question is, are you repentant of it? Do you look at that divorce and say, you know what, I'm even remotely sorry about that. That's what I should have done. That's what I wanted to do. I'm glad I did it.

Everything's great. So take it. If that is your posture, then yes, you are in unrepentant sin, as evidenced by the fact you're not repenting of your sin. Right?

If you are justifying—you can't justify the same behavior of which you are repenting. You understand this. You can't be like, Yeah, I'm so sorry about that, but I would do it again in a heartbeat. Well, hang on. Which is it?

So you could be. But you could also say, at that point in my life, where I was, I couldn't bear another minute, and I didn't know what to do, and I pulled the only lever available to me, and I recognized that it was an act of disobedience, and my only hope is to plead the mercy of God—that he in his grace would override that, and by the way, 5,000 other things.

Wouldn't that be great? Am I repentant of it? Then yes.

But when you see, like, for instance, when you see Jesus engaging with the woman at the well, what does he say to her that's relevant to this? What's the first thing he says?

‘Go get your husband.’

And she's like, ‘Well, I don't have a husband.’ And he says, ‘You know what? That's a good point. You don't have a husband. You’ve had five husbands, and now you're living with some dude.’

Now, when he does that, what he is necessarily doing is he is conferring legitimacy, genuineness, on husband one, husband two, husband three, husband four, and husband five. She didn't have one husband and then five boyfriends. She had five husbands and one boyfriend. Right?

Which is to say these things were legitimate. And each divorce, if she were to divorce number five to go back to number three, it would have been adding to the grief. They're real. Right? So all that to say, are you living in unrepentant sin? Well, don't know, but you don't have to be. And to get into repent doesn't require you to compound your sin by adding to another divorce.

Answer this question: are you, you tell me. Well, don't tell me. Tell yourself—what is your posture to your divorce and remarriage? Is it defiant self-justification? Or is it humble repentance that you are a broken person in a broken world and you're trying to make your best sometimes, and sometimes you're not trying to do your best because we're weak and we're frail creatures?

Do you feel that range of this? When the fall happened—this is important—when the fall took place, when the world broke, two massive realities flooded into the human experience.

One is that we broke, and two is that we became bad. When I say we broke, what I mean is we became liable to all sorts of injury and difficulty and pain, and life became hard. Cancer entered the world because of the fall. Right?

And blindness and baldness and insecurity. Pick a thing. Why did that one make you laugh? Shut up. Okay? None of those things are—you’re not culpable for any of those things. You’ve got cancer, we're not like, ‘What did you do?’ We’re just like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And then also badness. But you'd feel all kinds of shady stuff. You laugh at bald people. You do very mean things, and there's something wrong with you.

Both of these things are true. Now here’s the thing. You’ve got badness and you've got— I said brokenness. You have brokenness and you have badness, but watch it. Because it's in your brokenness that you very often will do something bad.

Have you noticed this? You're in a situation and you're like, I don't like the way this feels, and so maybe I will feel less bad if I do something evil.

This is like the human experience all the time. And sometimes you will do bad things, and that bad thing will produce suffering, often for you and often for somebody else.

And so badness and brokenness are different, but they live in this horrific, like, relationship where brokenness leads to badness, and badness leads to brokenness.

It very well could be the case that you are in your marriage suffering something that was just terrible, just miserable and so sad and so awful. And I don't know what I would have done if I were in your situation. And then in that process, as you scramble to find a strategy, the lever that you pulled was a lever that's not available to you.

And then having, because you were broken, you did something bad, and then that badness probably worked to some extent. That's why we— we employ sinful strategies because they work for a little while to some extent, but then it produces more badness.

When you evaluate this, you don't need to look back. If you're like, I want to repent of my sin. I want to repent of all of my sin, but, man, I really hated that. That was hard. That was a difficult marriage. You can parse out the badness and the brokenness. Yes. We can authenticate and legitimize. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe.

Maybe you're just being selfish. Right? Maybe you've got more—maybe your brokenness was more of it wasn’t your brokenness. It was your badness. You're just selfish. Right? And I get that. I'm selfish too. Don't feel accused by that. At least not as if I think I'm not. Right?

There's something wrong with all of us. But in all of it, can you look back to that and say, Lord, I didn't have the strength to trust you through it. I just—I didn't know how to efficiently depend on your grace to get through this thing, and so I pulled the escape chute.

That's the thing. And my encouragement to you, pastorally, is to say that— and all things, you can repent of. Right? All of it. But the key to the repentance is you just gotta own it. You gotta stop justifying yourself and to say, I am willing to be known that this—I own this. And maybe not all of it. You never own all of it. Life is always a dance. Life is a mix.

And some of you, even this—let me say this. This is even more tender and painful. Sometimes people commit adultery because of their selfishness. It's always sin. It's always wrong. But sometimes they're going to commit adultery in the context of a very, very painful relationship where their needs aren't being met.

Are you familiar with this? So when we look at this thing, life is hard. Life is hard in a million different ways. And you might have things to repent of because your spouse committed adultery. You definitely have things to repent of if you committed adultery. There's endless opportunities for us to lay down our self-righteousness, our unrighteousness, and to say, Lord, it's in you.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Okay. We're almost out of time. So let me pause there. And again, we can pick this up next week and give more time for interaction. And you can go back and study this text so we can see where we go.

So questions, comments on any of this so far? John?

That’s right. Yeah. I’m sorry. Thought you were gonna keep reading there.

So, yeah, in Malachi 2. Here, I'll read it. I’ll give you a little more context. Here's Malachi 2, one of the key texts:

Another thing you do, you flood the Lord's altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer looks with favor on your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. You ask why? Because the Lord is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.

Has not the one God made you? You belong to him in body and spirit. And what does the one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on your guard and do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth.

The man who hates and divorces his wife, says the Lord God of Israel, does violence to the one he should protect, says the Lord Almighty. So be on your guard and do not be unfaithful.

Malachi, this is weighty stuff. There's more going on.

Our little marriage here between any two people is a picture of greater things, and God cares that it be maintained. We’re broken people, and we’re bad people, and we live in a world that's very far from Eden, which calls us to be very gracious with one another in all things.

I say this endlessly, I know, but we are to be a truthful people. We are to be a gracious people. We observe what God has said, and we work, walk with other people in light of that.

Our—we're no better than they are. Right? We're all—we're all bad and we're all broken.

Yeah.

I'm just curious because, you know, if you read this, like, our society—So, essentially, the question is, let's say someone has a significant involvement with pornography, does that qualify as either adultery or sexual immorality? And how do we treat it? So is a significant involvement with pornography grounds for divorce? Is that essentially the question?

Yeah. I mean, and I’m just kind of, like, again, having friends in this sphere and I'm trying to, you know, help them through that. Like, Yes. I would hope that would be an unbeliever, not a believer who's doing that, but I would just—I don’t know. How do you use the potential pastor? How would you speak to that?

Yeah. Okay. So and we'll end on this because I gotta go greet. But the rather than characterize it as like, is this activity grounds for divorce or is that activity grounds for divorce, I would suggest a paradigm in which you recognize that when it comes to sin, you have two options. You can surrender to it or you can struggle with it.

Okay? But there's no other option here. And so sometimes when people say, Well, I'm really struggling with this right now. I want to be like, Well, are you struggling or did you just surrender? Because sometimes you're like, I just gave up. If you're on the river and it's flooding and you're just floating with the river, you're not struggling. You're just surrendering.

Are you swimming upstream? Are you fighting this? Are you putting things into place in your life? Are you seeking accountability? Are you doing this? So I would say the more that we surrender to our sin, the more vulnerable place that that leaves us, and the more likely that I would say that pornography becomes more likely to be a legitimate, authentic biblical ground for divorce because you're like, I'm done here, and you're just floating down the river rather than, I am struggling against this. I've put this off for my computer. I've made this decision. All of life I’ve done this before all of life, all of you, is going to be sin and repentance. Sin and repentance. Sin and repentance.

And you're never going to flat line this thing. You just don't. I mean, it would be lovely if you could, but you're not going to, right? It's going to be sin and repentance, sin and repentance.

The question is, is it sin and repentance, sin and repentance? Right? Every once in a while, you come up for breath and then go back down into the misery of it? Or are you like, sin and repentance? Sin and repentance?

Right? Which way does your life run? And so I would say the more that that sign curve gets jacked up, the more that you are putting yourself in a place where there may very well be legitimate grounds for your marriage to be dissolved.

But I don't have the wisdom to say, Here's the rule. Like, I don't know. It's more of a process.

Okay. We've got to stop. Are we done, or do we need to talk about this more next week? More? Who thinks we need to talk more about this?

A couple of hands. Okay. Well, maybe we'll start with it. I'll prepare something else. Okay? So read those passages, come back with questions, we'll talk about it.

Got to go. Hold on.

Divorce.

Yeah. I would say.