"And the Two Shall Become One" Matthew 19:3-9 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Matthew 19 begins this way.

When Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

Large crowds followed him, he healed them there.

The Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?

He answered, 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 the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh.

What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

They said to him, Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?

He said to them, Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.

Obviously, our culture has undergone a huge moral revolution in the area of marriage.

And it's difficult, like the uh frog in the boiling water, it's difficult to even appreciate how substantial the cultural renovation has been concerning marriage just in the last ten years in our society.

For all of human history, really, there's been a view of marriage that in the American legal tradition is called the conjugal view of marriage.

In fact, if you were to look up conjugal in the Bible uh in the dictionary, it would simply say uh marriage, pertaining to marriage.

It's almost a synonym for marriage, but it's a word that has taken on legal significance in the American jurisprudence as well as in other nations as well, to describe a concept of marriage that has societal implications.

So the reason government regulates marriage is precisely because it's conjugal, it has effects on those outside of the married couple.

So you marry someone, and there's this understanding in law in every society ever in the history of the world that your marriage doesn't terminate on yourself, but it affects those around you.

This is precisely why governments regulate marriage.

Because they have concern for your kids, uh, what happens if one of you dies, for the distribution of property.

At the most basic level, government is concerned above everything else with taxes.

I'm glad you're sitting down.

That's not a surprise.

That's why the government regulates marriage, because it has uh financial implications to how they tax you, to how they tax your children, to how they tax inheritance and property, and so forth.

This is not uniquely American.

As I said, this is true in every country, every culture, every civilization, from the most remote tribe all the way through the Roman Empire.

Uh they all have this understanding that marriage affects those around you, and so society regulates it.

That's the conjugal view of marriage.

Our country has stepped away from that in the last, obviously the last 10 or 15 years, but certainly the last like 30 or 40 years, towards, you know, books that talk about this thing don't even really have a name for the other view of marriage because it's so novel, but the one it seems that a lot of authors have settled on is the revisionist view of marriage.

The revisionist view of marriage views marriage as terminating in the married couple.

That as far as the government's concerned, there's no interested parties beyond the married couple.

And so there might be implications for kids or for property or whatnot, but that's not primarily what the government's concerned about.

The government, as much as they regulate marriage, is concerned about you and your spouse.

And that seems like a fancy way of just saying that in our culture, in our country now, you can marry whoever you want for whatever reason you want, and the government should stay out of it more or less.

That's the revisionist view of marriage.

And let me give you just a basic example.

Uh, through most cultures and most nations in world history, uh, divorce has been very difficult to obtain because of how it affects family and all the other government interests I just noted earlier.

But in our more modern and enlightened culture, if you are married to someone and you fall in love, with those are the sarcastic quote marks, you fall in love with somebody else who's married to somebody else, then you could even say, I want to divorce my wife to marry this person, she wants to divorce her husband to marry me.

After all, we are in love.

And to deny us the ability to do that would be calling us to live a lie.

And we can't live a lie.

You can't ask us, the government shouldn't make us be married to someone whom we don't love, and the government shouldn't make us abstain from marriage with a person that we really do love.

And so, not only must the government allow us to divorce and remarry, but the government must must fully support us.

In fact, the government must encourage us to cultivate our new concept of love and marriage together, regardless of the harm it may cause other people.

That's none of their business.

What the government's business is, is making me happy by validating this relationship I have with this new person.

If I want to marry this new person, the government better support it.

And if they don't, that's discrimination.

If they don't, that's the government controlling my life.

And the only reason the government would do that is because they are not minding their own business and they're overstepping their authority or they have, you know, puritanical influences in their past, and they should stop it and just let me marry whoever I want to marry for whatever reason I want, because that's what will make me happy.

It's the revisionist view of marriage.

And that is certainly the view of marriage that is held in our culture now.

And I think this comes from, I mentioned this a few Sundays ago, but it bears repeating.

I think this comes from in the American, you know, last 30, 40 years, this emphasis on pop psychology, especially in the 1990s, this emphasis on self-esteem, on happiness.

That in the American experiment, your greatest good is your happiness.

You have the right to happiness and you can do whatever you want to be happy.

And if other people are in the way of your happiness and they are probably acting illegally.

Because the most important thing is your happiness.

You should think highly of yourself.

Your self-esteem is the most important contributing factor to your happiness.

So if something is not making you feel good about yourself, that thing is bad because you should be happy.

You're happy, right?

You can repeat to yourself, I'm happy.

I'm I'm good enough.

I'm good enough.

I'm worth it.

I'm special.

I can do what I want because I'm privileged and I'm good.

And that's just the pop psychology mantra that's just emblazens in our psyche that leads to, when you start to believe that, or you start to see that filter through society, the kind of self-esteem movement of the 1990s, it leads, of course, to the largest divorce rate in world history.

A culture that comes out of this idea that your happiness is tantamount is going to be a culture that embraces divorce.

Because in that culture, why would anyone get married?

You get married because you think it will make you happy.

And then lo and behold, it doesn't make you happy, and so therefore you get out of marriage.

I mean, the only reason you got into it was to be happy.

I love you, you love me.

We can be happy together.

I do, I do.

Uh-oh, I'm not happy.

So therefore, I can get out of this marriage and go find someone else that'll make me happy, or go find another lifestyle that will make me happy, or go do my own thing.

And I'm not even blaming gay marriage for this because gay marriage is a symptom of that.

Um, not the root cause.

The root cause isn't Prop 8 getting struck down by the Supreme Court or whatever.

The root cause of this is this obsession with happiness and self-esteem, that how you identify your own traits or whatever in your pursuit of happiness is the most important thing about you and must be protected and advanced by the government at all costs.

That is the hard issue.

The idolatry of happiness, ripping God's design of marriage away from it.

The Jews also, in Jesus' lifetime, had a problem with divorce.

They also divorced their wives somewhat willy-nilly and for superficial reasons, but they, unlike Americans, they at least went through the legwork here of creating a facade of religious justification for their divorce.

They wanted to pay lip service to the idea that God is in charge of marriage, and so for them to divorce their wives, it has to somehow have divine approval.

They were habitual divorcers, not necessarily because they were pursuing self-identity and self-esteem and self-happiness.

They would often divorce for lack of children.

The chief purpose of marriage in the Jewish mind was children, and so the destroyer of marriages was childlessness.

So if you weren't having children, you would feel justified in divorcing your spouse.

And most Jews viewed that as like a no-brainer.

You know, I'm married to somebody, we got married to have children, to pass down property and the family name and all that, and now we're not having children.

And so, would God want my family line to terminate with me and my family to lose our property and our legacy and our history, or would God want me to divorce?

Obviously, he'd want me to divorce.

So, now how do I justify it?

That was the typical Jewish way of thinking.

That's what's in the background of the Pharisees' question to Jesus here.

They find him in the wilderness, Matthew 19, verse 1.

Matthew 19:1

He's walking from Galilee to Judea beyond the Jordan.

He's walking down to Jericho.

Mark lets us know exactly where he is here.

He's walking from Galilee to Jericho.

This is his final march down to Jerusalem.

From Jericho, in Jericho, he'll heal blind Bartimaeus, and he'll turn right, go to Jerusalem, and spends his last, you know, through Bethlehem into Jerusalem.

Triumphal entry, his last week of life in Jerusalem.

That's this journey.

When he gets to Jerusalem, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the lawyers are going to ambush him at the temple with questions designed to trap him in his words and turn the crowd against him or turn the Romans against him.

That's what's going to happen later on in Matthew.

Now, this is foreshadowing that.

This is their first attempt at that.

The Pharisees head him off at the pass, so to speak, out in the wilderness, following the Jordan River down from Galilee to Jericho.

The Pharisees intercept him there and they ambush him with a question about marriage.

Their goal is to trap him.

It says in verse 3, they're testing him.

That's the same word Matthew will use later for trapping him in his words.

That's their goal.

I just love the naivete of the Pharisees here.

They think they can trap Jesus.

Haven't they read the New Testament?

The answer is no, they haven't.

But you can't trap Jesus.

But they are going to try.

It is very significant where this happens here.

This happens along the Jordan River.

This is where John the Baptist was arrested and ultimately martyred.

Do you recall why John the Baptist was arrested and killed?

It was over teaching on marriage.

Herod, who was the king of Galilee, had divorced his wife to marry his brother's wife, and John the Baptist said that's not allowed, and that's an illegitimate divorce, and it's an unbiblical marriage, and you're sinning.

And John kept pushing that issue.

He kept preaching about it and kept confronting Herod about it.

And finally, Herod had enough and had him arrested and finally chopped his head off.

So Jesus is in that same place.

And if he escapes the Galilean region, he'll be out of the reach of Herod.

And so if the goal is to get Herod to arrest Jesus and do to him what he did to John the Baptist, you've got to get him before he crosses the state lines, so to speak, he's on his way.

And the crime that will get Herod's attention would be speaking against divorce.

This is exactly how John got killed.

This wouldn't be subtle, by the way.

That's why there's the geographic introduction here in verse 1.

It might be obscure to us, but a more modern analogy might be of, you know, uh, you know, a president was giving a news conference in Ford's Theater, and there's a question about the propriety of a president watching a play, so to speak.

Everybody would get the historical context of that question.

It wouldn't be obscure to an American.

This is the same thing here.

Ambushing Jesus out in that region with a question about marriage is designed to trap him and get Herod to seize him and hopefully martyr him.

And so the Pharisees do that.

They test him.

Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?

In other words, is Herod right or Herod wrong?

What are you going to say about that?

If he says Herod is right, the crowd will turn against him because many of Jesus' followers were following him because of their allegiance to John the Baptist.

So if Jesus says John was wrong, he'll lose his followers.

If Jesus says John was right, hopefully Herod will arrest him before he gets out of town.

Jesus, of course, does not fall into the trap.

Jesus instead preaches a little sermon on marriage.

And so I'm going to give you an outline this morning, walking you through Jesus' sermon.

I'm a pastor and preacher, so I see a three-point outline in everything.

And this is no exception.

Jesus here has a little three-point sermonette here on the walk about marriage.

He begins with this basic principle that it is, in fact, God who made marriage.

God designed marriage.

Jesus answered, by the way, I love it when Jesus answers the Pharisees by asking them, have you not read?

And he always does it with some like very obvious Bible story.

These are the experts in the law.

They know how many books that are in the Old Testament.

They know how many words are in every scroll of the Old Testament.

They know how many commands are in the Torah.

They have read the Old Testament.

And Jesus insists on asking them, have you not read?

This is one of those places.

Have you not read?

And he doesn't follow it with some obscure Bible passage.

Have you not read and follows it with that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

He follows it with Genesis 1.27.

Don't you know that God actually made people and he made them male and female?

What he's saying here, he's not going to get trapped into the legality of divorce yet.

He's going to go down that road in a second, but he's going to start under the hood of marriage.

Like, let's look at how marriage is supposed to work.

Let's look at how God designed it.

First of all, Jesus says, marriage is as old as gender.

Marriage is as old as male and female.

We looked at this a few weeks ago in Genesis 2, but it bears repeating the very existence of male and female is testimony to the idea that God designed people for marriage.

He made them male and female for the purpose of marriage.

Adam was by himself.

It was not good that he be alone.

God put Adam to sleep.

Adam woke up with Eve.

Adam sees Eve and does not see her and go, oh, a friend.

Oh, here's someone who's exactly like me.

He says, here's someone who's like me.

She's a human like me.

But she's different than me.

She's a helper for me.

This is the design of marriage, that men and women are made differently from each other for the purpose of marriage, for the purpose of being brought together as a help meet suitable.

If they were identical, they wouldn't complement each other.

Instead, they the very existence of the two sexes, the two human sexes, testifies to the reality that God will cause the human race to expand through marriage.

And that's where Jesus goes.

That God designed marriage and he designed marriage before the fall.

Marriage is not a post-fall reality.

God designed marriage before the fall.

In other words, it's in the mind of God.

This is his creation.

The main principle here is that because marriage is made by God, marriage belongs to God.

It's not for us to redesign, it belongs to God.

It is his.

In marriage, they do exist.

Just the act of being married demonstrates that new unit.

And that new unit is foundational in society.

God made family before he made government, before he made laws, before sin, before he made languages, marriage existed.

So there was when Adam and Eve left the garden, there was family, but there wasn't government.

There's no law enforcement, there were no laws.

When God floods the earth, they come off the ark in a family.

They begin repopulating the earth.

God then tells them to scatter and so they build up.

God scatters them by languages and they scatter out by their family groups.

This is why Genesis is sprinkled with these genealogies.

You're seeing family, family, family.

Families become the fabric of government.

Families become the fabric of society, of culture.

The families are the fabric of it.

It's woven through the whole thing.

A family unit, then, exists at marriage.

A new component in society exists with every marriage.

Notice that the family is a new unit before there are children.

So you get married one second after your marriage, you are a new family.

You don't have to wait until you have kids to be a new family.

And this, I think, is important because in a fallen world, there are families that don't have children.

God hasn't granted children to them.

That doesn't mean they're less married, doesn't mean they're less of a marriage.

No, the marriage is complete.

They are a new family unit well before there are children.

This is how the Jews were justifying divorce, too.

We want kids, she's not giving me kids, we want kids, he's not giving me kids, therefore we can divorce.

But that is not God's design.

The marriage was complete when male and female were brought together long before there were kids.

But this new foundational unit will be the place in society where kids are raised.

This is a teaching that transcends culture, by the way.

It transcends languages, it transcends ethnicities.

It's regardless of your religion, God designed the fabric of society to be composed of families.

Families become where kids are raised, where there's the uniqueness in the household.

Your family is kind of the safe spot.

Your home is a safe spot for your family where your kids feel safe.

They're protected.

They belong with you in your house, in your home.

Your kids are safe there.

It is your family's world where your kids can grow up and prosper, where the husbands provide and protect their family, where the wives nurture the children together.

They help each other fulfill the creation mandates in the world.

They form a new family unit.

That's true of everything.

Every family that is brought together, it happens at marriage, a new family unit.

That's where Jesus goes to answer this question about divorce.

The God made families as a new thing.

Husbands leave their wives, they come together, and then he says they become one flesh.

That's this little second sub point here.

That this new family is an ontological reality.

What ontological means, somebody asked me after first service, it just means the state of being.

It's not contingent on your feelings, it's not contingent on circumstances, it is a fact, it's a state of being that transcends your feelings, it's bigger than your circumstances.

It just is.

That's what ontological means.

It just is.

When this new family is formed, it is an ontological reality.

There exists now a new family through marriage.

In other words, marriage is more than a status change on Facebook.

There's a phase in people get married and update their status on their phones at the wedding.

I'm glad that phase ran its course because that was kind of weird.

I now pronounce you husband's wife.

You may kiss the bride.

Hold one, please.

Okay, now.

Glad that has worked its way through our culture already.

Marriage is more than a Facebook status, it is more than a tax exempt status, it is more than a legal status, is an ontological reality.

It's not based upon your feelings, it's based upon your marriage.

So Jesus says when they, husband and wife, come together, what God has joined together, let no man separate.

He says at the end of verse 5, the two shall become one flesh.

Jesus is not making a potential statement.

He's saying, this is what has happened.

This is what has happened.

And you can't undo that.

You can't undo an ontological reality.

It just is.

If a father leaves his family, he's still the kid's dad, even if he moves across the world, never sees them again.

He's still their dad.

He can't undo that reality.

The same thing is true in Jesus' statement about marriage.

You can't undo the reality of husband and wife.

You're married, it is a new family unit.

Even if there is divorce, what divorce does is it can harm that family unit.

It can tear at the fabric of that family unit, but it can't erase that family unit.

That family unit can be wounded, but it's still the family unit through marriage.

It is the reality that God has designed.

This one flesh reality should exclude adultery, because adultery would, of course, defile that.

It would exclude divorce, it would exclude sexual immorality.

Because this one unit is this idea of a new name, a new family.

Identified even by taking one name together.

It's a new thing that marks that.

Thirdly, this is a form of common grace.

This God designing marriage is a form of common grace.

Look at verse 5.

Um, sorry, verse 6 more closely.

They're no longer two but one flesh.

That's the ontological reality.

They are one flesh, they just are.

What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

Now, we hear this in like wedding vows and stuff, so we might lose the jarring nature of what Jesus says.

What God has joined together.

What does he mean by that?

What marriages is he talking about when he says that?

Is he so in Virginia?

There's two kinds of marriages in Virginia.

Most states don't have this, but Virginia does.

When you get a wedding license in Virginia, you have to check if you're applying for a civil marriage license or a religious marriage license.

And you check one of the two boxes, and that determines which kind of license you get and who can sign it and who can mail it back in.

Again, most states aren't like this, but Virginia is, and I appreciate it just for this illustration.

Does this mean that if you check the civil box, now you have to be married by a judge or a Justice of the Peace or a boat captain or something weird in Virginia?

But if you check that box, does that mean that you are not joined together by God?

And that you're only joined together by God if you checked the religious box on your wedding license.

So is Jesus making a statement here about the importance of religious weddings over civil weddings?

And he's not, I don't think.

I've never encountered anybody who's seriously argued that from this passage.

What it's clear Jesus is saying is that all weddings, all marriages, mark this ontological reality of a new family, regardless of if the married couple recognizes the lordship of Christ.

So if two non-Christians get married in the most civil ceremony imaginable, it is still a new family.

It is still two people that God has joined together, husband and wife, are married.

Even if they don't believe in God, they're now joined together.

This is God's design for marriage.

God's design for marriage, God's design for the world is that everybody would have faith in him.

But in the dispersion of the families around the world, in the dispersion of the nations, God has let them, Paul says in Acts 17, all the other nations go their own way, still functioning with marriage, designed by God.

It is a form of common grace that non-believers can benefit from, even if they don't recognize God.

Other examples of common grace, rain.

Rain doesn't only fall on Christians.

You know that, right?

Non-Christians can also grow food that can be tasty.

Government is a common grace.

Countries that don't believe in God can still have a function in government that checks evil.

Taxes are a form of common grace, Paul says.

Because the taxes, you pay taxes for the police to come protect you and the fire department to come put out fires.

And it doesn't matter if they're Christians or not, it is a common grace that everybody in the world has.

You know, when you dial 911 and say, my neighbor's house is on fire, the operator doesn't say, okay, are they saved?

Are they Christians?

That's common grace for the world to appreciate.

That's common grace.

Marriage is like that.

Non-believers can be married and enjoy the benefits of marriage.

And just because of the culture we live in, I feel compelled just to add this little footnote in here.

I'm not talking about gay marriage here, because two people of the same sex is not a marriage, as this is where Jesus started.

Male and female, he made them.

I'm talking about straight marriage, and I recognize that that last 30-second statement would sound absurd to anybody in world history before 20 years ago.

But there we are.

Even non-believers, though, can be married and have the benefits of marriage because God designed it that way.

But those who know Jesus maximize the benefits of marriage because they know who designed it.

Here's an example.

I, at the start of COVID, bought a treadmill.

And the treadmill did not come with a user manual.

It was like a floor model, so it didn't come with an instruction manual or a user manual.

I looked for one online, couldn't find it, gave up, and eventually started using the treadmill.

And eventually the treadmill had problems and I couldn't know how to adjust it because I didn't have the user manual.

And so I did what any sane person would do, and that is, of course, stop using it.

What am I supposed to do?

It's not my fault.

Didn't have a user manual.

But I could use it even without the user manual.

Finally I get a hold of the company and they send me a user manual and they explain to me how to fix it, and then they send the person to actually fix it.

It was really nice.

Great.

Now I can use it again.

I was able to use it without the user manual, but I wasn't able to maximize its use without the user manual.

The user manual now not only lets me use it, but lets me maximize use.

If I want to walk away from it and be lazy, I can't blame the user manual anymore.

That's similar to how marriage works.

You can be married without the user manual.

You can have a marriage and you can enjoy marriage without even knowing of the Bible or the God who wrote the Bible or Yahweh, the covenant of God of Israel.

You could never heard of him and still be married and enjoy marriage.

You'll have problems, probably, but you can still enjoy marriage.

But when you discover the user manual, you're like, whoa.

So this is how it's supposed to work.

It's kind of cool.

That's what I mean by it's a common grace.

And Jesus is articulating that to the Pharisees that God has designed this thing.

And when God brings a married couple together, you should not seek to separate it.

You should not seek to separate them.

So, first, God made marriage.

Secondly, sin breaks marriage.

Sin breaks marriage.

What God has brought together, Jesus says in verse 6, let no man separate.

That's starting to indicate here what the Pharisees are going to go down is that people love to tear apart what God has made.

God makes the garden good and puts Adam and Eve there.

They tear at it by going after what they not should not go after.

They get expelled from the garden.

God tells Cain and Abel how to worship.

Cain refuses to worship the right way, tears at it, pushed even further away.

You know, God tells the nations to spread, they build up, God scatters them.

This is the normal human condition because of the fallen world, because of our indwelling sin.

We attack things that God makes.

We don't like what He commands us to do.

We want to tear it down.

And the same is true with marriage.

Because God designed marriage, people who don't like God want to tear at marriage.

Rather than simply being thankful for it and live with the blessings of it and refuse to worship God but be thankful for marriage.

There are those that want to tear down marriage because they're angry at God, but they can't reach heaven and tear down God.

So instead they can go after what He made.

Pretty obvious thing that God made in this world, marriage, gender, another pretty obvious thing that God made in this world.

And so you attack that.

You make marriage an artificial construct, gender an artificial construct.

You attack people made in the image of God.

That's tearing at what God made.

It's a form of rebellion against God.

And that's what happens when sin encounters marriage.

Sin desires to destroy marriage and tear it apart.

And tear it apart.

Jesus' point here is that marriage was designed by God.

Divorce was designed by people.

Marriage was designed for good and for God's glory by the mind of God.

Divorce engineered by people to promote sin.

And you see this in the Pharisees' response, verse 7.

Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and send her away?

The Pharisees are playing Bible trivia with Jesus.

Guess who's going to lose?

Jesus, why did Moses command divorce?

So Moses did not command divorce.

You're not going to find the passage that the Pharisees are talking about.

Moses never commanded people to divorce their wives.

What Moses did say, and it's Deuteronomy 24, I'm not going to have you turn there now because it would take too long to work through.

It's six or seven verses, but I will summarize it very quickly.

What Deuteronomy 24 does say is that if a couple is married and the husband divorces the wife, the husband sends the wife away because he's no longer pleased with her and tells her, get out, go away.

The husband marries somebody else and then gets displeased with this person over there, who could have seen that coming, and then wants to remarry the person he divorced.

Moses says, cannot do that.

Unlawful.

And to protect against that happening, when the husband divorces his wife, he needs to give her a certificate of divorce.

Something in writing.

He's got to write it down that he's sending her away so that she has evidence to show that he divorced me.

The husband can't just say, I'm not happy with you.

I'm going to put, and this is in a polygamous society, remember?

The husband can't just say, I'm not happy with you.

I'm going to put you in that closet over there.

Now I'm going to go over here and marry this person.

Oh, I'm not happy with her either.

She's not giving me kids either.

And actually, I like this one better.

I'm going to go back here to this person.

Moses says, You cannot do that.

And to protect that first wife, she needs a certificate of divorce.

So that if he tries to do that, she can say, No, you divorced me.

That's what Deuteronomy 24 is about.

The Pharisees have twisted that to say, see, Moses commanded us to get divorced if we don't like our wives.

Imagine how hard your heart has to be for this.

That passage has the what's called the adultery exception, too.

Because what was the punishment for adultery in the Old Testament?

Death.

So rather than killing the person who committed adultery, Moses allowed for the certificate of divorce.

Instead of putting her to death, write her a certificate of divorce and put her away.

But now you can't go back and marry her again if you divorced her.

It was an act of mercy to the adulterer.

So again, how twisted does your heart have to be to look at that act of mercy and say, I think Moses is telling me to divorce my wife.

But that's what the Pharisees did.

And Jesus' answer is, God's not commanding you to be divorced.

Notice Jesus swats us to the cheapseats in verse 8.

He said to them, Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you.

Do you see the word the Pharisees use?

They say commanded.

And Jesus says, ah contraire, it's not commanded.

I know Deuteronomy.

It's allowed.

Moses allowed you to divorce your wives because of your hardness of heart.

In other words, there's divorce in the world because you are super sinful.

Not because God likes divorce.

Let me give you an analogy for this.

Your teenage son comes to you and says, I want to borrow the car.

I want to drive it really, really fast on the wrong side of the road.

There's less traffic there.

And you say, No, you'll crash the car.

And your son says, the car has airbags.

It's designed to be crashed.

They wouldn't have put airbags in it if they didn't want me to crash it.

I see some of the teenage sons laughing out there.

Don't try this at home.

It's the pilot who says, it's okay for me to crash my plane because it comes with those oxygen masks and the cool slides that go out the door.

They wouldn't have put those slides in the door if they didn't want you to crash it.

The arsonist who says, I can burn down the building.

No, you're not supposed to burn down the building.

It's illegal.

Well, they put smoke detectors in it.

Of course they want it to burn down.

That's the Pharisees' logic right now.

Moses allowed a certificate of divorce.

It was the airbags.

It's for the husband who's a ruinous villain and it wants to leave his wife because she's not giving him children.

Or it's the for the wife who was an adulteress and so she's not put to death.

It's the airbags in the situation so that you don't die.

So don't look at that and say God's actually commanding divorce any more than he's commanding you to drive the wrong way on the road with your car because it has airbags.

That's the point.

It was an act of mercy towards them.

Divorce is better than getting hit in the head with rocks until you die.

And so Jesus says, I repeat, from the beginning it was not so.

They want to quote Deuteronomy 24 on Jesus.

Jesus says, I know something Moses wrote before Deuteronomy 24.

Before there even was a Deuteronomy, there was a Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

So don't pervert what God designed for your good.

Jesus goes on, verse 9, to say, I say whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.

Jesus here forbids divorce.

He says, as if a marriage could be dissolved by paper.

Paper cannot dissolve what God designed.

What he's saying here is if you divorce your spouse and you remarry somebody else, you are committing adultery.

Your remarriage is adulterous because you, in God's sight, are married to that person you divorced.

And you say, Yeah, but I filed the paperwork with the county clerk.

Well, God didn't get a copy of that paperwork.

The paperwork you file with the county clerk does not undo your marriage before God.

It doesn't.

Divorce, no matter how nuanced in its defense or how cleverly justified, violates God's design for marriage.

Divorce is breaking of a seal which has been engraven by the hand of God.

And if you get a divorce and you remarry, you're now in an adulterous relationship.

And there's no fixing that, by the way.

If you unbiblically divorce your spouse and marry someone else, and then you realize, oh, now I'm in an adulterous relationship.

You can't now divorce spouse number two and go back to spouse number one.

That's exactly what Deuteronomy 24 forbid.

There's some eggs that are omelets here, and you can't unscramble them.

You can't get the eggs separated from the omelet and back into their shells.

The shells are broken and in the trash.

You can't unscramble that.

You can't divorce your wife, marry someone else, and then try to fix it.

There's no fixing it.

There's no fixing it.

It's adultery.

And you're stuck there for life.

Don't divorce your second spouse now.

Because oh, I'm in an adulterous relationship, so I gotta divorce you.

No, that again would be perpetuating and multiplying the sin.

You're stuck.

Now it's not the unforgivable sin.

You're not doomed to a life of unrepentant sin.

You can always repent from your sin.

Matthew 19 is right after Matthew 18, of course.

Matthew 18 is if you confess your sins, you can be forgiven.

When you repent, you can be restored in your relationship with the Lord.

But Jesus here divorces marriage in God's sight from marriage in the eyes of civil authorities.

Civil authorities will file divorce paperwork all the time.

They don't care.

You file your paperwork for divorce, they'll stamp it and file it and problem solves.

But it does not undo marriage before God.

Marriage before civil authorities is valid before God.

Divorce before civil authorities is not valid before God because God designed marriage.

God designed marriage.

Now, Jesus has in here what some people refer to as the exception clause because it has the word accept in it, accept for sexual immorality.

And marries another.

His point here is that in marriage, if your spouse has an affair, if your spouse commits adultery, then divorce is permissible.

Because your spouse should be dead in the Old Testament.

So divorce is an act of mercy to them.

They can go their own way.

If they commit adultery, you can get a divorce.

And you're not sinning in divorcing an adulterous spouse.

You're not sinning.

You can stay married as well.

You can also stay married, or you can divorce and you're not sinning.

That's what Jesus' point here is.

If your spouse has an affair, you are justified in getting a divorce.

But barring that, if there's two believers who are married, there should never be a divorce.

From Jesus' perspective, there's no plausible reasons for two Christians to get divorced.

So the question that I am often asked is what about in situations of abuse?

What about in situations that aren't an affair?

What about then?

Well again, Matthew 19, coming after Matthew 18.

Matthew 18, if somebody is in sin, they should be confronted.

If they don't repent, they should have witnesses brought in.

If they don't repent, they should be put out of the church.

The other so-called exception is 1 Corinthians 7, where if a non-believer leaves the marriage, Paul says, let them go.

If there's a person who's married to a non-believer and the non-believer doesn't want to stay married, Paul says, let them go.

Two people married, one is saved, one's not.

The unsaved person doesn't want to live with the saved person, Paul says, let the unsaved person go.

So if you're married to someone who is not acting like a Christian, who is sinning against you, then you confront them in their sin.

Even if they claim the name of Christ, you confront them in their sin.

And if they don't repent, then you get help from the church.

You get witnesses, you get the elders involved.

And eventually, if they don't repent, the elders will put that person out of the church.

And now you're in a situation where you're married to a non-believer.

Even though he says he's a believer, he's a non-believer.

Your church has said he's a non-believer.

And if they don't want to stay married, you can let them go.

But you can't skip that process.

You can't just say, I don't like how my spouse is treating me.

You can't even drop the abuse mom and say, my spouse is abusing me, so I'm divorcing and skip that process.

The point is, from Jesus' perspective, there's no biblical justification for two believers to get divorced.

If one has an affair, then you are freed because it was the affair that broke the wedding bond.

If one is abusive or mean or difficult to live with, and I'm going in descending order there, then you get help and you confront the person in their sin.

And if they get put out of the church, then you are freed in that sense.

So first, God made marriage.

Second, sin breaks marriage.

Thirdly, Jesus restores marriage.

Jesus restores marriage.

This is the basic principle.

This is why Matthew 19 is the bridge here from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

The Pharisees and the Jews had cultivated an environment where divorce was rampant and excused.

Jesus brings the truth of creation back to bear on the situation and transforms the Jewish understanding of marriage.

And he's going to launch a Christian understanding of marriage that we will look at next week.

The point, though, is that Jesus takes something that God made good, that sin broke, Jesus restores.

Jesus can fix.

This is an exact parallel of the gospel, of course.

People were made good in the garden.

Sin wrecks people.

The image of God is marred in us.

Jesus redeems broken people.

And Jesus can redeem broken marriages because broken marriages are made up of broken people.

So if you're here today and you are a Christian and you are thinking about divorce, I would appeal to you to stop thinking about divorce.

Should Christians pursue divorce?

No.

I would say behind the heart that is pursuing divorce is an attitude that I'm unhappy in my marriage and God can't fix it.

That's generally the attitude I've heard from people that pursue divorce.

I'm unhappy in the situation and God cannot fix it.

And I would submit to you that that is a lack of faith and a lack of understanding about why you were made.

The primary purpose in your life is not to be happy in your marriage.

The primary purpose in your life is to be happy in God.

To be happy in God, to delight in Christ and the gospel.

And the more difficult your circumstance, the more bright the light of the gospel shines.

We go through trials, not just marriage trials, but cancer trials and death trials and losing your job trials and all kinds of trials.

We go through trials because they sanctify us, they purify our desires, they clarify that we love Christ more than this world.

That's what trials do, including marriage.

And this is why it's the universal declaration of the New Testament that even if you are in a difficult marriage, you should stay in that difficult marriage because the Lord is at work.

Even if you're married to a non-believer and the non-believer wants to stay in the marriage, both Paul and Peter say, stay in the marriage.

You don't know.

Maybe that non-believer will get saved through you.

You have no way of knowing.

Maybe they'll get saved.

If they want to leave, let them leave, Paul says.

But you say, I'm so unhappy.

I would appeal to you to find your happiness in Christ, not in marriage.

If you're unhappy in your marriage, you will be unhappy in your singleness.

And that is a flip coin, too.

If you're unhappiness, if you're unhappy in your singleness, guess what?

Marriage doesn't fix it.

Marriage is not a happy pill.

An unhappy person will be an unhappy person.

This is why a strong marriage is with two people who love Christ more than each other.

They're happy in Christ.

They put up with each other.

They're happy in Christ.

You recognize you're living with a sinner.

You're happy in Christ.

Your delight is in Christ.

That causes you to grow in your love for each other.

This is the great mystery of Christian marriage, which we'll talk more about next week.

But the more you love Christ, the more you in turn love each other.

A lack of faith that God can restore a broken relationship is what leads to divorce, saying, yes, but this is too far gone.

There's no way God could save this.

Oh man.

Whenever you start the sentence with there's no way God can, dot, dot, dot.

I want to stop you right there.

Some are more concerned about happiness and sanctification and an inability to see their own sin over how much they've been forgiven.

But by submitting your life to Jesus, you can have faith that God is at work in your marriage, even your broken marriage.

You repent from your sin and you live with your spouse in an understanding and repentant and humble way.

And you say, How about my spouse doesn't treat me like I want to be treated?

You repent from your own sin.

You can't repent from your spouse's sin.

You repent from your own sin.

And you live with your spouse in a humble and repentant way.

Recognize thinking that your spouse will not make you happy, your spouse will do things you don't want them to do, your spouse will aggravate you, but you remind yourself that you're not in this marriage for your happiness, you're in it for what the Lord is doing through it.

And the Lord redeems broken marriages because the Lord redeems broken people.

But God does have a better plan for marriage than simply tolerating each other.

God has a better plan, which is growing in love and faithfulness and sacrifice and service for the rest of your life together.

That's the growth of Christian maturity in your life.

And we'll talk about that next week.

Lord, we're thankful for the death of Jesus Christ, the ultimate injustice, the sinless Savior crucified on a tree, buried and resurrected on the third day.

Vindicated, Jesus Himself said, vindicated by the resurrection.

The truthfulness of his life seen in his resurrection, the truthfulness of his commands, validated by the fact he overcame the grave.

Lord, we do live in a broken and fallen world.

We live in a world where there is sin and difficulty, where what you made perfect is marred, what you made good is tattered, and it is tattered because of our sinful and fallen hearts.

And so, Lord, we do cry out to you and pray for mercy on our marriages, mercy on our families and on our children.

We're grateful that you designed the home as a respite from the world.

You designed the home as a place where the family can be safe, where children can grow in love and affection for their parents, as parents care for and nurture their children.

I do pray that this church would be marked by marriages that are mature, by families that are loving towards each other, by homes that are safe for the flourishing of the family.

This is a gift you give, and you give it to people all around the world, but we pray that it would be evident in our church.

Pray for hearts that love you, pray for marriages that are difficult.

Pray for marriages where there are temptations for divorce.

I pray that you would cut those weeds at the root and in their place, you would cause um Christian growth and maturity to develop.

We know it's not easy.

Marriage is the most intimate relationship on earth, and so sin and disappointment is felt there more intimately than anywhere else.

So I do pray for your grace and compassion on those dealing with trials in their own lives.

We're thankful for the kindness you've shown us through Christ.

It's a kindness that we are not worth and that we could ever deserve, but one that you have showered on us abundantly for no other reason than you've set your love on us.

And so we're thankful for that.

We give you thanks for the gospel of Christ, and it's in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and church information are on our website at ibc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.