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Marriage When is Divorce Good? I felt condemned for being divorced. Well-meaning comments wounded: "Divorce is a sin, but God forgives," and "When there is a divorce, both parties are at fault." Comments like these trivialize the endless agony that goes into the divorce of a Christian. A Scarlet D Pastors don't preach on the goodness of Christian divorce. Instruction is either nonexistent or inconsistent while churches send a double message by restricting approval for divorce to cases of adultery, while silently welcoming divorced and remarried men and women to populate the pews and boards. If they really condemned divorce, wouldn't divorced people be excommunicated or stoned or forced to wear a scarlet D? Despite the misunderstanding by Christian friends at the time, I look back on my divorce and see the leading of the Holy Spirit directing events. Driving away from the attorney's office after filing for divorce, I heard the Holy Spirit clearly say to me, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." Why did He commend me? I was grateful for His comfort but did not understand how the apparently tragic divorce, which heaped upon me the reproach and ostracism of my charismatic church, could be something that God would commend. Although I didn't understand how unfolding events agreed with scripture, somehow I knew in my heart that I had no other choice but to divorce. In the ensuing years, I have come to see that the incongruity didn't lie in what the scripture said but rather in my understanding of the scripture. Four points clarify an understanding of Christian marriage, divorce, and remarriage. All are based on the covenant model as portrayed throughout the whole Bible, Old and New Testaments:
WHAT IS A COVENANT? A covenant is defined as a "formal, solemn, and binding agreement." We see this illustrated in the covenant between Abram and God. "I will establish My covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come? (Genesis 17:7 NIV)." A covenant is entered into by mutual agreement of two parties. Second Chance - Biblical Principles of Divorce and Remarriage by Ray R. Sutton describes marriage as a covenant entered into by a man and woman. Sutton explains that the Old Testament takes this view illustrated by Malachi 2:14, "because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant." In the early centuries of the church, divorce was granted for such crime as a adultery, witchcraft, and wife-beating. Remarriage often followed. During the Reformation as well, Martin Bucer among other influential teachers saw marriage and divorce based on the covenantal model and determined that divorce was permissible for any type of fornication, witchcraft, insanity, and contagious incurable disease, like leprosy. HOW CAN A COVENANT BE BROKEN? While it takes two parties to enter a covenant, it only takes one party to kill it, just as it only takes one to destroy the terms of a legal contract. According to Sutton, the innocent party can rightly file for divorce when the covenant or bond has been broken. The most obvious way the marriage contract is broken is through the physical death of one spouse. In the Old Testament, "divorce" was carried out by a literal physical execution of the guilty party for capital offenses, which were the same as what most people would consider divorceable offenses today, such as adultery, rape, incest, homosexuality, bestiality, murder, child-sacrifice, witchcraft, and blasphemy. "Divorce by death made remarriage possible, and freed the innocent partner from bondage to a guilty and unclean person," writes Rousas John Rushdoony in The Institutes of Biblical Law. Today, people are not executed for the above practices, but such behaviors kill the marriage covenant, causing covenantal death. WHAT IS COVENANTAL DEATH? Adam and Eve were instructed by God not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or they would surely die. They did eat. Did they physically die? Not right away. However, they died covenantally with God. They voluntarily broke the bond with God and caused judgment to come upon themselves and the entire world. Romans 6:23 says "For the wages of is death?" If this were physical death, we all would be dead, because we have earned death, but thanks be to God, believers have been forgiven for their sin. What about all the sinners in the world? Are they dead physically? No, but they are dead covenantally. A few verses later Paul writes in Romans 7:2 "by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage." Sutton raises the question that within the context, isn't Paul talking about covenantal death either by physical death or by a deliberate breaking of the marriage covenant by ethical violation? The Westminster Confession of Faith, the historic seventeenth century creed of the Presbyterian Church, states that it is lawful for the innocent person in a adultery-caused divorce case to marry another, as if the offending party were physically dead. Sutton writes, "Death is covenantal in the Bible, not mere cessation of existence. It is the loss of a relationship with God through an ethical violation of the original bond. It is the severance of the fundamental God/man union, due to disobedience to the covenant-terms, and unlike the pagan view of death, it does not mean a "loss of being." Once created, people never lose their being, not even in hell, which is why hell is such a terror. No, death occurs when a person's relationship to God is broken through covenant-breaking." Therefore, covenantal death can occur while both parties are still physically alive, and divorce is application of the death penalty. Wherein had my marriage covenant been broken? I asked myself when I understood the concept of covenantal death. It became clear that my Christian husband had broken the marriage covenant in several ways, causing me to be rejected and alone with three children without financial support long before I filed for divorce.
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