Let’s take our Bibles and open them to the passage we’ve been looking at now, this is our sixth week looking at Matthew chapter 19 and examining our Lord’s teaching on the subject of divorce. I just want to touch very briefly on Matthew 19 and then spend our time this morning in I Corinthians chapter 7.
Now, there are some characteristics of the early church, the church of the New Testament, that are different than the church today. They had Apostles. They had prophets?unique to their time. It was a time when the revelation of God was just unfolding. There was a closeness to the life of Christ. There was a zeal. There was a fire. There was a passion. There was a dynamic purity. There was a simplicity of life. There was a profuse kind of testimony reaching out to their world that maybe is different than today.
But while there are some different things and maybe some things that we’d like to recapture, there are some things about that early church that are identical to today. There are some things that they possessed that we also possess, namely the same message, the same Christ, the same Holy Spirit and the same Word of God with the same teaching, the same principles, and the same demands and blessings for our life. That doesn’t change. And so, as we go to the Word of God and we touch life in the time of our Lord and life in the time of Paul the Apostle, we must hear what they say and understand that it is a direct truth for this generation. One of the really tragic things that happens in our time in the church is that people take the cultural standards and try to back them into the Bible…and eliminate anything in the Scripture that doesn’t fit the way we think we need to live today. We can’t do that to the Word of God without desecrating its purity. We must hear what it says; we must affirm its principles to be timeless for every generation.
Now, one of the areas in which the Bible gives very clear teaching is the area of divorce and remarriage. We cannot alter that. We cannot change it to accommodate our quote/unquote “sophisticated day.” We cannot back into the Bible with contemporary ideas and change the Scripture or eliminate the ones that we feel are an intrusion on our life patterns. We must objectively, openly hear what the Bible says. And our Lord gives us a very clear statement in regard to divorce.
The Pharisees came to Jesus in Matthew chapter 19 and they said in verse 3: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for every cause?” And Jesus, in effect, said: “No, that was not God’s principle from the very beginning when God made a man and a woman to cleave together for all their life, to become one flesh and never part.” Not it is not lawful. And then they said: “Well, why did Moses allow a bill of divorcement?” And Jesus said: “For those cases of hard?hearted, continuous adultery … and I don’t mean mental or spiritual adultery, but actual adultery, where there could be no reconciliation, where there could be no forgiveness … God permitted divorce as a merciful concession to the innocent party to free them from that bond, allowing them to marry another who would fulfill, in line with God’s will, the significance of marriage.” Now that is the divine principle outlined in Matthew 19. No, you cannot get a divorce for every cause, there’s only one cause in the law of God for God’s people and that is hard?hearted adultery and then the innocent partner is free to remarry.
Now that is a simple statement. I really don’t think there’s a lot of confusion about that if you understand the Scripture. Now you can back into the Bible with your pre?conceptions and come up with a lot of things, and people have done that and confused the church in many ways. But it’s very clear if you just take it from the text. The problem with it is it’s so isolated, it doesn’t tell us about all the exceptions. It doesn’t answer all of our myriad questions. It just lays down one principle.
Now, in order to broaden our understanding, we must go elsewhere in the New Testament and I want to take you now to I Corinthians chapter 7 because I believe this chapter is Paul’s commentary on the divine principle, Paul’s commentary on the divine law, Paul’s commentary on the teaching of our Lord. Now keep in mind that Paul was dealing in a society much like ours, much like ours. I told you last time that there were basically four kinds of marriage within the Roman system. And people were married under all kinds of … all of these kinds of means. For example, there was what we called contubernium which was tent companionship, slaves were just living together, it was sort of live?in sex. In fact the slave owner would match two of them together to procreate other slaves. And there was no ceremony, there was no vow exchange, there was no covenant necessarily made, there was nothing official or legal about it, they just lived together. That’s not unlike our time. We don’t have slavery today but we sure have a lot of live?in sex. We have people who come to Grace Church and are always curious when they do, some of them will apply for membership in the church and we’ll notice that there’s a man’s name and a woman’s name, completely different names, both living at the same address. Our conclusion is obvious, they live together, they’re not married.
We have people who come to Christ in that kind of situation. They are not legally married. They’ve never been legally married. They’re living together. It may have been they’ve only been together for a few weeks. They come to Christ and all of a sudden they face the fact that they’re living in an ad…in a fornicating or adulterous relationship. What about them? What do they do? And that leads us to the idea of usus which was the Roman common?law, what if they’ve been living together for years? We’ve had that situation. I remember in a situation where a couple had come here, they were never legally married, had been together long enough to have three or four children and it was a long?term kind of thing and they came to Christ. Now what? What’s their status? And what if they had former partners to whom they were legally married and now are not legally married? Is this just an extended case of fornication and adultery? Who’s wife is she and whose husband is he?
And then you had the Roman coemptio in manum situation where there was a selling of the daughter by the father for economic gain. And we even have seen that. I remember a man who came here from a foreign country who had a wife which he had purchased from the father, he didn’t really like her, in fact, it was a family relationship. The family had worked it out and in other cultures that happens. He was assigned to marry her. He took off. He’s been living in America for six years. She’s over in the orient somewhere; He comes to Christ and wants to know what about her?
And then you had that final confarreatio which was the sort of noble wedding with vows and all the legal stuff. But here in the case of the Apostle Paul, there were these people coming to Christ in the midst of all of these kind of chaotic approaches to marriage. Some of them just living together. Some of them in the midst of adultery…others in fornication relationships. Some had been married and divorced over and over again, now they come to Christ, they don’t know what their status is, they don’t know who they belong to, if anybody, or if they’re free to marry anybody else.
And you add to that all of the vice and vile activity of that culture, to Corinthianize meant to have an affair with a prostitute. That’s what Corinth did. That was the best definition of a Corinthians, one who had relationships with a prostitute. There was in Corinth the Temple of Aphrodite and it had at least a thousand priestesses and every evening the priestesses would descend from the temple ground of Aphrodite, down into the streets of Corinth to ply their trade. They were prostitutes at night. And when you paid your money to the prostitute, you were not only indulging in a quote/unquote “religious experience” but you were giving them the money which was used to support the temple. They actually built the Temple of Aphrodite from proceeds earned by the prostitute priestesses.
So, the life style of the Corinthians was at the very pits to say the least. The Romans, frankly, had had a more moralistic view of marriage. But as one historian notes for us, though militarily and politically, Rome conquered Greece; morally and socially, Greece conquered Rome. And in the marriage of the Greek and Roman cultures, the Roman might prevailed and the Greek immorality prevailed. And the seeds of destruction were built into the Roman Empire because of the corrupt life style of the influence of Greeks. It came to be a rather common jest among the Romans that marriage had two happy days: the day you first clasped your wife to your breast, and the day you put her in the tomb. And so, they mocked marriage.
Now, the Apostle Paul is confronting a society like this. He’s not talking to a Jewish society like our Lord was, that had been reared and raised on Mosaic Law, a society where people were trying to conform to the divine standard all along, even though they were unable fully to do that. He is talking to an utterly pagan society, is Paul, who had no relationship to the law of God, whose background is literally jammed full of incongruities in terms of God’s law, who are in and out of marriages and relationships ad infinitum adnauseam. And now they’re coming to Christ and they’re asking very basic questions. What is my status? Where do I stand? And so forth.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
