Divorce is not God’s will

Malachi 2:16a “For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away…”

God hates divorce. Married partners hate it too. Children, who are the ones who suffer the most devastating effects of divorce, detest it. Most neighbours, family and associates hate to see a marriage disintegrate. But somehow, despite everyone’s hatred of divorce, parties to the marriage covenant find themselves filing divorce papers. It seems that divorce is an invincible enemy.

It is my belief that spouses mean it when they vow to each other in the presence of many witnesses, “Till death do us part”. But regrettably they find their vows changing to “Till divorce do us part”. Reasons for this unfortunate change are many. The Bible gives marital unfaithfulness as the only permissible ground for divorce. The marriage act gives a number of them including imprisonment of a spouse for a very long time, irrecoverable mental illness, and irreconcilable differences between the spouses. But in practice people are divorcing for any reason whether great or small.

Thousands of years have passed since the time of Moses but lifestyles seem to have remained the same. In Moses’ time men were allowed to divorce their wives freely. According to the notes from Bible Study Fellowship, no reason was too small or too selfish for a man to send his wife away.

A wife could never divorce her husband, but a man could leave a faithful wife destitute without fear of consequences. Are we any better today? According to Jesus in Matthew 19:8, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.” God’s desire for marriage was and still is for the couple to cleave to each other till death separates them.

The reason we divorce is the hardness of our hearts. This means that we allow sin to rule our hearts and minds and wills, we know what God’s will is but we choose to act contrary to it, instead of forgiving our spouses we choose to hold them in our hook, we choose to be selfish and self-serving, we choose not to commit, we choose not to give in and complement but to compete and complain.

Most importantly, hardness of hearts means we choose to exercise our rights and go our own way while ignoring the will of God and the feelings of others. In simple terms, hardness of hearts means being ruled by sin. Few areas in our lives reveal our sinfulness more than in marital divorce.

As Paul put it, we know what is good but we do what is evil. We need God’s grace. There is no need to live in guilt and condemnation if you divorced. It was because of sin and the remedy of sin is always repentance. And you have no right to rush to judge those who have divorced because many were left against their will by their partners.

For prayer and counselling call 0772889766 or email mairos78@yahoo.co.uk