The Best Commentary I’ve Found on Matthew 5:32 (Divorce & Remarriage)
Difficult Verses on Divorce & Remarriage
There are lots of difficult Bible verses about divorce and remarriage:
Matt 5:31–32
Matthew 19:3–10
Mark 10:11–12
Luke 16:18
1 Corinthians 7:10–11
They all say similar things, but I think Matthew 5:32 is the hardest yet also most concise. It’s where Jesus says,
“Whoever divorces his wife makes her commit adultery, unless she cheated on him sexually. Also, whoever marries a divorced person commits adultery.”
This is such a difficult text. Even if the wife is 100% innocent, Jesus says that when the husband divorces her, he makes her commit adultery. And then He adds that whoever marries her also commits adultery. (Yikes.)
I Really Wrestled with This
As a Jesus-lover who has been dating a divorced woman, I really struggled with these verses. I listened to sermons, read articles, read commentaries, talked to respected believers (including pastors), and read one of the main books on the topic: Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible by David Instone-Brewer.
Pretty much all those sources encouraged me to just get married, but that didn’t sit right with my spirit. I felt like all these sources were trying to weasel their way out of Jesus’s words even though His words seemed very black-and-white. I felt like if I was ever gonna marry my girlfriend, I’d have to shamefully sneak behind God’s back to do it.
The Best Commentary
But then I came across one commentary by Pastor Jon Courson that stood out from the rest. Jon said:
I once talked with a young man about 25 years of age who was part of our church family and on leave from an elite branch of the air force. He had fallen in love with a lady who loved the Lord but had been married at age 17. After her marriage failed, she was—at age 25—a single mom. This young pilot sat in my office weeping as he said, “I love this lady deeply. But if I marry her, I fear we’ll be living in adultery all of our lives.”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” I said, “But I do know this: I’m a bride and I have failed greatly. But my Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, was willing to absorb my pollution and iniquity to bring me into His love and into His family. Therefore, I do not believe it is against the heart of God for you to enter into a relationship to redeem that mother and child—even if it means absorbing pollution and bearing iniquity—because that’s exactly what Jesus did for me.”
—Jon Courson
Modeling Jesus
Wow. I was in the exact same position as the young pilot, so that commentary really gave me a new perspective. Here’s how it helped me:
Jon wasn’t trying to weasel his way around Jesus’s words like the other commentators. Instead, he acknowledges Jesus words and accepts them at face value: divorce and remarriage technically ARE adultery. Now that I acknowledge Jesus’s words, I don’t have to shamefully sneak behind his back about it anymore.
If I marry a divorcee, my marriage would model Jesus’s relationship to the church even more precisely than if it was my wife’s first marriage. (And the whole point of marriage is to model Jesus’s intimacy with the church.) Jesus took on my pollution so He could be intimate with me, and now that’s exactly what I’d be doing by marrying a divorced woman. Instead of the marriage being a barrier between me and Jesus, it now makes me feel even closer to Him.
This perspective calls me into an even higher standard: if I have to take on sin to redeem my wife, then I better do a really good job of treating her right.
That’s the most helpful commentary I’ve ever read on biblical divorce and remarriage, and I hope you find it helpful too.
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