The Sanctity of Marriage
Matthew 5:31–32
“It was also said, ‘Whoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorce,’ but I tell you that whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of sexual immorality, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries her when she is put away commits adultery.
World English Bible
A piece of paper. In Jesus’ day, that was all it took for a man to end a marriage: a certificate, properly worded, placed in his wife’s hand. The rabbis debated how little cause was needed, and the loosest school had concluded: almost none. A ruined meal would do. The certificate, which Moses had permitted to restrain hard-hearted men and protect discarded women, had become a license for the very hard-heartedness it was meant to curb.
Jesus refuses the whole premise. Marriage is not an arrangement that paperwork can dissolve, because marriage was never merely an arrangement. It is a covenant: two lives joined by God into one flesh. The certificate could change a woman’s legal status; it could not undo what God had done. That is why Jesus says the man who casually discards his wife “makes her an adulteress”: he pushes her toward a remarriage the covenant never released her for, and the wreckage spreads to everyone it touches. The one exception He names, sexual immorality, proves the point: only a violation of the one-flesh union itself can sever the one-flesh union.
Read this passage where it sits, in the middle of Jesus’ teaching on the heart: anger, lust, honesty. Divorce-on-demand was simply lust and hard-heartedness wearing legal robes. Jesus is not handing us a rulebook for marital litigation. He is forming people who keep covenant, people whose love does not evaporate when it stops being convenient.
Hold this teaching with both of Jesus’ hands. One hand is unbending: marriage is sacred, and we must stop treating it as upgradeable. The other hand is scarred and gentle: if divorce is part of your story, the Christ who spoke these words is the same Christ who spoke tenderly to a Samaritan woman with five marriages behind her. His standard is uncompromising. So is His mercy. Let the first make you serious about covenant, and the second make you certain of grace.
Reflect
- Where in my closest relationships have I been keeping covenant only as long as it stays convenient?
- If I am married, what am I actively doing to strengthen the covenant, rather than merely avoiding breaking it?
- Is there pain from a broken marriage (mine or my family’s) that I have never honestly brought to Christ for healing?
Pray
Thank God that He is a covenant-keeper who never discards His people. Pray by name for the marriages closest to you (your own, your parents’, your friends’), asking Him to renew commitment wherever it has worn thin. If you carry wounds from divorce, bring them to Him honestly and ask for healing rather than carrying shame He never assigned.