Did John the Baptist Advocate Divorce?
00:00:00.000 | We get a lot of emails on relationships, everything from dating and engagements, marriage, and of course divorce and remarriage.
00:00:07.700 | This is a genre of email that dominates all the other questions we get, as you know.
00:00:11.780 | And we get a lot of good pushback emails as well and follow-up questions in search of greater
00:00:17.620 | clarity like this one from a listener named Matthew.
00:00:21.380 | Pastor John, I have a follow-up to you on episode number 920 on divorce.
00:00:26.580 | Didn't John the Baptist want Herod to ditch his wife?
00:00:30.180 | Because John had been saying to him, "It is not lawful for you to have her," present tense.
00:00:35.940 | See Matthew chapter 14 verse 4. He did not say, "It is not lawful for you to have taken her," past tense.
00:00:43.460 | And we all know how important tense is interpreting the Bible. She is called his wife.
00:00:48.560 | So how do you reconcile this seemingly clear call for a married couple to divorce?
00:00:54.580 | There are at least three things in this passage that are unknown to us.
00:01:02.220 | And that keep me from using the passage to justify divorce.
00:01:08.380 | I admit, I don't know if that was clear, I admit that sometimes divorce for a faithful believer is inevitable
00:01:17.180 | because Paul says so in 1 Corinthians 7 15 when an unbeliever insists on leaving.
00:01:24.580 | A believer who does everything he or she can to make the marriage work.
00:01:28.260 | You can't stop an unbeliever from doing that and therefore
00:01:32.900 | divorce as they carry it through may be inevitable.
00:01:37.660 | Remarriage in that situation is another issue. We're not talking about that. So let's go back to this text. The text says,
00:01:44.780 | "For Herod has seized John," John the Baptist, "and bound him and put him in prison
00:01:52.700 | for the sake of Herodias,
00:01:54.700 | his brother Philip's wife."
00:01:58.520 | Because John had been saying to him, "It is not lawful for you to have her."
00:02:06.380 | That's a good translation, by the way. "It is not lawful for you to have her."
00:02:09.780 | So the first thing that is unknown to me is when
00:02:14.460 | Herod
00:02:16.580 | married his brother's wife, or if he actually
00:02:22.060 | married her. When John says, "It is not lawful for you to have her," is he
00:02:29.180 | definitively saying that they're married, or
00:02:32.860 | only that they're sleeping together or living in some kind of common-law situation, some kind of situation that looks like
00:02:40.220 | marriage just to avoid legal issues.
00:02:43.140 | Most commentators
00:02:45.780 | document that they were married, but
00:02:48.940 | nobody seems to actually put a date on it in
00:02:52.380 | relationship to this event. If they weren't
00:02:56.580 | married, then John is saying, "Get out of the relationship. Stop sleeping together."
00:03:03.180 | Not, "Get out of a marriage." I don't know. I don't know.
00:03:08.460 | Number two, the second thing that's uncertain is—
00:03:12.660 | let's just suppose they were married, okay? So the second thing that's
00:03:18.700 | uncertain is whether John is
00:03:20.780 | actually saying that the marriage should end. He is saying, "It is unlawful
00:03:26.820 | for you to have her. You sinned in marrying her, if he married her."
00:03:33.260 | But it may also be unlawful to throw her out after she had been married to another man, and
00:03:42.260 | therefore make her destitute on Jewish principles, since she can't go back to that first husband.
00:03:47.860 | It is not crystal clear from this text that John is saying,
00:03:51.820 | "Ditch her." But now let us suppose that John was actually saying, "End the marriage." And
00:03:59.020 | let's suppose they were married. So two uncertainties. We'll just assume both of them are true.
00:04:05.780 | The third thing that's uncertain is whether he is saying this because
00:04:12.220 | the unlawfulness of the marriage is owing to the fact that she was married before,
00:04:19.220 | or at the same time, or
00:04:21.940 | that she was the wife of
00:04:25.260 | his brother, which according to Old Testament law would make the second marriage incestuous,
00:04:32.480 | like marrying your sister or your sister-in-law or your daughter.
00:04:37.180 | So Leviticus 18, 16, "You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife. It is your brother's nakedness." Or
00:04:44.620 | Leviticus 20, 21, "If a man takes his brother's wife, it is impurity. He has uncovered his brother's nakedness.
00:04:52.260 | They shall be childless."
00:04:54.260 | Frankly,
00:04:56.540 | and this kind of boils down to the practical reality, I have never,
00:05:01.340 | in all my pastoral life,
00:05:05.140 | been confronted with a situation in which a man had married his sister or sister-in-law.
00:05:12.540 | It's difficult to know what I would say about the ongoing
00:05:18.260 | reality and propriety of that
00:05:21.500 | marriage. My inclination, not having faced it and not having thought more than a little about it, is
00:05:29.300 | that I probably would
00:05:32.740 | say the marriage should end the way I would if the man was found to have married his own daughter.
00:05:38.220 | But those are such extraordinary
00:05:40.860 | cases that I'd be very
00:05:43.980 | hesitant to build a case in favor of divorce in general
00:05:50.040 | upon them. So in view of those three
00:05:53.060 | uncertainties at least, I don't think Matthew 14, 4
00:05:58.380 | can be used in any ordinary situation to justify divorce.
00:06:02.980 | Such a good breakdown of the entangled questions and issues involved in
00:06:08.460 | interpreting this text. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:06:10.820 | And if you have a question of your own about a perplexing Bible text that you can't make sense of, send those questions into us
00:06:17.220 | at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.
00:06:19.220 | And as I said, we get a lot of questions about relationships, and on Monday
00:06:24.980 | we're going to talk about engagements and what should be the special priorities as a couple moves forward towards marriage.
00:06:31.900 | That is on Monday. You've been listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime author and pastor John Piper.
00:06:38.540 | You can find our audio feeds and podcast archive all through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:06:44.620 | I'm your host Tony Ranke. Have a great weekend, and we'll see you on Monday.
00:06:50.540 | [BLANK_AUDIO]