Whoever Marries a Divorced Woman: What Jesus Actually Said
Short answer: In Matthew 5:31-32 and Luke 16:18, Jesus does say that a man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and that a man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. That is the plain sense of the wording. But the same Gospel tradition records a limit Jesus placed on this in the case of sexual immorality, and Paul later addresses a situation Jesus did not speak to directly, where a believer is abandoned by an unbelieving spouse. So the honest answer is not that every remarriage after divorce is adultery in every case. The texts themselves distinguish between a divorce that is no divorce at all in God's sight and a divorce that a spouse forced by unfaithfulness or abandonment. Read carefully, Jesus is not condemning the innocent party.
The Setting on the Mountain: Why Jesus Raises Divorce at All
Matthew 5:31-32 sits inside the Sermon on the Mount, in a run of six contrasts where Jesus sets his own teaching against what had been said before. Each one begins with a formula: you have heard it said, but I tell you. The point is not that the older Scriptures were wrong. The point is that Israel's teachers had narrowed, externalised, and managed what God meant. Jesus is not adding a new law on top of an old one; he is exposing the heart behind the command. Adultery already begins in a look, he says in the preceding lines. Divorce is the next exhibit in the same argument about the heart.
It matters that Jesus is speaking to men in a culture where the wife had almost no legal standing in a divorce. The wording of the tradition he quotes is telling: whoever puts away his wife must give her a writing of divorce. That phrase comes from Deuteronomy 24, where Moses regulated a practice that was already happening. The certificate was not a celebration of divorce; it was a protection for a woman who would otherwise be left with nothing, no name, no household, and no way to remarry lawfully. Jesus is addressing men who used the certificate as a tool for ditching a wife.
So the question behind the question is not whether paperwork is filed. It is whether a man is dealing faithfully with a covenant he made before God. Malachi 2:14-16 calls Yahweh a witness between a man and the wife of his youth, and says the man has dealt treacherously against her. The word there is covenant language, not contract language. A contract can be ended by the terms of the contract. A covenant is broken before a Person. That is the framework Jesus assumes, and it explains why he speaks so severely about a man who dismisses his wife and then starts a new household.
Notice also that Jesus does not deny the existence of a legitimate divorce. He quotes the certificate and then says, in the Authorised reading of the tradition, that it was permitted because of hardness of heart. In Matthew 19 he will say more. Here, on the mountain, he reasserts the weight of the marriage bond and warns that a man cannot simply manufacture a divorce and thereby make a new marriage clean. The ceremony does not launder the reality. Heaven does not recognise a dismissal that was really a betrayal.
"“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery;’": Reading the Wording Closely
The supplied text of Matthew 5:31-32 reads as a quotation of the older tradition followed by Jesus's response. The verse as it stands names three parties in two clauses: the man who dismisses his wife, the wife who is dismissed, and the man who marries her. The second clause is the sharper one. Even the second husband, who did nothing wrong in the transaction, is drawn into the guilt. He marries a woman whose first marriage has not been rightly ended, and so the union is adulterous in Jesus's accounting.
This is why the traditional reading has weight. Luke 16:18 states the same thing without qualification: "Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery. He who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery." There is no exception clause in Luke. Mark 10:2-12 likewise reports the teaching without the exception. If Matthew alone had the exception, someone might argue that Matthew created it. But the exception appears in Matthew in two places, and the same Matthew records the rest of the tradition faithfully, so the exception is not an interpolation invented by a later hand.
Still, the wording must be honoured for what it says and not stretched. The clause assumes an ordinary case: a husband dismisses a wife without a valid ground, and she then marries someone else. In that case, the first man's treachery has produced a situation in which the second marriage is, in God's eyes, adultery. The victim of the dismissal is not the one Jesus is exposing. The man who dismissed her is, and the man who takes her in a union built on that injustice shares in it. Jesus is not indifferent to her; he is refusing to let the injustice be normalised.
That distinction is not a loophole. It is the shape of the sentence. In the Greek of Matthew 5:32, the active subject is the one putting away; the passive participle describes the woman who has been put away. Jesus is not handing out a verdict on her. He is warning men who think a piece of paper settles what God has seen. Any reading that turns the verse into a weapon against the sinned-against party has misread the grammar and the pastoral direction of the whole sermon.
The Exception Jesus Names: Sexual Immorality and the Meaning of the Bond
Matthew 19:3-9 supplies the exchange that makes the ethics of this topic workable. The Pharisees come testing him, asking whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason. That was a live rabbinic argument: one school said almost anything counted as a grievance; another said only something serious. Jesus refuses the terms of the question. He goes back to Genesis, to the making of male and female and the one-flesh union, and says that what God has joined together, man must not separate.
When they press him, he acknowledges that Moses allowed a certificate because of hardness of heart, but he says it was not so from the beginning. Then he adds the exception: not in the case of sexual immorality. The word used there is broad, covering any sexual sin, not only adultery in the narrow sense. The logic is not arbitrary. Adultery is itself a severing of the one-flesh union; it is the covenant-breaking act that marriage exists to prevent. If the bond has already been broken by the sin, the wronged party is not commanded to pretend otherwise and remain bound forever.
Paul picks up this same logic in 1 Corinthians 7:10-16. He says he has a command from the Lord that a wife should not leave her husband, and a husband should not divorce his wife. Then he adds something he says the Lord did not speak to directly: if an unbelieving spouse departs, the believer is not bound in that situation. God has called us to peace. Paul is not contradicting Jesus; he is applying him. The abandoning spouse has acted against the covenant, and the believer who is left is not made a slave to that abandonment.
This is where careful teachers must say plainly that faithful Christians differ. Some hold that the exception covers only the one specific sin of adultery and that no other situation permits remarriage. Others, reading the same texts, hold that the abandonment case and other similarly fundamental breaches of covenant belong to the same category. Both positions have been argued by serious readers of Scripture for centuries. What the texts will not support is the claim that the sinned-against spouse is condemned by the same words Jesus aimed at the treacherous one.
The Innocent Party in the Text: Who Is Actually Being Warned
It is worth pausing on how easily this passage gets turned in a direction it does not go. Jesus is not addressing a woman who was abandoned, abused, or betrayed. He is addressing men who had the power to dismiss, the lawyers to draft the certificate, and the social standing to walk away clean. His sharpest language in the whole sermon section is aimed at the heart that treats a person as disposable. If we read the passage as a general prohibition laid on every person in a broken marriage, we have swapped the plaintiffs for the defendants.
There is a further pastoral point. The certificate in Deuteronomy existed because, as Jesus says, hearts were hard. The certificate was the concession, not the ideal. A man who used the law's concession to sin against his wife was guilty precisely because the concession existed to protect her, not to free him. When a wife is put away unjustly, she is not the one who broke faith. Jesus's words fall on the one who broke it. She may remarry or not; the text does not convict her of adultery for having been wronged.
This does not make every remarriage after any divorce automatically innocent. Jesus's words still stand for the man who creates a grievance in order to be free, and for the one who takes the discarded woman into a union built on the injustice. There is such a thing as mutually agreed, no-fault divorce where both parties walk away for convenience and the covenant is simply discarded. The passage speaks to that too, and it speaks with a warning, not with a shrug. But the warning is aimed at those who caused the breach.
What does this mean practically? It means a church should never treat a betrayed spouse as though she were the adulteress of Matthew 5:32. It means the guilty party is the one who broke the covenant, and the church should call that sin what it is, even as it offers repentance and restoration. It means those in a second marriage should not read Luke 16:18 as a permanent sentence with no possibility of forgiveness. Jesus does not teach that a sin committed in the past puts someone beyond grace, and the gospel has no category for an unforgivable marriage.
Malachi's Witness: Divorce as Treachery Before God
Malachi 2:14-16 supplies the background tone of the whole discussion. The complaint there is that men have dealt treacherously with the wife of their youth, and Yahweh is called as witness to a covenant the men have violated. The woman is called a companion and a wife of covenant, not a servant or an asset. The betrayal is not merely private. Because God was witness, the wrong is against God, and the wrongdoing is answered by God himself. That is the gravity Jesus assumes when he speaks about dismissing a wife.
Notice, too, the direction of Malachi's rebuke. The prophet is not scolding the abandoned wife for her marital status. He is indicting the husbands who dismissed wives they had pledged themselves to. The language of treacherous dealing, which appears repeatedly in that passage, puts the guilt squarely on the one who broke faith. When a man covers his garment with violence, the prophet says, God does not accept the offering. The altar and the divorce certificate are in the same hands, and God sees both.
This helps clarify what is at stake in the Matthew 5 and Luke 16 sayings. Jesus is not introducing a stricter law that the prophets did not know. He is reasserting the prophets. The one-flesh bond is not a formality that a document can dissolve, and the God who is witness is not mocked by legal footwork. The certificate Moses allowed was always a shield for the weak, never a licence for the strong. That is the frame in which the warning about remarriage makes its proper sense.
For readers today, Malachi's witness is a call to take marriage and its dissolution as seriously as God does. It is not a call to harshness toward those already wounded. The prophet's anger is directed at the powerful who use their power to abandon the vulnerable. Any teaching on this subject that lands harder on the abandoned than on the abandoner has read the prophets backwards.
Conclusion: How to Teach and Apply This Faithfully
So how should this be taught in a church? First, teach the text for what it says: Jesus treats a calculated divorce followed by remarriage as adultery, and he will not let a certificate make it clean. That is the plain force of Matthew 5:31-32 and Luke 16:18. Second, teach the exception that Matthew records. Jesus himself makes room for the case of sexual immorality, and Paul makes room for abandonment by an unbelieving spouse. Third, teach the direction of the rebuke. The warnings are aimed at those who break covenant, not at those who suffer from that breaking.
Practically, this means a church must not weaponise this passage against someone who was betrayed. It must not tell a woman abandoned by a faithless husband that her new marriage is adultery on the strength of a verse aimed at the man who did the abandoning. It must also not treat sin lightly in the one who walked away. Repentance is available to both, and repentance is only real when it names the wrong honestly. Restoring a broken marriage where possible is a good and beautiful thing; where it is not possible, the church's task is to be honest about who did what.
For someone carrying guilt from a divorce in the past, the gospel speaks a better word than the certificate. Jesus does not treat the confessing sinner as hopeless. The same Lord who says the words in Matthew 5 is the one who receives the woman at the well and the woman caught in adultery. If you were the one who walked away, the call is to repentance, and the promise is forgiveness. If you were the one left behind, the words of warning are not written against you, and you should not read yourself into them.
Finally, teach this with humility about the areas where faithful believers have differed. The permanence of marriage, the seriousness of covenant, and the reality of forgiveness are all clear. The precise boundaries of the exception, and how to apply them across the many situations the New Testament does not spell out, have been debated by careful readers for two thousand years. Hold the clear parts firmly. Handle the debated parts gently. And never let a passage about the sin of the strong become a club against the weak.
Biblical fidelity check
What these verses do establish: Jesus treated a self-serving divorce followed by remarriage as adultery, and he rejected the idea that a legal document dissolves a covenant in God's sight. He also made room, in Matthew 19, for the case of sexual immorality. What they do not establish: that the innocent party in a divorce is guilty of the sin, that every remarriage is adultery with no exceptions whatsoever, or that a person's marital history places them beyond forgiveness. The text does not name a category of unforgivable marriage, and the gospel does not know one.
A common misreading takes "whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery" and applies it to every woman whose marriage has ended, including one abandoned by a faithless husband, then treats her second marriage as a standing state of sin. That reading fails on the grammar of the passage, which directs the accusation at the one who put her away, and on the pastoral direction of Malachi 2, where the anger is aimed at the man who dealt treacherously. It also fails on the gospel, which does not make any past sin an unrepeatable sentence. The verse should be read in its context, not as a general weapon.
Other passages that speak to Matthew 5:31-32
Several related studies help readers place this teaching in a wider scriptural context: What Does 1 Corinthians 1:10 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, on the unity and mutual care that a divided church is called to pursue; What Does 1 Corinthians 1:9 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application, on God's faithfulness as the ground of the call into fellowship; 1 Corinthians 1: Called, United, and Boasting in the Lord, for the wider argument of the letter's opening chapter; and 1 Corinthians 10: Warnings and Freedom, on how the apostle handles conscience, liberty, and the danger of presumption in the life of a believer.
Frequently asked questions
Does Matthew 5:31-32 mean every remarriage after divorce is adultery?
No, not in every case. The verse names a specific situation: a man dismisses his wife and marries another, or takes a woman who has been dismissed. In Matthew 19:9 Jesus adds an exception for sexual immorality, and in 1 Corinthians 7:15 Paul says the believer is not bound when an unbelieving spouse departs. Faithful Christians differ on how broadly to apply these exceptions, but the text itself does not make every second marriage an ongoing act of adultery.
Who is the guilty party when a marriage breaks up?
Scripture consistently places the weight on the one who breaks covenant. Malachi 2:14-16 calls Yahweh a witness against the man who dealt treacherously with the wife of his youth. Jesus in Matthew 5 directs his warning at the man who puts away his wife. That does not mean both parties are always innocent or guilty in the same measure, but it does mean the abandoned spouse should not be treated as the offender simply because the marriage ended.
Can someone in a second marriage be right with God?
Yes. The gospel offers full forgiveness to the repentant, and Scripture nowhere teaches that a second marriage is an unforgivable sin. Where a divorce involved real wrong, repentance names it. Where a person was wounded and the church has added shame, the good news is still for them. The same Lord who spoke the strong words in Matthew 5 also said, "I will be merciful to their unrighteousness," and receives every sinner who comes to him.
