A Christian Wife Divorcing Her Husband

Dave L said:

It's possible to sin as a Christian, but John rules out a sinful lifestyle as a possibility for the born again.

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When you have gone through the absolute soul destroying experience of a divorce or something similiar, you might grow an attitude of grace rather than judgment.

Michael Collum said:

Churches tend to select who they exclude and include based on the average morality quotient. What you are advocating implies a liberal theology, which in my view isn't necessarily a bad thing since the world could use more application of God's mercy, it would be most effective however with consistency. .

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I have a pretty strict Puritan-based theology concerning personal holiness and eternal security - a bit different to many Arminian Pentecostals. I tend much more to grace-based and performance-based Christianity.

Christ's and Paul's teaching on holy living were presenting God's standards and Jesus said that our righteousness has to exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were very strict in their personal holiness and compliance with the Law in a way that most of us would just dream about. They were 99.9% perfect, and yet Jesus said that our righteousness has to exceed that. At one stage when hearing His teaching, the disciples cried, "How can anyone be saved?"

So, if Christians are trying to continue to please God and remain in fellowship with Him by performance, all they are doing is equaling the righteousness of the Pharisees, and even if a believer got so good at it that he was 99.9% perfect in obedience, it was not be good enough, because Jesus said that our righteousness has to exceed it. I think that those who come on the forum and demand that we all be perfectly obedient to the commands of Christ actually miss what He said about the level of our righteousness.

So, we could follow all the commands and be perfectly obedient, and Jesus would say it would not be good enough, because the Pharisees could achieve that! So all the person would be is just a Pharisee!

Therefore, the only righteousness that would exceed that of the Pharisees would be the righteousness of Christ Himself, and for those who believe the gospel and receive Christ as Saviour and Lord, He has bestowed on them, enabling their righteousness to exceed that of the Pharisees, through the gift of God, and not through their own performance.

Michael Collum said:

I can see the logic in your argument, but it can never be orthodox. However, perhaps the issue is with orthodoxy.

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Actually, seeking God for Him to do the work of conversion in us through the Holy Spirit is orthodox Puritan theology. Joseph Alleine, a well-known Puritan divine taught it in his book, "Alarm to the Unconverted". He says that anyone can profess Christianity, but if he doesn't press into God for the transforming work of the Holy Spirit, then he remains an unconverted religious person.

myst33 said:

And the outcome is...?

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The question is, who was Jesus speaking to; what was His intention; what was He meaning; was this is central teaching or just an example; how did His hearers understand what He was telling them? The important question is: was Jesus giving direct teaching on how they should view marriage as His main point, or was it comparing their take on the Law with God's standards of keeping it? If He was talking to the Pharisees, who were pressing him for answers, would He have said the same to ordinary people? And, why did He say in Matthew, "for the sake of immorality" instead of adultery, when the two are totally different to each other?

I could answer these questions, but I'm interested in what answers you come up with. These questions don't deal with how we would interpret the passage for our own generation. That is another function. This is putting the passage into its First Century context to see how these First Century Pharisees would have understood what He was saying to them then.

There have been a lot of answers about how modern Christians understand the passage, but I wonder if, without doing an accurate exegesis of the passage as First Century Pharisees understood it, are some modern folk going one plus one equals three in their hermeneutical interpretation of the passage, especially when Jesus left out a lot of vital teaching about marriage?

myst33 said:

But how can you get to this conclusion when its contradicting words of Paul and Christ? What exegetical and cultural operations you needed to do to accept this view?

Show me your thinking in steps, to get from "its adultery" to "its OK".

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Is it really contradicting the words of Jesus and Paul? Do we know what Jesus and Paul really meant and how their listeners understood them, without doing an accurate exegesis of the passages concerned? Or are we taking their words out of context and directly mis-applying them to modern believers?

Francis Drake said:

Even "true believers" can go astray.

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Too true.

Francis Drake said:

But Oscarr, there are some here who consider themselves so perfect that it'll never happen to them.

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Correct. When I was a deacon in a Charismatic church having been a Christian for 10 years, I thought I was getting along pretty well. I thought my marriage was good and sound, having married the church secretary whose faith was genuine and strong.

When God told me later, when I was doing through the storm and stress years, that all I had going for me was that Jesus died for me on the cross, He said that was all I ever needed, even though I thought I was progressing pretty well on the pilgrimage path and had amassed some pretty good brownie points through my obedience and dedication to Him and the church. What He told me was that all that was nothing to Him and He had to bring me down to the point where I had to realise that I was just a poor sinner and nothing at all, and that Jesus Himself was all in all. It was quite a horrendous way of teaching me that lesson - by taking away everything I had and was through my marriage breakup.

My first wife suffered depression, and it changed her whole perspective, and she lost faith that there was any meaningful future for her in our marriage. I have learned a lot about depression, and it is a horrible thing to experience. My daughter experienced it to the point of planning suicide. Her whole personality changed when she was in the middle of it. I know it can be demonic, but often it is a mental illness that changes a person's whole thinking while in the throes of it. With a severe depression it can take years to come right out of it, and it takes careful therapy in many cases. This is what happened to my first wife.

If I'd have known that at the time, I might have been more gracious and prayerful about things instead of judgmental toward her. But I didn't have the knowledge and experience at the time, and my church taught that depression was spiritual and demonic. But I thought that problems in our marriage were the cause of the depression, when in fact, it was the depression that brought the problems.

Depression can hit any person, and it can be developmental through certain life stages, or situational, causing extreme stress. It can often hit people in their 30s when they realise that they are no longer as young as they used to be. Also we were having a lot of stress in our church because my wife was disagreeing with some of the questionable teaching going on there and she was getting judgmental telephone calls while I was at work. Also, I think there was post-natal depression there as well that was not recognised or treated.

So, my divorce was not as straightforward as some might think, and if it can happen to us, being two really committed believers who had a very effective ministry to the young people of our church when things were going well, then it can happen to any committed Christian married couple. This is why we should always watch and pray.

So when a marriage gets into difficulty, the last thing people need is judgmental church people, who have less grace than the sofa I am sitting on, to attack them with Scripture quotes to make them feel more stressed and condemned than they already are.