Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

–Parallel verses:
‭‭Matthew‬ ‭19‬:‭3‬-‭9‬ ‭AMP‬‬
And Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” He replied, “Have you never read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined inseparably to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.” The Pharisees said to Him, “Why then did Moses command us to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” He said to them, “Because your hearts were hard and stubborn Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

As we read this story about divorce associated with our passage today, I find it interesting that they used such a horrible thing in God’s eyes to test Jesus. At another time, they used adultery to test Jesus. One of the “right-away takeaways” I get here is that people who are self-righteous like to test and compare themselves to others. They care more about their appearance and power than they do about the things that grieve God’s heart.

Jesus, on the other hand, was God. And knowing God’s heart through his law, he called out the sin that grieved God’s heart. He called out hypocrisy back in Moses’ day, as well as the hypocrisy in this time.

Why does divorce, outside of adultery, happen? Most of the time it happens because marriage gets difficult. And so some people want to get out of marriage because it becomes difficult. But God designed marriage as a sacred covenant between a man and a woman, and he designed them to become one. One, not only in sexual relations, but in how they live life, in their life pursuits and values, as they follow him.

And when we break a covenant with our spouse, one that we made to honor God and come together in marriage, this angers him! We see the results of this evil: children who are caught in between, homes in chaos, and broken relationships that are tough to repair.

The good news is, in Jesus Christ we are new creations, and those past sins, even divorce, are forgiven and covered over by the blood of Jesus. But let us not pretend it is a minor thing. Christians should try every other route they can, prior to divorce. We are supposed to stick with our spouses and walk with them in the good and bad times.

Lord, forgive our churches (and the people in them) for the rampancy of divorce today. We repent of this sin to you! Teach us to be committed and in-it-for-a-lifetime with marriage! Help us to come around these broken families, help them heal, and help them break the cycle of divorce that persists in our world today!