This is a verse I’ve always puzzled over:
Whosoever putteth away his wife,
and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is
put away from her husband committeth adultery.
(Luke 16:18)
The thing that bothered me before was I couldn’t understand
how divorced people could ever be able to marry again and find happiness if any
man who marries a divorced woman has committed adultery.
Finally it hit me that Jesus is describing a situation with
certain preconditions that may or may not be true in our modern age of
increased mobility.
In Jesus’s day, people stayed in the same place and hardly
ever moved far from their ancestral home.
People knew everyone in their locale. We are also to remember His previous pronouncement in the
Beattitudes that he who looks on a woman to lust after her has committed
adultery already in his heart.
So, the man who puts away his wife and then marries another
woman immediately after has been looking and lusting after that second woman
who lives in the same locale. The
second marriage is essentially legalized adultery.
Likewise, the man who pretty quickly marries the woman who
was divorced is one who knows her and has been looking and lusting after her
all the time she was married to the other guy. His marriage to her is legalized adultery as well.
The principle Jesus was teaching was you don’t look around
and people in your community and pick out who you would marry if you or they
were unattached. And singles aren’t
supposed to pick out potential spouses from people who are married. And if the way seems to open to do
something about it, to act on any ideas you’ve had of that nature is adultery,
even if it is legalized, because God knows what has been happening in our
hearts. That kind of thing does
not stop if the itch is scratched.
It will itch again.
Now, having established this, we can see then that if
two singles meet, want to marry each other, and find out that one or both of
them have been divorced before, then that is not adultery because there is no history of them knowing and
wanting each other while married to other people.
Now, let us examine another version of this.
But I say unto you, That whosoever
shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to
commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth
adultery. (Matt. 5:32)
This is also puzzling, the part about how woman who are put away for any cause
besides fornication are being forced
to commit adultery. How does
that happen?
I suspect this goes back to the idea of looking and
lusting. Women are not visually
stimulated like men, but after being rejected and divorced for a lesser cause
than fornication, they might find themselves looking at other relationships
around them, looking at the men and wondering if that man or that man
would have treated them better than their ex had, wondering what it would have
been like to marry one of them instead. The way women are so relationship-oriented,
Jesus implies that those kinds of thoughts are practically inevitable in a
frivolous divorce, to the extent that He declares that the ex-husband is to blame for it. That’s a pretty heavy condemnation, I’d say, especially
since this verse comes in the middle of a lot of commandments about guarding
thoughts.
Understanding these verses really teach how important mental
loyalty is in marriage. They no longer seem unreasonable or nonsensical, but instead are plain in requiring purity of thought.
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