Prior Book | Prior Chapter | Prior Verse | Next Verse | Next Chapter | Next Book | Viewing NASB and Amplified 2015 | |
NASB | Matthew 19:9 "And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery." |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Matthew 19:9 "I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery." |
Bible Question: Hello. My friends and Merry Christmas I am haveing a problem with this and I know what the Bible say about having one living wife for a Bishop..and the one that was reading this had a living wife and 3 children and he went off and left her. How could he of been reading this and he was ordaining a Preacher. which he read all the formast.of being a Preacher. Could you give me scriptures on this. other than being a deacon or bishop. thanks Mae64 |
Bible Answer: I feel dogmatically that no Christian should ever initiate divorce or remarriage proceedings. By "no Christian" I don’t mean necessarily that an unsaved person can initiate them. My advice always to a Christian is, "You must never initiate this." Why not? Because 1 Corinthians 7 says that if a wife departs from her husband she is, verse 11, to remain unmarried or to be reconciled. Those are the two options that are open to a believing person. In other words let’s say that your husband is a child abuser: where they were literally sexually abusing their own children. You cannot, as a wife, remain in the same household with a man like that. For one thing, according to the laws of our country, if you are a wife, and you are aware that your husband is abusing your children like that, and you do not report that to the authorities, they will take the children away from you. They will say, "You are not a proper mother no proper mother would allow this to go on." There is a sense in which the state is right about that: that is criminal offense that was punishable by death in the Old Testament and our society has laws against that and we cannot protect people like this. As the church we cannot protect this. We have to understand that our government has a legitimate interest in the welfare of its citizens. So, let's say that you are dealing with a woman in a situation like that. She cannot continue living with that man while he is doing that. What are her options? Her options, if I understand 1 Corinthians 7:11, are: 1.) Remain unmarried. This does not release you to remarry. 2.) Reconciation. One of those two options. For you as a Christian, as long as there is any hope that there could be reconciliation you must remain open to that. You should not initiate anything no matter how bad that person has been. Now there would be good men who would differ with me. When does the possibility of reconciliation end? It ends when that other partner remarries. The book of Deuteronomy, in one of the only passages in the Old Testament that even addresses the divorce issue, this is the very question that is being discussed. Chapter 24 takes up this question: If a man divorces his wife and she marries another man and the second man divorces her, can she go back to the first husband? The answer is, "No." |