What does the Bible say about marriage and divorce? Quite a lot, for God is the One Who invented marriage after all. Even before sin came into the world, we have the beautiful story of the first marriage, which Genesis 2:24 explained this way: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Jesus Himself quoted Genesis 2:24 when the Pharisees asked Him to interpret Deuteronomy 24:1-4 for them (see Mark 10:2-9).
That means we have to start with the big picture, with God’s intention for marriage, before we can understand how to deal with a couple that has failed to hit that target. God always intended one man and one woman to be married as long as they both shall live. And verse 5 of today’s passage proves that God wants marriages to be as strong as they are intimate. It is still a good idea for newlyweds to spend a good deal of time getting to know one another before launching out into jobs or hobbies that will cause them to be apart. Moreover, just as Moses told the Israelites not to put too many demands on newlyweds, it would be good for our culture to follow their example so that our own marriages may be stronger.
But because every marriage is made up of two sinful people, the process of becoming one flesh is never easy. And for lots of reasons, some couples just don’t last. As Jesus says, it is thus because of the hardness of our hearts that the Law of Moses had to deal with the subject of divorce (Mark 10:5). But while Deuteronomy 24:1-4 recognizes this sad reality and attempts to regulate it, the Bible never encourages divorce. No, this passage just says what to do in the particular instance when marriage and divorce has happened twice to the same woman. It forbids her from going back to her first husband.
And why is that? Most obviously because God doesn’t want us to consider the marriage bond to be disposable. He doesn’t want us to take our vows flippantly or with crossed fingers, going into marriage with the idea that we can always dissolve it if things don’t work out. In fact, verse 4 says that having such a cavalier attitude toward marriage is abhorrent in God’s eyes, and that if a culture makes this practice normal, it will bring sin upon the land itself, corrupting the most basic foundations of society. After our own 50-year experiment with disposable marriage, and facing the poverty, ignorance, disease and violence that have erupted as a result, can we modern Americans doubt this to be the case?
Deuteronomy 24:1-4 (ESV)
“When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house,
2 and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife,
3 and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife,
4 then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the LORD. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.
5 “When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be liable for any other public duty. He shall be free at home one year to be happy with his wife whom he has taken.
