Reasons for Divorce

 

Question:      Christ says that any man who divorces his wife and goes with another is committing adultery.

 Richard:       He was concerned with the individual who is trying to make a marriage and then is lusting after somebody else, and finally, because of his lust, says, “I’ve had enough of this,” or just runs away; disappears or goes someplace else and you never find him again so he can be with another person, is really doing a disservice to everyone concerned, and it’s just not fair and it’s not right. Whether you go to hell for it is something else again. I think that’s an ecclesiastical interpretation, which serves to force people who are kind of childish for a long time to do what the state wanted them to do. But then again, most people didn’t live much past twenty-eight or thirty years old, and most people could stand fourteen years of marriage because they got married at about fourteen. But when you start talking about thirty or forty years, maybe it’s not for the greatest good of all concerned. But I don’t know that for a certainty. Every culture, in every age, has its own unique ways of looking at things, and we seem to be in a different mode at the present time than what has been going on for quite a long time. But there have been much more lucid era than ours in the Christian world. About two centuries ago, things were a heck of a lot worse than they are today, as far as morality is concerned, or the honoring of marriage and things of that sort.

 

I’ve looked through those things and struggled with them. We’ve had lots of discussions. The workings are too vague. If you come right out and say, “You’re going to go to hell for the rest of eternity if you divorce somebody,” it would have been a lot easier. There it would have been in black and white. But He was talking about ideals and not necessarily absolutes. That’s the nice thing about Moses; he handed down clear-cut things. If you did this, then this is what happened to you. Jesus was too kind. Moses didn’t give us ten guidelines. 

 

 

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