DESCRIPTION: Jack discusses Malachi 2:16, where some translations say that God hates divorce. He asks whether divorce is the only thing God hates, and whether there might not be some very serious issues that concern God at least as much as divorce does—and whether those other issues are being given the same weight in the churches as divorce is.

Let’s talk about divorce.

First of all, I need to point out that our culture tends to be pretty sloppy in our understandings of Bible doctrines. While the Bible has over 1,100 pages of information, we tend to draw on tiny segments of it when developing our beliefs, ignoring the full body of information and deferring to a one-liner passage here and there. And to be even more specific, it’s not the one-liner so much as our interpretation of that one-liner that’s the problem. That is to say, there are many Bible passages that could reasonably taken in more than one way. But when do we ever roll up our sleeves to consider all the reasonable interpretations of a verse before deciding that we know what the author or speaker meant to convey?

If we were considering all the reasonable interpretations of a passage of scripture, we would definitely want to know what, if anything, all the other passages of scripture have to say on the topic.