REACT: Churches of Christ Remarriage Interpretations

The Churches of Christ inherited a culture of independent thinking from their Restorationist Movement roots.  That culture, along with their inherited opposition to denominationalism, creeds, and other instruments of constraint (and unity) causes them to read the Scriptures afresh.  That has resulted in a significantly more restrictive view on divorce and remarriage than evangelicalism's majority view.  However, not all Church of Christ pastors agree.  Pastor Mike Hisaw, on his Progressive Primitivist channel ( @TheProgressivePrimitivist ), shared his current view that a remarriage is a mere one-time act of adultery.  The Gospel Broadcast Network ( @GBNTVA ), a major Church of Christ channel, publicly "corrected the error" of Pastor Mike Hisaw.  I react to both views, sharing where I agree and disagree.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We have covered the typical evangelical view, both from Mike Winger and from Craig Keener. We have covered the view of the Eastern Orthodox on divorce and remarriage. We've also covered the view from the Catholics. Today we're going to cover a different view. We're going to cover the view from the churches of Christ. There's a collection of churches. They call themselves the churches of Christ, and the divorce remarriage views in the churches of Christ are different than other traditions or denominations that we've covered. So I actually used to have the same view as they have in the churches of Christ, which is really interesting because I didn't have any association with their like content. I never went to their church. I didn't talk to their people, but I stumbled on the same view they had. And I had that view for about 20 years. And there's a pastor in the churches of Christ named Mike Highsaw who had also the kind of the majority main view that the churches of Christ have on this. So Mike and I had the same view for a long time. And then I studied the issue more, and he studied the issue more, and I went more restrictive, and he went more permissive. So that's interesting. So we're going to uh look at his story about what started his journey to look into this some more, uh, that resulted in him eventually becoming more permissive in his interpretation of what the scriptures teach about divorce and remarriage. So first we're going to look at Mike's story, and then we're going to zoom out and we're going to look at who are the churches of Christ, kind of get a bigger picture story on who they are. Third, we're going to look at the majority view on divorce and remarriage in the churches of Christ. This is the view that I started with and Mike also started with. We're going to learn what that is all about and how they defend it. And then fourth, uh, I'm going to react to the debate that occurred between Mike Highsaw and like the main majority view in the churches of Christ. So what's interesting about this is I'm going to be reacting to myself in a certain way because I'm going to be, I'm going to be reacting to my old view as presented by the churches of Christ, which is very the way they present it and defend it is pretty close to the way I would have. And so I'm kind of going to be reacting to myself in that way. So that'll be kind of interesting. So please comment as the episode progresses. It's going to be a long video, as I'm sure you can already see. Uh, so I'd love to get your comments and like, subscribe, do all the things, get my book, divorce your remarriage. You can get that at Amazon. I'll have a link below. Let's just do a quick overview of three positions. So the positions are first, you have my view, Chris Iverson's view, the already married view. And that is one where there is no exceptions. Divorces do not end a marriage. Uh, therefore, while a prior valid spouse is alive, remarriages are invalid, remarriages are ongoing adultery, remarriages should be divorced. So that's my view. It's very simple. Two people get married, they're married for life. That's not just a hope or an aspiration. It's a fact. They are in fact married for life. So as long as they're both alive, they are still married. Even if they go get a civil divorce, that divorce does nothing regarding whether or not they're actually married. They are still, in fact, married in God's eyes, so that if they get remarried, that remarriage is just an ongoing state of adultery against the first spouse. What is the churches of Christ's majority view? This is my old view, and it's also Mike Hisaw's old view. And it's very close to my view that I have now, except they have one exception. So I have no exceptions, they have one exception. And their exception is that the remarried person's first marriage ended after their spouse committed adultery, assuming they did not commit adultery. So this is commonly referred to as the innocent party to adultery view. The idea is that two people are married. Let's say the wife cheats and then the husband divorces, well, the husband is the innocent one. Somebody committed adultery, but the husband is the innocent one because he did not commit adultery. So he's innocent, she's guilty, he's the victim, she's the perpetrator. The innocent victim can go ahead and remarry, but the guilty one cannot. So that's the one exception in the majority view of the churches of Christ. Then we have Mike Hysaw's current view, and uh, we'll call this the one-time act view. Jesus calls divorce and remarriage adultery seven times in the New Testament. So you have to do something with that, whatever theory you have. So Mike says, well, yes, sure, the remarriage in the in certain cases is adultery. When it is adultery, he would say it's just a one-time act of adultery. It's not an ongoing state. And since it's only a one-time act of adultery, the marriage is a real marriage, it's a valid marriage, that remarriage. And so that they, that remarriage should not be divorced. That's Mike Hysaw's view. So you have my view, no exceptions, very simple. You're married for life, that's it. Churches of Christ, majority view, much the same, except we got one exception for the innocent party to adultery. And then Mike, Mike's view is actually it's just a one-time act, shouldn't be uh divorced. All right, so now we're gonna look at Mike's story about what prompted him to study the issue more. Now, Mike's channel is called the Progressive Primitivist, which means if you want to go forward, uh that's that's like the progress, progressive progress side. Uh first you have to go back to the primary source, you have to go back to the Bible. Then you can go forward. Uh, Mike is a pastor in mesquite, Texas, uh, which reminds me of a joke from Jerry Seinfeld when he was in the grocery store and he would say, This is flavored like mesquite. And he would ask himself, what is mesquite? Which is a hilarious question. Anyway, so Mike's a pastor and he's in mesquite, Texas. And Mike, for a long time, had the uh majority uh churches of Christ view, just like the one exception for infidelity, there, and he would tell people to divorce their remarriages. So this is a guy who walked the walk and told people tough things. So I just want to give him credit where that's where it's due. That's a that's a hard thing to tell somebody. Okay, so I'm gonna let Mike explain his story, his personal story that persuaded him to re-examine his views on this subject.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

He talked about uh, you know, if you really love your wife and you're in an unscriptural remarriage, you'll love her enough to get out of the marriage so that she can go to heaven. And, you know, various statements like that are made. I mean, Don tells the story about the uh elderly church member who was in an unscriptural marriage, per, you know, Don's view, and the wife died, and the husband asked to speak to Don and he cries and he says, you know, I've caused my wife to go to hell because uh we didn't get out of this marriage. Let me tell you my story. So uh years back, this would have been about 2008, I had a Bible study with a man whose parents, uh his dad had died, but his mom was still a member of the congregation, his sister was a member of the congregation, and and I studied with this man and he decided he wanted to be baptized. And I said, Um, man, I'd love to baptize you, but tell me a little bit about your marriage. And as he as he spoke to me about his marriage, he this was his first marriage, but he said that his wife had been married before. His wife was not a Christian, but his wife had divorced her first husband because he had been terribly abusive. And then they had remarried after that after that uh divorce. And so when I was talking to this man, I said, Man, I want to baptize you so badly, and I will baptize you, but you've got to get out of your marriage because as horrible as abuse is, it's not sexual immorality, and so you're living in adultery. And that man said, I just can't leave my wife.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Okay, so I want to I want to mention two things here, real quick. First, notice the emphasis on uh baptism. That's because they believe baptism is required for salvation. And I don't have that view, but and I don't want to get off on the whole baptism thing. So I'll just kind of continue there. But I just want to mention that in the churches of Christ, there's like a lot of baptism emphasis, and that that's where it comes from. I commend Mike for saying this to this guy. That's a tough thing to tell somebody. It's especially difficult when you have a to make it so that there's an exception for adultery and not an exception for abuse to be able to divorce and remarry. And the reason they do that is because of their interpretation of the exception clause, and we'll get into all of that. And they believe that's for infidelity and that, and that abuse, you know, wouldn't just wouldn't qualify. You end up with this weird problem where abuse, you can't divorce and remarry, but adultery you can, and people are uncomfortable with it, but they're kind of stuck with that view if you have the churches of Christ view. And I remember that thinking years ago, that is very uncomfortable. Um, but I thought that's just what the text teaches. So there you are. Uh, and actually, Origin writes about this, the church, uh, early church writer, he writes about how something is off here that we say you can divorce for adultery, but not worse things, like if somebody kills an infant. But anyway, here my point is I just want to commend Mike for standing with his convictions and telling the guy that he had to divorce uh his wife. And I think Mike really believed it uh at the time.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

And listen, I had I had pushed the view of divorce and remarriage that Don, Aaron, Dave, and Carrie taught in this episode. I'd pushed it. I mean, I had led the church where I'd preached before to withdraw fellowship from people we thought were living in adultery. I'd refused to baptize people that I deemed to be living in adultery. I found out that one preacher had used our baptistry to baptize a couple that was living in adultery because I'd refused to baptize them because they were in adultery. And when I found out that he had done that, you know, he was from a neighboring congregation, uh, I harassed him because he had done that. Uh you know, anyway, I had I had been very militant with this position. But when this man said to me, I just can't leave my wife, I don't know what it was. It really bothered me. And it caused me to go back to study.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

The reason he started to doubt his position, I think, is that when the guy said that the remarried woman was his wife, some part of Mike agreed with that man's assertion that that man actually was married to this woman. Once you start to think maybe, maybe they are actually married, what's going to happen is there's gonna be a lot of strong emotions that are just naturally gonna come up with that. Uh, it feels disorderly to tell them to divorce. It feels controlling to go into someone else's life and break up their illegal marriage. It feels like an unreasonable invasion of their personal life to tell them who they can and can't marry. It feels cruel to tell somebody to break up with the person that they love. I totally get that. But suppose the woman never divorced, suppose she was still legally married to her first husband, and then she just moved in with this guy. Well, telling him you're gonna have to leave this adultery, that doesn't feel disorderly, controlling, unreasonable, or cruel. It's the right thing to do. Everybody in Christendom, yeah, you can't be having sex with some other guy besides your husband. So what it comes down to is this is the first marriage dissolved or not? And I think Mike allowed in the thought, oh, maybe the first marriage is dissolved. Some part of him believed that, even though the scripture says that's not the case.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

And um I I I mean, I I studied scripture, I studied what had been taught in the Brotherhood through the years.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Um Brotherhood is like their insider talk for like the churches of Christ. You know, I read what Foy Wallace had said on this, and I came to the conclusion, and it was really based on Carol Osborne's article, that um Carol Osbourne is a theologian and who's written a uh popular article about this, and they'll talk more about uh the content of that as we go forward.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

It is not clear that commits adultery is ongoing action. But I said it's very clear that water baptism is necessary for salvation. And I and I came to the conclusion why would I deny someone the clear teaching of scripture, that is water baptism, over something that's not clear, over something that just can't be proven. So I went to this man and I said to him, and this was months later, I don't know, maybe six months later, and I said to him, Listen, I've I've been restudying, I've been thinking, I've been praying, and I think that I think that you need to be baptized without leaving your wife. And let me explain to you, let me explain to you why. And he wouldn't listen. And he wouldn't explain why he wouldn't listen. He just wouldn't be baptized. Well, um we end up moving from that church. I mean, just a couple months later. But um, I got a call from his mother uh a few years later. We moved from there in 2009, and I got a call from his mother in 2014 to tell me that he had died, he had died of cancer, and um the man died unbaptized, and the reason he died unbaptized is because um I wouldn't baptize him at first, and I ended up pushing him away from the kingdom because of my view that commits adultery must mean ongoing action.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

That is a very strong emotional story that Mike's talking about here. He gives his main argument about the word commits adultery, and we're gonna learn more about that argument as we watch another video where GBN, which is uh Gospel Broadcasting Network, which is a Church of Christ organization, they're gonna respond to Mike's view and they'll show clips of him and then they'll respond, they'll chime in and we'll take a look at that. Um, now before we do all of that though, let me just say that despite the fact that his view began to change after this personal interaction that I think was very strongly moving for him, a lot of emotion was involved. Some people might say, well, you know, he just changed his mind because of his personal thing and he kind of caved and all that stuff. Now, I'd tell you, that doesn't really matter to me. Um, all that matters to me is the evidence in the arguments, not who says them or what triggered them to take another look at their view. I mean, because the fact of the matter is a good person can be wrong and a bad person can be right. It's the evidence and arguments that matter, not who says it. For example, if an artificial intelligence chat thing tells you something, that thing that it tells you is either true or false, regardless of the fact that the AI has no motives at all. So it's really not the motives that matter, it's really just the uh evidence and arguments. We want to kind of zoom out and understand who are the churches of Christ. And it starts with uh a couple of guys, Barton Stone and Thomas Campbell. And Barton Stone was around 1804, and he started his movement, which rejected creeds and traditions and theological systems, and he focuses on primitive Christianity based on the Bible. And then there's another guy, Thomas Campbell. Uh, he started his movement in around 1809, and he had similar instincts. And then these two movements formally merged in 1832 in Lexington, Kentucky. And the merger is called the Restoration Movement. So if you've ever heard of the Restoration Movement, this is what we're talking about. And so, in that sense, the restoration movement's around 200 years old. Now, I say in that sense, because I'm told that typically congregations today don't emphasize Stone and Campbell as much. Instead, they try to teach or imply that they they're a continuation from the time of Christ and that they are not a denomination. Um, so that's kind of a strange way of looking at it from my perspective because they look like what I would ordinarily think of as a denomination that started 200 years ago. That's just how I would normally look at it, but they look at it differently. So, on most things, they're actually kind of like Baptists who are on the more conservative side, uh, except they think that baptism is necessary for salvation. They reject the doctrine of original sin, they reject instruments in worship, uh, and they have weekly communion. So those are some things that are different. Uh, some of those uh differences are bigger than others, but anyway, claims vary about how much doctrinal diversity exists in the churches of Christ. So I don't want to opine on like how much diversity there is, but there is some diversity. They're independent uh of one another. So uh they're kind of free to go this way and that way. There are some other groups that are somewhat related, but they are different. So if you run, if you meet somebody and they say, Well, I go to a church of Christ, you got to drill down and figure out like what what what do you mean exactly? Uh disciples of Christ, you know, you got to figure out what what group or classification they belong to. I'm trying not to use the word denomination because that's the word I normally would use. I have to try to find use some other word because I don't want to get into all of that, that whole question. Okay, so numerically they hit their peak uh from everything I can tell in the 1980s, and they've kind of been on the decline since then. Now, some people estimate they have up to two million members globally, and the largest concentration of members remains in the Bible belt. So Texas and Tennessee and Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, stuff like that. All right, so third, we're gonna look at the majority view of the churches of Christ uh on divorce and remarriage. But so just to refresh, the majority view uh is that remarriage after divorce is a continual state of adultery, except for one case. And that one case is where the remarried person was the innocent party to adultery in their first marriage. So that and that's my old view. It's also Mike's old view. Uh so we're gonna react to their view, which is basically means I'm gonna be reacting to myself in the past. So let's go check that out.

SPEAKER_06 17:27

I had a discussion with a man a while back about an unscriptural, sinful marriage situation. And he said to me, it just doesn't seem right to ask someone in an unscriptural marriage to get out of it.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

So now when they say unscriptural marriage, what they mean is an invalid marriage. Uh, and here he is talking about an adulterous remarriage that is invalid. So they and they agree that if a remarriage is adultery, it must be divorce. And so that's really good.

SPEAKER_06 17:59

And I tried to explain to him what the Bible says, and he said, I understand what the Bible says. He said, it just doesn't feel right. That's not how Jesus answered. Jesus did not appeal to emotions or strange reasoning or feelings. Jesus said, Have you not read?

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Okay, so they seem to do a lot of this where they say things like, I just believe in the Bible, uh, that kind of talk. And most people I talk with about this issue, they also believe in the Bible. So this can feel like kind of begging the question, uh, with kind of a little side of condescending sometimes. So I don't think he's trying to be that. This is Don. I think he's I think he's a nice guy. But the guy he's speaking with here, the guy's moral intuition opposes Don's view of what the scriptures says. And so that's because the guy doesn't view his first the first marriage as still being intact. And so if a man was married and he moved in with his girlfriend and had a kid with her, should he stay with her because how much time has elapsed, or should he quit the adultery? Right. And I think it's better to use examples like that to help people understand the doctrine in their moral intuition. Uh, but having said that, I appreciate that he stood up for the truth on this issue in that in that conversation. All right, so we're just gonna skip ahead to where he talks more about uh their their doctrinal understanding.

SPEAKER_06 19:22

First one is this the Bible teaches that marriage is for life. The Pharisees came to Jesus talking about getting a divorce, and Jesus' response was, let not man put asunder. In other words, he said, Don't get a divorce. The Lord said that the original intent of marriage was for a man and a woman to remain married until death. Romans chapter 7 and verse 2 says, For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband. And so marriage is for life. The second thing that I want you to get from this passage is this God is the one who does the joining. Now that's very important. Listen to verse six. What therefore God has joined together. God does the joining.

SPEAKER_00 20:19

All right, I just want to mention that he said something kind of both ways. He said uh that marriage is for life, and then he also said that the intent of marriage is for it to be lifelong. And I think this intent statement is incomplete. Um, not only is it intended to be lifelong, it is in fact lifelong. And he did say that, but he kind of said it both ways. So consider this if God intends the marriage to be lifelong and God does the joining, well, then only God can unjoin them. And since God opposes unjoining prior to death, then to imagine that God unjoins a marriage would mean imagining God would oppose his own conduct. And that's impossible. So we're gonna skip forward here a little bit.

SPEAKER_06 21:07

And then number four, I want to suggest to you that not only is God the one who does the joining, but he is also the only one who can do the separating, only God can break or dissolve the marriage bond. Now, that only makes sense. If only he can join, only he can separate or release. And if only people who have met his qualifications can be joined, it follows that only people who have met his qualifications for separation can be separated or released from the marriage bond.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

So I agree that only God can dissolve it, since only God can join it. Uh, but since he opposes dissolving it before death, then he doesn't dissolve it before death. It's it marriage is indissoluble.

SPEAKER_06 21:56

Listen to verse number seven. They say unto Him, why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement and to put her away? He said unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. Jesus said, When God designed the home and the institution of marriage, he never intended for men to corrupt it as they have. Men have corrupted it. And Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered it. But it wasn't that way from the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

The Pharisees first came to Jesus and they asked him, Well, can we divorce for any cause? Jesus says, No. Then in verse 7, they go, Okay, what about Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1? That's where the allowance for divorce was written by Moses. So Moses says we can divorce. You say we can't divorce. Are you against Moses? That's all implied in the text. And what Moses allowed divorce for in Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1 was for a matter of uncleanness. And the Pharisees debated, what is this matter of uncleanness that Moses allowed divorce for? And there were two schools there was a Rabbi Halel and Rabbi Shemmai. And I want to mention three things about these two rabbis. So first, neither of them believed a woman could divorce a man. Only a man could divorce a woman under certain conditions. Second, Shemai believed a man could divorce his wife for her adultery or like adultery adjacent conduct. Third, Hillel believed a man could divorce for any cause. He had to have a cause, but any cause would do. That was the Hillel view. Now most pastors will reference that much about Hillel. But if you read further in the Talmud, it paraphrases a debate between Hillel and Shemai, where Shemai presses Hillel. Why does it say a matter of uncleanness? If it's any cause, what's with the word uncleanness? You don't need that word there because that would be included under any matter. So why does it say uncleanness? And so Halal's finally got to answer Shemmai. Why does it say that? And Halal finally concludes that uncleanness is for adultery. He agrees that's what Moses is talking about by uncleanness is adultery. And Halal concludes Moses required divorce if a woman committed adultery. Now, this is really helpful context because if you go back to Matthew chapter 19 and verse 7, it says, Why did Moses, the Pharisees are asking Jesus, why did Moses command a writing of divorcement? Command. Now this is really interesting. If you thought these Pharisees, that their only view was that Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife for any cause, then you get to verse 7 and then they use the word command. Well, if you put that together, you would think, oh, well, I guess the Pharisees, the Hillel Pharisees thought that if she burns the toast, well, that's a cause, and you must divorce her for burning the toast. Come on, then nobody thinks that. Nobody thinks you have to divorce somebody because they burn dinner. That's ridiculous. I don't know who's having toast for dinner. But anyway, but when you read the Talmud, now the word command in verse 7 makes more sense because these are Hillel Pharisees and they believe that Moses required divorce for adultery, which is a nonsensical interpretation of Deuteronomy 24.1. There is no way Moses was requiring divorce for adultery. But the Hillel Pharisees thought Moses did. And so that's why they asked Jesus, what about Moses' command for divorce? Which is another way of asking. Jesus, you just said no divorce. Are you saying we can't divorce, even though Moses says to divorce in the case of adultery? That's what they're asking. They're talking, asking specifically about divorcing in the case of adultery in Matthew chapter 19 and verse 7. I'm not the only person who has noticed this. There's a scholar named David Instone Brewer. He has a book, he has a more permissive view on divorce and remarriage because he uses Exodus 21, which is a whole nother question. But he notices this also. Actually, the Talmud says, do you have to divorce for adultery? Now, and the Talmud says it, let me just mention this. The Talmud says it not just in one place. It says it in a lot of places that the majority of you required divorce for adultery, uh, when a wife cheated on her husband. And then Jesus in verse eight, in response to their question about divorcing for adultery, Jesus rejects divorce for adultery. Specifically, he says that divorcing for adultery is a hard-hearted act. It is sinful to divorce your spouse because they cheated on you. That's a hard-hearted act. And he doesn't use the word for adultery. I agree, the word for adultery is not in verse 7 and not in verse 8, but that's what he's talking about. Now, if you don't want to trust the Talmud, some people are like, well, it's the Talmud, I don't want to read it. Okay, fine. Then look at Jeremiah chapter 3. The text references Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1. All the commentators agree Jeremiah 3 1 is referencing back to Deuteronomy 24.1. It's if you read the text, it's very obvious to reference back to Deuteronomy 24. And then there's a divorce that happens, it's talked about in Jeremiah chapter 3, verses 1 through 8. And the divorce is for adultery. So Jeremiah interprets Deuteronomy 24, 1 as allowing divorce for adultery. And Shemai interpreted it as adultery. Hillel thought it included adultery. So nobody thought Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1 was for not adultery. Nobody thought that. So then Jesus said is saying in verse 8 that Moses allowed it for your hardness of heart, which means that the Mosaic allowance is not the moral law on divorce and remarriage. A hard-hearted act is not the moral law. So whether you want to look at Jeremiah or you want to look at the Talmud, no matter what you look at, Jesus rejected divorce for adultery in Matthew 19 in verse 8. This is important because the churches of Christ think Jesus allows divorce for adultery in the next verse, in verse 9, but that's impossible. Jesus just rejected divorce for adultery specifically in verse 8. So he isn't allowing divorce for adultery in the next verse.

SPEAKER_06 28:25

All right, now listen very carefully to verse number nine. And I say unto you, Jesus said, and I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, commits adultery. And whoso marries her, which is put away, does commit adultery. So let me restate what Jesus is saying. He says, He who puts away his wife and marries somebody else commits adultery. That's the rule. He that puts away his wife for any reason and marries somebody else commits adultery. That's the rule. Now he gives one exception to the rule. The exception is if you put away your wife because she committed fornication and you marry another, then you are not committing adultery. So what is fornication? That's the exception. What is fornication? Fornication is from a Greek word that means illicit sexual intercourse. It's a word that includes a wide variety of things. It certainly includes adultery, it includes homosexual relations, bestiality. This exception, fornication, is the only one that Jesus made that would allow a man to divorce his wife and remarry without sex.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Okay, so the three things uh I want to mention here are true. The Greek word in the exception clause is pornea. It is typically translated as fornication, and the word can uh refer to all kinds of illicit sexual conduct. However, it can also refer to one type of illicit sexual conduct in a given context. So I believe fornication here refers to one specific kind of illicit sexual conduct. So Don is saying it's all kinds, and I'm saying it's one kind. And that one type is a marriage to somebody who is already married. It's a marriage to somebody who is already married, or you could also call it an adulterous remarriage. This passage that we're reading is in Matthew, and Matthew already told us what fornication means in the exception clause when he used it the first time in Matthew 5.32. The second half of Matthew 5.32 says if a man marries a divorced woman, he commits adultery. That's an adulterous remarriage, it's a marriage to uh a woman who is already married. And my view is that the Matthew 5.32 B is an explanation of fornication in the Exception Clause. So that's also how the word fornication was used in the Damascus document. This is a document that was believed by the Essenes, most likely. We found it in 1892 down in Cairo, Egypt, and in the 1940s or 1950s, up by the Dead Sea. It refers to a remarriage as uh fornication there. And it also uses the same argument Jesus uses from Genesis when discussing this issue. Jesus uses an argument from Genesis, the Damascus document uses the same argument. The Damascus document uses the word fornication. Jesus uses the word fornication. The Damascus document means sex within a remarriage by fornication. And so it would seem that Jesus also means the same thing when he uses the word fornication in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9. And then, of course, Jesus explains that in the second half of Matthew 5.32b. The Damascus document is not the only place where you find this. The Talmud also uses the word fornication in this way. And Jesus, of course, is having an argument with the Pharisees in Matthew 19 about this. These are the same Pharisees whose religious descendants write the Talmud, and in the Talmud use the word fornication to refer to an invalid, adulterous remarriage. The whole point is that's what the word fornication meant in the Jewish debate about divorce and remarriage. We have it in the first, in the largest religious group around uh Jewish group at Jesus' time, which is the Pharisees, when they wrote the Talmud, and we have it in the third largest group, which is the Damascus document, likely believed by the Essenes. Also, some early church writers uh also use the word fornication to refer to a remarriage. Uh, and so I have an episode where I explain all of that, but it's Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Basil the Great. They're using the word fornication to refer to a remarriage. And so I'll I have a whole video where I explain all of that. It lays it all out. Now, so now we just had Jesus rejecting divorce and for adultery in verse eight. And now we have Jesus using the word fornication in the exception clause. So obviously it cannot mean adultery. Additionally, if it did mean adultery, we have another problem. And the other problem is the man could divorce the woman for the for adultery, but the woman can't divorce the man for adultery. Look at Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9. These are the only two places where you have an exception clause. In both cases, the man is divorcing. And so if you believe fornication is adultery, then the person who committed adultery, the infidelity uh was committed by the woman, not the man. So then the man could divorce the woman for adultery. Now you might say, well, Chris, we're more enlightened today. Everybody has equal rights, everything. Okay, Jesus is not talking to us today. This is he is this is like 30 AD-ish. They thought the moral law was very gendered. For example, in Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1, the man can give the wife a certificate of divorce, but she can't give him a certificate of divorce. They thought the moral law was gendered. And in fact, if you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul is flipping the genders back and forth to show the rules are the same for men and women. We don't, we wouldn't have to do that today, right? But they had to do it back then because their assumption is that the moral law is gendered. So they have to be very clear, the moral law is not gendered. You look at Mark chapter 10 and verses 11 and 12, Jesus flips the genders to show that what he's teaching about divorce and remarriage is not gendered. You look at Luke 16, 18, it's the same thing. You look at Matthew 5.32A, the first moral formulation, and you look at Matthew 19, 9, again, the genders are flipped. Why? Because Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they know while writing this, we better make sure we flip the genders. We don't want anybody to think Jesus taught a gendered rule here. They need to understand that the rules for divorce and remarriage were very clearly gender neutral. Seeing that pattern over and over and over, and then you see an exception clause that gives the man the right to remarry for infidelity, but not the woman the right to remarry for infidelity. That should tell you something is kind of incoherent about this interpretation of the exception clause. And in fact, there are a handful of early church people, not very many, who interpreted uh Matthew 532 and Matthew 19.9 to allow the man to be able to remarry, but not the woman to be able to remarry in the case of unfaithfulness. And why? Because they just read the text. The text only gives the man permission to be able to remarry in the exceptional scenario if you think fornication is for infidelity. Now, under my view, where I think it's an invalid marriage, it doesn't really matter, you know, who's doing the divorcing or whatever, because the point is that marriage is invalid. So it's the nature of the marriage that's being legally dissolved. It's the nature of that that allows for the remarriage. So my view is not gendered, but the Church of Christ's view, and also my old view and Mike Hysaw's old view, results in a gendered provision for Matthew 5, 32, Matthew 19, 9. Now, the churches of Christ would say if a woman finds her husband committing adultery, she can divorce him and she can remarry. So they don't, they're in their application of the exception clause, they don't have a gendered kind of rule there. But that's not textually supported at all. The text would say only the man could do it, the woman could not do it. And I mentioned this earlier, but it's also an irrational rule to be able to say you can divorce and remarry for adultery, but not for, you know, if if your spouse killed your infant or, you know, things that are worse than adultery. And this is something that Origen brought up. It's an irrational rule, he said, but I guess that's the rule. He thought you could divorce for adultery, but you couldn't remarry. He had a kind of a different view with what the churches of Christ have or that what I have. But the point is he understood something is wrong with interpreting fornication and the exception clause as infidelity because the result is kind of irrational. An additional problem with the innocent party to adultery view is that Jesus' argument in Matthew 19 verses 4 through 8 has been a no exception argument. If you only had Matthew 19 verses 4 through 8, let's say you didn't have verse 9, and say you didn't have Matthew 5.32, you would think there are no exceptions. You would because Jesus makes an argument for no exceptions, you would think, oh, well, obviously the conclusion must be no exception. If you have an argument for no exception, the conclusion must be no exception. But then you're going to say the conclusion has an exception. Something is off there because the argument and the conclusion, they don't match. So that what that should tell you is you're misreading the conclusion because we should imagine the argument and the conclusion probably matched. And so this makes them not matched. So the interpretation must have a flaw. All right, let me give you another problem with interpreting fornication to be infidelity. If a wife cheats and she remarries, it's adultery. I agree with that. Church of Christ agrees with that. Now, when she when it's adultery, who is she cheating on? She's cheating on her first husband, right? Well, that means she's still married to her first husband. So if she remarries, uh, she commits adultery, like we just said. But also if he remarries, he commits adultery because he's still married to her. So the idea that one spouse is permitted to remarry because they're innocent, but the other spouse is not permitted to remarry because they're guilty is incoherent because it imagines a marriage bond that exists and doesn't exist at the same time. There's no coherent way to imagine there's a bond and not a bond. It's a Schrdinger's marriage bond. It doesn't make any sense. It's there and not there at the same time. Now, Mike's going to talk about that a little bit later on, and we'll get more into that because the churches of Christ are aware of that objection. They have a response to it. I just want to, I don't want to make it sound like they don't have an answer to that. They do have an answer to it. I think their answer is insufficient because Mark chapter 10 and verse 11 says uh that uh if a man divorces and remarries, he commits adultery against her. So it's not adultery against like some moral obligation out there in space, it's adultery against a person to whom one is still married. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Interpreting the exception clause to be for adultery creates an avalanche of problems. But interpreting the exception clause to be an adulterous remarriage or a marriage to somebody who is already married creates no and none of these interpretive problems. So it's just logically coherent and fits within the context of Matthew 532. But we're going to have Don here continue to uh defend the Church of Christ view.

SPEAKER_06 39:09

What if the reason is incompatibility? What if he said, ah, we just can't get along. I can't live with this woman. She's just difficult. I'm divorcing her. Could he remarry? No, he doesn't fit the exception of Matthew 19. Now, what if he remarries anyway? He divorces his wife, not for fornication, but incompatibility, and he marries someone anyway. The Bible says he commits adultery. He's living in adultery. It's an adulterous marriage. Now, it should be mentioned that it's not required that an innocent party put their spouse away for fornication. It's an allowance that God gives. That is, if a man caught his woman committing uh fornication, she's cheating on him, he's not obligated to put her away. He could opt to stay together, and that would be great, but God allows him to divorce.

SPEAKER_00 40:10

So I agree with all of that, except for a couple of things. I don't think the exception clause refers to infidelity in a marriage. Rather, it's a case where, for example, a man married a divorced woman and the for the sex in their marriage was fornication. The situation in the exception clause requires him to divorce, uh, because I think he I think the exception clause is referring to somebody in an invalid marriage. So I would say it does require them to divorce. I don't think it's optional. Don thinks it's optional because he thinks it's infidelity. So the exception clause itself doesn't say whether the divorce is required or not. So whether divorce is required or not in the exceptional situation depends on your interpretation of the word pornea in the exception clause.

SPEAKER_06 40:51

Sometimes people say, well, baptism washes away unscriptural marriages. And the idea of this teaching, this doctrine is that if a person enters into an unscriptural marriage, an adulterous marriage before he became a Christian, they will say that when he was baptized, that adulterous marriage was okay. It became a non-adulterous marriage. Somebody else might say, well, that kind of makes sense because baptism washes away all sins. But you see, there's one major problem with this, and it's called repentance. Before a person can be forgiven of any sin, he must first repent of that sin. That is true of stealing, it's true of idolatry, it's true of lying, homosexuality, and it's true of living in an adulterous marriage. You see, in God's eyes, a person in an adulterous marriage is living in constant sin. And in order for that sin to be fixed and for him to repent, he has to stop committing it. He cannot continue living in it. And so he's repent, he repents, he stops, and he's baptized. He doesn't continue in that marriage, he ceases it. In fact, I want you to consider a homosexual couple. Imagine two men who are married. Would baptism fix that union and make that sinful marriage a right marriage? No. He said, that's not a valid comparison because homosexual marriage is sinful, heterosexual marriage is not. But friends, an unscriptural heterosexual marriage is fornication.

SPEAKER_00 42:44

So I agree with all of this, except for his implication about the baptism being necessary for salvation. But yes, repentance is required for salvation, and that means, you know, adultery has got to stop. Um, so I want to highlight here that he said unscriptural heterosexual marriage is fornication. Uh, by unscriptural, he means invalid, uh adulterous remarriage. So I just want to point out we seem to agree that the word fornication can refer to an invalid, adulterous marriage. And that's what I think the exception clause is talking about.

SPEAKER_06 43:19

And so baptism doesn't fix it. There has to be repentance and there has to be uh ceasing to engage in that activity. That means you've got to get out of the unscriptural marriage. Number two, a second thing that sometimes people will teach and say that's wrong is they will say non-Christians are not amenable to the law of Christ. And basically, their doctrine goes like this in Matthew chapter 19, they will say the laws of marriage are part of God's covenant law for Christians. That is, when you become a Christian, you're part of the covenant, and now these. Laws apply to you. But before a person becomes a Christian, then God's covenant laws don't apply to them. And so they'll say marriage is a covenant law. And so if a man enters into an unscriptural marriage before he becomes a Christian, they'll say he's not sinning, he's not committing adultery, he's not in violation of Matthew 19. And as a matter of fact, if he's been married and divorced unscripturally 10 times before he becomes a Christian, it doesn't matter. They'll say he can keep that wife. Whichever wife he has when he becomes a Christian, when he's baptized, now God's law on marriage applies to him, and he has to start obeying Matthew 19. Friends, this is a false position. God's law applies to everybody. Acts 17, 30 says, in the times of this ignorance, God winked at, but now commands all men everywhere to repent. Now, there's a lot in this passage, but one of the main things is in the past there were some things God overlooked, especially with regard to the Gentiles, but now all men are amenable to the law of Christ. It's sometimes argued that there are certain laws that apply to Christians, but do not apply to non-Christians. And for an example, I've had suggested to me, someone said the command to partake of the Lord's Supper, they say that's only a covenant command. That is, only those who are Christians are commanded to partake of the Lord's Supper. And they would say the same thing is true about marriage. You know, that's not a valid argument. You know, the fact of the matter is, God has commanded all men everywhere in the world to repent and obey the gospel and then to worship him. That would include partaking of the Lord's Supper. Just because a man hasn't properly prepared himself yet doesn't mean that he's not commanded to worship God. Of course he is. He's got some things he has to do first, but of course those things apply to him. That would be like saying a man who doesn't believe yet isn't commanded to be baptized. Of course he is. Now he's got a prerequisite. He has to believe first, but he's still commanded to be baptized. Friends, God's law on marriage applies to all of humanity. Listen what the 1 Corinthians 6 and verse 9 says. He says, Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God, be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, that is, homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. Now listen to verse 11. He says, and such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. It's interesting that they were viewed as adulterers before they became Christians. Now, what's the implication of that? The implication is that God's law on marriage applied to them even before they were baptized. In other words, this argument, this doctrine is a false one.

SPEAKER_00 47:24

A third. Did you catch how he said baptize? I notice that they like to emphasize the last syllable on baptize uh there on the churches of Christ. So I agree with his conclusions here generally. Um his toler God's tolerance for sin is less in the New Testament than it was in the Old Testament. There was more tolerance for sin in the Old Testament. And historically, that's just not a controversial opinion at all. It should not be surprising uh theologically. Uh, consider that Abraham married his half-sister and Jacob married two sisters. That's and is overlooked by God during the patriarchs, uh, but after Leviticus 18, where God gives the laws about incest, uh, that's not kosher anymore. So it was wrong for Abraham and Jacob to do it, but it wasn't intolerable yet until more of the law was revealed. So it's not that the moral law changes. It's not even that the perfect moral law wasn't somewhat revealed in the Old Testament by the law I'm talking about in the first five books of the Bible. It's there, but it's like in the background. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that he was fulfilling the law, which means to add uh until it is full. Here's an analogy that might be helpful. We're coming on the 250th year of America. And in the American Declaration of Independence, we have that beautiful phrase that all men are created equal. But in but then in the Constitution, uh, we tolerated unequal rights in America. And eventually our legal code matched our ideal, or at least closer to our ideal. And we, you know, we finally ended slavery, we passed the Civil Rights Act. And so that's an analogy I think it's helpful for us because the Old Testament has glimpses of the real moral law. Uh, but what was codified by Moses included laws that made concessions to the hard-heartedness of man, as Jesus says in Matthew chapter 19 and verse 8. And so Jesus calls us back to the ideal as we find in the beginning, which is Jesus' like touchstone idea that he talks about there in Matthew 19. So he doesn't call us to the regulation, he calls us to the beginning. The regulation was a concession to sin, but the beginning is what he calls us back to, back to the ideal. And the same with the Declaration of Independence, you know, by analogy, calls us to that ideal that we're all created equal and our laws should kind of catch up to that. Um, so one more thing. The reason Don here is able to identify and respond to these objections uh so cogently, frankly, uh is because there's this history and can even a culture in the churches of Christ uh of debate in their in their group, which I'm not gonna call a denomination. And you know, and there's virtues and vices, you know, I suppose, to a debate culture. One of the virtues, though, is it forces competing views to be tested so that the best ones can rise to the top and people can you know cogently understand and respond to them. And I think I think Don just showed that here.

SPEAKER_06 50:20

Third thing that is taught that is false is this. People will say if fornication occurs, then both parties in the marriage are free to remarry. In other words, if a man divorces his wife because she cheated on him, then both he and she would be free to remarry. Now, I know there are a lot of people who argue that this is the case, and I'm very familiar with their arguments, but it's simply not what the Bible teaches. It's sometimes argued that if the innocent party is free from the marriage bond, then of necessity the guilty party would have to be free. Also, if one is released, the other is released. But Matthew 19 and verse 9 is written in such a way as to release the innocent while binding the guilty.

SPEAKER_00 51:08

Okay, so the argument is there either is a marriage bond or there isn't a marriage bond. There isn't half a bond. It's there or it's not. It's a light switch, it's not a dimmer switch, it's a light switch. It's either on or it's off. So if if there is a bond, then it's adultery for either of them to remarry. If there isn't a bond, then it's not adultery for either of them to remarry. But what you can't have is one spouse bound and the other spouse unbound. So they can't be married and unmarried at the same time. That's the Schrdinger's marriage dilemma. So now before I change my mind on this subject, I recognize this problem and I deduced the same answer he's about to give, and I'll let him explain it, and then I'll share why I no longer think that that actually solves the problem.

SPEAKER_06 51:56

It says, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication and shall marry another, commits adultery. If you are not a person who has put away your spouse for committing fornication, then you cannot remarry.

SPEAKER_00 52:12

He says that Matthew 19, 9 is written in such a way as to free the innocent and not the guilty. That's not quite right. The text doesn't say that. What Don's doing is making a deduction. So he starts from the premise that fornication and the exception clause is infidelity in a valid marriage. Then he deduces there's an innocent spouse and a guilty spouse, and the innocent can remarry. But the problem with that is the innocent guilty distinction is a deduction, not something explicitly stated in the text. Now, if you don't assume that meaning of fornication, then the text itself doesn't say who committed fornication. The divorcer, the one being divorced, both of them. From just the text, we don't know that there is an innocent party in the exceptional situation. We know that someone did something. That's all we know from the literal text there. The word fornication is used to highlight the fact that their marriage is invalid. Now, their marriage is also adultery because one or both of them is married to a prior spouse still, because divorce doesn't divorce, right? So one or both of them was married, and then they got a legal divorce, which does nothing in God's eyes. They're still married. The divorce, it's as if the divorce didn't happen. And then they, you know, got in this remarriage. And that and that remarriage is adultery. That's very clear. And the word adultery is used in seven times by Jesus in the New Testament to talk about these remarriages. And the reason why the word adultery is used is to highlight the fact that the divorce didn't divorce, right? Because if the divorce divorced, then the remarriage couldn't be adultery. But since the remarriage is adultery, they must still be married to the first spouse. The word adultery is used to tell you about the divorce. That's the purpose of that word. That's the aspect it's focused on. But when you get to the exception clause, it uses the word fornication. Why is that? Well, because that tells you that they're that this remarriage, this is an invalid marriage that they entered into, it tells you that that marriage is invalid. Why is it invalid? How do we know that? Because married people, validly married people, can't commit fornication with each other. That's not what that's not what the sexual act would be called. It's just a marital act. So because it's called fornication, that means they're not married. So that's why the word fornication there is used. But here's my point: there is no innocent person being talked about in the exception clause. There's no, there's nothing in the exception clause that tells you, oh, there must be an innocent person.

SPEAKER_06 54:32

It is as simple as that. And if you're the guilty party, then you are not one who has put away your spouse for fornication. Therefore, you cannot remarry. God's law has restricted you in this way. Keep reading. And whoso marries her that has been put away for adultery does commit adultery. So additionally, we learn that if you're the one who has been put away.

SPEAKER_00 54:58

All right, let me just say this. So the second moral formulation in Matthew 19.9 is not in all manuscripts of Matthew 19.9. Um, but this exact same moral formulation is in Matthew 5.32. So Don is reading Matthew 19.9 as explaining one story in two parts here. And the first part is this the man divorces and remarries. That's the that's the first part. And the second one is the divorced woman remarries. Okay, but that's not the only way to read this. Uh, the other way to read this is that the second moral formulation is an explanation of the exception clause. And that's my view. So the idea is Jesus is saying if you divorce and you remarry, it's adultery, except for fornication. And by fornication, I mean if a man married a divorced woman. So this interpretation works as a possibility, whether you think the moral formulation is in Matthew 5.32 or if it was also in Matthew 19. Since Matthew assumes his readers are reading both of those texts, and he and he assumes his readers understood him the first time in Matthew 5.32. So the text doesn't explicitly say whether or not the second moral formulation is an explanation of the exception clause, uh, but there are good reasons to view that as a viable option. So, first, this information that a man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery is already told to us in Matthew 5.32. So it says if a man divorces a woman, except for fornication, he makes her commit adultery. He makes her commit adultery. Well, if her remarries, it's imagining she's likely to go ahead and be remarried, and that would be adultery. Well, if she remarries and it's adultery, then she commits adultery when she remarries. And the man who she remarries also commits adultery, right? It takes two to tango. So you already know a man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Why would you need to say it a second time in Matthew 5.32 B? So it wouldn't be adding more information to say that her remarriage is adultery. We already knew her remarriage was adultery. You just told us that. Why would it be repeating it? Jesus isn't repeating it. Jesus is telling you what he means by the exception clause. Second, consider this. If you look at the other two moral formulations, Matthew 5.32A and Matthew 19, 9a, it says remarriage is adultery regardless of which gender remarries. If you look at Mark 10 and Luke 16, 18, they also flip the gender. So the reason for having two moral formulations in these passages isn't for emphasis. It's to make clear that the moral law on remarriage isn't gendered. It doesn't favor the man. So you'll and you'll notice the same thing in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, the genders are flipped over and over and over again there by Paul. And that's important because at Jesus' time, they didn't necessarily think that the moral law was gender neutral. They actually thought it was highly gendered. This is really interesting because there is no purpose for the second half of Matthew 5.32 unless it's there to explain the exception clause. And I think that is, in fact, what's happening in Matthew 5.32. Don't view is that fornication, the exception clause is for infidelity in a marriage. And my view is that the exception clause is referring to fornication in a marriage where one of them was already married. So, and when you put those two options in, the infidelity option, that's Don's view, and the uh invalid marriage option, that's that's my view, the infidelity option, as we already mentioned, has is just chock full. It's an avalanche of internal logic problems. It doesn't make any sense. You got Schrödinger's marriage, only the man can divorce and remarry for infidelity. You're saying I can divorce and I can remarry for infidelity, but not if they kill my baby. You know, so there's just a ton of logical inconsistencies there. But if you take my view and you put it in the exception clause, you don't have any of those problems. Everything works seamlessly. Also, fornication in the debate about divorce or marriage in the Jewish context with the Damascus document and the Talmud, fornication meant something. It had a meaning. They understood what this word meant, and what it meant was the sex within an invalid marriage. And that's Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees who wrote whose religious descendants wrote that later on in the Talmud. So I have a video again that explains all of that. But let's continue in here, Don's perspective.

SPEAKER_06 59:05

For adultery, the guilty party, you cannot remarry, or else you will be committing adultery. Matthew 19, 9 is written so as to protect the innocent, not to release the guilty. Imagine the implications. If this doctrine were true, it would mean that if you're tired of your marriage, you could cheat on your wife, and then she could divorce you, and you'd have God's approval to remarry. A fourth objection that sometimes people make, that it's not a right one, is this if children have been conceived in the adulterous marriage, they will say, then it's God's desire for you to keep that home intact and to not separate. And so they'll say, if a couple marries and they have children, and then some years pass and they learn God's law, they discover that they are in an unscriptural marriage, they might say, Surely God doesn't expect us to break up this home. Doesn't God hate divorce? Or as someone asked me, do two wrongs make a right? Well, two wrongs don't make a right, but that's not what we're talking about here. If a person is living in an unscriptural marriage, that's wrong. But separating from an unscriptural marriage, that's right. That's not a wrong thing to do. It's never wrong to stop living in sin. As a matter of fact, it is required. Now, what if children are involved? That makes it harder. It's certainly more difficult from an emotional standpoint, from a legal standpoint, from a financial standpoint, but it doesn't change the fact that the marriage is not right in the eyes of God. Let me give you an Old Testament example that might shed some light on this. In the Old Testament, God did not permit his people at that time, the Jews, to marry people of heathen nations. In Deuteronomy chapter 7 and verse 3, this is what the Lord said: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them. Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For here's the reason for they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods, so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you. Now, some of God's people ignored that law, and they did it anyway. The Jews married people from heathen nations.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:33

This actually reminds me of a story where there was a young guy at a church I was going to, and he was all excited about how he's gonna go off to college. And uh I just said um beware of the Canaanites, uh, as my way of saying, like, well, you know, you're going off to college, you're gonna be on your own, a lot of freedom, a lot of girls. Watch out. Anyway, just reminded me of that, of that uh interaction. And he he he laughed. He knew what I meant.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:57

They had wives who were heathens and they had children with them. But did that cause God to change his law? Listen when you get to the book of Ezra, chapter 10, and verse 10. And Ezra the priest stood up and he said to them, You have transgressed, and you have taken strange wives to increase the trespass of Israel. Now, therefore, make confession unto the Lord God of your fathers and do his pleasure. Now, listen, and separate yourselves from the people of the land and from the King James says, foreign wives. That is, uh, the King James says strange wives, it's foreign wives. In other words, the heathen nations, you married these women, you should not have done. He says, separate from them. These people could not remain in a relationship that was contrary to the will of God with his approval.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:51

It didn't today. If a Christian married a non-Christian, they're not supposed to, but if they do, we would say that's a valid marriage, and they should not divorce that marriage. Paul's pretty clear about that in the New Testament. But here we have Ezra saying that they should divorce these marriages to these idolaters. So, how do we square Paul saying stay in those marriages, but Ezra saying to divorce those marriages? And the difference between the two is that Ezra had the executory authority of the government delegated to him. And under the government, they're using the Mosaic law as their laws, and under that law, those marriages were not given civil authority approval. So they were invalid because they didn't have the civil authority approval. But Paul, when he's writing, he's not writing as a government or whatever. He's an apostle. He's not running a government that can uh that makes those marriages ill illegal. They're under the Roman government, and under the Roman government, people can marry, you know, it doesn't matter what your religion is, they didn't care about that. They just wanted to know are you going to pay your taxes?

SPEAKER_06 1:03:57

It did not matter whether children were involved or not, and neither can people today. But here we're talking about a relationship that God never approved of in the first place. And I would add this even if a couple does the right thing and separates, that daddy still needs to support his children. They are still his responsibility. All right, a fifth thing that sometimes people say that's not right. It's on the basis of 1 Corinthians 7 and verse 15, and it focuses on the phrase, not under bondage. Now, let me read the passage and then we will discuss it. It says, but if the unbeliever departs, let him depart. A brother or sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us to peace. And so the idea is if a spouse leaves you, that is, your spouse departs, then you are, quote, not under bondage. And we're told that what that means is you're released from the marriage bond. You're not under bondage, you're free to remarry. This has sometimes been called the Pauline privilege. In other words, it suggested that Paul is giving an additional reason that a person could divorce and remarry. Of course, that's being added to what Jesus said that we've already looked at in Matthew 19. So the second reason, the Pauline privilege, they would say, is desertion. So Jesus said fornication, and they're saying Paul adds desertion. Let me show you some of the problems with this view. First, Paul does not use the word in verse 15 that refers to the marriage bond. Instead, he uses a word that has to do with slavery. Now, in other places, he uses a different word when he's talking about the marriage. Bond in verse 27 and verse 29, he's clearly talking about the marriage bond. Same thing in Romans chapter 7 and verse 2. But in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verse 15, he uses the word for a slave. And so here's a Christian woman, and she's married to a non-Christian man, and he decides he doesn't want to be married to her anymore. And so he just takes off. He deserts her. What is she supposed to do? Follow him around like a puppy? Beg him to take her back? Act like she is his slave? Paul says, No, you are not his slave. Let him go. Now, the question though is this does that imply that she can marry someone else? If he had used the word for the marriage bond, then we might conclude this, but that's not the word that he uses. It's different. A second thing about this passage that is very important is that Paul uses the perfect participle, which means is not now, nor has ever been. And so what Paul is saying is, you are not now a slave. It's the word for slave, not a wife. You are not now a slave, and you have never been a slave. If this were referring to the marriage bond, you would have Paul saying, you are not now married, nor have you ever been married. And that's not right. Friends, 1 Corinthians 7, 15 does not contradict Jesus. It doesn't give an addition to Jesus. It is not saying that desertion is a reason that a person can remarry. It's a false doctrine on marriage, divorce, and remarriage.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:41

So yeah, I agree with him that there is no allowance for remarriage after abandonment. Uh, and he presented that pretty well. All right, we're gonna go into the fourth part of this episode where Mike Highsaw went public with his change to a more permissive view on divorce and remarriage. Remember, Mike was the guy who talked to the person who wanted to baptize him and uh said, Oh, but you have to divorce your wife because she was previously married. And the guy says, I'm not gonna do that. And so then Mike went back and researched and he became more permissive, right? When Mike went public with his more permissive view, it created a stir in the churches of Christ and GBN, this the same organization here that Don and articulated their majority view, they did some reaction videos to Mike. And so they had some YouTube videos back and forth. And I've watched the videos all the back and forth, it's hours and hours. Um, and instead of doing all of that here, uh, we're just gonna show the GBN reaction video to Mike, and then we'll take some clips from Mike's response to their reaction video, uh, and that'll give us a good summary of the points going back and forth.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:40

Told Mike, you know, I was afraid he was encouraging people to stay in adulterous relationships, and then I thought that was a big deal. And he likewise said, Well, I believe you're encouraging people to break up marriages that God would not want them to, and he thought that was a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:54

They're right that those are the stakes, and they're very high stakes. And this is why we really need to understand what Jesus taught on this subject and apply it correctly.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:03

We've got uh the first clip where Mike represents his view, right? That's great. All right. Why don't we play that now? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:11

I don't believe that there has ever been a divorce without sin. And I believe that many remarriages which have occurred after divorces also involve sin because Jesus said, whoever divorces his wife, except it be for sexual immorality, and marries another woman, commits adultery. Now the question is, what is the nature of that adultery in Jesus' teaching? Many believe that what's meant is any time someone unscripturally divorces and unscripturally remarries, then each time that remarried couple comes together in sex, adultery is committed. And so these people believe that the adultery is ongoing throughout the duration of that remarriage.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:59

That's my view. And it's also the view of the churches of Christ when someone is in a remarriage that is an adulterous remarriage.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:08

On the other hand, believe that what Jesus is saying is that whenever someone unscripturally divorces their mate and unscripturally remarries another person, in those acts, that unscriptural divorce and unscriptural remarriage, adultery is committed. And so I believe the adultery to be point action.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:35

That's a one-time act of adultery, not an ongoing state. Now, he does that by going to the Greek. He's going to the original Greek words. And here's kind of the fundamental problem with that. You know, if my friend gets married on Monday, that's point action. That's a one-time act. But he's still married on Tuesday. The fact that it's a point action on Monday doesn't mean it's not ongoing on Tuesday. Suppose there's a Texan police officer who has no jurisdiction with in Mexico and there's no like agreement with Mexico for him to enforce the law. And so he goes into Mexico and he arrests somebody on, say, Monday. Well, he doesn't have authority to do that, so he is guilty of kidnapping that person. So that's one kidnapping on Monday. Now, if he goes back in on Tuesday and arrests another person, that's kidnapping again on Tuesday. The fact that it's kidnapping on Monday once doesn't mean it's not kidnapping on Tuesday. In fact, the the fact that it's kidnapping on Monday means that it underscores the fact that he doesn't have jurisdiction to arrest people there. And so that would tell you that if he goes back and he arrests somebody on Tuesday, he's going to be kidnapping again. So in the divorce and remarriage context, people think the divorce ends the first marriage and the remarriage starts the second marriage, and therefore sex is morally permissible within that marriage. That's the normal way that people think about it. But by Jesus calling it adultery, not only does Jesus say the remarriage isn't a marriage, he says the divorce didn't end the first marriage. And that's why it's adultery against her, as Mark 10, verse 11 says. A man divorces and remarries, he commits adultery against her that is against his first wife. Why? Because he's still married to her. But basically, the the short version is divorce rate, divorce rates have increased in America. The churches of Christ have had a history of debating the issue. And then around 2005 or so, I apparently the debates have like kind of died down. And so then there's younger people who are moving into pastoral positions, leadership positions in the churches of Christ, and they're just not aware of all these debates on divorce and remarriage. They're more um susceptible to permissive arguments on the subject. And so then what they're worried about is that Mike's videos, recent videos, come at a time when there's a potential audience from uninformed churches of Christ younger pastors. So that's that's what they say. And we're just gonna skip past all of that and go back to the argument. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:25

Present indicative verbs, do they always mean ongoing action, progressive action? And so must moiketi mean keeps on committing adultery? Well, the answer to that is is no. Definitely not. If you read Matthew's gospel in Greek from beginning to end, you're going to find lots of present indicative verbs that don't carry with them the idea of ongoing action. In fact, even in Matthew chapter 19, 9, moikati is not the first present indicative verb. The verse begins with a present indicative verb. When Jesus says, but I say to you, or and I say to you, it's Lego, which is a present indicative verb. Does that mean that Jesus is progressively saying, or does it mean that he's saying then at that time? Well, obviously it means he's saying then at that time.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:25

I want to begin and summarize Mike's view. Mike believes that if a man divorces his wife and remarries someone else, that act of divorcing and remarrying is adultery. That's how he defines adultery. But he says it doesn't continue to be adultery. He committed it only once, and so he can stay in that marriage with God's approval. That is his view. Now, to prove his view, he's going to make four points. And we just showed you the first one. To make it very simply, his first point to defend this view is Matthew 19, 9. The phrase commits adultery is a present indicative verb. And he says that doesn't necessarily mean continuous action.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:12

Okay, so I've tell you this is really painful. Um, even if we grant it doesn't necessarily mean continuous action, it could mean continuous action. So the fact that it may or may not be continuous action doesn't mean it isn't continuous. In other words, you you can't go to the mood in the tense to figure that out because it doesn't tell you one way or the other. Okay. So, second, even if the specific act Jesus is referring to is a one-time action, so it's adultery on Monday, that doesn't mean it's not adultery on Tuesday. That would just mean Jesus is specifically speaking to the conduct on Monday, but he is not directly saying anything about Tuesday. Third, for it to be adultery in the the first time they have sex and not the second time, that requires a disillusion of the first marriage. When does that disillusion happen? We already know adultery doesn't give the guilty party a right to remarry, even according to their own view of the exception clause. It gives the innocent party the right to remarry, but not the guilty, right? So adultery and divorce doesn't dissolve a first marriage for the guilty party. So that is logically incoherent theory. And and number one, we we should disfavor an interpretation that's incoherent because Jesus wouldn't give us that kind of that kind of uh doctrine. And number two, Jesus was speaking so as to be understood by his audience, and his audience just would not interpret his doctrine to be incoherent. So the other thing is that the religious descendants of the Pharisees compiled the Talmud and it talked about scenarios where a remarriage was adultery. Divorce was required when the remarriage was adultery. And Jesus knew uh that they taught that adulterous remarriages must be divorced. And I have a video about understanding Jesus through his audience that's helpful in this regard. I do want to mention one other thing. Mike apparently thinks that what's adultery is not the sex in the remarriage, but the marriage ceremony. That's just incorrect. Adultery, people have sex when they commit adultery. Uh, I mean, there's a sexual component to it, it's not just a marriage ceremony. It's not like signing the certificate is an act of adultery. That is just not correct. It's the sexual act that's adultery, and it's adultery because the person is still married to their first spouse. So that just doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:33

How would you respond to that, Dave? Well, yeah, I think he's correct about that. In other words, uh, as Aaron pointed out, the other Greek moods, the present is pretty much linear. But in the present tense itself, there can be different types of present tenses, like the gnomic present or uh the historical present. There's a bunch of different ones trying where the uh notice that none of these are laid in concrete. These are just grammarians studying the language and trying to give names to what appears to be taking place. And and lexicographers can be wrong on things. But that to me, that comes he's completely sidestepped the point. It doesn't matter whether it's punctilia or point action. It's what that that, in other words, uh a gnomic present is where you come in and look at event as just here, this is occurring. But the Greek is not in any way intending to imply that there was no activity before or after that. You would have to look at other circumstances, context, remote context, what else the Bible says, because that's just not clarified there. Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:37

Any thoughts about that, Karen?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:41

There is a tremendous overdependence on Greek and an over-emphasis on Greek in the church, especially among preachers.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:53

Yeah, he is totally right about this. Context matters much more than the Greek words. The language is not a mathematical formula where you can say if the author meant this, they would have used this tense instead of this tense. Words are understood primarily by the relation to other words in a given passage. And so the there's a logical idea going on in the mind of the author. And as a reader, you're trying to figure out what is that idea that's coherent, that's responding to something that's in the mind of the author. And that's what you're trying to figure out. So if the context says A, but a complex Greek study tells you a different interpretation, you should almost always go with the context. So if you're watching one of those like police shows and there's a bad guy who's got a cell phone, they're trying to track the cell phone, and they have three cell phone towers that are going to triangulate. Where is this cell phone? Well, imagine that the cell phone is a Greek word. We're trying to figure out what this Greek word means in a particular passage. And you've got a few tools you can use. What is the definition of the Greek word? You can use that. You what's the mood? What's the tense? That's another cell phone tower. What is, you know, generally the context there? But you know, sometimes that's only going to get you kind of in the neighborhood of where it is. You don't know if it's in this house or that or across the street, or that maybe they're in the park or they're in the bushes. So then you're going to have to physically go there in a squad car, in a helicopter, you're going to have to bring in people and do an intensive look at it. And when you're doing an intensive look on it, that I would analogize that to doing a uh more deep study into the specific particular context of that word in its neighborhood. If there's a conflict between context and mood or tense, context always wins. And it's the same thing with definition and context, context always wins.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:41

I have thought, I have said this for 30 years, that 95% of the time, I'm not trying to be overly critical here, but 95% of the time when I read or I hear someone using Greek to prove a point, it was unnecessary. You could do the same thing with English. But somehow we've gotten into this mode where we think that we make the point more powerfully if we refer to a Greek rule or something like that. And we've we've got the situation in reverse, and we've got to start teaching better on this. When you think about the process here of how a Greek rule is formulated or concluded, it's not like this. It's not that the Greek rule determines the usage in the New Testament. It's that the usage in the New Testament as a whole determines the Greek rule. But we got that in reverse. Because the first thing that many times we want to do when we look at a controversial issue is well, what does the Greek say? And then the next step is what do the Greek scholars say? What do the Greek authorities say? And I really appreciate what Davis said. We're talking about people here who don't believe in baptism for the remission of sins. Most of the time, they can't even get it right on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:04

Okay, so I agree with his main point about the Greek thing, or too much with the Greek and all the Greek gymnastics, and it's not helpful. It actually kind of throws people off. But this, you know, kind of denigrating scholars because they disagree with his opinion on baptism, I just think is unhelpful. I don't think baptism is sylvific, but that's something uh a person should do after they're saved. But I don't want to get off on that tangent. But anyway, let's just continue. I just we don't need to denigrate the the scholars, we just need to put them in the right, uh the right location, which is they're giving you general guidelines that help that it's one tool, but it is not the main tool. Context is king when it comes to interpreting the scripture.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:42

They're wrong on any number of things. And and the more you read them, the more you see that when it comes to actually interpreting the text, that they're sometimes above average in their interpretational skills, but they're certainly not experts in that. There's a difference between there's a different mindset involved in dealing with particular nuances in Greek and the translational process than there is in interpreting and applying the scriptures. It's a different mindset. There's a different set of skills involved. And it's really hard to get that across, very hard to get that across. So when it comes to the to the present tense, um, you you don't want to make the argument, as Dave and Aaron have have well stated, you don't want to state the argument that the present tense always means that it's ongoing, that it's always repetitive. But that doesn't automatically mean that it's point action. The issue, as you've already stated, um Don, you said that the issue is not that at all. The issue is what is the meaning of adultery, right? Not the time, but what is the idea, what is the what is the concept involved in it. And once you do that, right, if if the adultery is sexual, then the matter is laid to rest. And when when we say context, when we say context, that's what we're going to be talking about today. And we're not done with this yet. We're just getting started on this. And we're trying to be very careful in this not to overdo it on the Greek terms. As far as the Greek terms are concerned, you know, here's a Greek testament, and and I can read that, but what good is that going to do? I mean, for most of the hearers, and the the point that I'm trying to make is that what the Greek says in Matthew chapter 19, 9 is not any different from what it says here in the end. And and think of it in this way what what language was the New Testament written in? It is called Koine Greek. And Koine means what? It's the the common, yes. Mark 12, 37, the common people heard him gladly. Now I'm not identifying the word there, I'm just trying to say that in the first century, when Paul preached, you didn't have, let's say, Aristarchus over here saying to Titus over there, hey, you know what? He used an imperfect there. He didn't use an aorist, so there must be something to that. Oh, but Titus says, no, but you have to understand there's a difference between the subjunctive, which he used, and the indict indicative, which he did not use. And so you've missed that completely. And you have another. That's not how they that's not how you communicate.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:24

Well, and I just want to I am sitting here too, like of with the voice of the objector, because I've heard this argument before where someone will say, Well, if you can't prove it in the Greek, you're gonna run from the Greek. Now, maybe if someone like me who's inexperienced made that argument, but you've been teaching Greek and you've been studying Greek for years. And so I think the thing that does it for me that we've had just in casual conversation is when you show the examples, you know, because you know, I've looked at tons of grammars, you know, we gave Mike a list, and Mike actually looked at the list that we gave, and with the exception of one, he said, No, I understand from these grammars why you came to the position that it's, you know, more the the sort of the rule. I even hate to say that, right? Right, but the majority is ongoing. But the thing, what all these what I've learned from studying with you and listening to other guys is that it's always context. Some some they use the fancy German word action sort, which means sort of action, right? That word confused me for so long. Like, what does this mean? But it's always, hey, this in the indicative present can mean point, it can mean continuous, but the only way to figure that out is looking at the context.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:26

Yes, yeah. The actual uses of the verb or the noun or whatever it is, it took me 10 or 15 years of making some mistakes like that, where I just depended on the Greek so much, I just went to the lexicons, I went to the grammars and things like that until actually about 1990. By the way, um when it comes to Greek and Hebrew in churches of Christ, we're we're about 30 years behind on this point that I'm about to make here. There was a shift about 35 years ago in the Protestant circles about the over-emphasis on Greek and Hebrew and how that we have made Greek and Hebrew into languages that communicate in ways that they were never intended to communicate, you know, concepts. You don't do that with a subtle nuance and or subtle change in intents and so forth.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:11

And so what what happened to me was in in my so I just want to say this is um this is one of their college professors. Um, I appreciate his humility and his honesty here. He acknowledged mistakes that he made and acknowledged that the churches of Christ are behind on this.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:35

And I began to ask the question, okay, first of all, he doesn't even understand Acts 238, and he he chopped it to pieces. And I I don't have to know anything about Greek to know that.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:44

And he's he A. T. Robertson said, You'll determine your theology on Acts 2, you'll you'll determine what Acts 238 means based on your theology. Yes. But he had no problem in Matthew 26 28. Yeah. So it shows you that the theological bias even, you know, it filters into the most you know, well. Respected. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:01

Yes, absolutely. What I began to ask myself was, where did they get their information? In other words, how did they arrive at this rule? They did that by looking at instances of the usage of that verb, noun, phrase, whatever it is in the New Testament. That requires simple interpretation of New Testament passages. Well, anybody can do that. You know, um, Carol Osborne, who's been quoted by the speaker on this video, went through a list of verses in the New Testament where he said, here's the present tense, and it doesn't refer to something that is continuous and something that is repetitive. And one of the first verses he mentioned was Matthew 3.11, where John the Baptist said, I indeed baptize you with water. And he said, That's not necessarily repetitive. Well, all Jerusalem came to hear him, and and and he was baptizing people right and left. That's not repetitive. You don't have to know anything about it to know that. So, so what I remember reading years ago in a book on logic by Lionel Ruby was that he said that dictionaries and grammarians are historians, not lawgivers. But we have unintentionally, but we have elevated them to the standpoint or to the position of being lawmakers almost, because we use these words. Well, he's a Greek authority. Oh, what do you mean by that? He he is an observer. He is an observer, he is a historian, and more than I ever realized in the first 10 or 15 years of my studies, the Greek grammarians are commentators.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:45

Okay, so saying that they're commentators is a bit of an overstatement. I mean, there's a little bit of that going on, but generally speaking, they're trying to codify the rules for a language. And then when we go to employ those rules, we have to understand that language is not math. Here's my favorite example of this. I go to the grocery store and I buy two apples, apples, it's in the plural. The next day I go to the store and I buy one apple, it's in the singular apple. Then I then the next day I go to the store and I buy zero apples. It's zero. Why is it plural? It doesn't have to always make a whole lot of sense. And that doesn't even phase us. In fact, that nonsensical zero apples thing, we don't even notice. It doesn't make any sense. We just are talking. If I hadn't brought it up, you probably wouldn't have never thought about it. It's not a math problem. There is some coherence to it because intelligent people are the ones who are using it. But then when you come up with a set of rules, those rules are really just guidelines. Context is going to help you a lot more than trying to apply some guidelines as though they were strict rules, uh, like a like a math problem.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:46

So that means whenever they talk about these verses and these usages, you need to test them by reading the scriptures yourself.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:55

One thing, a point I want to make about this. Uh Aaron, you spoke with Mike, and Mike said that he got his view from Dr. Carol Osborne, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:31:04

Yeah, he said he said that's what essentially changed his mind was he read Carol Osborne.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:08

Dr. Carol Osborne wrote an article and has also done some QA. You can find it online. We can provide the links. But basically, he argues that in Matthew 19:9, if a man divorces his wife, except it befornication and marries another, he commits adultery. Commits adultery is present indicative. He says that the phrase there, commits adultery, moicai, is anomic present. In other words, it's just a general truth. And then he goes on to say over and over and over in the article, you can't tell whether it's a one-time action or ongoing from the grammar. He says you just can't tell. I think that's very important because Mike has carried this further, and Mike has said this is punctillier. He says that this is a gnomic present. It's a one-time action. And Carol Osborne does not do that. Carol Osbourne, I've got four quotes from the article where he says it's a no a gnomic simply means it's a general statement of truth. He says this is a general statement of truth, but he says you cannot tell whether it's durative, ongoing, or whether it's a one-time action. I think it's very important that we make that point. And he said he's explicitly says at least twice context is to determine. That's right. And that's going to become very important. So if I'm going to summarize this in very, very simple terms, Mike is trying to prove his position. And the first point is commits adultery, he says, doesn't necessarily mean continuous action. And we all agree with that, right? We would agree that uh you have to determine it from the context. All right.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:50

Aaron, you want to set up the second one? Yeah, that's great. Uh so in the second one, he's going to move to Matthew chapter five and verse 32. And we'll show a clip here in a minute. But essentially, he's going to say, you know, in Matthew 19, 9A, or the first clause, whoever divorces his wife except for fornication and marries another commits adultery. And that's present indicative, right? That's what we just discussed. He's going to connect Matthew 5.32, the first clause. Whoever divorces his wife for any reason except fornication causes her to commit adultery. And he's going to say, okay, it was present indicative, commits adultery in Matthew 19.9. Matthew 5.32, it is now aorist, passive, infinitive. And so what he's basically saying is he's making a parallel between Matthew 19.9 commits adultery, Matthew 5.32 commits adultery. One is present indicative, which he says can be point and action. He's going to parallel that with Matthew 5.32, which is aorist, passive infinitive. And like we said, we know this is getting in the weeds a little bit, but you're probably asleep or turn the video off if we haven't lost you already, right? And so we'll go ahead and play his clip and then we'll discuss that as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:53

So but here's a second reason why I believe that's the case. It's because that verb moicitai, the action of that verb moiketai, is parallel in Matthew 5, verse 32, to the action of an aorist passive infinitive, moicuthani. Now, back to Matthew 5, 32. Remember, Jesus said in Matthew 5, verse 32 that whoever divorces his wife, saving for the cause of sexual immorality, makes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a uh divorced woman, or I think the idea is a woman so divorced, commits adultery. All right. So that phrase makes her to commit adultery is puye atane moicuthani. Now, that word, moicuthani, is an aorist passive infinitive. And the action of an aorist infinitive is undefined. If Jesus really had wanted to communicate this idea that the woman in remarrying enters into an ongoing state of adultery, the verb to use is not an aorist passive infinitive. The verb to use would be a present passive infinitive. What Jesus would have said is mmu estai. Puye outain muicu estai.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:27

All right, so in this clip, uh 1205 to 1338 in this video, Mike essentially is comparing the aorist infinitive, passive infinitive in the first clause of Matthew 5.32, and basically says it's peril, it's uh paralleled with Matthew 19. The indicative present. Okay. And so essentially the argument is that the aorist infinitive is paralleled with the present indicative.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:50

Now, Carrie, I'm going to throw this one to you, but okay, these guys are about to just totally destroy this Greek argument from Mike. Um, but if you've never seen this kind of thing where someone makes a big deal out of the Greek, and then that argument gets like annihilated, this will be instructive.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:07

What he's saying is, and and he's got several grammarians that will back him up on this, that the present infinitive does denote ongoing action. And if Jesus had meant to say that the adultery is ongoing rather than one time, he would have used the present infinitive. Now, here's what I'm talking about. Here's what I mentioned a minute ago. That sounds like a uh a technical, it sounds like a very intelligent rule until you put it to the test in the New Testament. So here's a very simple way here. You don't have to know anything about Greek. All right. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 9, I'm looking at it here in English. Got the Greek right here open, but I'm gonna read it in English. It is better to marry than to burn. Everybody remember that. It's better to marry than to burn. Now, to marry, there is an aorist infinitive, just like Matthew 5:32. Better to marry than to burn. So I wouldn't argue that that's ongoing. I would simply say, look, you it's it's better to marry. You do that one time. But when you look at what Paul also wrote in 1 Timothy chapter 5, verse 14, this is where it gets very interesting. In 1 Timothy chapter 5, verse 14, Paul said, Therefore, I desire or I will that the younger widows marry. Now, in the in the Greek, that is the infinitive. That's the infinitive form. Guess what it is? It's present. That's the present infinitive, which the video and the so-called scholars say that is ongoing action. Can't be. Can't be. In other words, the aorist infinitive in 1 Corinthians 7, verse 9, means the same thing, has the same time of action, the same kind of action as the present infinitive in 1 Corinthians or 1 Timothy chapter 5, verse 14.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:06

So what happens to the response to that is that it's better to marry than to burn, is talking about one person and then saying the younger widows should marry. It's talking about all the younger widows that should marry. And so they'll say, Well, that's the difference. That's why one of them is one tense, the other one's the other tense. But that doesn't really work because better to marry than to burn doesn't reply, doesn't speak to one person. That's that's that's a general rule to a bunch of different people.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:33

So the rule now. I would think, well, I've got a good argument. You know, years ago, I've got a good argument because the Greek means this and it means that. And then two years later, I would find an exception to that rule. And I thought, why do I keep falling for this? You know, they're giving comments, they're giving general rules, which we really ought to call general principles of of usage. And this is just one here. And I do want to come back to that also because it does what those verses I just looked at do have a strong statement to make about the nature of adultery, and it's not a one-time act. So if I could come back later, John, and talk about that.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:14

Absolutely. So what I so what I just saw there is the argument of hey, Jesus used an aorist infinitive. If he wanted to say it was ongoing, he would have used present. And you just showed two passages that are talking about the exact same action, marriage, and that they use one uses the aorist and one uses the present. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:31

And it also implied that if he wanted to say this, he would have used the perfect. Well, he could have, but you don't have to do it that way. So once again, you're in you're trying to impose kind of a a prejudice onto the text.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:44

Right. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_06 1:39:45

That's right. Let's uh let's go to his third argument.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:49

If so, if you have a situation where you could use in Greek, where you could use two different tenses and one of them would emphasize one thing and the other one would emphasize something else, but they're not mutually exclusive. They're like a Venn diagram where either one of them is useful, but you're gonna choose one over the other. The one you're going to choose is the one that you're trying to emphasize. So the choice in a verb tense is not to rule out what would have meant under this other verb tense. The choice of a verb tense is to figure out what to emphasize, not what to rule out. But Mike wants to make it this is what you rule out. Now he agrees that they overlap, but the way he uses his language, he makes it sound like they don't overlap, and he uses arguments like, well, if he meant this, he would have used this other thing. No, no, no. If he wanted to emphasize that, he would have used that other one. But instead, he made a decision to emphasize something else, which is why the tense was different. So anyway, let's continue.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:52

Aaron, if you'll explain that and play the clip for us.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:55

Okay. But in the third place, if Jesus would have wanted to communicate the idea that this remarriage is an ongoing state of adultery, he could have done that very easily linguistically. All he would have had to do is to put that verb in Matthew 19, verse 9, moikao, is to put it in the perfect tense. All he would have had to say is, uh, meh moiketai. You know, whoever divorces his wife, except to be for sexual immorality and marries another, commits adultery, enters into a state of adultery, meh moicetai. If he just would have put it in the perfect tense.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:33

All right, so in this third argument that Mike uses, he essentially goes back to Matthew 19, 9, and he says that if Jesus wanted to communicate that the ongoing remarriage was adulterous, he would have used a different word. He would have made moicetai the perfect passive form to show continuous action. How would you respond to that, Gary?

SPEAKER_02 1:41:54

Well, in the first place, when you get into translating in the Greek New Testament, you start out with, usually in learning Greek, you start out with a grammar book, you know, like Summers or Mounts or something like that. And you start out translating simple sentences. And I've noticed that students sometimes are shocked when they get into maybe second-year Greek or third year Greek, and they're translating from the Greek New Testament. You do some of that in the first-year Greek, but they will oftentimes say to me, Well, I thought you said this, or I thought the book said that. You know, what was the rule that we studied? This is different. Well, the rule is a general guideline, it's a basic principle. It's it's not an ironclad universal rule that fits every situation, but it's very difficult to get across.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:40

Yeah, so what's happening is that students are given the impression that language is like a set of rules, and then you know, so just memorize the rules and then apply the rules and then get to translation. And then they see exceptions and they think, oh, the rules are more complex, but it's still the same kind of thing. It's still, you know, like a math formula. It's like the fine-tuning of the universe, E equals MC squared, you know, oh, but I guess there's we have to add in a couple decimal points or whatever. But eventually, when you're this guy and you see example after example how the math approach just doesn't work, you go, this isn't math. It's language. The nature of it is different. It's not just a bunch of rules, it's quirky, it changes over time. It's not engineered with precise rules. So treating human language like it's a computer program is just a category error. It's like if someone who has no social skills enters into a conversation and they take everything super literally, and the people in the room just look at them like this person just doesn't get it. And that's what it's like when people treat Greek and Hebrew like it's a math formula.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:44

So in in this case, what I'm saying is that the the perfect tense is something different than what we have in English. The perfect tense in Greek means that an action has been completed, and the results remain from that action, and the emphasis is on the abiding or the continuing results. So it's a little bit different from just a past tense.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:08

It's I want you to notice he used the word emphasis, and that's what you're getting a lot of times with these Greek moods and tenses. You're getting the emphasis of the speaker.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:19

It's different from the aorist, it's different from the imperfect, which is uh a past tense um in the Greek. But how do you translate that um into English? It's it's kind of difficult. For for instance, when Jesus says to the devil, it is written, that sounds like present tense, right? But it's actually perfect. It means it has been written. But if you're going to put the emphasis on the results that remain, which the King James Version translators and others do, then you say it is written. If you want to fully state it, you would have to say it has been written and it stands written. But that's a little laborious, you know. So most of them just translate it just as um a simple English present tense. So that being the case, it it's easy for for the speaker in the video to say, well, you know, if if Jesus wanted to say this, he would use the the present instead of the perfect. When you do exercises in translating sentences from the Greek New Testament, you find that the distinction there is not always a wall. Sometimes they they bleed over. And so these are, and Brother Dave put this very well a minute ago. We're talking about grammar books that were written 18 and 1900 years after the New Testament was written, and they label these things. And we get so caught up with the labels that we forget the beauty of how the language worked and was understood by the common man. And so I would simply say that again is just what we said about the aorist infinitive. That is pure speculation. That is nothing but conjecture on his point to say, well, if he wanted to say this, then he would have said it this way. That it's impossible to prove that.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:05

And I one thing that I think I mentioned to you one time in a previous conversation is I love to read the early church fathers who all ate, you know, slept, spoke Greek. And it's funny, I I mentioned this to you once. I said, you know what's really interesting to me, I never ever see them make an argument from the grammar. And I'm I'm not saying there's never a place for it, but it's interesting to me that all these guys that spoke Greek as their native language never made these arguments, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:29

That's very interesting. And you bring that up to the Reformation. Calvin and Luther were not dummies when it came to Greek and Hebrew. Yeah, those guys were very educated. They knew what they were doing with the languages. I'm not saying that we would agree with what they said, but as far as linguistic abilities are concerned, they they had tremendous uh understanding of it. But you go back and you read Luther and you read Calvin, you read Calvin's Institutes, it's rare that you ever find him saying anything grammatically to prove his point of his system of Calvinism. Now you would think that if it's necessary or if it adds weight, that a guy like Calvin would do that, but he doesn't. And so we we are in a phase of church history right now about this this has been in motion for about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred years. I think it came from a lot of German rationalism back in the 1700s, 1800s, but it but it has affected New Testament exegesis to this day. But we're in a period of church history right now where there is this over-emphasis on an over-interpretation of Greek and Hebrew. I don't know any other way to say that, that is unlike what we saw for the previous 18 or 1900 years.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:43

Yeah, so this is a really important part. The early church, they're just not, like the guy said, they're just not doing this kind of stuff. Um, if you read them, they're trying to get to the depths of the logic. What's the idea going on here, the philosophy, the systematic understanding of the concepts and how they interrelate with one another? And the early church thought if someone was in a remarriage that Jesus called adultery, that they were in an ongoing state of sin. It's just obviously the logical deduction you would make. And so these were native speakers of Koine Greek. Uh, these were some of the people who, you know, were not that far from the time of the apostles, uh, uh, chronologically, you know, origin speaks of some lower-level church leaders who allowed people to remarry because they thought it was less bad than having fornication all over the place. So even the permissive people knew this was wrong. They just thought it was less bad, which I don't think is a good way of making policy. But the point is, they all pretty much knew if you remarry, it's an ongoing state of adultery. And they didn't say, oh, but wait, look at the Greek tense. Nobody's doing that because that nobody, that wouldn't wash with anybody who knew Poin A Greek at the time. So Mike responded to their response video. Uh, and so we're gonna we're gonna look at some clips from this. This is a three-hour video, so I'm not gonna go through the whole thing, but I just want to point out some clips uh where he responds to some of the things that they say, so we can make sure that we uh cover all of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:06

What if a Christian widow marries a non-Christian man? She sins in marrying someone the Lord did not desire, did not will for her to be married to. She sinned in that marriage. Well, how does she repent of it? And this is not just some hypothetical situation. The first church I preached for out of Memphis School of Preaching had a widow in it who had married a non-Christian man. How's she to repent of it? Well, brethren have typically said it would be wrong for her to repent of it by divorcing her non Christian husband because that's explicitly condemned earlier in 1 Corinthians 7, verses 12 through 16. And so it's been understood that she could repent of the sin of having married a non Christian man and remain in that marriage. So, in other words, just because it was Sinful at the start did not mean that it remained sinful if she repented of the attitude that brought her into that marriage. And on that point, let me just quote Wayne Jackson. This is from an article of his that you can find on the Christian courier website. He says, quote, finally then, there is this question: what should one do when he or she realizes that in remarrying, or excuse me, in marrying out of Christ, the primary interests of the Lord's kingdom were not pursued? The answer is simple. Repent of the disposition that led to that decision and then set your mind toward the goal of making seek the kingdom first choices henceforth in your life. There are many circumstances in our lives which are irreversible currently. Is it not possible that one could realize that he or she did not approach some of his earlier decisions with the highest of ideals? There is nothing wrong with asking God's forgiveness for such superficial choices, resolving to make more spiritually responsible determinations in the future, and working then to make the very best of one's present circumstances. And to that I say a hearty amen. And in fact, that's how I think that you repent of marrying, contrary to Matthew chapter 19, verse 9. The sin is not in continuing the marriage, the sin is in illegitimately divorcing one spouse and illegitimately marrying another person. And so how do you repent of it? You purpose to the Lord that you will not illegitimately divorce your present spouse and illegitimately marry a person other than your present spouse. That's how you repent of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:41

So it's correct that believers should only marry other believers. And if they marry an unbeliever, they shouldn't divorce. But that only works because Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, in verse 14, that the unbelieving spouse is sanctified by the believing spouse. So it's not ongoing sin to stay married. The sin problem was between them, and Paul says that's not an issue after that they're married. But that doesn't work with divorce and remarriage because the first marriage still remains in God's eyes.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:19

Dave's quote, in which he concludes that Moikati in Matthew chapter 19, verse 9, means ongoing action because if it was a sin to begin the marriage, it's a sin to continue the marriage. You know, it's based on this faulty reasoning, which I think is the driving force for why some have gone to 1 Corinthians 7.39 and have reinterpreted it. They have reinterpreted it to not mean marry only a Christian in order to try to find some consistency. All right. So Dave, in his book, when he is um uh critiquing Osborne's view and my view concerning the present indicative of Moycottai, he quotes Daniel Wallace's book, The Basics of New Testament Syntax from page 224. And uh in that quotation, Wallace also quotes Bust Fanning's work, uh, The Verbal Aspect. So so here's the quote that Dave that Dave makes in his book of Wallace, quote, in his book on Greek syntax, Daniel Wallace describes the gnomic present, quote, the present tense may be used to make a statement of general timeless fact. He then quotes Fanning. It does not say that something is happening, but that something does happen. Wallace continues. The action or state continues without time limits. The salient point to observe is that the gnomic present does not exclude continuous action of the verb, rather, it merely expresses the timeless nature of the action of the verb without weighing in on whether that action occurs continuously. And that quotation is on pages five and six of uh Dave's book.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:09

Now, all right, so let me let me set this up. To ask about the meaning of a Greek word for remarriage uh being adultery. Mike had his son email a couple of Greek scholars who have a permissive view, and here we're gonna see what happened.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:24

I had Jake email Beuse Fanning and Daniel Wallace. And when Jake emailed them, Jake provided them a quotation from Wayne Jackson's little booklet uh called The Teaching of Jesus Christ on Divorce and Remarriage, a critical study of Matthew 19.9. And the quote from Jackson's book that we gave them was this quote, and so in Matthew 19, 9, the one who divorces Aorist and marries Arist, another, not for fornication, keeps on committing adultery each time he, she is intimate with the new companion. In the words of H. Racer, he enters the realm of adultery. Professor William Beck rendered the verb in this fashion. He he's living in adultery. And that's on pages 15 and 16 of Jackson's book.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:15

So so Jake Yeah, so so Mike's son uh Jake emails a couple of scholars with this quote and asks them, you know, does the adultery of the remarriage is that ongoing, as this quote indicates?

SPEAKER_01 1:55:27

Jake emailed them this quote, and he asked both Bust Fanning and Daniel Wallace to comment on that quote. And so I'm gonna read their emails in full, and you'll see it on the screen here. So Beuse Fanning replied to Jake's email on uh Monday, July 7th of this year, and here's what he says that's a possible reading of the verse.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:51

Right there, right there. That's actually all you need to know. That's a possible reading of the verse. In other words, the Greek doesn't require the adultery to be one time. So then to determine whether or not that's what was intended, you would read the context, not the Greek.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:12

But I think it is unlikely. It reflects only a partial grasp of the Greek present tense. The tense pays attention to the internal features of an action or state. So if an action is ongoing or continuing, it can focus on that. But the act that is ongoing can be a repetition of discrete acts viewed in a narrow series, like he was chopping the log. Also, the repetition can be gnomic or general rather than narrow or specific. Talking about a type of discrete event repeated at various times, not on one occasion only. Finally, such a gnomic action can be characteristic, generic, of a type or class of people or actors, not of a single agent. Here are some examples of present-tense gnomic actions understood to be done by various people as a characteristic action. Check the Greek text of these. So he gives Matthew 18.6, 23.16, Mark 9.37, Mark 10.11, which is Mark's version of Matthew 19.10, 1 Corinthians 12.8. He continues, you can see the generic sense in which the use of pos, every, or the relative pronoun with or without on, who, whoever, to set up the nonspecific meaning. This is like Matthew 19. Has on apeluse ten gunica autu me epi porneia chi game sae alein moikitai. I think the sense is that the sort of person who divorces and marries another thus commits adultery against the first spouse in that connected act, divorce and remarriage. And the repetition comes in the picture of various people of that type who will do that. It's not continuous or repetitive in the narrow sense of a single marriage that is abandoned in favor of living conjugally with another specific individual. I think the parallel in Mark 10:11 reflects this focus in the phrase against her. If you have access to a good library, you can check out my treatment of this in verbal aspect. And then he also says, and the work of Carol Osborne, the present indicative in Matthew 19:9, Restoration Quarterly, 1981.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:39

Okay, so the bottom line is he says it could be continuous or not, but he thinks it's not continuous. He can he can think that if he wants, but the question here is does the Greek require it to not be continuous? The answer is no. That was the reason for emailing him, and we have our answer. So the Greek doesn't tell you, so you have to go to the context, not the Greek. Let's continue.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:07

Etc. See what you think. Beose fanning. Now, I mean, it beuse fanning agrees with the position that I'm setting forth here. That moyketai in Matthew 19 9 does not mean keeps on committing adultery, but rather it is committed whenever someone divorces and marries another. And Beuse Fanning is a world-class Greek scholar. In fact, Daniel Wallace dedicates his Greek grammar beyond the basics to Buuse Fanning. Buced Fanning was his teacher. And isn't it significant that Buced Fanning refers us to Carol Osborne's article on the present indicative of Matthew 19? And by the way, if you look at the best commentaries on Matthew, you see them often refer to Carol Osborne's work to show that the present indicative moikitai doesn't mean keeps on committing adultery. You see that in John Nollin's commentary on Matthew. You see that in Grant Osborne's commentary on Matthew. If you look at works that are done on the subject of divorce and remarriage, for instance, the most up-to-date scholarly work on divorce and remarriage is done by a Lutheran scholar who also is on the uh translation committee for the Christian Standard Bible. His name is Andrew Doss. His book is called Remarriage.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:27

Let me just say so. I don't agree with Andrew Doss's conclusion, but if you just ignore for the moment what his conclusion is and you just look at his academic ability and his scholarly ability, this is a it's a it's a fantastic book. It's it's a good book in that sense. I don't I just think his conclusions are incorrect, but he's a very smart guy.

SPEAKER_01 2:00:46

And uh in the conclusion of that book, he deals with this question is a remarriage ongoing adultery? And a part of his response to prove that no, it is not ongoing adultery, he refers to Carol Osborne's paper on the present tense.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:03

All right, so here we go. We're gonna get up to scholar number two.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:06

All right, so that was Bus Fanning's uh response. Here is Daniel B. Wallace's response. And this came on uh Thursday, July 10th of this year. And uh Wallace says, Jake, your email sent to my email address at Dallas Seminary was forwarded to me. You ask a very important question. It comes up often. I am saddened that people will use my grammar to prove that marriage after divorce is ongoing adultery. If you have my grammar, you will notice that I discuss a variety of uses of the present tense. It could be treated grammatically as a customary or iterative present. That is, such a person repeatedly or regularly commits adultery. But that is only one interpretation and hardly one that is necessary here. In fact, if a person were to press the notion of repeated acts of adultery, how do they deal with the posha apoluon in Matthew 532?

SPEAKER_00 2:02:11

He says it could be treated grammatically as a customary or iterative present that is such a person repeatedly or regularly commits adultery. Again, that's all you need to know. Nothing in the Greek requires the word that's translated commits adultery to be a one-time act. So they're emailing Greek scholars to say what are the limits of this word based on the tense and the mood and all of that. What are the limits of the word? And they both tell you, both scholars tell you, yes, it could be ongoing adultery. These are Greek scholars that they emailed who have a permissive view on divorce and remarriage. Even they say the Greek does not require it to be only one-time action because they are academically honest people, which I really very much appreciate. So he emailed two Greek scholars to try to prove his point, and I think it backfired.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:12

Everyone who repeatedly divorces his wife, grammar only gives us the options, but it doesn't tell us how to take a passage as if only one of the categories of usage would fit. That's simply bad exegesis. A far more likely usage in Matthew 5:32 and 19.9 is the gnomic present. The one who divorces his wife and remarries does commit adultery. There is no ongoingness about it.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:42

All right. So what he did here was he switched from what does the Greek require? to what's my interpretation here. And so what Mike does is he uses these Greek scholars' personal interpretation to make it seem like the Greek text requires his interpretation. But that's just a category error. One thing is, what does the Greek words require? And the other one is, what is this guy who studies Greek, what does he think it means? So I'm not saying that Mike does this explicitly, but he'll say it in a moment that these Greek scholars agree with him, which makes it seem like the Greek text requires his interpretation. But they the Greek scholars said the opposite. They said the text does not require that interpretation. I'm not saying that Mike is trying to be misleading, but I do think people could be misled by what he says.

SPEAKER_01 2:04:27

The person, uh, excuse me, once a person illegitimately gets remarried, the first act of intimacy marks that person as an adulterer. The act of getting remarried in such instances is against God's law. But would every act of intimacy thereafter be adultery? If so, should the couple get divorced? But God hates divorce. And the Mosaic Law says that if a divorcee remarries and gets a divorce from the second person, it is forbidden for them to remarry the first spouse. So if that is wrong, what is left? To live together in a completely celibate relationship? Common sense and the mercy of God would seem to dictate otherwise. But if entering into such a relationship is sinful, what if they repent? Clearly, that is needed to restore fellowship with the Lord.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:18

So, yes, adulterously remarried people should get divorced. And while God does oppose divorce of valid marriages, this is not a valid marriage, it's adultery. God supports ending adultery. So if like uh a guy married his sister, that's incest, they should divorce that. You wouldn't say, well, God hates divorce, so the incestuous couple should stay together. No, that's not what he's talking about when God opposes divorce, or if two gay guys got married, they should get divorced. And you can't say, Well, God hates divorce. That wasn't that's category error. And so if it's an adulterous remarriage, they should get divorced. You can't say, well, God hates divorce. That doesn't apply in that situation because it's a fake marriage. Now, Deuteronomy 24, 1 through 4, let's talk about that. It does not forbid a divorced person from returning to their first spouse after the second marriage ends. What it forbids is something different. What Deuteronomy chapter 24, verses 1 through 4 forbids is a woman, not a man, a woman from going back to her first husband after the end of her second marriage, if her if her first marriage ended because of alleged adultery. It's a very narrow prohibition. So here are the steps that have to occur before Deuteronomy chapter 24, verses 1 through 4 kicks in. Number one, the man divorces the woman for alleged infidelity, a matter of uncleanness. Then she marries another man, then that marriage ends, and then that man wants her back. That's what has to happen. Now, suppose, for example, a man divorced his wife because he hated her, and then she married somebody else, and that marriage ended, and then he wanted to go back to her. Deuteronomy chapter 24, one through four does not prohibit them from getting back together. Okay, now let's suppose another scenario. A man and a woman are married, he divorces her for, let's say, infidelity, and then she does not remarry, but he remarries, and then his second marriage ends, and then he wants to go back to his first wife. Can he do it? Yes, he can. Deuteronomy chapter 24, one through four does not prohibit him from going back to his first wife after the end of his second marriage. So it's very narrow. He has to divorce her because of infidelity, then her second marriage has to end, and then he has to go back and uh try to return to her. And then in that particular very narrow circumstance, would remarriage be prohibited under the Mosaic law? Now, Jesus tells us that the first condition, the man divorcing his wife for alleged infidelity, that that is not the moral law. Jesus tells us that in Matthew 19, 8, where he says he allowed you to divorce for your hard-heartedness. So that first part that was allowable under the Mosaic law, that uh produced a legal fiction in Deuteronomy that treated them as though their marriage was dissolved. But now when you move into the New Testament, you're not using this Mosaic system anymore. Now you're using uh Jesus when he applies, you know, the principle from in the beginning from Genesis. That first point that the legal fiction that the first marriage was dissolved by the divorce is gone because Jesus says, no, that was for hard-heartedness. You can't do that. If you divorce for adultery and you remarry, it's adultery. So that so the whole prohibition then on the remarriage is no longer binding. If it was binding, it would be binding in a very narrow circumstance with a man divorced his wife for infidelity, she remarried, and then he wanted to go back and return to her. Only in that particular scenario would it be binding. But I don't think it's binding at all because Jesus kind of kicks out the leg from underneath Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse one, because that first legal fiction, Jesus exposes it as a legal fiction. That was just for hard-heartedness. The other thing was that Mosaic law was a civil law that was used for governmental purposes. And Moses is trying to bring about good pragmatic outcomes as but the best he can dealing with the people who he's trying to govern here, which there are some challenges with, as there always is running any country. So the problem he's trying to prevent is using, allowing people to use the government law to do wife swapping. Uh, that's one potential problem he's trying to prevent, or another potential problem he's trying to prevent, is a situation where a man claims she committed adultery and then he wants to go back and marry her. And Moses doesn't believe him, that his first allegation that it was for infidelity, Moses doesn't believe him. Moses thinks he lied originally on that certificate of divorce. And the reason why you might interpret it that way is because Moses says uh that after she marries another man, she has been defiled. In other words, she had sex with another guy. And so that's the reason why Moses doesn't want the guy, the first husband, to go back to her after the end of her second marriage. Because if the man just couldn't be with her because he thought she cheated on him, but he's willing to go back to her after she's been with another man, something's wrong here. He must have been lying in the first place. And so Moses is putting a prohibition on him for that apparent lying and trying to use the trying to game the government law and to mistreat his wife the first time. Jesus is not running a government. When you're running a government, you have to pass laws to try to get good outcomes. And Jesus is not doing that. Jesus is giving the moral law, and the moral law is not concerned with all the same things exactly that the government law is concerned with.

SPEAKER_01 2:10:29

One hermeneutical principle I learned from my pastor as a young man was this: between two competing and viable interpretations, one focusing more on the truth and the other focusing more on grace, the latter is most likely the right interpretation.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:47

We're not trying to figure out what he thinks the grace interpretive grid would want. We're trying to figure out what the Greek word means. That's why he was emailed. I'm sure he's a nice guy, and I'm sure he's very smart. But we're asking you what the Greek says, what Jesus talked about, which is we're going back to the beginning here. We're not going to the regulation that was given for hard-heartedness. Jesus says, Yeah, but that wasn't what we what we had in the beginning. And what we're trying to do here is we're trying to bring forward the kingdom of God here. So it's just a different framework uh that Jesus is working from than what uh David uh Daniel Wallace uh is working from here.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:19

The key here is viable. Both interpretations have some good evidence for them. I think that applies in this instance too.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:28

When he writes that both interpretations have some good evidence for them, it sounds like he's saying there is good evidence for the interpretation that adulterous remarriages are ongoing adultery, not just one time. So he says the one time interpretation is viable. Now, I don't think it is viable at all. Uh, the only reason the remarriage could be adultery is if the divorce didn't end the first marriage, which means it's an ongoing state of adultery. When the Talmud calls a remarriage adultery. It requires it to be divorced. Jesus is speaking to Pharisees whose religious descendants wrote the Talmud. And so it would seem like they would understand Jesus to mean divorce, the adulterous remarriage. It would be very strange for Jesus to say to them the remarriage is adultery and like hide from them what he really means by that, which is different than what everybody would have thought Jesus meant at the time, because the Pharisees was the largest group, and they would require divorce of a marriage that was classified as an adultery marriage.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:31

I could elaborate further, but instead I'm attaching the section and footnotes on the gnomic present in my grammar in his grip, Dan. Now I think that it's really important for us to notice that Dan begins the email by saying, I am saddened that people will use my grammar to prove that marriage after divorce is ongoing adultery.

SPEAKER_00 2:12:53

I'm sure it saddens him, but the purpose of the email was to find out what does the Greek requirement, not does he like the outcome or does he interpret it the same way that these other people do? What does the Greek require? And the Greek does not require this permissive view.

SPEAKER_01 2:13:08

In the first answering the air episode, you know, Don and Aaron uh uh went to great extent to try to prove that the rule for present indicative verbs is ongoing action because they looked at a number of Greek grammars. I mean, I mean, they really wanted to make the point from the Greek. And on this particular panel, you have Dave Miller. And Dave Miller wrote a book called Baptism and the Greek Made Simple. And this book can be downloaded on the GBN website.

SPEAKER_00 2:13:40

And why is everything about baptism?

SPEAKER_01 2:13:44

I just it's this book, Dave. Um, for let's see one hundred one hundred pages, just quotes endlessly uh denominational Greek scholars, and quotes endlessly these books. Now, Carrie will go on to say that you know, these these quote unquote scholars that uh you know we use to try to make these points from the Greek, like you know, they can't even read the Greek New Testament and come to the conclusion that baptism is necessary uh for salvation. Well, I mean, Dave Miller quotes from them to try to prove that baptism is necessary for salvation. And I had a debate with a Reformed Baptist, and one of the arguments that I made in the um cross-examination was from BDAG, showing from the entry on Baptizzo in Bidag, that uh the Lutheran scholars who were responsible for BAG argued that the purpose of baptism was so that your sins could be forgiven. But but Kerry seems to just totally downplay the Greek. And it seems to me, now I may be wrong, I don't want to attribute bad motives, but it seems to me that the reason why they did that was just to try to escape the force of some of my arguments. But but I just want to remind us the reason why I argued in that first video the way that I did, uh, with so much from the Greek. The reason I did that is because for decades, people who have held to the divorce and remarriage view that Don, Aaron, Carrie, and Dave hold to, they have said that the that the Greek proves their point. In fact, if you just go back and you listen to presentations that uh Roy Deaver gave on the subject of divorce and remarriage, and and you can find these all over the the the uh YouTube, uh in in the classic presentations that uh uh that Roy gave, he goes through and he tediously uh pronounces every Greek word in Matthew chapter 19, verse 9, arguing that you need to understand these Greek words in order to see the full force of Jesus' teaching on the subject of divorce and remarriage. So, so to me, and and again, I don't want to attribute bad motives, but that that just seemed like a debate tactic to try to um blunt the force of some of the arguments that I've made.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:20

So I do want to be fair here. You know, to the extent that he's pointing out that commits adultery in Greek can mean one time or ongoing, to challenge assertions that it must be ongoing, I'm I'm fine with that. If he's just saying the Greek doesn't require it one way or the other, uh, I'm fine with that. But every everyone just needs to say it can mean one or the other. You can't figure out which one it means from the Greek, and so you have to use uh context and logic to figure out what is meant there and leave it there instead of trying to use doing doing a bunch of rhetorical backflips to frame it as leaning one way or the other. And the framing I have seen is stuff like these Greek scholars agree with my interpretation. Okay, well, the Greek scholars might personally agree with your interpretation, but that doesn't mean the Greek scholars are saying that the Greek requires that interpretation, as we just saw from the two people uh he read from. I've also seen this argument that I think is a problem. Jesus could have used a different word to say X. Okay, we're interpreting what Jesus said, we're not interpreting what Jesus did not say. I've also seen this kind of way of arguing that, you know, all the brilliant Greek scholar people say that this Greek word doesn't have to mean X. And so, like the way it's phrased makes it sound like you know, it must mean A and not B. When what everybody is saying, though, if you listen to everybody literally, is it could mean A or B, the Greek doesn't say. All right, so let me give an example of this last one where literally what they say is true, but the way the way they say it rhetorically stacks the deck in one direction. Let me show you an example of that.

SPEAKER_01 2:17:54

Uh, here's what Osborne said quote, there is nothing so explicit in Matthew 19 or in the vo verb moikati to necessitate an iterative in verse nine.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:09

Okay. Yes, nothing necessitates it, that it's ongoing. So what? So what? That doesn't mean anything. Oh, why does this matter? The the Greek doesn't say it is or it isn't ongoing. So now I I want you to hear how Mike understands this statement.

SPEAKER_01 2:18:25

So Carol Osborne took a side. Carol Osborne sided with the idea that moiketi means point action.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:34

Okay, now it's true that this author, Carol Osborne, interpreted it as a one-time act, but it's not true that Carol Osborne said that the Greek requires that interpretation. But Mike seems to interpret Carol Osborne as saying the Greek requires it to be one time. That's just not what the sentence said. And so this is just a rhetorical tactic, and Mike keeps going back to it, which is what GBN was trying to focus on. Like you're just using, uh you're just stacking the deck in one direction. So what you say is literally true, but if you listen carefully, he's stacking the deck in one direction, and it's misleading.

SPEAKER_01 2:19:11

But now here's the reason why I'm bringing this up. So, you know, in this video, they advertise not just the book that Dave wrote against my position, but they also referenced the book that Carrie Duke wrote, What God Rejoins Studies in Divorce and Remarriage. And in that book, on pages 28 and 29, here's what Kerry wrote. Carol Osborne admitted, quote, moicetai may involve continuity, and added uh that the verb and the context must decide. But he then argued that, quote, there is nothing so explicit in Matthew 19 or in the verb moikitai to necessitate the idea of continuity. And Kerry Duke is quoting from this article of Osborne's that was so I don't want to speak for Kerry Duke.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:05

He was one of the gentlemen in the GBN video we watched earlier, but it on first glance from that quote that uh was provided here, it looks like Kerry isn't saying Osborne's two statements contradict each other. Because the two statements don't literally contradict each other if you look at them precisely. Rather, what Kerry is saying is Osborne's framing changed from maybe A, maybe B, to nothing necessitates A. And nothing necessitates A is a different framing because it strongly implies it must mean B. But, and then Carol Osborne can always retreat behind. Well, I never said it had to be B. I just said nothing necessitates A. And so you kind of retreat behind the literal. So you leave people with the impression of the implication, and then if questioned about it, you just hide behind the literal. We just got to quit doing this. Just say the Greek doesn't say one way or the other instead of like this this rhetorical game.

SPEAKER_02 2:21:05

In other words, the airist infinitive in 1 Corinthians 7, verse 9, means the same thing has the same time of action, the same kind of action as the present infinitive in 1 Corinthians or 1 Timothy chapter 5, verse 14. So what happens to the rule now?

SPEAKER_01 2:21:21

All right, so um it seems to me that that Carrie's real error is in trying to act as though the the infinitives, Gamasi in First Corinthians 7 9, and Gamain in 1 Timothy 5 14, that they're functioning in the same way in both passages.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:45

Okay, so this is back to in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul writes it's better to marry than to burn. That's one Greek tense. And then in Timothy he writes, uh, the younger widows, uh, I will that they marry, and that's a different tense. And so carry duke. He was using that to show that these tenses are not as though one rules out the other, and they're not mutually exclusive, that you could use two different tenses to refer to the same uh thing because one tense does not rule out a continuous, for example.

SPEAKER_01 2:22:16

His error is assuming that these are parallel passages, and they're not parallel passages. So in 1 Corinthians 7 uh 9, you have this general truth that's being spoken. So um, but if he's not able to control himself, uh, or if they're not able to control themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:22:37

Okay, so just to point out here that Mike said if they, they, multiple people, they are not able to control themselves, it's better to marry than to burn. They should get married.

SPEAKER_01 2:22:49

Okay, so in that second statement, for it is better to marry than to burn. I mean, that is just a general truth. Uh, it is better to marry than to burn. And so you've got two infinitives there. You've got games to marry, and that's an aorist infinitive. And then you've got the opposite of it, uh, perusthai, and that is a present infinitive, to burn, to burn with passion. And so it is better to marry than to burn. Okay, and so this is this is just a general statement that's true for every individual. It is better to marry than to burn. So there's a contrast between getting married and this present infinitive continuing to burn with passion. Okay. But then if you look at 1 Timothy chapter 5 and verse 14, um, you know, that statement is, but I will therefore that the younger women, and and here it's the younger widows, uh, marry, bear children, guide the house, you know, give uh no opportunity to the adversary to speak reproachfully. And so so there, you know, the the infinitive of gameo is gamane, it's a present infinitive. But if you if you look at that closely, why is it a present infinitive? So uh subjects of infinitives are in the accusative case, okay? So the subject of the infinitive, gamain, is neoteras. So the younger widows, okay, and it's a plural subject.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:18

It's a plural subject in both cases. Remember, in 1 Corinthians 7, he says they should get married. Here, younger widows should get married. The point is, in both cases, you have a plural subject, and in one case you use one tense, in another case, you use another tense, depending on what you're trying to emphasize. So it does not mean that um one tense rules out the meaning of the other tense, it just means that one tense emphasizes one thing, and another tense emphasizes another thing. They're not mutually exclusive. Kiri Duke's point holds.

SPEAKER_01 2:24:55

It's multiple younger widows. So there are multiple marriages that Paul has in mind. And so that's why Paul says, I will, therefore, that the younger widows gamain, because he doesn't just have one marriage in mind, he's got multiple marriages. In 1 Corinthians 7 9, it's just a general principle. It's better for a person to marry than to keep on burning with passion.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:17

But in both cases, there's multiple people being married that are is being considered by the author.

SPEAKER_01 2:25:25

But in in 1 Timothy 5, verse 14, you know, it's there's, you know, as a general principle, you know, I will that younger widows, all these younger widows, that they marry and and do these other things. So so Carrie, um, I don't think that he's disproven my point because he's comparing apples and oranges. He he's assuming that these infinitives of Gameo are being uh used, you know, in these parallel statements, and the statements are just not parallel.

SPEAKER_03 2:26:00

But you don't have to do it that way. So once again, you're in you're trying to impose kind of a prejudice onto the text, right?

SPEAKER_04 2:26:08

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:10

That's I think that this is interesting that Dave does this, and I don't think that Dave is consistent when he does this, because Dave did the very same thing in Dave's book, baptism in the Greek made simple. So when Dave was dealing with Acts 238, and he was dealing with the argument that so many denominationalists make that, you know, in that phrase, ace of marion human, you know, so that your sins could be forgiven, so many argue that ace there is used in a causal sense because, you know, because your sins have already been forgiven. And so Dave on page 46 of that book said this quote, had the Holy Spirit intended to say that baptism is because of or on account of past forgiveness, he could have used the Greek preposition that conveys that very idea, dea, with the accusative.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:09

So I disagree with this kind of argument, whether it's used in baptism context, watch, I don't know why everything is in the baptism context or divorce and remarriage context. Um, the the mistake that's made is that there's an inference that by not saying A, the person must have meant B. And that's really a mistake. Now, I don't want to say that there's not an exception to this rule because I can't think of every scenario right now. But generally speaking, we should be interpreting what was said, not what was not said. And so Mike scored a point here on them being inconsistent, but I don't think that really helps his end conclusion. It just shows that you can't uh be trying to interpret silence.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:48

So so Dave says that you know, Deuteronomy 24 has no bearing on this because Jesus uh has gone back to God's ideal will for marriage at the beginning. But I don't think that Dave's criticism is legitimate. Um, you know, Jesus in Matthew 19, he is dealing with the question of Deuteronomy 24. Okay, but but but again, just keep in mind what I said earlier. I think we all can agree what Jesus says on divorce and remarriage in Matthew 19 is consistent, it's harmonious with what Jesus said on divorce and remarriage in Matthew 5.32. And in Matthew 5.32, Jesus is correcting the rabbinic false understanding of Deuteronomy 24, verse 1 in Matthew 5.31. He states that false understanding in Matthew 5.31, and then he clarifies what Deuteronomy 24 verses 1 to 4 really means in Matthew 5.32.

SPEAKER_00 2:28:44

Okay, that is a total mistake, totally wrong, incorrect mistake. Jesus is not correcting the rabbinic understanding of Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1 in Matthew 5, 31, 32. Jesus says, You have heard it was said certificate of divorce. That's Deuteronomy 24. You've heard it was said certificate of divorce. Jesus is referencing what Moses had was a certificate of divorce. Then he says, Jesus says, but I say to you, and so Jesus is overriding Moses. Jesus isn't explaining Moses, Jesus is overriding Moses. And to put it more precisely, Jesus is choosing Moses in Genesis over Moses in Deuteronomy. So it's not a question of how to interpret Deuteronomy 24. It's a question of which Moses? Genesis Moses or Deuteronomy Moses. And we learn later in Matthew 19, 8 that Deuteronomy Moses was writing a regulation that had a concession for hard-heartedness. Therefore, we should be looking to the beginning, not to the regulation, both of which were written by Moses. So no, Jesus was not saying you need to interpret Deuteronomy 24 properly. He was saying you need to stop acting like Deuteronomy chapter 24 is the moral law.

SPEAKER_01 2:30:09

And so it seems like uh Jesus still believes that Matt that Deuteronomy 24 verses 1 to 4 is relevant. I don't think that Dave's argument works. So Dave has made the big argument, or you know, uh, or made his argument on the basis of Matthew chapter 19, verse 8. So, you know, in in Matthew uh 19, 3, the um Pharisees ask Jesus about the any cause divorce, and Jesus rebukes them, haven't you read? And he quotes Genesis 1.27 and he quotes Genesis 2.24. So he goes back to the beginning. And so what's Jesus' point? His point is that since this is God's ideal will for marriage in the beginning, no, it's not legitimate then to divorce your wife for any and every reason. You know, you you should try to keep together what God has put asunder. And so the Pharisees come back and they ask verse 7, well, why then did Moses command to you know, ride her a bill of divorce and send her away? And and Jesus makes the point it's because of the hardness of your heart. It's because human sinfulness causes marriage to be so damaged sometimes that divorce is the better alternative.

SPEAKER_00 2:31:26

Okay, this is another mistake. Jesus says the man who divorces his wife has a hard heart. Mike flipped that around to me to say the opposite. What Mike is saying is that two people are married, say the wife does some bad stuff, she has a hard heart, is what Mike is saying, and therefore the man divorces her. That's not what Jesus said. Jesus focused on the hard-heartedness of the divorcer. He didn't speak to the heart condition of the woman who was who allegedly sinned. Right? He so he so Jesus focuses on the divorcer, the man in that culture. What Jesus is saying is if your wife cheats on you and you divorce her for it, your divorce is a hard-hearted act. If that stuns you, then you can understand why the disciples were stunned a couple of verses later.

SPEAKER_01 2:32:17

But then Jesus says, from the beginning it was not so. Now, uh, was not so in Greek is oo gagamen. And so that's a perfect tense form, negated perfect tense form. And so, you know, some argues that what that means is God's ideal will in the beginning has remained true to the present time. But a problem with that interpretation is the first part of the verse, because standing in between Jesus and the beginning was Moses. And so if it has never been the case, because of the ideal will at the beginning, that human hard-heartedness would allow divorces to take place, that totally negates Moses.

SPEAKER_00 2:33:07

So it was Yes, yes, yes, yes. It totally negates Moses in Deuteronomy chapter 24. 100%. That's exactly right. That's what Jesus was saying. Jesus chooses Moses in Genesis over Moses in Deuteronomy.

SPEAKER_01 2:33:22

Moses not speaking by inspiration? No, of course he was speaking by inspiration.

SPEAKER_00 2:33:28

Okay, so yes, Moses was speaking by inspiration because more sin was tolerated in the Old Testament, and Moses was enacting a government law which is not a mirror of the moral law. So it can't be a mirror of the moral law because it doesn't match God's ideal will from the beginning, as Mike just agreed to. So what what the confusion here is about is what changed from the Old Testament to the New Testament. There is a change to the law. Hebrews chapter 7, verse 12 uh tells us that Jesus came to fulfill the law, which means to add the law until it's full. That's Matthew 5, 17. We have baptism now. We have communion now. We're not doing the temple and the sacrifices. Circumcision isn't required. Oaths are now disfavored. The list goes on. We're not doing the Levitical calendar. We're not doing love-right marriages anymore. There's a change that's been made. Much of what was tolerated in the Old Testament is not tolerated now. And this shouldn't surprise us because Abraham and Jacob both have incestuous marriages, right? But after Leviticus 18, you're not doing that anymore. So that was tolerated during their time, but no longer tolerated. So there's a tolerance that was removed because of Moses with Leviticus 18, for example. And now there are other tolerances that are removed now because of Jesus. One of those tolerances was for divorce and remarriage. Moses allotted for hard-heartedness, but now we're going back to the ideal in the beginning. So Jesus said to pray for God's will on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus is the new Adam in Romans chapter 5 to buy back everything that Adam lost. We're not trying to bring the kingdom of Moses, right? That's the Pharisees' dream. Let's bring back Moses. Jesus came to bring the kingdom of God. And in Luke 16, 16, Jesus said that until John the Baptist there was the law and the prophets, but now the kingdom of God is preached. There's a change now in the New Testament.

SPEAKER_01 2:35:15

And so most translations then have understood that perfect Gagan there as being an aoristic perfect. And so they don't say, but from the beginning it has not been so. Rather, most translations say, but from the beginning it was not so. And that's what you find in the King James, you find that in the New King James, you find that in the uh RSV, you find that in the uh NIV, you find that in the New Revised Standard Version, the ESV, the NIV, you know, that's the understanding that that perfect is an aoristic perfect.

SPEAKER_00 2:35:53

Yeah, so this is just missing the forest for the Greek here.

SPEAKER_01 2:35:56

Yeah, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. So, so in other words, the point is since God's will in the beginning, his ideal will, is that marriage not end, then obviously uh you know, you shouldn't try to get a divorce for any and every reason, but man's hard-heartedness has caused God to allow uh some marriages to end. And then Jesus continues on in verse nine, and I say to you that whoever divorces his wife, except it be for sexual immorality and marries another woman, commits adultery. Now, now what Jesus says in verse nine is not a restatement of God's ideal will in the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 2:36:39

Yes, it is a restatement of God's ideal will in the beginning, and that's why you should change the interpretation of fornication uh to not be a real exception, because that would make Jesus to be arguing with himself, which is the whole thing Mike's trying to navigate here, because in Matthew 19, you have Jesus saying, in the beginning, no exceptions, all that. And then he thinks there's a like a real exception going on. In Matthew 19, 9, it's not a real exception. Jesus is talking about there an invalid marriage. That's why he uses the word fornication.

SPEAKER_01 2:37:09

Because God's ideal will in the beginning is that marriage be permanent. I mean, in the beginning, whenever uh God brought Eve to Adam, there was no death. There was no sin. God's will in the beginning was that marriage continue. You know, however, sin changed that. Sin caused marriages to end. And so whenever Jesus says, except it be for sexual immorality, that wasn't God's will in the beginning because there was no sin. There was no sexual immorality. That is a concession to human hard-heartedness.

SPEAKER_00 2:37:46

All right, so Mike is noticing here the contradiction between Jesus' appeal to the beginning and his interpretation of that the exception clause allows a person to divorce for infidelity. He's he's identified there's a contradiction here. And he's right that there is a contradiction here. So he's trying to figure out how do I navigate that, how do I make sense of that? And so I think he's misinterpreting the exception clause here, and I have a whole video on that. But and I think the exception clause refers to an uh an invalid marriage. The idea was a man married like a divorced woman, for example. He married somebody who was already married. I have the already married view of the exception clause. Uh, and so Mike is right that if you interpret the exception clause to be for infidelity, you have to do a lot of work to try to make it fit with Jesus' argument because Jesus' argument would not agree with his conclusion if you think the exception is for infidelity. And that should tell you they're misinterpreting the exception clause.

SPEAKER_01 2:38:44

Now, I believe that Jesus got that exception from God himself because God divorced Israel, you know, metaphorically, for Israel's fornication. Jeremiah chapter three, verse.

SPEAKER_00 2:38:58

Okay, so first the Jeremiah passage isn't in the Matthew passages. Second, if Jeremiah was teaching us about rules for marriage, rather than it just being an analogy designed to call a particular group of people to repentance. But if it was, you know, rules about marriage in Jeremiah chapter three, if that was the idea, then if that was true, it would be permissible for a pastor to be the husband of two sisters in violation of Leviticus 18 and 1 Timothy chapter 3. Third, Jeremiah 3 understands the Mosaic allowance for divorce in Deuteronomy chapter 24, verse 1 to be adultery. So that means when Jesus rejects the Mosaic allowance for divorce in Matthew 19, 8, Jesus rejected divorce for adultery specifically in Matthew chapter 19, verse 8. So therefore, Jesus couldn't be rejecting divorce for adultery in verse 8 and then allowing divorce for adultery in verse 9. So if anything, Jeremiah chapter 3 tells us that the exception clause in Matthew 19, 9 can't be for infidelity. I think it's more likely than not, at least at the time that he made this video, Mike has not had the opportunity to hear the argument I'm giving, so I don't know what he would say to all of this. But the point is, Jeremiah chapter 3 just does not help him at all, actually argues against his position.

SPEAKER_06 2:40:09

John the Baptist told Herod, you have your brother Philip's wife. In fact, the verse says, because John had said to Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. John said, She is still Philip's wife. This is continuing. The idea is that she is continuing in adultery.

SPEAKER_01 2:40:28

So I just think there's some problems with what Don says. So so, first of all, here's the thing John the Baptist was an Old Testament prophet. So, so what Old Testament passage served as his basis for saying to Herod, it is not lawful for you to be married to your brother's wife. Notice what John said to Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. That marriage was commanded to be broken up because it was an incestuous marriage. That's the point. And whenever you read Josephus, and he speaks of this situation and he speaks of similar situations in the Herodian household, where uh people had divorced and you know married brothers' wives, the basis of criticism is not the adultery per se, the basis for criticism is the incest. So, for instance, in uh Antiquities, book 18, uh Josephus says Herodias took upon her to confound the laws of our country and divorce herself from her husband while he was alive, and was married to Herod, her husband's brother by her father's side. And concerning a similar situation, Book 18 of Antiquities, uh Josephus writes, For it is abhorrent to the Jews to marry the wife of a brother. And so that that was the basis upon which John said to Herod, It's not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. So trying to parallel that with Matthew 19, verse 9 is not legitimate.

SPEAKER_00 2:42:25

So I agree uh that John the Baptist's criticism was of Herod's incest through affinity with Herodias. John the Baptist was not focused on the fact that it was an adulterous remarriage, uh, he was focused on the fact that it was incest. But Mike, I would say, needs to go another step further here. So if divorce ended Herodias's first marriage, then her marriage to Herod would not be incest through affinity. The point is divorce didn't end Herodias's first marriage. That's the point. So then if you say, well, their first intimate time together, that's incest, but it ends the first marriage, and now she's married to Herod uh validly, then John the Baptist's comment doesn't work because he says it's unlawful for you to have her, not just marry her, but to have her. I agree that John the Baptist isn't giving an opinion about remarriages, adulterous remarriages here. But he is proceeding on the basis of three premises. Number one, divorce does not end a valid marriage. Number two, divorce and remarriage doesn't end a valid marriage. Divorce, remarriage, and sex in the remarriage doesn't end the first valid marriage. Those are the same premises at issue when Jesus teaches on divorce and remarriage. That's why Herod should have divorced Herodias and why adulterous remarriages should be divorced as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:43:57

The adultery of Matthew 19:9 is committed when someone illegitimately divorces their maid and marries another person. And I think I think that's what the grammar shows. Um, you know, for instance, if you look at it in Luke 16, 18, you know, whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery. And there, what you find is the action of divorcing your wife and marrying another person, those are those are present participles. So it's, I'm just quoting the relevant parts. Ha apaluon chi gamon muekue, right? Force of present tense participles generally describes action that's simultaneous with the action of the main verb. So so the force of this statement is something like, you know, by divorcing and marrying another person, you commit adultery. I mean, a good parallel to illustrate that would be a passage like First Corinthians chapter 8 and verse 12. So here's what what Paul says. Um, but by so sinning against the brothers and striking their weak consciences, you sin against Christ. So so there you've got two present tense participles, and then you've got a present tense verb. So uh hamartanantes, sinning, that's a present tense participle. And uh tuptantes, striking, that's a present tense participle. And then last word of the sentence, sin, hamartan eta, that's a present indicative verb. So the point is by sinning against the brothers and striking their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. So so the action of the two participles uh results in the action of that main verb. In committing these, in doing the action of these two participles, you do the action of the main verb. And that that seems to be the the same thing that you have there in Luke chapter 16, verse 18. So, so in other words, you commit adultery by divorcing and marrying another person. Now, you know, this panel says that I've used a definition for adultery that that is not backed up by any lexical source. Um because because they think that I've restricted the meaning of adultery just to divorce and marry. And if you've listened closely, that's not what I've said. I mean, you commit the adultery when you divorce and you marry, but it's more than that. You know, I've argued that you know, uh you commit adultery by divorcing and remarrying because when you divorce illegitimately and you marry another person illegitimately, you're unfaithful to this person to whom you made the vow, and you are lusting after this other person to whom you are not entitled. And so I'm not really arguing for a different definition for adultery than what you find in Matthew 5.28, where whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart, where you're acting unfaithfully to the one to whom you've made these vows and you're lusting after this other person. And so I don't think that their criticism of me is legitimate. And I would just say um Don and Carrie have argued that there's literal adultery and there's spiritual adultery. And in the video, you hear Carrie say to um, Dave, well, I'm glad that you brought up Hugo McCord's statement that there's a third category of adultery, there's mental adultery. So they're all arguing that Matthew 5, 28 is mental adultery. But you know, if you look up that word that's translated commits adultery with her art in his heart in in Bidag, right? The most respected Greek lexicon, and and Dave acknowledges it as such in his book, it's it's muikuo. But if you if you just look that up in in Bidag, uh it just defines it as um uh commit adultery with someone. And and it never uh will include this idea of mental adultery relative to Matthew 5.28. It lumps Matthew 5.28 in the same category as uh literal adultery in Matthew 5.27 and other passages. So so, in other words, I mean here's what I'm saying. This this may not be clear, but what I'm saying is what the argument that they're using against me concerning how I'm defining adultery in Matthew 19.9 could be used against them concerning how they're defining adultery, mental adultery in Matthew 5.28. Because BDAG does not say anything about mental adultery, it just includes Matthew 5.28 under this general definition of commit adultery with someone.

SPEAKER_00 2:49:06

Okay, so that's a lot, but what he seems to be saying is that the remarriage ceremony is adultery, and that's the adultery Jesus speaks of when he says divorce and remarry, it's adultery. But he seems to also say that it's the lust after the new spouse that's adultery. So in one breath it's the ceremony, in another breath, it's the lust. And then previously he said that the idea commits adultery, Matthew 5.32, is the same idea as the woman being defiled in Deuteronomy chapter 24 when she remarries. And the woman being defiled, that's that they're having sex. That's what that's all about. So that's so the definition of like what is the adultery kind of keeps moving around. But you know, in the Talmud, and Jesus is speaking to Pharisees, for example, in Matthew 19, when it refers to remarriage at adultery, they're talking about sex in the second marriage. It's not complicated. In Romans chapter 7, when it talks about a woman who is joined with another man, shall be called an adulteress, it's talking about the sex. So I don't just understand how hermeneutically it makes sense for him to say that fornication and the exception clause has to be a physical act, but adultery does not have to be the physical act there. Now it's true in Matthew 5, 28, it talks about adultery in the heart, but it's contextually defined there. There's nothing in the divorce remarriage passages that contextually changes the meaning of adultery away from its normal meaning. Like in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul said it's better to marry than to burn with passion. Are we supposed to think Mary Paul wasn't including the idea of sex when he said to marry? Of course. And so similarly, Jesus is including the idea of sex when he says a man divorces and marries another, he commits adultery. So the adultery has to be the sex in the remarriage, and that means neither the divorce nor the remarriage ended the first marriage.

SPEAKER_01 2:50:57

If a woman is put away by her innocent husband for her sexual immorality, that's a legitimate divorce, and he has the right to remarry. And so she is in no sense married to him. Now they're gonna argue something like, well, she's still handcuffed to the law of God. She's not married. Even if you take that position, she's not married. And by the way, we're all handcuffed to the law of God. I'm not gonna critique that argument anymore, but she's not married, she's not married to this man.

SPEAKER_00 2:51:29

If the if the exception clause is for infidelity, there is a Schrdinger's marriage dilemma. They're married and not married at the same time. So if a wife cheats and uh a husband divorces, the churches of Christ, their majority view, which is also my old view and Mike's old view, what what uh they would say is that they're married and not married at the same time. So the woman who cheated, she's still bound to the marriage, but the man who's innocent, he is not bound to the marriage. So they're married and married, uh married and not married at the same time. And so then Mike mentions this standard response from the church of Christ, which is also what I used to do, also. The woman is still kind of bound to the law of God. So that's how the husband can be free. He's not bound to her, but she's still bound to the law of God, and that's why she can't remarry, but he can. And the problem with that is Mark chapter 10 and verse 11. It says that if a man divorces and remarries, he commits adultery against her, that is, against his first wife. Adultery is against a spouse, not only against the law of God. Adultery can only be against a spouse if the two of them are still married. So infidelity either frees both to remarry or it frees neither of them to remarry, but it cannot free one, but not the other. That's impossible. That's the Schrdinger's marriage dilemma, and it should knock down every divorce and remarriage exception argument that allows only the innocent one to remarry.

SPEAKER_01 2:52:57

So here's a woman who has been legitimately divorced for her sexual immorality, but per their understanding, the second clause of Matthew 19, 9, if another man marries her, they commit adultery. Now, their definition of adultery is for a married person, that I mean, this is the standard definition, for a married person to have sex with someone to whom they're not married. But for them to maintain their view that a put away guilty party commits adultery if they remarry, for them to maintain that view, they've got to redefine adultery.

SPEAKER_00 2:53:32

So he's absolutely right here. Two unmarried people cannot commit adultery. There's no issue with my view because I don't think the exception clause allows anybody to remarry after a valid marriage is divorced. But if you think pornea in the exception clause is for infidelity, Mike is totally right. You've got a major problem with the word adultery. Husband and wife are married, wife cheats, husband divorces. He's free to remarry, right? He's got no marriage bond. She is not free to be able to remarry. If she were to remarry, it would be adultery. So, in order for that to be conceptually possible, you'd have to change the meaning of the word adultery because adultery is someone's married and then they go marry somebody else. But if you believe in the innocent party to adultery view, then he's able to remarry, which means they're not married, which means her remarriage can't be adultery. Or you have to change the meaning of the word adultery. And that's what Mike's pointing out here, that they claim to think the word adultery has its normal meaning, but in fact, they have to assume a separate meaning for the word adultery to make their whole construct work. And that all comes from a wrong interpretation of fornication in the exception clause.

SPEAKER_01 2:54:42

So Don says relative to Matthew 19, 9, you know, whoever literal man shall divorce his wife, literal divorce, literal wife, and marry another little marriage, literal other woman, he commits adultery. And so he's saying, since all these other words are literal, uh, it's inconsistent to say then that the adultery would be uh metaphorical. But uh what I would say is it's the very fact that the marriage, that excuse me, the divorce and the marriage are literal that demand that the adultery be metaphorical. It's that very fact. Because if it's a literal divorce, and if it's a literal marriage, and if the literal definition of adultery is for a married man to sleep with someone to whom he's not married, it demands the metaphorical meaning of adultery.

SPEAKER_00 2:55:36

But okay, so let me try to explain this. What happened was that uh this is another video, Don criticized Mike's view because Don said if you look at all these words in like Matthew 19, for example, verse nine, all these things are literal. It's a literal man, it's a literal woman, it's a literal marriage, a little divorce. All these things are literal. And so then the adultery at the end of it must also be must also be literal. Now I don't think that saying all the other words in a passage are literal, therefore this last word must also be literal is always going to work. I mean, it sounds great rhetorically when you hear it, but I don't actually think that's always going to work. But I want to respond to what Mike Mike says here. The issue here is what is meant by the word literal. So when Mike says the divorce and remarriage are literal, it sounds like what he's saying is that they're valid. Uh, and so that the divorce actually ended the first marriage. And so the remarriage was actually a new valid marriage. But literal and valid are not the same thing. So take Mark chapter six. Mark says Herod married Herodias. Was that a literal marriage? Yes, it was a legal marriage. Uh, I'm sure there was a ceremony and there was paperwork and all that. Was it a valid marriage? No, it was incest. We know that from John the Baptist. So the Greek words for marry, divorce, husband, and wife can be used literally to refer to what is typically sociologically, culturally, legally called marriage, divorce, husband, wife. So it's literal in that respect. But that doesn't mean God sees it as a valid marriage. And so I've seen this over and over where, again, where literal and valid are assumed to mean the same thing and they don't. It's just not how these words were used. So it's the same way. Like if I say, oh, the two gay guys, they got married. Did they literally get married? Well, they got legally married, they think they're married. That's the term that we typically use in our common parlance. Do I think that they're validly married? No, I don't think they're validly married.

SPEAKER_01 2:57:35

But but here's what I want you to realize concerning Don's position. Don cannot give full weight to those words divorce and marry, because he gives the literal meaning to commits adultery. So, in other words, the reason why Don thinks that a remarriage is literal adultery is because Don believes that a person wasn't really divorced when they were divorced. God didn't recognize the divorce. And Don says that a person wasn't really married when they were remarried because God didn't recognize the marriage. And so because God didn't recognize the divorce or the marriage, God still views this person as married to their first mate. And so they commit adultery every time they sleep with the second mate.

SPEAKER_00 2:58:22

All right, so Mike is partially right here. It's not that adultery, divorce, and remarriage cannot all be literal. They are all literal. It's just that your choices are these. Adultery is literal and divorce and remarriage are not valid. Or adultery is not literal and divorce and remarriage is valid. So, and I would say it has to be the first one. It has to be that the adultery is literal because it's adultery against her in Mark chapter 10, 11. And so if the divorce ended the first marriage, he cannot commit adultery against her. So it has to be the divorce and remarriage are not valid. Otherwise, John the Baptist would be wrong. It wouldn't be unlawful for Herod to have Herodias due to incest through affinity because her marriage to her first husband would be gone. So both Mark 6 uh with Herodias and Mark 10 with the phrase against her show us that neither the divorce, the remarriage, nor the sex in the remarriage dissolves the first marriage.

SPEAKER_01 2:59:20

Apoluo in BDAG, the word for divorce, look at Gameo in BDAG, the word for Mary, and see if it ever gives the definition of a civil divorce and civil marriage in BDAG. It doesn't.

SPEAKER_00 2:59:52

Okay, so in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 10 and 11, it says a wife shouldn't divorce, but if she does, she should remain unmarried or reconcile to her husband. I think all of that is literal. I think the divorce is literal, and I think that she still has a husband. The question is not literalism, the question is validity. Either the divorce was not valid, that is, it did not dissolve the marriage, or her husband uh is not her valid husband. And I would say the divorce was not valid, which is why she should be single or reconciled. And you know, suppose her divorce was valid. Let's suppose it did dissolve her first marriage somehow, then there'd be no reason for her to be single or to be reconciled, right? So then what kind of divorce is this, right? It's a civil divorce, not a divorce that uh dissolves her marriage in the eyes of God. So that's the way you have to understand it. You have to go through the logic of it and then realize what the person means.

SPEAKER_01 3:00:47

Think about uh 1 John 3, verse 15. Uh, whoever, literal person, hates literal act of hating, his brother, literal brother, is a murderer, metaphorical murderer. And you know that no murderer has eternal life in him, literal eternal life. So you see, Don's Don's argument just doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 3:01:11

So I I agree with Mike on this point that the rhetorical tool there, like there's you know, there's five literal things in a row, so the sixth thing must also be literal, is not a good argument. So I agree with Don's conclusion that an impermissible remarriage is an ongoing state of adultery, but not just that particular argument that he used there.

SPEAKER_01 3:01:26

Corinthians chapter 7, um, verse 11, after telling the woman not to divorce her husband, says, But if she divorces him, let her remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband. And um that term unmarried, I mean it's an adjective, it means unmarried. In fact, if you drop back a few verses, it's found in 1 Corinthians 7 9, where Paul speaks to the unmarried and to the widows.

SPEAKER_00 3:01:54

Yes, so she is unmarried legally, but if she was unmarried in God's eyes, she could marry someone else. So this is just failing to distinguish between legal, social realm, how and how God views it. So it couldn't be adultery in any sense of the word for anyone to remarry after divorce if the divorce actually dissolved the marriage. It's not that adultery would just be figurative, it's that it could not be adultery at all. So it certainly is an adultery against her, as Mark 10, verse 11 says. And now he goes back to a couple of verses earlier where it says uh to the widows and to the unmarried. And the unmarried in that verse is referring to widowers. So widows and widowers you have in verse 8, then you have to the married starting in verse 10, and then you have uh to the betrothed in verse 25. So Paul writes in reverse chronological order widows, right? Married, then betrothed. Well, when it says widows and widowers, the word for widowers, he just uses the word unmarried there. And of course, those unmarried people can marry somebody else. Why? Because they're widowers and their first spouse is dead. But the unmarried, quote unquote, person in verse 10 cannot marry somebody else. Paul tells them not to. Why? Because they are in fact still married. So again, you can't use the Greek word. You have to understand what the person meant by what they said. And the definition of the Greek word kind of gets you in the neighborhood, but you got to use the context and you have to use some reason to figure out what was intended by the author.

SPEAKER_01 3:03:19

And the unmarried there are probably widowers, because in Greek at that time they had no word for widower. And so because it's coupled with widows, it probably means widower. But a widower is literally someone who is unmarried. And so, so here, 1 Corinthians 7 11, if a woman divorces her wife for a reason less serious than his sexual immorality, Paul calls her unmarried. Now, Don says, well, civilly, not literally, civilly, not before God, just civilly. But, you know, look up Agamos in uh in BDAG, and you're not going to find civilly unmarried. I mean, again, the argument they use against me concerning how I define adultery, I could use against them and how they define unmarried. But but it seems like since Paul uses that word, you know, right there, 1 Corinthians 7, what is it, verse 8 and 1 Corinthians 7 11, it seems like she's literally unmarried. Or think about John 4.

SPEAKER_00 3:04:19

It could not be adultery for her to remarry if she was in fact not married in any stretch in any possible way. But it is adultery for her to remarry, hence she is still married.

SPEAKER_01 3:04:50

Now, you know, here this woman has been married five times, and now she's not married, she's just living with a man. And it seems like Jesus grants a status to those five previous marriages that he doesn't grant to her present live-in relationship. And because she's living with a man, she doesn't have the highest morals. You have to you have to believe that uh you know some impropriety happened in those five previous marriages. I mean, she probably was divorced and remarried contrary to God's will. But even though she was divorced and remarried contrary to God's will, those were real husbands that she had. And it's different than her present live-in relationship. And so Jesus says to her, in what you say, you say rightly, I have no husband. None of those five previous men to whom she was married did God consider to be her husband. And so that's why I think that we have every reason to interpret whoever divorces their wife to be literal divorce, whoever marries another woman to be literal marriage. And that's why I think it's demanded to see commits adultery as metaphorical adultery.

SPEAKER_00 3:06:10

Okay, so again, these words married, divorce, husband and wife are literal, okay, but the Greek word itself does not convey validity. This just conflates literal with valid. So in Mark chapter six, the author writes that Herod married Herodias. No one thinks that Mark thought incestuous marriages were valid, but he writes married. Why does he write married? Because it's true. They are legally married sociologically. They all think they're married, but it wasn't a valid marriage in God's eye. So the fact that Jesus calls the Samaritan woman's husbands doesn't convey validity. Thank you for sticking with me through all of this. Go ahead and get my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. You get it at Amazon.com. Subscribe, like, comment, do all the things. I would love to hear your comments, and I will see you guys next time.