The Biblical View of Divorce

If it's hard to think about family without thinking about marriage, in today's society it is, unfortunately, equally hard to think about marriage without thinking about divorce. Divorce has become something of a guiltless sin. We gloss over it, ignore it and excuse it for any reason, biblical or not. And by "we" I mean evangelical Christians, not the lost of the world.

The Bible takes a far different view. According to the Bible, there are only two reasons for divorce. First is adultery and the second is abandonment. In other words, if your spouse leaves and you can't find them, or if they divorce you and you can't keep them from it, you are, as Paul put it, not under bondage.

In any other circumstances, remarriage after a divorce is adultery.

That's not a very pleasant conclusion, but it is the Biblical one. Abuse is not an excuse for divorce. Neither is mental cruelty or incompatibility or any of the myriad other things that are used in the courts today.

I don't mean to say, of course, that a person should stay in the house with an abusive spouse until they or their children are killed. But what I do mean to say is that while separation may be necessary to save lives, divorce is not an option. And separation is an option only in exigent circumstances. That is why it is so important to marry carefully and within the Lord.

Of late there has even been a huge debate over whether ministers and deacons should be allowed to serve while divorced, asserting that Paul was referring to plural marriage in the qualifications for ordination, not divorce. That is a patently self-serving view.

The truth is, plural marriage is an Eastern, not a Western, custom. Although it did happen in the West, it was uncommon. The cultures of Greece, Rome and Israel were all monogamous. And every one of them had a huge problem with divorce – with rates rivaling those in America today. That is the problem Paul was addressing.

If you doubt that, then think on this. The Jews had periodically had issues with plural marriage in the Old Testament. Yet, in the gospels, Jesus never once addressed plural marriage, but repeatedly addressed divorce.

Here's the thing – as evangelicals we either live by the Bible or we don't. If we pick and choose, or change it to suit ourselves, we're doing no different from those we preach to. This is exactly the tactic of the homosexual and abortion lobbies. Jesus said if the salt of the earth has lost its taste, it is good only to be thrown out. He also said to get the beam out of our own eye before we went after the speck in someone else's.

In other words, we can't preach that others should hold fast to the word of God, as written, unless we do it.

As a final word, what about the person who is already divorced? If they have not remarried, they should seek to be reunited with their original spouse. If they have remarried, they should stay with the spouse they are now married to, and cannot ever remarry their original spouse. Beyond that, they should ask God's forgiveness, which He will grant if they are sincere, and accept the limitations God has placed on their activities gracefully and with the understanding that we all must accept God's limitations at some point, and from there seek to live God's will for the rest of their lives the very best they can. This, of course, is the recipe for forgiveness of any sin.

Deuteronomy 24: 1-4, Matthew 5:32, I Corinthians 7:15, I Timothy 3:12, Titus 1:5-6, I John, 1:9