Divorced and Not Remarried: What God Asks of You Now

The paperwork is finished.

Whatever the last two years were, they're over, and the house has gone quiet in a way you haven't gotten used to. People stopped asking how you were holding up somewhere around the fourth month. Lately one or two of them have started asking, in a careful voice, whether you've thought about meeting somebody.

Your church has probably gone quiet on you too. There's no shortage of Christian writing about how to save a marriage. There is almost nothing written for the man or woman whose marriage is already gone, who has to get up tomorrow and figure out what an ordinary Tuesday is supposed to look like now.

We'd rather give you our answer up front than bury it six pages down. We believe Scripture asks you to stay unmarried while the person you married is still living. To keep your body out of anybody else's bed. To pray for them, by name, whether or not you feel like it. And to leave the door open, since the only marriage Scripture holds out to you while they're alive is the one you already had.

That is a hard word and it costs something real, and you're owed the reasons behind it and not just the rule. So the reasons are what the rest of this is for, and they take a while.

The paper and the bond

A divorce decree is a real thing. It splits the property, it settles which weekends you get your kids, it ends a legal partnership, and every institution in the country will honor it. None of that is nothing, and we're not going to talk about it as though it were.

What the decree never touched is the thing God made when the two of you became one flesh. The state can dissolve what the state set up. It was never handed jurisdiction over the rest of it.

We didn't invent that distinction. It's how Jesus handled the question when it was put to Him.

They came asking how far the permission stretched. He went back behind Moses, behind the whole business of certificates and procedure, all the way to the week the world was made, and told them who had done the joining in the first place. God did, and not the couple, and certainly not the man standing there holding the certificate.

So a judge can rule that you are no longer married under the law of your state, and the ruling is valid, and it is also not the last word about you.

Moses, and what he was working around

They pushed back on Him with Moses, which was fair enough, because Moses really had written the thing down.

Permitted. He picks the word on purpose. The certificate in Deuteronomy was a restraint God put on men whose hearts had already gone hard, something to limit what they were going to do to their wives anyway. It was damage control, and Jesus won't let anybody dress it up as design.

Then comes the sentence that lands square on the question you're carrying.

Mark has the same teaching without the clause, and he adds the wife's side of it.

In both accounts the sin He names is the divorce and then the marrying another. He calls the second marriage adultery. That only works as a sentence if the first bond is still standing, since there is no such thing as adultery against a marriage that has stopped existing.

Which leaves the exception clause in Matthew, and we're not going to pretend it isn't sitting there or that it's easy.

We read it the way Matthew's own vocabulary pushes us to read it. Jesus doesn't reach for the ordinary word for a married person's adultery; He uses the wider word for sexual sin, porneia. Then look at how the same Gospel opens. Matthew calls Joseph Mary's husband and calls his plan to end the betrothal a sending-away, and that is divorce language, and in the same breath he tells us the two had not yet come together. A betrothal in that world was binding enough that ending it took a formal divorce, and it had not made anybody one flesh. So the clause protects the betrothed man who finds out about unfaithfulness before the marriage is consummated. He can end it and marry someone else, since the bond that only death cuts was never formed to begin with. What it gives a married person is nothing.

That is the short version of a long argument. The full case, with all the texts laid out side by side, is in our covenant treatise, and we'd honestly rather you weigh it there than take our word for it here.

Paul is the one who speaks directly to where you're standing, and he does it in a single sentence that has shaped how the church counsels separated people.

He isn't writing to stop the separation. It's already happened; he's writing to the woman who has already gone. He calls her married in one verse and tells her to stay unmarried in the next, which only makes sense if unmarried means unmarried to anybody else. Then he gives her the roads that are open, and there are two of them. Stay single. Or go back.

Paul had every reason to offer a third road, writing to a Greek city where nobody would have blinked at one. He doesn't.

Why He wouldn't bend

There is a picture underneath all of this that God has never been willing to give up.

Marriage was built to show the world one specific thing, and the thing is how Christ holds His church. The church He holds is not a faithful bride. She wanders off, forgets Him for years at a stretch, spends His gifts on other loves, and turns up again when the money runs out. He has known all of it from the start and He doesn't send her away. He carried her sin in His own body and covered her in His own blood and He keeps her to the end.

Set a marriage down next to that. A marriage that ends when it stops working preaches a god who leaves when you disappoint him. A marriage that holds after betrayal, or after fifteen years of disappointment, preaches the God who is there.

Here is the part we want to say carefully, because it's easy to hear wrong. Your marriage failed. The picture it was painting got torn down the middle, and you can't put it back by yourself. But your obedience now, in a season when there's no marriage left to save and nobody is watching you keep it, is painting the same picture. Someone who stays faithful to a covenant the other person walked out of is showing the world what God is like. That is not a consolation prize. It's the same sermon, preached alone.

God married an unfaithful wife on purpose

If you want to know what God thinks of a spouse who has been betrayed, He wrote a whole book about it, and He put Himself in it as the husband.

He told a prophet named Hosea to marry a woman who would be unfaithful to him, so that the nation could stand there and watch a man live out what God had been living for centuries. Gomer left. She went to other men. By the third chapter she has ended up somewhere so far down that she has to be bought back.

Before any of the buying back, God says what He means to do with the wife who walked out on Him.

He doesn't say He'll shame her. He says He'll court her again, the way He did at the beginning. The valley of Achor was the place of Israel's disgrace, the valley named after trouble, and He makes it a door of hope. If you're the one who was left, take your time with that verse.

Then comes the command to Hosea, which is the hardest sentence in the book.

Go again. Not go find someone better. Go back to the one who broke it, pay what it takes to get her home, and bring her home.

And there's a clause at the end of that passage almost nobody quotes. Hosea tells Gomer she'll live with him a long while without another man, and then he binds himself to the very same terms. So I will also be toward you. He waits with her. His celibacy isn't a punishment tacked onto hers; it's how he loves her back into the marriage, and it is part of the picture God is painting.

You may be standing in exactly that season right now, and if you are, Hosea 3 is the chapter to live in for a while.

Jeremiah takes the same imagery and pushes it right to the edge. He picks up the old law in Deuteronomy 24, which said a man could not take back a wife he'd divorced once she had belonged to another man, and he holds it up against what God is prepared to do.

Under the law that door was shut and bolted. God quotes the law, and then holds the door open anyway, and calls His adulterous people home.

We should say honestly that Deuteronomy 24 bears on some of your situations, particularly where your former spouse has since married someone else. That case is genuinely hard, the church has weighed it for a long time, and nobody should settle it off a paragraph on a website. Take it to your pastor with your Bible open and let him work through it with you. What we can tell you from here is which direction God's own heart runs in Jeremiah 3.

Where the church has stood

We're a Reformed Baptist ministry and we hold a position that isn't the majority view among our own people today. So here's the history, straight, including the parts that cut against us.

The earliest Christian writing we have on any of this is a second-century book called The Shepherd of Hermas. Its author asks what a man is supposed to do about a wife who is unfaithful and won't repent, and the answer he gets is that the husband should send her away and then stay by himself. If he marries another woman, Hermas says, he has committed adultery too. And Hermas gives his reason for it, the same one we've been circling this whole time. The husband has to stay unmarried so his wife still has somewhere to come back to. Marrying again would shut the door on her repentance.

Hermas was no outlier. Through the first several centuries the writers and councils of the church allowed separation for grave causes and refused remarriage while a spouse was living, and they were remarkably consistent about it. Augustine and the Western church after him treated the bond as standing until death. The East eventually worked out a practice of permitting remarriage in some cases as a pastoral concession. The West didn't, and Rome still doesn't.

The change in our own stream came at the Reformation. Erasmus argued for remarriage after adultery. Luther and Calvin, reacting hard against a medieval system they judged had turned marriage into a sacramental trap, allowed it for adultery and for desertion. From there it went into the confessions. The Westminster Confession says it, and our own 1689 London Baptist Confession says it in nearly the same words: that in the case of adultery after marriage the innocent party may sue out a divorce and afterward marry another, as if the offending party were dead, and that adultery or irremediable willful desertion is sufficient cause for dissolving the bond of marriage.

We don't hold that, and we'd rather say so out loud than let you discover it later.

We stand inside the 1689 and confess it gladly, and on this one article we take a stricter line than our confession takes, for the reasons laid out above from Matthew, Mark, and 1 Corinthians 7. It's a matter of confessional liberty. A real minority in our tradition holds it, and the church before the sixteenth century held it almost without exception. Your own pastor may land where the confession lands. If he does, he is not a compromiser, and we'd ask you to honor him and keep reading these texts alongside him rather than around him. What we won't do is hand you a lighter word than we think Scripture gives just to make it easier to swallow.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

Doctrine that never reaches a calendar isn't worth much, so here it is on the ground.

Stay unmarried. Paul told the separated woman to remain unmarried and he meant it as a way to live, with a dignity of its own, rather than a waiting room. You aren't a second-tier Christian now. Jesus never married. Paul never married. The kingdom has never once run short of unmarried saints doing its heaviest lifting.

Keep your body pure. People skip this part, and it's the part that will cost you around eleven at night. If the bond is still standing, your body is still spoken for, and grief gives terrible advice at that hour. Get honest with somebody before you're standing in the weak place rather than after. Sin here is forgivable and God is not looking for a reason to drop you, and you will still save yourself a great deal of sorrow by naming it early.

Pray for the one you married. Daily, if you can manage daily. Pray for their salvation, their repentance, the hardness in them breaking, their good with nothing in it for you. Praying that way keeps your own heart soft, and it is very hard to go on hating somebody you carry to God by name.

Praying for a person is not the same as contacting them. If there's danger anywhere in your situation, keep the distance and keep praying. God hears you fine from three states away.

Give the season to Christ. There's something Paul says about unmarried life that reads differently once you're the one living it.

Undistracted devotion. Paul is naming something the unmarried have that married people don't, and your hours are yours again in a way they haven't been for years. Be in your church on Sunday and through the week. Sit under the preaching, come to the Table, and let somebody there get close enough to ask you hard questions on a weeknight. We've never seen anybody carry this alone for long.

If the fault was yours

Some of you have had this landing on your head since about the third paragraph, because you know exactly what you did. You left. Or you were unfaithful, and you've done the arithmetic on what it cost your children, and there's no telling of the story where you come out clean.

Don't run from it. Carry it where it needs to go, which is one place only.

David wrote that after adultery and after arranging a man's death to cover it. He isn't somebody with a manageable sin fishing for reassurance. He has destroyed people, and he has found out that the one thing God will not turn away is a heart that has finally quit defending itself.

Paul had a list for the Corinthians of what some of them used to be. Then he put one sentence after it.

God is the one who moved that sentence into the past tense, and He did it for people whose histories were no tidier than yours. Your record isn't what determines what happens to you next; Christ's record is, and He has never yet failed anybody who came to Him with empty hands. Repent specifically, make what restitution can be made, and go to your pastor so the church can walk with you through it. Then live the rest of it as someone whose debt has been paid, because it has been.

If you've already remarried

Some of you didn't find this in time. You've remarried, there are people in your house who depend on you, and now you're reading a paper telling you the second marriage started wrongly.

The answer is not to leave.

Repent of whatever was sinful in how it began, bring it honestly to God, and let it be dealt with by the blood of Christ, which is more than sufficient for exactly this. Then keep the vows you're standing under now. You have a spouse, and very likely children, who didn't ask for any of it and would be torn up by another rupture. Breaking a second covenant repairs nothing about the first one, and it puts a second family in the wreckage alongside the first.

So stay, love your spouse well, and raise your children in the fear of the Lord. Take the guilt to Christ instead of carrying it around in silence, and take the situation to your pastor, who knows your family and can shepherd what a website can't.

When leaving was the only safe thing

We have to say this part clearly, because permanence in the wrong hands turns into a weapon, and we won't be responsible for that.

Nothing here asks anybody to stay in a house where they or their children are being harmed. Nothing here asks you to pursue contact with a violent person, to put yourself back within reach of him, or to treat your physical safety as the smaller concern. God has never asked a husband or a wife to be destroyed on covenant ground in order to honor the covenant. Getting out was right, and getting out carries no obligation to go back.

If that's your story, then everything above about praying and leaving the door open is about prayer and not about proximity. Pray from wherever you're safe. Tell your pastor and your church the truth about what happened and let them carry some of it and protect you.

Then there's the reader whose spouse just left and wouldn't stay. Paul says something to you in particular.

That verse gets asked to carry a great deal it was never built for. What it releases you from is the chase. You aren't bound to go after a spouse who has gone, and nobody is asking you to spend your life at the window. You may stop pursuing, and you may have peace about stopping. Paul doesn't say the bond is gone, and twenty-four verses later in the same letter he tells us what does end it: “A wife is bound as long as her husband lives.” Being let out of the pursuit is a real mercy. It stops well short of being let out to remarry.

What the whole thing was pointing at

We'll finish where the strength for any of this comes from, because without it everything above is just cruelty with footnotes.

If what we've written is true, you're being asked to live something you cannot live out of your own supply. Nobody keeps faith with an absent spouse for years on willpower. Willpower gives out, usually somewhere around the eighteenth month, usually on an evening that started out fine.

A Christian is drawing on something that was never his to begin with. You're joined to Christ, and the faithfulness you're being asked to show is first a faithfulness you've received, from the One who has kept covenant with you through every single thing you've done to Him. The fruit comes up through the branch from somewhere else. That's the whole difference between this and the shelf of self-improvement writing on the subject, which tells you to try harder tomorrow than you managed today. We're pointing at a fountain and telling you to drink.

And there's a last thing, which puts the size of this season back where it belongs. Marriage ends at the resurrection. All of them, the happy ones too. What you're keeping is the shadow of a covenant that doesn't end, cast by a Bridegroom who is coming back for a bride He bought with His own blood and will not lose track of. If you keep faith and your former spouse never comes home, you will still have spent these years pointing at Him.

So pray for them tonight. Stay close to the Lord who has never once let go of you, and leave that door exactly where God left it.

This is a pastoral article, not counseling, medical, or legal advice, and it does not replace your pastor, or a biblical counselor sought with your pastor.