Dennis Tuuri

labeled sublabeled limitations on the family and that may not be quite clear why I’m calling it that but it’ll become a little clear as we move to the end of today’s talk. Again, I probably my timing is not in sync for some reason like last week we had the example of the great shaking of the building blown down in Portland. So today is one of the things it’s the Lord’s day but beyond that of course we also take time out today normally to remember the mothers in the congregation and in our families of course and that’s perfectly appropriate.

One of the commandments from God we have been given by God of course the fifth commandment is to honor our mother as well as our father and that’s okay. And on Mother’s Day I’m going to talk about divorce. So but to salvage that we will be able to reference the joys of motherhood when we have the baptism of the H.’s two new boys later in the service. One other thing I wanted to mention about last week’s talk on contraception.

Steve Nelson pointed out to me at the end of the talk that those people who would posit that we should let God determine the number of children we have in terms of his sovereignly opening and closing wombs and then saying that he should determine how many children we have that is a problem also in terms of adoption if we move toward adoption of children have we then taken away the sovereignty of God and planning of our family and of course obviously not adoption is a biblical model for our acceptance into the family of God and stresses the idea of covenant which we’re going to talk about this morning as well but in any event we’re going to move on this morning.

I’m not sure we’ll get through I had originally intended to cover the entire subject of divorce and remarriage in one Sunday. I won’t do that. Next week we’ll talk about remarriage and then the following week we’ll talk about the limitations of the tension between the natural family and the covenantal family of the church. So we’ll talk about remarriage next week and this week we’ll just talk about divorce proper.

Even so having said that I may well not get to all the points in this outline particularly the fifth point where we answer objections if we don’t get to that point in time, we will take it up next week when we consider remarriage. Many of the objections are the same as to the objections we the view we’ll take on remarriage so we can consider those later, but we’ll at least move through the first four points.

I’m going the first thing we want to mention just briefly to sort of set the stage for what we’re talking about in terms of divorce. Obviously, the context of that is marriage. And so we just wanted to call attention very briefly here to the institution of marriage out of Genesis 2:23. In Genesis 2:23, God has provided Adam with Eve. And Adam then says, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.”

Just three very quick points there. First of all, there’s a covenantal nature to marriage. We talked about that before. If you want more detail on that, you can go back to the tapes at the beginning of this series. And we talked about the fact that marriage is a covenant. And there’s many scriptures that affirm that. The one flesh that’s spoken of here in every marriage that we all enter into these days is certainly a covenantal oneness of flesh. And of course that’s premised upon the idea it’s imaging—as we said last week—one of the primary if not the primary purpose of marriage is to image the relationship the church has to Jesus Christ. And we are definitively not of the same substance as our creator Jesus Christ.

And so our one fleshness with him is a covenantal unity. And so marriage is basically a covenantal union. Okay. Every time a new family is started today, it must be started on the basis of covenant and not on the basis of flesh. And so it’s very important to keep in mind. In fact, there are specific limitations within the laws of God that prohibit intermarriage with people that are close to being the same physical relationship to you. The degrees of consanguinity or one flesh we’ve talked about. Again, it’s as if God is shouting to us that whatever we build in the terms of the marriage has to be built upon covenant and not upon flesh in the sense of physical relationship.

Now that is an obvious point but it carries with it some implications that are quite strong for the issue of divorce. The reason for this is that if marriage is a covenant and marriage demonstrates the covenant relationship we have to God then we have to look at the covenant we have with God to understand marriage better and really all covenants are kind of imaged on that covenant we have with God.

God has made known to us by way of covenant and that covenant includes laws and that covenant includes sanction if those laws are broken. Okay? So, the covenant is not unconditional in one sense. It’s conditional. It’s unconditional in that Jesus Christ fulfilled all the terms of the covenant of grace for us. And so, it’s not conditional on our part to merit inclusion into that covenant. But works are necessary in the covenant of grace to evidence the salvation offered to us in Jesus Christ and purchased with his precious blood.

Point is that if a person acts in complete disobedience, not trying and falling short of the righteous commands of God, but a complete rejection of God’s law. Then the scriptures tell us quite clearly that person invokes upon himself not covenantal blessings but covenantal cursings. Now this is pretty primary stuff but it’s so important to remember when we talk about marriage. The idea that covenant has sanctions and the sanctions includes both blessings and it includes cursings for a complete rejection of the law of the covenant.

A person recently said in one of the tapes I was listening to that one of the problems with most modern contracts and covenants that men enter into today is the absence of cursings, the absence of penalty clauses as it were. It was interesting. I thought about this. We rented a video couple of days ago with the kids called The Princess Bride and one of the scenes in that video there’s a fight between the good guy and the bad guy and they’re going to the bad guy says let’s have a fight to the death and the good guy says no we’re going to have a fight to the pain.

Okay. And he then explains that he’s not going to kill the bad guy. He’s just going to cause him eternal pain. He’s going to do various things to him and it’s going to result in his pain, not in his death. Well, if we look at death in the way that the evil man posits it is annihilation of his being, then what God’s covenantal curses involve death, but it’s a continual ongoing death. It’s not annihilation.

And so, it is a cursing as it were to pain of the person. And that’s what hell is all about. Eternal pain and misery and torment. Eternal death in that sense. So, there is covenantal sanctions involved in covenants and that’ll have implications as we go through this talk about divorce. Secondly, notice from Genesis 2:23 that the clear indication in verse 24 that the man become the man leaves his father and mother and they should cleave unto his wife, they become one flesh.

Obviously, there it’s talking about a permanence to the relationship. It is perpetual. It’s the second point of what we see from Genesis 2. Marriage is to be perpetual and permanent. It’s implied within the text. The third thing though we have to say about this particular portion of scripture in Genesis 2:23 is that these aspects of the marriage covenant are prefall. Okay, this happens before the fall occurs and the fall is going to change things.

And so we move to the second portion of our outline which is God’s lawful divorce in the Old Testament. And God’s lawful divorce in the Old Testament must be seen in the context of the fall of man and a movement away in some has changed about the marriage relationship from the fall from prefall to postfall. The first point we want to make under God’s lawful divorce in the old covenant is the case law statute of Deuteronomy 24.

Deuteronomy 24 reads as follows. When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favor in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her, then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. And when she has departed out of his house, she may go and be another man’s wife. And if the latter husband hate her, and write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and sendeth her out of the house, or if the latter husband die, which took her to be his wife, her former husband, which sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife after that she is defiled, for that is abomination before the Lord, and thou shalt not cause the land to sin, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.

These case laws obviously posit a lawful case for divorce, and they are recognized almost universally as such by commentators who take the word of God seriously.

Now it may not be it may first of all just to put one thing out of your mind. If you think this is just addressing a situation that God finds and then says what are the implications of that situation? Okay. The problem with that is that when we get to the gospel accounts which we’ll move to in a few minutes here you’ll see the Pharisees and Jesus clearly treating Deuteronomy 24 as a legitimization of divorce with in the old covenant.

Certainly, it recognized what was already happening, but it legitimized it and it controlled it. And Jesus will point that out later as I said, but the point is that this case law gives us a specific lawful cause for divorce in the old covenant. And that is almost universally accepted by scholars, even those people that believe that there is no divorce allowable in the New Testament. The second thing I want us to notice here is that the reason for divorce that is legitimate according to Deuteronomy 24, and by the way, it’d be probably helpful to point out that case laws are like that.

Case laws take a particular situation and then develop that in terms of lots of implications on how the law of God, the Ten Commandments, affect that particular situation. And so, one thing this case law does, although it does other things as well, one thing is to say that the only legitimate cause for divorce under the old covenant, the lawful legitimate divorce can occur as a result of some uncleanness.

That’s what it says in verse one. He hath found some uncleanness in her. Okay, she finds no favor in his eyes because he hath found some uncleanness in her. Then let him write her a bill of divorcement and give it in her hand and send her out of the house. So the legitimate cause for divorce under the old covenant was uncleanness. So we have to look at that word a little bit. The word for uncleanness here has its root meaning in being naked or uncovered.

It’s translated nakedness actually in most of the text that you find it in the Old Testament. One interesting place where that’s translated nakedness that is not the normal association is in Genesis 42:9. Joseph accused his brothers and we come to Egypt of being spies to see the nakedness of the land, the vulnerability of the land. Okay, for the purpose of conquering it. The nakedness of the land can be seen but not by the spies. So the spies are in there looking at the nakedness of land. The order, the purpose of that according to what Joseph is positing here is that they would want bring harm to the land. Okay? In the sense that they’d want to defeat the people that are on the land.

Now, nakedness uncleanness refers to sexual sins in general and is not limited to adultery under the old covenant usage here. That’s clear as you go through a concordance with these with the particular word. The root, as I said, meaning to uncover is also sometimes translated as to pour out, specifically in the context of somebody pouring out their soul unto death. And you’ll find occurrences like that in the Psalms and in Isaiah. Okay. There’s a connection here then between the shame and nakedness which was an appropriate reaction to man’s fallen sinful estate and to the covenantal death that resulted from the fall.

Okay, there’s a pouring out there’s a nakedness unto death as it were. So if a man discovered some sort of sexual perversity in his wife apparently or a violent rejection of the covenant evidencing an idolatrous uncleanness in respect to God. Divorce was allowed in the statute, although it was not commanded. He didn’t command a man to divorce the wife, but he allowed the man to divorce his wife, and it was manifestly lawful.

For a detailed analysis both of this word and the word fornication, which we’ll get to in a couple of minutes, I would commend to you Greg Bahnsen’s book, Theonomy and Christian Ethics. On pages 106 through 109, he does a very detailed exhaustive listing of these and also R.J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law on pages 406-409 also is another good place to look those up. But what we want to say about this word uncleanness is that it is specifically applied to shameful public disgrace in Deuteronomy 25:3 quoting from Greg Bahnsen’s work now to perversity in 1 Samuel 20:30 and rebellious dishonor for authority for instance in Ezra 4:14.

Okay. The Septuagint root for indecent thing is used in the New Testament in early Christian literature for behavior which is somehow shameful, unrespectable, disgraceful, indecent, dishonorable without proper department, propriety or decorum. The point of all that is this, the word for uncleanness there is a very generalized term. It’s not specifically talking about adultery. Number one, it’s not even restricted just to sexual sins, although that’s the most common root use of the word and the most common sin it would refer to.

There are other sins obviously in the Old Testament were uncleanness. If we’re going to let God’s word interpret God’s word, we’re uncleanness also be a legitimate cause for divorce that are not sexual sins specifically. Now, we may like this word to be clearer, but it isn’t. And it isn’t because God’s word has made it that way. If God wanted to make it a specific sin, adultery, meaning the legitimate cause of divorce in the old covenant, he would have done that, but he didn’t.

He used a very broad term to cover a multitude of sins. And of course, one of the reasons for that is that man’s heart is very sinful and there are many manifold ways to exhibit some sort of terrible rejection of the covenant you have with God. And as a result, the covenant that God has created between you and your husband as well. But given this fact that uncleanness is a legitimate cause for divorce, then this passage goes on to say before us Deuteronomy 24 rather goes on to say that remarriage is acceptable after this kind of divorce, but with a consequence, no return to the original spouse.

And we’re going to talk about this a lot more next week. But this morning, what I want you to see about that particular portion of this passage before us in Deuteronomy 24 is that Deuteronomy 24 provides an equivalency between the death of the spouse and a bill of divorcement. What am I talking about there? It says that in verse 4, let’s see, verse 3 rather, if the latter husband hate her, write her the divorcement gives it to her hand sends her out of the house or if the latter husband die which took her to be his wife then she cannot return to the original spouse.

The point I’m trying to make is the two conditions divorce by the second husband or the death of the second husband are equated at least in this particular case law. Okay, there’s an equation between physical death and divorce in this particular law. That’s important what we’ll bring up in a couple of minutes. We’ll talk about that more in detail next week when it comes to remarriage, but it also is important for this morning’s study.

Okay. Now what this should show us from Deuteronomy 24 is a radical change in the marital relationship which the fall brought. The once permanent perfect union between man and wife is now prone to death and to disillusion, death and divorce. Divorce by death or divorce by dissolution by some terrible sin on the part of the wife. And of course, if we understand the scriptures to talk about reciprocal obligations both ways, the same thing would be true about a terrible sin on the part of the husband as well.

And so there is a radical shift here to the postfall world in terms of marriage. And in fact, such a shift that the wife cannot even return to her original husband after she’s been divorced or set free from her second husband, which you would think it’d be a restoration of what the perfect marriage would be. But the scriptures say no. Specifically, you cannot do that. We’ll talk about reasons about that next week for the prohibition against remarriage.

But for now, we’re going to see this radical shift and the obvious legitimization of divorce that occurs in this passage. Now there are theological implications for this as well. The dissolution of the marriage covenant either through death or through divorce for cause in Deuteronomy 24 mirrors the covenant of God. in that respect as well. An important element to keep mind as we go through the these texts is that Ephesians 5 tells us as we pointed out a couple of minutes ago that marriage clearly images or reflects our covenant between us, God’s bride and himself.

As Adam and Eve on the basis of their plunge into sin and resulting uncleanness, their nakedness before God, their being bare as it were to death, were divorced and turned out of God’s house, the garden so to speak. So the wife that rejects the covenant of marriage to God first and then resultingly also to the covenant man that God has provided to her in Deuteronomy 24, she’s turned out by that husband and written a legal declaration of that fact akin to the declaration of God’s word against fallen man. That point is an important point and it will be brought out again next week when we talk about remarriage.

So the case law of Deuteronomy 24 shows the legitimization of divorce, shows what causes for divorce and helps us to see the theological reasons when we look back to the garden of Eden and what God did in terms of kicking the people out of his house in the garden. Let’s look at a second set of scriptures though that talk about the divorce of Israel by God himself.

First Isaiah 50:1 Isaiah 50:1 reads as follows. Thus sayeth the Lord, where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement whom I have put away? Or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.

That’s Isaiah 50:1. Now, that text is important for our consideration this morning for several reasons. First of all, it’s interesting how God phrases this. He says, “To which of your creditors is it to whom I have sold you?” God has sold them into slavery as it were. Now, the purpose of that, the purpose to show that of course is is the same as the purpose of God divorcing his people for their uncleanness. They’ve been divorced by God. They’ve been sold into slavery. They’ve been turned over to bondage to somebody else.

But God says in the next portion of the verse there, “Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves.” You see, ye sold yourselves and for your transgressions as your mother put away. The question we want to consider just briefly here is who put us under this marriage relationship between Israel and God? Who initiated it? Well, God certainly wrote the bill of divorce. We see that real clearly here. But it’s important to see here that what who really broke that covenant relationship was not God. He didn’t put it under.

Who broke the covenant relationship was Israel for its manifest rejection of God. Now again, I’m not talking about a falling short and attempting to follow the commands of God and falling short, but Israel had totally rejected God. Had gone after other gods, had entered into idolatries. And there’s a correlation between idolatries and fornication. We’ll get to in just a minute here. The point is, Israel rejected God, broke the terms of the covenant in a manifest way, and Israel cut itself asunder from God.

In one sense, then they sold themselves. They put us under what God had brought together. But in another sense, God does write that bill of divorcement. And that’s quite clear. Is your, he says, for your transgressions is your mother put away confirming what he said here that he had given them a bill of divorcement. God divorced Israel is the point here real clearly pointed out. And it’s interesting that the bill of divorcement here talked about is in relationship to Deuteronomy 24 God’s own law here the case law that he set up and he cites Deuteronomy 24.

He says that he gives them a bill of divorcement which was the requirement of Deuteronomy 24 when a divorce was entered into. Additionally by the way that term bill of divorcement the Septuagint translation of this particular clause bill of divorcement is the same Greek word as is found in Matthew 5 and in a later form which we’ll look to in a couple of minutes in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 the bill of divorce and we’ll read about there in the gospels in a few minutes so there’s correlation between those two items also Deuteronomy 24 is followed by God in Isaiah 50 in that divorce divorcement is for transgressions the transgressions are what yield the uncleanness described in Deuteronomy 24.

The transgressions must be of a particular nature then that would yield the nakedness or death that is there covenantal death. It must be that sort of transgression. Let’s look at another verse where God has said to divorce his people. Jeremiah 3:1. Jeremiah 3:1 says the following. They say, “If a man put away his wife and she go from him and become another man’s, shall he return unto her again? Shall not that land be greatly polluted?

But thou has played the harlot with many lovers. Yet return again to me, sayaeth the Lord. Then in verse 8, and I saw when for all the causes where by backsplitting Israel committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a bill of divorce. God says because of her adulteries, I put her away and I gave her a bill of divorcement. God again references in verse 8 Deuteronomy 24.

Now unlike a man in Deuteronomy 24 who was unable to return to the first spouse, God does return to Israel after he has put her away. And we’ll talk about that next week. It has implications what we’re going to say in terms of remarriage. But the important thing to realize from this verse this morning is that God did divorce Israel again using Jeremiah 3, the Deuteronomy 24 prescription that he had provided, of course. And the other thing to remember with this passage is that whoredoms here are identified as idolatry specifically. And so idolatry created uncleanness in the nation of Israel.

And that kind of manifest idolatry then would also create the uncleanness of the bride in Deuteronomy 24 the individual wife or the individual husband. Okay. So what does the Old Testament show us? The Old Testament shows us first by specific case law. Deuteronomy 24 that there are legitimate and lawful causes for divorce. The Old Testament shows us by theological equivalence to the death of covenant to the death of covenantal blessings suffered by Adam and Eve in the garden that there are theological reasons for that.

And third by specific sanction. God divorces Israel. And so divorce is plainly set forth as a certainly unhappy but as a sometimes necessary result of the fallen condition of man. I might just mention in passing and this has a lot of implications. I just mentioned in passing that divorce by death obviously would not also would not have occurred prefall. Do you see what I’m saying about that? If you’re married, your spouse dies, you’re not divorced by death and you’re certainly allowed to remarry.

The point is that divorce by death would also not have occurred prior to the fall. And that’s important to kind of keep in the back of your mind again for next week. But in any event, we have here by specific case law, by theological equivalence, and by specific sanction by God’s divorcing of Israel, a case that divorce for cause under the old covenant was legitimate. And by the way, one more thing before we move into the new covenant teaching on divorce is that it is found the reference in Malachi 2:16 that God hates divorce, which is an important reference to keep in mind, that’s found in that same Old Covenant book.

Okay? So, if you’re going to whatever you’re going to do with that phrase that God hates divorce, you have to take into account the rest of the Old Covenant. You can’t make God oppose himself. Okay? What’s that hating talking about? It can’t be a complete rejection of the total act itself because he entered into divorce against Israel himself and he gave specific case law out of that same old covenant to provide for divorce.

Okay, that’s old covenant. Let’s talk about the new covenant now and see if there’s any differences. Under the new covenant, we want to look at God’s lawful divorce and the new covenant. And you can see where I’m going, but we’ll see whether or not you agree with me as you follow through the reasoning from the scriptures here. The case law of Deuteronomy 24 is, I believe, reiterated or restated, reinforced by Jesus in Matthew 5.

In Matthew 5, we have the sermon on the mount. And Jesus says the following from our text we read this morning. It hath been said who Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement. But I say unto you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery. And whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committh adultery.

Okay? Now to understand this correctly, we have to first of all remember what Jesus did on the sermon on the mount. And the sermon on the mount should be real familiar to most people in this church because we remember that it’s in the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5:17-20 that Jesus restates the validity of the Old Testament law. He says he did not come to abolish the law. He came to put it into force, to fulfill it in the sense of putting it into force and reminding people of the true intent of that law.

What Jesus did in the sermon on the mount, and we don’t have time to go through all the examples of this, but again, Bahnsen’s work is probably the best to reference if you want to study that out in more depth. What Jesus did in the sermon on the mount is to restate what God’s law always required for people. Okay? And he goes back to that law that had been perverted by the Pharisees. and other people at the time of the Pharisees and corrects what they’ve done and then restates it to them in its strengthened form the way that had always been stated to them in the old covenant.

And so what we have in the sermon on the mount is a restatement of the law bring them back to their original meaning. The whole of the sermon on the mount is a restatement of this law. He does not give a new commandment but corrects their perversion of the old commandment thus making it new in that sense. Certainly new to them because they had so long followed their interpretations. They didn’t know what it said anymore. And that’ll become obvious as we go through this particular case and point.

Nowhere is well this the fact that Jesus restates old covenant law is very obvious for this specific example we’re going to look at here and you’ll you’ll see that as we go through this. I believe that Jesus gives us an inspired commentary on Deuteronomy 24 here. The Pharisees had misquoted and misapplied Deuteronomy 24 and now held to divorce for any reason. We’ll get to that in a couple of minutes. Jesus gives the corrective reading of the sole reason for divorce which is fornication. Marriage to one who is divorced for improper reasons Jesus tells us is tantamount to adultery. And again we’ll talk about that more next week in terms of remarriage.

But Jesus says that there is this exception clause is what you hear writers talk about this statement in Matthew 5 that except for the cause of fornication. They refer to that as the exception clause. And the big debate about the exception clause is what does it make an exception to? Is it divorce or is it remarriage? Does it apply just to divorce or just to remarriage? And we’ll have to get into that in some detail next week. But most people would agree that the exception clause certainly applies to divorce if not remarriage.

Even Bill Gothard, who if we get time later this morning or certainly next week, we’ll talk about some of his objections to what we’re talking about this morning, our interpretation of the text. Even Gothard seems sees the exception clause allowing for remarriage if the conditions of the exception clause are met. Okay. So the real problem with the exception clause relative to divorce now not to remarriage there’s some contention there but relative to divorce the whole question is what does it mean? What is porneia? If those conditions are met most scholars would agree or most people that study the Bible or read it through would agree that then divorce is legitimate.

Well that means what we have to do is understand the exception. And the exception term here is fornication. One of the common problems dealing with the exception clause is the continuing uh lack of preciseness that people have about language. Fornication is not adultery. Adultery can be a subset of a generalized term fornication, but they are not equivalent terms. And there’s lots of verses that point that out, but the words are different. They’re used differently in the New Testament, and they refer to different things. So Jesus does not give the exception here just for adultery. He gives it for fornication like he says he gives it for now it’s interesting that some people believe that porneia here refers specifically to incest and just to incest. Bill Gothard believes that porneia here refers to an illicit marriage or sexual union and could be one of three different things he said.

First it could be a sodomite marriage. Secondly, it could be an incestuous marriage or third a fraudulent marriage and the wife not being or the man not being what they had purported to be prior to the marriage in terms of their sexual cleanness. He says if those three conditions are met then you can have divorce and remarriage. Okay. But the point is that’s his definition of porneia. but I think if we go to the scriptural understanding of the use of the term we’ll find a much broader term being used here.

Now it’s interesting that they have to go at least this far to say that porneia is incest because John the Baptist obviously went to Herod and told Herod that he should not be married to his brother Philip’s wife Herodias. Okay, his sister who was a sister-in-law as well as his niece and they certainly have to then say that incestuous marriages should be spoken against and broken up. But in any event, I think the term is much broader than just incest or sodomite marriages.

The Westminster Confession and many of the reformers that we might read over the last three or four hundred years have taken the word fornication in a narrow sense of adultery. But I think that if you look at the origins of the word and look at some of the ways that used, you’ll see the term is much broader. Specifically, again, I’m recommending Bahnsen’s study on this in his Theonomy and Christian Ethics because he does a very detailed analysis.

I’ll just point out a couple of things. But fornication, Bahnsen tells us, includes the unclean things, defilements, and abominations of secular, ungodly Rome in Revelation 17:4 and 19:2. It also refers to profane apostasy in Hebrews 12:16 and idolatrous fornication in 1 Corinthians 10:8. Thus, fornication can function as a generic term for immoral behavior and is so translated as well as other diverse sins of a repugnant nature.

What we have then is this word porneia. If you look at the occurrences, it can be used of a number of things. Certainly sexual sins of a whole variety, not just adultery, but homosexuality, incest. Certainly those things are legitimate. As well as a generalized apostate teaching as is talked about in the book of Revelation. And so the word porneia is also a broad term although in a in a in one sense it certainly refers to sexual sins which are idolatries.

Okay. Well that should bring to mind I think in our minds what we’ve said earlier about Deuteronomy 24. Deuteronomy 24 used this term uncleanness which was not the nice precise word we’d like if it was adultery or just sexual sin. It’s a broad term. And so we have Jesus reiterating Deuteronomy 24 by again using a broad term porneia instead of a very limited term for either incest or for adultery. You see, so there’s a correlation there.

And in fact, the studies that are done by von Bahnsen shows that there is essentially a uh a co-extensiveness in terms of their application. They’re extensive. Let’s see. Quoting from Bahnsen, the two terms in their cognates are virtually co-extensive in their applications. If you look at the Septuagint use of the word uncleanness in Deuteronomy and then look at the Greek term porneia used here for fornication you’ll see all kinds of similar the same sorts of usage in Greek and so these terms are used co-extensively and so what Jesus is doing is he’s just restating it in a new language of course Greek because he wasn’t speaking Hebrew at that time but the point is he uses the same equivalent word for uncleanness in the Old Testament he uses porneia in the New Testament now before we leave this point it’s important that we talk just for a brief minute here about 1 Corinthians 7:15.

In 1 Corinthians 7:15, Paul says that the one that the that the believer is not under bondage, if their unbelieving mate deserts, leaves. Okay? And he says there that if their unbelieving mate leaves, you’re not under bondage in such a case. Okay? Now, I’m not going to get into whether or not that means that person can remarry. We’ll talk about that next week. But the point here is that the term bondage that’s used here and is used throughout the Corinthians text refers to divorce by dissolution of marriage.

Now how strong the dissolution is we’ll talk again about next week in terms of remarriage. But for now I want you to realize that what Paul is saying here is that desertion by the unbelieving mate is a legitimate grounds for divorce or no longer being bound to that marriage partner. And that’s why the Westminster Confession and the reformers and other people that take the Bible uh in its total application for us have said that there’s two grounds for divorce.

Adultery because of the porneia which they interpret in a very narrow sense which I think is wrong and then desertion. And so the Westminster Confession says divorce is legitimate either adultery or desertion because they’re stuck with 1 Corinthians 7:15. Here’s the problem. The problem is that if the exception clause that Jesus gave is porneia and limited to adultery or even limited to sexual sins, who is this Paul fella to come along and give another reason for divorce.

How could he do that? See, he wouldn’t do that. He didn’t bring new laws. He took the law that God had established, which Jesus then had reiterated, and built upon it and showed application to certain areas of life. But he wouldn’t grant another exception. This isn’t another exception clause that he’s going to tack on to Jesus’s exception clause. You see what I’m saying? Paul doesn’t work that way. Paul doesn’t bring a new law.

He exposits God’s law and shows application to individuals and the application of porneia says that if the person deserts his wife and rejects that covenant and is going to act in that sense he has broken the covenant he has cut it asunder and the unbelieving mate now is free to move to divorce against such an individual Paul’s reading of porneia or definitive proof that porneia is a broad term used for all kinds of sin by the marriage partner.

Okay. So Jesus goes right back to Deuteronomy 24 tells him the same thing. Now he then the second point of the new covenant teaching on divorce is that this case law is also reiterated to the Pharisees. What we’ve been talking about the sermon on the mount where the exception of the Deuteronomy 24 passage is reiterated to the masses or to the great bulk of people. But now we’re going to talk about the same thing reiterated specifically to the Pharisees.

Matthew 19:3 The Pharisees come to Jesus trying to tempt him, and saying unto him, “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” And he answered and said unto them, “Have you not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female? And said, for this cause shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the twain shall become one flesh. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh, what therefore God have joined together, let not man put asunder.”

So the first thing Jesus does here is to take the mistaken emphasis of the Pharisees and correct it. They come to him saying, “Does this can a man divorce his wife for any reason?” When the question they should have been asking is, “How can we keep marriages together?” They wanted to know how to break them apart. Okay, they had a totally wrong emphasis when looking at the law of God. Deuteronomy 24 is the exception to what God wants ideally for marriage couples, which is to stay married together.

And that should have been what they wanted. But what they were looking for was some sort of excuse to get out of marriage. So Jesus first of all corrects their mistaken emphasis relative to the divorce laws. And that’s an important reminder to us, isn’t it? If we have a mate we’re having problems with, we shouldn’t be looking for ways out of the marriage agreement. We should be looking first of all, ideally to try to how to keep that marriage together.

Okay? So he corrects the mistaken emphasis. Now, sometimes you cannot do it. Sometimes your marriage partner is dead, stays dead, and we’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. But you cannot keep them together necessarily. But the point is that the emphasis should be on trying to keep marriages together, not on trying to break them apart. So he corrects the mistaken emphasis of the divorce laws.

He goes on from this to say though in verse 7, they then say to him, why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your heart, suffered you to put away your wives. But from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication and shall marry another committh adultery.

And who so marrith her which is put away doth commit adultery. The second thing that Jesus does in this whole context of Matthew 19 is to correct the Pharisees mistaken quotations of the law. Now in Matthew 5 he said to the masses, “You have heard it said that let a man divorce his wife by giving her a bill of divorcement.” And here the Pharisees come to him and say, “Is it lawful for a man to put his way of his wife for every cause?

And then he says, “What did Moses say?” Or they say, “Then Moses commanded us to give a writing of divorcement to put her away.” You see, what I’m pointing out here is that every time the Pharisees talk about divorce and every time they quote from Deuteronomy 24, what they say is Moses says, “Give her a bill of divorcement and put her away,” they leave out the uncleanness aspect. Okay? So they misquoted the scriptures.

And Jesus then tells them about that and says that the reason why Moses said that divorce was applicable in some cases was because of uncleanness and he uses the word fornication and by doing that he corrects their misquotation. Now it’s interesting that when Jesus talks about Deuteronomy 24 though the legitimacy of divorce when he says about the fornication being an exception clause for divorce he doesn’t use the terms originally from Deuteronomy 24.

Well let’s see I’ll just Deuteronomy 24 says that when a man takes a wife marries her and it comes to pass that she find no favor in his eyes because he hath found some uncleanness in her let him write the bill of divorcement. The Pharisees were saying, “Let her write the bill of divorcement.” And we’re leaving out the uncleanness. Jesus, in his retort to them, leaves out the phrase that she has found no favor in his eyes.

Because that’s the one the Pharisees were using for him to divorce their wives, the no favor in his eyes. Jesus doesn’t repeat that part of Deuteronomy 24 because that’s what they were mistakenly emphasizing is their own personal dislike of somebody as opposed to the uncleanness which is defined by God’s law as a violation of his covenant. So Jesus corrects their misquotation. And then finally, thirdly, in addition to correcting their misquotation, he then corrects their faulty interpretation of Deuteronomy 24.

And we want to look at a couple of the words that Jesus used here in his response. First of all, Jesus says that Moses because of the hardness of your heart suffered you to put away your wives. It’s important here to realize that term suffered is not an allowing for an evil thing to happen. Okay? What you’ll hear people talking about this particular verse is well you know people are so hard-hearted these days you got to let them divorce their wives.

Okay. But you know Paul told Timothy that the law and the restrictions of the law of course are made for evil men. The more evil people are the stricter laws you need for them. So Jesus isn’t going to take a strict law a an obstinate people here and say well I guess I’ll relax the stringency of my law for you. Just the reverse. And in fact, that’s what he’s doing to them is he’s bringing back to the original intent of Deuteronomy 24 and restricting their loose interpretation of the law to a very tight interpretation.

Okay? So the word suffered here in terms of Moses does not mean that Moses wrote this to accommodate people in their sin. Okay? Suffered here in the specific way it’s used in the New Testament, this same Greek word is used specifically to speak of an authorization from a superior. Okay. In Acts 26:1 for instance, Agrippa grants Paul the legal prerogative of speaking for himself. He authorizes that to him. He didn’t go beyond the law.

He said that’s your lawful right. Go ahead and do it. Okay? And so Moses when Moses suffered the people doesn’t mean that he allowed them somehow against what they should be doing. He gave them legal authorization from a superior and he was not the superior God was. The second term that Jesus used here that’s quite important to remember what it’s talking about is the hardness of hearts. It says that Moses suffered them this because of their hardness of heart.

The hardness of a man’s heart speaks to the fall of man from which they were to be regenerated by God. In Deuteronomy 10:16, we read, for instance, circumcise therefore the foreskins of your hearts and be no more stiff necked. Okay. Hardness of hearts refers to the rebellion of man that was a result of the fall of sin into sin rather by Adam and he fell into a hardness of sin.

The hard-hearted person is the offending party, not the innocent party. And then third, Jesus says that in the beginning, it wasn’t so. And this is confirmation of the above two items. Christ contrasts the time of the provision for divorce with the time of the creation of the institution of marriage itself. And the beginning it wasn’t so. Why? Because men weren’t hard-hearted. Because the fall hadn’t occurred.

With the fall, we have men who are self-consciously given over to evil. And when those people are involved in marriage relationships, it becomes an abomination to God. Save they repent. And because of those hard-hearted people, Moses wrote a bill of divorcement giving authorization from a superior which is God for divorce in those cases.

Mark 10:1 I won’t read the whole thing. But again the Pharisees come to Jesus trying to tempt him. They say, “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?” Tempting him. Verse 3 of Mark 10, he answered and said unto them, “What did Moses command you?” He points them back to Moses. The very law that some people would say that Jesus is doing away with here. He points them back to Moses. What did Moses command you to do? Saying in essence, you know what he told you to do? Do it.

They misquote Moses. He corrects their misquotation and says what Moses said was except for porneia or uncleanness, some sort of violent act against the covenant of marriage and the covenant of God, you cannot divorce your wife. It is illegitimate. He corrects their misapplication of the law. Stresses on the perpetuity of marriage, not on its dissolvement. Jesus first tells them to go back to Moses.