"I Hate Divorce"

I Hate Divorce

Matthew 19:9 "I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

I was raised to believe that divorce is wrong and immoral because of Matthew 19:9. It is below in context with the verses around it. Too many sermons and too many Sunday School lessons were designed around this one verse, but it fails the context test when you take one verse and build an entire morality around it.

We have created many laws around divorce in our western world. Many of those laws are designed to protect the wife and children from the Husband's abuse outlined in Malachi 2. Jesus and God hate/d divorce in the ancient/modern world because it was often used as a tool to get rid of a wife who had been with the husband since they were young. The husband had grown wealthier with time: more powerful. He had inherited lands and other property. He was a force to be dealt with now and he felt he was entitled to an even better wife. She should be young and fertile and compliant. She should always be in position of lesser authority than him. What is worse than a wife who knows all your fears and all your faults when everyone else around you thinks you are a leader and strong and brave? The wife of your youth knows the truth of who you are and instead of finding comfort in her, too many men project all their faults on her. The love and comfort they may have had in their youth is gone.

I am presenting what may be the best outcome or ideal situation because I assume there is love and comfort at the start between the two. Some couples certainly had this. But far too many couples also saw abuse and violence between the husband and wife from the start. Who would want to stay married to someone they saw as less than human. Too many men created a world of lies saying, "I never wanted her. She was not kind enough to me. She shows me no support. She keeps me from what I want. She is cruel. She is my enemy." They have reached an age where their parents are either gone or they have abdicated their authority to their son. In this caustic environment, too many husbands could get rid of their wife as easily as signing their name on a piece of paper.

This had to be a fairly common occurrence in the ancient world of Israel or it wouldn't be have been addressed so much, but we should assume it was a problem everywhere for most women. Too many men must have been divorcing their wives like this because God even uses their concept of divorce to mock the Israelites in Isaiah 50:1. He tells them that he has issued them divorce papers and sent them away. When a woman was sent away, she had very few options in the ancient world. She had no legal protections. She had no right to the property her and her husband had both worked to build. She could return to her family, if they would accept her. She could turn to prostitution, if her age wasn't too advanced. She could become a beggar. But every bad choice that faced her was designed to break her and humiliate her. And once she was gone, the husband could remarry. While it is true that she could also remarry, the laws limited this option for her and made it much easier for her new husband to divorce her again.

For the husband, it was an easy win. The law protected him. He only had to find something disagreeable about his wife's character and he didn't have to be honest. Divorce in this world favored abuses against the wife and against the children. The law allowed the husband to become a tyrant, to corrupt his character and to rule his wife with fear and constant threat of divorce until it was carried out. Often in our discussion of the victims of abuse, we forget about the abusers. Very few children start life born as an abuser (I say this sardonically). They often discover that the environment allows for the abuse and that even some systems make it the moral choice to abuse. It corrupts them. Slowly, one small inch at a time. One of the worst things you can do for a person's character is to enshrine corruption and evil into law. This Mosaic law allowing for divorce created an environment for this abuse. Even Moses resisted this law, but it was forced upon him by the demand of the people. This must have been an old practice they had learned in Egypt they wanted to bring into their new law. And Moses, as he too often did, compromised and the consequences for it was felt for centuries in the Hebrew world.

Not every marriage during this time was built on abuse and violence. Moses and Zipporah seemed madly in love with each other from the biblical accounts. Certainly, some men and women learned to thrive despite the laws which were designed to send most people into a descent of madness, entropy, and chaos. If you understand this context, you understand better why God used the word hate to describe his feelings about divorce. It is obvious He doesn't agree with the Levitical Laws allowing divorce for frivolous reasons which only gives the husband rights. He is also stating He cares deeply for women and children and any abuse and violence they receive. It helps illuminate why He came to fulfill the law rather than to add to the law. I think much of the reason we don't practice Levitical Laws today is because of the compromise of Moses. The Levitical Law became a way to demonstrate righteousness without actually being righteous. Many of them are ridiculous*. They become a mockery of righteousness rather than a reflection of the Holy.

In many ways, the Levitical laws were additions to the nearly perfect Ten Commandments to express how holy the Jewish people wanted to be. I only say nearly perfect because Jesus was able to sum all ten of them to two short statements. I'll sum it up because they are below in their perfection, but the first commandment is to love God and then to love everyone else around you as you love yourself. Jesus is making a mockery of the long lists of Kosher laws the Jews followed at the time. He is also saying that in all your laws, none of them made you love your God, the people in your life, or yourself.

So it begs the question in my mind, why did God allow the Hebrews to even develop the Levitical and Kosher laws. Surely they would have been better off with the raw truth? And I think this is my 21st Century self trying to project my sense of morality that has developed over two thousand years into the minds of people three thousand years ago. They weren't ready for it. They barely managed monotheism in the face of other gods. Their conceptual framework and worldview didn't allow for the possibility of it. This is long before Greek philosophy and the Roman law. This is a world where irrationality ruled and there was a supernatural cause for everything. It demonstrates just how slow we can be to learn new concepts when we are committed to our current worldview. As much as God showed the Israelites, they didn't have the tools to understand it. Four hundred years of being enslaved in Egypt had burnt out many monotheistic concepts from most of them. We must not think every enslaved Jew in Egypt practiced their religion pure from the influences of their world. So as Moses tried to break them from that worldview, they pushed back against him. We see it time and time again in Exodus. They just couldn't and wouldn't give up all they had known and their stubbornness crept into the Levitical Law.

So God being the wise and long patient being He is, allowed for the creation of the laws because He knew over time it would lead to His final goal in freeing their minds and souls from the physical/spiritual enslavement they had faced, even if it took thousands of years. And in doing so, God demonstrated to us that laws cannot bring anyone closer to God. It is folly to guess the mind of God, except where He reveals part of it to us. I think in this (and I have to tread carefully), God reveals that He doesn't exist in the law, but outside it. He doesn't seek to be lawless, but above it. He knows that a law written can be interpreted and misinterpreted almost as many ways as there are people. People with good intentions can misinterpret the law. And people with malice intent will use the law like a bludgeon like it was used in divorce. It is akin to when preachers and teachers use Mathew 19:9 to convince people to never divorce at all, not for the purpose of holiness, but to protect men over women and children. It is why Jesus intentionally references Micah in the verse in Matthew for people who want to dig deeper and see a greater truth. I think Jesus is fully aware that every word He will speak is in danger of being misinterpreted by those with malice and hatred in their intentions and hearts. He is also aware that well-meaning people will misinterpret these verses also because of their own biases. My belief is that when Jesus comes again, it won't be to add to the Bible but to fulfill the Bible. We too often use the Bible like the Pharisees used the Levitical Law. It doesn't make you holy because you can quote scripture to win points in an argument or because you are certain scripture points out how evil other people are. It makes you Holy because Christ resides in you which is the whole point of the law and the Bible and God's end goal for us all.

God hates laws that are unjust and that can be used to demean and destroy the lives of people. We still live in world of laws like that. It has been a rare occurrence in human history where women have been given protections under the law in the case of divorce rather than having all their safety removed. Today, women are also given the protections to be free from abusive and violent husbands if they can access those protections. I know it can be hard, but we as a society no longer silently tolerate spousal or child abuse. Men are also granted the same rights in divorce and against abuse. I don't know where the moral strength came from to help women and children receive better rights, but I believe it has to come from the biblical teachings that condemned this practice of treating women like they could be replaced with a younger and more youthful woman. I will go so far as to say God hates when people abuse their spouses or uses the threat of divorce against each other. He hates when we have no gratitude to the spouse of our youth and seek to destroy them because of the evil in our our heart. And this destruction can look like many things. Abuse is a hydra and for every head I can name and cut off, two more can grow in its place. Cruelty in a marriage is one of the most destructive things we can do and if this is you, then you will face God in all of his judgment. If you are a victim of this type of cruelty, but have been told all your life that marriage is sacred and you cannot divorce your spouse, I hope you find freedom from your spouse. There is no sacred tie on your life to remain there. Have courage and use the protections you have in our world that God has helped produce. The women and children in the past may not have had those protections, but you do now. God will not judge you for protecting yourself.

Below is the list of many of the verses dealing with divorce that I spoke about. But it is not the complete list of verses on divorce. Please read for yourself and try to consider the context and purpose behind the verses. God allowed the Jewish nation to write religious laws and then spent the rest of the Torah showing how those laws failed to help them achieve righteousness. Then He sent the Redeemer who pointed out how evil the laws were when practiced by unholy men. Jesus turns the law on its head in 19:9 when he accuses the men of adultery, which was a common accusation against women to divorce them. This ruined their moral character and made it nearly impossible for them to remarry to a man with a strong reputation in their community.

*As a note, it is usually bad form to call part of the Bible ridiculous. But I don't know a single professor or teacher or pastor that hasn't called these laws boring to read. And if they are boring and they break the narrative form of the rest of the Bible, then don't they deserve a little ridicule? Go read them. Far too many of them are just silly and are designed to make a person like a religious peacock. But this is just my 21st Century point of view.

Malachi 2:15-16 is in a section about the harm we do to our family.

15 [r]But not one has done so who has a remnant of the Spirit. And [s]why the one? He was seeking a godly offspring. Be careful then about your spirit, and see that none of you deals treacherously against the wife of your youth. 16 “For [t]I hate [u]divorce,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “and [v]him who covers his garment with violence,” says the Lord of armies. “So be careful about your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously.”

Matthew 19:3-10

3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”

Deuteronomy 24:1-4 Laws Concerning Divorce

24 “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 ehe writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, 2 and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, 3 and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, 4 then fher former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the LORD. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.

Matthew 22:37-39 New American Standard Bible - NASB 1995 (NASB1995)
And He said to him, “ ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’
Share