Shall
We Divorce for Any Reason?
Marriage,
Divorce, and Other Alternatives: A (non-explicit) Biblical Primer on Human
Sexuality
INTRO:
You need to know a couple of things about
me:
1) I’m divorced and remarried. God brought me to this church for healing while
I was going through my divorce and recovery.
2) I am a theologian and college professor
by trade. My lectures sometimes feel like sermons, and my sermons like
lectures. I will be doing theology on
the basis of the Bible verses in your bulletins, without doing a full
exposition of each passage. That would
take more time than we have.
Why this topic? The good news is that divorce rates are no
longer growing. They are actually declining. The bad news?
Divorce rates are declining because more people are choosing to not get
married. They either live together
without benefit of marriage, and raise their children in this kind of home, or
women find themselves raising children on their own, often by choice.
In
the cover story of the November Atlantic magazine, Kate Bolick declares
her liberation from marriage: “It’s time to embrace new ideas about romance and
family—and to acknowledge the end of ‘traditional’ marriage as society’s
highest ideal.”
……..
Kate
goes back to speak to younger women today, and is appalled by what she finds
among 20-somethings:
Most
of them said that though they’d had a lot of sex, none of it was particularly
sensual or exciting. It appears the erotic promises of the 1960s sexual
revolution have run aground on the shoals of changing sex ratios, where young
women and men come together in fumbling, drunken couplings fueled less by lust
than by a vague sense of social conformity.
What
caused the “de-eroticization of sex,” she wonders.
Who
exactly are the new enemies of Eros?
Sex
has been divorced from meaning. Men are not being raised to be good family men,
and women are not being raised to appreciate good family men. And men are
failing to become the kind of men women want. Porn is available for all as a substitute
for life.
(Maggie Gallagher, “The New Singleness.” Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/10/4164.
October 20, 2011)
So Kate chooses to celebrate this state
of affairs and the women who band together to raise their children without men
in a new form of matriarchy.
Is that the answer?
God’s Original Design
Gen 1:26-29: Male and Female Reflect
Together the Image of the Triune God
26 Then God
said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over
the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps
on the earth."
27 So God
created man in his own image,
in
the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 And God
blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the
earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
ESV
Gen 2:18, 23-25: Marriage as a Strategic
Alliance and a One Flesh Relationship
18 Then the LORD God said,
"It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit
for him."
23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone
of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was
taken out of Man." 24 Therefore a
man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they
shall become one flesh. 25 And the man
and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
ESV
Shall we divorce for any reason?
Mal 2:13-16: Divorce as violence. God is our witness
13 And this
second thing you do. You cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and
groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor
from your hand. 14 But you say,
"Why does he not?" Because the Lord was witness between you and the
wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your
companion and your wife by covenant. 15
Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union?
And 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. 16 "For the man who hates and divorces, says
the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of
hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless."
ESV
Matt 19:3-12: Shall we divorce for any
reason? Not so fast!
3 And Pharisees
came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's
wife for any cause?" 4 He answered, "Have you not read that he who
created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his
father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one
flesh'? 6 So they are no longer two but
one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man
separate." 7 They said to him,
"Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to
send her away?" 8 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. 9
And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual
immorality, and marries another, commits adultery."
ESV
Romans 7:1-3: Marriage is designed to
last until one partner dies
1 Or do you not know, brothers--for I am
speaking to those who know the law--that the law is binding on a person only as
long as he lives? 2 For a married woman
is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is
released from the law of marriage. 3
Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another
man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that
law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.
ESV
1 Corinthians 7:10-15: What if one
partner refuses to live in covenant relationship?
10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but
the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11
(but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to
her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife. 12 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if
any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him,
he should not divorce her. 13 If any
woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she
should not divorce him. 14 For the
unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife
is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean,
but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if
the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or
sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace.
ESV
1)
Marriage Defined
a. Covenant before God
i.
Ordained
by God as an expression of His image in our humanity.
ii.
One
man with one woman for one lifetime
1. Heterosexual. There is something about learning to live in
harmony with the “other” that reflects God’s Triune image in us.
2.
b. Lifelong Strategic Partnership – “help
fit”
i.
Help
(‘ezer)
ii.
Fit
– “At the same level,” “able to see eye to eye.”
c. One flesh relationship
i.
She
came from him, is made of the same stuff – Even if your spouse seems to you as
if she or he came from another planet, they didn’t.
ii.
Sex
iii.
Procreation
(children)
2)
Divorce Defined
a. Amputation
i.
A
friend asked me to encourage her to end her marriage. I told her it would not end her pain, merely
replace one pain with another.
ii.
Another
friend’s cancer and colostomy – mutilation, nearly killed, still recovering –
though he will likely return to normal life, he will retain the memories and
the scars
iii.
Is
divorce a good thing, or a bad thing? Is
it to be taken lightly? I think it’s a
lot like my friend’s surgery, a painful mutilation that is only justified when
the alternative is far worse.
iv.
Those
of us who have been divorced (and I include our children here) will live with
the scars of that amputation, though we may well find a healthy way to live
going forward.
b. Breaking
i.
Covenant
ii.
Partnership
iii.
One
flesh relationship
3)
Other alternatives
a. Living together (Divorced – “I’m not
going through that again.”)
i.
No
covenant
ii.
Tenuous
partnership: Why aren’t you getting married?
Because one of you wants to be able to bail when the going gets tough.
iii.
Tenuous
one flesh
b. Serial partners / hook ups
i.
No covenant
ii.
No
partnership
iii.
Trivialized
one flesh: You’re using each other
c. Chaste singleness – THE acceptable
alternative to marriage
i.
Not
easy. Most of us are hardwired to want
relationship with the opposite sex.
ii.
Doesn’t
mean NO relationships with the opposite sex, merely APPROPRIATE relationships.
4)
Is there a way back / forward?
a. ALWAYS!
b. First, if you are in a good or even an OK
marriage, do everything you can to keep it sweet.
c. If your marriage is failing, or has
failed, the biblical prescription for failure is the same – REPENTANCE AND
FAITH
i.
In a
troubled marriage, repentance means looking at YOUR OWN contribution to the
marriage’s problems, while faith means you make the changes IN YOU that you
need to make, by the grace of God.
1. Get help.
If your spouse won’t go to counseling, then go yourself.
2. CPC offers a number of small groups. Take advantage of them.
d. If you’ve been divorced,
i.
Understanding
our part in the failure of our marriage and seeking God’s forgiveness and
healing.
ii.
What
part? I was married to an ax murderer! Then you had a broken picker. You also probably learned some unhealthy
responses in the middle of trying to make that relationship work.
iii.
Faith
– Commitment to seeking God’s wholeness and healing, by God’s grace
1. Spouse – Paul’s dictum, “Insofar as
possible, be at peace with all men.”
2. Children – Though you may have broken the
covenant, your children will ALWAYS be your children. You have an obligation to them to MITIGATE
the harm done to them by the divorce.
3. THERE IS HELP IN THIS CHURCH! Pastor Pat
can refer you to Christian counselors.
And CPC offers a number of small groups.
NO CHRISTIAN SHOULD WALK ALONE!
e. What if I’m living one of the “other
alternatives?”
i.
Living
together – Determine whether you should move forward to a marriage
relationship, or backward, out of the live in relationship.
ii.
Serial
partners – STOP IT!
iii.
Chaste
singleness
CONCLUSION
Marriage is
designed by God as a key part of how we reflect His image. One man and one woman commit their lives to
each other before God, promising to be each other’s ally through thick and
thin, to the point where they become “one flesh,” both in the character of
their relationship, in the sex act itself, and through the children they raise
to honor God. There is something in the way a
healthy couple interacts that reflects just a little piece of heaven!
For this reason,
we are called as Christians to do everything in our power to preserve and
strengthen our marriages. Though God
allows us to divorce when our marriage fails, divorce is nothing less than an amputation,
a ripping apart of the one flesh relationship.
Though healing is possible, it will leave scars in all involved.
I believe God
allows us to remarry following divorce.
However, I cannot recommend strongly enough that each of us who has been
divorced repent of our own contribution to our divorce and learn new ways of
interacting BEFORE we seek to enter another relationship.
What about the
other alternatives to the biblical view of marriage? I believe the only acceptable alternative to
marriage is chaste singleness, meaning we are in appropriate brotherly and
sisterly relationships – “Friends without benefits,” not “friends with
benefits.” The remaining alternatives,
though they reduce risk by reducing our level of commitment to the “relationship,”
also trivialize the relationship itself, making it far less than what God
intended.
