Joel M Bradshaw

1“When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, 2and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, 3and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, 4then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the LORD. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.–Deuteronomy 24

Ponder a moment if the opposite of this text were true and if it said: “if the second jerk divorces her or dies, the wife has to go back to the first jerk.” You and I and everyone else would say that God was setting that poor woman up for a lifetime of emotional abuse. That the first jerk would be taking advantage of her vulnerable state, and would use the fact that he divorced her before to manipulate her further. She would have a horrible life.

But the text doesn’t say any of that. God forbade that first jerk from having her again as his wife. Why do I keep calling them ‘jerks’ instead of husbands? Because they weren’t acting like husbands. Jerks divorced their women and played fast and loose with the covenant of marriage before God. Husbands loved their wives. For our sake today, husbands you get one verse. And this never stops being our verse. It’s an every day verse. It’s an all the time verse. It’s a ‘memorize and have it at the ready to speak to yourself when you are being a jerk’ kind of verse. Ephesians 5…

25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

The fact remains that God cares for the vulnerable. In this text, he cared for the vulnerable wives were in positions of two horrible extremes. Being divorced twice and nobody else wanting to marry her to provide for her needs and going back to the first jerk who kicked her to the curb. Nope. God cares for the widows and the orphans. And God cares for the vulnerable. By giving this law, God protected these women from an abusive, manipulative marriage. God is not just the King, but the King who cares. He cares for the lowly and vulnerable. He is worthy of our trust.–JMB