Christ Condemning Immorality, Homosexuality Connecting It with Idolatry

Mat 5:31 It has been said, whoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorce: Mat 5:32 But I say to you, That whoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery: and whosoever marries a woman that is divorced commits adultery.

Christ makes it clear how important it is to keep together a marriage. Divorce is but one step away from adultery, which is Christ's second most series crime and one that leads to destruction. In our more "liberal" times, this commandment seems outdated, but, even though I have been divorced and married a divorced woman, my tendency after a life of experience is to agree totally that Christ was right to set the bar for getting a divorce very high.

Where does he set the bar? At what is called here "fornication" but which in the original Greek was porneia, a term which includes adultery (in Greek, moichao, which in narrowly defined as sex with another's wife) but which also includes other forms of sexual immorality, including homosexuality, incest, prostitution, and so on. (So those who defend homosexuality by saying that Christ never specifically condemned it, here is one example--and there are others.) This is the root word for the English word, "pornography." And lest you think that Greeks had a more "sophisticated" view of this sexual activity, this is the word that Demosthenes used to vilify a corrupt individual (speech 19, section 287), and Aeschines, another Greek orator, used it to describe the lewdness of another (speech 2). There are dozens of other words for sexual activity in Greek, including much more specific terms for various sexual acts than we have in English. It is interesting that the word chosen here is the most inclusive with clear sense of evil.

Most interestingly, in Greek porneia was also a synonym for idolatry, worshiping idols. This connects the worship of false gods with sexual immorality. Since we are discussing commandment here, this word connect adultery with the first commandment, worshipping false gods. Even the ancients Greeks thought of indulging in sexual immorality as a form of worshiping a false god (and they had many gods).

So, divorce was acceptable if your spouse had fallen to this level of degradation but is otherwise forbidden. The question is, why do we consider it so much more acceptable now? Studies show that people who divorce are generally unhappier five years after than those who stay married. No child of divorce has anything to say good about it. It treats our relationships as disposable. We cannot divorce our family, so it lowers the spousal relationship below that of "true" family. Christ will have more to say about this thinking later in the Gospels.