I remember back when I was in school at Abilene Christian University, a friend of mine went to interview with a church in South Carolina. Before he went, the congregation sent him a message: “Preach about whatever you want… except tobacco.” Now while I would like to think that there was a godly motive behind this, my fear is that these people just didn’t want to hear a lesson that would make them squirm. If they were convinced about the rightness of what they were doing, why would they not want to hear a lesson about it?
I’m thankful that hasn’t happened here. I feel an absolute liberty to preach the Word as long as what I preach is the Word of God. As long as I speak the truth in love.
Today we’ll make a stop in our journey through the book of Luke. I want to touch on a topic that is mentioned in Luke 16:18, even though Luke’s gospel doesn’t devote much time to this topic. Yet I think that it merits a look. We’re going to look at what happens when two people become one… and then become two again.
So open your Bibles with me, and let’s turn to Luke 16, verse 18. “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Putting this verse back in its context, we’ll see that Jesus was speaking to the Pharisees about their disrespect for God’s law. In this case, they were doing so by not respecting God’s teaching on divorce.
For the Pharisees the whole debate about divorce comes from Moses’ statement in Deuteronomy 24:1 “If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house.”
The two opposing views on this passage came from two rabbis: Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai. Rabbi Hillel said a man could give his wife a "certificate of divorce" if she “displeased” him, be it for burning the food or nagging too much. One rabbi taught that a man had grounds for divorce if he “found a woman fairer than she.” Rabbi Shammai believed that a man could divorce his wife only if she had been unfaithful to him; that is, "something indecent" referred to adultery.
Now if you’ve studied this before, you probably remember that Jesus, as recorded in the gospel of Matthew, twice taught in agreement with Rabbi Shammai, teaching that adultery is grounds for a divorce. My feeling, however, is that we’ve spent way too much time looking at that exception. If you had lived in the first century and had received the gospel of Luke, you probably wouldn’t even know about this “escape clause.” We’ve spent way too much time talking about when you can and why you can and not enough time talking about God’s point of view! Isn’t that why the divorce rate in the church rivals that of the world?
Let’s go to the book of Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament. In Malachi 2:13-16 we have a wonderful look into God’s heart as he discusses divorce. Hear these words:
Mal. 2:13 Another thing you do: You flood the LORD’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. 14 You ask, “Why?” It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.
Mal. 2:15 Has not [the LORD] made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. And why one? Because he was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth.
Mal. 2:16 “I hate divorce,” says the LORD God of Israel, “and I hate a man’s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment,” says the LORD Almighty.
So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith.
I want you to take this away this morning: God hates divorce. God hates divorce. And as children of God, as imitators of Christ, we should hate it as much as he does.
Please don’t tune me out yet nor get upset at what I’ve said. Fortunately, I don’t know any of the stories behind the divorces that have occurred in this congregation. I may know bits and pieces here and there, but I don’t have the details on any of them. I will not stand in judgment on anyone here that has gotten a divorce. And I have a special message for you: God hates divorce, but he loves divorced people. And as a child of God, as an imitator of Christ, I should love you too.
That being said, I still need to speak the truth on divorce, the truth that is revealed in God’s word. And the central part of that truth is: God hates divorce.
One reason why the divorce rate has climbed in recent years is that people aren’t that concerned with what God hates and what he doesn’t hate. We look at marriage in much the same way as the Pharisees did, seeing it as a business agreement or a social commitment. We forget to see it as the sacred act that it is. We get caught up in wedding dresses, tiered cakes and painted cars and forget what’s really going on.
To understand how God feels about divorce, we need to see how he looks at marriage. Look at what he says in Malachi.
(1) God is witness to a vow that we have made. We don’t talk much about vows, especially because Jesus taught against their overuse. Yet we do talk about our wedding vows, and we need to remember that that’s exactly what they are. Vows.
Keep Malachi handy, but turn over with me to Ecclesiastes 5. Let’s read the first 7 verses.
Eccl. 5:1 Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong. 2 Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few. 3 As a dream comes when there are many cares, so the speech of a fool when there are many words.
Eccl. 5:4 When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow. 5 It is better not to vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it. 6 Do not let your mouth lead you into sin. And do not protest to the [temple] messenger, “My vow was a mistake.” Why should God be angry at what you say and destroy the work of your hands? 7 Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore stand in awe of God.”
God takes vows very seriously, and so should we. In fact, I think this is the basic problem in our world today when it comes to marriage. We don’t stand in awe of God. We don’t consider the seriousness of making a vow before God. Today people want to say vows like, “I pledge to love you until our love dies.” That’s not God’s way.
When Jesus talked about the seriousness of marriage in Matthew 19, his disciples responded: “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.” To which Jesus basically replied: “That’s right.” And he would say that today. If you can’t live up to God’s high standards you are better off staying single than you are to risk breaking a vow before God. In Malachi 2, God condemns the people for “breaking faith” with one another.
Turn back with me to Malachi 2. Here’s another look into God’s point of view.
(2) When two people marry, they become one. We say, “Oh, what lovely symbolism.” And God says, “No… what a lovely reality.” Two people become one. This is a reality. God creates one new being out of the two.
If this is hard for you to see, I want you to think about how your life began. God took chromosomes from your father’s body and chromosomes from your mother’s body and made a new being… you. This is what happens physically. And the same thing happens spiritually. God takes two people and makes a new being… a married couple.
That’s why living together is so damaging to people. They experience this oneness, yet try to make it temporary. God wants to permanently fuse people together. That was his plan from the beginning: one man, one woman, joined together for life. Anything else is outside of God’s plan. There was a time in our society when this was an accepted norm. No homosexual marriages, no cohabitation, no “no fault” divorce. But now we find that our families are falling apart because we do not recognize the sanctity of marriage.
Is there a time when divorce is okay? The answer is “NO.” It may be justifiable, it may be necessary, but it is never okay. God hates divorce, even in those rare instances where he permits it.
Do you remember the story of Aron Ralston from last year? Aron Ralston loves the outdoors, hiking and trekking in the mountains. Last May he was hiking alone when a boulder fell and pinned him by the arm. For five days he waited for rescue. Then, facing dehydration and death, he took an incredible decision. He took a pocketknife and slowly amputated his own arm, freeing him and allowing him to hike out to safety.
What would it take to come to a decision like that? How desperate would you have to be to cut off a member of your own body? Would you turn to that solution quickly, or would you first explore every other possibility? Only when faced with death would a man do such a thing. So should be divorce. It is a desperate act, a self-mutiliation. It is the amputation of a part of our selves. We should resort to it only in extreme circumstances.
When you take a course in wilderness survival, they rarely teach you how to cut off your own arm. Why? Because it is assumed that you won’t ever reach that state of desperation. What if our teaching on divorce was similar? What if we could go back to a time when divorce was a rarity among us and not the norm?
During the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, the Iraqi Air Force was equipped with the MiG-29, one of the most technologically advanced planes of all time. Yet they suffered an incredibly high rate of loss of these planes, even when facing the Irani force that had inferior equipment. The makers of the MiGs went to study the situation, and I once heard that they discovered the following. These planes were equipped with an alarm that warned a pilot whenever a guided missile had locked onto their plane. The alarm was designed to allow the pilot to take evasive measures, which were successful more often than not. But the Iraqi pilots had a different reaction when that alarm went off. They hit the eject button! They saved themselves, but lost their planes unnecessarily.
Are we hitting the eject button when we should be trying to save our marriages? Has it become to easy for us to bail out when we should be trying to fly higher? Why is it that at one time over 90% of our marriages held together, but not so anymore?
I learned a great life lesson once from some scraggly college kid whose name I don’t even know. I was 8 or 9 years old and was taking swimming lessons from the Red Cross. The day came for our swim test to pass from Advanced Beginners to Intermediate, and we each took our turn trying to do the different exercises on our way across the pool and back. Each person before me had tried and failed. One girl had made it to the other side and started back, but that was as far as she got. My turn came, and I started out, waiting to reach that moment when I too would admit failure. At one point, I felt the familiar burning sensation of water filling my nose, and I stopped and grabbed the side of the pool. This young man towered over me as I looked up from the water and screamed, “Why did you stop?” I gave him the obvious answer, “I got water in my nose.” And he then uttered the one word that I will never forget: “So?” That’s when I realized that I didn’t have to stop, I had merely chosen to stop. I learned that many times finishing something is merely about “stick-to-itness.” As you can probably guess, on my next try I was the first one in the group to pass the test. And, not surprisingly, several others in the class passed after that.
What does that have to do with marriage and divorce? I think we need to question our reasons and motives for giving up on a marriage. Are we giving up to quickly? Have we lost our “stick-to-itness.” I also think that we need to consider the impact our example has on others.
Do you want to know one of the real reasons I feel the need to teach on this subject? It happened almost a year ago, when I was teaching the high school kids on Wednesday night. During one lesson, I got them to think about where they would be ten years from now. I’ll never forget the words of one boy who grew up in our church. “Wow, in ten years, I’ll probably be married. I may even be divorced by then.” Is that how we want our young people to think? Do we want them to go into their marriages thinking that divorce is a strong possibility for their future? Or do we want something better for them?
Albert Einstein once gave this definition of insanity: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Look at our church. Look at our families. Is this what we want? If not, we’ve got to do something different.
We have to break the cycle. Painful as it is, our generation has to admit that we were wrong, that we have not looked at marriage the way God looks at marriage. We have to teach our young people that God’s people are different from the world, that our marriages are for life.
Let me tell you something else I heard from one of our young people in class just a few weeks ago. As we discussed premarital sex, he asked, “Why do people worry about waiting until they’re married when so many marriages end in divorce anyway?” Do you see what we are doing to our young people? We have robbed them of the concept of the sanctity of marriage. We have robbed them of the hope of “’til death do us part.”
If it bothers you that I haven’t given more time to the exceptions, more time to those rare moments when divorce is the answer, remember our young people. Hear the words that come from their hearts. The next time you hear of a young girl getting pregnant, think about who taught them that marriage was a trivial thing. The next time a couple decides to move in together, remember where they learned those lessons.
We’ve got to break the cycle. We’ve talked enough about the “excepts” and “in the case of” and the “what about whens.” It’s time to teach one clear message on divorce: God hates divorce. We’ve got to say, “We’re sorry. We were very wrong.” We’ve got to teach our children that divorce is not a Christian thing. We’ve got to stand up and teach that lesson, even if it’s embarrassing for us or painful for some. We’ve got to break the cycle.
