The Ancients We’re Told #5

So this morning we're going to be moving on in the Sermon on the Mount from our treatment of adultery, which is what our past few sermons have been about. We're going to be moving on to the next section, which addresses a topic that's closely related to adultery, and that is divorce. We'll be spending at least two weeks in this section. And as we study this passage, at times I'm going to rely heavily on other passages of Scripture that deal with this topic. One of the things in preparing... I became convinced of was that what Matthew gives us here is a short summary of what the Bible has to say about divorce. And for us to understand what Matthew is saying here in short form, we need to understand what he says in other places like Matthew 19, as well as 1 Corinthians and Malachi. So we're going to be looking at a couple of different passages over the next couple of weeks, all aimed at us getting a better understanding of this section here.

Now, this is a sin. First of all, I should say that divorce is sinful, except in a very few cases, which we'll come to figure out as we work through. To get divorced is to commit a great sin. I'm also convinced that this sin has become so common, so prevalent in the church. I could say in society, but I think it would do us better to say this is a common sin in the church. But I'm convinced of one of two things. Either we have no idea what the Bible says about it, or two, we know what the Bible says and we simply don't care. Whatever the reason is, the results have been devastating. Some examples would be that Christians don't want to get married anymore. They just don't want to get married. They'd be happy to fornicate, they'd be happy to live together, but they'd be not happy to get married. Except, of course, for the pressure that...

homosexual marriage has put on the church and says, you have to recognize this, we want to get married. And the church has been left flat-footed with no response to this sort of pressure because we don't know what marriage is and divorce has become so common we just go, well, I guess it's just a normal part of life. We also know that for those who do get married in the church at large, that their odds of maintaining their marriage until one of them dies is no better than those that are enacted outside the church. that somewhere close to half of all marriages, when we look at it as a whole, end in divorce, outside the church as well as inside the church. Now, I will say that there are some very basic things that you can do to change that percentage quite a bit. It really isn't a coin toss as to whether your marriage will end in divorce or not. But if you don't do those things, it can be a very, very scary endeavor.

And I think that's why we've seen so many marriages fall apart around us, why we see so many divorces, why when we go to our family functions, we have not just our mom and dad's families to go to, but our stepmoms and our stepdads. And so as we work our way through this passage, we're going to be covering a lot of ground, but the goal will be simple, and that is to understand and to obey what the Bible says about divorce. This morning we're going to be focusing on the biblical context of the first verse, verse 31, that we're studying. And my hope is that you will see the temptations that you face in your own marriage and that you see that those temptations are not new or unique. The people around you, the people that were addressed by Jesus, even the people who were around at Moses' time, all faced the same temptations and committed the same sins for the same reasons.

Our job isn't to look down on them and to think, well, I would never do that, I can't believe it, but rather to learn all that we can from what Jesus says here so that we are inoculated against Satan's efforts to destroy our marriages. And you should realize from the beginning that when you get married, you are stepping into the crosshairs of Satan in a particular way. He is going to aim to destroy your marriage. You shouldn't be surprised when that happens or shocked, but you do need to be prepared for it so that you don't end up defenseless to his attacks. Our text this morning is Matthew 5, verses 31 and 32. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. It was said, whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So if you look up on the screen in verse 31, you'll see that there's a large section of that verse, basically the whole verse, that is in capital letters. And when you find a passage of Scripture in our Bibles that's all in capital letters like that, it means that it's a quote from another place in Scripture. Jesus is quoting something. He's quoting the Old Testament. And the passage that he's quoting is Deuteronomy chapter 24. And this is what the law says, God's law says about divorce. And so I want to read to you this passage in its context. So Deuteronomy 24, verse 1, it says, When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand, and sends her from her house, you know, she is free. I'm not going to go on and continue reading. That section goes on through verse 6. But what we have are the essential components here in this verse. A man and a woman get married. The husband finds some sort of indecency in her, some sort of problem, something he doesn't like. And on those grounds, he's able to write her a certificate of divorce and to send her away. And so the question we have before us first is, what was this indecency?

What was the grounds in the Old Testament for divorce? This is the main clause, the main point of that passage there in Deuteronomy that Jesus is working with. Now, he's working to correct their understanding of divorce. And we can understand from reading Matthew 31 and 32 that he is saying, you guys get divorced for lots of reasons, and you shouldn't. In fact, you should never get divorced except for, so we can understand without digging in too deep from the very beginning, He is saying, you guys are doing something all over the place you should be doing almost never, except in this circumstance. They would have understood what they were doing, what their practice was, as appropriate, good, acceptable. The divorce was no big deal, much like it's seen today. It's just part of life. If you were to talk to the people that you know who've gotten divorced and you ask them, why did they get divorced? Many times you'll find the reasons they give are not,

Terrible, bad, much different than what you would find in your own marriage on any given day. We just grew apart. We just don't love each other anymore. I'm just sick and tired of them doing fill in the blank. You will hear they cheated on me. You will hear they were abusive. You will hear that they won't work. But which one of these things? What would it take for someone if we said, why did you get a divorce? And they said. This is what was happening. What would it take for us to be shocked at the fact that they've spoiled their marriage, that they've ruined it, that they've broken it? Many times we listen and we go, well, yeah, that's what happens. And it seems, if we read this passage from Deuteronomy, that we could read it and say, yeah, it's a pretty open-ended endeavor. You can get married, you can get divorced. If the husband finds some indecency in his wife, he can send her away.

There's another place here in Matthew 19, and this is one of the passages we're going to spend a little bit of time in, where they ask Jesus about divorce. And he gives a more extended answer than he does here in the Sermon on the Mount. So I want to read that to you. Matthew 19, this is verses 3 to 9. It says, Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and asking, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? And we should pay very particular attention to the words. They say, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

And he, Jesus, he answered and said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? And said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate him. So this is Jesus' answer, and we're going to dig into it a little bit. But then they restate their question a little different. They say to him, why then did Moses command... to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away. And he said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning, it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for immorality and marries another woman commits adultery. So the Pharisees were trying to catch Jesus in an answer here. They did this numerous times.

They'd pose a question and they'd think, we've got him. There's no way to answer this question without us being able to accuse him of one thing or the other. We're going to ask him a yes or no question. And if he says yes, then we'll accuse him of this. And if he says no, then we'll accuse him of that. And so in this situation, if he had answered their question, is it lawful for any reason to divorce your wife, if Jesus had said no, then they would accuse him of abolishing the law, of doing away with it. You remember just ahead of our section here in Matthew 5, He says, I didn't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. But if he had said, no, there is no circumstance under which a man can divorce his wife, they would say, but the law says that we can. Look right here in Deuteronomy 24 where Moses said we should write these laws. So they thought if he says no, we've got him. If he says yes, then they'll say, surely there's reasons we can't divorce our wives. You're saying we can divorce them for any reason at all? And so they thought whatever Jesus answered, yes or no, we've got him.

But Jesus doesn't answer their question with a yes or no. His answer is a perfect answer. And he argues, instead of saying yes or no, he argues from creation. He says, haven't you read that from the beginning it wasn't this way? That God made man and woman for one another. And that when he joins them together in marriage, man should never try to break that up. Never try to break that up. That that was never God's design. That men would take in hand to tear apart the things that God has put together. Let's restate their question. You do know that in Malachi 2, it says, I hate divorce, says the Lord, the God of Israel. He hates it. It's never been a part of his plan. It was not a part of creation. It's not a part of redemption. It's not something where we say, and this is a good way to grow in godliness. This is well-pleasing to our Lord. Divorce is never pleasing to God.

And I would go so far to say is even when you have biblical grounds for divorce, God's not sitting there smiling and going, I'm so glad that your marriage is dissolved. Divorce takes something. If marriage is supposed to be a picture of Jesus' relationship to his bride, the church, whenever there is a breaking of that bond in our marriages, we tell something about that relationship, and it's not the truth. You say, oh, unfaithfulness. Break that bond. Where would we be if God dealt with us or his church that way and said, oh, unfaithfulness. I'll no longer keep my word. And so the overarching theme or pressure that you're going to feel as we work our way through this passage is you should not get divorced. You should not think of it as an option. You should not live telling yourself that there are a few biblical reasons in which it's okay because you're a Christian.

And this is not something that God is indifferent about. It's not something that he says, well, you have to do what you have to do. You've met the requirements, and so now you can walk away. Even in circumstances where you can say there was an appropriate grounds for divorce, it is still devastating, and it is never without sin. In Deuteronomy, if we continue to read the part on down, there's this part where he says, if a man divorces his wife, finds some indecency in her, sends her away, She marries another man, and then that man sends her away. Her first husband may never remarry her because that would be an abomination to the Lord because they're messing around with their marriage in such a way that brings no honor to him. You might think, well, why would her first husband want to marry her again after the second husband divorced her or died? And I'd say it's very simple. He's jealous. If you read the commentators on that passage, that's what they'll all say is that the Lord said that to discipline the first husband's jealousy.

in his frivolity, his carelessness in sending his wife away, that what he has thrown away, he may never have back again because he threw it away. And so we should treat our marriages or the destruction of them with the utmost seriousness and sobriety. It's not something that we pick up and lay down, even though all of the pressure around us is to do just that, to think, well, it's just an unfortunate part of this life. Not everything goes the way it should go. So the question we've got to figure out is what that word uncleanness or indecency in Deuteronomy means. Now I want to read to you, if you were in men's group a few months ago, I read this passage to you. It's from a commentator named John Gill. And he's working to sort out what this word means. What are the grounds? What did the Jews understand, the people Jesus was talking to? What did they understand this passage to mean? What was Moses getting at here? Because we might look at it and say,

I think that what Moses meant by indecency was adultery. And John Gill says, no, that's not what they thought. There were different schools of thought. There were different rabbis that were sorting these things out, and he's going to name three of them. But I want you to pay attention to the reasons that the accepted rabbi, Hillel, gave as reasonable grounds for divorce. This is what it says. This is what John Gill said commenting on Deuteronomy 24. The word uncleanness or indecency does not signify adultery or any of the uncleanness forbidden in Leviticus 18 because those things were punishable by death. And so you wouldn't divorce someone for a sin that was punishable by death. So we're out of the category of it being what Jesus said. It's something else now. What is it? He says, those things were punishable by death when they were able to be proved. And where there was only a suspicion of adultery, the husband might make use of...

the bitter water, the Old Testament. And then he goes on and he says, though the house of Shammai, this is one of the rabbis who's trying to sort this all out, but the house of Shammai seemed to take it in this sense. For they say a man may not divorce his wife unless he found in her some unclean thing, some dishonest and wickedness, something dishonest and wicked, in which they ground these words. So that's what he says. Shammai says, well, he found some major problem in her. But he says, no, that's not what it is. And he goes on and he says, But the house of Hillel says, if she burned his food, if she spoiled it by over-salting or over-roasting it. And the third man, the third rabbi, Akiba, says, if he found another woman more beautiful than her or more agreeable to him. So you've got three men saying, you know, rabbis saying, here's what Moses meant. One guy said, there's some unclean, there's some real problem with her. There's this other guy who's like, well, she can't cook. And there's this other guy who's like, well, if he found someone better.

These are the three choices that they had to choose from. I'm not making this up. This is what they would have understood. But in neither his sense, Akiba, the one talking about finding a woman more beautiful, nor that of Shammai, the one who says that there was some uncleanness in her, neither one of their reasons are approved by the Jews in general. But that of the house of Hillel, the one who's talking about burnt food. And they suppose, the Jews, suppose that a man might divorce his wife. for any ill qualities of mind in her, or for any ill or impudent behavior of hers. As if her husband saw her go abroad with her head uncovered and spinning in the streets, or showing her naked arms to men, or having her garment slid on both sides, or washing in a bath with men or where men used to wash, or talking with every man or joking with young men. And you think, well, okay, some of these things sound like they could be heading toward adultery. And then he says, or that her voice is sonorous or noisy.

or that she has any disease of the body as leprosy or the like, or any blemishes such as warts are upon her, or any disagreeable smell that might arise from any part of the body, from sweat or from stinking breath. That was the acceptable understanding of what was grounds for divorce. By the rabbi Hillel, this is what the Jews understood Moses to be saying. You can basically divorce your wife for not knowing how to cook or having bad breath or a mole that you don't like. Now that's awful, isn't it? Do we have better reasons for getting divorced today? Are our reasons so much better than that? Do we not get irritated at the same sort of things? Burned food, an unpleasant voice, or bad breath? These are the things that Jesus' audience would have understood to be legitimate reasons to break up a marriage. Do these sorts of things bother you? I think they bother most people in their marriages. We do actually get upset about these things, don't we?

They're really small. I mean, when we say it out loud, we're like, these are really small, insignificant, really stupid, you know, the problems probably with me sort of things. But in the moment, how angry do you get at your spouse? And how quick are you to be like, you know, I wish I'd not married you? Now, maybe you say it and maybe you don't. But which one of us can admit we don't have these impulses in us? To get irritated at something in our spouse, something... insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and immediately jumped to, I can't stand this person. I wish I had married someone else, someone whose voice didn't sound that way, someone who knew how to cook a proper Thanksgiving dinner. Now, you did note in Matthew 19 where they says, well, why did Moses command us to get divorced? And Jesus changed it when he answered, and he says, he didn't command you, he permitted you. He permitted divorce. And the reason that he permitted divorce

It was because of their hardness of heart. They were hard-hearted toward one another. They didn't want to bear up under the burdens and the difficulties of life. And this is an issue for both men and women. You might think that in our passages it talks just about the man doing the divorcing and that the woman, there's very linear things. Some of that is just the way the culture would have operated at that time. A woman would have never thought, if I'm going to leave my house, in the society that she lived in, in Deuteronomy or even at Jesus' time, if a woman had... had left her home, she would have nowhere to go because of the shame involved in it. And we can look at that and say that's good or bad or otherwise. I'm not here to argue about that. I'm simply here to say that it was in the man's court to divorce his wife. And it would have been in the woman's court to do the sorts of things that would cause her husband to divorce her wife. Have you never pushed somebody to do the thing you wanted them to do that was wicked? I wish you would just do this so I could be free. And so while the passages speak only of the men doing the divorcing, we live in a different time.

And it's very common, even more common than not, that the women are the ones who initiate divorces in America. The vast majority of the time, it's wives that initiate divorces now, not men. But either the man or the woman could have a hard heart toward their spouse and work to dissolve their marriage. It's very easy for us to become embittered against one another. And the reason is because we have hard hearts. Your marriage is hard. One of the things I tell couples, young couples, and I know many of you I've said this to numerous times, Marriage is hard. Marriage is hard. And when you see a couple that's been married 40, 50, 60 years, you should not presume that they've been married that long because their marriage hasn't been hard. Their marriage has been hard because they're both sinners. And they didn't somehow grow up in the golden generation that didn't face these temptations. They've existed since before the time of Moses. In fact, that law that Moses wrote...

was not a proactive, here, we're going to have marriage, and here's the way out of it. It was written in response to the hardness of men's heart. If a man couldn't put his wife away, couldn't send her away because of his sin, he was likely to kill her. And so Moses, because of his hardness of heart, said, you can put her away, and she can go through society without shame because of your hardness of heart, man. But from the beginning, it wasn't this way. Men weren't supposed to be able to give in to their hardness of heart and to be able to throw away their wives or to kill them if they didn't want to deal with their marriage anymore. Now we might look at this and just go, this is just a bridge too far. I can't handle the thought of a husband thinking that he would kill his wife to get rid of her. Does that not still happen today? Does that not still happen? Do people not go to great lengths to break up and to dissolve their marriage and to try to

free themselves from the things that they don't want to deal with. Sure they do. You and I do it. Maybe not to this extent, but we look at what we want and we say, how can I get what I want? And every option's on the table. Just because we say, well, I wouldn't do that because I couldn't get away with it, doesn't make us any different than them. And so marriage is difficult. We do all have to fight against the hardness of heart toward our spouses. When you're young and your marriage is new, This is not the thing that you're dealing with as commonly as I think you will later on as you grow, as your marriage ages, as you have children, as they get older, as you feel more pressures, as you become more faithful. But as you get older, you will get frustrated with your spouse. You will get sick of it. I had a conversation recently with someone, and they said to me, I haven't seen them in years. And we had occasion to talk, and they said, I'm going to divorce my spouse.

That's what we were going to talk about. I knew their marriage was trouble, and they said, I'm going to divorce my spouse. And I'm listening to why, and I've known them for so long. And their marriage has always been hard, always been a very difficult marriage. And at one point I asked them on the phone, I said, okay, it's hard. Tell me what's different now than it was five years ago, or whenever, when we used to talk about it. And they said, well, it's just gotten worse. And I said. No, I've listened to what you described, and I've been to that rodeo multiple times with you where your marriage has been hard. You've dealt with these very things. It doesn't sound like it's worse. And they said, well, I'm just so tired of it. The difference is it's been years more of dealing with it, and I just don't want to do it anymore. And they're crying as they tell me this. And I love them, people I love.

Both of them, the husband and the wife. And it is a difficult marriage. And it's difficult because of both of them, not just one of them. And I'm left with having to figure out what I'm going to say to them. So what do I say? All I said to the person was, and Vanessa was with me at the time, and with fear and trembling, I said, I don't buy it. And they said, okay. And I said, I know it's hard, but you do not have grounds for divorce. I'm sorry it's hard. I'm very sorry it's hard, and we'll pray for you. But you don't have grounds for this. You've just been talking to yourself too much for too long, building up the trouble, downgrading the power of God. I'm sorry that it's hard. Now, you might listen to that story and think, glad I don't have a marriage like that. And if you don't, then praise God, because that's his mercy to you. All marriages are hard, but some more than others.

And so if you're new in marriage and you think, man, I don't know what you're talking about. You've told me this since premarital counseling, and I just haven't really made good contact with anything you've said about the difficulty of marriage, then thank God that he's giving you a season of preparation. Because there will be some season where it is difficult, where it is hard, where you run out of steam, and you think the solution would be my husband or my wife, getting rid of them. We do all have hard hearts and think that our spouses are the problem. And that's the direct result of our hardness of heart is we think our spouse is the problem. Now, your spouse is a problem, but so are you. So Moses gave a command that was a gracious allowance. It was gracious to the wife. In that law that says you can divorce, you can give your wife a certificate of divorce, one, it protected her life, and it removed her shame so that she could continue to live a life and not have to wear a scarlet letter, so to speak. That law is gracious because it restrained a greater evil.

And yet the Lord didn't give it because he didn't care about divorce or care about marriage. He gave it to restrain the wickedness of men's hearts. So the Jews had a way of excusing their behavior, even up until committing adultery and having a divorce. They had a way of saying, well, I'm allowed to. I'm allowed to. What Jesus says here is, no, you're not allowed to. You're not allowed to. And so if I could communicate to you the simple fact that when you, all of the questions about getting married and what your spouse is going to be like and what marriage to them will be like, I can tell you a couple of things. One, the vows that you take in marriage, you take by faith because you do not know what the future will hold, okay? When you say, till death separates us, and you might say, well, I didn't get married with those vows. And I say, but God made marriage and you're married and those are the terms of the thing you're doing.

whether you knew it or not at the time, right? You didn't read the fine print. You didn't know what you were committing to, but here you are committed to it till death separates us. And to this, I guarantee my faithfulness. Those are the marriage vows at the very end. And the reason that we take those things so serious on the front end is to prevent divorce later. It's meant to be a prophylactic, a way of protection, a way of keeping you from falling in and going, well, I didn't know that my spouse was going to be like this. When Vanessa and I were in premarital counseling, one of the questions that got asked of us was, can you live? Okay, that's a sin that your spouse has. Can you live with that the rest of your life? Because everyone goes into their marriage thinking, I'll change him. I'll change her. We'll change. They wouldn't do that forever. Surely, out of love for me and the Lord, they will just.

Be past that. And so we were asked, can you live with that sin the rest of your life? Because that's what getting married to this person means. And you don't want to think of it in those terms, but it's helpful to be told to think of it in those terms. Because it's very easy once you're in a marriage and you go, I didn't know it was going to be like this. It's very helpful to have had people in your past say, yeah, it is. Yeah, we told you. We didn't know the particulars, but we did tell you it was going to be hard and you were going to have these impulses. And you may not give in to them when?

They arise. And so this first verse, whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce, was something that the Jews abused. It's something that they used to justify their immoral behavior. That's not what we should do, ever. If you're married, one of you is going to die first, and the other one's going to be a widow. That's God's design, okay? So we have almost no widows here. But someday... all of us who sit with our wives or our husbands and love them will be without them. And that's God's design. We shouldn't take that design and rejigger it in such a way that says, it's not going to be death that separates us, it's going to be me. We shouldn't look to this passage that says, whoever sends him away, let him give her a certificate of divorce and say, okay, how can I get a legitimate excuse to get rid of my spouse? You shouldn't want to. And I say that and it's like, I know you'll want to.

At some point, you'll just be like, I can't deal with you anymore. But it's sinful for you to have those impulses. It's incredible to me to think of Jesus and all of the sins that his bride commits that we commit for millenniums, and he doesn't ever say, I'm done with you. And if that's how God is with us on a day-to-day basis, that he is merciful and long-suffering and bears with and forgives, Where do we get off thinking that we can just take our marriages and throw them away like last week's newspaper? Just because your marriage is hard, just because your spouse doesn't understand you, this is no reason, no reason at all to even entertain the thought of divorce. We tell people in premarital counseling, these are words you may never say. Now, why do we say that? Because we know they're going to be tempted to do it. And do you know why else we say it? So that when they say it,

You think, oh, if you just tell people not to do this, then all the problem is solved. And I say, no. If we did an exercise where everyone closed their eyes real hard and promised not to look and then raised your hand and said, have you ever said to your spouse something akin to, I want a divorce or I wish I had never married you? Raise your hand. You would be shocked at how many hands would go up in this room. You'd be shocked. If I asked the children, have you ever heard your parents say that? You'd be shocked at how many hands go up.

But we would rather bury all of that reality in the sand and act like that's not actually how it is. Good Christians don't even struggle and deal with that. They have good marriages. They have easy marriages. They're quick to repent. They're quick to confess their sins. They're quick to forgive. Are we? Are you? Am I? I'm not. And so it's very helpful for us to understand what Jesus is saying here, which for all intents and purposes is, you're married. and don't even think about getting a divorce. Well, I don't love my husband anymore. Well, then we'll need to work on that. My wife's a miserable shrew. Well, we're going to need to work on that. We're going to need to pray and work at it. Well, they won't come to counseling anymore. There's nowhere in the Scripture that says because your wife or husband is hard-hearted that you can now divorce them. And it's so hard for us to hear because in our society, we don't think we should have to ever bear with things that are very difficult for us, at least not for a long time.

And so I feel crazy standing up here and saying that to you, that you can have a really, really hard marriage. There can be real, real sins committed in the marriage. And the discussion does not turn toward divorce and saying, I want out. In our day, what would be brought up as a very good reason and why can't you is abuse. If someone is being abused, what should you do? I don't know. What should you do? What should you do? I'd call the police. But would you be surprised to know that many times when there is physical abuse in the home, what will happen is we'll divorce in a heartbeat, but we will not do as press charges. Do you know that? Do you know that that's what happens? The wife refuses. Someone else calls the police and all of a sudden she's there with a black eye. No, nothing's wrong. And it's even worse if the wife is the one who's physically abusive. Men would never admit that because what man wants to admit that his wife hits him?

but we'll divorce in a heartbeat. But man, if we want to adjust this, if we wanted to actually discipline that behavior, we're not really interested in that. And I want you to see that in our society, that's a problem. It's a problem that we would look at it that way and think, well, if this happens, then that's just, you know, we're just on the fast track. There's no other thing that can be done. If you were to come to our elders and say, my husband's hitting me, we'll get involved right along with the police because that's criminal. We'll get you and your children out of the house right now. Once the situation has died down, we may also ask you, why did he hit you? We may ask him, why did you hit her? Not because there's a good reason for it, but because it's possible that the wife pushed him to that point. It's another thing we talk about in premarital counseling. Men should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, there should never be physical violence in a marriage, ever. And then we say, women, do not confront your husband like you're a man.

Do not get in his face. Do not push him. Do not be physical with him and expect him not to respond physically. Are we justifying that sort of behavior from a man? Absolutely not. We would call the police on him if he did it. But we also tell the women, you have a way of pushing to that point. Don't do that. And these young couples, they look and they think, they look at me like I have a third eyeball right here when I say things like this to them. Sort of how you're looking at me now. Why are you talking to me? Like, we don't do that sort of stuff.

We don't have those sorts of temptations, don't you? Haven't you? If you were honest, marriages can be very difficult. We really can get very upset at each other. If I can just impress upon you, divorce does not solve the problem. Calling the police might be a help to solve the problem. Separating might be a help to solve the problem. But you should never get a divorce because you're angry at your spouse or because they frustrated you. One of the things I said to that... that friend of mine, is I said, you know what? You know what you need to do? I said, I'm not your pastor. What you need to do, you would never in a million years want to make the decision to divorce your spouse without your pastors and elders' direct involvement. And I'm telling you, you go ask your pastor, look him straight in the eye and say, you know my marriage. Do you think I have grounds for divorce? And ask him to say yes or no. Because he won't want to answer yes or no because he'll feel the pressure of it. You ask him, say, I want to do what honors God. My marriage is terrible.

Tell me if you think I have the grounds. And I said, the reason you need to do that is not just because so you know what to do. It's so that when Satan comes to you later after the fact and says what you did was wrong, you can say, I didn't do it by myself. I had counsel from people who keep watch over my soul. You should never be entertaining the thought, let alone acting on the thought, on the impulse to divorce somebody without talking to your pastors and elders, ever. If there's violence in your home, call your pastors and elders. Call the police. If you hate your spouse and you're embittered to them, call us. The last thing that you should do is have us find out through lack of attendance that all of a sudden their marriage is falling apart. And she filed for divorce or he filed for divorce or he's living in an apartment now. I said to that person, I said, they said, well, I just need a break. I just need to move out. I won't get a divorce. I just need to move out. And I said, you need to be honest with yourself. You know as well as I do, if you move out of that house, you'll never go back. And they said, you're right.

I said, then let's just be honest. You're just making, you're just spinning the story for why this is a good idea and it's not a good idea. Would you be surprised to know that that person called me a few days later or a week later and thanked me and said, thank you for telling me you didn't buy it. Our marriage has actually changed. I don't know if it's real repentance or what, but I'm thankful. And with fear and trembling, I said this stuff. I don't know if, Vanessa, I don't know if you thought I was scared when I was saying it, but I was like, oh, how can I like say the hard thing?

But I was convinced somebody had to say it because marriage is not just a contract between you and your spouse. God's reputation is at stake in your marriage and whether you make it work or not. Your children's spiritual health is at stake in whether you make it work or not. And it would be foolish for us to act like none of those things matter or that everyone else will have to understand the Lord as well as our children and all the people at the family gatherings. Well, they don't have to understand that you have a hard heart and you did what you wanted to do and you just let the damage roll out in every direction. They don't have to accept that and say, that's okay, it's just how it is. So next week we're going to pick up and we're going to talk about the verse 32, the unchastity clause. What does it mean? How do we deal with that? Because there is circumstances in which a divorce is permissible. I spent my whole time today arguing that you should not be looking for it at, you know,

pining for it, looking in that direction. And yet there does come a circumstance here in Scripture where we say, okay, we think there are grounds. There are times our elders have been asked, do you think I have grounds for divorce? And we've said yes or we've said no. And it's according to this passage and ones like them. There have been times where we've been asked, I'm divorced, do you think I could remarry? It's a crazy thing for your pastors and elders to be asked questions like that, but how can you read this passage and not have those questions? So next week we'll talk about the circumstances under which divorce is permissible, not commanded, but permissible, and how that should be addressed and handled. All right, let's pray.