In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss the controversial topic of marriage as a lifelong sacrament. Joe dives into scripture, addressing the common objections regarding divorce and the meaning of porneia. Discover the profound implications of God’s design for marriage and what it truly means to be united in faith.
Transcript:
Caller: All right, my question is to dispute the issue about marriage being a sacrament for life, because if that were true, then God would not have given a reasonable divorce.
Caller: Okay, are you referring to Matthew 19?
Caller: Yeah. Okay. If you want to take that scripture, that’s fine. Let’s deal with that. There’s more.
Cy Kellett: Okay, so that’s just so that the listener knows that’s where Jesus says, except in cases of porneia. So he forbids divorce in all the gospels. Except in Matthew’s Gospel, he gives the exception. Except in cases of porneia. And this is a common objection Papu makes, and that. What about that exception? If Christ gives an exception, then the Catholic Church must be wrong, that marriage is for life.
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah, that’s a great question, and I really appreciate you asking that. I would actually back up even into the Old Testament and say In Malachi, chapter 2, verse 16, God says, For I hate divorce, says the Lord, the God of Israel. And although he’s talking there not just about, like, literal divorce, he’s also talking about schism. I think Protestants have tended to take that too lightly in both senses. They’ve been way too okay with divorce, way too okay with schism, that we’ve been trying to separate what God has joined together, that the church is the bride of Christ. And in Ephesians 5, St. Paul describes the relationship of Christ and the church and the relationship of husband and wife. Using the language of Genesis, the two become one flesh. And what Jesus says is what God has joined together. Man cannot separate. Like, if God makes two people one, just as if God makes Christ and the church one, you shouldn’t even try to tear that apart. You shouldn’t try to undo God’s work, nor will you succeed in doing so. Like, you can’t make the church not the bride of Christ, and you can’t make a married couple not married in the eyes of God. So that leaves this question, okay, why is there seemingly a. This exception in Matthew’s gospel that goes against everything that we just heard from everywhere else? And the important part there is what this word porneia means. This word porneia is where we get the word pornography. And it literally refers to fornication. And it’s the word the Jews used to refer to invalid marriages, that if two people were living together, but maybe they were, like, close relatives, and so they could get married in pagan society, but the Jews didn’t recognize the marriage as valid. They would refer to it as porneia. They’re not really married. They’re just fornicating. And so Matthew is making sure. We know that when Jesus is saying divorce and remarriage is totally impermissible, he’s not talking about cases where there’s an invalid marriage. To use a modern example, if someone’s in like a same sex marriage that’s recognized by the state and not recognized by the church and they say, well, I don’t know what I should do, am I allowed to get divorced? We would say yes, because you weren’t married, you were fornicating. That’s what Matthew is like making sure that’s what porneia means. It does not mean adultery. There’s a different Greek word for adultery. So in other words, this has long been understood by Protestants as an adultery exception or a sexual immorality exception. That’s not what’s going on. What’s going on here is that if there’s an invalid marriage, then Jesus’s words don’t apply because God didn’t join it together in the first place. Does that help people?
Caller: No, no, it doesn’t help. Why it doesn’t happen is because you. Okay, you are speculating. The way I see it now, if you say that God says no divorce under those circumstances. So are you trying to tell me you are married and your wife decides to commit adultery, Are you just gonna just live with her? God did not say that. So I think what the church is doing, the church is speculating by reading into the scripture what you want to believe. Because there’s no way. There’s nowhere in the Bible it says that you cannot get a divorce. And even Paul himself went, if I. When Paul said that if you married to a unbeliever and unbeliever leave you, you are free. So what are you going to do by that scripture?
Caller: Because if God didn’t join you together. Yeah, yeah. So the whole question is, did God join you together? Yeah.
Caller: Okay, okay, okay. Now, okay. What, what does it mean by God joining together? What does that mean?
Caller: That’s a great question.
Caller: When the Bible says God joins you together, how does God join two people together?
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah, this is the sacrament of matrimony. And so the whole question of what we call annulments in the Catholic Church are looking at whether God joined this couple together or not. And so an unbelieving couple who has no idea of the sacramental nature of marriage, they’re not baptized, they’re not being joined together in a sacramental marriage, but two baptized believers are if they, you know, if they’re validly entering into this thing. So Mark 10, you say this is nowhere found in the bible read mark 10, verse 11 and 12. And he said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. So we’re not speculating. We’re just taking the words of scripture as the words of scripture. It just says, if you do this, you’re committing adultery. And we say that means if you do this, you’re committing adultery. We’re not adding anything. We’re not taking anything away. We’re taking it at face value. And so it’s been the Protestants who’ve gone totally against the plain and explicit teaching of Jesus Christ on this topic.
Caller: Okay, that scripture you just read. Yeah. That is with the assumption that you devote your wife without adultery. So I ask you the question, are you going to stay married to your wife if she chooses to commit adultery? Okay. For example, my father was married to his wife, his second wife, and he has 15 children. I mean, adulterers, adults, affairs she’s giving him, because, I mean, she didn’t do any better. But you can’t tell me that God is going to make a law and require me to stay with a woman that is unfaithful. No, that is unreasonable. If God said that, then God is unreasonable.
Caller: Well, so what? Why?
Caller: That sounds like what the apostles said.
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah, that’s exactly what the apostles pointing out. Right. Like the apostles in Matthew 19 say, well, if such is the case of man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry. In other words, Jesus’s teaching is so radical that the apostles are shocked by it. And so I’m really glad you’re shocked by it, because the teaching on marriage is shocking. If it was just you can get married and get divorced and get remarried, then Jesus’s teaching was no different than the law of Moses. And Jesus explicitly says that it is different than the law of Moses. He begins in Matthew 19 by contrasting his teaching from what used to be allowed in the Mosaic Law, saying, that was allowed because of the hardness of your heart. And I would say, in addition to that, like, if you’re going to allow an adultery exception, what about all the other ways husbands and wives let each other down and betray one another’s trust and everything else? There’s all sorts of reasons why people want to get divorced, all sorts of pretty good reasons why people say, this isn’t working out? And so if you’re going to say, well, we’re going to take this one reason and no others, it does seem like you’re playing games a little bit with the scripture that Jesus isn’t assuming all marriages are happy. You know, marriages when he says if you divorce your wife and remarry, you commit adultery. If the marriage didn’t have a reason the person wanted to get divorced and commit adultery, he wouldn’t need to make the warning in the first place. If everybody just lived happily ever after, there’d be no need for a Christian teaching on marriage. There’d be. The whole reason that’s there is because he knows that going will get tough. Maybe it’ll get tough because one or the other partner is unfaithful. Or there could be any number of things, pornography, abuse, all sorts of things. Now, I want to be clear. You may have to get civilly separate. You may have to, for the sake of your own physical, mental safety or the safety of your children, get separated from your spouse. That’s a different question. The question here is, can you get remarry to somebody else? And the answer is no. If you’ve been married in the eyes of God, if the two have become one flesh, if God has joined you together, you don’t have the power to override God. You don’t have the power to undo this. And so you should be very careful, like before you go into a church and promise before God and your spouse and everyone else that you’re going to stay married until death do you part. Make sure you actually mean that and believe that and can actually live that out. And, and that’s why marriage has to be a sacrament, because it’s one of the hardest commitments you’ll ever make. And so God gives you a tremendous amount of grace to make it and to make it through.
Cy Kellett: I’m going to leave it there. Papu, that was a wonderful conversation. I love those kinds of conversations and I’m grateful that you called.