And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one ‘s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh ’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “ Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
What are what are usually referred to as “biblical reasons” for divorce? Well, Jesus tells us there’s one reason for divorce, and it’s not what you think… “hardness of heart.” Usually when people ask about divorcing their spouse, they’re looking for a kind of loop-hole to allow them to walk away. Yet, Jesus has a very high view of marriage. When the Pharisees asked Jesus for some excuses to divorce, He didn’t play their game. Elsewhere (like 1Corinthians 7) the Bible acknowledges there are times when you can’t help what happens to you. Getting a divorce isn’t the unpardonable sin. It’s not the scarlet letter. There is grace and hope after divorce… but we do need to take marriage seriously. Marriage is the uniting of two people into one, that means divorce is like killing a person, sometimes it is necessary to kill (but not murder), but that’s the rare exception, not the rule. So to with marriage, sometimes divorce is forced upon you, but that’s the rare exception. Don’t be hard hearted, and don’t let a divorce rob you of what God has in store for you today and all the days to come…
