According to Matthew 5:32, Jesus has this to say about divorce:

“But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

During the time of Jesus, the laws favored husbands. Women did not have the ability to divorce their husbands. And many husbands took advantage of the laws and discarded their wives for another. Adultery is a husband desiring another woman other than his wife; and a wife desiring another man other than her husband. By tearing himself from his wife, divorcing her, and uniting himself with another woman, a new wife, he commits adultery. And the ex-wife becomes the victim of adultery, because a divorced woman had few options and most of the time had to remarry another man to survive.

Jesus makes one exception: if the wife committed adultery herself, then the husband may divorce her. In this situation, she does not become the victim of adultery because she was the one who committed adultery.

According to these words spoken by Jesus, divorcing your spouse and remarrying is committing adultery. The reason is because when you marry, you become united, and become one flesh. When you divorce and remarry, you are tearing that union apart and becoming one with another person.

Why did Jesus speak out against divorce? Jesus was rebuking the husbands who disregarded and divorced their wives. Divorced women had few options: often, they had to remarry another man. These husbands wrongly believed that they were not doing anything wrong because they were behaving within the law. But according to Jesus, that behavior, and that heart, was adulterous.

Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor as ourself. Jesus commands husbands to love their wives as themselves. To be clear, Jesus is not commanding us to feel love for our spouses, or to be always be “in love” with our spouses. No. Love here is a state of heart that says: You are one with me. I will take care of you as I take care of myself. I will meet your needs as I meet my own needs. You and I are not separate, but one.

Jesus desires for us to realize that he holds us to a higher law, a spiritual law. We must not think that as long as we are living within the letter of our laws that we are doing okay. We have a much higher spiritual law to live by, which is to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our minds, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.