31 “It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’[a] 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.
This passage can cause a lot of hard feelings and angry arguments because of some very ignorant interpretations. Some people will try to just focus on the very last phrase of verse 32, saying that if someone marries a divorced women, every time they are intimate they are committing adultery, they are committing a continual sin and thus not saved. This is a very extreme view, but believe me, it is out there. It is also very wrong. This is not the point that Jesus is trying to make.
Sometimes we read what Jesus says as if it was said in a vacuum, and only applies to our interpretation 2,000 years later.
But people can get so caught up on arguing about what this specific phrase means that they miss the whole point of what Jesus is teaching here.
So what is the main point? What is Jesus trying to say?
He is combating rampant divorce and the oppression of women in his society. This is what I think Jesus is doing.
As we will discuss tomorrow, Jesus was living in a time when men divorced women for any and every reason. Sound familiar? And Jesus is trying to show his disciples that people who follow Jesus, who are his disciples, they are called to a higher standard.
We in the church are called to a higher standard in our marriages, yet the statistic still stands that the divorce rate is 50%, the same inside the church as well as outside the church. The only reason Jesus gives for someone to divorce his wife is for marital unfaithfulness. Not for nitpicking or for arguing all the time, or for getting ugly, or for a newer and younger version, or for even just having a bad year. Jesus actually expects us to believe and hold true to the vows, or promises, we made to our spouses on our wedding day...
"For richer, or poorer; for better for worse; in sickness and in health, till death do us part."
Jesus expects his followers to live to a higher standard than the world around them, and to sustain their marriages.
Also, Jesus was combating the oppression of women in his society.
It is a proven fact that when divorce increases in a society, so do a number of other things:
- homosexuality increases
- male sexual addiction increases
- and women in poverty increases
The third one may surprise you the most, in a world where women have the same jobs and have the same opportunities as men, supposedly, yet in the ancient world, this was much more true.
In Jesus' day, women were not able to make a living for themselves, in general. They relied solely on the care given to them by their Fathers, and when they got married, their husbands, and when he died, their sons. Women were always being taken care of, being provided for, by some male. Yet if a man divorced his wife, no one else wanted to marry her, she was used goods. So she would either go back to her Father's household, or live a life of prostitution, or live as a beggar.
This was rampant in the first century, and Jesus didn't like it. He expected his male followers to take care of women, even those that were oppressed and unjustly divorced. If you look at Acts the sixth chapter, the early church actually had a ministry for single women. Maybe that is something as a church we should do.
James 1.27 does say that "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
As followers of Jesus, we are called to sustain our marriages and to take care of single women. Let's do what he says.
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