Insights on Marriage and Divorce

Chuck Swindoll: Very few things are suddenly hardened. Hardening takes time. It is a process for water to harden to ice. And it is as well a period of time for a heart that was once soft to be hardened.

Dave Spiker: It's difficult to understand how two people who began their relationship enamored with one another can eventually decide to dissolve their marriage. And yet in our culture, the painful realities of divorce are pervasive. Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll will address the question that naturally follows divorce: what does the Bible say about remarriage? What are the guidelines for going to the altar a second time? Those are compelling questions that strike close to home. Just before we begin the message, Chuck Swindoll is here to set the stage for us. We're talking about getting through the tough stuff of remarriage.

Chuck Swindoll: Divorce happens all the time. Dangers appear, relationships fracture, commitment weakens, predators pounce. And not surprisingly, the bond of love and permanence breaks. All of us saw the gravity of that in the previous message on divorce, and our hearts ached through much of it.

Obviously, anyone who views marriage as an endless ecstasy of romantic bliss, a sort of heaven on earth, is living in a dream world. I can testify that it is the most challenging responsibility in all of life. Keeping our marriage strong, wholesome, fulfilling, and enriching is neither simple nor easy. I saw a little motto the other day that read, "The hardest years of marriage follow the wedding ceremony." And that is so true.

So rather than asking, "What are the grounds of divorce?" I'd suggest we give our attention to God's perspective on the tough stuff of remarriage. So I have a better question: when is remarriage acceptable in God's sight? After a great deal of thought and time and prayer spent in my study, I have finally concluded that there are at least three situations set forth in the Bible where God allows for remarriage.

Today we want to take a look at each one of the three. The biblical basis for some of our study will be found in the seventh chapter of 1st Corinthians, verses 1 through 17, and then at the end, verses 39 and 40. So find your Bible and turn to this passage as we look at it together.

I'll begin reading at 1st Corinthians 7, verse 1. "Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband. The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. But this I say by way of concession, not of command. Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am. However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that.

But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband. But if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband, and that the husband should not divorce his wife.

But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her. And a woman who has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.

Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave; the brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases. But God has called us to peace. For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife? Only as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each in this manner let him walk. And so I direct in all the churches."

And then the final two verses, verse 39. "A wife is bound as long as her husband lives; but if her husband is dead, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. But in my opinion, she is happier if she remains as she is; and I think that I also have the Spirit of God."

Dave Spiker: You're listening to Insight for Living. Remember you can order helpful resources at insight.org. And now with the message called "Getting Through the Tough Stuff of Re-marriage," here's Chuck Swindoll.

Chuck Swindoll: Mr. and Mrs. Mallard Duck fly into our backyard most every day now. For some reason, they have chosen the Swindoll backyard as the place of their temporary abode. And from the looks of things, they might be on their honeymoon. It's a beautiful sight.

I was sitting out back just this last week with a book and enjoying it thoroughly. Our dog was by my side, sort of half asleep. And as Sasha sat there and snoozed, I was sitting there reading and suddenly, without announcement, I heard that familiar flutter of wings and there they came and landed. What a beautiful, beautiful sight.

This emerald green head of the male snuggling next to his beloved mate in her brown beauty, and she sort of wiggled and quacked and coddled. He was busy forever looking around, watching for things like dogs. I was lost in the beauty of it. Suddenly I looked to my right and had to chuckle because our Sasha, who is a big white furry Samoyed, was trying to look like a pointer.

She had focused in on the duck. It sort of gave new meaning to the old song, "Two Different Worlds We Live In." Here I am enjoying the delightful beauty and rare experience of ducks within ten, fifteen feet of me. And here is my dog, thinking other thoughts entirely.

And herein it seemed rested an allegory about marriage that I thought was appropriate. First of all, I thought of the lovely bride and groom as they come to an altar. And the many who sit in churches and in audiences around the world, oohing and aahing over this handsome man who promises for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, he will give himself to her until death do them part.

And here is his lovely bride who stands in exquisite white with the veil. And she, through sickness or health, through times of sorrow and prosperity, promises to keep herself faithful to him until death separates them. And then they don't live happily ever after. They get married.

As time passes, they neglect the things that were of utmost importance to them in their courtship. They become preoccupied with things other than their relationship. And they forget the predators. You see, I have this fear that one day while I am not there to protect them or to call her off, Sasha will have what she craves: warm duck with feathers.

I will walk out the door some sad afternoon and find a small pile of bloody bones that she has left. That is not the way life was meant to be for those ducks. You may not know it, but ducks choose their partner, and it is on record that there are cases where ducks have been studied and one is either shot out of a sky or falls with ill health, the other mate will circle and come down and die alongside rather than let there be a separation.

Marriage was meant to be like that. Not an easy street, not a simple, happy-go-lucky lifestyle, but it was meant to represent a new frontier. Mike Mason, in an excellent work entitled *The Mystery of Marriage*, writes so well.

"Marriage partners may be thought of as the astronauts of society, the daring explorers who do all the test flying in a sort of ongoing experiment in the most radical fringes of human relations. Naturally, there are many crashes, many casualties in this stratosphere of intimacy. It is a most dangerous profession and one with a high rate of burnout. It is demanding, draining, and often dreary work.

And unlike space exploration, the rewards it offers do not seem very glamorous. There will be no ticker-tape parades for the good wife or husband, and most couples actually have a tendency to avoid the very aspects of their work which do offer the greatest rewards. Particularly are they prone to resent all the time they must waste with one another.

After the first year or so of marriage, they begin to have great difficulty believing that the lavish interpersonal extravagance which characterized their courtship might actually still be allowed, let alone be a necessary or a glorious thing. Accordingly, great amounts of energy are channeled into other concerns: into friendships and social life, into careers, into the raising of offspring, into every conceivable cause except the cause of marriage itself.

For what possible practical use could there be in continuing that systematic and unrelenting invasion of privacy, which is the heart and soul and rocket fuel of a loving relationship? Everywhere else throughout society, there are fences, walls, burglar alarms, unlisted numbers, the most elaborate precautions for keeping people at a safe distance.

But in marriage, all of that is reversed. In marriage, the walls are down. And not only do the man and woman live under the same roof, but they sleep under the same covers. Their lives are wide open. And as each studies the life of the other and attempts to make some response to it, there are no set procedures to follow, no formalities to stand on.

A man and a woman face each other across the breakfast table and somehow through a haze of crumbs and curlers and mortgage payments, they must encounter one another. That is the whole purpose and mandate of marriage. All sorts of other purposes have been dreamed up and millions of excuses invented for avoiding this central and indispensable task.

But the fact is that marriage is grounded in nothing else but the pure wild grappling of soul with soul, no holds barred. There is no rulebook for this, no law to invoke except the law of love. So while marriage may present the appearance of being a highly structured, formalized, and tradition-bound institution, in fact, it is the most free and raw and unpredictable of all human associations. It is the outer space of society, the wild frontier.

And so it should be. We were meant to be those who fly free, free alongside each other, who mate for life, who know the joys and ecstasies of intimacy, and who are willing to circle and fall when the other falls to stay alongside. But we don't. And herein the analogy, the allegory breaks down. The duck must because it's a duck.

It is its instinct just as it must fly north in the summer and as it must fly south in the winter. But we are free not to. How tragic. It was never meant to be so. My Bible is open to an unusual place. You wouldn't expect me to turn to James chapter 3. But I find in verses 9 and 10 strong and it may seem to some even harsh counsel for marriage partners.

And for everyone actually, but if I may apply it for the sake of today's subject to marriage partners. Let me read what it says and then let me read you a paraphrase I have written. Speaking of the tongue, James 3:9, "With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be this way."

Here a paraphrase: With the tongue we bless our Lord and Father, and with the same tongue we curse our marriage partners who have been made in the likeness of God. The ones who have stood at the same altar, who have participated in the conception, birth, and rearing of our children, who have shared life and endured trials and stayed with us for the hard years.

Yet from the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. Brethren, these things ought not so to be. I am your God who hates divorce, who heard your vows, who was there to help you when your relationship wore thin, who grieved when you walked away instead of work through the failure. Time passes.

And even for a duck, there are moments of neglect and forgetfulness where they fly too low in range of men with big powerful guns, or others with hungry big dogs. And those who live in marriage forgetting the predators are only moments away from the buckshot of neglect and the teeth of temptation that tear away at the vows.

Now I've said all of that to introduce what I call an unenviable task. For a man who believes so firmly in marriage, I am forced by the sheer factor of sin and compromise and the reality of divorce to address the other side. It would be ideal if I could just talk about ducks that swim on pools and in streams of water who are never hurt and live their full lives and die only of old age.

But that isn't real. And I cannot speak today simply of people who live lives of uninterrupted bliss. There is no such life. And those of us who have been at it 30 years and more would tell you and perhaps be the first in line to tell you, it is the hardest work of our lives.

And anyone who sees it as endless ecstasy is living in a dream world. Dream world. If the divorce dilemma is going to be addressed, if marriage is going to be affirmed, then someone needs to say something about the issue of remarriage. For that really is at the heart of the question.

We really are not asking, "What are the grounds for divorce?" We more often than not are asking, "What are the rights of remarriage? When am I free according to scripture to say God permits remarriage? When is that true?"

I am prepared today to present evidence from scripture that I have worked through. It has come from not just weeks of thinking but years, and I'll continue to think on it. My position continues to be in a state of research and flex a bit. This thing of marriage is a mystery. How much more mysterious is remarriage and the issues related to it.

I've said for a number of years that if you took a group of evangelical scholars and they all believed in the Bible equally so and you put them in a bus and gave them a trip around America for three months in the full 90 days when they came back to their original destination, there still would not be agreement. This is a debatable issue.

And good men and women disagree. Some I deeply respect but I couldn't disagree with them more in their convictions, and they with me. So it has nothing to do with my respect for colleagues in ministry; it just has to do with the difference of interpretation. And since I speak today, it is my task to share with you what I am comfortable speaking on from scripture.

If you disagree, I fully understand. If you want to be wrong, that's your problem. But these are the things that I feel I can support from scripture. Thanks for laughing with me; that truly was a joke. Matthew chapter 19 is the place to start.

Matthew 19 is that, at least for the first 12 verses, is that section where Jesus is asked about the issue of divorce when the Pharisees came to test him according to Matthew 19:3. They ask, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all?" They represented the liberal position.

On the far left, you will recall the Hillel rabbinical school that taught one may divorce for any reason whatsoever. Even a change of mind or a wandering eye was sufficient. The wife was gone and the man pursued another marriage. But there was another school that taught there was no reason whatsoever and only in the rarest and most extreme cases would the Shammai position represent the possibility of a divorce.

They want to know Jesus' answer. He gives them the beginning of the story as he talks of Genesis 1 and 2 and quotes from the passages, but that's not sufficient because that's not addressing divorce. That's addressing marriage. They want to know what about divorce.

So he says, or they say verse 7, "Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate and divorce her?" And he said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning, it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another commits adultery."

I have come to the position in my study that the first of three cases of permissible remarriage is the case of the unrepentant immoral partner. Look again at verse 8. Jesus corrects them by saying it wasn't a commandment, it was a permission. You said, "Why did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce?" I say Moses permitted you. Note the difference in wording.

He softens it. No one is ever commanded to divorce. Malachi the prophet states that God hates it and he would never command something he hates. There are permissions granted, and he said in this case, because of the hardness of heart, a permission was granted. When you read the Bible, pay attention not only to wording but to word pictures.

Now hear this well. God uses terms that are vivid and picturesque on occasion; this is one of them. For the purpose of letting your mind dwell in meditation on the thought behind the word. Very few things are suddenly hardened. Hardening takes time. It is a process for water to harden to ice. And it is as well a period of time for a heart that was once soft to be hardened.

And since he states immorality as the reason in verse 9, I have in, I believe he has in mind the thought of a continual returning to a permissive lifestyle.

Dave Spiker: With the first portion of a three-day broadcast, you're listening to Chuck Swindoll and Insight for Living. The title of today's message: "Getting Through the Tough Stuff of Re-marriage." Today's study and the companion message on divorce is just a part of a larger 14-part series. It's called "Getting Through the Tough Stuff." And when you order the complete set, it comes with a helpful workbook.

You can make your purchase online at insight.org or call us at 1-800-772-8888. As you dig deeper into this topic on your own, remember that Insight for Living has a wide variety of other resources available to you online. We invite you to spend some time browsing through our website to see the articles, messages, books, and other related materials at your disposal.

You'll find these resources and more at insight.org/marriage. And you can download the convenient mobile app online in order to hear Chuck's teaching on your own schedule and wherever you go. You'll find a link for downloading the mobile app on our website at insight.org/app.

And finally, we'd invite you to follow Chuck Swindoll on Twitter and join the conversation about today's topic and more by liking our page on Facebook. You'll find the links for both Facebook and Twitter online at insight.org. I'm Dave Spiker. Chuck Swindoll's message on the biblical view of remarriage continues next time on Insight for Living.