Luke 16:18

“Every one who puts away his wife, and marries another, commits adultery, and he who marries one who is put away from a husband commits adultery.”

For God's Instruction says that every man who puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery. And that anyone who marries a divorced person commits adultery. This is because, as Genesis 2:23 makes clear, when a man and a woman marry they become ‘one flesh'. That is why Jesus elsewhere declares, ‘what God has joined together let not man put asunder' (Mark 10:9; Matthew 19:6). So having become one flesh they are inseparable, and to break that oneness in any way can only bring them under the displeasure of God. This means that when a man puts away his wife and marries another he commits adultery. He falsely breaks the tie that binds him to his first wife.

The particular addition of the second part of the verse, ‘he who marries one who is put away from a husband commits adultery', may indicate a propensity on the part of Pharisees to marry wives who have been divorced. Perhaps they saw themselves as obtaining merit through it, or perhaps there were particularly outstanding cases that Jesus has in mind.

This particular example was a good one to use as easy divorce caused such clear and open distress to innocent women. It very much revealed the worst side of the Pharisees who had a contempt for women. All listening would recognise the point, for on the whole the Rabbis had watered this Law down so much that divorce was allowed for the most trivial of reasons. By a misuse of Deuteronomy 24:1 they had made void the Law through their traditions. Hillel allowed a man to divorce his wife if she burned the dinner, or if she talked to a strange man, or if she talked disrespectfully about his relations in his presence, and Akiba allowed it if a man found someone prettier than his wife. Thus was the sacredness of marriage, established at creation (Genesis 2:24), treated with mockery. On the other hand a woman was not allowed to initiate divorce for any reason whatsoever. All this was a scandalous treatment of the Law and made a mockery of it. But it epitomised the whole Pharisaic attitude to the Law and to women. In one sense they treated the Law very reverently, but by their manipulation of it they often made a fool of it.

So the Pharisees, having mocked Jesus because of His teaching on riches, have suddenly had the tables turned on them. He has demonstrated not only that they cannot ‘see the Kingly Rule of God' (compare John 3:2), but also how they misuse the Law in even what is most basic to a satisfactory family life. They are seen as totally unreliable guides, and as destroying what lies at the very root of a stable society. Rather than simply argue with them about riches He has totally laid bare the bankruptcy of their whole lives and teaching.

The dual thoughts of the use of riches, and the validity of the Law and the prophets now lead into the story of the rich man and Lazarus. This commences with the false behaviour of a rich man and ends with an appeal to the Law and the prophets, that Law which, if given its Scriptural interpretation (‘the prophets') rather than its Pharisaic interpretation, will, if men heed it, prevent them taking the downward path. But, as he has already stressed, the Pharisees have manipulated that Law to suit their own ideas, and it has therefore for them lost its effectiveness. And He will now also make clear that it is precisely because the rich man, like the Pharisees, has manipulated the Law of Moses and the prophets, and has in his case withheld help from the poor, that he ends up as he does.