Heart Matters: Insights on Marriage and Divorce

Marriage is the most amazing thing, brings so much joy, so much pain. You might be married or thinking about getting married, maybe struggling ways you can't talk about. Jesus addresses this issue in the Sermon on the Mount and talks about the one quality that most impacts our marriage. We're going to get to that, and as you might expect, it has to do with the nature of our heart. [00:00:08]

One of the big questions in the church historically has been can a Christian get divorced? Based on what Jesus says here, often the response has been no, you never can unless there has been adultery. Later on, when Paul writes to the church of Corinth, he talks about somebody who has an unbelieving spouse and that they might abandon him. [00:01:05]

Obviously, that raises the question of, well, what if you have somebody who's selling drugs to little kids or somebody who is being physically abusive? One of the early church fathers was so adamant about this, literally he said if your wife is poisoning you or poisoning your children, you cannot leave her. [00:01:41]

David Instone Brewer, he's written a few books, "Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible," "Divorce and Remarriage in the New Testament," and his work has really been, I think, kind of the definitive work in our generation here. He says to understand Jesus, you have to understand what was the conversation about marriage and divorce that Jesus was engaged in that everybody knew. [00:02:30]

In the Old Testament, there were two basic passages that the rabbis would cite for this. One was Deuteronomy 24, and it talks there about divorcing a wife for a cause of indecency. Not long before Jesus, there were two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, and they debated about everything. [00:03:07]

Exodus 21, here's what it says: Moses here is giving rules really basically on servanthood and slavery and about a man who marries a woman that's been a slave. If he marries one woman and then marries a second woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing, and marital rights. [00:04:34]

The reason that the certificate of divorce was so important was it was a tremendous protection for women in Moses's day. In the ancient Near East, a man typically would just simply leave a woman if he didn't want to be married to her anymore. But then, if he decided later on that he wanted her back, he could just go and reclaim her. [00:05:37]

There were basically, the rabbi said, three areas that you are committing yourself to provide for your spouse. One of them is food, one of them is clothing, and then the third one is marital rights. The rabbis, being rabbis, they would spell all that stuff out quite carefully. [00:06:23]

Those were the obligations, and when those vows were broken, that's when divorce came into play. So it wasn't arbitrary, it wasn't mechanical. It wasn't like, well, if you commit sexual immorality, if your spouse does, then you can get divorced. But if they're a murderer and a drug dealer, you can't. [00:07:43]

Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard, but it was not that way in the beginning. So the real issue is hardness of heart, and if anybody's looking at would a divorce be biblical, it's not a legalistic mechanical formula as we tend to make it. [00:08:57]

The thing I want to leave with you today is have an open heart. Today, one of my greatest regrets in life is how many times I had hardness in heart towards Nancy when she did something I did not like, said something I wish she had not said, acted in a way that, for whatever reason, I didn't like. [00:09:56]

Be ready to apologize today, be ready to appreciate today, be ready to affirm today, be ready to learn today, be humble. Nobody has to live with a hard heart, and that's what's at the core of the Sermon on the Mount, is the true goodness, the surpassing goodness that exceeds the scribes and Pharisees because it's flowing out of the heart. [00:10:39]