Give honor to marriage, and remain faithful to one another in marriage. God will surely judge people who are immoral and those who commit adultery.
-Hebrews 13:4, NLT
What if adultery was treated as the enemy more than divorce in our churches?!
A truly astounding teaching–whether spoken or implied–is how Christians treat divorce as a worse “sin” than committing adultery.
In fact, my former evangelical denomination had a required ecclesiastical process for an instance of the former in their ministers yet not–explicitly–for the later.
For the new readers, I want to be clear that divorce is not necessarily a sin. God Himself divorced adulterous Israel in Jeremiah 3:8. God cannot sin; ergo, divorcing an adulterous spouse must not be sinful.
That said, adultery is always sin (see Exodus 20:14).
The two are too often equated by sloppy exegetical and pastoral teaching as morally equivalent. They are not!
Fidelity is the bedrock or foundation of any marriage. Blow up that bedrock–like deceitful adultery does–and the whole edifice comes down. Divorce acknowledges this moral and relational reality.
Like God divorcing Israel, the faithful spouse who divorces is not the one who destroyed the marriage with sin, but rather it was the cheater.
I think our churches would be healthier places if the fire from the pulpit and pastor’s office was refocused on sin of adultery rather than on divorce. It certainly would help in diminishing unbiblical divorce shame for faithful spouses and their children.
And how about making God’s moral emphasis the denomination’s moral emphasis in vetting pastors?
Instead of having a “divorce policy” for ministers as a denomination, how about having an “adultery policy”?
After all, God treats adultery as far more morally problematic than divorce in Scripture.
