The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it. — Matt. 19:10-12
Excerpts from the book:
Page 318 - Jesus’ response is not to lower the bar so that marriage becomes less risky. Instead, he says, in essence, that the ability to remain single if necessary and the ability to stay in a hard marriage if necessary are both a gift of God.
Page 318 - “Not everyone can receive this saying [the saying that marriage is permanent], but only those to whom it is given” (Matt. 19:11). The point is not that some disciples are given the grace and some are not. The point is that this grace (or faithfulness in singleness and marriage) is the mark of a disciple. “Those to whom it is given” are followers of Jesus.1 God gives the grace or what he demands.
Page 318 - The words “Let the one who is able to receive this receive it” are like the words “He who has ears, let him hear” (Matt. 13:9, 43; 11:15). That is, whether you have ears to hear—or whether you have grace to receive this call to radical respect for marriage—is the mark of being a follower of Jesus.
Page 319 - Marriage is a great work of God........Jesus would grieve over the cavalier way that marriage is treated in our day. He would be appalled at any thought of two men or two women calling their homosexual union marriage. He would not call it marriage. As much pity as he may feel for the sexual brokenness, he would call the practice of homosexuality sin and the attempt to sanctify it with the word marriage folly.
Page 319 - (on homosexuality).....He would respond to this folly the same way he responded to
the Pharisees’ justification of divorce with Moses’ teaching. He would go back to the beginning. Only this time he would underline the words male and female. “Have you not read that he who
created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’?” (Matt. 19:4-5).
Page 319 - Are Divorce and Remarriage the Unforgivable Sins? But as great as marriage is, divorce followed by remarriage is not the unforgivable sin. Sometimes I am asked whether my understanding of Jesus implies that divorce is the unforgivable sin. The answer is no. Jesus said that his blood will be the basis of forgiveness for all sins (Matt. 26:28). Therefore he is able to say, “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29).
Page 320 - Forgiveness is received freely through trusting Jesus to forgive our sins. This implies that we see sin as sin and hate it as a dishonor to Jesus. The only unforgivable sin is the sin that we refuse to confess and forsake.
Page 320 - Marital sin is in the same category as lying and killing and stealing. If someone has lied, killed, stolen, or illegitimately left a marriage, the issue is not, can they be forgiven? The issue is, do they admit that what they did was sin? Do they renounce it? And do they do what they can in order to make it right if possible?
Page 321 - What then would Jesus expect from one of his followers who has sinned and is divorced and remarried? He would expect us to acknowledge that the choice to remarry and the act of entering a second marriage was sin and to confess it as such and seek forgiveness. He would also expect that we not separate from our present spouse. I base this on at least five observations.
First, Jesus seemed to regard multiple marriages as wrong but real. He said to the woman at the well in John 4:18, “You have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.”.......
Second, Jesus knew that Deuteronomy 24:4 spoke against going back to a first husband after marrying a second. He did not go out of his way to qualify this provision.
Third, covenant-keeping is crucial to Jesus as we saw in the previous chapter (also see Demand #23). Therefore, even though the current covenant is adulterous in the making, it is real and should be kept. Its beginning in sin does not have to mean that it is continuously sinful and without hope of purification.
Fourth, there are illustrations of God taking acts of disobedience and turning the result into God-ordained plans. One example is the fact that it was sin for the people of Israel to ask for a king to be like the nations (1 Sam. 12:19-22). Nevertheless, God turned the sinfully instituted kingship into the origin of the Messiah and the kingship of Jesus. Another example would be the sinful marriage of David to Bathsheba. The adultery with her, the murder of her husband, and the marriage “displeased the LORD” (2 Sam. 11:27). So the Lord took the life of the first child of this union (2 Sam. 12:15,18). But the second child, Solomon, “the LORD loved” and chose him as ruler over his people (2 Sam. 12:24).
Fifth, through repentance and forgiveness on the basis of the blood of Jesus and through the sanctifying work of the promised Holy Spirit, a marriage that was entered sinfully can be consecrated to God, purified from sin, and become a means of grace. It remains less than ideal, but it is not a curse. It may become a great blessing.
Page 322 - There is no doubt that Jesus’ demand for faithfulness in marriage is a radical word to our modern culture. Here is a test for his lordship over our lives. His standards are high. They do not assume that this earth is our final home. He makes it very clear that marriage is an
ordinance for this age only.................Jesus’ standards are high because marriage does not and should not meet all our needs. It should not be an idol. It should not and cannot take the place of Jesus himself. Marriage is but for a moment. Jesus is for eternity.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Demand #41: What God Has Joined Together Let No Man Separate, For Whoever Divorces and Marries Another Commits Adultery
Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery
against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she
commits adultery. — Mark 10:11-12
Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery,
and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits
adultery. — Luke 16:18
It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate
of divorce.” But I say to you that everyone who divorces his
wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit
adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits
adultery. — Matt. 5:31-32
And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual
immorality, and marries another, commits adultery. — Matt. 19:9
Excerpts from the book (note - free download available in at www.desiringgodo.com - see link on posting site(
Page 307-308: Jesus set a higher standard for marital faithfulness than Moses or the Jewish teachers of his day. He did not affirm the permission for divorce found in Deuteronomy 24. He said it was owing to the hardness of the human heart (Matt. 19:8) and implied that he was here to change that. In this chapter we will try to discern just how high Jesus’ standard of marital faithfulness is.
Page 308: I suspect that Jesus saw a higher standard for marriage implied not only in the creation account of Genesis 2:24 but also in the very wording of Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which shows that the one-flesh relationship established by marriage is not completely nullified by
divorce or even by remarriage.........
Therefore, it may well be that when the Pharisees asked Jesus if divorce was legitimate, he based his negative answer not only on God’s original intention expressed in Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, but also on the implication of Deuteronomy 24:4, that remarriage after divorce, while permitted, nevertheless defiles a person.
In other words, there were clues in the writings of Moses that the divorce concession was on the basis of the hardness of man’s heart and did not make divorce and remarriage the most God-honoring path.
Page 309: Moses’ prohibition of a wife returning to her first husband even after her second husband dies (because it is an “abomination,” v. 4) suggests that today no second marriage should be broken in order to restore a first one. I will return to this issue later on. But for now I would say that even a disobedient second or third marriage should not be broken, but confessed as less than ideal and yet sanctified by God’s mercy. It is better in God’s eyes than more broken covenants.
Pge 309: Twice in the Gospels Jesus expresses with no exceptions his prohibition of divorce followed by remarriage...
Luke 16:18 - Here Jesus seems to call all remarriage after divorce adultery. These are strong words. Evidently the reason a second marriage is called adultery is because the first one is considered to still be valid. So Jesus is taking a stand against the Jewish culture at the time in which all divorce was considered to carry with it the right of remarriage.
Page 310: Since there are no exceptions mentioned in the verse, and since Jesus is evidently rejecting the common cultural conception of divorce as including the right of remarriage, the first readers of Luke’s Gospel would have been hard-put to see any exceptions on the basis that Jesus shared the cultural acceptance of divorce.
Page 310: The other instance of Jesus’ unqualified rejection of remarriage after divorce is found in Mark 10:11-12....These two verses repeat the first half of Luke 16:18 but go further and say that not only the man who divorces, but also a woman who divorces and then remarries is committing adultery.
Page 311: But what makes the matter more controversial is that in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 there seems to be an exception to the rule of no remarriage after divorce. Both these verses are generally interpreted to say that Jesus allowed divorce and remarriage where there has been “sexual immorality” by one of the partners. Is that what the “exception clauses” mean?
Page 311: So Matthew 5:32 does not teach that remarriage is lawful in some cases. Rather, it reaffirms that to remarry after divorce is to commit adultery, even for those who have been divorced innocently, and that a man who divorces his wife is guilty of the adultery of her second marriage, and that a man who marries a woman who is put away by her husband, even innocently, commits adultery.
Page 312: All of my adult life I assumed that adultery and desertion were two legitimate grounds for divorce and remarriage. This was the air I breathed, and I saw a confirmation of this in the exception clause in Matthew 19:9, even though, as I see it now, the rest of the New Testament pointed in the other direction.2 But there came a point when this assumption began to crumble.
Page 312: I was initially troubled that the absolute form of Jesus’ denunciation of divorce and remarriage in Mark 10:11-12 and Luke 16:18 is not expressed by Matthew, if in fact his exception clause is an opening for divorce and remarriage.
Page 313: The second thing that began to disturb me was the question, why does Matthew use the Greek word porneiva (porneia, “sexual immorality”) instead of the word moiceiva (moicheia) which means adultery? Sexual immorality in marriage would naturally be adultery. But the word Matthew uses to express Jesus’ meaning is one that usually means fornication or sexual immorality without reference to marital unfaithfulness.........The question nagged at me why Matthew would not use the word for adultery (moicheia), if that is in fact what he meant.
Page 313: Then I noticed something very interesting. The only other place besides Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 where Matthew uses the word porneia is in Matthew 15:19 where it is used alongside moicheia......Could this mean, then, that in Matthew’s record of Jesus’ teaching he is thinking of porneia in its more usual sense of fornication or incest or prostitution that does not denote marital unfaithfulness, that is, adultery?
Page 314: The next clue in my search for an explanation came when I noticed the use of porneia in John 8:41 where Jewish leaders indirectly accuse Jesus of being born of porneia. In other words, since they don’t accept the virgin birth, they assume that his mother Mary had committed fornication and that Jesus was the result of this act.
Page 314: Matthew 1:18-20....The Relevance of the Exception Clauses for Joseph’s Betrothal to Mary....In these verses Joseph and Mary are referred to as husband (anj hrv ) and wife (gunhv). Yet they are described as only being betrothed to each other.
Page 314: In Matthew 1:19 Joseph resolves to “divorce” Mary though they were only betrothed and not yet married.........But most important of all, Matthew says that Joseph was “just” in making the decision to divorce Mary.....In other words, this “divorce” was permitted according to Matthew.........In handling this crisis he called Joseph “just” in the plan to “divorce” her. That means that Matthew, as a follower of Jesus, would not consider this kind of “divorce” wrong. It would not have prevented Joseph (or Mary) from marrying another.
Page 315: Since only Matthew had told this story and raised this question, he was the only Gospel writer who would feel any need to make clear that Jesus’ absolute prohibition of divorce followed by remarriage did not include a situation like Joseph and Mary’s. That is what I think he does with the exception clauses.
Page 315: A common objection to this interpretation is that both in Matthew 19:3-9 and in Matthew 5:31-32 the issue Jesus is responding to is marriage, not betrothal. The point is pressed that “except for fornication” is irrelevant to the context of marriage. My answer is that this irrelevancy is precisely the point of the exception clause........I don’t think it sounds pointless if you hear it the way I just suggested or if Matthew 5:32 goes like this: “But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife—excluding, of course, the case of fornication [porneiva] during betrothal—makes her commit adultery.” In this way Jesus makes clear that the action his earthly father almost took—to “divorce” Mary because of porneiva—would not have been unjust. It would have been right. That is the kind of situation the exception clause is meant to exclude.
Page 315-316: This interpretation of the exception clause has several advantages:
• It does not force Matthew’s Gospel to disagree with the seemingly plain, absolute meaning of Mark and Luke.
• It provides an explanation for why the word porneia is used in Matthew’s exception clause instead of moicheia.
• It squares with Matthew’s own use of porneia (for fornication) in distinction from moicheia (for adultery) in Matthew 15:19.
• It fits Matthew’s wider context concerning Joseph’s contemplated “divorce” from Mary (Matt. 1:19).
What are the implications of this high standard of marriage?
To this we turn in the next chapter.
against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she
commits adultery. — Mark 10:11-12
Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery,
and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits
adultery. — Luke 16:18
It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate
of divorce.” But I say to you that everyone who divorces his
wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit
adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits
adultery. — Matt. 5:31-32
And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual
immorality, and marries another, commits adultery. — Matt. 19:9
Excerpts from the book (note - free download available in at www.desiringgodo.com - see link on posting site(
Page 307-308: Jesus set a higher standard for marital faithfulness than Moses or the Jewish teachers of his day. He did not affirm the permission for divorce found in Deuteronomy 24. He said it was owing to the hardness of the human heart (Matt. 19:8) and implied that he was here to change that. In this chapter we will try to discern just how high Jesus’ standard of marital faithfulness is.
Page 308: I suspect that Jesus saw a higher standard for marriage implied not only in the creation account of Genesis 2:24 but also in the very wording of Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which shows that the one-flesh relationship established by marriage is not completely nullified by
divorce or even by remarriage.........
Therefore, it may well be that when the Pharisees asked Jesus if divorce was legitimate, he based his negative answer not only on God’s original intention expressed in Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, but also on the implication of Deuteronomy 24:4, that remarriage after divorce, while permitted, nevertheless defiles a person.
In other words, there were clues in the writings of Moses that the divorce concession was on the basis of the hardness of man’s heart and did not make divorce and remarriage the most God-honoring path.
Page 309: Moses’ prohibition of a wife returning to her first husband even after her second husband dies (because it is an “abomination,” v. 4) suggests that today no second marriage should be broken in order to restore a first one. I will return to this issue later on. But for now I would say that even a disobedient second or third marriage should not be broken, but confessed as less than ideal and yet sanctified by God’s mercy. It is better in God’s eyes than more broken covenants.
Pge 309: Twice in the Gospels Jesus expresses with no exceptions his prohibition of divorce followed by remarriage...
Luke 16:18 - Here Jesus seems to call all remarriage after divorce adultery. These are strong words. Evidently the reason a second marriage is called adultery is because the first one is considered to still be valid. So Jesus is taking a stand against the Jewish culture at the time in which all divorce was considered to carry with it the right of remarriage.
Page 310: Since there are no exceptions mentioned in the verse, and since Jesus is evidently rejecting the common cultural conception of divorce as including the right of remarriage, the first readers of Luke’s Gospel would have been hard-put to see any exceptions on the basis that Jesus shared the cultural acceptance of divorce.
Page 310: The other instance of Jesus’ unqualified rejection of remarriage after divorce is found in Mark 10:11-12....These two verses repeat the first half of Luke 16:18 but go further and say that not only the man who divorces, but also a woman who divorces and then remarries is committing adultery.
Page 311: But what makes the matter more controversial is that in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 there seems to be an exception to the rule of no remarriage after divorce. Both these verses are generally interpreted to say that Jesus allowed divorce and remarriage where there has been “sexual immorality” by one of the partners. Is that what the “exception clauses” mean?
Page 311: So Matthew 5:32 does not teach that remarriage is lawful in some cases. Rather, it reaffirms that to remarry after divorce is to commit adultery, even for those who have been divorced innocently, and that a man who divorces his wife is guilty of the adultery of her second marriage, and that a man who marries a woman who is put away by her husband, even innocently, commits adultery.
Page 312: All of my adult life I assumed that adultery and desertion were two legitimate grounds for divorce and remarriage. This was the air I breathed, and I saw a confirmation of this in the exception clause in Matthew 19:9, even though, as I see it now, the rest of the New Testament pointed in the other direction.2 But there came a point when this assumption began to crumble.
Page 312: I was initially troubled that the absolute form of Jesus’ denunciation of divorce and remarriage in Mark 10:11-12 and Luke 16:18 is not expressed by Matthew, if in fact his exception clause is an opening for divorce and remarriage.
Page 313: The second thing that began to disturb me was the question, why does Matthew use the Greek word porneiva (porneia, “sexual immorality”) instead of the word moiceiva (moicheia) which means adultery? Sexual immorality in marriage would naturally be adultery. But the word Matthew uses to express Jesus’ meaning is one that usually means fornication or sexual immorality without reference to marital unfaithfulness.........The question nagged at me why Matthew would not use the word for adultery (moicheia), if that is in fact what he meant.
Page 313: Then I noticed something very interesting. The only other place besides Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 where Matthew uses the word porneia is in Matthew 15:19 where it is used alongside moicheia......Could this mean, then, that in Matthew’s record of Jesus’ teaching he is thinking of porneia in its more usual sense of fornication or incest or prostitution that does not denote marital unfaithfulness, that is, adultery?
Page 314: The next clue in my search for an explanation came when I noticed the use of porneia in John 8:41 where Jewish leaders indirectly accuse Jesus of being born of porneia. In other words, since they don’t accept the virgin birth, they assume that his mother Mary had committed fornication and that Jesus was the result of this act.
Page 314: Matthew 1:18-20....The Relevance of the Exception Clauses for Joseph’s Betrothal to Mary....In these verses Joseph and Mary are referred to as husband (anj hrv ) and wife (gunhv). Yet they are described as only being betrothed to each other.
Page 314: In Matthew 1:19 Joseph resolves to “divorce” Mary though they were only betrothed and not yet married.........But most important of all, Matthew says that Joseph was “just” in making the decision to divorce Mary.....In other words, this “divorce” was permitted according to Matthew.........In handling this crisis he called Joseph “just” in the plan to “divorce” her. That means that Matthew, as a follower of Jesus, would not consider this kind of “divorce” wrong. It would not have prevented Joseph (or Mary) from marrying another.
Page 315: Since only Matthew had told this story and raised this question, he was the only Gospel writer who would feel any need to make clear that Jesus’ absolute prohibition of divorce followed by remarriage did not include a situation like Joseph and Mary’s. That is what I think he does with the exception clauses.
Page 315: A common objection to this interpretation is that both in Matthew 19:3-9 and in Matthew 5:31-32 the issue Jesus is responding to is marriage, not betrothal. The point is pressed that “except for fornication” is irrelevant to the context of marriage. My answer is that this irrelevancy is precisely the point of the exception clause........I don’t think it sounds pointless if you hear it the way I just suggested or if Matthew 5:32 goes like this: “But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife—excluding, of course, the case of fornication [porneiva] during betrothal—makes her commit adultery.” In this way Jesus makes clear that the action his earthly father almost took—to “divorce” Mary because of porneiva—would not have been unjust. It would have been right. That is the kind of situation the exception clause is meant to exclude.
Page 315-316: This interpretation of the exception clause has several advantages:
• It does not force Matthew’s Gospel to disagree with the seemingly plain, absolute meaning of Mark and Luke.
• It provides an explanation for why the word porneia is used in Matthew’s exception clause instead of moicheia.
• It squares with Matthew’s own use of porneia (for fornication) in distinction from moicheia (for adultery) in Matthew 15:19.
• It fits Matthew’s wider context concerning Joseph’s contemplated “divorce” from Mary (Matt. 1:19).
What are the implications of this high standard of marriage?
To this we turn in the next chapter.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Demand #40: What God Has Joined Together Let No Man Separate, For Marriage Mirrors God's Covenant With Us
Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh”? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. — Matt. 19:4-6
Your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name. — Isa. 54:5
Excerpts from the book (see link on right for free download of complete book)
Page 301 - Jesus demands that husbands and wives be faithful to their marriages. He does not assume this is easy.....Against all the diminished attitudes about marriage in our day, Jesus’ message is that marriage is a great work of God and a sacred covenant breakable only by death.
Page 302 - Jesus knew his Jewish Scriptures and saw them as coming to fulfillment in himself and his work (Matt. 5:17-18). This includes his awareness of what God had said about his relationship with his people when he portrayed it as marriage. For example, God said, “Your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name” (Isa. 54:5)...(Hos. 2:16, 19-20)...(Ezek. 16:8)...(Jer. 3:20)...With these Scriptures as the backdrop, it is inevitable that Jesus would see God’s creation of marriage in the beginning as a means of portraying his relationship with his people. So Jesus read in Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” When God said this—and Jesus explicitly says that God said this, not just Moses, the writer of Genesis (Matt. 19:4-5)—he had in view (as he has all things in view) that he would call his people his wife and himself her husband. Therefore, the union between a man and a woman is uniquely God’s creation with a view to portraying the relationship between himself and his people.
Jesus is explicit about marriage as God’s creation. He does not leave
us to figure this out from the Scriptures, and he does not limit the creMarriage
ation to the first marriage between Adam and Eve.
Page 303 - And as a God-created union of “one flesh” this man and this woman are in a covenant analogous with God’s covenant with Israel. Through marriage God fills the earth with (mostly unwitting) witnesses to the relationship between him and his covenant people. This is one of the main reasons that divorce and remarriage are so serious. They tell a lie about God’s relationship to his people.
Page 304 - They had come to him with a question: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matt. 19:3). Jesus answers them not by reference to the Mosaic law but by reference to the Mosaic creation account. In other words, he intends to root the meaning of marriage in its original design, not in the way marriage is managed by the law in view of sin.
Now the Pharisees think they have Jesus trapped. He seems to
have just taken a position contrary to the Law of Moses. So they ask,
“Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce
and to send her away?” (Matt. 19:7)
In other words, Jesus is raising the standard of his
disciples above what Moses allowed. He puts it like this: “And I
say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality,
and marries another, commits adultery” (Matt. 19:9).
Page 305 - We are now at a point where we need to tackle the question, did Jesus make provision for his disciples to divorce and remarry? Are there situations in which he would sanction this? There is no consensus on the answer to this question today among his followers. I want to say clearly from the beginning that I am aware that men more godly than I have taken different views than the one I will give here.
I realize that simply saying this will feel devastating to some, adding more misery to the injury of what they did not want to happen....Divorce is painful. It is often more emotionally wrenching than the death of a spouse...often long years in coming...long years in the settlement and in the adjustment.....upheaval of life...sense of failure...guilt....fear....torture the soul. Like the psalmist, night after night a spouse falls asleep with tears (Ps. 6:6). Work performance is hindered. People draw near or withdraw with uncertain feelings. Loneliness can be overwhelming. A sense of a devastated future can be all-consuming. Courtroom controversy...And then there is often the agonizing place of children. Parents hope against hope that the scars will not cripple them or ruin their own marriages someday. Tensions over custody and financial support deepen the wounds. And then the awkward and artificial visitation rights can lengthen the tragedy over decades.
Page 306 - In Matthew 19:3-9 and Mark 10:2-12 Jesus rejected the Pharisees’ justification of divorce from Deuteronomy 24 and reasserted the purpose of God in creation that no human being separate what God has joined together. He said that Moses’ handling of divorce was owing to the hardness of the human heart and then implied that he had come to do something about that. His aim was that the standard of his followers would be higher than what the Law allowed.
How high? That’s the question I try to answer in the next chapter.
Your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name. — Isa. 54:5
Excerpts from the book (see link on right for free download of complete book)
Page 301 - Jesus demands that husbands and wives be faithful to their marriages. He does not assume this is easy.....Against all the diminished attitudes about marriage in our day, Jesus’ message is that marriage is a great work of God and a sacred covenant breakable only by death.
Page 302 - Jesus knew his Jewish Scriptures and saw them as coming to fulfillment in himself and his work (Matt. 5:17-18). This includes his awareness of what God had said about his relationship with his people when he portrayed it as marriage. For example, God said, “Your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name” (Isa. 54:5)...(Hos. 2:16, 19-20)...(Ezek. 16:8)...(Jer. 3:20)...With these Scriptures as the backdrop, it is inevitable that Jesus would see God’s creation of marriage in the beginning as a means of portraying his relationship with his people. So Jesus read in Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” When God said this—and Jesus explicitly says that God said this, not just Moses, the writer of Genesis (Matt. 19:4-5)—he had in view (as he has all things in view) that he would call his people his wife and himself her husband. Therefore, the union between a man and a woman is uniquely God’s creation with a view to portraying the relationship between himself and his people.
Jesus is explicit about marriage as God’s creation. He does not leave
us to figure this out from the Scriptures, and he does not limit the creMarriage
ation to the first marriage between Adam and Eve.
Page 303 - And as a God-created union of “one flesh” this man and this woman are in a covenant analogous with God’s covenant with Israel. Through marriage God fills the earth with (mostly unwitting) witnesses to the relationship between him and his covenant people. This is one of the main reasons that divorce and remarriage are so serious. They tell a lie about God’s relationship to his people.
Page 304 - They had come to him with a question: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matt. 19:3). Jesus answers them not by reference to the Mosaic law but by reference to the Mosaic creation account. In other words, he intends to root the meaning of marriage in its original design, not in the way marriage is managed by the law in view of sin.
Now the Pharisees think they have Jesus trapped. He seems to
have just taken a position contrary to the Law of Moses. So they ask,
“Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce
and to send her away?” (Matt. 19:7)
In other words, Jesus is raising the standard of his
disciples above what Moses allowed. He puts it like this: “And I
say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality,
and marries another, commits adultery” (Matt. 19:9).
Page 305 - We are now at a point where we need to tackle the question, did Jesus make provision for his disciples to divorce and remarry? Are there situations in which he would sanction this? There is no consensus on the answer to this question today among his followers. I want to say clearly from the beginning that I am aware that men more godly than I have taken different views than the one I will give here.
I realize that simply saying this will feel devastating to some, adding more misery to the injury of what they did not want to happen....Divorce is painful. It is often more emotionally wrenching than the death of a spouse...often long years in coming...long years in the settlement and in the adjustment.....upheaval of life...sense of failure...guilt....fear....torture the soul. Like the psalmist, night after night a spouse falls asleep with tears (Ps. 6:6). Work performance is hindered. People draw near or withdraw with uncertain feelings. Loneliness can be overwhelming. A sense of a devastated future can be all-consuming. Courtroom controversy...And then there is often the agonizing place of children. Parents hope against hope that the scars will not cripple them or ruin their own marriages someday. Tensions over custody and financial support deepen the wounds. And then the awkward and artificial visitation rights can lengthen the tragedy over decades.
Page 306 - In Matthew 19:3-9 and Mark 10:2-12 Jesus rejected the Pharisees’ justification of divorce from Deuteronomy 24 and reasserted the purpose of God in creation that no human being separate what God has joined together. He said that Moses’ handling of divorce was owing to the hardness of the human heart and then implied that he had come to do something about that. His aim was that the standard of his followers would be higher than what the Law allowed.
How high? That’s the question I try to answer in the next chapter.
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