At the church where I serve, we are in a
sermon series entitled “Love and Marriage”, where we are asking and answering
four questions surrounding the issue of marriage: “What is marriage?” “Does
marriage matter to Jesus?” “What is marriage for?” And “How are we to handle
conflict in marriage?” And as we go through this series, our hope and our
prayer is that God would move by the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to
wrap our heads, hearts, and hands around the answers to these questions in a
way that result in us being able to experience the love and marriage that we
were designed to experience.
This week, I would like for us to
ask and answer the question “Does
marriage matter to Jesus?” And to answer that question, I would like for us to
spend our time together looking at an event from history that has been
preserved and recorded for us in an account of Jesus life in the Bible called
the gospel of Matthew. And it is in this event from history that we will discover
the timeless answer to the question “Does marriage matter to Jesus?” So, let’s discover the answer to that
question together, beginning in Matthew 19:3:
Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any
reason at all?"
Matthew begins this
section of his account of Jesus life by giving us a front row seat to a
confrontation that Jesus had with a group of people who were known as the
Pharisees. Now the Pharisee’s were a
group of self-righteous religious leaders who led of one of the largest
religious denominations of the Jewish people during Jesus day. The Pharisees
were aware that Jesus had grown in popularity in the eyes of the Jewish people.
And as a result of His growing popularity, Jesus was viewed as a threat by the
Pharisees to their position and power that they loved.
And it
was in this context that Matthew tells us that some Pharisees came to Jesus to
test Him with a question. Now when Matthew uses the word test here, this word
means to attempt to trap someone through the process of inquiry. In other
words, this group of self-righteous religious leaders hoped to trap Jesus with
a question. The Pharisees hoped that Jesus response to their question that
would undermine His credibility with the Jewish people. The Pharisees hoped
that Jesus answer to their question would give them the opportunity to bolster
their position and popularity with the Jewish people.
So, the
Pharisees asked a question that they believed would be controversial enough and
emotional enough to drive the crowds away from Jesus and toward them: "Is it lawful for
a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?" Now this question,
if communicated in the language we use in our culture today, would have sounded
something like this: Is it right and proper for a man to divorce his wife for
any reason at all? Is it ever okay to get a divorce?”
Now here is a question to
consider: Do you think that this question is controversial? Do you think this
question provokes strong emotions? Do you think that this question provokes
strong opinions? You see, the emotional and controversial subject of divorce
and remarriage is not new. Divorce and remarriage has been an emotional and
controversial subject throughout human history.
And now, the Pharisees
were attempting to get Jesus to weigh in on the debate in hopes that His answer
would undermine His growing popularity and credibility with the crowds that
were following Him. Matthew records for us how Jesus answered this question that
was designed to trap Him in verse 4-6:
And
He answered and said, "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM
MALE AND FEMALE, 5 and said, 'FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS
FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH
'? 6 "So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore
God has joined together, let no man separate."
Matthew tells us that Jesus
began to answer their question with the phrase “Have you not read”. When Jesus
uses this phrase, this was Jesus way of basically saying “You should know that
answer to this question because you position yourselves as the self-righteous
religious experts. You should know that answer to this question because you
already have the answer to this question but obviously you have not read the
Bible like you should have read the Bible so that you could see the answer to
your question which is right in front of your face.”
Jesus then revealed the
answer to their question which was right in front of their face by quoting from
a section of the very first letter in the Bible called the book of Genesis.
Jesus quoted from Genesis 1:27, which we looked at last week and which referred
to the creation of humanity. And in God’s creation of humanity, “God made them
male and female”. What is so interesting here is that Jesus did not quote all
of Genesis 1:27. Here is what all of Genesis 1:27 states:
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He
created him; male and female He created them.
Instead of quoting all of
Genesis 1:27, Jesus quotes the last phrase of Genesis 1:27 from the Greek
translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. But why would Jesus only quote the
last phrase of Genesis 1:27? You see, Jesus quoted the last phrase of Genesis
1:27, as the last phrase of Genesis 1:27 highlighted the differences between
men and women. As we talked about last week, Genesis 1:27 reveals the reality
that in God’s design, men and women have equal value and worth as being created
in God’s relational image.
Jesus here is
highlighting the reality that in God’s design, there is a distinctiveness
between men and women in the midst of the equality of men and women in God’s
sight. After quoting the last phrase of Genesis 1:27, Jesus quoted Genesis 2:24.
But notice the words that occur between the two quotes. Notice the words “and
said”. Jesus here shows the causal linkage between the last phrase of Genesis
1:27 and Genesis 2:24 to reveal the reality that God created men and women with
distinctiveness that was to be united in marriage in a way that those
distinctive features between a man and a woman would complement one another in
a lifelong commitment to one another.
Jesus pointed to this
linkage to point out that “For
this reason”; in other words, because it is not good for man to be alone in his
unique distinctiveness; because it is not good for a woman to be alone in her
unique distinctiveness; a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined
to his wife and they shall become one flesh. Jesus point here is that marriage
is an institution that was created by God by which a man and woman cut the
cord, so to speak, from their parents and join together in a covenant
commitment that involves one man and one woman for one lifetime and become one flesh,
in a relationship that is marked by vulnerability,
transparency and intimacy.
Jesus was reinforcing the
reality that marriage is not a legal contract where two parties agree to do certain
things for each other and make promises about how they will conduct their life
together that can be dissolved at any time. Instead, marriage is a covenant
commitment that can only be revoked through death of one of the parties or by
one of the parties entering into another covenant agreement. Jesus was
reinforcing the reality that marriage is not just sexual in nature. And Jesus was reinforcing the reality that marriage is not just
personal in nature. Jesus was reinforcing the reality that marriage, according to God’s design, is not simply about
love, or sex, or a legal piece of paper. Instead, Jesus was reinforcing God’s
design for marriage as being about bringing the distinctiveness of a man and a
woman together to complement one another by uniting them together in a covenant
commitment for their lifetime.
And because of that reality, in verse 6 Jesus proclaimed "So they are no
longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man
separate." Now what is so interesting here is that the phrase “let no man
separate” is a command. In other words, Jesus responded to the question by the
Pharisees by giving them a command concerning marriage. And that command was
that no man was to separate, or divide into two, what God had made into one as
a result of the covenant commitment that had been made before God and man.
So, Jesus not only
answered their question by pointing to God’s design for marriage. In addition,
Jesus doubled down on God’s design for marriage by commanding that no one
should get between a man and woman who have become married.
Tomorrow, we will see Matthew
reveal how the Pharisees responded to Jesus…
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