Divorce Your Remarriage

REACT: Corey Minor on Divorce and Remarriage (SmartChristians Podcast)

• Chris Iverson

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 59:23

Corey Minor runs the large SmartChristians podcast and in May 2026, he uploaded an episode about divorce and remarriage ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uSMy4L-fmE ).  Corey has the typical permissive evangelical view on the subject except he believes the guilty party to adultery is not specifically prohibited from remarrying.  I react to Corey's interpretation in this episode.

Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH9YRS7N/
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/divorceyourremarriage/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DivorceYourRemarriage
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-7751594
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578367894327
Email: DivorceYourRemarriage@gmail.com

SPEAKER_01

Corey Minor runs a YouTube channel called Smart Christians, and he's got 250,000 subscribers. Corey has had a rough upbringing. He had a period of homelessness, and I think his dad had some drug problems at some point. Um, he was found guilty, Corey was, of some kind of fraud scheme, and he received a prison sentence of 240 months, 20 years. And also in April or May of 2026, he had like some significant health problems. But I think he's recovered from those. So Corey Minor did an episode recently where he talked about divorce and remarriage. And so we're gonna cover what Corey has to say about that.

SPEAKER_00

When you marry someone, again, this is a vow, and in this vow, you are taking that other person to be one with you. Remember what God says. He says this in Genesis 24. He says that for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. How important is that? Well, Jesus reiterates the same thing in Matthew 19, 4, who, by the way, he's the same Lord who says it in Genesis. He says, and he answers and says, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this reason, a man shall leave his mother and father and be joined, and the two should become one flesh, no longer two, but one. And now I want you to notice this last part. I think we forget. I think we forget because of that vow, this is why God takes it seriously. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. The questions people are going to have, well, how do I know God has joined us together? Well, here's how you know. Did you make a vow? Sure. Well, then God is going to honor your vow. The issue is though, what if you marry someone that you should not have married? We'll talk about that.

SPEAKER_01

Let me give a little background here. It might be, I don't know if it is, but it might be that Corey is responding to uh an incorrect teaching that's been going around where people will say, Well, I got married. It looks like I got married, I got a marriage license, I had a church ceremony at all the things normally people would do to get married, but this wasn't the person that God had for me. So therefore, we weren't really married. We weren't really joined together. We weren't really married because this wasn't a spouse God had for me. Some variation of that. Now, Corey might be responding to that. And what he's saying is, no, no, once you fulfill the necessary conditions for a marriage, you're married. That's it. If you married the wrong person, still married. That's, I think, maybe what Corey is responding to. So if that's what he's responding to, I totally get the instinct there. But I don't think the vow is the thing that makes people married. Or let me put it this way: I don't think the vow is the necessary condition for marriage. So the necessary conditions for marriage, I think there are five of them. It's one man and one woman, consent to be married, approval by the government, not incest, and not adulterous. The consent part is kind of what he's getting at with the vow. But I don't think technically you'd have to have a vow. You'd have to have consent. For example, you two atheists can get married. They're still married even though they're not vowing to God. They're consenting to be married with each other, and then God joins them when all of the conditions for a marriage are met. Let me also mention about approval from the civil government. You do have to have approval from the civil government. We see that, like, for example, under the Mosaic law, there's a number of laws. You know, the priests are restricted from marrying certain women. Um, you have to marry within your tribe. You're not allowed to marry an idolater. There's a bunch of governmental regulations on marriage, and the presupposition behind those is that the government has to approve your marriage or you're not married, right? And that's why, for example, in Ezra chapter 10, Ezra, who had executory power of the government, could require a disillusion of marriages because those were not valid marriages under the laws of Moses from Deuteronomy chapter seven. So let's continue to hear what uh Corey has to say.

SPEAKER_00

Who can marry? Who is allowed to marry? Well, anyone, according to God, who is biblically single for whatever reason, either they have never been married before, or they are single either because they're widowed or a widower, or they have been divorced biblically.

SPEAKER_01

But he said, who can marry? And then he said, who is allowed to marry? And those are not the same thing. So let me give you an example of how those are not the same thing. For example, if a believer marries an unbeliever, that's not allowed. Like you're not supposed to be unequally yoked with an unbeliever, but they can do it. So there's a situation where somebody can marry, but they're not allowed to marry that person, not supposed to. But if they do, then they are still married. Um, not being allowed to marry, I would say that would be like, for example, if a brother wanted to marry his sister, you can't do that. Like even if they, even if it was legal somewhere and they consented and all of that stuff, you can't. Like literally, you cannot. Leviticus 18 prohibits that. That's not a marriage. You can call it a marriage. God is never going to join those two together in incest. So that would be an example of a marriage you can't do, where there are marriages you can do, but you're not supposed to, like being unequally yoked.

SPEAKER_00

God is concerned about who you marry. For example, he says, do not be joined together or bound with unbelievers. There is no fellowship that you can have with light and darkness. So, number one, you can only marry or you should only marry a believer. Again, there are some people who marry someone who's not a believer. And so, what do we do about that? We'll come back to that in a second. And by the way, on this particular point that we're looking at here, it's not so much about ethnicity or anything like that. Why do we know that? Because there are people in the Bible who previously, though they were not part of ethnically Israel, becomes part because they have accepted God as the God of Israel, the the Lord, our Lord. They've accepted him as their God. So people like Rahab or people like Ruth, who we even see in the genealogy of Jesus, you are free to marry them. Why? Because they are believers, and so it's believers marrying believers.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, I just want to mention here, I completely agree with Corey that interracial marriages are completely 100% biblically permissible.

SPEAKER_00

Now, here's the question, though. What if I got married, but I married an unbeliever? If you're happily married to an unbeliever, amen. Praise God. Live in such a way that you want to convert that unbeliever to a believer. What if they are part of the occult, et cetera? You name it. Guess what? You're married to that person. When you say I do, he said you better. So marry the person, be committed to the person. And the Bible gives us an example of someone who marries a person who is unfaithful, but God still causes him to stay with this person, even though the person is giving them legitimate reasons to divorce, and that is Hosea being married to Gomer. And God is trying to show the point that he still has this love. And so the focus is pleasing God with your body, with your marriage. Uh now, granted, even if you there is some sort of infidelity, you do have the option to leave. But God was showing how committed he is, even with us who have been certainly at times in our walk with Christ and before that, unfaithful to him. But he's showing you how important his vows are to us.

SPEAKER_01

Corey brings up Hosea, and he says Hosea has grounds for divorce because of Gomer's infidelity. He doesn't say this here, but I believe he's getting this from Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9. And there's an exception clause in those two passages, and I disagree with his interpretation of the exception clause. Now he doesn't defend that interpretation in this video, but here's the defense that is normally given. So Jesus says, if you uh divorce your wife except for fornication, or in some translations, sexual immorality, so except for this thing, this sexual sin, if you divorce except for this sin, uh you make her commit adultery. That's Matthew 5.32. Or if you divorce except for sexual immorality and you marry another, then you commit adultery by that remarriage. And the whole point of that is Jesus is calling remarriages adultery. He does that seven times in the New Testament, in order to say that the first marriage is not over. Like you got a divorce, you thought your first marriage is over because you got a divorce. That's what people typically think. Jesus is upending that. He's saying, no, divorce does not dissolve a marriage in God's eyes. So that if a person remarries, they're just cheating on their first spouse to whom they are still married. That's the shocking teaching of Jesus on divorce and remarriage. But then there's this exception clause, except it be for fornication or sexual immorality. The Greek word there is pornea. So the question is, what is this sexual sin Jesus is talking about? So Corey has the view that it's infidelity in a marriage. So, for example, a husband and wife are married, she cheats on the man, and then he is the innocent party, and so he can divorce her and he can go marry somebody else. Later on, Corey's going to say maybe the guilty party can also remarry. So he has that view. So there are a number of problems with this view. For example, it would only allow the man to divorce his unfaithful wife, it would not allow the wife to divorce an unfaithful husband. Uh, that's because the exception clause is only in those verses that talk about a man divorcing his wife, and not in the verse, it talks about a wife divorcing her husband. So it would be a one-way gendered rule. And yet the divorce and remarriage passages are very clearly in Matthew 5, 32, Matthew 19, 9, Luke 16, 18, Mark 10, 11, and 12, and in 1 Corinthians 7 are definitely gender neutral in all other respects. And yet in this one respect, we're supposed to believe that it's not gender neutral. So that cuts against the rules everywhere else. And that should make us disfavor the interpretation that except for for for fornication is referring to except for infidelity within a marriage. Another problem is that in Matthew chapter 19, verse 7, the Pharisees asked Jesus, what about divorcing for adultery? Now they don't use the word adultery there, but they say, what about the Mosaic allowance for adultery? But they use the word command. And we understand from the Talmud what they mean by that is divorcing your wife because she cheated on you. And that was the Hillel view. We see that in the Gemera, in uh Gitin 9, 10, the Gemera portion there. Also, we know that in Jeremiah chapter 3, verses 1 through 8 that reference the Mosaic law in Deuteronomy 24, that the uh matter of uncleanness there in Deuteronomy chapter 24, one, that the Pharisees are referencing in Matthew 19, 7, that that matter of uncleanness is for adultery. That's how Jeremiah interprets it in an inspired way. So the Pharisees were asking Jesus, what about divorcing your wife for adultery? in Matthew 19, 7. And in Matthew 19, 8, Jesus says, that is not morally permissible. That is not the moral law. Moses allowed you to divorce your wife for adultery because you had hard hearts. It's not part of the moral law. So he rejects that. And that's consistent with what he did earlier, because in Matthew 19, verses 3 through 8, Jesus is giving a no exception argument. And then the Pharisees asking, like this extreme case. What if your wife cheats on you? Moses said, You can divorce her if you can divorce her if she cheats on you. In fact, the Hillel Pharisees interpreted that to mean that you must divorce her. So, Jesus, you're saying, you know, Moses required divorce for adultery, and you're saying you can't divorce for adultery? And then Jesus says, actually, that wasn't required to divorce for adultery, that was allowed to divorce for adultery. And uh that was allowed for your hard-heartedness. That was a concession to your hard hearts, but from the beginning it was not so. And if you notice that in Matthew 19, 8, who has the hard hearts? The man who's divorcing his wife for infidelity. That's a hard-hearted act. And if that shocks you, that it'd be a hard that Jesus would call it a hard-hearted act to divorce your wife because she cheated on you. Now you can understand why the disciples were shocked two verses later, there in Matthew 19. And there's a number of other problems. There's an avalanche of problems. Let me give you another problem with this view that infidelity is what Jesus meant in the Exception Clause. At the time Jesus is speaking, the Jewish people have some degree of political control that the Romans allow them to have as they're being occupied by the Roman power. And as part of that, they had this Jewish law that if a man's going to divorce his wife, he has to give her a certificate of divorce. That's straight from Deuteronomy chapter 24 in verse one. And on that certificate of divorce, very clearly, it had to say, you are allowed to marry any man, right? The man's giving the wife a certificate of divorce, so it's it's in that kind of language. And so the man would say, on the certificate of divorce, you're allowed to marry any man. So now we're supposed to think that Jesus told people that a husband can divorce his wife as long as he gives her a piece of paper that tells her she's allowed to marry any man, even though Jesus doesn't think she should be allowed to marry any man. So Jesus would be telling people to lie. That doesn't sound correct. Now, Corey here, he doesn't really exactly have this problem. That's a problem you have if you have the innocent party to adultery view where only the innocent person is supposed to remarry. Corey is a little more nebulous on whether or not the guilty party to adultery can remarry. But there's no way you can have like the Westminster Confession of Faith view where only the innocent is supposed to be able to remarry. You can't have that view, and once you understand the certificate of divorce requirement, because that would be making Jesus to be telling men it's okay to lie to your wife and tell her you can go ahead and marry somebody else. That's the certificate of divorce problem with the innocent party to adultery view. Anyway, there's a there's an avalanche of problems with this. Most evangelicals have never heard any of the problems. And there's like a whole bunch of them with this idea that the exception clause was for infidelity. So if the exception clause is not for infidelity, what is it for? It is for a situation where a man marries a divorced woman, for example. This is the already married view. This is my view. So the idea is this Jesus is saying if you divorce your wife and you remarry, it's adultery, unless, unless you have this exceptional situation. What's the exceptional situation? Your marriage was an invalid marriage to begin with. That's odd. How could a marriage be invalid? A marriage could be invalid if, for example, a man married a divorced woman. And Jesus actually explicitly says what he means about the exception clause in the second half of Matthew 5.32. We just miss it because it looks like one of Jesus' other moral formulations. And I have a whole video where I go through how the second moral formulation in Matthew 5.32 is very different than all the other ones. It's just easy to miss, and people do miss it. But the second half of Matthew 5.32 is designed to explain the exception clause. It's designed to explain porneo or sexual immorality or fornication, whatever word you want to use for it, in the exception clause. And the idea there is, for example, a man married a divorced woman. She is still married to her first husband. Their marriage then is invalid between the woman and this second man. And so Jesus is saying, well, if you're the second man and you're divorcing this divorced woman and then you and then you go remarry, that's fine because that's that's a fake marriage anyway. You wouldn't be cheating on her if you go marry somebody else because you were never married to her. There's nobody to cheat on. This is just a big fake marriage. So the sex in that invalid marriage is two kinds of sexual sin. It's adultery against her first husband. It's also fornication between the woman and her second husband. So Jesus uses the word adultery in these moral formulations to highlight the fact that she is still actually married to her first husband, that they're cheating on somebody, that she's cheating on her first husband. But Jesus uses the word fornication in the exception clause to highlight a different fact. And that different fact is that the two of them are not married, right? Because married people, if they have sex, we won't call that pornae or fornication, right? But you would call it that if they're not married. So Jesus uses the word fornication to highlight that antecedent fact. And this is a way Greek words are used a lot in the New Testament. If you think of the atonement, for example, uh, it talks about our redemption. Well, that tells you that there was a debt that had to be paid. Or if it talks about our reconciliation, that tells you there was a separation that had to be bridged, or it talks about propitiation, that tells you there was wrath that had to be satisfied. And those different words tell you something antecedent to the atonement. And so with the exception clause, it's telling you a fact antecedent to the exceptional situation. So it's using the word fornication to tell you that the marriage is invalid, it's also using the word adultery to tell you that the first marriage is still intact. So that's the already married view. A man married somebody who was already married. And this would also work vice versa. So if a woman married a man who was already married, because let's say he divorced his first wife and she's still alive, he's already married. So that would be an invalid marriage. So that's why the already married view does not result in a gendered conclusion. But the infidelity view, his view, does result in a gendered conclusion because it only gives permission to the man to be able to divorce for infidelity, if that's what uh somebody were to imagine Jesus meant in the exception clause. But let's continue hearing what Corey has to say about divorce and remarriage.

SPEAKER_00

But to the married, I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband. But if she does leave, what does it say? She is to remain unmarried. So if you decide, hey, I can't do this anymore, then God is saying you need to remain unmarried for the rest of your life. Remain unmarried. But if she does leave, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled back to her husband. And that the husband should not divorce his wife. Amen. Now we're talking about two believers.

SPEAKER_01

All right. Did you catch that at the very end? He's talking about, he says, we're talking about two believers. That statement is incorrect and it's actually kind of a big deal. And he said it really quickly, so it's easy to miss, but this is a big deal. If you read 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 10 and 11, which he was just covering, nothing in there indicates that it's only referring to a believer married to a believer. Nothing in the text says that. The text refers back to Jesus' teaching, which you can find in Matthew 5, 32, Matthew 19, first 12 verses, Mark 10, first 12 verses, and Luke 16, 18. If you look back at Jesus' teaching in all those places, in none of those places does Jesus say, I'm only talking about two believers being married. He doesn't say that. Here's what he does say: he refers back to creation. Creation involves everybody, believers and unbelievers. Every person is a son or daughter of Adam and Eve. So creation is talking about everybody. Jesus, when he's talking about divorce from marriage, he's talking about all marriages. Two believers, believer and an unbeliever, two unbelievers. That combination doesn't matter. All marriages are covered in Jesus' teaching. Additionally, Jesus taught this to unbelieving Pharisees. He was teaching them this is the rule you guys should be following, and that you guys should be teaching. This is the teaching for everybody, not just two believers. There is no way you could go back and, you know, imagine yourself as a Jewish person having grown up in the synagogues, listening to this debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, and think to yourself, oh, Jesus is only talking about those people who are his disciples have to follow this rule. You would never get that from listening to Jesus' teaching because that's not what he said. He was applying it to everybody. Now, why would Corey try to limit Jesus' teaching and 1 Corinthians 7, 10 and 11 only to two believers? The reason he does this, and a lot of evangelicals do this, is because they want to try to find a second exception. They think they have one exception from Jesus in Matthew in fidelity, and now they want to expand that. They want to find another exception in 1 Corinthians 7.15. But there's a problem. If there's another exception in 7.15, why wasn't it in Jesus' teaching? Doesn't that make Jesus to be arguing with Paul? They can't do that. So what they have to do is they have to try to narrow the scope of what Jesus taught and then open up the door for what Paul is teaching. And what they're going to do is they're going to say, well, Paul teaches this other exception. This other exception only applies for believers married to unbelievers, right? And then they're going to say, Well, if you're married to a believer, if you have two believers who are married and one of them abandons, that's what the other exception is for in verse 15, they'll say, then if they abandon, you can treat them as though they were an unbeliever. So that's a way that they can make it, so they can start off with it's about believer-unbeliever marriage, and then they can turn it into, oh, here's an exception for all marriages, whether your spouse was a believer or an unbeliever. And in that way, they add a second exception that's not in Jesus' teaching and they try to make it seem like there is no contradiction between the two, but there definitely is a contradiction. Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. If you are hearing Jesus for the first time in Matthew chapter 19, let's say you thought the exception clause was for infidelity. And then somebody asks you, according to your understanding of what Jesus taught, if your spouse abandoned you, can you remarry? You would have to say no, because the only exception is for infidelity, right? But they're going to say here, oh, but that's, you know, Jesus was only talking about two believers. Okay, so we're saying that Jesus could imagine a believer committing adultery, but Jesus could not imagine a believer abandoning. I don't think so. That that does not wash. And so that just shows this whole kind of house of cards comes falling down. If you think there's a second exception for abandonment in verse 15, you're going to be forced, I think if you're going to be intellectually honest, to That Jesus and Paul are contradicting each other. Now, I don't think they are contradicting each other. I don't think there are any exceptions that allow a person to divorce and remarry. But the typical evangelical view is there are uh two exceptions, one for adultery and then another one for abandonment. And then they'll they'll expand those to other things that allow you to be able to divorce and remarry because they'll take those two and then they'll look at, oh, there must be some kind of background principle behind these two. And then what they really begin to do is just adjudicate and apply that background principle to lots of different situations. And before you know it, you can divorce because they gambled away the money. You just have a very malleable application of a value, not an application of text from the scripture.

SPEAKER_00

That's I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her. So if you're if you're a believer and your spouse is an unbeliever, and that spouse does not want to leave, wants to stay, you must remain married. 13. And a woman who has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her husband. Doesn't mean that they're saved. Um, but possibly, maybe there's a layer of protection or something that the Lord will do out of honoring the believing spouse's heart. Don't know for sure, but it seems to convey that something that God will do uh for that household and for the children, especially for the children. Uh verse 15, yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let them leave. If they leave, fine, they can go. The brother or sister is not under bondage in such case. And so they are allowed to leave. Now, it's going to bring up something interesting in just a second as to divorce and separation in a second, because a lot of people are tuning in because they want to know what I should do if I have been divorced, I'm contemplating divorce, uh, I'm getting remarried, though I've been divorced, or I am already married even after the divorce, and the divorce was not biblical. If the divorce was biblical, you are free to go and do what you want to. And here's the example of being able to divorce someone who's an unbeliever who leaves.

SPEAKER_01

He's getting that from the word, I'm pretty sure, this is where most evangelicals get this from, the word not enslaved in verse 15. And so the word not enslaved does not mean not married. That's how it's typically construed when somebody wants to say that abandonment permits somebody to be able to remarry. They'll say, Well, not enslaved means you're not married. And if you're not married, then you can go ahead and you can remarry. And there's seven reasons why that is incorrect. So the first one is Paul would be calling marriage slavery. If not enslaved means not married, then what you're doing is taking the word enslaved out and you're putting the word married in, and you're saying enslaved and married are synonyms, and they are not synonyms. Uh, so that does not work. That would be Paul calling marriage slavery. Slavery is bad, marriage is honorable. The same way that at our weddings, we wouldn't call it a, you know, a slavery cake, and I now pronounce you slave enslaved. In the same way we wouldn't do that, Paul isn't doing that either. Paul is not calling marriage slavery. He's not saying husbands are slaves to their wives. That's just totally incorrect. The second reason why this doesn't work is the Greek word. So the Greek word for enslaved there is duolo, and the Greek word for bound to a marriage is deo. They're just different words. And Paul uses both of these words in the same chapter. So the fact that he's using two different words, one for the binding of a marriage and one for the binding of slavery, tells you he's referring to two different things. Also, the nature of the slavery bond and the nature of the marriage bond are different. So slavery is a unilateral bond. Slavery is the slave is bound to the master, but the master is not bound to the slave. But marriage is not like that. The two are bound to each other. It's a bilateral bond. So the nature of the two things are different. Additionally, if you look at verses 21, 22, 23, that section there, Paul talks right there about slavery. And that's in the same context there because 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 10 through 25 is the section to the married of this whole chapter. And so in verse 15, he says, not enslaved, with reference to a whole marriage conversation. And then six verses later, still in the to the married section, he talks about slavery. And that's an analogy back to verse 15. And there, what it's saying is listen, if you're a slave and you can get free, that's great because now you're not encumbered by this difficult slavery relationship. And now you're able to, you're free to be able to serve God the way you want to. And that's also what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 7, 15. When he says not enslaved, what he's saying is you're now free from this difficult marriage, presumably difficult, a believer married to an unbeliever where the unbeliever ends up leaving, probably was not the easiest marriage. So now somebody is free to be able to serve God. That is also what the Corinthians want to do. If you look at the very beginning of 1 Corinthians chapter 7, they don't want remarriage. They don't want marriage at all. They want to be celibate. They want to be free from marriage. And so Paul is saying, okay, well, here is one situation where you could be free from the practical encumbrances of marriage. The way you'd be free from that is if you're married to an unbeliever and they leave. Well, if they leave, then you are free from those practical encumbrances. You're free to do what it is that you want to do, which is not remarriage, which is to be able to serve God now without the practical encumbrances of that difficult relationship. And the final reason why not enslaved does not mean not married is that this would contradict Jesus. Uh, Jesus hears would think that if somebody were to divorce because they were abandoned and they were to go remarry somebody else, that remarriage would be adultery. There is no exception for abandonment in Jesus' teaching. And so Jesus hearers would think that's adultery. To say that Paul allows remarriage for abandonment, but then Jesus does not would be to make Paul and Jesus contradict each other and they do not contradict each other.

SPEAKER_00

What about abandonment? Well, abandonment, if it's an unbeliever who abandons you, then you are free to go. But is it possible to treat a what you might think is a believing spouse as an unbelieving spouse? What if I find out that my spouse is not actually a believer and they leave? Is that a reason? Well, if the spouse is not a believer and you find out, because again, it's not so much the profession, but it's actually the actual possession of Christ. If the person is not a believer, I'm a Christian, but I'm really not. Uh I don't read, I don't pray, the spouse would know that better than anyone else. Um, they would be able to identify these things better than anyone else. And that person were to leave, well, then guess what? You are free to go.

SPEAKER_01

First of all, when two people are married, they're married for life. So if you look at Genesis chapter two, when Adam and Eve are married, Adam says of Eve, She is my bone of bone and flesh of flesh. And that is family language. And we see that in the Old Testament and other places. For example, Genesis 29, Laban says of Jacob, are you not my bone and flesh? And that's family language. And what that means is in the same way that I can't unsibling my sibling, so I can't unspouse my spouse. It's not possible because we're family. It's not just that I shouldn't. I cannot. It's not possible to do so. Another place you see this presupposed is in Leviticus chapter 18, where it makes uh relations between two people to be incest if they are family through blood, but also if they're family through marriage. If they're family through marriage, it's also incest, the same way it's the same way if they are family through blood. And what that tells you is marriage made people family. That was the categorical understanding in the Old Testament there. And it all comes back to bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, and that's back in Genesis in the beginning. So it is not possible to end a marriage while both people are alive. Now, if somebody dies, then they're then that's then the marriage is over, then a widow or a widower can go ahead and remarry because the person has deceased and that dissolves the marriage. But outside of death, people, a marriage is undivorceable, unable to be dissolved prior to death. And so the problem is if somebody remarries while their first valid spouse is alive, their remarriage is a continual state of adultery against their first spouse. And so if that person who remarried, who's living in a continual state of adultery, if they die while they're in a continual state of adultery, uh they won't make it to heaven because adulterers don't inherit the kingdom of God. So this is like a huge problem for people who are adulterously remarried. And the early church understood this. This is why they would excommunicate people for life for getting remarried. They would tell them they are not able to take communion for life after they got remarried, because they understood it was a continual, ongoing state of adultery. That is the majority view of the church throughout church history. It's a it's more of a modern view to say, oh, it's a one-time act of adultery or to do these other things to make it so that people are able to stay in their adulterous remarriage. That remarriage is a continual state of adultery as long as their prior valid spouse is alive. Now, if somebody remarries and then their prior valid spouse dies while they're in the remarriage, then I would say that that final condition for that second marriage to be valid has been met now, because it's no longer adulterous because there's nobody to cheat on because the first spouse is gone. So if the first spouse dies while they're in a remarriage, then their remarriage can be valid and that can that should be continued. But if somebody's in adulterous remarriage and they die while that remarriage is still adultery, they got a real problem in eternity. So now you might think, well, okay, what if I divorce but I won't remarry? What if I just do the one, but I don't do the other? Is that okay? And the reason why that's not really okay to do is because divorce causes the other person to commit adultery. So if you look at Matthew chapter five, in verse 32, it says that if a man divorces his wife, he makes her commit adultery. He causes her to commit adultery. What that means is she is likely to go ahead and get remarried to somebody else. And so he is culpable for her likely remarriage adultery. So that's why we would say people should not divorce, even if they promise not to go ahead and get remarried. So if they got remarried, that's worse. That's definitely worse to go ahead and get remarried because that's actively committing adultery and it's an ongoing thing, and people are kind of trapped in this adulterous union, and it's hard for the people to kind of get out of that. But the divorce is also bad because divorce causes the other person to get trapped in one of those kind of adulterous union things. So that's the issue with divorce itself. Now, what now, when it comes to abuse, though, I would say that a person is able to separate for abuse. People do have a right to be able to retreat from an abusive situation. I would say that is analogous to being abandoned. Um, when Paul writes that in 1 Corinthians 7, 15, he talks about in such cases, a person is not enslaved. And I think abuse is in in such cases, it's analogous to abandonment because it's forcing the person to kind of retreat or run away from the violence. Uh, so if a spouse is being abused, for example, or if a child is being abused, a parent has a responsibility to protect their child. And so if they retreat from the unsafe environment, I think that is permissible to separate. Sometimes that separation is going to require or cause divorce. For example, in Corinth, to who the people to whom Paul is writing, at the time, the Roman law made it so that if you moved out, you auto-divorced. So there was no such thing as like, well, I'm going to separate, but not divorce. That wasn't a thing at the time Paul was writing that. So I would say today, you know, if you have to worry about, like, for example, uh the husbands being abusive and to the children or whatever. And so the wife flees with the children, but like he can go in and take them out of school or whatever, and he can like figure out where they live because of the nature of their marriage record, nature of their records and everything because they're married. So she has to get a divorce in order to kind of free herself and the kids from him and the unsafe environment he's going to create, then that would be permissible because it's it's necessary to get to safety. So those are the situations under which I would say that uh the second step of separation, not just moving out, but also actually getting a legal divorce, would be permissible. And then I would say it's the abuser that is causing uh that whole chain of events there. And so then she wouldn't be guilty for making him causing him to commit adultery, but he would be causing her to leave. And so he'd be causing himself to commit adultery, if that makes sense. He'd be at the front of the causation chain chain in that sense because he is doing the equivalent of abandonment, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7:15. All right, let's continue to hear what Corey has to say.

SPEAKER_00

Can I divorce him? Again, only for sexual immorality and for abandonment. So let's say there's a husband who is doing things unguiding to the spouse, not providing for the spouse, not protecting her, abusing her and the children. Uh biblically, is that a grounds for divorce only if that spouse leaves? That's it. So now here's a question because there's some people who are divorced and their divorce is not considered a biblical divorce. What's the punishment for an unbiblical divorce? You know, any reason other than sexual morality on the part of the other spouse or abandonment by an unbeliever. Well, I reiterate again, there are no specific punishments in the Bible mentioned for what happens in an unbiblical divorce.

SPEAKER_01

However, so he's talking about like earthly consequences, and he's going to try to emphasize what those earthly consequences are and all that kind of stuff. I don't do that. I would just say, I mean, there are earthly consequences, but I would say that the problem is if somebody is in a remarriage that's a continual state of adultery, and they die in that state, they're living in a continual state of habitual, gross sin, unrepented of, that is intolerable in the New Testament, period. We have verses that say adulterers will not inherit the kingdom of God. And the idea is an unrepentant person, person who's living in it. In those verses, it talks about adulterers won't inherit the kingdom of God. So I think there's an eternity problem, not just an earthly consequence problem.

SPEAKER_00

There are going to be consequences. Remember, the Bible says that whatever you sow to the flesh, you will reap to the flesh. You are going to reap whatever it is that you sow. Meaning there's going to be consequences for what you do. By the way, could God make one of the consequences death? He sure can. He has the ability to do what he wants because he's sovereign alone. He's God. And if he wants to send a statement, he can do so. Now, before I continue, what if the person who causes the sexual immorality? What if that person wants to get a divorce? Well, no, it's not a it's not a biblical divorce if there's sexual immorality on your part and you use that as well, we got to get divorced. Now, if the other person wants to, are you free to marry? The Bible doesn't the by the Bible doesn't differentiate between the person who was cheated on and the person who did the cheating, uh, just that there is a uh dissolving of the marriage because of that. Now, God is going to hold you accountable because you are the one that committed adultery. And so the punishment is going to be meted out by God. Are you allowed to get married, remarried? The Bible doesn't say that you're not.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so what Corey does here is kind of interesting. So the problem with the innocent party to adultery view, that's the view that says uh two spouses are married, one cheats, and so that makes one of them innocent and one of them guilty. There's a victim and there's a perpetrator. And so the innocent victim is able to divorce and then remarry, but the guilty one is not able to divorce or remarry, or shouldn't divorce. And if they do divorce, you're not supposed to remarry. So it gives rights to the innocent victim, not rights to the guilty perpetrator. That's the innocent party to adultery view. The problem with that is it imagines that the guilty party, the one who did the cheating, is married still, but the innocent party is not married. And that's weird because that means they're married and not married at the same time, which is not possible to do. And we would like to refer to this as the Schrdinger's marriage dilemma. So that's a dilemma for the innocent party to adultery view. And the innocent party to adultery view is the Protestant view. It was enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith. That's the that's the majority Protestant view, although it is not the only Protestant view. But Corey's take creates a separate problem. This is a different problem. This is the problem the Innocent Party to Adultery View was trying to avoid. And the and the problem is this it frees the guilty adulterer to remarry. They have a right to remarry because they cheated. They're rewarded for their adultery. And that doesn't make any moral sense that you would reward the guilty adulterer with the right to be able to go ahead and remarry because they committed adultery. Imagine two different couples. One couple gets a legal divorce for irreconcilable differences. Neither one of them are permitted to remarry. Imagine another couple where the husband cheats and then the wife divorces. Under Corey's view, the husband who's the cheater, he can remarry. So the husband in the first marriage, where they divorce for irreconcilable differences, he cannot remarry. He should not remarry. But under Corey's view, the husband who's the cheater in the other marriage, he can remarry. So the man who didn't cheat is disfavored, and the man who did cheat is favored. He has more rights. And this is the problem the innocent party to adultery view is uh sought to solve. And they did solve that problem, but then they created another problem, which is the Schrdinger's marriage view, where you you end up with two people who are married and not married at the same time, which of course is a logical impossibility. Now, if you had to choose, I suppose, between this moral dilemma that Corey has or the logical dilemma that the innocent party to adultery view has, I guess if I had to choose between those two, I'd much rather have the logical dilemma, because this moral dilemma is really grotesque. So I think Corey chose the worst option. If you're going to believe that infidelity allows a person to uh divorce and remarry, you should have the innocent party to adultery view. Of course, you shouldn't have either one of them because they they logically fall apart.

SPEAKER_00

Does that mean that the person should never get remarried? Well, if it's unbiblical divorce, then you're not supposed to get remarried. However, let's be honest, there's a lot of people who have been remarried even though their divorce was unbiblical. Question: Should they go and divorce the person that they married in an unbiblical fashion?

SPEAKER_01

The answer is yes. If they're remarried and their prior valid spouse is alive, they should divorce that remarriage. If they don't divorce their remarriage and they die while they're in their remarriage, and their prior valid spouse is alive when they die, then they die in adultery, and unrepentant adulterers cannot go to heaven.

SPEAKER_00

Well, what happened? Israel still was a bankrupt morally group of people.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so he's talking about Ezra, and I think Ezra was right to require those divorces. Those were not valid marriages under Deuteronomy chapter seven, and Ezra was using the executory power of the government to dissolve invalid marriages. He was totally within his right to do so. And what was Ezra supposed to think was going to happen if the priests were married to idolaters? What is, I mean, that was the whole reason why they went into captivity in the first place. So I think this criticism of Ezra, oh, it was good intentions taken too far and all that, I think that's just unfair to Ezra. He's been given a very difficult task. These people are not playing ball, they're marrying idolaters uh in violation of Deuteronomy chapter seven. They're just going to rinse and repeat the same problems that they had before. And so he's trying to do a reform. Now, just because the reform didn't bring about everything that we would hope for uh at that time, that doesn't mean some reform was wrong. Uh the idea here is that well, they did some reform, it wasn't enough to get them to the place they were supposed to be, therefore the reform that they did was wrong. That doesn't make any sense. Reform is good, and they were moving in the right direction, but it just, you know, the whole thing didn't take. Now, today, when we read Paul, Paul says that if you're married to an unbeliever, stay in that marriage. But Ezra said we had to divorce these marriages to these idolaters. So it seems like Ezra did one thing, and Paul is giving us instruction that goes a different direction. So, how do we understand that? Well, the difference is that Ezra was using the executory power of the government. At the time, the government did not approve of marriages to idolaters because of Deuteronomy chapter seven. But Paul is not running a government. The Roman government doesn't disallow those kinds of marriages. So those marriages have civil authority approval, and so those are valid marriages. And so Paul is proceeding on that basis, whereas Ezra is proceeding on a different basis that those marriages were impermissible because he's running a government that has that Mosaic law. So that's the difference between Ezra and Paul there.

SPEAKER_00

Here's what we know about God. God will never ever ask for a sin to remedy another sin.

SPEAKER_01

This happens a lot. I don't think when evangelicals do this, that they're intending to beg the question. I don't think they even know that they're doing it, but it is, in fact, begging the question. So here's what I would say suppose two gay guys who were, quote, married to each other, came to church and now they're born again, they say, and uh then you say, Well, you you have to divorce your gay marriage. And they say, No, no, because that would be a sin to divorce the marriage. And God never requires people to sin in order to fix. The situation that they had created. You'd say, well, no, no, that does that rule is true. You're not supposed to sin. You're not supposed to do evil so that good may come, but divorcing the gay marriage wouldn't be evil. It would be an act of repentance. You'd be rejecting this fake marriage. Or suppose two people were married and it was incestuous and they were going to repent of that. Well, you would still say they have to divorce the incestuous marriage. It wouldn't say that's sin to do that. You'd say that's fixing the situation. And so also divorcing an invalid marriage is not sin. And an adulterous remarriage is an invalid marriage and so ought to be divorced, just like the other marriages should be. We're just not accustomed to maybe thinking about those as invalid marriages, but they are in fact invalid marriages. So that would be the question: is it in the invalid marriage? Is that the bucket it is in? And if it is, then divorcing it would not be sin. So what Corey is doing is he is presuming that adulterous remarriages are valid. Well, if they're valid, then I agree with him they shouldn't be divorced. But they are in fact invalid. And so therefore they ought to be divorced and requiring that divorce would not be sin. So to say it would be sin to divorce an adulterous remarriage is begging the question. It's presuming that those are valid marriages when in fact they are not.

SPEAKER_00

To someone who has um, and though you and you marry because an unbiblical divorce, you don't remedy that by getting another divorce because now you're going to break a second vow. God holds that vow. Even if you make a vow in an unrashed fashion, like Jeptah, or you make a vow in a deceptive fashion like Levi and Simeon did, God.

SPEAKER_01

So this is the problem why Corey shouldn't make vows the basis for what a marriage is or the necessary condition for a marriage, and then make it so that marriages and vows are kind of synonymous. It's this is the problem. So for example, homosexuals, if they get married, maybe they vowed. Oh, I guess they can't divorce that now because they vowed, right? Or let's say somebody hires a hitman and the hitman vows to go ahead and murder somebody. Should they do it? No, they should not do it. They should absolutely should not do it. A vow to do something that is intrinsically sinful ought to be rejected. That's what repentance is. Repentance is a rejection of our commitment to sin. And so if the commitment to sin was is in a vow form, doesn't matter. Still should reject it. If there was an incestuous marriage and they avowed, still should reject that. If there's an adulterous remarriage that was vowed, also should go ahead and repent of that and should reject it. We shouldn't continue our commitments to sin. We should reject commitments to sin. Okay, so Jephthah made a made a rash vow and it was a terrible vow, and then he followed through on it, and he should not have followed through on that vow. And then he talks about uh Levi and Simeon. Now they were rebuked in Genesis chapter 49 for their anger and violence, but Corey thinks they were rebuked because they were made a deceptive vow. Uh, but that's not, if you read Genesis 49, that's they weren't rejected for their vow. They were rejected for their violence and anger, that that was the problem that they had there. Uh, you can't make vows the basis for marriage because atheists can get married and they're not vowing to God because they don't believe God exists, and yet they can also still be married. So again, you have to have one man and one woman consent between the two of them to be married, uh, approval from the civil government has to be not incestuous and not uh adulterous.

SPEAKER_00

That still holds you accountable to your words, to your vow, even in this vow. So the best you can do, if you are married and it's your second or third time, hopefully just your second time, but if you're married and the previous marriages were un or the divorces were unbiblical, celebrate God in that marriage. Lift up God as best you can in that marriage. You do not, you should not go and get remarried. Now, if the person is remarried for unbiblical reasons, divorced for unbiblical reasons, is that person guilty of adultery? Well, unfortunately, the answer is yes.

SPEAKER_01

We need to consider how that works. How could that be adultery? Who is it adultery against? And the answer is it's adultery against the prior valid spouse. We see that in Mark chapter 10 in verse 11. Is the first marriage still in existence? Yes, it is. How do we know that? Because it's adultery. So if you have a single woman never been married before, totally single, you have a man who's divorced from a valid marriage, his first wife is still alive. If this man who's divorced marries the single woman and Jesus calls that adultery, which he does, the only way that could be adultery is if they're cheating on his first wife. We see that in Mark chapter 10, verse 11. Also, the only way that's possible is if his first marriage still exists. If his first marriage didn't exist, his remarriage could not be adultery in any sense. The only way it can be adultery in any sense is if his first marriage is still intact. For example, if his first wife died, he'd be a widower, and his remarriage there, his second marriage could not be adultery. He can't commit adultery due to his first marriage because his first marriage doesn't exist anymore. So that that would not be a basis for him to be able to commit adultery. So it's only adultery because his first marriage still exists. That's what the word adultery is there to signal. The first marriage is still there. So yeah, so the first question is adultery against who? It's adultery against the first spouse. Second question is, does the first marriage still exist after the divorce? Yes, it absolutely does still exist. That's why it's adultery to remarry. So when does the first marriage end? And the answer is the first marriage doesn't end until one of the spouses dies. That's it. The marriage is for life. That's not just a hope or an aspiration or a wedding card. It's a fact. People are joined by God and they are married for life. You know, if God joined them, only God could unjoin them. And if God opposes unjoining them, they're not unjoined. They're only unjoined when somebody dies. But prior to that, God does not unjoin them because that would mean God would be opposing his own conduct. God joins them, he does not want them to be dissolved, and he would have to dissolve it, so he's not going to dissolve it. Otherwise, we have to imagine that God is opposing his own conduct. That doesn't make any sense. The next question to ask is if the remarriage makes a person guilty of adultery, as Corey just agreed to, is the remarriage ongoing adultery? And the answer to that is yes, because the first marriage is still going on, the first spouse is still alive, the remarriage is an ongoing state of adultery. And the last question is well, how would you remedy that? How would you, this is a real problem. Somebody is stuck in this ongoing thing of adultery that puts their soul in peril. How do they remedy that? They remedy that by divorcing the adultery. So just imagine for a moment uh a man and woman are married, it's a valid marriage. He gets a girlfriend on the side, he moves in with the girlfriend, he's living with her for five years. He's living in a continual state of adultery. Five years, 10 years, 15 years, the length of time doesn't change anything. He's still married to his first wife. Let's say he has one kid with the second with the second woman, two kids, three kids. He's living in adultery with the second woman while his first wife is alive. The only difference between this scenario and a lot of divorce and remarriage scenarios is the human paperwork. Oh, you have a divorce piece of paper. Good for you. It's just a piece of paper, it does not end the marriage. The remarriage is still adultery. So that's what Jesus is saying is he's saying divorce and remarriage is adultery, the same way if a man moved out from his wife's house and moved in with a girlfriend and lived with her, that's also adultery. It's the same kind of thing. And so the only way to solve that adultery situation is to end the relationship. And it's the same thing with an adulterous remarriage. The only way to solve that problem is to end the adulterous remarriage. And that's why my book is called Divorce Your Remarriage, because that's what somebody would have to do to remedy this kind of situation.

SPEAKER_00

Does that mean you are guilty of divorce forever? No. Here's how we know divorce, unbiblical divorce, and an unbiblical remarrying is not an unpardonable sin.

SPEAKER_01

So evangelicals will say you're calling remarriage the unpardonable sin if you think people should divorce their remarriage, right? So my book called Divorce Your Remarriage, they would say that this concept here is equivalent to saying remarriage is the unpardonable sin. That is totally incorrect, totally untrue, not even close to being true. In fact, it's strange to me that they would make this objection. The idea is there is a remedy. It's not an easy remedy, but there is a remedy. The remedy is repentance. The remedy is forsaking the adultery. That means the person would have to leave the marriage. But there is a remedy. We're not saying there isn't a remedy. When you call something the unpardonable sin, that's like it's over. Like there is no way out of this problem. I'm not saying there's no way out of the problem. There is a way out of the problem. Quit doing the adultery. That's the way out of the problem. So the idea that this would be the unpardonable sin is just totally incorrect. It's the what they're really saying is it's unreasonable to require somebody to end their remarriage. It's so unreasonable that it's as though you were saying there really is no option for them to be forgiven. But that is not my position. I don't think it is unreasonable to tell somebody to quit committing adultery. I don't think Jesus thought it was unreasonable to tell people to quit committing adultery. I suspect a lot of people are just kind of put back on their heels when they hear this and they don't quite know how to answer it. But the answer is really not that complicated. People need to divorce their adulterous remarriages. That's what you would tell somebody who who left their wife and moved in with their girlfriend. You would tell him he's got to quit the adultery. I don't understand why that is not the unpardonable sin to move out of your girlfriend's house, but divorcing or adulterous remarriage would be the unpardonable sin. So he's gonna have to explain to me why one is the unpardonable sin, but the other one is not. That doesn't make any sense. Like in other words, the Mosaic government was not gonna use the force of the state to be able to say, no, you can't divorce. They weren't gonna do that. So they're gonna allow divorce, and but you're gonna if you're gonna do the divorce, you're gonna have to do the certificate thing. So if there's clean records and everybody knows what's going on, it's organized and it's not a bunch of weird confusion and problems applying the law in various circumstances. So what Jesus is teaching in Matthew 19, 8 is that this whole mosaic thing, where they allow divorce, that was a concession to hard-heartedness. That wasn't morally permissible, that was morally wrong for people to divorce, but it was uh it was tolerated during the Old Testament period of time, but it's not tolerated anymore. Now we're going to the moral law, we're not going to the regulation, we're going to the beginning. That was what Jesus was teaching there in Matthew 19, 8.

SPEAKER_00

I'd hold the those Jews um guilty of that perpetually. No, even though these were some cases ungodly people, he didn't hold them guilty of that.

SPEAKER_01

So I agree that God tolerated adulterous remarriages and polygamy in the Old Testament. But today, if somebody is legally married to two wives, he should divorce the second wife. And similarly, if somebody is divorced and remarried, they should divorce the second uh spouse if the first valid spouse lives. So this shouldn't be surprising to us. If you look at Abraham and Jacob, they both had incestuous marriages, and that was tolerated during the patriarch period in time. But when you read Leviticus 18, that's no longer tolerated. You can't have these incestuous marriages anymore. So what was tolerated at one time is not tolerated anymore. Now it was still sin, but it was tolerable uh at one period in time and not tolerated later. And in the same way, there were things under Moses that were tolerated then, but are not being tolerated now. And so we see that in Hebrews chapter 7 and verse 12. It says very clearly that there's a change in the law. And we see from the prophets, it's reiterated in the New Testament, that we're, it takes out our stony hearts and gives us a heart of flesh. And Jesus says in Matthew chapter 5, verse 17, he came not to abolish or subtract from the law, but to fulfill or add to it. That is, Jesus is going to pull back the curtain and reveal more of the moral law. And now we cannot do those things that were intolerable in the past. It's true that a lot of the moral teachings from Jesus, you can find glimpses of them in the Old Testament, but now they're brought forward in a much clearer way. So there is a change in the law going from Old Testament to New Testament. So you can't use the permissions and the tolerance that we had in the Old Testament and to kind of bring that forward now into the New Testament, because we're in a different period in time where less sin is tolerated. For example, in the book of Hebrews, it tells it tells us that Lot was righteous. Well, if the book of Hebrews didn't tell me that, I wouldn't have figured that out from reading uh the Old Testament because he doesn't look very righteous. But for his time, for what was tolerated in his time, he was a righteous man. But that wouldn't be t that wouldn't be tolerable now. And so you can't use standards from the Old Testament and bring them into the New Testament because we're in a different time period. So that's just like a category error uh to mix and match those things. Again, they were doing polygamy then. You can't be doing polygamy now. Um it didn't treat under the Mosaic law if a man cheated on his wife with a single woman. That wasn't treated as adultery in the Old Testament, if you look very carefully, but it would be now. For example, in Mark chapter 10 and verse 11, it says if a man divorces and marries another woman, that he commits adultery. Well, that wouldn't have fallen under the Mosaic law for adultery uh in the Old Testament. So there's a change in the law from Old to New. If you look at now, we can eat bacon, we couldn't do that before. We're not doing the Leverite marriages, we don't have the high priests, we don't have the high holy days and the complicated calendar, we don't have a temple and all the priests and all the animal sacrifices. A lot of things change from old to new. And one of those things is that bless sin is tolerated in the New Testament than was tolerated in the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_00

Lord, so does God will God hold you perpetually um in the status of an adulterer because you remarried someone unbiblically? No, there is forgiveness of every sin, including that. And again, you don't rectify or remedy that previous sin with another sin. This is not an unforgivable sin.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so ending adultery is not sin. And everybody agrees the adulterous remarriage is forgivable. I agree, Corey agrees the adulterous remarriage is forgivable. The question is whether to continue the relationship Jesus calls adultery or to discontinue the relationship that Jesus calls adultery. So I appreciate Corey covering this. He has a pretty standard evangelical view on divorce and remarriage. So I just wanted to be able to respond to it since he recently did a video. I'm glad Corey is feeling better after his time in the hospital. I hope he continues to stay healthy. And uh make sure you get my book, Divorce Your Remarrige. You can get that at Amazon.com. I'll have a link to that in the description below. Subscribe, comment, let me know your thoughts, and I'll see you guys next time.