One of the most spiritually gut-wrenching events that a believer in Messiah Jesus can go through is a divorce. Even after a divorce is legally finalized, its sting can last a lifetime.
To make matters worse, it is not unusual for well-meaning believers to add to the sting by giving alleged “biblical” counsel that condemns, as opposed to giving counsel that heals.
Believers in Messiah Jesus who have undergone a divorce don’t need others to speak words of condemnation, because believers who have undergone divorce often condemn themselves.
They do so whenever they compare themselves to the elderly married couple who have been married fifty years or more and who are in a worship service every weekend.
Divorced believers condemn themselves when they read Bible verses about divorce but overlook the cultural context of those verses.
Sadly, preachers may also overlook the cultural context of those verses when preaching about divorce, thus adding to the emotional pain that divorced believers experience.
I do not write about divorce as a preacher or as a professional counselor. Instead, I write about divorce as a believer in Messiah Jesus who has underwent and survived divorce. I write as someone who has been on the receiving end of bad counsel from preachers. I write as someone who has witnessed the pain that other divorced believers experience.
It is not easy for me to write about this topic, but I do so with the hope of helping believers who have been through divorce.
What I have come to believe about this topic is influenced by what the Bible says in Micah 6:8. In the JPS Tanakh, that verse says, “It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”
When talking about divorce, Messiah Jesus promoted justice and mercy, and he did so within the context of the ancient Jewish society. He was well aware that Jewish men had bad habit of divorcing their wives for unjust reasons, and he was well aware that people could be socially condemned for getting divorced for a just reason.
In Matthew 5:32, Jesus says, “I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
In Matthew 19:9, Jesus says, “I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”
Was Jesus turning a blind eye toward people who are physically abused by their spouses? Was he without mercy for people who have been abandoned by their spouses or who have been harmed by their spouses in ways that threaten their survival?
No, I do not believe so. God is just and merciful. It would be out of his character to require people to remain victims of abusive relationships that serve no purpose for his kingdom.
When one reads Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9, one sees the mercy that Jesus has for people who have been sinned against by their spouses. In those verses, Jesus clearly permits divorce for victims of sexual sin. Nowhere does the Bible speak against the victims of such sin becoming remarried after a divorce.
It is true that Jesus did not mention victims of abusive spouses, but to focus on a strict word-for-word interpretation of his words would be to miss the forest for the trees. Again, Jesus promoted justice and mercy. There is no justice and mercy in telling victims of abusive spouses that they cannot get divorced, or, if they are divorced, that they can never remarry. One can infer from the teachings of Jesus that victims of abusive spouses are under the same umbrella as victims of sexual sin.
Even if a believer has just cause to get divorced, that believer can still bear the pain of a shattered dream about marriage. We believers can fool ourselves into thinking that, if only we had done this and that, then we wouldn’t have gone through divorce.
I wish that such were true, but it isn’t reality. That is because one cannot control what one’s spouse says or does. We believers can do our best with the help of the Holy Spirit and still end up divorced. We only harm ourselves by comparing ourselves to an ideal that wasn’t realistic in the first place.
Yes, marriage can work between two believers who are being led by the Holy Spirit and who give their relationship to God priority over their relationship to each other. That is why one can find in Christian churches and messianic synagogues married couples who have been married for fifty years or longer.
Yet, it is wrong and harmful for divorced believers in Messiah Jesus to belittle themselves because their own marriages didn’t last “until death do us part”. If divorced believers are divorced because of sin on their part, then they have this assurance from 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Divorce isn’t the unforgivable sin, and neither is remarriage.
Sadly, it isn’t unusual for divorced believers to be re-victimized by people who take Bible verses out of cultural context, with some of those people being preachers or church elders.
As I see it, pastors should acknowledge that divorced believers have been harmed by bad counsel coming from certain preachers. All too often, divorced believers will stop attending worship services altogether because of how they have been treated by preachers or other religious leaders. This is especially true when the divorced believers were victims of sexual sin or abusive spouses.
Such believers need the healing ministry of a local congregation that promotes the Good News of Messiah Jesus, but they won’t get that healing if ministers don’t acknowledge all sources of those believers’ pain, including the pain inflicted by bad preachers or bad elders.
I have encountered way too many believers who have been too scared to set foot in a church because they expect to be condemned for being divorced, even when they got divorced because of an adulterous or physically-abusive spouse.
I felt that way after my divorce. While sitting through a church service, I would look at the 2-inch (5-centimeter) scar on my left arm that my ex-wife gave to me, and I would wonder if I was condemned to a life of singleness. I am certain that other divorced believers have felt condemned, too.
Well, I have good news of divorced believers. They are not condemned. In Romans 8:1, the Apostle Paul writes, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ [Messiah] Jesus.”
God bestows his mercy on divorced believers as much as he does on non-divorced believers. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, divorced believers can recover from divorce, and they can have another marriage, one that is pleasing to God.*
God works to restore the broken lives of all his children. That includes his divorced children.
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*I am not saying that every divorced believer in Messiah Jesus will find another spouse, but that a divorced believer can find another spouse. In my case, I met my late wife after my divorce. At the time that I met her, I was involved in a church that had a godly approach to divorce and remarriage.
