Well, Henry was having marital problems. He felt that he had fallen out of love with his wife, Cathy, and he had actually met someone else, a friend of Cathy's, Anne, who was younger, cuter, sassy, and he had developed a bit of a crush on her. There was a problem, though. Henry was a devout Catholic, and so he appealed for an annulment of the marriage and wanting to get a divorce. And he appealed directly to the Pope because he had these connections. And the Pope said no, under no circumstances, because there was not a biblical sanction for this divorce. And so Henry did what a lot of other Catholic people do, is they just went ahead and got divorced anyway. But there was a problem with that. The Pope was dead set against it because Henry was kind of a public figure, what with being the King of England and all. When Henry VIII decided he wanted to divorce Catherine, his queen, the Pope was against this and said under no circumstances people would notice if I gave you an annulment for a perfectly legitimate marriage that didn't have a biblical sanction for divorce. He did what other disgruntled church people often do. Henry left the church in a huff and started his own church. This is the one that he was in control of. He called it the Anglican Church, and it was exactly the same as the Catholic Church, except he allowed people to get divorces, starting with him. Now, I know that that's an oversimplification of the church history, but that's how it played out in the public eye. He banished Queen Catherine, married her cute, sassy lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, and then repeated that cycle a few times over. Now that he had created a religion that allowed for divorce, he took that out for a spin. So marrying and divorcing and executing at times, and then remarrying, until he had gone through the decidedly un-Catholic number of six wives. Well, many people along the way were executed for either committing adultery with one of his queens, or he executed the queen for committing adultery with someone else. All the while, Henry VIII himself was committing adultery with some people that he sometimes married and sometimes didn't even bother to marry. And the irony of all of this is that the very reason the pope wouldn't give him the sanction of a divorce is because he said that that would lead to an adultery, a situation of adultery. Well, I'm not promising that tonight we'll be able to make sense of the Pope's reasoning or the shenanigans of Henry VIII, but we will bring some biblical clarity to the questions of when is it permissible to be divorced. So turn your Bibles to Luke chapter 16. Now last week we looked at Jesus' teachings on money. He's now transitioning into a whole section where he's talking about how our hearts need to be devoted to God and not to money and then right in the middle of this talk about money and just before we get into the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and a lot to do with money there's this one verse that just seems completely out of place where Jesus just talks about divorce. But I believe that it is part of the flow of the context because divorce offers a very clear example of people looking for loopholes in the law while missing the whole point of the law. And that's what Jesus was saying about their money as well. You know, you tithe and you think that you're right with God, but God wants the heart. And so this whole section is not as much about money as it is about the heart and what you truly believe and that God sees your heart. And so divorce is one of those cases that, I mean, I can just tell you being in the ministry, it's one of the hardest things to have to deal with in a church, is counseling people and the questions of divorce and remarriage. And often people will come with very technical, well, you know, technically this person, you know, blah, blah, blah, looking for a loophole so that they can be happy in a new relationship, rather than coming to the scripture saying, well, what does God want? What does God say is best for his glory and for my good? I also remember once in a question and answer with John MacArthur, who's written many books and commentaries is considered very wise on many issues, and he was asked this interesting question by somebody, if you could add something to the Bible, what would you add? And he thought about it for a second, he said, I would add a couple more chapters on divorce and remarriage. Because honestly, as a pastor, there's just all of these complicated situations arise, messy situations, and you really want to help the people think this through, but there's not that much in scripture about it. And I also just want to have one caveat. If you're here tonight and you have been through a divorce, I don't want you to feel condemned as we're reading what Jesus says in that, because there's a lot of good news coming, but you have to make it to the end to hear that good news. Okay, so let's pick it up from there, and I'll just start in verse 17 to show you the flow, where Jesus says it's easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the law to become void. And then he says in verse 18, everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery. And he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery. And there was a rich man who was clothed in purple. And then he goes into the parable of the rich man Lazarus, which we'll get to next week. Lord willing. So verse 18, everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery. This is flowing out of the idea that God is looking at your heart and that the law is there and that it can't be undone. Not one jot or tittle can be changed of the law and so he brings up He brings up divorce as an issue, as a test case. So we're going to look tonight at three areas of understanding so that we will know God's will on this topic. And the three areas are marriage, divorce, and remarriage. We're going to look at what the Bible says about that. It's a little bit more of a topical study, because as you can see, there's not much in this text except that this command. But we can go to other texts and flesh it out a lot. So let's first look at marriage. And for that, you can turn to Genesis chapter 2. Whenever I do a wedding, this is the passage I go to, and there's a very good reason for that. Now, in June 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States made an historic ruling on the defense of the Marriage Act. In a nutshell, the court ruled that the definition of marriage cannot be limited to a man and a woman. And that really changed society forever, that now, a woman can marry a woman, a man can marry a man, they try to redefine what marriage was from how society and various cultures have viewed it for centuries, millennia really, and comes all the way back to the biblical institution of marriage at the very first wedding in Genesis 2. So Genesis 2 is the passage, you know, Genesis 1, God creates the heavens and the earth. Genesis 2, he creates man. Man names all the animals, sees that there's no one like him. It's going to be kind of a lonely time. And this was a point of God saying, you're in charge of all these, but you can't do it on your own. You need help. So verse 18, Genesis 2, 18, then Yahweh God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground Yahweh had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens, et cetera. And then verse 21, God caused a deep sleep to fall on the man. While he slept, he took one of his ribs, closed it up in the place with flesh, And the rib that God had taken out of the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. And then he recognizes, at last, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She will be called woman because she comes out of man. And the point there is that God created all of the animals out of the dirt, including Adam, As we've been learning in our animal class, they come up with the breath of life in them, the animals do. The man gets a special breath of life put in him because our souls are different than the souls of animals. And then the woman comes out of the man to show that she's not one of the animals, she's like him. Okay, so that's what's going on there. What's interesting is that he says in verse 24, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and wife were both naked and not ashamed. And I always ask in premarital classes and sometimes even in the wedding ceremony itself, I say, here's a pop quiz. Who was Adam's mother and father? Because the only people that exist in the universe at this point are Adam and Eve, and God says, You can be naked and unashamed. Therefore, a man shall leave his mother and father. There's no such thing as a mother and father in the world yet. It's a blueprint for future marriages. So God is attaching this little ceremony that's happened, that he brings the woman to him, that they are now one flesh. They're one new unit. They're distinct from every other family unit. That's why you leave your in-laws. One of the great things we need to counsel some young couples is the leave and cleave principle. You've got to leave your parents and cleave to your new family unit. And parents, you just have to wear beige and bite your tongue. You get to offer advice if they ask for it, and if they don't, that's up to them. They are a new family unit, right? So that's leaving and cleaving. And the whole point I'm trying to make here is that this wasn't just one wedding, and now you can do weddings any way you want. This was a blueprint, this was a paradigm that God was setting up for every future wedding. That you break away from your mother and father and you start a new family unit, the two of you become one flesh that's permanent, inseparable, one man, one woman for a lifetime, and that you can be naked and unashamed now. The marriage bed is undefiled, as Hebrews said. So, the purpose of marriage is to create a unit that is better than two individual parts. You take one man, it's not good for him to be alone. If you've just been to a bachelor's house, you can just see that. Pizza boxes everywhere, you know, crushed beer cans everywhere. He needs help. But when you put a man and a woman together, they are now far more useful than their individual parts. That's the purpose of marriage. But in this union, the covenant relationship is permanent. That's why it's okay for them to now have sexual intimacy, and that's why it's safe, and why there's no reason to be ashamed about anything that happens, because it's just the two of them. Now, most relevant to our discussion is this idea of being one flesh, the idea that it's meant to be permanent and inseparable. So now I want you to turn to Matthew, to go all the way back to the New Testament, first book of the New Testament, Matthew, and chapter 19. Because here in Luke 16, Jesus just kind of throws this out. If you do get remarried, you're committing adultery. And then he moves on. And we're like, wait, what? That's kind of harsh. Well, in Matthew 19, he explains it a bit more. So we're going to camp here for most of tonight. While you're going there, I can tell you that the rabbis at the time of Jesus, and for centuries before, considered a bad marriage a fate worse than death. They considered a bad marriage to be the worst thing that could happen to you. And so they saw divorce as a gift from God. It was an escape hatch from a bad marriage. Here are some quotes from ancient rabbis. A bad wife is like leprosy to her husband. What is the remedy? Divorce her and be cured of your leprosy. Okay, I mentioned you could just divorce your disease and be done with it. Here's another one. If a man has a bad wife, it is his religious duty to divorce her. Here's another one, among those who will never behold the face of Gehinem. Gehinem was hell. So these are people that will never go to hell. He who has had a bad wife, because such a man is saved from hell because he has expiated his sins on earth by living with her. I mean, basically saying it's worse to live with a bad wife than to go to hell. Man, I do not want to hear any amens in the sermon, by the way. Now, these quotes, these were like quotes that the Pharisees were proud of. They would like retweet these quotes, you know, and this was the prevailing mindset of the day. So they now come to Jesus with a question about divorce that they know is at odds with the scripture because they want him to kind of pick a side so that whatever side he goes on, if he says, no, you can never get divorced, then they say, ah, but there's this case in Deuteronomy that says you can get divorced. And if he says, yes, you can get divorced for any reason, then they're going to say, oh, but you're not upholding the institution of marriage or whatever it is. So here they try to trick him in Matthew 19, verse 3. The Pharisees came to him and tested him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? And he answered, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? That's Genesis two and said, therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. And the two shall become one flesh. Notice that Jesus is looking at the Genesis account as a paradigm, a blueprint that has authority of the way we do marriages for six. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. They said to him, why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away? And he said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning, it was not so. And so I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery. And the disciples said to him, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it's better not to marry. Jesus said, hmm, not everyone can receive that saying, but only those to whom it is given. And then he talks about people who choose to be single. Okay, so, very interesting passage. You can see it's fleshed out a lot more than the time in Luke. That's why we've moved here. Jesus quotes Genesis 2 and drives home the point that marriage is meant to be permanent. Now, these divorce-happy Pharisees come with their little loophole, a little like, technically, it says in Deuteronomy, they're referring to Deuteronomy 24, And they found their little loophole, which says that if, what Deuteronomy 24 says, that if a man discovers that his wife has committed adultery, he may execute her, according to the law of Moses, he'd bring her before the elders and they'll stone her to death. But if he wants to have mercy on her and not kill her, then he can send her away and have a divorce, but he has to give her a certificate of divorce as proof. Why do you think that is? Because if you're trying to be merciful to a woman that you have every right and everybody knows she should be executed, because in those days you got executed for adultery, and you just choose not to, but you don't tell anyone that, she's walking around with a death sentence hanging over her head. Everyone thinks, well, it's just a matter of time before she's going to be stoned to death. And so this is now not only a reputation, but actually her life is in danger because nobody knows what's happening. So he says, if you've decided to To forgive her and let her go and not execute her, you can do that. By the way, you were also allowed to stay married to her. That was your choice. You can either stay married to her, you can execute her. And then Moses said, if you don't want to execute her and you don't want to stay married to her, don't just send her out there. Send her out with a piece of paper, like a license, a certificate of divorce, so that she can prove to people that she hasn't run away and isn't avoiding the death penalty. but that she's actually been sent by her husband so that she can go to another village maybe and start over. So it's a mercy on the woman, but it's not an ideal situation, obviously. So that's what's happening here. So that's marriage. Marriage, and the only main point I want to make about marriage is that it's permanent. Let's move to the second point, divorce. So when they say, why did Moses, this is Matthew 19, 7, why did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and send it away? He said, because of the hardness of your heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wife. But in the beginning, it was not so. So divorce is a concession, not a command. So what that means is, There's certain places in the Bible where God says, I don't want you to do this, but I know you're going to, so let me legislate it. For example, I only want you to marry one wife, but if something happens that you're now married to another wife, you have to make sure that you keep supporting the first wife. Don't make it even worse by having two wives and just leaving this one alone. You still have all responsibilities to her. Same with slavery. You know, if you're gonna have slaves, this is how you need to treat them, and if you don't, then you're really sinning, even more. So there's some strange places where God just kind of condescends to us and says, look, I know this is gonna happen, so let me at least legislate this. And this is one of those things. I mean, a lot of the Bible is like, just don't sin. But if you do, then you have to do this, you know? Even the sacrificial system is, don't sin, but if you do, you have to kill an innocent lamb to die in your place. So that's one of these things. Don't get divorced. But if you do, at least have the compassion to let this woman move on with her life and not have everyone think that she's run away from the death penalty. So first prize is that you stay married, that you forgive each other, you reconcile your marriage. But I understand that there's a hardness in your heart that shouldn't be there. If we lived in an ideal world, none of us would have hard hearts, but there's something about breaking the marriage bond that it's understandable, even to God, that you can't get over. Of all sins, I mean, we sin against each other all the time, right? And husbands and wives sin against each other all the time, but there's something about the marriage covenant, the trust, the vulnerability, the commitment, that causes a marriage to work, that if that's been broken by adultery, you can never regain that trust. Now, you can, and you ought to, but God says, I understand if you can't. Because you've got a hard heart now. You'll never trust your wife again, or she'll never trust her husband again. And you cannot run a marriage without trust. It just doesn't work. You can't run a marriage without intimacy. And for intimacy, you need vulnerability and for vulnerability you need trust and if you don't have trust you don't have a marriage so first prize is just get over it have the person ask forgiveness grant forgiveness and i mean it's not like you flip a switch but allow the lord and the spirit working in you over time to bring healing so that you have a bond that's as strong as it was beforehand or you may get divorced in that case of adultery Not for just any old reason, though. She just keeps burning my meal. I'm done. I want a wife that can cook. That's just not a reason to get divorced, because that's not this covenant-shattering breaking of the covenant bond and the trust. You can get over that. In fact, you are instructed to get over everything that your spouse does, except this one thing, and that's breaking the marriage vows. So yes, God did allow legal divorce for this one reason. Did you spot it there where Jesus said it in Matthew 19? Verse nine, I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery. So what he's saying is if you get divorced and you remarry, we'll get to that under the point of remarriage, you're now with somebody else that you shouldn't be, that's adultery. Except for immorality. unless the reason you're divorcing is your spouse has cheated on you. You know what a mulligan is? Mulligan, it's a term in golf, right? It means it's a do-over. Apparently, it started with a Canadian golfer by the name of David B. Mulligan. There's another guy that they also think it might be attached to, and the idea was he apparently had a very difficult day getting to the golf course, and he was late, and he kind of shanked his... as he was teeing off on the first drive, and everyone kind of felt sorry for him because of what had just happened, and said, take another shot. So he got a do-over, and that just became known as the mulligan. So now today, if you're playing, and you really turf your first shot, you look at your buddies, and you're like, mulligan? And they say, yes, you can take another shot. There are no marriage mulligans in the Bible. There's no such thing as, I took a shot at it, Lord, it's not working out, we're not compatible, my parents were right, I want to do over. I'm going to get a divorce and start over. There's no such thing. There's no opportunity for that. The only opportunity, according to Jesus up until this point, for a divorce is if your spouse actually cheats on you. Malachi chapter 2 verse 13, it's a famous passage in the Old Testament on divorce. God no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand, but you say why does he not? Because Yahweh was witness between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless. In other words, committed adultery. Though she's your companion and your wife by covenant, did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? What was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourself in your spirit and do not be faithless. So you might be thinking, if you know your Bible well, there's one passage in the Bible where divorce is actually commanded. Can you think of where it is? You can just shout out the name of the book. This is Bible trivia night. Ezra, yes, we'll get to the Hosea passage. Hosea is the opposite instruction. So in the book of Ezra, when the Israelites were repenting and wanting to kind of start over and build a new temple, the problem is that they had intermarried with a bunch of pagans, which they shouldn't have done, and Ezra says, you need to repent of that. God told you Jews not to marry the pagans, and now you've done it, You can't bring them in and have a half-breed nation come from this, so you have to divorce your wives. And so that's what the men did. The men divorced their pagan wives, and everyone was weeping, and it was a very, very unusual, exceptional, kind of the exception that proves the rule part of Scripture. But Jesus doesn't mention that one. The Hosea passage you're thinking of, Hosea was a prophet that God said, I want you to marry this woman, and let me just warn you, she's going to commit adultery. And I want you to stay married to her, because I want your whole life to be a picture of how committed I am to my covenant with Israel, even though Israel's cheating on me by going to foreign gods. So that was a command to stay married, and he does, and it's a beautiful love story, really, because he purchases her, he buys her out of her prostitution and her slavery, and restores her, and their family is made whole again. It's a very, very beautiful love story, but there's this haunting prophecy in the beginning where, like, your wife is gonna cheat on you, go marry her anyway, and stay faithful to her. Okay, out of the... Old Testament. So when they come to Matthew 19.3, is it lawful to divorce your wife for any cause? They're trying to open a can of worms from this Deuteronomy 24. Now, Jesus basically says, because the purpose of marriage is permanent, you may not get divorced. Now, if you're here tonight and you're like, yeah, but I've been divorced, now what? What about people that have already been divorced? What did they do? What about if I didn't know any of this and then I got divorced and married and I got divorced and married and then I became a Christian? Or I became a Christian and I did these things because the church I went to never preached the Bible and they didn't tell me this stuff. Because I know if you're visiting tonight, you're like, sermon on divorce, really? That's what I got all dressed up for? It's what's next, okay? But that's what happens when you go to a church that preaches the Bible. When it comes up, it comes up, and you learn about it. If I were a preacher that just wanted to pick what I want to preach on, I'm not going to preach a whole sermon on divorce. I wouldn't preach Sunday morning sermon either. I would just pick the easy texts, you know? But that's expository preaching for you. But the good side of that is, now you know what the Bible says on this. But what if you didn't? So now you're in a situation like, I've been married, I've been divorced, I didn't know, or I did know, and my church didn't do anything about it, and I felt guilty about it, what do I do now? Go marry your ex. No, I'm kidding. Well, I'm kind of kidding. We'll get there. Okay, so we looked at marriage, divorce, let's look at remarriage. Stay in Matthew 19, and a little commercial break. Have you heard of the website SockItToMe.com? Sockit2me.com. They're a website that sells socks, crazy socks. I got a good sock game. I pay attention to my socks because it's a way of letting that part of my personality out without actually anyone seeing it. Sockit2me is a great website, and they had this campaign for a while where everybody knows that when you buy a sock, you buy socks in pairs, right? And then everybody also knows that somehow, at some point in that sock's life, one of them is going to make a break for it. and there's going to be a divorce. And somehow you just put it in the washing machine, and by the time it comes out of the dryer, one of them's just gone. Nobody knows where they go. They go to the singles club with all the single socks, I don't know. And now you've got this sock, and you don't know what to do with it because you can't use one sock, especially if it's got this patent on it. So you kind of keep it around, hoping that the spouse returns, but she doesn't. So eventually you just... it gets part of the dust rag brigade or whatever, you know, the shoe polish kit now. And then often when that happens, then the spouse shows up and says, actually, I do want you back now, it's too late. So what this soccer to me did was, they had a policy where throughout the lifetime of that sock, if one goes missing, they'll send you another one. You get to, they'll let your sock remarry. On one condition, you had to send them a photograph of you holding the one sock with the sad face. and then they would send it to you, which I thought was really, really cute. So I like soccer to me. Well, what does this have to do with divorce? It's obvious, right? Okay, there are two cases actually in the Bible that God says what to do once there's a divorce or when a divorce is allowed. So the first one we've looked at is adultery. Verse nine says, whoever divorces his wife except for a sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery. So if you get a divorce, Now you've got two single people. So you had two single people, they got married, they get divorced, you've got two single people again, but they can't get remarried to anyone because they weren't allowed to get divorced. So even though they got divorced, they shouldn't have, but even though they got divorced, the way to repent of that now is to reconcile, to get remarried. But what happens when you've got two single people? Well, at some point, one of them gets lonely, and they meet another sock and they get married, right? And so now you repent and you want to reconcile, but now you can't because your ex-wife is now married to another dude. So what do you do? So this is where divorce and remarriage gets really complicated because you shouldn't have got divorced and you did. So what do you do? You get remarried because then you fix the problem. But what if she doesn't want to remarry you? Or he's married to someone else now. Now what do you do? There's no way to back that up. Can't unscramble the egg. So, I mean, I really don't know what to do in that situation. It's a hard situation. So that brings us to the second point, because what Jesus says is, if you do get remarried to someone else, you're now committing adultery. because you're supposed to be married to that person. Just a little footnote. I don't like using the terminology, you're still married in God's eyes. Have you heard people say that? So you got married in God's eyes, and then you went to the courts and you got divorced, but you're still married in God's eyes. So if you get remarried, you're committing adultery. That's not how that works. You're married when the courts marry you, or whatever your culture does to get you married. You're not married before, you're married when the courts marry you. whatever the legal proceeding is. Once that happened, and you get divorced, once the courts divorce you, you're now no longer married anymore. Shouldn't have done it, but you're literally unmarried. So getting remarried, it's not because you're still married in God's eyes. It's just you're not supposed to do it. It's just the more you scramble the egg, the more we're trying to pick up the pieces. So what happens? And we're gonna have Q&A after this, so you can ask me more specific questions to help tease this out. But for the second part, 1 Corinthians 7. So just to put it plainly, if your spouse cheats on you and you divorce them, then you may get remarried. You haven't done anything wrong. You can remarry a Christian. They shouldn't be getting remarried. Right? Okay. Now, if you get divorced for an unbiblical reason, like, we just fight all the time, so we get divorced. Well, you just fight all the time? Welcome to marriage. What did you think? You weren't going to fight? Did you not read Paul Tripp's book called What to Expect? Of course you're going to fight. No, no, that's not a good enough reason. There was no adultery. But, oh, well, we separated. Now you get saved, or you want to repent. What do we do? Well, we're going to counsel you to get back together. Unless you marry someone else. Now you can't get back together. You can't divorce that person to get remarried, because you can't make something wrong right by making another wrong. In fact, Deuteronomy 29 says you may not remarry your ex-spouse if you've been married in the meantime. Okay, let's move on. Abandonment of an unbelieving spouse. This is 1 Corinthians chapter 7. So the Corinthian church was primarily a Gentile church, you know, they're Greek people. They don't memorize the Old Testament like the Jews did, so they don't know Deuteronomy 24 and what it says. So they've got some complicated situations in their church, and so they write to Paul, and they say to Paul, what about marriage? And so he starts off chapter 7 with that line where he says, now concerning the matters about which you wrote, Okay, you ask me these questions, Q&A, here's the answers, and he has a few of them, and one of them's about marriage. So he says in verse 10, read this, to the married I give this charge, not I, but the Lord. In other words, this is something Jesus taught when he was alive, Matthew 19. The wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, she should remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband, and the husband should not divorce his wife. Okay, so, I'm gonna tell you now about divorce. You guys didn't know it because you're Greeks. This is what Jesus taught. Not I, but the Lord. Matthew 19, he summarizes it, just what we just read. Then verse 12. To the rest, I say, I, not the Lord. That doesn't mean me and Jesus disagree on this. This means Jesus didn't teach this part in Matthew 19. I've got new revelation from God as an apostle that I'm giving you. To the rest, verse 12, I say, that if any brother, any Christian, has a wife who's an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. So do you see how this is like a completely new situation that's never existed in the history of Israel? Because in Israel, you didn't have somebody who suddenly became Israelite after they were married to you. You could only marry another Israelite. So here, you have two unbelievers, two Greek pagans. One of them hears the gospel and gets saved. Let's say the husband becomes a believer, and now he's married to an unbeliever. And she doesn't want to be saved. So they write to Paul, and they're like, now what do we do? That's never happened before. So that's why he's got new revelation. And this is what he says. If she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. So your unbelieving wife says, I'm not becoming a Christian. I like Venus or Aphrodite or whatever. I'm going to worship her. You worship Jesus. But I like you. You're easy on the eyes, you know. You work and bring home the bacon, so I'll stay married to you. Well, then good. Stay married. Now you're just married to an unbeliever. You're not sinning by being married to an unbeliever. You must stay married to her. You made a covenant. But, verse 13, if any woman has a husband who's an unbeliever, so now it's the other way around. If a woman has an unbeliever and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. Same thing. For the unbelieving husband's made holy because of his wife. The unbelieving wife's made holy because of her husband. Otherwise, her children would be unclean. You can ask me about that in the Q&A. But as it is, they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases, the brother or sister is not enslaved. God's called you to peace. So two unbelievers, one gets saved. Let's say the husband gets saved. The wife's an unbeliever, but she wants to live with you. Good. You have a marriage. Good luck with that. If she says, no, I don't want to be married to you. I hate Christians. They're the worst. I'm out of here. I'm going to go meet me an Aphrodite-worshiping dude. And she leaves, let her go. You can get remarried. You can get remarried only in the Lord, he'll go on to say. But God wants you to be at peace. Don't be fighting this and like, no, we're married. I know you hate me because I'm a Christian, but I have to stay married to you. It's what Paul said. Paul's like, no, no, no. Then you can let her go. God has called you to peace. OK, so in summary, if you're a Christian who's married to an unbeliever and they leave you, you can remarry another Christian. So let me give you some of the questions that I anticipate that you would ask. What if two Christians do pursue a divorce? So, let's say there's a Christian couple in our church, and they decide, we don't want to be married anymore. Well, if it isn't for sexual immorality, we would urge you to repent and obey the Lord, and say, you can't. We're going to help counsel you, If you continue down that path, we're going to discipline you out of the church because it's an unrepentant sin. And we've done that. We haven't had to do that at this church in that particular situation, but I've done that in my previous church where a Christian couple in the church decided to get divorced. They said, we know it's not a biblical reason, but we just hate each other and we're done. And so we had to pursue church discipline and call them to repentance and tell them once you reconcile and are willing to work on your marriage, then you can come back. So there's that. By the way, the solution isn't you guys are fighting all day long. Well, God wants you to be married and be miserable. That's what's glorifying God. He hates divorce. He loves miserable marriages more than divorce. That's not the solution. If you're fighting all the time, you know, if you're fighting a little, welcome to marriage. If you're fighting all the time and you're miserable, you can't get divorced, but you need to come get counsel. That's what the church is here for, so that older men and women can help younger men and women, and we can all be in each other's lives. And God wants your marriage to soar, not to limp along. And I hate it when people say, yeah, we're just married because the Bible won't let us divorce. We're just married because of the kids. We hate each other. But God hates divorce. Yeah, God hates your marriage too. Yes, he hates divorce more and outlaws it, but he hates your marriage. You're okay with that? He wants your marriage to be known as the grace of life, is what Paul calls it. Okay. Secondly, what about physical abuse? Is a husband beating a wife a reason for divorce? And the answer is, I would need to know a lot more about that situation. There's no cut and dry. I just told you the Bible says that there's only two reasons for divorce, sexual immorality and the abandonment by an unbelieving spouse. Now, when we've had to counsel this in the past, this is kind of what that looks like. You can't just jump to, well, he hits me, so I'm divorcing him. There's some steps that need to be put in place there. If your unbelieving spouse is leaving the marriage, or chasing you out of the marriage, or throwing you out of the house, you know, one of the ways you throw someone out of the house is you hit them every time they come home, then that person needs to be called to repentance. And if they repent, that's good, you're not in danger anymore. If they don't repent, which is a little bit more likely, then we go through the stages of church discipline with them, we'll do it very, very quickly, and you don't have to live with them while we go through this, we'll take care of you, and then when the church labels that person an unbeliever, now you have an unbelieving spouse who's abandoned the marriage. Does that make sense? It's not just lawyers playing loophole in the contract here, I truly believe, like, if your husband's hitting you, he's not a believer. I mean, if he repents, and of course, that's great, but if he doesn't repent, he's an unbeliever, so why are we calling him a believer? He should be disciplined out of the church. And he is abandoning you, you know how you know? Because he hits you. If there's a stray dog in your house, and you're hitting it with a broom, it goes. How does it know it doesn't belong there? You're hitting it. Don't hit animals, by the way. And don't hit your wife, by the way. But if you are, we're going to have to do church discipline on you, and that discipline can is going to be very quick. Okay, so you can ask me more questions about that in the Q&A. Another question, what if I've already got divorced un-publicly? Answer is, you can reconcile and remarry if possible, but sometimes that's not possible, because they've remarried, or you've remarried, or neither of you remarried, but they don't want to marry you now. There's nothing you can do about that. You can't make somebody remarry you. Or they've been married and divorced, and now you really can't get remarried because of Deuteronomy 29. Okay. So then what do you do? You have to remain unmarried. I mean, you're single the rest of your life. And if you're somebody who doesn't have the gift of singleness because you wanted to get married, that's a heavy burden. That's a very heavy burden. That's why Jesus' disciples said, well, then it's better not to be married. And Jesus was like, yep. Not everybody can do that. So be very careful. The biggest decision you're going to make in your life is who to marry. Once you're in there, you can't get out. And if you do, you're not single. One more question. What if I got divorced unbiblically, and then I got remarried unbiblically, and now I'm sitting in church tonight, and the person next to me is someone that we just both realized we shouldn't be married to? I'm not making any eye contact. I don't know if anyone's like that here tonight. According to this verse, I've committed adultery. Yes. Now what? Here's the good news. We finally got there. The good news. You're not saved by what you do or what you've done. You're saved by what Jesus did. So even if you've done something to completely mess up your life, break laws, scramble eggs, make an omelet, Jesus is who saves you, and he can make something beautiful out of the biggest mess we've ever made, and there's always hope. As long as you're willing to repent, and if you can't do anything to undo the damage, because you're married now, the repentance isn't divorcing that person, because step number one, stop getting divorced. That's how you repent of divorce. Stop getting divorced. Don't divorce the person you're with now. That's not going to fix it. But just say, I didn't know, or I did know, or I've made a mistake, I sinned against the Lord. And please forgive me, and guess what? He forgives you. There is no sin that puts you beyond God's forgiveness. Whatever you've done, and it might not be anything to do with marriage and remarriage, but just think of the worst thing you've ever done. Christ's blood covers that if you repent of it. Now, if you justify it and say, well, I don't believe that. I'm going to go to Henry VIII's church where they have different views. I'm like, well, now that's between you and God then. Good luck with that on Judgment Day. But if you are willing to admit that what you did was sin, he wipes it clean. So, conclusion. We live in a very messed up and broken world, don't we? Relationships are messy, we make mistakes, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of willful ignorance, sometimes out of stubbornness, but praise be to God that he accepts us because of Christ's perfection. That's the gospel, that's the good news. Without Christ, we would all be doomed, whether you have a good marriage or not. No one is perfect, no one is righteous, but all can be made clean because of what Jesus did on our behalf on the cross. He can give us new lives, He can make them bright and radiant, and He can even take a very dark and messed up situation and make a trophy of His grace out of that and put that on display of how He can make something beautiful as long as you're willing to admit that what you did was wrong and the beautiful thing you have now is all of His grace. Let's pray and then I'll take questions. Heavenly Father, this really is a heavy topic, especially because of so many lives that have been touched by this, this sin, this brokenness, and yet there's such good news in knowing that Jesus is in the business of making all things new. And so I thank you for your grace, Lord Jesus, and I pray that you would give us as elders wisdom as we counsel people, even in our own church, on the way to make a beautiful, marriage or state of singleness out of what they have done for your glory. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, so rather than questions about eschatology tonight, let's start off with just stuff about what I just taught. Anything about divorce and remarriage, relationships, anything like that that I can help clarify. Yes, I noticed your husband's not here, so this is a good question. Did you kick him out, or did he leave on purpose? I know John's on a business trip, I'm just joking. Right. Yeah, that's a great question. What about cases of emotional abuse? Is that a grounds for divorce? And so the short answer is no, because it's not one of the two mentioned. So remember, you always have to go back to scripture, Is it for sexual immorality? No, there's no adultery. Is it for an unbelieving spouse, abandoning a believing spouse? No, then you can't get divorced. You can get counsel for that because God doesn't want that marriage to be miserable. He wants it to be a blessing. whenever a scenario comes we're always going to bring it back to which of those two categories does it fit into so emotional abuse is a very general term that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people like he never says he likes my dress you know that's not really that's not divorce worthy but if a person is You know, you get these like hyper-narcissistic people who play mind games and gaslight, and you know, they really, they're like sinister, and they start causing life to go insane or whatever. I think you could start, if you get the church involved in that, saying, hey, buddy, you're not acting like a Christian, you're acting like an unbeliever, and you're signaling to this wife that you want her out of your life. So again, Every situation I'd have to look at very, very carefully and we need the wisdom of the elders. And usually when it comes to divorce situations, we call a bunch of different elders and different pastors from other churches because everyone has lots of experience and we kind of pool that. And we get calls from other churches as well, what do you do in this situation? So it can get very complicated. But in general, I would say no, that doesn't constitute abandonment of a spouse. Good question. Maybe I'll just dovetail another question off that. Sometimes people say, well, what about if your husband is addicted to pornography? Does that fall into the category of sexual immorality, meaning adultery, because it's outside of the marriage bed? And the answer then, again, you have to look at everything involved and what's actually happening and the other people involved in that, et cetera. But the short answer is no, that's not adultery. Adultery is adultery. You need another person for adultery, not just a picture of a person or whatever. But again, sometimes these things can be very fuzzy because there's interaction online, and there's relationships that get built up, and sometimes people are like, well, he's having an emotional affair. Is that adultery? It's like every one of these cases we would have to look at very specifically. But in general, the answer is always going to be, if it was adultery, it's allowed. If it was not adultery, it's not allowed. Yes. Jenna. Oh, great question. So if a husband is an unbeliever and he's married to a wife who's a believer, but Scripture says that the role of the wife is to submit to her husband, but then how do you submit if you're a believer and he's not leading you spiritually? That's a very good question. Peter actually answers that question in 1 Peter. He deals with that exact situation in 1 Peter 3. He says this, likewise wives, be subject to your own husbands. So that's the part you're talking about submitting to your husband. So that even if some do not obey the word, so some are disobedient believers or unbelievers, They may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives when they see a respectful and pure conduct. And then he goes on to talk about how you can do that. And then verse five says, this is how the holy woman who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord or sir, and you are her children if you do good and don't fear anything that's frightening. And then he goes on to talk about the husbands and their role. His point there, and I did a sermon on this when we were in the gym called Supermodels of Submission, if you wanna look it up online. This passage in the First Peter series, where I did a whole sermon on that passage and explained the different scenarios. But the short answer of that is, if your unbelieving husband wants to remain married to you, then you can't divorce him, but how do you submit to him? Well, I mean, you submit to him just like you'd submit to any other husband. Submission doesn't mean that there's no place for appeal or discussion. Certainly if you are a Christian woman in a church, you can have the church get involved and the elders can help with that and chat to your husband. Sometimes it's helpful if the husband gets spoken to by other men rather than his own wife. Hey, you should be leading me so that I can submit to you. That comes better from other men saying, you need to lead her so she can submit to you. If she's going to respect you, you need to be respectable. If she's going to submit to you, you need to be a good leader. And that discipleship can come from the church, even if the person's an unbeliever. But in general, it's going to boil down to you need to submit to your husband. And that's what can win him over. If he sees the church and you as clubbing up against him, and, well, I'm not going to obey you because I'm going to obey the church or I'm going to obey Jesus, then he's never going to become a Christian. But when he sees, hey, I make her life really difficult, and she submits in such a joyful way and continues to pray for me and continues to respect me, according to Peter, that's how you win him without a word. You don't have to nag him. and slip little gospel tracts under his pillow or whatever, put a post-it note with John 3, 16 in his lunchbox. You don't have to do anything with the word because your conduct is what proves to him that there's something supernatural happening. That's a very short answer, but go listen to that sermon, that'll help you. Great, any other questions? Yeah, Logan. Oh yeah, I thought maybe you'd forget to ask that question. So in 1 Corinthians 7, I mentioned that. It's just a tricky text. But I know the answer. I gotcha. I'm your huckleberry. Where are we? 1 Corinthians 7. Yeah, for the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband, otherwise your children would be unclean, and as it is, they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. Okay, so the idea there is that if you have a believer in the family, let's say the mom is a believer and the dad is an unbeliever, and your children are in that marriage, still there, at least they have one spouse. Well, let's say it's the other way around. In our day and age, it would work better the other way around. Let's say the husband is a believer, the wife is an unbeliever, and your kids are in that house. At least the dad has spiritual influence on those kids. So they're sanctified or made holy. They are exposed to the gospel. Their dad can lead them to the Lord. They can be baptized. They can grow up as Christians. If he leaves her with the kids, the unbeliever with the kids, they're never going to hear the gospel. They're never going to be sanctified by that. So having one believing spouse in the marriage sanctifies the whole marriage. It just makes the whole marriage have a flavor of biblical wisdom and the Spirit's guidance that wouldn't be there if the believers always left when they got saved. I think that's what he's talking about. He's not talking about children are saved if you remain married and unsaved if you're not. That's just not what that means. That's the short answer. Good. Anything else? Emery. OK, great question. I actually said the courts. I was careful not to say the government. But you're right. OK, so the question, I said in the sermon that you are married when the courts say you're married, and you're divorced when the courts say you're divorced. But I kept saying, did you hear my little caveat? Whatever your culture sees is that signal. Thank you for asking that question. It helps me clarify. Throughout history there have been, in different parts of the world and in different time periods, there are different ways of signaling who's married and who's not. So it doesn't have to be through a court system if your culture and your country and your time period you grew up in weren't. But whatever it is that signals to people that you're married, Christians need to do that so that they're not just married privately but that they're married publicly. That's why there's public witnesses and all that kind of thing. So, for example, if you live in a country where, I don't know, putting a dot on your forehead shows that you are married, then put a dot on your forehead. And if you're in a culture that wears wedding rings to show that you're married, then wear a wedding ring. Do what the culture has you do to pair you off. Now, some cultures are set up in such a way that that you can't obey the Bible if you do it. So I'll give you an example. When I went to Bhutan, so Bhutan is a tiny little country in the Himalayas, 600,000 people, everybody there is Buddhist, there's a small Hindu population, and then there's underground Christians. It's the eighth most persecuted country for Christians on Earth. And so they're completely secret, nobody knows the church there. Now, in Bhutanese culture, your spouse is picked when you're born, And the marriage is arranged at birth. So the two families get together and say, your daughter and my son are now married. There's no ceremony, there's no wedding, there's no nothing. They're married already from birth. So at any point in their life, they can start sleeping together because they're married. They have no choice in it. They can move in together, they can grow up in their parents' homes until they're ready to do that, that's encouraged, but you guys are married and you have no say. But when those people get saved, now what do they do? So there was a couple. I was there preaching in this underground church. We were literally underground. And this young couple came and said, we've been married since we were born, but we've never had a Christian marriage ceremony, and we're feeling convicted that we're living together without being married, in God's eyes. So I married them. I mean, I don't have a license in Bhutan, but I'm a pastor, and they asked me to. They invited their unbelieving parents, risking their lives, inviting their unbelieving parents who heard the gospel from us. And we had a little marriage ceremony, and I got to do a wedding in Bhutan. It was really cool. That's not what you asked, but it's a cool story. Yeah, so the reason I stress that is because in America, the way you get married is you have to have the courts give you a document that says you're married. And sometimes I've heard Christians say, well, we're married in the eyes of the Lord. We don't need that piece of paper. That's not true. You're not married until you're married. And the way this culture recognizes marriage is through the courts, and so you have to do that. And if the courts won't marry you because she's your sister, then that means you can't get married. Okay? That's pretty much the only reason the courts won't marry you. I mean, they'll even let you marry a man these days, but don't do that. Anyway, you know what I'm saying. So whatever the culture allows for marriage or says is how you get married, you need to do that. Great. Okay, just one little story as well. The Christians in Israel, there's no way for Christians to get married legally in Israel. Well, it wasn't when I was there in 2000, maybe they've changed it now. So Jews can get married, for obvious reasons, and Muslims can get married in their religion, but Christianity is not seen as a valid religion. Jews who become Christians cannot get married in Israel legally. So what they do is they have their wedding ceremony, and then they go to another country for their honeymoon, and they get married in the other country. And I don't know what to say about that, except I think that's pretty cool, that even though they've made it that difficult for them to get married, Christians are that committed to having the legal piece of paper saying that we're married.