With this foundation laid, we can begin to explore more specifically what God has declared about divorce and remarriage. Since the most controversial statements about divorce and remarriage are those spoken by Jesus to Israelites, it will help us to first study what God said hundreds of years before on the same subject to earlier Israelites. If we find that what God said through Moses and what God said through Jesus are contradictory, we can be sure that either God’s law changed or that we’ve misinterpreted something said by either Moses or Jesus. So let us begin with what God first revealed regarding divorce and remarriage.
I’ve already made mention of the passage in Genesis 2 that, according to Jesus, has some relevance to the subject of divorce. This time, let’s read it straight from the Genesis account:
And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. And the man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh (Gen. 2:22-24).
Here then is the origin of marriage. God made the first woman from the first man and for the first man, and personally brought her to him. In the words of Jesus, ” God …joined [them] together” (Matt. 19:6, emphasis added). This first God-ordained marriage set the pattern for all subsequent marriages. God creates about the same number of women as men, and He creates them so that they are attracted to the opposite sex. So it could be said that God is still into arranging marriages on a grand scale (even though there are many more prospective mates for each individual than there were for Adam and Eve). Therefore, as Jesus pointed out, no human should separate what God joins together. It was not God’s intention that the original couple live separate lives, but that they would find blessing in living together in mutual dependence. A violation of God’s clearly revealed will would constitute sin. Thus, from the second chapter of the Bible, it is an established fact that divorce was not God’s intention for any marriage.
