Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Good morning. Where we left off last week. If you remember correctly, we talked about scriptural perspective on divorce. Last week, we were going to deal with objections. We never got to them last week, not having enough time. So this morning, we’re going to do something a little bit unusual. We’ll start this morning by talking about objections to the interpretation of divorce that we gave last week from the scriptures.

We’ll then move to nine statements concerning the biblical teaching of remarriage after divorce, and then finally look at some objections to that part of what we’re saying.

You know, I was thinking as we were singing that song of prayer about the scriptures that some churches have a separate podium for where the scriptures are read and then a separate podium where the speaker would come and speak about the scriptures. And the reason for that, of course, is that the scriptures are an infallible rule. They’re the only standard God has given to us and they’re the one we must cleave to. When we expound the scriptures, we’re prone to error, and that’s certainly no less true of myself. What I’m saying is an encouragement to you all to take this teaching and not see it as the last word, but to take it and then test it by scripture.

I think that when we get to the nine statements relative to divorce and marriage, they’re biblically sound. But when dealing with the subjects we’ve been dealing with for the last few weeks, which are quite controversial—there, as well as every other place—we must be good Bereans and study the scriptures for ourselves, make sure that what we’re saying is correct. This is particularly true in an area where there’s been a lot of controversy in the church, as there has been regarding divorce and remarriage.

Having said that, we’ll look this morning at—oh, one other thing I wanted to mention was I got a newsletter this week in the mail and it had an old Persian proverb quoted there that says it takes 10 pounds of common sense to apply one pound of learning. And I think that’s also good to keep in mind. The scriptures say that we must seek wisdom from above. That God gives us wisdom in how to apply his law and what we read from his scriptures to everyday life.

And certainly there are things that occur in terms of marriage and divorce and remarriage that are very unusual situations. You can probably think of many of them that you might even be familiar with yourself. And it takes wisdom from God to be able to apply these teachings from scripture to our life. And so that’s important to keep in mind as well.

Okay. Having said that, we’re going to look at some objections to our view of divorce.

The view we put forth last week was that Jesus in Matthew 19 reiterated Deuteronomy 24—that there was a connection between the word porneia, or fornication as it’s translated in the King James version, and the uncleanness talked about in the provisions of Deuteronomy 24 for divorce. Remember we mentioned that although Deuteronomy 24 specifically is talking about the prohibited remarriage of a wife back to her first husband, yet it does teach also that there are biblical grounds for divorce.

The Pharisees interpreted it that way. Jesus did too. He argued that it gave biblical grounds for divorce. He differed with them first in their misquotation of the scriptures. Second, in their misemphasis—by emphasizing that there was a way out for marriage instead of emphasizing the fact that marriage is given to us to be unbreakable, only put asunder by death ideally. And then third, he took exception to their application of Deuteronomy 24 when they took the term uncleanness to mean just about any reason the husband would want to put away his wife.

Jesus corrected all of that. But he brought them back to the true meaning of Deuteronomy 24, which was that marriages should be kept together. But if one of the partners is particularly hard-hearted and falls into some sort of gross sin and violation of the covenant the person has with God and the covenant of marriage itself—and many of those sins would be sexual in nature, although not all of them—that there would be provision then for the innocent party to recognize what the offending party had done, which was to split the marriage covenant in twain or in two.

That’s the view we held. Now, I’ll be referencing a book this morning called *Jesus and Divorce* written by Wenham and Heth, and that’s probably one of the strongest works in terms of disputing some of the things we said last week and what we’re going to say this morning. And so I’ll be dealing primarily with that. We’ll also talk about Bill Gothard’s objections as well because he’s quite a popular minister and teacher of God’s word.

But first of all, we have to deal first with their old covenant critique. Remember we talked about Deuteronomy 24 being the basis of Matthew 19. Wenham and Heth have objections to what we said about Deuteronomy 24 more in detail than in substance. They posit a big change from old covenant to new covenant, which of course we wouldn’t posit. And they would normally see provision for divorce and remarriage in the Deuteronomy 24 passage, but they try to break the linkage between Deuteronomy 24 and the teachings of Christ in Matthew 5 really with a three-strand rope that we’ll talk about now.

I’ve mentioned here that I don’t particularly like critiquing another person’s work like this. But I think it’s very important. Many of the objections we’ll talk about this morning, you may well have put to you. It’s good that you’re familiar with them and understand them and understand the weakness involved in them. Additionally, I should say that in terms of Wenham and Heth’s book, *Jesus and Divorce*, I’m going to be talking about what I think their position is.

Maybe it’s just my own slowness of mind or something, but I didn’t find the book necessarily all that clear. And I was talking to another gentleman who has written a book on divorce, and he said the same thing—that he had corresponded with Wenham about what he thought their position was only to find out that he was wrong. So, it’s not a particularly clear or lucid book in terms of some of their specific points.

So I should be saying that I’m going to be responding to what I think their position is. And if I’m wrong, that’s okay. Point is that other people will make these objections.

First of all, one problem with that book is they continue to refer to the position that some of the positions on divorce that we would be closely related to as the Erasmian position on divorce. And Bill Gothard does the same thing in trying to equate the modern teaching of people like ourselves who believe that there is provision for divorce and remarriage in the new covenant to Erasmus. Now it’s true that Erasmus was one of the first people to break with the church in their perspective on divorce. But to call people Erasmians because they believe something that Erasmus taught at least in part is really kind of pejorative to the argument.

It really kind of claws the whole thing with the very terms they use. It’s interesting that in Wenham’s book the subtitle refers to “the evangelical consensus on divorce,” which they’re against. And I would much prefer that they would have used that term throughout the book instead of “the Erasmian view,” but they didn’t. That’s one problem I have with it.

Now, in dealing with Deuteronomy 24, what they have to do is tie together Genesis 2, Leviticus 18 with the prohibitions of the degrees of consanguinity or one-flesh relationship, and then Deuteronomy 24. They tie them all up together, and that really is the only critique they have of our position on Deuteronomy 24. It has several strands to it.

However, strand one that they posit to break the link between Deuteronomy 24 and Matthew 5 is to equate Deuteronomy 24 with the legitimization of polygamy. They say that the Old Testament polygamy was acceptable and okay and nothing unlawful about it and therefore Deuteronomy 24 has to be understood in that light.

Quoting on page 106, they say “the Old Testament presupposes the legitimacy of divorce.” They say again “under Old Testament law polygamy was permitted.” Okay. And then on page 106, “divorce in the Mosaic economy did not actually result in the dissolution of the marriage bond.” And then another quote, “where the Jewish law went wrong was in the failure to perceive that the one-flesh persisted after divorce.”

Now, I can only hope here, but by “the Jewish law going wrong,” they’re referring to the rabbinic interpretations in the interim period after the scriptures were written. I certainly hope they’re not saying here that the actual laws recorded in Deuteronomy went wrong, but they really leave that unclear. I’m not sure what they believe on that.

The point here is that they say that there’s little support in the scriptures that an extramarital relationship dissolves the marriage bond. The only verses they cite in their search for such a provision are those that relate to premarital relationships. Okay.

Wenham and Heth need a legal standing for polygamy in the Old Testament as we’ll see in just a minute here. Yet, it’s simply not there. They posit a legitimate polygamy in the Old Testament. The church has been nearly unanimous in its position for 2,000 years that polygamy was not okay in the Old Testament.

For more study on that, I’d refer you to Dabney’s *Systematic Theology*. I have copies of a couple of pages out of that systematic theology where he deals with polygamy. But suffice it to say that the commandment against adultery, which is one of the ten commandments, of course, prohibits polygamy, as well as many other scriptures. Polygamy was not legitimate in the Old Testament.

It is a complete failure to understand biblical exegesis to look at something that was in practice in the Old Testament and think as a result of that it was okay and not condemned. We used the example before of David’s polygamy, for instance, and how—specifically we know Deuteronomy 17, the king is prohibited from polygamy by specific mention. And yet David is not condemned for his polygamy. And so we don’t have to see a condemnation of an individual’s action to posit a biblical law against it. David’s the proof of that.

There are many scriptures including the degrees of consanguinity in Leviticus 18 that Dabney talks about to indicate that polygamy was not all right, as well as of course the commandment against adultery. So I think they’re just flat wrong in that. And there’s lots of reasons for that we won’t get into this morning. We’ve talked about it before in some detail and you can read these other works.

If Deuteronomy 24 can be equated with sanctioning and approving of polygamy, then clearly Jesus and Deuteronomy 24 are at odds because Jesus doesn’t speak in favor of polygamy. He speaks against it. And so they’re really trying to break apart the connection here, which we think was quite clear from Matthew 5 and Matthew 19 last week, by saying that one allows for polygamy and the other doesn’t.

The second strand they add to this cord is by raising the question of the reason for the prohibition of remarriage to the original partner. Quoting now from them, “any suggested meaning of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 that does not speak to the reason for the prohibition of the reunion of the original couple in verse 4 misses the intent of the legislation found in that verse.”

So saying if you don’t understand why God didn’t allow it in Deuteronomy 24, then we can just almost disregard that verse because we don’t know what it was saying. Well, this to me is a really fatally flawed position in terms of the law of God. We don’t have to understand with our mind what the law of God says in order to obey it.

Now, I would say here there are lots of people that have given lots of plausible reasons for the prohibition, including to prohibit hasty divorce on the part of the first couple and the protection of the second marriage. Ray Sutton in his book *Second Chance* talks about a theological reason for the prohibition—that God forbids anything that would picture him returning to the first bride that he divorced, which he sees as Israel, without her becoming part of the second bride that he married, which is the church.

Now, I’m not sure if he’s accurate in that, but it’s good to look for those sort of theological reasons. But what I’m trying to say here is there’s lots of plausible reasons for the prohibition of Deuteronomy 24.

Additionally, I think that one of the things that I’ve been working on that I haven’t really settled in my own mind yet, but I’ll just kind of throw it out there and you can test it according to the scriptures. I wonder if there isn’t some picture going on in Deuteronomy 24 of the church being married to Moses, the administrator of the law in the old covenant, analogous to Romans 7. Remember Romans 7—we have the idea that death produces dissolution or divorce. And we talk there about our death to the law that we might live to Christ.

And so I wonder if there’s some sort of picture there of our dying to Moses and the Mosaic administration of the law relative to trying to achieve salvation by it, and instead being married to Jesus Christ in the new covenant and as the covenant mediator, which of course is plainly pointed out in Ephesians 5, that connection. And as a result of that, then it would be illicit for a believer to try to return to a Mosaic system of salvation by Mosaic administration. In Hebrews 12, the book of Hebrews makes a big point about not returning to the Mosaic ceremonials that found their completion in Jesus Christ.

And so there’s another possible theological reason for Deuteronomy 24. But the point is—you know, to say that if we don’t understand the reason for the prohibition then we should throw out that as a consideration in our understanding is just crazy. We don’t approach the law in that way. And it’s interesting that Wenham and Heth don’t approach divorce that way. They ask the question of themselves why does the Old Testament not ban divorce outright. And their answer to that question is we’re just not told. Okay? We’re just not told.

And see, they don’t use their same rule upon themselves. They don’t understand the reason for divorce in the Old Testament, yet they use teachings of the Old Testament relative to divorce to support their position, which is amazing in light of their requirement of knowing specifically the reasons for Deuteronomy 24 before considering it.

The third strand of their rope comes when they give their interpretation of the reason for the Deuteronomy 24 prohibition. They combine the first two points and Wenham then says that incest in the first marriage—incest is involved here because the first marriage creates a one-flesh relationship with the wife, and upon divorce there’s no dissolution of the marriage, and so for her to go back and marry her former husband would be to go back and to marry one’s brother, which is prohibited by the degrees of consanguinity in Leviticus 18.

You see they’re saying that there’s still a relationship there covenantally, and as a result of that one-flesh that’s occurred—now for them to go back to the original husband would violate Leviticus 18. The problem with that way of thinking, of course, is that in the marriage relationship itself, once a person has become married, you’re now saying the person is your sister and relationships with her would violate the degrees of consanguinity as well. And so he’s already in that sort of problem with the first marriage.

Now Ray Sutton in one of his sermons on divorce and remarriage said that he has interacted with Wenham over that point and he’s made that specific point to him, which all of us I think would probably realize as soon as you read that sort of interpretation of this prohibition. And that then said he’d have to rethink it, and probably Sutton was right that he’d have to rethink the whole position. So they only give one reason, that reason is not a strong reason at all, and involves a lot of convoluted logic including the legitimate use of polygamy in the Old Testament, which is simply not the case and is a violation of the laws against adultery.

Jesus, after all—or God rather, after all—created marriage so that the two should become one, as Dabney says, not the five or six become one. Okay.

So what do they have to assert the destruction of the first of the two pillars of the Erasmian view? What they call the Erasmian view—the Old Testament dissolution of the marriage bond through divorce. They assert the destruction of this, but that assertion is foundationless due to their unique and fatally flawed view of the Deuteronomy 24 prohibition of remarriage.

They view that to be based on consanguinity prohibitions of Leviticus 18, which necessitates their denial of the traditional reason given in Deuteronomy 24 and also mandates that they accept polygamy under the old covenant because, you see, if it was a violation of the consanguinity laws and if they’re still one-flesh, then it’s okay to be one-flesh with somebody else. See that’s their logic. So they have to get they have to put polygamy in the back door to justify their reason for Deuteronomy 24.

Polygamy is not allowed in the old covenant. The reason they give for Deuteronomy 24 prohibition is not supported by the text and it’s specifically denied by the fact that polygamy is outlawed in the old covenant as well as in the new covenant. So that’s their reasoning in the old covenant.

What happened in terms of the new covenant considerations of our view of divorce as we talked about last week. It’s interesting that they’re stuck, of course, with the exception clause in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19 that Jesus allowed for something with that exception clause—and at least the very least he allowed for was some form of divorce. And they’re kind of stuck with that.

They don’t like it though. And what they posit about Jesus putting this exception clause in—and they think the Mark and Luke passages, the parallel passages without the exception clause, are the real teaching of Christ and that Matthew is kind of a little bit fuzzy. What they say about Matthew is that Jesus in all probability is saying that he will not hold his disciples guilty for violating his absolute prohibition of divorce should they be forced by the mores of the community around them to put away a willfully adulterous spouse.

They posit that the exception clause is there to accommodate an unbiblical view in the society around them—the Jewish view that a wife is adulterous, she must be put away. Instead of saying that if the society forces you by peer pressure and other things that they would do to you, what he’s saying in Matthew 5:32 is that it’s okay.

Okay? So what they end up with regarding the exception clause is an accommodation by Jesus to the hardheartedness of men, as it were, in the times of our Lord and to their particular sinful teaching on divorce.

Well, this to me strikes me as absolutely ridiculous. It’s incredible that Jesus would change his very law—just issued to them, mind you—telling him not to divorce and he would change it immediately to accommodate a society of Jewish unbelievers.

We’re also told by Wenham and Heth that Jesus would surely require the forgiveness of seventy times seven in the case of an unfaithful partner. For Jesus to be replacing the penalty—the Old Testament penalty of death—with divorce would seem to be returning to the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law.

So Wenham and Heth break apart the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and they say that if Jesus were going to the law for divorce, that he’d be going against his own teaching about the need for forgiveness seventy times seven. But you remember what we talked about several months ago—that forgiveness is premised upon repentance of the individual. It’s not unconditional in that sense. God says that you’re to forgive people that repent, and he forgives people who come to repentance.

If you posit forgiveness that Jesus talks about as being unconditional, then who goes to hell today? Nobody. Everybody sinned, everybody is forgiven and as a result you have no hell. But so they try to break down the view that divorce is acceptable because people should be forgiving instead, without seeing the necessary correlation between forgiveness and repentance.

It also I think is very wrong of them to break the spirit away from the letter of the law in the particular sense in which they do in this case.

They also talk about some contextual problems for people that believe in the exception clause. They talk about the fact that Jesus is being confronted with two separate schools of Jews here—rabbis, the Shammaite school and the Hillelite school—and they say that certainly Jesus wouldn’t have agreed with any of the two existing schools of the rabbis. So they say that if Jesus is confronted with two errant views, we can’t make him agree with one of those wrong positions, which is really interpreting the text by extra-biblical evidence.

Although it’s certainly true there were various schools of rabbis at the time, in response to the point that Jesus’s answer assumed the same type of divorce as his questioners used and the same Greek word is used in all those cases, Wenham and Heth first appealed to the fact that Jesus was giving a new and radically different teaching and thus cannot be bound to the implications of the old term. They also argue from the fact that the early church fathers knew of no sort of divorce that Jesus was talking about.

So they appealed to the fathers. They appealed to the fact that Jesus was giving a new and radically different teaching to support their view, and that’s what they’re supposed to be proving—is that Jesus is giving a new and radically different teaching. So they assume what they’re going to teach first as proof of what they’re trying to prove, and then they also bring in the church fathers and of course again that’s extra-biblical evidence that doesn’t really cut it over trying to be noble Bereans—understanding the scriptures in the light of the scriptures.

In result of this they posit not only that Jesus broke with the Jews of his day but they also posit clearly that Jesus broke with God’s clear provisions for divorce and remarriage in the Old Testament. And to posit that sort of radical shift from the old to new covenant requires much more evidence than they have given us in these few objections that they have to our new covenant view of divorce.

In their effort to clear Jesus of agreeing with the Shammaite school of divorce interpretation, they in essence have him agreeing with the pharisaical interpretation of the Old Testament law. Okay? They’re saying he’s not correct in the interpretation of the Old Testament law. He’s agreeing with the Pharisees now—to reject Old Testament law and give a new and radically different teaching—and that clearly isn’t acceptable when we look at the Savior who came to bring the law into force and did not come to abolish the law. Okay.

So much for Wenham and Heth’s objections to old and new covenant teaching on what we said last week relative to divorce.

The next thing we want to consider is Bill Gothard’s objections.

Bill Gothard, it must be said, agrees with us primarily except in the use of the term porneia—to be as broad, as we used it last week—which was any sort of radical violation of the marriage covenant. Gothard holds that the word porneia refers specifically just to incest, to homosexual marriage, and to marital unfaithfulness prior to the engagement period. Now, to support this and to deny our position that it is broader and would include, for instance, adultery after marriage, which he thinks it does not include, he gives these reasons as why that is incorrect.

First, he says a covenant is unconditional. We talked about this a little bit last week. He’s just plain wrong there. A covenant always has conditions. It always has blessings and cursings. That’s part of what makes it a covenant. And to posit an unconditional covenant in that sense is wrong.

Secondly, he says there’s no exception clause in Jesus’s first answer. But of course, Jesus’s first answer in the text involved him bringing them back to the central meaning of marriage and the central purpose for marriage, which was that it wouldn’t be breakable—us brought under by death ideally. But he goes on to explain that because of man’s sin and the hardness of their heart, it was. And so, you know, that’s really no reason at all to say that there’s no exception clause in Jesus’s first answer. There obviously was an exception clause in the second answer.

Three, they say that God’s relationship with Israel is unconditional and that adultery would not separate Israel from God’s love and chastening. Well, again, Gothard is just wrong here. The Israelites as a nation were rejected by God and judged in AD 70. The book of Romans clearly taught us last week when we looked at it that God broke off the unbelieving Jews from the tree of his covenant. And so God divorced them and broke them off in that sense.

Fourth, he says that Deuteronomy 22—this is really kind of incredible. I’ll have to read this for you. He says: “Many who claim scriptural grounds for divorce base their claim on Deuteronomy 24:1-4. What these people fail to realize is that Deuteronomy 22:28-29 prohibits any divorce if the parties had physical relations before marriage.”

Well, he’s writing that second statement. But how does that disprove the teaching in Deuteronomy 24? It doesn’t. See, the point is—and actually in contradiction to what he’s saying here—Deuteronomy 22 is one more reason that we should understand Deuteronomy 24 is permitting and allowing and making provision from God for divorce in certain cases because Deuteronomy 22, which says that if a couple has marital or sexual relationships before marriage that they then the man cannot put away his wife later on because he has dishonored her, that obviously is an added condition to that marriage that isn’t found in most marriages.

You see, it’s a penalty for what’s happened here. It may seem like a light one to us. The point is it is a penalty. And so the fact that it’s a penalty means that most marriages don’t have that penalty. And so Deuteronomy 22, instead of denying that Deuteronomy 24 taught dissolution of marriage, is just the reverse. It says that normally we would expect couples to have the ability to divorce given good cause according to the scriptures as found in Deuteronomy 24.

Five, he says that if we held this view of the broad interpretation of divorce, then divorce would cause people to break the vows they made to God and to each other. Well, if this is true, then why did God allow for divorce in the old covenant? If this is true, did God break his vows when he cast off Israel and divorces her and cuts her off from the covenant people and brings his cursings upon her instead of blessings because of her numerous adulteries?

We talked last week about the vows being “till death do us part” in the Westminster Confession. This can be cited as an evidence that the church has always understood that covenantal death is also in view in those vows.

The sixth thing he says—and this is the last point he makes—is that divorce is harmful to children and so we shouldn’t allow for this sort of broad provision of the term porneia. Well, of course that has nothing to do with the interpretation of porneia in the text whether or not it’s harmful to children for that to occur or not. So even if we were to agree with Gothard that it’s always harmful to have a divorce, we’d still have to say that if God says it’s okay, we better allow people to do it and we better trust God to take care of those children.

But of course, he’s wrong even in what he says. How harmful is it to a child to have—let’s say we have a case where a mother has a small infant child and the father is an adulterer, let’s say he’s a homosexual rapist, for that matter. Without trying to be too colorful this morning, we have a person who is in vile disobedient sin against God, maybe even his children. Let’s throw that in for good measure. How is it good for that child for the wife to remain married to that husband? Is that good for the child? Would a divorce be more harmful for the child involved? Obviously not.

And that’s one reason why God gives us divorce. He cares about children. And he doesn’t want a child being continually exposed to that sort of danger and that sort of terrible abuse by a father who is reprobate. And so Gothard’s sixth reason again works against him.

Okay, those are objections to last week’s view. By the way, one other thing I want to mention about Bill Gothard—he has in the past, I don’t know if he still does or not, he has in the past advocated the specific violation of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 by advocating couples who have divorced and remarried another couple to go back to the original spouse. Direct violation of Deuteronomy 24. Okay, that’s objections to last week’s view.

And I know it was a lot of material there, but if you want to get more in detail, go get the tape and go through it.

We’ve got to move on to the marriage aspect this morning, and we’ll try to deal with the objections as well to the remarriage aspects we’re going to talk about this morning. And I’ve got nine statements here that are summary statements of what I believe the scriptures teach about remarriage after biblical divorce.

And again, we’re saying that biblical divorce is divorce for cause according to Deuteronomy 24 as repeated by Jesus in Matthew 5:32, which means that there has to be some sort of porneia—fornication, vile disruptive sin against the marriage partner by the guilty party. Without that, there is no biblical divorce. That’s the condition as we’re going to use that term. The biblical divorce refers to that sort of divorce.

**First statement: The continuity of the law indicates that remarriage would be acceptable after biblical divorce.**

There is a continuity of ethics from old to new testament. And this continuity of ethics, as taught in our confessional statement for instance, and I think clearly pointed out by Jesus in Matthew 5, speaks in favor of remarriage after divorce.

Clearly, remarriage was all right in the old covenant. Deuteronomy 24 makes that quite clear. It specifically prohibits one sort of remarriage—back to the original spouse after a couple is, after a wife has married somebody else. Okay, there are other scriptures, but we won’t put a lot of time into that. I think we talked about that enough last week—that the old covenant obviously sees remarriage as being acceptable after divorce.

And of course Wenham and Heth would agree with that, but they’re saying that it’s okay to have polygamy and that’s why they would accept it. But they’re wrong in that. But in any of that, remarriage is acceptable in the old covenant.

If it was acceptable in the old covenant, we have the same ethical system, but put back into force. We’re given the power of the Holy Spirit now. We might obey it more fully. We’re given the spirit teaching us the scriptures, both old and new covenants. We understand it in a better sense. We have Jesus’ correction of possible misinterpretations of Deuteronomy 24 in the Gospels. We’ll turn to Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 7 in a couple of minutes. We have more light from God of the New Covenant on what the implications of that law are.

But it’s the same ethical system as we move along here. Okay? And so since it’s the same ethical system, why would remarriage be illegitimate in the new covenant if it was legitimate in the old covenant?

Sometimes people almost assume an evolutionary posture relative to ethics. They think somehow the people in the old covenant just weren’t quite with it. And so God gave them kind of a loose law that had lots of problem areas in it—were actually kind of immoral things to let them do because they were somehow less able to keep his ethical requirements than we are. Well, that posits an evolutionary view of man that just isn’t true biblically.

The scriptures have one standard—God’s holy standard—one word from God that takes shape then in the ten commandments and the implications of those commandments in specific case law throughout history. Okay.

Another thing I should point out in this first point is that the negative law formulation of God’s law means that one must find an absolute prohibition of an activity such as remarriage in order to teach people that it is sin.

What do I mean? God’s law is normatively phrased as negative law. He says what we cannot do and if he doesn’t say we can’t do it, then we can do it. Now, there are activities that we would engage with that we don’t seem to have an explicit prohibition from God. But if you understand the implications of the ten commandments and then the case law that further applies everything—a lot of other activities that aren’t specifically mentioned—you’ll understand that he gives us negative prohibitions about lots of things.

But the point I’m trying to make is that we have a God who doesn’t bind men to a certain set of—”these are the 25 activities you can engage in.” He says instead, “these are the activities you cannot do and all the rest of the activities are okay.” That’s the way God’s law is phrased. And so as a result of that phrasing of God’s law—now it’s different when we come to worship. We won’t consider that now. In terms of his ethical law, what that means is we have to have a clear teaching from scripture to teach people that it is sin.

The burden of proof is not on the person that wants to do an activity. They can’t do it by inference. The burden of proof is on the person that wants to say that remarriage is illegitimate. The burden of proof is upon him, not upon us, to prove that remarriage after biblical divorce is legitimate. You understand the difference there?

Now, that’s a very important point for all kinds of ethical considerations that you might be involved with. Be very careful before you judge another person relative to his activity if you don’t have clear biblical prohibition of that activity. That’s the God’s word to the convicting and not our own thoughts and behaviors.

Okay. So we’ve had two things now in this first point. The continuity of ethics and the negative law formulation, which points out quite clearly that as we come to the new covenant, we have to have clear evidence from the school that says that remarriage is wrong after biblical divorce. Or we’ve got to find that prohibition in the New Testament because the Old Testament clearly allows for remarriage after biblical divorce.

That’s the first point.

**The second point is that all remarriage is not condemned in the new covenant. Therefore, it is generally accepted.**

**The third point is that because the scriptures liken divorce and death, as well as widows and the divorced, and since remarriage is acceptable should one spouse die, remarriage is also acceptable presumably for the innocent party in a divorce for cause.**

Okay, let’s slow that down a bit.

Romans 7 tells us quite clearly that a wife is bound to her husband until he dies. But once he dies, she is free then to remarry. So death means remarriage is acceptable in God’s sight—explicitly in Romans 7.

Secondly, the scriptures in Ezekiel 44:21-23 equates the death of a spouse and actual divorce when he says that the priests may not take for their wives “a widow nor her that is put away.” There’s two groups here he puts together—a widow nor her that is put away. He equates those two. Now, this isn’t proof, but it’s clearly an inference here that there’s a correlation between these two.

Now, it’s also interesting that the scriptures use the term “widowed” in the same sense as a woman who is put away. I’ve listed some verses on your outline. Let’s just look at one of them. In 2 Samuel 20:3, we read, “And David came to his house at Jerusalem. And the king took the ten women, his concubines, and put them in ward and fed them, but went not in unto them. So they were shut up unto the day of their death living in widowhood.”

Widowhood. The widowhood mentioned there is not that their husband has died. It’s that he has abandoned them or cut them off, as it were. And so the term “widowhood” in a sense—he’s divorced them from conjugal rights here. And so in a sense the scriptures equate widowhood or death of one’s spouse to being put off from one spouse for whatever reason.

And we have a clear instance of that in this 2 Samuel 20:3 passage. The other verses I give you there also should be looked at relative to that equating of widows and those who are divorced.

Okay. So we have an equation in Ezekiel 44 between death of a spouse and a divorced spouse. And then in 2 Samuel and the other passages that I have listed on your outline—between widowed and being divorced. And we have the clear teaching of Romans 7 that says that if a person’s husband has died, they’re free to remarry.

So you put all that together and the implication seems to be quite strong that remarriage after divorce is legitimate in the New Testament.

Okay. By the way, if you’re concerned about that prohibition on the priest for taking those classes of women, remember also that the verse just before the verse I quoted talks about how they cannot drink alcoholic beverages. Yeah. In Ezekiel 44:21, “neither shall any priest drink wine when they enter into the inner court.” They’re obviously commanded to do that as we go into communion downstairs.

And so these are special prohibitions put upon them for a special reason and shouldn’t bother us and make us think that somehow those sorts of wives are less godly wives than other wives. It’s not the case here. It’s a typological reference going on.

Okay.

**The fourth statement I want to make is that the rabbinic bill of divorcement upheld by Jesus for cause in the Matthew passages we looked at last week included the right of the divorced to remarry.**

Jesus knew that when the Pharisees used the term “a bill of divorcement” in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19, they were talking about a bill of divorcement that they commonly used at that time. It had been used probably from just about the time Moses gave the instruction. That bill of divorcement included this statement: “Behold, you are hereby permitted to marry any man.”

Now, that was part of the bill of divorcement the Pharisees were questioning Jesus about. And when Jesus upheld the bill of divorcement—as long as it was for the reasons of Deuteronomy 24—he upheld the bill of divorcement that was currently being used, which included the clause that the wife or the husband was free to remarry. Okay.

Another indication that remarriage is no sin. In fact, remarriage is actually commended in 1 Timothy 5:14 for young widows. So remarriage itself is certainly not looked down upon in the scriptures. It is upheld.

**Fourth point: We’re going to move to consider the fifth point rather. We’re going to move to 1 Corinthians 7. We’ll be there for the rest of the morning. And so you might want to turn there.**

Now what we’ve said so far is that it’s up to the opposition, as it were, to posit a prohibition of remarriage. They’ve got to prove it. And not only can they not prove it, we’re now going to look at various texts that prove our side. And we don’t even need a proof because God has already—we assume continuity. We assume that he doesn’t give us any prohibition. We can’t find any prohibition. We don’t need a proof that it’s okay.

But we’re going to look at four or five statements here that seem to say just that.

Okay.

**1 Corinthians 7: The command in 1 Corinthians 7 for the unsettled to marry instead of burn means the divorced should normally remarry.**

You see, in 1 Corinthians 7:1-7 we have Paul teaching that although for the time of the present distress it’s not a good idea to be married and to be in a bound state in that sense, yet if a person—it is better for a person to marry than it is for the person to burn.

Verse 2: “Nevertheless to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife and let every woman have her own husband.”

Okay. Verse 6: “But I speak this by permission and not by commandment. For I would that all men were even as myself: but every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner and another after that.”

And obviously what Paul is talking about here is what Jesus talked about to his disciples—that some men are gifted to be eunuchs, as it were, to be without marital relationships by God. It’s a gift from God. If you don’t have the gift, you can’t do it. It’s a gift from God. Jesus teaches that. Paul teaches that. And if you don’t have that gift, he says get married if you’re having trouble avoiding fornication.

And so the clear implication here is that the unsettled are normatively to marry although unless they’re given this gift by God. And I would posit that if a person has already been married, God may well gift them after the divorce or the death of that spouse, but he may well not.

And if he doesn’t, and we have no teaching that God so gifts those who have been divorced, then what we should normally expect from those people is to get them married. So Paul says to us in this passage from 1 Corinthians.

**Secondly, in 1 Corinthians 7—point number six: Paul tells the unmarried and I think very possibly including divorced here who are unsettled to marry.**

A specific command verses 8 and 9 says: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I but if they cannot contain let them marry for it’s better to marry than to burn.”

So what we just said, and plus he goes a little further now. He says now he gives a general group here called “the unmarried.” If they’re going to fall into fornication let them marry.

Now he says to “the unmarried and widows” here, and that the connective word “and” there is *kai* in the Greek. And Lenski, for instance, says that this word *kai* is often used to single out a part of a group for special mention. It doesn’t mean that we have two separate groups. It means that the second part of that group—the widows—are probably included in the first part of that verse. *Kai* isn’t always used in that fashion but often times it is. There’s nothing weird about the construction to see it that way.

And indeed widows have a particular reason for this statement from Paul. And so I think that we could probably see it in that particular way.

It is important to see here that Paul is speaking to the unmarried and to widows in the church. Okay. And he again suggests celibacy because of distress. But he repeats the allowance for remarriage that is taught in the Old Testament. There’s no new teaching from Paul going on here. Okay? He is simply giving them the teaching of scripture and does not posit in his teaching a new testament versus Old Testament break. There’s nothing to indicate that in the text.

Now the term used here for “unmarried” is a broad term. It is *agamos*, which is—you know, the preposition or the prefix that says not, like “a millennial” means not no millennium. *Agamos*—and *gumos* comes from the word for married. And we have words like “polygamy” that have that same sort of root. And so it just means “those who like it says are unmarried”—not married. It’s a very broad term.

If we take Paul at face value here, then the issue is over, isn’t it? Because if a person is divorced, they’re obviously not married. And if they’re not married and they don’t have the gift of celibacy, he tells them in this verse to marry rather than to burn. And that it’s certainly legitimate for them to do that.

If we take them at face value in the use of the term *agamos* here, the issue is settled definitively.

Now the unmarried—and the term here certainly applies to those who have been widowed. But we think that if Paul had meant to exclude those who had been divorced, okay—and if he meant unmarried just to mean widowers and widows—that he could have done this quite easily by using the term for widowers here instead of this broad term for unmarried. He uses the more general term and so I think indicates his inclusion of the divorced into this term.

Now if you want more evidence of the inclusion of the divorced in this particular category of *agamos*, let’s just go ahead a minute—three verses to verse 11 and see what Paul says there. He says: “But and if she depart let her remain unmarried”—*agamos*, same term. And we’re going to get to this in just a minute, but these two verses, verses 10 and 11, that we’re looking at now or looking forward to just a little bit here, posit an exception to this general position that those who are divorced can remarry.

The *agamos* can remarry and indeed should remarry in according to 1 Corinthians 7:8 and 9. In that particular case, the believer who departs from another believer without sufficient cause is to remain single or be reconciled. But note that the term used here again is *agamos* or unmarried. And so we have a specific verse just three verses later that specifically includes divorced and separated people in the class of *agamos* or unmarried.

And so if we’re going to take Paul at his word here again, we’re going to say that to the unmarried—to those who are widowers, to those who aren’t married, to those who are divorced—he tells them to remarry rather than burn.

Okay. So we do not find evidence in this section of Corinthians 7 that remarriage is prohibited, which is what we need to find if we’re going to say it. But instead, we have the positive statements of Paul here that it is allowed.

Now, I’m going to 1 Corinthians 7 because this is the most extensive teaching on the responsibilities relative to marriage in the New Testament. And most everybody involved in the discussion would agree with that. In terms of when he, for instance, take 1 Corinthians 7. And I’ll tell you what their interpretation of these phrases are in just a minute. But it’s really the place to go to seek out an answer to this question and for fuller teaching from God in his scriptures relative to divorce and remarriage.

Again I would point out that the divorced are never said to be given the gift of celibacy in all occurrences. And if they’re not then Paul would certainly have them being remarried. Okay that’s point number six.

**Point seven in our third 1 Corinthians 7 reference is that only those who separate against the command of the Lord—in other words, without biblical cause, without having biblical divorce—only those are prohibited from remarrying, meaning that divorce with cause allows remarriage.**

Okay, the verses we just read—verses 10 and 11. “Unto the married I command yet not I but the Lord: let not the wife depart from her husband. Now in context here he’s talking about two believers. He’s going to talk about the case of a believer married to an unbeliever in a couple of verses we’ll get to in a minute. He’s talking about two presumptively believers, two professors, two members of the church, as it were.

Okay. He tells them, “Let not the wife depart from her husband.” If you’re both in the church, don’t depart from your husband. He’s presumably a believer. He hasn’t violated covenant, been kicked out of the church. He’s presumably a believer. Don’t depart from him.

Verse 11: “But if she does depart,” he’s not making allows for that. He’s simply saying if she does, in violation to what he’s just told her, which was the Lord’s command that she not depart, if she does depart, “let her remain unmarried”—and be reconciled to her husband—”and let not the husband put away his wife.”

He addresses her the married of the Lord. And to them he says that if one has divorced another without cause, they are to remain single or unmarried, as it were *agamos*, or be reconciled to their husband.

Okay?