On Sunday (10/25/2026) I preached my first sermon on divorce. Our church is teaching through the Gospel of Mark so our elders, knowing I've done a little study on the topic, asked if I'd be willing to take a turn. When I mentioned my sermon on Facebook, within 24 hours over a dozen people asked if it had been recorded. It wasn't, but I decided to share it here in both print and video, as requested.
Explaining Jesus' words on divorce in one's own congregation is weighty enough, but sharing one's explanation online is a whole nother matter. Though I enjoy nudging people to think carefully about the Scriptures, I don't enjoy the misunderstandings and accusations that often come with differences of beliefs. If you read (or hear) my words below, please consider the following:
This was a sermon to my home church, so I crafted it with their knowledge and needs in mind. Divorce is not a big teaching topic in our church and most people's semi-informed views probably span the typical evangelical range, unlike the firmer views of churches of my youth. I'm lightly editing my words for sharing here, but I didn't initially prepare this for you (or for a print medium).
I didn't attempt a full exposition on divorce. I left more divorce questions unanswered than answered. I stuck mostly with Mark, aiming to read this passage faithfully within the context of that book, though I did briefly include other passages for both exegetical and pastoral reasons. Also, I said some things I didn't prove exegetically, given limits of time and attention. Don't expect footnotes (just a few links).
I know some of you will celebrate my understandings and some will be disappointed. All I can say is that I'm at peace before God with what I'm sharing, despite my limited knowledge. For years now I've thoughtfully and prayerfully studied a wide range of perspectives on divorce and remarriage (over 2 feet of scholarly and/or earnest books, plus many commentaries, articles, sermons, and online resources). Many of these have helped me better understand Jesus' mind and heart. I trust my words here can, by God's grace, do the same for some of you.
And, as always, check my words with the Scriptures.
Are You Using the Manual Correctly? Marriage and Divorce from the Creator’s Perspective (Mark 10:1–12)
I. Introduction:
Paul and Mary had just purchased their first washing machine. They were so excited! The new washer looked proud sitting just inside the back door. But how to make it work? It looked so different from the washers they were used to using at the laundromat. Paul couldn’t even find the slot for inserting the quarters!
After 10 minutes of fruitless effort, Mary had a brilliant idea. Hadn’t an owner’s manual come with the new washer? Indeed, it had! Paul picked it up and started flipping pages.
“Safety Information… Operation… Control Panel… Cycle Operation… Clothing Care… Maintenance… Troubleshoo”—Ah, that’s what he needed: Troubleshooting! Paul and Mary were definitely having trouble, so surely they’d find help here.
Together they began reading and scurrying around the room.
Won't fill: Make sure faucets are turned on. Check. Make sure the hoses aren't kinked. Check. Clean the screens in the mixing valve and hoses. Check.
Won't start: Make sure lid is closed. Check. Make sure power cord is plugged all the way into the outlet. Check. Check the laundry room circuit breaker. Check.
Won't agitate: No problem here. This thing is definitely agitating us just fine!
Won't spin: Make sure lid is closed. Already did that. Make sure power cord is plugged... Already done. Check the laundry room circuit... Again?
Is Noisy: I'd give anything to hear this beast make some noise!
Load is too wet: Nope, nope.
Sigh.
Paul and Mary spent half an hour following all sorts of suggestions in that troubleshooting guide, but they never did get the washer going. Finally, in frustration, Paul flipped to the last page of the manual. Ah, “Warranty Repairs.” Thank God, their new washer came with a warranty! Paul picked up his phone and made the call.
“Hello, this is ACME Appliances. How can I help you?”
Paul cleared his throat and began: “I think we need a new washer. We’ve tried everything in the manual, but we still can’t find the coin slot.”
Wow, talk about trouble! What do you think, where did Paul and Mary go wrong?
Here’s the mistake I want us to see: Paul and Mary went straight to troubleshooting section at the back of the manual without first reading the user instructions at the front. They didn’t take time to learn the right way to run the machine before trying to solve all the things that might possibly go wrong. If they had looked more carefully near the front of the manual, they would have found a section called “To Wash Clothes,” with eight easy steps for running their new washer.
In today’s Scripture text, Jesus wants to teach us a similar lesson about marriage and divorce. Please read Mark 10:1–12 (ESV):
1 And he [Jesus] left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.
2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
This is the word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God.)
II. Mark 10:1–12 in the Context of Mark’s Gospel
How would you summarize what is happening in this passage? Is this a travel story? A teaching passage (like the Sermon on the Mount)?
I suggest that, in the context of Mark’s Gospel, this passage is first a conflict story. Mark is full of conflict stories, including especially these:
Scribes think Jesus is blaspheming when he forgives sins of paralytic man. (2:1–12)
Scribes ask why Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. (2:15–17)
Pharisees ask why disciples are plucking grain on the Sabbath. (2:23–28)
Pharisees accuse Jesus for healing man with withered hand on the Sabbath. (3:1–6)
Scribes say Jesus casts out demons by using Satan’s power. (3:22–30)
Pharisees and scribes ask why Jesus’ disciples eat with unwashed hands. (7:1–23)
Pharisees demand Jesus to perform a sign “to test him.” (8:11–13)
Pharisees ask Jesus a question about divorce “to test him.” (10:1–12)
Priests, scribes, and elders challenge Jesus’ authority to cleanse temple. (11:27–33)
Pharisees and Herodians ask about taxes “to trap him in his talk.” (12:13–17; Jesus: “Why put me to the test?”)
Sadducees ask Jesus a trick question about the resurrection. (12:18–27)
After Jesus wisely answered a final question about which commandment is greatest, “no one dared ask him any more questions” (12:34). Then Jesus asked his own trick question, using Psalm 110 to prove that the Christ is even greater than David.
These conflict stories cover a wide range of topics—forgiveness, the Sabbath, ritual cleanliness, taxes, the resurrection, and yes, divorce. But in all these stories the main point is really the same: Mark is showing us Jesus’ great wisdom and authority.
In every story, Jesus shows his wisdom and authority by escaping the trap that was set for him, usually by showing the error of his opponents, sometimes leaving them embarrassed. He can forgive sins, he is Lord of the Sabbath, he can avoid being tricked into saying things that might turn the crowds or the Romans against him, he can expose the hypocrisy within the religious leaders, and he can interpret the Scriptures so much better than they can.
Yes, Jesus can interpret the Scriptures so much better than the Jewish leaders can! Or, to return to our opening story—true, the Bible is more than just a manual for Christian living, but we could say Jesus knew the right way to read and use the manual God has given us.
That's the first thing I want us to see about these conflict stories:
1. Mark's main goal seems to be to show us Jesus’ great wisdom and authority.
Here are two more things about these conflict stories:
2. Jesus doesn’t attempt a full systematic teaching about the main topic in any of these stories. We can learn a little about a Christian view on taxes or the resurrection in their respective conflict stories, but we need to look at many other passages as well for a fuller understanding. The same is true with divorce in this passage; we do God a dishonor if we copy some preachers who act as if this passage is all we really need to know about divorce and remarriage.
3. In two conflict stories Mark leaves out exceptions that Matthew records:
Mark 8:12: “Truly I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.”
Matthew 16:4: “No sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”Mark 10:11: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.”
Matthew 19:9: “Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”
What should we make of this? Are Matthew and Mark contradicting each other? Well, consider the following pair of statements:
"Anyone who drives without a license is breaking the law."
"Anyone who drives without a license, except on their own private property, is breaking the law."
If we heard someone make both these statements (at different times and places), which of the following would we most likely conclude?
The person is contradicting themselves.
The first statement is clearer than the second and therefore it must be given priority.
The first statement is safer than the second, which is likely to be abused.
Both statements are normally true, with the second including an exception that most listeners would assume is true even if it weren’t mentioned.
Under normal circumstances, the first statement is entirely adequate. It is a generalization, a statement that is normally true. But the second statement, which includes an exception, is also definitely true. (Can you think of more exceptions we could truthfully add? What about if I was driving without a license on your private property, but with your permission?)
Everyone uses generalizations in ordinary speech. (That was one right there.) Generalizations are useful. They make our speech simple and uncluttered. They drive home powerfully the central points we want to make and give us all the information we normally need.
But exceptions are equally important for those times that are . . . exceptional. (And as for which is clearer, the greater specificity of an exception means it is arguably clearer than a generalization.)
Conclusion: Mark and Matthew agree, but they had slightly different purposes. Mark wanted to drive home Jesus’ main point without any distractions. He did not include the exceptions that most readers in his day would have assumed anyway. Matthew focused on Jesus’ main point but included an exception that Jesus also taught. For us to understand Jesus’ heart well, we need to consider both Mark and Matthew.
I want to briefly mention another way we can read Mark 10:1–12 within the context of Mark's Gospel: as part of a "Markan sandwich." The term Markan sandwich refers to how Mark often organizes his stories. He commonly splits a single story in two (like two slices of bread) and inserts another story in between (like sandwich meat). The two stories illuminate each other, and the middle story often provides the key for interpreting the outer one. (See a simple discussion here and a longer one here.)
Sometimes the two outer "bread" sections are not the same story but related stories. That's the pattern we find in Mark 10:
Bread: Conversations about divorce (1-12)
Meat: Story about receiving the kingdom as a child (13-16)
Bread: Conversations about wealth (17-31)In both “bread” conversations we find this pattern:
1. Someone asks Jesus a question.
2. Jesus responds with a question.
3. They defend themselves.
4. Jesus gives a command that exposes their hearts.
5. Jesus gives further explanation to his (amazed) disciples.Interpretive key: We must be willing to be a child (a nobody in the eyes of others) to accept Jesus’ difficult teachings on marriage and wealth and enter the kingdom.
II. Reading Closely Verse by Verse
Vs. 1:And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.
Jesus left Galilee, walking south to Judea. But he avoided Jerusalem, turning east instead toward the Jordan river. This was the region where John the Baptist had preached, the area where John had gotten in trouble with King Herod by telling him it wasn’t right to for him to have married his brother’s wife.
Vs. 2:And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
This question raised a topic that was a big point of debate among Jews around Jesus’ time. Scholars have differing opinions about the details, but everyone agrees that almost all Jews believed husbands had a right to divorce their wives for a wide range of reasons.
The dominant view was tied to Hillel, a great rabbi who was a leader in Jerusalem until his death, when he was about 120 and Jesus was a young teenager. Based on Deuteronomy 24, the followers of Rabbi Hillel argued for any-cause divorce; a husband could divorce his wife for merely burning or over-salting his supper!
A newer, minority view was tied to the rabbi Shammai, who died at age 80 probably only a few years before Jesus did. (This view was actually an ill-fated attempted revival of the older view that pre-dated Hillel.) Shammai’s followers argued that Deuteronomy 24 gave only much narrower grounds for divorce: the husband had to have reason to believe his wife had committed adultery.
However, it is often missed that the followers of Shammai defined adultery very broadly. For example, they “regarded ‘going forth with her hair disheveled’ and ‘her arms uncovered’ as equivalent to adultery” (Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible: A Social and Literary Context, Instone-Brewer, p. 99).
Further, the followers of both Hillel and Shammai agreed that other passages in the Law of Moses provided additional grounds for divorce. For example, based on Exodus 21:10–11 “the Hillelites and Shammaites debated about how much neglect of food, clothing and love warranted a divorce” (Instone-Brewer, personal correspondence). It seems that, based on this Exodus law, some Jewish women did go to court to force their husbands to divorce them for neglect, and a few women initiated divorce themselves (like Herodias who divorced her husband before marrying his brother, Herod). But that was comparatively rare and difficult; men could easily divorce.
Beit Shammai say: A man may not divorce his wife unless he finds out about her having engaged in a matter of forbidden sexual intercourse [devar erva], i.e., she committed adultery or is suspected of doing so, as it is stated: “Because he has found some unseemly matter [ervat davar] in her, and he writes her a scroll of severance” (Deuteronomy 24:1). And Beit Hillel say: He may divorce her even due to a minor issue, e.g., because she burned or over-salted his dish, as it is stated: “Because he has found some unseemly matter in her,” meaning that he found any type of shortcoming in her. (From Mishnah Gittin 9, https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Gittin.9.10?lang=bi)
The Pharisees were trying to test Jesus. Perhaps they wanted to split his followers over this controversial issue (like Paul split his Pharisee and Sadducee opponents by raising the topic of the resurrection). Or perhaps they wanted to get him in trouble with Herod by leading him to condemn divorce while in Herod’s territory. Or, it seems from Matthew that they already knew of Jesus’ strict divorce position, so maybe, thinking they had the Law on their side, they wanted to prove him wrong: He would have to either approve their divorces or else contradict the Law of Moses.
At any rate, divorce was a complex topic that they knew very well. Judging from the Mishnah (an ancient written collection of Jewish oral traditions), they had probably debated every conceivable detail about what made for a legitimate divorce. So they were confident they could beat Jesus on this topic.
Vs. 3.He answered them, “What did Moses command you?”
Jesus doesn’t back down, but neither does he give a straight answer. Instead, he asks a question.
Vs. 4.They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.”
The Pharisees are ready. They cite their favorite divorce text, Deuteronomy 24—a "trouble-shooting" text from the last book in their Torah.
English translations vary, because it’s a tough passage to translate. In some versions, the first verse includes a command:
If a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, he may write her a divorce certificate, hand it to her, and send her away from his house. (Deut. 24:1 CSB)
In other versions, the first verse is merely a preamble describing a possible scenario, part of a long sentence that doesn't include a command until verse 4:
When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house… (Deut. 24:1 ESV)
I think the second option is more likely. (The Septuagint—Greek OT—agrees.)
But the focus of debate in Jesus' day was elsewhere. Two primary questions under discussion were: 1) What qualifies as “some indecency” (valid grounds for divorce)? and 2) What is required for a certificate of divorce to be valid?
Notice again that these are men asking about whether husbands may divorce their wives, and they turn to a text in the Law of Moses that deals with husbands divorcing wives. This is not a group of women asking whether they may divorce a husband who fails to provide them with food or clothing, or the discussion might have turned to the Exodus 21 passage I mentioned earlier. And this is not a group of conservative Christians who are wondering whether it is okay to separate from an unfaithful spouse.
So as we consider Jesus’ strong words of rebuke that come next, remember who he is addressing: men who believe they have a right to divorce their wives for almost any reason. If he were talking to a different audience with different needs, he would have spoken differently.
Vs. 5:And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.”
Jesus: “Okay, so you’re citing your favorite divorce proof text? You know what? God would’ve never had Moses give this to Israel if their hearts hadn’t been hard. And the fact that it’s your favorite verse shows that you’re dull and unbelieving, too!”
The phrase “hardness of heart” in Mark refers primarily to lacking understanding (and also faith). More broadly in Scripture, it also indicates stubbornness and lack of responsiveness. It affects how we act both toward God and toward others. (See here and here.)
The Deuteronomy 24 law the Pharisees cited recognized that men were often hardhearted toward God and cold toward their wives. They were already mistreating and abandoning their wives, so God put some guardrails around their behavior to limit the damage. (It is for the same reason that God actually commanded divorce in some circumstances. See Exodus 21:10–11 and Deuteronomy 21:14.)
Deuteronomy 24 basically says, "If you are going to send your wife away for something you find offensive, and then she marries someone else, you have no right to ever take her back. And yes, if you’re going to send her away, the proper thing to do is to give her a divorce certificate so she is legally free to return to her parents or marry someone else." This law does not say “you may divorce” but “if you do, here are some rules.”
(Side note: According to other laws [Deut. 22:22, etc.], the penalty for adultery was death, not divorce. This Deuteronomy 24 law therefore was probably designed either for lesser indecencies or for men who failed to carry out the adultery death penalty law. Either they were divorcing for secondary matters or disobeying the adultery law.)
Again, Jesus said that these men who were practicing any-cause divorce had hard hearts; he did not say, as some people do, that everyone who divorces has a hard heart. We must be careful not to misquote Jesus.
Vs. 6–8:“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh.”
What Jesus does next is take us to the front of the manual. “Don’t start in the trouble-shooting section. If you want to think rightly about marriage and divorce, you have to go back to the beginning. Don't just ask 'Is it lawful?' Remember to first ask 'What is consistent with God's original and highest will?'”
“From the beginning”: Not in the beginning but from. God’s creation design has always been true—for Adam and Eve, when Moses gave the Deuteronomy law, in Jesus’ day, and in ours. The legal provisions God gave for divorce did not change his perfect creation purposes for marriage. So Jesus takes us back to Genesis, back to what has always been true about marriage, back to the first two chapters of the Bible: “God made them male and female” (Genesis 1:27) and “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).
If the Pharisees had been thinking about Genesis 1 and 2, what are some things they might have remembered? They would have remembered things like this:
It was God’s idea for humans to be paired up in twos as male and female. He called it “very good” (Gen. 1:31)!
Men and women bear God’s image together and together labor to care for God’s creation.
God gave wives to men because they need help. Wives are not accessories for men but essential partners worthy of great honor and care.
A man’s wife is “bone of [his] bones and flesh of [his] flesh” (Gen. 2:23). As Paul put it, “he who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph. 5:28).
It is God’s creation norm (what he intends to usually happen) that men leave their parents and hold fast to their wives. While we see elsewhere that some people are called to singleness and highly blessed in that calling, that is not the calling God gives to most people.
For those who marry, the only marriage pattern indicated by Genesis is male-female pairs who live together in faithful, unbroken devotion.
As Jesus put it, “they are no longer two but one flesh.” To end a marriage is to divide one into two. It’s not just a de-coupling but a tearing.
These truths from Genesis remind us that when we debate the grounds for divorce, we are already acknowledging that things have fallen short of what God has purposed “from the beginning.” Worse, when we, like the Pharisees, start defending divorce for any cause or for minor offenses, we are working directly contrary to God’s creation purposes.
Vs. 9: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
This command is the “punch line” in Jesus’ conversation with the Pharisees.
There are some who teach that it is impossible for man to separate what God has joined, but that is not what Jesus says in this passage. None of his vocabulary (“hold fast/cleave,” “one flesh,” “what God has joined,” etc.) indicates it is impossible to end a marriage. We can see that by how those terms are used elsewhere in Scripture.
What Jesus does say is this: Whoever separates a marriage is guilty of undoing God’s work, guilty of being at cross purposes with God’s good creation design. It is God who, by creating us male and female from the beginning, joins humans in marriage to this day. Those who divide marriages are directly attacking a part of God’s creation that he especially called “very good.” Let not humans separate what God has joined together!
Vs. 10-12:And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Yay! Unlike in the previous chapter, the disciples dare to ask a question! 😊
How should we understand Jesus’ statement here? It’s not a command. It might not even properly be classified as a law. It’s written in the form of this = that. It might be closest to a proverb or a wisdom saying, intended to surprise the listener, making them sit up and think.
I once did a deep dive, looking for sentences in the Greek OT that have the same grammatical forms and structure as "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her." I only found a handful of possible matches in the Law. The closest match I found (in both grammar and function) turned out to be this proverb: “The one who mocks the poor insults his Maker” (Prov. 17:5).
Like Jesus' statement, this proverb has a surprise ending. What?! I thought I was just making an innocent joke about a guy who looks funny in his old clothes, but you’re saying I was actually mocking God?
What?! I thought I was carefully following the laws about providing my first wife a proper divorce certificate before I remarried, and you’re saying I’ve committed adultery? As Matthew’s account makes clear, the disciples were shocked.
What, by the way, is adultery?According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary online, adultery is “voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone other than that person's current spouse.”
But according to the Bible, adultery is not just “sex outside of marriage.” It’s more than a physical act; at its heart adultery is treachery against a marriage covenant, a breaking of the marriage covenant. In Jesus’ day when adultery happened, the innocent spouse was expected to initiate divorce; the marriage was over. OT law was even more strict. Adultery was not something that one could atone for by sacrifice. The penalty was death, which finalized the end of the marriage.
Jesus here is saying that an unauthorized divorce followed by remarriage is equivalent to an act of adultery: You might think you are doing everything in a legal and respectable way, but you’re really no better than someone who has destroyed their marriage by secretly sleeping with someone besides their spouse.
(I say unauthorized divorce because of other texts such as Matthew's exception clause. Speaking of that text: I believe one reason why some people doubt Jesus intended to include a real exception to his divorce and remarriage prohibition is that we too easily forget the biblical view of how utterly serious adultery is.)
A couple more observations about Jesus' statement:
Jesus says the man commits adultery “against her”—against his first wife, that is. This is amazing, because the common understanding in Jesus’ day was that a man could not commit adultery against his own wife, only against a man whose wife he had stolen. But Jesus here honors women by acknowledging that adultery can be an act of treachery against a woman. In Greco-Roman culture it was perfectly acceptable for married men to visit prostitutes. But Jesus indicates that wives have just as much right as husbands to expect that their spouse remains faithful.
In balance, Jesus also warns that it is possible for a woman to commit adultery by wrongfully divorcing and remarrying. This was rarer in Jesus’ day, but possible.
III. Wrapping It Up
That brings us to the end of today’s text. What have we learned?
Mark 10:1-12 is a conflict story first and a teaching passage second. The way Jesus showed his wisdom and authority in this conflict story was by showing the proper way to read the Bible’s teachings on marriage and divorce—not by starting with the trouble-shooting passages, but by beginning with God’s creation design.
I trust we’ve listened today with soft hearts, hearing Jesus' heartbeat about marriage and divorce:
Marriage is a wonderful creation gift from God that must not be broken by humans.
Any time humans break a marriage, somebody somewhere has fallen short of God’s good design.
I also want to emphasize something I said near the beginning: This conflict story does not address all our questions and needs about divorce! In fact, Jesus only hinted at answers to most of our divorce questions. For example, we saw how Jesus honored women in this passage, but he did not directly address the needs of abused spouses, whether women or men. Nor did he say what we should do after someone has already experienced a broken marriage.
Other Bible texts provide additional help:
As we noted, Matthew records an exception to Jesus’ black-and-white statement here, recognizing that when a marriage has already been broken by sexual immorality, it is not adultery for the spouse who has been wronged to divorce and marry someone else.
In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul agrees with Jesus by saying that Christians should not divorce each other—and if they do, they should remain unmarried or seek to be reconciled to each other. Then Paul addresses a situation Jesus didn’t: marriages between Christians and unbelievers. In such cases, we must remain married to an unbelieving spouse (for their spiritual good) as long as they are committed to the marriage. But "if the unbelieving partner separates," then we are "not enslaved," Paul says, indicating we are free to marry a Christian spouse instead. (Note: I have about 40 pages of detailed study on meaning of "not enslaved" that I may share at some point. I can't see how Paul's readers could have understood it to mean less than my summary above.)
And what about abuse? It’s definitely consistent with Scripture to seek help and to separate as needed in cases of dangerous physical, mental, or spiritual abuse. Churches need to be alert to help those trapped in abusive marriages, getting them to safety even in cases where it isn’t clear that a full divorce is biblically justified.
Perhaps sometime we’ll have time to consider some of these other Bible passages on marriage, divorce, and remarriage. We definitely do need the trouble-shooting passages that God has included in his manual!
But today, let’s start where we began: Let’s do better than Paul and Mary. Let’s read the front of the manual and catch a vision of the beauty of God’s unchanging marriage design.
In a world that celebrates radical freedom, with people discarding marriages for the most selfish of reasons, let’s model radical faithfulness to our spouses—the second-mile radical faithfulness that Jesus shows to us as his bride. What God has joined together, let not man separate!
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