¹⁴ For the believing wife brings holiness to her marriage, and the believing husband^[a] brings holiness to his marriage. Otherwise, your children would not be holy, but now they are holy.

¹⁵ Didn’t the Lord make you one with your wife? In body and spirit you are his.^[a] And what does he want? Godly children from your union. So guard your heart; remain loyal to the wife of your youth. ¹⁶ “For I hate divorce!”^[b] says the Lord, the God of Israel. “To divorce your wife is to overwhelm her with cruelty,^[c]” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. “So guard your heart; do not be unfaithful to your wife.”

¹⁵ Everything is pure to those whose hearts are pure. But nothing is pure to those who are corrupt and unbelieving, because their minds and consciences are corrupted.

⁵ For we know it is made acceptable^[a] by the word of God and prayer.

Deliverance for Jerusalem

¹⁶ And since Abraham and the other patriarchs were holy, their descendants will also be holy—just as the entire batch of dough is holy because the portion given as an offering is holy. For if the roots of the tree are holy, the branches will be, too.

¹⁵ Don’t you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never! ¹⁶ And don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the Scriptures say, “The two are united into one.”^{[a] 17} But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.

Ezra’s Prayer concerning Intermarriage

9 When these things had been done, the Jewish leaders came to me and said, “Many of the people of Israel, and even some of the priests and Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the other peoples living in the land. They have taken up the detestable practices of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites. ² For the men of Israel have married women from these people and have taken them as wives for their sons. So the holy race has become polluted by these mixed marriages. Worse yet, the leaders and officials have led the way in this outrage.”

²³ So Peter invited the men to stay for the night. The next day he went with them, accompanied by some of the brothers from Joppa.