Photo by JD Mason on Unsplash
By John Piper. © Desiring God Foundation. Source: desiringGod.org
We would be naïve, I think, to suppose that people, young or old — our own children or those of others — will act on the basis of reason and biblical truth when it comes to justifying divorce.
I would guess that 95 cases out of 100 people do what they want to do and then find reasons to do it. Those who claim to believe the Bible will find biblical reasons to do it. They know what they’re going to do. They want to do it. They do it.
We should be realistic as we talk to people, and we should pray. That’s the greatest realism. Pray and fast that God would do what our biblical arguments and reasoning, by themselves, could never do.
Having said that, I totally believe in speaking the truth in love because it’s God’s way. It’s God’s design that people should know the truth and the truth would set them free. And that context is free from sin, like leaving your wife.
I will hang my thoughts on three words: joy, significance, and ownership.
Joy
I would say to a young man or woman who wants a divorce because he or she is not in love, “Oh, what joy lies ahead for those who do not break their covenant even when their hearts are broken.” Here’s what I mean. I believe that most couples who stay married for fifty or sixty years fall in and out of love numerous times. I say that with not the slightest hint of trying to be funny.
It is, in my judgment, almost ludicrous to think that we experience “being in love” the same for the entire sixty years, just like we felt at the beginning of that relationship. That’s just utterly crazy. It is naïve and immature to think that staying married is mainly about staying in love.
In a relationship between two sinners forced to live as close as married couples live, it is naïve to think that every season will be one of warmth and sweetness and sexual romance. That’s just contrary to almost the entire history of the world and contrary to every makeup of fallen human nature.
Staying married is not first about staying in love. It’s about covenant keeping, promise keeping. Be a man and woman of your word, a man and woman who keeps the vows to be committed for better or for worse, a man and a woman of character. That’s what it’s about.
This covenant keeping relates to being in love. We get this. I thought about how to say this. This covenant keeping relates to being in love the way gardening in the fall relates to roses in the spring. This is why I said a minute ago, “Oh, what joy lies ahead for those who do not break their covenant even when their hearts are broken.”
The modern world of self-centeredness and self-exaltation and self-expression has taken the normal fifty-year process of falling in and out of love and turned it into a fifty-year process of multiple divorces and remarriages. That pattern has not and will not bear the fruit of joy. It leaves a trail of misery in soul and misery along the generations.
Marriage is the hardest relationship to stay in and the one that promises glorious, unique, durable joys for those who have the character to keep their covenant. That’s what I mean by joy.
John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Why I Love the Apostle Paul: 30 Reasons.
