Adultery, Divorce, and the Call to Covenant Faithfulness | Matthew 5:27-32
Brian Hedges | January 25, 2026
Good morning! Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to Matthew 5. We’ll be reading Matthew 5:27-32 in just a moment.
I want you to imagine standing in front of a mirror that has been shattered. There are pieces of the mirror still there, and as you look in the mirror, every piece reflects something that is real—an eye here, a mouth there, a fragment of a face. Nothing in the mirror that you see is false, but the image is fractured. What you do not see is a whole person. If you try to just grab one shard of that mirror, you will cut your hand.
I want that image to stick with you as we work through a passage of Scripture this morning that is aimed at wholeheartedness but is speaking into the reality of fragmented hearts, fractured relationships, and broken lives.
I want us to remember that the aim of the Lord Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is not just the avoidance of sin, but it is the forming of whole people, wholehearted devotion to God, wholehearted love for God and others; the kind of hearts in which our desires and our loves are ordered and are rightly related to God and others.
It was St. Augustine who defined virtue as rightly ordered love. The problem we have in our lives is not that we love too much, it’s not that we desire too much, it’s that our desires are out of order, and maybe we love things in the wrong order. We do not love God fully, with whole hearts, and we do not love those to whom we are bound in covenant relationship with the kind of wholehearted devotion which should characterize our lives. Instead, our hearts are fragmented as desire turns inward and selfish and then leads to brokenness in our lives.
We’re looking today at a passage in the Sermon on the Mount that I’m sure is going to hit each one of us uniquely, because it’s a passage that speaks to the depths of our humanness, our personhood, our relationships. These are Jesus’ words from Matthew 5:27-32. Jesus the King, the wise teacher, and the Savior, who speaks to us about three closely related realities: lust, divorce, and marriage. Let’s hear God’s word.
“You have heard that it was said, ’You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
“It was also said, ’Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
This is God’s word.
These are hard words of Jesus, but they are good words, and my hope is that by the end of this message you will walk away not feeling shame and guilt and condemnation, which you may feel on the initial hearing of those words, but that you will hear and feel the hope of the gospel. But I want us to work through the text carefully.
We’re going to do that in three steps, as we look at:
1. Disordered Desire: Adultery in the Heart
2. Divorce: The Tragedy of Covenant Breaking
3. Covenant Faithfulness: God’s and Ours
That’s what Jesus is aiming at, he calls us to, and it’s what we receive from God himself in the gospel.
1. Disordered Desire: Adultery in the Heart
You see it in these first two verses, Matthew 5:27-28:
“You have heard that it was said, ’You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Of course, Jesus’ words here would equally apply to men or to women who struggle with lust or disordered desire in their hearts.
Jonathan Pennington, in his book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, is helpful in clarifying what Jesus is and is not condemning here. He notes that the phrase translated “with lustful intent” reflects a Greek construction that communicates the idea of purpose or intention. In other words, experiencing natural attraction to someone is not lust. Noticing someone’s beauty is not lust. That’s not the issue. The issue here is what the imagination is being used for. As Pennington puts it,
“Jesus is warning against using the creational gift of the imagination, which functions in the heart, for the purpose of fantasizing about and objectifying another man’s wife as a sexual partner.”
That distinction matters. Jesus here is not condemning desire as such; he is condemning, rather, desire that has been enlisted in the service of lust rather than love.
As we’ve already seen, Jesus here is not correcting the Old Testament, he is not redefining the Old Testament, and here he is not redefining adultery; he is, rather, exposing its very roots. The root of adultery is a disordered desire in the heart.
The Old Testament itself forbade this. The tenth commandment went deeper than outward action when it said, “You shall not covet [or desire] your neighbor’s wife.”
We also see this in the wisdom literature. Remember that righteous Job said, “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then can I gaze at a young woman?” (Job 31:1). And in Proverbs we read this exhortation: “Do not desire her beauty [that is, the beauty of the strange woman or the immoral woman] in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyes.”
So Jesus, right in step with the Old Testament, is getting to the heart of sexual sin. Lust is a way of desiring that is disordered. It is a way of desiring that dehumanizes the other person. It’s to look at another person not as a whole human being—someone who’s made in God’s image, someone with history and dignity and purpose and relationships—it is rather to look at someone as a means to an end. Lust abstracts sexual desire from its covenant context and turns it inward. It is desire detached from responsibility, faithfulness, and love.
I think C.S. Lewis helps us see this distinction. This is from Mere Christianity; it’s a very helpful statement. He says,
“The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union, the sexual, from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating; it means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting by chewing things and spitting them out again.”
That’s helpful. Lewis elsewhere captures this same insight by distinguishing between wanting her and wanting it. Love wants her, the specific beloved, the one to whom you are committed in marriage and covenant and a loving relationship. Wanting it is simply wanting the satisfaction of the physical desire, and the person is an object rather than a subject.
The applications of this are fairly obvious. We might think, first of all, of pornography and the terrible distortion that pornography brings into sexuality—pornography that trains the heart to consume images without any relationship, without responsibility, without mutuality; teaches us to look at people as objects rather than as persons. Jesus’ words, of course, reach beyond pornography into the life of the mind—our thoughts, our fantasies, our viewing habits, our basic posture towards other people.
Jesus here is targeting something that is broken in the human heart, but he’s not simply condemning disordered desire. He also gives us very practical, though shocking, language about how to deal with it. Read the next two verses.
“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.”
I think it’s pretty obvious here that Jesus is not advocating literal self-mutilation, otherwise there would be a lot of one-eyed people and one-handed people in this room this morning. Jesus is, rather, speaking with what we might call prophetic hyperbole, but he is advocating something very serious. He is reminding us here that disordered desire does not starve itself, and it’s up to us rather to limit and put constraints on ourselves. He is saying to cut off the behaviors that feed lust.
That’s really the first application point this morning. Cut off the behaviors that feed lust. Lust grows through access, opportunity, and secrecy, and the call of Scripture is to not give it fuel so that it can live.
We might think also of Paul’s words in Romans 13:14: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” Make no provision for the flesh. Don’t give sin an opportunity. Don’t willingly walk into temptation.
Or consider also these words from Ephesians 5. Paul says, “Among you there must not even be a hint of sexual immorality or of any kind of impurity or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.” Not even a hint.
A number of years ago we noticed the faint smell of gas in our house, and so we did what you’re of course supposed to do; we called the gas company. They sent somebody out with, you know, a little meter, and he was checking the water heater and the furnace, he was checking our stove top. He was going around the house; he was checking every place where there could be a gas leak. He just said over and over again throughout his visit, “We have a zero-tolerance policy with NIPSCO. And so if there’s anything, we have got to shut it down. We have to shut down the gas.”
Of course, by the time we were done, the gas was shut down and we had a list of things that needed to be fixed, including replacing our entire cooktop.
A zero-tolerance policy. Not even a hint of gas. Not even the faintest scent of it. Why so strict? Because you don’t mess with something that can blow your house up! Right?
What Jesus is saying here is that you don’t mess with something that can destroy your heart, that can destroy your relationships. That’s the logic. He’s being realistic about danger. You don’t negotiate with that which can destroy your life.
That means that there are things we have to do in our lives to fight the disordered desires, cutting off that which feeds the desire. Faithfulness will look different for different people, but for many it requires structural changes in our lives, not just good intentions. It may mean things like putting a filter on your computer or accountability software that goes to a fellow believer with regularity. It may mean guarded use of your phone late at night or when you are alone. It may mean more discretion in the kinds of media that you consume. It does mean cutting off anything that consistently feeds disordered desire.
But Jesus’s call here is not merely negative, it’s also profoundly positive. It connects to the beatitude that we saw several months ago in Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” This is a call for wholehearted devotion to the Lord, because this is what brings the deepest satisfaction of our hearts and souls. And we are to seek that. We’re to cut off that which fragments our hearts, and we are to seek to serve and know the Lord with a united heart.
The goal here is not simply avoiding sin, it is to become a certain kind of person: a person who, under the reign of Jesus, in the kingdom of God, loves—loves God, loves our spouses if we are married, loves our brothers and sisters in Christ, loves our fellow human beings with a wholehearted, chaste, pure love.
I know that many hear these words of Jesus and initially feel only shame, condemnation. But listen, Jesus did not speak these words to drive strugglers away; he spoke these words to call us into freedom.
If this is an area of ongoing struggle for you, I want you to hear this clearly: The struggle does not disqualify you from grace, but what you cannot do is surrender to the sinful desires. You have to fight. You have to wage war against sin in the power of grace.
Hear this word from Peter, 1 Peter 2:11. “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.” Wage war on sin! Wage war on lust, on sexual sin. Bring your desires into the light. Keep naming them honestly before God. Seek help where help is needed, maybe help from a counselor, a friend, a fellow believer. And fix your eyes on Jesus and remember that the same Lord who names our sin is the Lord who gives us grace for the fight.
2. Divorce: The Tragedy of Covenant Breaking
Jesus speaks here to the inner world of desire, but then he also speaks to the outward reality of broken covenants through the tragedy of divorce. So point number two.
Before I say anything about this, I want to acknowledge that for many people in this room, divorce is not an abstract theological issue, but it is a lived experience. It’s something that you have been through, either personally or something that maybe you witnessed with a close family member. Maybe your parents were divorced. It is an experience that has been marked by loss and grief, maybe by shame, certainly by survival. Perhaps you are someone who didn’t choose divorce, but it came crashing into your life.
I want you to know, first of all, I’m just glad you’re here, and this church is a safe place for you. And again, I hope that by the end of this message you find comfort in the hope of the gospel.
But I want us to hear Jesus’ words in verses 31-32 and try to understand them in their full biblical context. Jesus says,
“It was also said, ’Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
At first glance, this may sound like Jesus is simply tightening the rules from the Old Testament. I don’t think that’s quite what’s happening. I think to understand Jesus’ words, we need to hear them in their original cultural context as well as in the broader biblical context.
When Jesus here speaks about a certificate of divorce, he’s pointing back to Deuteronomy 24. That was a passage that did not command divorce, but it regulated it. It addressed divorce in Old Testament Israel as a tragic reality in a fallen world. It placed limits on divorce, especially to protect women from being discarded without legal standing in a very deeply patriarchal society. The certificate made the divorce public and provided some accountability. It functioned more like a restraint than a permission slip.
By Jesus’ day, that provision was being abused. Divorce had grown casual, driven often by male desire, legal loopholes, and shifting preferences. And it’s into that context that Jesus speaks here with such moral clarity. The legitimate causes for divorce were a hot topic among the rabbis, and there were two schools of thought. There was the school of Shammai, which was more conservative, which taught that divorce was only permitted in cases of serious covenant-breaking, like sexual immorality. Then there was the much more permissive and much more influential and popular school of Hillel, the rabbi Hillel, who argued that a man could divorce his wife for almost any reason at all. If she burnt his dinner, he could divorce her. If he found someone that was more attractive, he could find a reason, he could divorce her and go after the younger, prettier woman.
In other words, divorce had become not a last resort for grave rupture of the covenant, but a socially acceptable way of exiting a marriage whenever personal dissatisfaction set in.
When Jesus says, “But I say to you,” he’s not rejecting the Old Testament; he is rescuing it from distortion of the permissive rabbinic school that failed to honor the marriage covenant.
As we’ve seen throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ words are interpreted most faithfully not in isolation from the rest of Scripture, but in continuity with the whole of God’s revelation in Scripture. And there are other passages that speak to the issues of marriage and divorce.
We might think of Matthew 19, where you have similar words of Jesus, where someone asks Jesus about the lawfulness of divorce for any cause. And Jesus, in his answer there, goes all the way back to creation. He grounds his understanding of marriage in creation when he says that Moses had given the certificate of divorce because of the hardness of heart, but he says,
“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 the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Jesus is there grounding marriage in God’s original design and intention in creation. The ideal, and what is God’s will for marriage, is that it be a lifelong covenantal union. And so in his teaching, Jesus consistently names divorce for what it is: not morally neutral, not merely unfortunate, but a serious breaking of that covenant. He confronts the normalization of this covenant-breaking through divorce, both in his day and in ours.
So we have to think about the application in our own lives, and I think the first thing to say is this, that Jesus’ teaching does not permit what we might call no-fault divorce.
No-fault divorce is the idea that marriage may be dissolved simply because of the cooling of romantic passion or because spouses no longer feel compatible with one another, or even because marriage has proved to be hard. Listen, covenant-keeping is hard, and just because a marriage is difficult is not a reason to exit the marriage.
We could say, I think, quite clearly that serial marriages built on changing personal desires are clearly at odds with Jesus’ teaching and his vision of life in the kingdom of God. Jesus does not permit no-fault divorce.
Yet—I think this matters—Scripture also avoids a cruel rigidity in the application of these truths. So in 1 Corinthians 7, the apostle Paul addresses a very real situation in the early church where married believers are sometimes abandoned by unbelieving spouses. In that passage, Paul doesn’t trivialize divorce, but neither does he seem to bind the conscience of the believer when the covenant has already been violently broken.
Across church history and among evangelicals today, faithful interpreters have landed at different points along a spectrum in talking about these issues. On one end are views that prohibit all remarriage, even after divorce, and on the other end are approaches that permit divorce and remarriage very broadly, pretty much in line with the culture today. Let me tell you where the leadership of Redeemer Church has landed.
In wrestling with these arguments, we’ve come to believe (and I think with some good reason) that something between those two extremes is right, that we have to hold together Jesus’ seriousness about covenant faithfulness with Scripture’s realism about living in a fallen world. I think there are good biblical and pastoral reasons to say that divorce and remarriage are permitted when the marriage covenant has been truly and irreversibly broken. Scripture names adultery and abandonment very clearly. Old Testament texts like Exodus 21 provide further categories for recognizing other forms of covenant-destroying behavior, situations where vows are not being kept. We might think of adjacent issues that are not directly named in Scripture but also destroy a marriage; things like severe abuse, domestic violence, criminal activity, or unrepentant, destructive, addictive behaviors.
The wise application of biblical teaching should guard us from being either permissive on one hand or punitive on the other. Against the culture, we should oppose the permissiveness of no-fault divorce and fight hard for covenant faithfulness in marriage, especially when it’s hard. But in a fallen world, sin is sometimes so destructive that the marriage covenant is broken and destroyed, and when that is the case, our stance should always be one of sympathy and compassion, never one of punitive judgment.
I want you to remember that the same Jesus who speaks these words is also the Jesus who met a woman by a well in John 4. She had been through five marriages. She was now living with a man who was not her husband. And Jesus, with great compassion for that woman, names her relational history truthfully and then offers her living water, something that will satisfy the deep desires of her heart.
Jesus does not normalize the breaking of the marriage covenant, but he does not discard those who have been wounded and broken by sin in this world.
3. Covenant Faithfulness: God’s and Ours
That brings us to point number three, I think what this passage is intended to lead us to and what we certainly see in the broader scope of Scripture, an emphasis on covenant faithfulness. I want to talk both about ours and the Lord’s.
If Jesus has exposed disordered desire, lust, or adultery in the heart, and if he has named the seriousness of covenant breaking through divorce, he also shows us what he is for. And what he is for is covenant faithfulness in our relationships.
I want us to think about this in three dimensions.
(1) First of all, in marriage: fidelity in marriage or faithfulness in marriage. Marriage, at its heart, is a covenant, and it is a covenant of wholehearted love. It’s not the promise to merely feel affection—in fact, feelings often wax and wane in any longstanding relationship—but it is a promise of faithfulness to give oneself, body, heart, will, future to another person.
Covenant love says, “I’m not keeping my options open. I’m not holding part of myself back. I’m giving myself fully to you.” That’s what we say in marriage.
You might think of it like this: The marriage covenant is the container that God has given for sexual desire. Like two banks of a mighty river, the covenant channels desire so that it is disciplined by love, so that passion matures into tenderness. Affection deepens into devotion. Marriage becomes a place of refuge rather than a place of consumption.
But if you remove those covenant constraints, just as the banks of a river will flood and destroy a surrounding area, so desire will flood our lives with destructive force. We’re called to faithfulness. If you’re married today, God’s best for you is to stay in your marriage, to be faithful to your marriage, to be devoted to your marriage, to give yourself as fully as you possibly can to your spouse, to do everything within your power to save that marriage.
Now obviously, if you’re someone that’s in an abusive relationship, his will for you is, first of all, be safe. Get to a safe place. We’ve talked about the exceptions.
But when marriage just needs work because it’s difficult, stick with it. Be faithful.
(2) The second dimension for covenant faithfulness is for singles, and I know there are many singles in the room this morning. God’s will for those who are single is chastity. It is abstinence from sexual relationship outside of marriage.
This is not the removal of desire from our hearts; it is rather the offering of desire to the Lord. And once again, wholeness of hearts is possible when we offer our desires to the Lord and we ask him to unite our hearts in love for him and fear of him.
Here’s what I want you to hear as a single person. Don’t believe the lie of our culture that personal fulfillment is dependent on personal sexual satisfaction. That’s the great lie of the culture. Virtually every TV show and every movie that has anything to do with romance is telling you that. I want you to remember that Jesus Christ never experienced a sexual relationship, and yet he was the most wholehearted, fully human being who ever lived. God’s will for you is chastity until the time that he might lead you to marriage.
(3) Then finally, in the church, for all of us—this applies to both married people and single people—covenant faithfulness takes a form in our relationship with one another, and it is what we might call familial affection. I want you to hear these words from 1 Timothy 5:1-2. This gives us the blueprint for how we are to relate to one another as men and women in the body of Christ.
“Never speak harshly to an older man, but appeal to him respectfully as you would to your own father. Talk to younger men as you would to your own brothers. Treat older women as you would your mother, and treat younger women with all purity as you would your own sisters.”
There it is. That is a form of covenant faithfulness. It is familial affection and love. I want us to hear this clearly: the Scriptures do not call us to avoid the opposite sex. That’s not the call. It’s rather to relate to one another in wholehearted, pure, godly, person-honoring ways. There is an appropriate love and affection that should characterize us as men and women in the body of Christ.
The final thing this morning, let us remember the covenant faithfulness of Christ himself, who is the divine husband. This is where the gospel comes fully into view. We can’t think about marriage in the Bible without thinking about the divine romance, the greater marriage, the marriage of Christ and his church.
Marriage in this world is always a sign that points to something greater. It points to the ultimate marriage between God and his people. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11 says that he has “betrothed the church to Christ as her one husband.” In Ephesians 5, Paul tells us that Christ is the husband who loved his wife and gave himself for the church. The Scriptures teach us again and again that when we have been unfaithful to him as the wayward bride, Christ has been faithful to us as the divine husband who seeks us, who pursues us, who seeks to woo us back to himself. When our hearts have been divided, his heart for us is a wholehearted love. He models for us what he asks of us.
Jesus seeks out over and over again in the gospel stories those who are sexually broken, those whose relationships have been broken and shattered, who leave behind them so many pieces of their lives, and he calls them to himself. He puts them back together again. He restores them to God and to community.
This is the heart of the divine husband, and he calls us to himself this morning. If you find yourself today as someone who is sexually broken, if you find yourself today as someone who is struggling with desire in your heart or struggling in a difficult marriage or wounded by a marriage that was broken, what I want you to hear is that your Lord is also your husband. He is the one who loves you with a faithful, unfailing love. He looks on you with compassion and with grace, and he calls you today to a fresh start. You turn to him, you offer your desires, you offer your heart, your relationship, your body—all that you are, you offer that to the Lord. He will receive it as a gift, and you channel your love to him and then through him to others.
Let’s pray.
Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for your word and for the teaching of Jesus, however it may hit us this morning. Maybe it comes with great conviction and exposes parts of our hearts that need to be changed. Maybe this morning you’ve put your finger on things in our lives that need serious adjustment. Maybe there’s something that needs to be cut off—a habit, a secret, a behavior. Maybe your word comes to us today with pointed application about our relationships.
But Lord, in and through it all, we pray that you would help us today to hear also the good news that Christ the bridegroom has come to save his wayward bride, and that describes every one of us, ultimately—those who have strayed from our divine lover through sin, but are now being called back to him in repentance and in faith. So Lord, would you give us today the grace to bring ourselves before you, to give all of our hearts to you, and to recommit ourselves today to covenant faithfulness in whatever context, whatever relationship that means for us today, whether married or single, and all of us in the body of Christ?
We pray, Lord, that you would help us to be those people who are characterized by wholeness of heart, by purity in heart, and that we would see you with the eyes of faith today.
As we come to the table this morning, may this be a table of grace and of restoration. Would you work in our hearts what is pleasing in your sight, and Lord, be glorified in our continuing worship as well as in our lives and in our relationships. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
