Divorce is a painful phenomenon of our age. Half of American marriages end in divorce. The trauma afflicted on children as well as on the divorced people themselves is devastating. Divorce is a calamity in many cases worse than death, for the hurt goes on and has to be lived with day in and day out. There is no burial, no putting away, no final resolution to the problem.

Often Christians have complicated rather than helped the situation. Some ministers, denominations, and individuals have developed a loose attitude toward marriage that countenances divorce as matter-of-fact. Other have been so cruelly legalistic that they have bound oppressive and impossible-to-bear conditions on people, or have marked and stigmatized them so that they are deprived of Christian fellowship. What does holy scripture really teach on this complex subject?

God ordained marriage between man and woman in the garden of Eden, and pronounced that they were now one flesh (Gen. 2:24). Jesus added a commentary to this scripture when he taught that man should not separate what God had joined together (Matt. 19:6). The prophet Malachi speaks for God when he says, "I hate divorce" (Mal. 2:16). Marriage is not only a vow, an assumed obligation before God that under God's law must be kept, but it is a covenant (Mal. 2:14). Covenants, once made, could never be broken, on pain of death. God once swore with an oath to Abraham to keep the covenant He had made with him, and promised his own decease if He failed to keep it (Gen. 15).

Scripture reveals only two situations where divorce can occur: unfaithfulness of the marriage partner (Matt. 19:9) or desertion (1 Cor. 7:15). Even in those instances, divorce is not mandatory, but permissible.

But what about remarriage? Did Jesus not condemn it in the Pharisees (Matt. 19:9)? A study of this problem in its context reveals that the Pharisees had a casual attitude toward marriage, and they were divorcing their wives in order to marry someone else. They were "trading in the old on a new model," presumably a younger and more attractive woman. This practice is an insult to God and a violation of the covenant of marriage. Those supercilious Pharisees should have known better, and probably did! Jesus was not teaching that remarriage is, in itself, wrong. To tell someone to remain celibate is to lay a burden on him or her that he/she may not be able to bear. Both Jesus and Paul taught that celibacy, sexual continence, is only for those to whom it is divinely given (Matt. 19:11-12, 1 Cor. 7:7-9). To forbid companionship and love to one who has already experienced the enormous pain of a broken marriage is to add a cruel and unnecessary additional pain and burden to the person. The sin is in the divorce, not in the remarriage!

Christians who have experienced divorce may or may not have sinned. Someone sinned, or it would not happen; perhaps both did. But Christ is in the business of forgiving sins. Divorce is not an unpardonable sin. Remarriage, in itself, is not a sin at all. Paul tells the Corinthians that if they are married, they should not seek a divorce, and if they are unmarried, they do not sin if they marry (1 Cor. 7:27). Many think that unmarried or loosed in that verse refers to divorced people, as Paul had already discussed the situation of the death of oneÌs spouse.

Divorced people need our love, our forgiveness, and our support. They do not need the added weight of humanly-contrived legalistic requirements, of being considered second-class citizens of the kingdom, or in any way denied our complete fellowship. They have it from God; they should have it from us!