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Marriage When Divorce Has Previously Occurred
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Hello. This concerns divorce and remarriage. I was wondering if you could tell me what the Bible says a couple should do if they find themselves in the situation where one of them has been married before and divorced, and they're seeking God's will, what they should do now.
HC: In other words, the question you're raising is, Here is a couple who are married. And when they look back on their lives, they find that at an earlier time in their life one or both of them had been married before, and their former wife or husband is still living. Now what are they to do in their present situation? All right. I'll be very happy to speak to this.
CALLER: I'll take my answer on the air.
HC: Thank you. Good night.
This is a very important question, because we're living in a day when more and more people are living by the standards of the world, flagrantly violating the rules of the Bible. And so unbiblical divorce and unbiblical remarriage is becoming more and more common. Now when a couple comes to their spiritual senses, and they see that all of this was sin, what are they to do?
Now ordinarily the Bible teaches that we are to flee from sin. If we are living by telling lies, we are to lie no more. If we've been stealing, we are to steal no more. If we are living in immorality, engaging in evil desire, we're to stop that. This is what repentance is all about.
But now what am I to do? I'm married. When I search the Bible, the best that I can come up with is that we can't divorce this last partner. That would only complicate the matter, because then we have another divorce on our hands. We know that we should not have been married this last time. We've discovered that this was sinful. It was an adulterous marriage. But we also know that we can go to our Heavenly Father, and we can seek forgiveness. We can ask that these sins, too, might be covered by the blood of Christ. And we can know that as a born again believer they have been covered. So there will be no Judgment Day that we'll have to face because of this last sin, or this sin which is part of a lot of other sins that we've committed in our life.
Now the only thing left to do is to live out our life in this last marriage as it were a first marriage. Now this may sound like a rather simple solution, but we must remember that there is a natural outworking of sin. The man who is a drunkard, and who has hurt himself and his family very grievously, who may have contracted cirrhosis of the liver, who may have destroyed his family to a high degree, now becomes born again. He stops his drinking, but the results of his former life will stay with him.
He may die of his cirrhosis of the liver, he may never be able to go back to his family, and so on. His former sins have a natural outworking in his life. Now by the same token, if we have sins in our life of the past, even though those sins have been completely paid for, there still will be troubles and trials in our life resulting from these sins. These troubles and trials will not be punishment for those sins. They will be, first of all, the natural outworking of sin. And secondly, God will be chastising us in order to strengthen our faith, in order to help us to live more carefully in the future. But these things will happen.
And in the case of a second or a third marriage, the problems of alimony, the problems of former loved ones who are still living, and all the confusion that results from this, this will trouble again and again and again. This last marriage can never be the ideal marriage. It could have been, had it been a first marriage in the Lord.
But nevertheless it is a genuine marriage. And while it began as an adulterous marriage, it is to be looked upon now as a real marriage, a marriage wherein the sin of it has all been forgiven by the Lord Jesus Christ, and now we make the very best of it, as if it were a first marriage. As I study the Bible, this is the best that I can do by way of trying to find an answer to this particular kind of a problem.