Divorce & Remarriage - God's Design? (part 1)

This subject has been on my mind a lot lately. We are all surrounded by people who are in either of the situations or affected by it. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing at all. If any, it’s on the rise. What’s scary is that the church isn’t immune from society’s ills. We too, the bride of Christ, are taking the stand of our world rather than God’s it seems at times.

As I ponder upon the reasons for the state of our churches today, the very fact of Christians getting divorced is very evident. Even Easterfest this year has an extra ticket type, which is for single parent family. I’ve witnessed Christians divorced and remarried and wondered how that impacts their walk with Christ. But recently, my thoughts have been on the role of the church on this issue.

It’s not hard to see many churches today, while not encouraging divorce, are accepting it and not discouraging remarriages that follow. I seriously thought about this a few years back when this subject was brought up in the BSF (Bible Study Fellowship, an intensive bible study group) class that I was attending. They uphold the teaching from the Bible and believed divorce is wrong and remarriage isn’t acceptable. There were group members at the time presenting a counter viewpoint supporting remarriage. I searched through the scriptures and came to the conclusion that indeed divorce and remarriage are not in God’s design and should be avoided.

Marriage
In Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:4-6, Mark 10:9 and Romans 7:2, it clearly tells us that God created marriage, that marriage is a life long union/commitment and that what God puts together no man or woman is to separate or break that bond. In other words, when a man and woman come together in marriage, they promise to be together for a lifetime. It is a contract that they agree before God and friends and family. The contract doesn’t have conditional clauses saying if you feel like you can’t handle the job anymore, or you realized that you aren’t the right person for the job, or you’re fed up by it that you can terminate this contract anytime. In fact, there’s a conditional clause saying if one of the parties chose to dishonour the agreement by abandoning it, s/he will be denied of further privileges to be involved in a contract of the same nature.