Today’s message is from 1 Corinthians 7:8-40. This passage is about marriage—about divorce and remarriage—about reasons to marry or not to marry. Today I’m just going to cover verses 8 through 24. I’ll cover the rest, the Lord willing, in two weeks. (Next week is Easter Sunday, so we will probably do something different.) As we read the passage, remember, as always, that we are reading the word of God.

Also, as always, I encourage all of you to read your Bibles every day. Don’t think you don’t have enough time! You have enough time to eat, but I understand (I’ve never really tried this out) that if you fast for more than a couple of days, you stop being hungry. Don’t let that happen with the word of God. You’ll starve to death. Read with prayer and make every effort to understand what God is telling you. The Holy Spirit is able to give you understanding.

¹⁰To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. ¹¹But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.

¹²To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. ¹³And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. ¹⁴For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

¹⁵But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace. ¹⁶How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?

¹⁷Nevertheless, each one should retain the place in life that the Lord assigned to him and to which God has called him. This is the rule I lay down in all the churches. ¹⁸Was a man already circumcised when he was called? He should not become uncircumcised. Was a man uncircumcised when he was called? He should not be circumcised. ¹⁹Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God's commands is what counts. ²⁰Each one should remain in the situation which he was in when God called him. ²¹Were you a slave when you were called? Don't let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so. ²²For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord's freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ's slave. ²³You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men. ²⁴Brothers, each man, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation God called him to. (1 Corinthians 7:8-24)

This passage seems plain enough when it’s taken by itself. It’s better not to marry unless you can’t control your desire for sex. Verse 9 says, “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” (How unromantic!) But when you look at the entire Bible (which is what you should always do when you try to understand a statement or passage in the Bible—you should look at the immediate context, the broader context—chapter, book, New or Old Testament—and the entire Bible)... When you look at the entire Bible, it’s clear that marriage and the family are fundamental to God’s purposes for us.

Today’s passage makes it sound as though the purpose of marriage is to keep us from sexual immorality, but God could have simply dispensed with sexual immorality—not even defined it or given any commands concerning it. But then there would be no families. God designed things so that children would be raised in families with fathers and mothers and grandparents. Even secular researchers agree that that’s the best way for children to be raised. Children do far better when raised in a family. It’s the way God designed it to work. (You may have noticed that godless governments tend toward the idea that the government should raise children, not families. That’s because they are godless governments.)

Anyway, it appears that God has designed things so that, through sex, men and women are encouraged to do what he designed as necessary for there to be children. He could have designed it so that we reproduced asexually, but his purpose was for us to have fathers and mothers and families—brothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles and cousins. (And for us who believe, God is our Father and Jesus is our brother. What would these concepts mean to us if we didn’t have human families?) And to keep families together God gave us a command: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” In the Old Testament this was a serious command. The penalty for disobedience was death. There is no death penalty for adultery now. (In fact, since around 1975 adultery hasn’t even been illegal. Now the only penalty is hell for those who don’t repent.)

So God gave us this command, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” to keep families intact (and for some other reasons, as well). And he has also commanded us to refrain from any sex outside of marriage—any sexual immorality. (It’s sexual immorality, by the way, because God says it is. And it’s not just arbitrary command or definition. It’s all part of God’s perfect plan for his creation.) You can choose to either obey God’s commands or disobey them. If you obey them, it brings blessings. And we all know that if you disobey them, it brings trouble and misery and destruction—and finally, judgment and condemnation. Each of us has a choice.

Paul says, “not I, but the Lord.” This is consistent with what Jesus taught. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:32 taught that the only valid reason for a man to divorce his wife is sexual immorality (the NIV says “marital unfaithfulness”, some other translations say “unchastity”). Jesus also said in Luke 16:18, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” God hates divorce. He says so in the Old Testament in Malachi 2:16. (And I need to point out here before I go on that Paul’s statement “not I but the Lord does not imply that everything else he is saying is not inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is.)

Today’s passage and the section that comes just before it (verses 1 through 7 that Tom talked about last week) are answers to some questions that the Corinthians had evidently asked Paul. (Verse 1 starts out, “Now for the matters you wrote about...”)

In the Corinthian church there were presumably people who had accepted Christ but their husbands or wives had not. They were not believers. We also know that Paul (the Holy Spirit speaking through Paul) taught that Christians should never marry unbelievers. He says so in verse 39 at the end of today’s passage: “A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.” (I know that Paul appears to be talking about widows, but clearly he means it to apply to everyone. In 2 Corinthians he says, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?” and “What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?” (2 Cor. 6:14b, 15b) Clearly believers are forbidden to marry unbelievers. I don’t know what Paul had taught the Corinthians earlier, but apparently they were asking whether they should separate from their unbelieving husbands or wives. Paul says, “No. If they are willing to stay, let them stay.”

There’s a big difference between already being married to an unbeliever when you accept Christ and marrying an unbeliever after you are already a Christian. But God hates divorce in any case. However, if you are already married to an unbeliever, he considers your marriage to be holy. (The unbelieving husband or wife is sanctified through the believing husband or wife.) If you are married to an unbeliever, you have the opportunity to lead your husband or wife to Christ. And, your children may be raised in a Christian home. But Paul also says that if the unbelieving husband or wife wants to leave, that’s OK because we are called to live in peace, and that you are not bound in such circumstances.

Just what does it mean to not be bound? Does it mean that you are free to remarry as though you husband or wife had been unfaithful? The situation Paul is talking about is not precisely any of the situations Jesus talked about when he spoke about marriage and divorce. For one thing, Jesus was talking to Jews who were, at least in name, God’s people. The Jews in Corinth had rejected Paul’s preaching so he turned to the Gentiles. The Corinthian believers were, at least for the most part, pagans, so maybe the situation was a little different. I really don’t have a definitive answer. There are many opinions about this, but most seem to think not being bound make you free to remarry, so I’ll leave it at that.

As long as what you are doing is not sin, Paul says it is good to keep doing it when you become a Christian. God calls some people away from the situation they were in when they become Christians—he did with Paul. But in most cases you will have the opportunity to be a witness to God’s mercy to those around you when you don’t go anywhere.

Verse 18: “Was a man already circumcised when he was called? He should not become uncircumcised. Was a man uncircumcised when he was called? He should not be circumcised.” Well, it would be hard to become physically uncircumcised. But what Paul is saying is that, if you are a Jew, you should not think that you should have to become a Gentile in order to be a Christian. And, in fact, as far as a Gentile thinking he needed to become a Jew goes... As far as thinking that you needed to be circumcised and become a Jew to be saved, Paul warned in Galatians that if you thought that, if you thought that you needed to be circumcised, Christ would be of no value to you at all—not a good thing!

We are saved by grace through faith, not by rituals or physical actions. Keeping God’s commands is what counts. God’s commands in this case are to love him with all of our hearts and minds and strength and lives and to love our neighbors as ourselves. There are no greater commands than these! Jesus said so and all the Jewish leaders, even those who were opposing him, knew it was true. These commands, to love God with all of our hearts and minds and strength and lives and to love our neighbors as ourselves, can only be kept by God’s power, the power that comes through faith in Jesus.

Verse 21: “Were you a slave when you were called? Don't let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so.” Would it trouble you to be a slave? Would you choose to be a slave? You know, in the Law of Moses (God’s Law, that is), Israelites could only be slaves for six years. They had to be freed on the seventh year. But a slave could choose to be a slave for life. If he loved his master and family, he could choose not to be free. He could say, “I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free.” He could choose to make himself a slave for life. And this was not just a verbal agreement. It was a formal agreement before the authorities. The slave had his ear pierced as a sign of the agreement. Can you imagine doing anything like that—making yourself a slave for life? Evidently some of them did it. The fact is nowhere in the Bible is slavery condemned. What’s condemned all through the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, is oppression. Oppression is what God condemns.

Verse 22: “For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord's freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ's slave.” You know what? When you accepted God’s salvation, you chose to be Christ’s slave—for life. You said, “I love my master and do not want to go free.” But guess what, when you did that, you became the Lord’s freedman.

You know, we value freedom very much—sometimes above anything else. But without Christ, we can’t be free. We are slaves. We can be slaves to men even when we think we are free. How many things do you do for appearances—to look good before men or to be pleasing to men rather than to be pleasing to God? Jesus says we can be slaves to money. Do you serve money? You can’t serve two masters. Either you will love one and hate the other or hate the first and love the second. You can’t serve both God and money. (But we, that is people in this current culture, hate anyone, any person, we think is our master.) If you trust and obey Jesus, you are free from being a slave to the world. The more you are willing to trust and obey, the greater your freedom is!