Divorce

Divorce

The Law regulated divorce, and the New Testament followed suit.

Deuteronomy 24:1-4

“‘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, and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, 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, 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.’”

Divorce was provided for under the Law of God, not because this was agreeable to God from the beginning, but because provision must be made for the fallen and sinful state of human beings.

The assumption in this case is that the woman had been adulterous, either before her marriage or since. He could thus give her a writ of divorce, assuming, of course, procedures for validating the accusation of adultery had been followed. Divorce was not something a man could accomplish on his own, apart from the oversight of the local elders. The accusation of “indecency” had to be proven to the satisfaction of the elders, and then the writ of divorce could be issued.

If the woman remarried and her husband died, she could not be married again by her first husband, for this was considered to be an abomination in the sight of the Lord.

The New Testament acknowledges abandonment, along with adultery, as a legitimate ground for divorce (1 Cor. 7). But, again, this is not something an individual should determine. A court of the Church should be involved in determining the justice of the charges.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T. M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.