Divorce And Remarriage Pt.1 - Matthew 5:31-32 Series

So when Jesus calls the remarriage adultery, what He is saying is the divorce did not work. The first marriage has not actually ended and there is no right to remarry. So there is no actual divorce. I recently saw a scene in a movie where someone asked the main character if he had ever been married.

He said, “Yeah, I was.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t take.”

He got divorced because his marriage “didn’t take.” What Jesus is saying here is, “You are wrong – the marriage took just fine. What did not take was the divorce.” Any divorce that is not on Biblical grounds does not take. It does not work. The couple is still married. They still owe faithfulness to each other, so that if they get involved with someone else, it is adultery – just like it would be if they got involved with someone else prior to the divorce.

There is a sense in which it did take

That is the force of what Jesus is saying, and if you think it sounds extreme – you are right. But how far should we take that? If you get a sinful divorce, are you still married in every sense? Does your spouse’s body still belong to you? Would it be OK if you showed up a couple years later and slept together? What about if you get married to someone else – are you married to two people now? Or is that second marriage not a real marriage – just an affair?

I don’t think Jesus meant for us to take it that far.

1 Corinthians 7:10-11 To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord)…

(So Paul is explaining to us what Jesus meant.)

10 A wife must not separate from her husband. 11 But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.

If you get a sinful divorce, are you still married? Or are you unmarried? According to Paul, the person who gets a sinful divorce is unmarried.

What about if you get a sinful divorce, then marry someone else? Is that second marriage invalid? Is it essentially the same thing as just having a live-in boyfriend? No. When Jesus spoke with the woman at the well, He said:

John 4:18 you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.

She had six partners – five she married and one she did not, and Jesus makes a distinction between the five and the one. He does not say, “The divorces were invalid therefore everyone after husband #1 was just a live-in boyfriend.” All five marriages were valid enough for Jesus to call those men “husbands,” and that last guy was not a husband even though they were living together.

So are sinful divorces valid or not? 1 Corinthians 7 and John 4 make it sound like the divorce really does end the marriage and makes you a single, unmarried person. But Jesus’ words in this text make it sound like the divorce does not end the marriage and you are still married to the person so that remarriage is adultery. How do we reconcile that?

Jesus’ rhetoric

I think the way to reconcile it is by understanding the type of rhetoric Jesus is using in Matthew 5. He is making an extreme statement, stated in the most extreme way for the purpose of jarring our attention and sensibilities. He wants to rattle us and get our attention off the exceptions and onto the main point. So even though there are qualifications to what He is saying, He does not mention those qualifications because He does not want the focus to be on those.