Sermon
What The Bible Teaches About Divorce And Remarriage (Part 1)
January 23-24, 1999
Pastor Donald Sheley

Would you take your Bible and join with me in Matthew's gospel chapter 5. For a number of weeks now we have been working through this marvelous sermon known as the Sermon on the Mount. We're just taking it a verse at a time, sometimes two verses, sometimes three, but we're really seeking to understand what Jesus was teaching in this marvelous, marvelous sermon. Now, might I make this observation that when you go through the scriptures as we do here, for the last 40 years as your pastor we have just simply taken entire books of the Bible or particular sections of the scripture or an entire chapter. But we go through verse after verse, sometimes word after word, and we do this because we really do want to grow in the grace and the knowledge of our wonderful Lord and Savior and His word. Now we call that expository preaching, and you just simply take it verse after verse, word after word, and it's much more challenging.

There is another kind of preaching known as thematic preaching and that is the pastor selects a theme that he wants to talk about and then he finds a number of scripture verses to support his theme. And thus, he can talk about any theme that he feels comfortable with and most of them do. There are just some subjects that some preachers, many of us, just stay away from. But when you approach the scriptures from an expository point of view, you can't leave out any verses. We're challenged and I'm challenged, and there are sometimes that I come across subjects that for years I've not spoken on, and I have to do research so that we can understand all of the scriptures. And today, we come to one of those subjects that is not too frequently handled in the pulpit because it is a sensitive, it is a tender, and it's a very difficult subject and that's the subject of divorce. 

We're in chapter 5 verse 31. Remember last week He talked about adultery, so did we. The week prior He talked about murder, so did we. Today Jesus wants to talk about divorce. Look at what He says. "Furthermore it has been said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' "But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery. Now the amazing thing to me is that Jesus takes a subject so intense, so broad, and so much a part of human life and yet He talks about it in two verses. And what we're going to find as we search through the scriptures, the teachings of God's word are very simple on this subject, very simple. 

Now I would like to read some opening comments, and in fact, much of our lesson today and next Lord's Day, I will stay very, very close to my notes. And the reason for this is that oft times when you talk about a subject that is very tender and very sensitive, sometimes you are misunderstood. And sometimes our thought process begin; as I would say something to you, then you begin to take a journey, a mental journey, off on some pathway of thought. And I've had folks come up to me after the service and say, Pastor thank you for saying what you said. And I say, well what did I say. And then they'll tell me and I think to myself; I didn't say that. What actually happened is in as the Holy Spirit is speaking to us as we study the scriptures, we often start down a process of thought that the Holy Spirit wants to talk to us about. And I think that's wonderful, but also sometimes if I'm not clear and precise you will misunderstand and it may come to you in a twisted way which I do not want it to, so I will adhere very, very closely to the scriptures for my protection and for yours.

Divorce is not pleasant or easy. It is painful and it is heartbreaking and its effects live on generation after generation. In that over 50% of marriages end in divorce, almost every person in this congregation has been touched and hurt by its effects. My own personal family has been shattered and almost extinguished by the unwanted tyrant; divorce. I know its pain just like you. Therefore, I do not speak with any sense of arrogance or judgment today. It has been my prayer in preparing these messages that God would use these moments together as a time of learning and a time of healing. Divorce causes enough pain and enough guilt, and I do not want to add to that as a preacher. 

Secondly, after studying this subject for hours and days and reading hundreds of pages of exposition on the subject, it is obvious to me that the evangelical church holds various and conflicting views. Thus, creating such confusion within the body of Christ on this subject. Some writers are gracious and respectful of other positions and some are very adamant and judgmental, and I might add, very pharisaical when it comes to this subject. But our goal will be to examine as much of the scripture which deals with the subject as possible. Then, draw the obvious conclusions from the text without trying to twist them to mean or to prove something or a position we may want to defend. I want the Bible just to clearly say what it says and we'll leave it there. I do not wish to go where the scripture does not go on this subject. 

My viewpoint is very unimportant. God's word is eternally important. There is a temptation to wander off on paths of personal situations and problems and seek to give some wisdom, but as your pastor I've learned long ago that in most situations I only have partial information concerning the breakup or the downfall of a marriage, and therefore it is unwise for me to sit with the ancient Pharisees in judgment. I will not do that. The material on the subject is so extensive therefore that we will take at least two Sundays to cover the material. And when we conclude, may each of us have a biblical understanding which brings us to a place of personal peace and joy in our present relationship with Jesus Christ. May the wonder of His grace and His mercy overwhelm us and even though many of us have sinned grievously in this area, may we experience the forgiveness and the love of Christ is my prayer. 

Jesus says, "Furthermore it has been said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' "But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery. Now Jesus set the background for this subject back in verse 20 of the same chapter. He says, "For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will be no means enter the kingdom of heaven. And we learned that the scribes and the Pharisees were the religious leaders of the nation and they were looked upon as the most spiritual people and if anybody was to go to heaven, the scribes and the Pharisees would get there. And they're standing in the congregation and Jesus said I want you to know that if you don't have a religion any better than these guys, you're going to go to hell along with them because they're not going to heaven.

Now that was a battering and a shattering statement. Here are these arrogant religious leaders who had given themselves and the nation to think that they were the ones who were going to heaven and Jesus said your not going to make it. Because if your righteousness is no better than theirs, they're not going into heaven, and neither will you. And what Jesus does we've observed in Matthew 5, He selects six areas of life, six illustrations and He shows how the teachings of the scribes and the Pharisees was so absolutely opposite to the teachings of almighty God. When He says, "You have heard of old", He is not in any way correcting the teachings of Moses. 

What He is saying is over the centuries these religious leaders known as scribes and Pharisees they had twisted and warped and confused and changed dramatically the teachings of Moses; gave us all of these traditions which were an absolute violation to the teachings of almighty God. Jesus said you've heard it said this way, but I'm here to tell you what God thinks of it. And thus, Jesus clarifies the matter on divorce. Because the religious leaders, the scribes and the Pharisees, had so twisted the Old Testament it was necessary for Jesus to say, look at, they're wrong and I'm going to tell you what God thinks. And God doesn't mince words. 

If you want to back up just go to Malachi it's just right before you get to Matthew. It's the last book in the Old Testament. I mean God's straight out on this one. You don't have to ask God what He thinks of it. Malachi 2:16. Look at what it says. Malachi 2:16, "For the Lord God of Israel says That He hates divorce, (why?) For it covers one's garment with violence." It's a Hebrew euphemism that says once you have gone through this shattering experience you live with its results the rest of your life. It marks you and it scars you and it covers you with its wrong. And I think every person sitting here today who has gone through divorce says I agree with God, I hate it too. I've gone through its pain. I've gone through its anguish. I've lived through it and I agree with God I hate it too. God said I hate divorce for what it does to people, and what it does to families, and how it mares and scars those who go through it. It really does. 

Now the many confused and conflicting ideas in our day about the biblical teaching on divorce are not caused by a deficiency in God's revelation, but by the fact that sin has clouded men's mind to the straight forward simplicity of what God has said on the subject. It's interesting. I said Jesus talked about the subject with two verses. It's not God's problem that we're so confused, it's ours because we read God's word through the lens of our own preconceptions and our carnal dispositions. And that's why we come up with some of the interpretations as twisted and as wrong and as corrupted at the Pharisees of old. If we will just let God's word say what it says instead of trying to twist it and make it say what we want it to say. Just let it say it and leave it there. That's what we want to do in our study. 

The sacred institution of marriage has always been under attack by Satan and his emissaries from the very beginning of time. Look at what he did to the first family. Adam and Eve because of the sin, then pain in childbirth, and two little boys are born and one murders the other, and a home is torn apart by a tragedy. Satan has always attacked the family. Every day. And I get tired of some of these folks who are against the family. 

A British physician named David Cooper in his book on The Death of The Family, suggests that the best thing society could do is simply abolish the family altogether. And he claims that it's the primary conditioning device for a western imperialistic worldview. He hates the family too doesn't he? Kate Millett, an advocate of women's liberation, recently wrote in her book entitled Sexual Politics, the family unit must go. Why? Because it's the family that has oppressed and enslaved womanhood. Sounds like a liber doesn't it? 

I say that the family has always been under attack, and it's always had its enemies and it has it today. Thank God, out of Harvard Medical School has come some common sense and some profound and startling proclamations. His name is psychiatrist Armand Nicholi, one of the world famous psychiatrists. Now he's not a Christian, but he has some interesting things to say about the family. Let me read them to you. 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. If any one factor influences the character development and the emotional stability of an individual, it is the quality of the relationship he or she experiences as a child with both parents, and he underlines 'both'. 

Conversely, if people suffering from severe non-organic emotional illnesses. In other words, something that's not brought about by a physical cause, an emotional illness. They have one experience in common. All of them have gone through the absence of a parent through death, divorce, or for some other cause. He goes on to say that a parent's accessibility either physically or emotionally or both can profoundly influence a child's emotional health. What has been shown to contribute most to the emotional development of the child is a close, warm, sustained, and continuous relationship with both parents. Yet certain trends in our society make this most difficult. 

What's his point? He is saying because of the breakdown of the home caused by divorce the most tragic thing is the results of the children and the markings and the scaring that takes place because of divorce. Tomorrow morning at 7:00 the doors will open and 1,000 plus children will come rushing into this building for school. It takes place every day of the week. Over 50% of these children come from broken homes with only one parent present, and we as administrators and educators, you can immediately pick up from a child the deficiency that comes from a broken home. And not only that, we have to live with these situations where homes break up during the school year and we watch those little lives traumatically affected. They come in mad. They come in broken. They come in with tears because their home now is broken, and we try as a Christian school to provide that close, warm, sustained, and continuous relationship that those children do not get at home. That's our challenge as Christian educators. I know the pain. These little children.

I told you some time ago. I had a little boy come through the front door. His mother just dropped him off and left, and he came up to me with a tear in his little eye and said, Pastor would you be my daddy? I knew the story. That little guy's daddy no longer came home a night. And what this psychiatrist is saying is these broken homes and these divorces are causing scared and marred little children that grow up to carry their wounds all the way through life. Now he goes on to say there are a number of trends and situations that are the most destructive to our families. Number one: married mothers of young children working outside the home. Now remember he's not a Christian, but he is saying, and we know that 70% of the mothers now in our homes here in the Bay Area they must work. You've got to have two incomes to supply to keep the family together. He's just simply saying that the children feel that and there's a discontinuance in the home life that mares them, and he says that families who have to work and the children pay the price in their childhood.

Secondly, he says the tendencies for families to move frequently. 50% of the population of the United States lived at a different address 5 years ago. Now what that tells me as a pastor, if I've been here 40 years, we have built 4 brand new congregations. Because if half the congregation changes every 5 years, then we have a new congregation every 10 years. Now all we got to do is go back in our rolls and that is a fact. But what he says is this mobility of society, what it does is the result has left the children without roots and the joys of extended friendship. We move from city to city as parents and we go into their little bedroom, tear up their bed, put it in a U-haul trailer and take it some place else. But we've done even more than that; we've torn away form them their friends down the block and thus they grow up without a sense of roots and extended friendships. And it marks them and they have a sense of insecurity that they always live with because we move them as parents. 

He goes on to say that the invasion of the television is destroying the family. He said if we lived to be 80 years of age, and we're an average American person, we will spend 4,000 of those days in front of a television set. And what he is saying is the television set is the most influencing factor in most homes today. And that's why I say, mom and dad, for most of us we could use some real good common sense and take that thing and throw it away. Get it out of the home because of its destructive value. It doesn't have its limitations any more. You say, have you got a Bible verse for that? No, but I sure got some personal reasons for it.

Fourthly, he says the lack of controls in our society. There are no moral standards. You see. What happened back in the 60s, we threw the Bible out of the schools. The moral guidelines are no longer there and so now we've raised a generation of children who have grown up and they have no sense of what is right and wrong. And the psychiatrist says thus deep moral confusion as to what is right and what is wrong exists across society. And he says this moral confusion produces intense guilt which results in aberrant behavior. With no standards of morality, there will be violent behavior because the people will be unable to control their impulses and perverted sexual activity will explode into every phase of society. 

What's he simply saying? You raise a generation without moral guidelines, which we've done in our nation, you cannot teach morals in a public school. It's whatever anybody thinks. What they want to make as right and what they want to make as wrong. And I'll tell you ladies and gentlemen we're headed towards an age of anarchy because these kids feel absolutely guilt ridden and they feel without any moral foundations. And then the old psychiatrist makes this observation, and this one really blew my mind. He said that they did a study in a small town in the United States and it indicated that the average father spends only 37 seconds a day with his children. Did you hear that dads? And what he's simply saying is our children grow up without the ability and the privilege of getting to know us and to share their stories, and to share their time, and to share their tears, and to share their training. And the home ends with no communication and the children bear the pain of it.

You say, I agree with this old professor. He's got it, but he says look at I'm going to tell you what the number one is. He listed above reasons for the breakdown of society. He says that by far the major cause of emotional problems and the major detriment to the family is divorce. And here's what he says. The trend towards quick and easy divorce and the ever increasing divorce rate subjects more and more children to physically and emotionally absent parents. And if the trend continues and is not reversed, the quality of family life will discontinue and completely deteriorate producing a society with a higher incident of mental illness than ever before. And he said, in 20 years 95% of all beds in every hospital will be occupied by mentally ill people who have suffered the trauma of the brokenness of a home. Did you get that one? Some of you folks work in a hospital. He's saying that in the years to come 95% of your patients are going to be mental patients because their whole substructure of life has been ruined and they have no sense of security and no sense of direction. That's why I'm concerned today and that's why Jesus was concerned. 

You see, what was it that those Pharisees were preaching as righteousness that so absolutely irritated Jesus Christ? He said you say one thing. You say just divorce them and make sure you take care of the certificate, but He said I'll tell you it's far more sacred than that. What were the Pharisees teaching? There were two rabbinical schools. There were the liberals and there were the moderates. The moderates said there must be a reason such as adultery that divides the family. We'll accept that. But the old liberals, and this was by far the greater, more influencing sector of religious society in Jesus' day. They said you can get a divorce for anything you want to. I mean if she overcooks your dinner, you can kick her out of the house and say I divorce you. Or if she embarrasses you in front of your friend, you can just simply say I'm going to divorce you. 

Those religious leaders were teaching that you didn't even have to have a reason if you didn't want to. All you had to do was make sure you took care of the paperwork. Just make sure that you wrote the divorce, the certificate of divorce, and they were so technical. It could only have 12 lines and only could have so many letters in a line, and as long as you wrote it according to their tradition then you were off the hook. Now you can understand why Jesus is angry. Because if divorce was that easy in the days of Jesus, then the divorce rate was much higher then than it is today. Because the easier it is to get a divorce, the higher the rate goes up. And here you could just simply say let's sit down and write this. I got two witnesses. We sign it off. Say bye-bye. It's all over. Can you imagine the shattered society in which Jesus had to preach? 

In the Roman Empire you advertised how many divorces you had by how many rings you put on your fingers. That's why ladies who wear a lot of rings sometimes bother me. But the more rings you wore, the more you advertised how many times you'd been divorced. Marriage was held with very low esteem, and I can imagine that as Jesus was standing there preaching this sermon there were people across that audience who had listened to those religious leaders, dissolved their marriages, and married over and over again. There was no limitation. That's why Jesus said you've heard it said one thing, but I wanted you to know they're a bunch of liars. Their lies have destroyed your lives and destroyed the families, and I want you to know as far as God is concerned there's a majesty and there's a sacredness about marriage that's indissoluble.

He says I'll give you one exception. One exception only for the dissolution of a marriage by divorce, just one. Martial infidelity. Adultery. Sexual immorality. That will dissolve the marriage Jesus says. Nothing else will. You see they were teaching that as long as you had a divorce and you had your certificate you were all right. You just stack up the certificates. And I had somebody come to me some months ago and said Pastor I got a divorce. You did. I knew all the subject. I said, listen, I want you to know something. I don't care if you've got divorce papers from every court in California and every court in the nation and every court in the world and you can stack them a thousand miles high, those divorce papers mean nothing to God, and God is still holding you accountable for something you destroyed that was a sacred thing to Him. Your excuse for your divorce is totally unbiblical and you're not released from that. God is still holding you accountable and we'll hold you accountable for that. 

You see what those Pharisees were saying, as long as you've got your divorce papers it's all right. God says just a moment. I created marriage and it is a delightful, wonderful relationship that God brings two people together and forms families. And God says no court in the world has the authority to dissolve what I created. That's still true today. We've got all these courts and all these laws that make up our society and people think as soon as I walk into a court and get my divorce papers it's all over. No it isn't folks for a lot of people because God says I will only consider one reason, none other, for divorce. It's that simple. My time is gone. Next Lord's Day we're going to go through the scriptures and see if that's the consistent teaching of the scriptures, and it will amaze you how simple God settles the issue.

Let's bow our heads in prayer shall we. Lord Jesus, may none of us ever be guilty of taking something so sacred as our marriage lightly. And may, Lord Jesus, we do everything we can to make our homes and our marriages what You want them to be.

Let's stand together, shall we? May God's peace and His joy and His divine benediction be upon us all. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit we pray. And everybody said. Amen. God bless you. God bless you.