Against the industry of divorce [Mark 10]

I really don’t want to go here. I’m not sure if Christ wanted to go here. But he was asked, and he did. I don’t want to go there because I have had one divorce, and I do not want to ever have another one. And I am aware that the scholars have spent a very long time looking at how Paul taught, and how Christ taught.

My simple idea, which may be wrong: for the Papists would argue there should never be divorce, is that Jesus gave the principle, and Paul the application: that those abandoned by their pagan spouses are free, but that is the exception [1].

The principle is that which God joins no man should tear apart. There should not be a divorce industry. The current idea that any anger is violence and any request that a wife obey her husband is oppression, and grounds for divorce is evil. Our family courts should not exist: they should not be needed: and divorce should be a matter for the church and not the state.

For the spirit of Molech — that children are to be sacrificed for the freedom of adults — exists. We see this in the appalling rate of abortion. We see this in the damage the family courts do to our children, and the lies we tell ourselves. The truth is bleaker.

And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.

	And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

	And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

	And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.

(Mark 10:1-16 ESV)

Why is Christ so harsh? It may be in the juxtaposition of Christ telling the disciples to bring the children to him. I do not hear much teaching on divorce at this time: it is sorely needed from the pulpit, for the pews are filled with women who have been through the mill, (Most men have left the church after the family court has destroyed them, out of shame and shunning).

And they wonder why their children are now hindered in coming to faith. If I have read the sociology of this it is the practices of the father, and not those of the mother, that predict the religious fervor of the children. By shunting men, husbands, out of the church the congregation is signing its own death warrant.

But, one says, we have not done this! Men are allowed in!. Well, I almost fell following my divorce. It is only the grace of God that kept me faithful. I still cannot go to the church where my ex-wife goes: she feels completely justified in what she has done[2]. Instead I worship with the broken.

And I pray that my children will have a saving faith, and those who are the children of my friends. For divorce has ravaged my generation. We now stand as a warning against the ideology of equal marriage. It failed. We cannot be as we were: the only viable model for marriage is that of obedience — Christ, who gives us commands, knowing that men need to be commanded to love, and women commanded to obey.

Let not any ideology destroy your family, and Let not the social warfare apparatus of the state near your congregation. For there is no health in the wreckage left after that tyranny.

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1. The Westminster confession allows divorce for adultery and abandonment against the pleading and direction of the elders. And warns against increasing the criteria for divorce, by piling precedent upon creative precedent. Which, of course, is what happened.
2. Divorce claimed the Session Clerk (head lay elder) of that church. It has shrunk: it has merged. And the women who divorced remain there, saying it was the fault of their husbands.