Few convictions run deeper in the Seventh-day Adventist Reform Movement than the belief that we exist to restore. Our very name declares it. And our understanding of the last days is shaped by a single closing prophecy of the Old Testament: that before the great and dreadful day of the Lord, God will send Elijah, and hearts will be turned back within the family.
On that much, this article has no argument. The Elijah commission is real, it is urgent, and it belongs to God’s people at the close of earth’s history. Marriage is an Edenic institution, it was designed to be permanent, and its collapse in the modern world is not a side issue of the gospel but one of the principal battlefields on which the image of God in humanity is defaced or restored.
The question, then, is not whether marriage should be restored, but what that restoration actually requires. Within SDARM, one important expression of this restoring work has been the prohibition of all remarriage after divorce, including in the one circumstance in which Christ Himself stated an exception. That position has been understood as a defence of the permanence of marriage and a safeguard against the growing ease with which marriage bonds are dissolved.
But this raises a deeper question. Have we sometimes come to identify the preservation of the marriage bond with the restoration of marriage itself? Our strong stand against divorce and remarriage may be intended to uphold God’s ideal, yet it can never substitute for the much harder work of restoring broken relationships between husbands and wives. We may rightly insist that marriage is for life while leaving largely untouched the estrangement, resentment, coldness, and unresolved wounds that can exist within the marriages of our own people.
Divorce is a terrible tearing apart of what God has joined, and Scripture speaks solemnly about it. But surely God’s purpose is not simply that two people remain legally married while living for years as strangers beneath the same roof. The Elijah promise speaks of something deeper: the turning of hearts. Restoration means healing what has been sundered within the relationship itself. If we are serious about restoring marriage, our concern must therefore extend beyond preventing divorce. It must include helping husbands and wives repent, forgive, rebuild trust, recover tenderness, renew neglected duties, and become truly reconciled to one another.
The Argument as We Have Made It
The SDARM case is set out most fully in the Good Way Series study “Is Marriage a Contract for Life?” and is developed in similar form in studies circulated more recently within the movement. The reasoning runs, in substance, as follows.
- Marriage originated in Eden as a divine institution, established alongside the Sabbath, and the two are twin institutions given for the glory of God and the benefit of humanity.
- In Eden there was no provision for divorce. Divorce and remarriage entered as a consequence of sin, and were tolerated among the nations and later in Israel because of the hardness of the human heart.
- The concession in Deuteronomy 24 was therefore not the will of God but an accommodation, of the same character as other concessions God permitted to a people whose hearts were still in Egypt.
- Christ, when questioned, appealed past Moses to the beginning, showing that the original arrangement, not the concession, expresses the perfect will of God.
- Scripture teaches that in the time of the end every divine institution is to be restored, and that the heavens must retain Christ until the times of restitution of all things (Acts 3:19–21). Restoration is therefore not merely desirable but a condition connected to the Lord’s return.
- The last-day people are the Elijah people. John the Baptist, who came in the spirit and power of Elijah, lost his life over precisely this question, telling Herod that his union with his brother’s wife was not lawful. A last-day Elijah message must therefore address divorce and remarriage, and must expect similar resistance.
- Since Ellen White’s statements on divorce were, on this reading, personal advice rather than revelation, and since she herself declined to have her letters used as a law or rule in such cases, the church must settle the matter from the Bible alone – and the Bible, in Mark 10, Luke 16, Romans 7 and 1 Corinthians 7, consistently binds the parties for life.
- Therefore the exception clauses of Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 must be read as permitting separation only, or as referring to unfaithfulness during betrothal, and the church, as a restoring movement, must require that those who separate remain unmarried until death or reconciliation.
That is a serious argument, and much of it is correct.
What We Affirm Without Reservation
Marriage is not a contract of convenience. It was instituted before the fall, it is a covenant made in the presence of God and not merely between two people, and Scripture says without softening that God hates putting away.
We affirm that Christ’s appeal to “the beginning” overturns every attempt to make divorce a matter of convenience. We affirm that the Deuteronomy provision was a concession and not an ideal. We affirm that the church should press for reconciliation before it entertains separation, and that repentance, not legal advantage, is what God seeks from the party who has broken the vow. We affirm that John the Baptist’s confrontation with Herod was a faithful act, that it cost him his life, and that a people bearing the Elijah message today should expect the marriage question to be costly.
So the disagreement is not about whether marriage is sacred or life-long, nor about whether restoration is our work. It is about one question only: whether the restoring work God has given us authorises us to prohibit what Christ permitted.
The Restorer Left the Exception Standing
Here is the difficulty at the heart of the SDARM position.
Matthew 19 is the restoration passage. It is the text in which Christ does precisely what our argument says restoration requires: He sets aside the Mosaic concession, goes back past it to creation, and declares that from the beginning it was not so. If there is a single moment in Scripture where the Edenic ideal is formally reinstated over against a later accommodation, this is it. And in that same discourse, Christ states an exception.
“And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery.”
Matthew 19:9
This exception came from the lips of the One doing the restoring. Whatever else may be said about how the exception should be construed, one thing cannot be said: that removing it would bring us closer to Eden. Jesus narrowed Moses’ broad licence – which permitted a man to dismiss his wife for almost any cause he pleased – to a single ground, and He left that ground standing.
The full exegetical case for reading the exception as Christ plainly stated it has been made elsewhere on this website, in our examination of the divine law of divorce and in the article on the “black swans” of Scripture. We will not repeat it here. The point for our present purpose is different and, in a sense, prior to the exegesis:
A restoration cannot be more complete than the restoration Christ Himself performed. If our doctrine ends in a rule stricter than the one the Restorer laid down in the act of restoring, something has gone wrong with our reasoning, not with His.
We do not honour Eden by exceeding Christ. Nor do we make His words safer by improving on them. The moment we conclude that His stated exception is an embarrassment to be explained away rather than a provision to be received, we have made our conception of the ideal the judge of His actual words – which is exactly the error our movement was raised up to protest against in other areas.
A Pattern We Have Seen Before
In our study of vegetarianism as a test of fellowship, we saw a similar line of reasoning at work. Eden gives us the original ideal; Elijah and Acts 3 point to a work of restoration before the end; and it is therefore reasonable to see health and diet as part of that broader return to God’s original purposes. The difficulty comes with the final step: the assumption that the church must enforce that restoration through legislation and make the ideal a condition of fellowship. The first three ideas can be supported from Scripture. It is that last step that lacks clear biblical warrant – and yet it is the step on which the whole argument for making vegetarianism a test ultimately rests.
The argument concerning marriage follows the same pattern. Eden establishes the permanence and sacredness of the marriage bond. Prophecy points to a work of restoration in the last days. From there, however, another step is taken: that restoration must therefore be secured through a church rule. But the move from “God will restore” to “the church must legislate how that restoration is enforced” is an inference, not a revelation. And it is precisely this kind of reasoning that the Spirit of Prophecy addresses in unusually direct terms:
“The disciples were to teach what Christ had taught. Human teaching is shut out. There is no place for tradition, for man’s theories and conclusions, or for church legislation. No laws ordained by ecclesiastical authority are included in the commission.”
The Desire of Ages, p. 826.1
And the standard by which any proposed requirement is to be measured is stated with equal clarity: before accepting any doctrine or precept, we are to demand a plain “Thus saith the Lord” in its support, and neither the deductions of learned men nor the decisions of ecclesiastical councils are to be regarded as evidence for or against any point of religious faith (Great Controversy, p. 595.1).
Restoration is the goal. And where it does prescribe the means of restoration, as we shall see, it prescribes something considerably harder than a prohibition.
Are we Consistent With Our Reading of the Testimonies?
The Good Way Series study on this topic rests a substantial part of its argument on Ellen White. It appeals to her statement that in the time of the end every divine institution is to be restored. It appeals to her identification of marriage and the Sabbath as twin institutions of Eden. It uses her to establish the framework within which the whole discussion is then conducted.
But when the discussion reaches her explicit statements about divorce and remarriage, the approach changes entirely. Those statements are recategorised as personal advice, human opinion, or counsel given without special revelation – and set aside. The reader is then told that on this particular matter it is safer to use only the Bible.
That creates an important question of consistency.
We should be clear about what actually carries the argument for prohibiting remarriage in the very circumstance Christ excepted. It is not the restoration motif itself. The decisive step is a prior claim about the text of Matthew – a claim stated without qualification in our own General Conference publication:
“There is only one conclusion that we can come to, and that is that this perplexing phrase in the Book of Matthew ‘except it be for fornication’ did not exist in the days of the early Christian church, but was introduced at some later date by the ‘holy fathers’.”
Divorce and Remarriage, Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement General Conference, p. 15
Even if the manuscript question were set aside entirely, however, the difficulty would remain. Ellen White did not treat Christ’s exception as doubtful, secondary, or textually uncertain. She repeatedly expressed its substance across decades, stating that there is one cause, and one only, which can release a husband or wife from the marriage vow in the sight of God.
“In the sermon on the mount [Matt 5] Jesus declared plainly that there could be no dissolution of the marriage tie, except for unfaithfulness to the marriage vow.”
Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing, p. 63
For a movement that affirms the continuing authority of the prophetic gift, this is not a minor difficulty. We would effectively be saying that the prophetic gift confirmed as Christ’s teaching a phrase that had actually been introduced centuries later – and that this conclusion is necessary in order to sustain a rule that Ellen White herself never taught.
What the Elijah Work Actually Consists Of
But let us set the legislative question aside for a moment and read the commission itself.
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
Malachi 4:5–6
The focus of the language of the prophecy is on turning hearts – on the restoration of relationships that have become divided, distant, or estranged. And here there is a practical dimension that we fear may have been overlooked in our zeal to uphold church legislation.
When researchers moved beyond consulting court records – which for generations recorded mainly the grounds that could be legally established – and began asking divorced people directly why their marriages had ended, a different picture emerged. In the Australian Institute of Family Studies research on divorce, communication problems and growing apart together accounted for roughly forty-eight per cent of stated main reasons, while infidelity accounted for about twenty per cent. The pattern is not peculiar to Australia. Wherever genuine survey data exists, estrangement outranks infidelity as the leading reported cause of marital breakdown, often by a wide margin.
Now read that beside Christ’s own words. When He said that what God has joined together no man is to put asunder, He was quoting Genesis, where the word rendered “cleave” means to cling, to stick fast. Scripture gives the picture elsewhere in an unexpected place: the scales of leviathan, joined so closely that no air can come between them.
We habitually hear “put asunder” as a reference to the divorce decree. But sundering is a process, and the decree only ratifies what has already occurred. Two people can be perfectly, legally, unimpeachably married and already far advanced in putting asunder what God joined – living parallel lives but drifting apart, communicating logistically, no longer known to one another. By the time a marriage reaches a lawyer’s office, the sundering is usually years old.
This is where our position appears misplaced. A restriction on remarriage can only operate after the marriage is dead. It arrives at the one moment when nothing further can be done, and it does nothing whatever at the many earlier moments when nearly everything could have been done. A church that concentrates the bulk of its energy on the doctrine of marriage at the point of the divorce decree has stationed all its resources at the mortuary and none at the hospital.
Ask yourself this. Which is more likely to preserve a marriage in our congregations this year: a rule governing what a person may do after it has ended, or a ministry that teaches husbands and wives to repair after conflict rather than let distance settle, to replace contempt with honour, to confess rather than defend, to return after withdrawing, to face life’s transitions as one unit rather than two, and to guard the small daily courtesies by which love is actually experienced?
Conclusion
The Reform Movement has rightly understood itself as a restoring movement and has seen the Elijah commission as part of its own end-time calling. But on the question of marriage, it has gone a step further: it has concluded that restoring God’s original ideal requires prohibiting remarriage even in the circumstance for which Christ Himself made an exception.
We are therefore asking the Movement to test that conclusion against three things. First, against the words of the Restorer Himself, who, in calling marriage back to its Edenic ideal, nevertheless left standing an exception that we have removed. Second, against our own method of interpretation, which cannot consistently appeal to the Spirit of Prophecy to establish a doctrine of restoration while setting aside its clearest statements on the very subject under discussion. And third, against the Elijah commission itself, whose language centres on hearts being turned and relationships restored, not simply on remarriages being forbidden.
A prohibition is comparatively simple to legislate and enforce. It creates a visible standard the Movement can identify, teach, and defend. But the turning of hearts is far more demanding. It is slower, more costly, and often hidden from view. It happens through countless ordinary acts of repentance, forgiveness, honour, patience, tenderness, and renewed attention within homes that no conference committee may ever hear about.
Yet this is the work the prophecy actually describes. And there is a real danger that the rule has come to stand in for the work – that we have chosen the easier thing to measure and enforce, and allowed it to represent the harder work of reconciliation.
We should be careful not to accomplish slowly, through neglect, what we would never willingly do at once: allow marriages to remain cold, divided, and estranged while congratulating ourselves that the legal bond has been preserved. And we should be equally careful not to build a fence where Christ Himself left an exception, and then call that fence restoration.