Is divorce ever permitted?

Question 11007.

Few questions reach my study with more pain attached than the question of the grounds for divorce. Somebody is usually sitting opposite me who did not want any of this, who has read the verses a hundred times at two in the morning, and who is frightened that God is against them as well as everything else.

So let me be careful. I hold that marriage is a lifelong covenant and that God hates the breaking of it. I also hold that Scripture names circumstances in which divorce is permitted, and that a church which refuses to say so out of a desire to protect marriage ends up protecting the wrong person.

God’s design comes first

Before any discussion of the grounds for divorce, the design has to be in view. When the Pharisees came to Jesus with the divorce question, He did not answer from Deuteronomy. He answered from Genesis. God made them male and female, a man holds fast to his wife, the two become one flesh, and what God has joined together let not man separate (Matthew 19:4-6).

Malachi puts the same point in covenant language. The LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant (Malachi 2:14). Marriage is not a private arrangement between two consenting adults; God stood as witness to it.

This matters for the whole discussion. Every biblical ground for divorce is a concession in the face of covenant-breaking, not an escape route built into the design. Nobody in Scripture treats divorce as a neutral option, and neither should we.

It also means the question ‘may I divorce?’ is rarely the first question. The first question is whether everything possible has been done to keep the covenant, and in many situations the honest answer is that it has not.

What Moses permitted, and why

The Pharisees pressed Jesus with Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which regulates a man who divorces his wife over some ‘indecency’. Notice what that passage does. It does not command or commend divorce; it restricts what may happen afterwards, protecting a woman from being passed back and forth between husbands.

The rabbinic schools had turned this into a debate about the grounds for divorce, with the school of Shammai restricting it to sexual sin and the school of Hillel allowing a man to divorce his wife for almost anything, including spoiling a meal. That is the argument the Pharisees were trying to drag Jesus into when they asked whether it was lawful to divorce ‘for any cause’.

Jesus refused the frame. Moses allowed it because of your hardness of heart, He said, but from the beginning it was not so (Matthew 19:8). The permission was a concession to human sin, given to limit the damage, not a right to be exercised freely.

That should govern our tone. Any teaching on the grounds for divorce that sounds relaxed about the matter has lost touch with the way Jesus spoke about it, and any teaching that leaves no room at all has lost touch with the exception He immediately added.

The first ground: sexual immorality

Jesus said: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery (Matthew 19:9). The exception clause appears also in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:32).

The word is porneia, and it is broader than adultery in the narrow sense. It covers sexual sin generally, which is why I do not restrict this ground to a single act of unfaithfulness discovered by accident. Persistent pornography use that has replaced the marriage, a long-term affair, sexual abuse within the home: these are covenant-breaking of the kind the word describes.

Two qualifications matter, and they are regularly missed by people quoting the grounds for divorce at one another. The exception permits divorce; it does not require it. I have sat with people who forgave a straying spouse and rebuilt something better than they had before, and that is always the outcome to hope for. And the exception belongs to the innocent party. A man cannot commit adultery and then cite his own sin as his ground for divorce.

Mark and Luke record the saying without the exception clause, which some take as evidence that Matthew added it. I take the simpler view: Matthew, writing to Jewish readers immersed in the Hillel and Shammai debate, records the qualification that Mark’s Gentile readers did not need spelled out. The Gospels supplement one another rather than contradict.

The second ground: desertion by an unbeliever

Paul addresses a situation Jesus did not: a marriage in which one partner has become a believer and the other has not. His instruction is that the believer must not initiate a separation, and should stay for the sake of the household (1 Corinthians 7:12-14).

But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace (1 Corinthians 7:15). The verb is douloo, to be bound as a slave, and Paul’s point is that the abandoned believer is not obliged to spend a lifetime chained to a marriage the other party has walked out of.

Most interpreters, and I am among them, read that freedom as including freedom to remarry, since a bond that has been dissolved is dissolved for all purposes. I have handled the remarriage question at greater length in its own place, on remarriage after divorce.

It is worth noticing how few grounds for divorce the New Testament actually supplies, given how much marital misery the apostles must have encountered in cities like Corinth. The silence is not indifference; it is a refusal to give the covenant an easy exit.

This ground is narrower than it is often made. Paul is describing an unbeliever who refuses to live with a believing spouse, not a difficult marriage between two Christians, and it should not be stretched into a general permission for the partner who finds things hard.

Does the Old Testament settle it?

People often reach for Malachi 2:16 as the decisive verse, quoting it as ‘I hate divorce’. The Hebrew there is genuinely difficult, and modern translations differ. The ESV renders it as the man who does not love his wife but divorces her covering his garment with violence, which if anything sharpens the point rather than softening it. Either way the passage is a rebuke to treacherous husbands discarding the wives of their youth, and it tells us how God feels rather than listing the grounds for divorce.

Ezra 9 and 10 are sometimes pressed into service in the opposite direction, since the returned exiles put away foreign wives. That is a unique national situation under the Mosaic covenant, concerning the purity of a people through whom the Messiah would come, and Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 7 to remain with an unbelieving spouse points firmly the other way for the Church. Israel and the Church are not interchangeable, and reading Ezra as a template for Christian households produces exactly the sort of damage you would expect.

Hosea is worth mentioning too, because it cuts against a rigid reading. God tells the prophet to take back an unfaithful wife, which is the most vivid picture in Scripture of a covenant kept when it had every right to be broken. Where the grounds for divorce exist, the option of costly faithfulness has not disappeared, and Hosea stands as a permanent argument against treating permission as obligation.

What about abuse?

Scripture does not name abuse in a list of grounds for divorce, and I am not going to invent a text. What I will not do is conclude from that silence that a battered woman must stay in the house, because that conclusion cannot be drawn from the Bible we actually have.

Several things stand together here. Separation for safety is never in question; nothing in Scripture requires anyone to remain where they are being harmed, and Proverbs is full of counsel about keeping away from a violent man (Proverbs 22:24-25). The law of the land exists for the punishment of evildoers (Romans 13:3-4), and a church that discourages a victim from calling the police has stepped outside its competence and its remit.

As to divorce itself, I hold that sustained, unrepentant abuse is a form of desertion. The abuser has abandoned every covenant obligation while remaining physically present, and a professing believer who behaves that way over years is giving the church grounds to doubt the profession, which brings Paul’s teaching about the unbelieving partner into play. Others hold this more cautiously, and I understand why, but I would rather err towards protecting the vulnerable than towards the abstract preservation of a marriage that the abuser has already destroyed.

Churches have a great deal to answer for here. Women have been sent home to submit harder, told to pray more, and warned about the testimony. That is not pastoral care; it is collaboration with the abuser, and any minister who does it should be nowhere near this conversation.

Where the grounds for divorce run out

Most marriages that end do not end over the grounds for divorce Scripture names. They end over drift, contempt, exhaustion, money, and the slow discovery that neither party is who the other imagined. None of that is a biblical ground, however genuinely miserable it is.

I say that gently, because ‘we have fallen out of love’ describes real suffering. But feelings are a poor foundation for a covenant, and the promise was made precisely to cover the seasons when the feelings go quiet. Marriages that looked finished have been rebuilt more often than you would think, usually slowly and with help.

Get help early and get it from outside. A minister who knows you both, a competent Christian counsellor, an honest friend who will not simply agree with whoever is speaking. The problems that end marriages are rarely mysterious; they are usually long-known and long-avoided.

And if you are the one being left, and none of this was your choice, hear this. You cannot keep a covenant alone. God does not hold you responsible for a promise somebody else broke, and the guilt you are carrying on their behalf is not yours to carry. Whether or not the grounds for divorce exist in your case, the failure of the marriage is not laid at your door by the God who witnessed it.

Questions people actually ask

Does a civil divorce granted before conversion count against me? No. Whatever your history, if you are in Christ you are a new creation, and I do not put converts through an audit of a pre-Christian marriage in order to decide what they are now permitted.

What if my spouse committed adultery years ago and I stayed? Then you forgave, and the ground you did not use is not held in reserve to be produced during a later argument. The grounds for divorce are permissions to be acted on at the time, not credit stored up against future need.

What if we are both believers and simply cannot live together? Paul allows for separation while insisting the separated wife remain unmarried or be reconciled (1 Corinthians 7:10-11). That is a hard word and I will not soften it, though I would want to know a great deal about why reconciliation has become impossible before I applied it to anyone.

What if my spouse is sexually unfaithful but repentant? Then you are permitted to divorce and I would urge you not to. Repentance that is real, tested over time and accompanied by genuine change, is the ground on which a marriage can be rebuilt, and the grounds for divorce were never intended as a reward for the wounded party’s pain.

What if I am not sure my spouse is a believer at all? That judgement is above my pay grade and probably above yours. Involve your church, look at conduct rather than claims over a long period, and do not make a decision of this weight on a private assessment made while you are angry.

How a church should handle it

A congregation should teach the permanence of marriage without apology and receive the divorced without suspicion. Those two things are not in tension, though many churches manage to fail at both by teaching permanence loudly and welcoming coldly.

In practice that means the church works for reconciliation while a marriage is alive, applies loving discipline to a member who is abandoning a spouse without cause, and then stands alongside the wounded party for the years it takes. Divorce is not the unforgivable sin, and treating it as though it were has driven a great many people out of church life for good.

It also means being honest that some cases are genuinely difficult and that godly people reach different conclusions on them. I would rather a church admitted that than issued confident rulings on situations it has not examined.

Leaders should also settle what they believe about the grounds for divorce before a crisis arrives, rather than improvising while a distressed member sits in the room. A congregation that has never thought it through will default to whatever the loudest person in the meeting feels most strongly, and that is a poor way to handle other people’s marriages.

And someone should be watching the practicalities. Divorce is expensive, isolating and legally bewildering, and a church that offers prayer while ignoring housing, childcare and money has understood only half of what pastoral care means.

So, now what?

If your marriage is in difficulty but no biblical ground exists, do not start with the exit. Start with the truth, spoken to someone who can help, and do the unglamorous work. Most of what saves marriages is not dramatic.

Read Matthew 19 and 1 Corinthians 7 in full, slowly, before you accept anyone’s summary of the grounds for divorce, including mine. Both chapters say more than the verses that get quoted, and both are gentler in tone than the arguments built on them.

If a biblical ground does exist, you are permitted rather than obliged. Take time, take counsel, do not decide in the first fortnight after discovery, and do not let anyone, on either side, hurry you into a decision that is yours to make before God.

If you are in danger, leave now and involve the authorities. No theology of marriage requires you to be harmed, and anyone telling you otherwise is wrong.

And if your marriage ended years ago and you have carried shame ever since, why? The blood of Jesus covers sin, including this one, and God has never treated a repentant person as a permanent second-class citizen. Why should His church?

So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

Matthew 19:6, ESV

For Further Study

For the wider framework, Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and J. Dwight Pentecost’s work on the distinct administrations of God set the dispensational context in which I read the Sermon on the Mount and the Pastoral Epistles. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology surveys the interpretive options on the exception clause with unusual fairness, and Lewis Sperry Chafer is worth consulting on the relationship between law and grace that lies underneath the whole debate. John Walvoord on Matthew is helpful for the Jewish setting of the Hillel and Shammai dispute, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s work on Jewish backgrounds fills in the rabbinic argument the Pharisees were trying to draw Jesus into. On the pastoral side, read widely among practitioners who work with abuse before forming a settled view.