We get a lot of emails on relationships, everything from dating, and engagements, marriage, and of course divorce, and remarage.

This is a genre of email that dominates all the other questions we get, as you know, and we get a lot of good pushback emails as well, and follow up questions in search of greater clarity like this one from a listener named Matthew.

Pastor John, I have a follow up to you on episode number 920 on divorce.

Didn't John the Baptist want Herod to ditch his wife? Because John had been saying to him, it is not lawful for you to have her present tense.

See Matthew chapter 14 verse 4, he did not say it is not lawful for you to have taken her past tense.

And we all know how important tense is interpreting the Bible. She is called his wife.

So how do you reconcile this seemingly clear call for a married couple to divorce?

There are at least three things in this passage that are unknown to us, and that keep me from using the passage to justify divorce.

I admit, I don't know if that was clear, I admit that sometimes divorce for a faithful believer is inevitable, because Paul says so in 1 Corinthians 715 when an unbeliever insists on leaving a believer who does everything he or she can to make the marriage work.

You can't stop an unbeliever from doing that, and therefore divorce as they carry it through may be inevitable.

Remarage in that situation is another issue, we're not talking about that. So let's go back to this text.

The text says for Herod has seized John, John the Baptist, and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodius,

his brother Phillips wife, because John had been saying to him, it is not lawful for you to have her. That's a good translation by the way. It is not lawful for you to have her.

So the first thing that is unknown to me is when Herod married his brother's wife or if he actually married her.

When John says it is not lawful for you to have her, is he definitively saying that they're married or only that they're sleeping together or living in some kind of common law situation, some kind of situation that looks like marriage, just avoid legal issues, most commentators document that they were married, but nobody seems to actually put a date on it.

In relationship to this event, if they weren't married, then John is saying get out of the relationships, stop sleeping together, not get out of a marriage. I don't know.

I don't know. Number two, the second thing that's uncertain is, let's just suppose they were married. Okay, so the second thing that's uncertain is whether John

is actually saying that the marriage should end. He is saying it is unlawful for you to have her. You sinned in marrying her if he married her, but it may also be unlawful to throw her out after she had been married to another man.

And therefore, make her destitute on Jewish principles since she can't go back to that first husband. It is not crystal clear from this text that John is saying ditch her.

But now, let us suppose that John was actually saying in the marriage and let's suppose they were married. So two uncertainties will just assume both of them are true.

The third thing that's uncertain is whether he is saying this because the unlawfulness of the marriage is owing to the fact that she was married before, or at the same time, or that she was the wife of his brother, which according to Old Testament law would make the second marriage incestuous.

Like marrying your sister or your sister in law or your daughter. So Leviticus 1816, you shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife. It is your brother's nakedness or Leviticus 2021. If a man takes his brother's wife, it is impurity. He has uncovered his brother's nakedness. They shall be childless.

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