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.
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