Whether or not one consciously knows it or admits it, whenever one reads the Bible, one will use a particular hermeneutical method to interpret its words, a system based on certain principles and assumptions that have been accepted through faith alone. And both secular and theistic humanists always interpret God’s Word through their blind faith in certain assumptions and principles which are totally antagonistic and violently opposed to the assumptions and principles through which God meant His words to be interpreted. Now hermeneutical methods may employ many multi-syllable terms to describe the ways in which it derives meaning from any text. However, those complex and erudite terms actually describe methods used by even the least educated and most instinctive readers of God’s Word, by those who will read it through either the faith or biases found in their own spirits.
Therefore, when we read and interpret the words of God in the Bible, we must do so in the way God intended it to be read and interpreted, according to the hermeneutical methods which God Himself endorses, through faith in the assumptions and principles God teaches to the more rational minds of our spirits. And we need a good example of how this is done. Therefore, we look to Jesus for this ultimate example of right hermeneutics. We study the way in which Jesus interpreted God’s Word and Law. And good example is when He answered a question about divorce in Matthew 19:3-12.
Jewish scholars of the first century were treated like gods, due to centuries of humanistic influences in the Jewish culture. And those rabbis were interrogating Jesus about divorce at this particular time, pointing out that God’s Law, specifically Deuteronomy 24:1-4, forbade a man may to marry the wife he previously divorced, if she had married another man in the meantime. Clearly, that prohibition depended upon whether the first man’s former wife had actually married again. And God’s Law only recognized one kind of marriage, one which was established through a covenant of the spirit made in the presence of God Himself. Only a man with whom she had made this kind of covenant be her true and lawful husband, and she could only be that man’s true and lawful wife if the man had made the same kind of covenant before God with her. Therefore, a man could be a lawful husband of a woman, while that same woman was not the lawful husband of that man—if her spirit had made a real marriage covenant with that man before God, but if that man had never made a real marriage covenant with her before God. And the reverse is also true. Considering the harmonious truth of all God’s Word as a whole, a man could be the husband of a woman while she was not his wife at all.
But those Pharisaic theologians or religious lawyers had been so enamoured by pagan, humanistic influences that they felt they could add, subtract, conveniently ignore or unduly emphasize any particular meaning they desired while interpreting God’s Law. And, since these humanists wanted to serve the lusts of their flesh, their interpretation of this one law studiously ignored all the other laws in the Torah and also nullified the careful expounding upon God’s Law done by the prophets. By these devious methods, these rabbis confidently asserted that a man was allowed to divorce his wife for literally any reason whatsoever, no matter how petty and unjust that reason might be. If a man was not completely pleased with a woman’s sex or her cooking, he had the “right” to cast her out into the street where she, as a “tainted” woman, would suffer great hardship or die. For, just like the pagan humanists of that day, these Jewish theistic humanists treated women worse than livestock, since they believed God’s Law provided for the welfare of animal livestock, but not for the welfare of women. So, in those days, the false and humanistic church of Israel drew self-serving conclusions from God’s Law by adding to it, by adding a meaning God did not intend His Law to bear, and by subtracting the meaning God wanted His Law to bear. In other words, that branch of the church was much like the theistic humanists of Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in subsequent centuries.
Yet divorce was a very serious matter in God’s eyes, especially in those days, because most women were homemakers who utterly depended on husbands or fathers for their livelihood. Most women of that time found it almost impossible to earn enough money to support themselves and their children in these male-dominated, humanistic societies. Of course, God’s Law commanded His true churches to provide for the needs of literally all the women, even all who did not have husbands or fathers to care for them. In the Old and New Covenant Scriptures, the word “widows” actually referred to all abandoned or divorced women, as well as all who were never married. The word geyr in Hebrew (e.g., Deut. 14:29; 24:19-21; 26:12-13; 27:19), and the word χήρα in Greek, indicated a woman without either a husband or father to care for her needs. Thus, her “brothers” among God’s people were assigned the task of providing for all her needs. This is why the true and apostolic true church visited and fed all such women daily (Acts 6:1), then declared that is how pure religion—the true worship, esteeming and serving of the real God through the human spirit—functions (James 1:27).
Now, since this false interpretation of God’s Law was strictly self-serving and unjust, Jesus rebuked those humanistic, Pharisaic scholars, and corrected their false interpretation. Jesus rightly interpreted God's Law based on the premise that God Himself is loving and just, never unjust. Jesus had faith that the God who designed all spiritual laws did so through a wise, just and loving act. And Jesus used the whole of God's Word to establish the right interpretation of God’s Law, including principles derived from the way God historically behaved when God applied His own laws, the true meanings of words in the Bible, the meaning of both the local and global context of the words of God’s laws, and the harmonization of other principles found in other laws of God. So Jesus began His reproof with an illustration of how God behaved: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mat. 19:4-6, ESV).
So, no, a man cannot divorce his wife for any and every petty reason, unless he is a loveless, evil pagan who hates the real God and, therefore, despises the words God taught to His people for their own good. For a true marriage is a covenant of the spirit of a man and the covenant of the spirit of the woman, as Malichi revealed (2:14-16). And this covenant must be ratified by God Himself, just as God did with the marriage of Adam and Eve. Two spirits join in marriage covenant, forming a loving relationship that becomes even closer than the relationship that a man has with his own mother or father. Then this bond is so inward and deep that the two become one flesh, each one caring for both the spirit and the flesh of the other who is bound to one, and both serving one purpose together, with one mind. And, since God is the Owner of both their spirits and flesh, the one purpose they serve together, in flesh and in spirit, is God’s purpose. For God initiates, shapes, develops, grows and cements this deep relationship between the two spirits. All His Law is spiritual, since God is a Spirit and His Law reveals the attributes of His Holy Spirit. Therefore, no physical reason can ever tear apart that spiritual union created by God Himself. Only if one or both spirits of the spouses either never formed a covenant of the spirit, or broke this covenant, is a divorce possible.
So Jesus responded with a very brief but magnificent rendering of consistent, logical hermeneutical principles derived from a knowledge of the attributes and character of God, as well as from doctrines found in various other Scriptures, such as Genesis and Malichi. Now Jesus could have expounded on these Scriptures, but did not bother to do so. For the cold, dead hearts of the humanistic Pharisees would never listen. They would just continue to argue blindly until they felt they won through brute force, including the slandering of their opponents and the true words of their opponents. Jesus left them to stew in resentment until they could finally arrest and kill Him for honestly and wisely opposing their destructive delusions and lies. Those humanistic rabbis only believed their own petty false reasoning carefully honed by their intellects of flesh, and never allowed even a shred of God’s love to rebuke the inner consciences of their spirits. But the truly elect Jews, after hearing these true words of Jesus, instantly remembered all the related teachings of God from Genesis and Malichi, all that Jesus was referring to, and understood. For the Holy Spirit of Jesus and the Father confirmed the words of Jesus with His other words that He had previously spoken through the prophets. And the Jews in those days were indeed familiar with the Scriptures that Jesus indirectly cited, since they not only studied the written words of the Scriptures all their lives, but their spirits also had been taught God’s Law personally by God Himself. So these elect Jews did not dare base their views about marriage and divorce on the way their intellects of flesh could add or subtract meaning in a verse of Scripture, after yanking it completely out of its local and global context. Rather, the very spirits of these truly elect Jews actually knew and trusted in the real God, then believed what God had directly taught their spirits in their hearts, all that God convicted their spirits to believe. They knew what God Himself intended His Law to mean, just as His true church of Israel did throughout history, even as the spirits Adam and Eve personally learned truth directly from God in the very beginning. This was Christ’s interpretation of God's Law, His true, correct, rational and just conclusions for our spirits.
Because so few have engaged in the same depth of study that these common Jews did in those days, let me expound on these teachings from Jesus, revealing the well-known background information Jesus used in drawing His conclusion. In our day, not even those with doctorates of theology have anywhere near the level of knowledge that these common Jewish men and women did. Thus, it may be a good exercise in hermeneutics to further delve into this background information, to illustrate how we are to interpret all the rest of God’s laws. After all, that is what this particular book is about.
First of all, our God Jesus knew that no true marriage could ever be made solely through the human wills of the two souls getting married, neither by the will of a man alone nor the will of a woman or any other human being. No true marriage can be formed by the human wills of even kings, priests or anyone else. Only God can create and cement a true marriage covenant between spouses, because only God created, owns, teaches, shapes, knows and governs the spirits of all human beings. So both spouses can only truly join in a genuine marriage covenant through God’s will and deeds. By a “godbreathed” or “Spirit of God originated” teaching revealed through His prophets, God declared to the husbands of the world that He Himself “was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did He not make them one , with a portion of the [human] spirit in their union ? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. For the man who hates and divorces, says [Yahweh], the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says [Yahweh] of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless” (Mal. 2:14-16, ESV). Clearly, God is the “witness” or authority that ratifies every true and real marriage covenant, and no marriage covenant of any spirit can make that covenant without God. It is God who makes the two spouses into one flesh, though they remain two individual spirits for all eternity, both here on earth and forever in heaven. God created marriage so His people would create physically united and cooperative families who love and care for the needs of one another, even in the faulty, foolish, messy and often trying ways that all true families in Christ love one another. Then every true church and even every just, loving and godly government of every nation is to be based on this model of the faithful family with spousal covenants. The family unit and its covenant is the foundation for all relationships in every land, even with the Father and Brother of our own spirits.
If there is a real marriage, formed through a real inward covenant and commitment of each spouse’s spirit to the other, then it is only because of the works of God’s Spirit, according to the will of the only Owner of both spirits. In every true marriage, where the spirits of both spouses actually form unbreakable covenants regarding a full union of purpose regarding their bodies of flesh, it is God who has actually joined those two spirits together in a genuine marriage covenant. It is God who creates or initiates that spiritual covenant that has developed between the two spirits. And God is a Spirit, who alone causes that bond to grow stronger between those two human spirits over time, if the spirits of the man and woman heed God’s whispering in their hearts. But, if two people make a marriage of convenience, or they marry through lust, or they are coerced into marriage, if they do not first develop a deep friendship and companionship through the works of God inside them, so their spirits form an inner covenant with each other, the marriage is not likely to become a true marriage, not unless God later develops the covenants of the spirits of both spouses. If both spouses do not have covenants established in the minds of their spirits by God Himself, there can be no marriage, only adultery, which is breaking God's Law. Or, if God only allows one spouse’s spirit to develop a true covenant, but not the other spouse, then God is teaching the covenanting spirit about the inner gains of unrequited love. So that spouse with the covenant of the spirit is truly married to the other. But the other spouse, whose spirit was not allowed to form a covenant of the spirit, or had a nonelect spirit which is incapable of forming such a covenant, is not truly married to the other spouse and is committing adultery. Therefore, if a covenant of the spirit is lacking in one or both spouses, God did not ratify and does not recognize the marriage. Therefore, the divorce of any couple who lacks a God-ratified and true marriage covenant between the spirits of both spouses, is not actually a divorce, but fulfills God’s Law forbidding adultery, in order to seek to fulfill a God-given destiny.
Of course, if God allowed only one spouse’s spirit to form a binding covenant with the other spouse, the “divorce” of the two spouses will cause the covenant-making spouse a great heartbreak, a tearing apart of the bond of that covenant, a rendering of the spirit as one’s spirit sees the other spirit pulls away through unrequited love, or through a total lack of love for the covenanting spirit. This can wound the spirit much and cause extreme pain, which only God Himself can fully heal. Still, this experience of an elect spirit making a covenant with another spirit who does not make that same covenant in return, is a form of sharing in God’s experiences, since God is a Spirit who has made covenants of love which have been totally ignored and spurned by those He has loved. But, if there is a real marriage, with an inner covenant between two spirits belonging to God, then let all human beings recognize that God alone has created that marriage, through His will and authority. And there is absolutely no human authority that can break that covenant of those two spirits without dire and possibly eternal consequences. Even if neither the man nor woman know God through their minds of flesh, if God has caused their elect spirits to form a marriage covenant through His kind of pure and just love, it is indeed the one God who has initiated or created that marriage covenant. It is through God’s will and authority. And God Himself will rule over that inward marriage covenant. Therefore, let no man even attempt to tear apart what God Himself has joined together in covenants of spirits.
God Himself, the real Owner of every man and every woman, must be one who initially establishes every marriage covenant and, therefore, God is always the principle Party of every marriage covenant, the only One who bears the final authority to declare whether or not a marriage covenant shall actively grow and remain binding, or shall be terminated. God does allow for divorce, but it must be God Himself who determines whether or not the grounds for divorce are valid, and whether or not the marriage will cease. And God only ends a marriage when a spirit’s covenant is broken.
Of course, God Himself declared that He wrote a certificate of divorce that terminated His Spirit’s covenant to remain faithful to the flesh of His living bride, to one living generation of Israel. And God nullified or terminated His marriage covenant solely due to her spiritual adultery (Jer. 3:8). So, whether this was a figurative act or not, God Himself openly declared that He Himself initiated a divorce. And God would never, ever declare that He Himself had sinned against His own Law, neither figuratively or any other way. Because God’s Law describes His very inner and immutable nature, and it is utterly impossible for the omnipotent God to go against His nature without utterly destroying all His creation and even Himself, and it is also utterly impossible for the omniscient God to have made any kind of error when He made any of His covenants, God did not sin nor figuratively declare that He sinned when He initiated and carried out this divorce. If a divorce was sinful in any way whatsoever, God would have never declared that He wrote a certificate of divorce. Thus, if a human being divorces in a just way, in a way that is like the way God Himself divorced, and if the Spirit of God calls one’s spirit to initiate a divorce, then that divorce is not a sin in any way. If a divorce must occur due to totally unrepentant sins of a spouse, of for other irreconcilable differences pertaining to a lack of a genuine covenant of the spirit in one or both spouses, then one divorces in the same way that God Himself divorced His bride, who was that generation of the church of Israel.
Clearly, God would never state that He committed any kind of a sin whatsoever, whether or not He was speaking figuratively. Therefore, the minds of our spirits are logically forced to conclude that God here (in Jer. 3:8) declared divorce to be necessary and just in certain circumstances. And God never remarried many in that generation of divorced Jews, since they made a marriage covenant with Satan, to gain the rewards of the world order. And this is what God’s Law truly said in Deut. 24:1-4, “if he has found some [exposed and spiritual] uncleanness in her: then let him write her a certificate of divorce, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.” God Himself proved the meaning. And, “and if she goes and becomes another man's wife,” but is later freed from that second husband, “then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife” (Deut. 24:2,4, ESV). This is exactly what God did with those of that generation of Israel who married Satan. Only elect Jews, who may have committed adultery with the devil, but whose spirits were never able to make a covenant of marriage with Satan, were returned to their first marriage, as the bride of God.
Then we must also conclude that God places no stigma of sin whatsoever upon any victim of the sins of the spouse who caused the divorce. For that would be unjust and a sin. It is obvious that God did not condemn Himself for divorcing Israel, nor place any kind of stigma or future restriction upon Himself. God never covenanted to never marry again, to never take any church as His bride ever again, or to stop teaching His creation because He divorced. For, after His divorce, God remained entirely the same God He always was, albeit His Spirit suffered pain and loss over the sins of His bride, the church of Israel. God remained the Head Teacher and God of all His people, the only truly authoritative Teacher and Judge of all their spirits. Thus, a justly divorced man can also be a teaching elder (pastor) and serve God with a clear conscience. The only restriction is that a teacher cannot have two or more wives (I Tim 3:2; Titus 1:6), because his duty to care for his own large household would interfere too much with his works for God. Anyone who says a divorced man cannot be a teaching elder must also stigmatize God Himself, and not allow God to teach their spirits or judge them, which is actually what they do. But every divorce must be ratified in one’s spirit by God, since every real marriage must also be ratified in one’s spirit by God. If the Holy Spirit of God tells one’s spirit that the spirit of one’s spouse did not make a true marriage covenant, or has fully broken one’s covenant—which generally means the spirit of one’s spouse never formed a real covenant to begin with—then one must accept this reality, learn from it, and justly divorce that spouse. Such a divorced spouse will receive absolutely no condemnation from God. Then a divorced spouse may marry again too, but only if God truly binds one’s spirit to another spouse and that spouse’s spirit to oneself. If God ratifies either a marriage or a divorce, let no human judge or authority on earth contradict or condemn God’s decision. Let no one condemn or stigmatize anyone for any God-ordained divorce.
Now, if we look again at God’s Law which the religious teachers of the church brought before Jesus (Deut. 24:1-4), we begin to see that it would not even apply to a woman who falsely married another man after her first husband divorced her. If a woman, after she was unjustly divorced for any invalid reasons, was forced to seek livelihood with another man through the desperation of her flesh, but her spirit did not form a true marriage covenant with that man, and her marriage was not ratified by God Himself, then the coercion of her flesh, which caused her to go to that other man, would make her relationship with that other man adulterous. Her relationship would be a forgivable sin, where her spirit did not have malicious motives or intentions, but where she acted either through coercion or in ignorance. Therefore, she would not be in a valid marriage with that spouse. Her relationship with that other man would indeed be adultery, but an unintentional sin of adultery, especially if it was done through coercion, by her flesh overcoming the will of her spirit so that her flesh could survive or fulfill its desires. Consequently, if her unjust first husband had not divorced her, her spirit would not have been coerced by the motives or intentions of her flesh to seek a relationship with that other man. And her unintentional sin of adultery will be automatically granted forgiveness by God through Christ’s sacrifice for sin. Consequently, this law (Deut. 24:1-4) would not forbid her first husband, who divorced her and caused her to go to the other man, from taking her into his home again, as his wife, after his own spirit had truly repented from his far worse sin, the sin of intentionally and very unjustly divorcing her. Clearly, if a woman had been falsely married between the time her first husband unjustly divorced her and the time when he repented and wanted to restore the marriage as the fruits of his spirit’s repentance, this law’s prohibition against remarrying a divorced wife who then remarried does not apply. And, if that man does not repent, then her sin of adultery, which was caused by him, will fall upon him with God’s judgment and condemnation, not upon her in any way.
Only if the very spirit of the divorced woman does enter a true marriage covenant with her second husband, one that has been truly ratified by God, is her first husband not allowed to take her back as his wife. And, clearly, this makes sense. For, if her first husband took her back, he would break up her second marriage, and would be opposing God Himself—since it must have been God Himself who initiated and ratified her true marriage to her second husband. And nothing good can result from opposing God. Remember, we saw David commit this sin with Michal, his first wife, who once truly loved him (I Sam. 18:27-28). King Saul had taken Michal away from David and forced her to marry another husband (I Sam. 25:44). However, after David became king, he used his power to take Michal back as his wife, in spite of the fact that a true marriage had formed between her and her second husband (II Sam. 3:13-16). And we all know how that turned out. In the end, Michal, whose spirit once truly loved David, then despised this same David in her heart (II Sam. 6:16). For David broke God’s Law by intentionally tearing apart a marriage covenant which God Himself formed in the spirits of her and her second husband. God’s Law is indeed wise and just, unlike the carnal and unjust interpretations of God’s Law through minds of flesh, by very worldly, false teaching elders.
So the Pharisaic rabbis and lawyers developed extremely carnal, warped, unjust and outright evil interpretations of God’s laws regarding marriage and divorce. Yet many souls in the church trusted these deceivers far more than they trusted God, often because their churches were preaching theistic humanism, the pagan worship of men, instead of biblical theism. Their interpretations lured innocent souls into thinking only through their minds of flesh, and subsequently breaking many of their own marriage covenants formed by God. It caused men to divorce wives in ways that would bring great condemnation from God upon them, and would cause divorced wives to suffer greatly. For those fools claimed that a man could divorce a wife for any reason at all, even because he did not like the way she folded his socks. These rabbis and lawyers were human gods worshipped by the people in their humanistic churches. And, as gods, they created their own laws to replace God’s laws, although they still pretended to obey God’s laws, through skilful academic acrobatics which made God’s Law appear to say the exact opposite of what God intended His Law to say. And they all suppressed the minds of elect spirits, so all would allow their minds of rebellious flesh to stop acknowledging that God Himself must establish marriage covenants in the spirits of both spouses. Rather, these human heads of the church, just like the pagan Romans, believed marriage was simply the act of purchasing and owning a wife, like a cow or a donkey. They treated a wife as their possession, and thought they could do anything they liked with their own possessions. Yet, the Scriptures are extremely clear in their denial of such beliefs. For God has never allowed anyone to truly possess anything. He required all to use all solely in the ways He commanded, since He declared He would always be the only true Owner of all creations, and stated that the most anyone could ever be is a steward of His property.
Those worshipped human gods of those churches obviously did not know the Scriptures nor God. They could not even conceive of such things as covenants that God created and ratified in human spirits. To them, wives were merely owned livestock, and they did not even realize that they could not truly own livestock either. They ignored the fact that God commanded them to treat even His beasts with respect, to serve Him as faithful stewards caring for His property. So there were many among them who did not treat wives as their beloved companions in the journey of life, but treated their wives worse than their livestock. They would never abandon their livestock in the wild, leave them without food or shelter. Yet they would do this to their wives. Literally all who have real faith in God, and thus, in the words of the real God, know that God alone owns the heavens and the earth, as well as all the souls and even all other created entities. Thus, no man can own any creature or thing, to do whatever he wants with it. And a man definitely can never truly own another human being. The most a man can do is serve God as a steward who lovingly cares for God’s property in God’s name to the best of his ability, according to the will and commands of God. Only if a man is not granted the ability to do what God’s revealed will requires, is a man excused from carrying out those duties. Since these arrogant human heads of the church did not believe any of this, we are forced to conclude that these highly esteemed human gods and heads of the church of Israel were actually humanists, not members of God’s real church. And, if they were not members, and did not have any genuine faith in the real God at all, they could not possibly serve as God-appointed elders.
On the other hand, Christ’s just and insightful words about God’s spiritual Law, when exegeted fully according to His intended meaning, prove that He intimately knew God and fully believed the words of God. Jesus fully trusted God’s words and sought only God’s intended meaning of those words. In fact, Jesus is God. So Jesus knew and applied God’s words in precisely the way God intended. The deeper we delve into Christ’s words, the more we find that they harmonize and confirm all that God taught in His Law. And Jesus reiterated the fact that it is God who makes two spouses into one flesh. Yet the rest of God’s Law and teachings treat the spirits of women exactly like the spirits of men, never as less or more. Therefore, a husband and wife are one flesh in every true marriage formed by God, although the two are not one spirit. And it is God, who is a Spirit, that causes the spirits of a husband and wife to join their flesh in serving one purpose together. Also, since no spirit actually heeds God unless that spirit is an awakened child born of God’s Spirit, made in the image of God’s Spirit, all spirits who are caused to form true marriages must be elect spirit. A husband and wife cannot even become one flesh, where both serve one and the same purpose during this earthly life, through their bodies of flesh. A true marriage can only exist if God’s Spirit chooses to create and maintain marriage covenants in the elect spirits of both the man and the woman. For Jesus clearly proclaimed that it is God, not man, who makes the two into one flesh. Therefore, let the spirits of both spouses listen to and heed all that God Himself whispers to their spirits. Nevertheless, because the two become one flesh, and because the flesh is temporary, appointed to die and perish along with the entire material universe, the marriage covenants made by their eternal spirits can only last until the flesh of one or both spouses die. And, if the flesh of one spouse dies, the marriage covenant is terminated, although their spirits will eternally love one another, just not as one flesh. Therefore, the surviving spouse may surely marry again, in the same wa