Jesus' Teaching on Divorce

Good morning.

Today's scriptures from Mark 10, 1 through 12.

And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again.

And again, as was his custom, he taught them.

And Pharisees came up, and in order to test him, asked, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?

He answered them, What did Moses command you?

They said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.

And Jesus said to them, Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.

But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and 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.

And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter.

And he said to them, Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

But when Zach does that thing, it's pretty good.

And I'm preaching on divorce.

But this is a this light Sunday, right?

Am I right to read that?

Or all of those like come to church, those three come to church sermons that we did for that last series that we did.

I don't know if those really took.

So get ready for another series.

It's always funny to say because the people that I'm saying that to, you know, are all here.

Uh let's uh we're continuing through Mark, and today is a pretty it is a really heavy topic that um uh everyone has been affected by personally.

It's uh Jesus' teaching on divorce and the uh um uh Pharisees uh trying to trap Jesus with this dilemma of divorce and how Jesus, of course, uh brings things to such a foundational fundamental level that you look back on the Pharisees' question and you think that was an outrageous question.

The question doesn't even make sense uh now that I see the way Jesus is explaining this.

So um uh I I know that uh as we approach this topic, uh, many of your hearts are just twisting inside.

And um I just ask you to stick with us.

Um uh we're we're going to look and see what Jesus has to say about this, and uh he is he is not a hard master.

Um so so uh let's listen for him there.

All right, let's pray.

We'll move into today's teaching.

Holy Father, we thank you for your loving kindness that never ceases, your compassion that never fails, your grace that's new every morning.

Great is your faithfulness, Lord.

We praise you for the beginning of the leaves changing and this uh rhythm of death and renewal that you have baked into your creation as this reminder of the way that you work redemption is through death and resurrection.

Lord, we pray that we would have hearts that are open to your word, that we would trust you as we hear your teaching, and that we would uh seek to uh Lord, Lord, receive this as the as the very as the very word of God.

Lord, we ask these things and uh lift them up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Okay, so the the question that Jesus will get today is from Pharisees.

Uh this is kind of moving out of Jesus' retirement ministry, which is where we've been for the past couple of weeks.

That's that time where Jesus was really spending with just his disciples.

There was not uh not really any public teaching going on.

But now Jesus is going more public again, and he gets surrounded by crowds, and where there's crowds, there's Pharisees and scribes that are seeking to trap Jesus with these questions.

Now, when we think of Pharisees, we often think of people who are making additions to the law.

So these are the type of people who are looking at the law of God, and in order to make sure that they have as strict adherence to the law as possible, and that they keep a safe distance from ever breaking the law, they add more laws to it.

And so you can think that the ordinances that they'd add are that they're making sure that they're tithing their mint and cumin and uh that their spices are perfectly tithe, or the stricter Sabbath regulations against movement and where they could travel, or against the type of work like just grinding wheat in your hands.

These are additions, or taking the cleanliness regulations that are applied to the temple and applying them to themselves for all meals.

So these are additions that we see the Pharisees making to the law.

They are not in the law, and we think of Phariseeism in those terms.

When we see those additions made, we should think this is legalism.

And what legalism is, it's not taking the law seriously.

Uh, oftentimes taking the law seriously is confused for legalism.

Legalism is a way of using the law in order to garner favor and even manipulate God.

So it's a way of saying, here is the law, and if I strictly adhere to it in this precise way, then the Lord must bless me, because he will be in my debt.

And ultimately it results in thinking like this if I adhere to the law perfectly, then I can guarantee my own salvation.

And of course, salvation would not be the word there.

Um when you successfully summit a mountain yourself, you don't say, I was saved by myself to the top of the mountain or something.

Uh summit and I guess come back down.

Because you know, that's you gotta complete the you guys are Coloradans.

You guys all saw, I don't know, that Alex Honnold movie.

I feel we've got off track.

When you successfully accomplish something yourself, like the uh perfect adherence to the law, that is not salvation.

That is desert.

It's what you deserve.

Uh but when you uh successfully apply it, that's just you you're gaining just uh exactly what you have earned.

And therefore, God must, if he is just, uh give to you the glory that that you deserve.

And this is the hope of legalism.

Uh, but it is a it is a foolish hope, and it misunderstands the very application of the law.

Oh do you remember?

Uh it's maybe a long time since you've uh read Exodus or uh subscribed to the Daily Wire Plus, which is like mainstreaming Exodus, um, or uh oh watch the Charlton Heston movie, but you'll remember that it is after they are saved out of Egypt that they are given the law.

They are not given the law, and then God tests their adherence to it and then decides whether or not he will deliver them.

The law is on the other side of grace, which means that if we use it as a means to demand our own salvation, we are misunderstanding the law.

The Pharisees, of course, in their legalistic tendencies, misunderstand the law.

But when we see that type of Pharisaical legalism, the type that makes all of these additions to the law, that says if you're going to truly live a Christian life, then it must look like these particular ways with this, you know, particular dress or aesthetic or this particular, you know, all those things that we that we add, the way that you can tell denominations apart by their styles.

Uh when we say that these are these are some sort of essential thing, um that is the Phariseism that we see, the additions to the law.

But look closely.

Because the Pharisaicalism is always hiding a more subtle antinomianism.

Antinomianism means uh uh against the law.

That we think, because of the grace of the Lord, that the law is meaningless and has no use to us anymore, and we ought to neglect the law because it is um not uh uh useful or meaningful to us anymore.

And this Pharisaical legalism is always hiding an antinomianism.

We can see this when Jesus talks to the Pharisees and he says, look, you are tithing mint and cumin, you're parsing the herbs that you've harvested uh to make sure that you tithe a tenth of them.

But what is that covering?

You are neglecting the weightier matters of the law, of justice and mercy and faithfulness.

You know, there's something about the law, it's like a zero-sum game.

When you make additions to it, you are uh you can all you can guarantee in your heart, it's because you are covering the subtractions that you're making.

So when you make additions to the law, this is what it really looks like to be a Christian.

There's some subtle real neglect of the law that's taking place.

Justice, mercy, faithfulness, those were able to be neglected by the Pharisees under the veneer of tithing mint and cumin.

So, what does that show us?

This shows us something about the way the Pharisaical tendency, and and I'm hoping to show like this is our tendency with the law, is uh that what we've really developed is something like a utilitarian approach to the law.

The law is something by which in our legalistic frame we are just trying to manipulate God into giving to us what we actually want.

Or in our antinomian frame, we are trying to use the law as something that can be manipulated on our behalf to justify our doing what we already want.

So, in one sense, it's just a mechanism of manipulating God.

And in another sense, we say, here's the law, if I read this and parse this price precisely, then I can I'm able to do whatever it is I already want to do.

And so this utilitarian approach to the law is a way of accomplishing our own salvation in one regard, or neglecting our need of it in another regard.

This is so different from David's understanding of the law.

A person with this suspicious adversarial relationship to the law could never say this, what David says in Psalm 119.

He says, In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches.

I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways.

I will delight in your statutes, I will not forget your word.

How different is that from the Pharisee who is he's not delighting, he he's he's he's ticking off and and he's uh uh uh manipulating and trying to put down others by his work of the law, puff himself up by his work of the law, but then in secret, in private, he's really trying to twist it in order to uh allow him to live in whatever way he sees fit and and really do whatever it is that makes the world center on him.

That is not someone who looks at the law and says, Oh, it is good.

What God has given us in the law, it's my delight.

It's better than all riches, what I see in the law from God.

This is uh it's describing a heart and a mode of being in a way that seems like my humanity comes alive when I understand it.

I delight in it.

My parts of me that had been unexplored now feel known and brought to life.

This is the way that David thinks of the law.

It's better than all riches.

Riches, man.

You know what solves a lot of problems?

Money.

It's a joke that I use often when talking with folks.

It's like, oh, you've got a problem that money could solve.

I don't that one like.

But it is, it does get funnier when you think about it.

Oh, you're right, you're right.

You know what's better?

Oh, when I when I see the way that God describes what a human can be in the law, when I see this this offering of a well-ordered life that he describes to me, oh, it's better.

It seems very good.

The Pharisee looks at the law and he stands off and he says, I can I know I can do this and I can make that happen in my life, and then I don't even have to look at that other part.

You know, it's suspicious and adversarial, the Pharisee's approach to the law.

David loves the law.

All right, so let's see how this Pharisaical tendency to emphasize aspects of the law.

This is the kind of thing I want to clear up, is when we think Pharisee, we think just legalists.

But I want us to think legalists in public, but their legalism is serving the function of neglecting the weightier matters of the law.

So we'll see how this question exposes their utilitarian approach to the law.

I'll use it as a mechanism to get what I really want.

And then we'll see how Jesus brings the law into the the most ultimate context, the context of creation itself.

And then I'm going to give just some thoughts on marriage and divorce.

Because I know when I get to the end of this, you'll say, Yeah, yeah, but what about marriage and divorce?

And so we'll all do that.

Mark 10, 2.

And Pharisees came up, and in order to ask him, excuse me, in order to test him, asked, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?

Okay, so why this question?

Why this question in order to test Jesus?

Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?

Well, they're bringing Jesus into an interpretive controversy that would have been a very meaningful uh public uh controversy of the day.

And it's kind of one of those shibbolets uh that we have in religious circles, in which but your stance on this means that I understand you in all of these, you know, other sorts of ways.

And there are two schools of thought.

There was the uh school under the rabbinical teaching of Hallel and the school under the rabbinical teaching of Shemai.

And Shemai is the more conservative, and his understanding was that divorce could not be permitted except for cases of adultery.

And Hillel's interpretation was that divorce was able to be permitted for almost anything.

Uh, that a man was able to divorce his wife, that was the direction that this went.

A man was able to divorce his wife for almost anything.

Things that were listed were burning his food, watch out, um, or talking so loudly that the neighbors could hear.

Anyway, so for all kinds, all kinds of reasons.

Um the point is that the they were divided with how to interpret, and we'll get to what they were interpreting is Deuteronomy 24, with how to interpret Deuteronomy 24.

And the um uh this this particular controversy settled in such a way that they uh uh knew that if if Jesus came down on one side or another, then he would be just dividing whatever room they were speaking to.

And they wanted to be able to say something like, Look, if he he's probably going to side with Shemai on this, the more conservative interpretation, the one which says only in cases of adultery.

But when he does that, what we'll be able to say is, but look at how you are commiserating with all of these sinners.

And how you the way that you're living seems to bring you in contradiction all over the place with so much of Shemai's teaching.

And then they would be able to say, see, you are isolated from everyone.

Uh, see, this Jesus is just an insane person who has no place in any of our understandings of the law.

So that is the mechanism.

See, do you see how they use the law as as a as a as a mechanism here, just to accomplish their own ends?

So Jesus, recognizing that the question is just like this, you know, Kafka trap, says this in Mark 10, 3 through 4.

He answered them, What did Moses command you?

They said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.

Okay, so the Pharisees, uh uh, with this emphasis on the law and their great knowledge of the law, we see that they likely fall in the camp of Hillel's interpretation, which is that for really any particular reason, uh the husband is able to uh divorce his wife, and their emphasis, which this is classic Phariseeism, is on the certificate.

What's important?

What do you really need in order to divorce?

The certificate.

That's what allows divorce to happen.

Do you see how the Pharisees understand the law?

It is it is just something that can just be checklisted, like, well, I got the certificate.

And look, it says right here, have a certificate.

Send her away with a certificate of divorce.

And so this is just what's accomplished.

We see that their their emphasis of care, getting the certificate, is meant to hide their real neglect of what the law actually means.

This is classic Pharisaical reasoning.

Man, it looks like they really care about the law.

But they don't.

This is the what I'm trying to break is this idea that, like, there's some danger in really caring about the law.

That's not what the Pharisees are doing here.

You know, we shouldn't think Pharisee is someone who really cares about the law.

No.

They're someone who really cares about their additions to the law, using the law in this utilitarian way, so that they're able to subvert the law.

Because they don't love it.

They love something else.

And the law is just a mechanism for them to get that something else.

So why is it Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away, the Pharisees say in in verse 5, and Jesus said to them, Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.

Okay, so what was good, what's going on in Deuteronomy 24 when Moses describes uh you must write a certificate of divorce.

Um if you divorce uh a woman, you you and she remarries, you ought not to remarry her.

He lays, he lays down these uh Deuteronomy, these passages of Deuteronomy, we should think of it as something like case law.

You know, these things have come up in Moses' judgments, and he's had to apply uh his particular wisdom to these situations.

For the people of Israel.

And so that's what he's doing here in Deuteronomy 24.

And the issue that Moses is addressing is that the men of Israel had such arrogance and hardness of heart towards the women that they had married that they were just abandoning them.

And so a woman would be left with no husband, no way to communicate that she was now unmarried, and would find herself in the Israelite community in this no-man's land, where the person who is meant to take care of her is not taking care of her, and her ability to marry somebody else was removed from her.

So Moses, addressing this vulnerability for the women of Israel, instantiates this commandment.

He says, Look, we're trying to make this marriage thing work with you people, and it's not taking, you're being cruel.

I'm going to instantiate this law to mitigate some of the cruelty.

And at least we'll be able to create some sort of position in our society where there's an opportunity to be reintegrated for these women who've been ostracized.

So what Moses is providing as a means to tend to the victims of this harshness is then utilized by the Pharisaic interpreters as a mechanism to ad hoc divorce their wives.

Now, how is it that they could miss the spirit of what Moses is doing so completely?

How is it that they could they could take this thing that is intended for good and then use it as a way to, as we see here, just justify their own doing of what they already wanted to do?

It looks like a close adherence to the law.

See, we know right where it says, write a certificate of divorce.

Moses permitted this.

It looks like care for the law, but don't you see it's neglect?

It's not care for what Moses is trying to accomplish in the law.

Jesus sees the law in its true context.

And because he sees the law in its truest context, he's able to interpret it.

He's able to say.

Something good like marriage.

It's a good thing.

But now our world is utterly, radically corrupted by sin, so that even good things we use as mechanisms for wickedness.

So Jesus puts it back in its real context of creation.

In verses six through nine, Jesus says, But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.

Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Doesn't that sound modern?

Like this sounds like a yeah, this is like a modern approach approach to marriage.

And it's like, well, you know, when when we made no fault divorce laws, then that goes down this path and disintegrates marriage, and then we uh go through a sexual revolution, and then there's the introduction of uh gay marriage and marriage not being between a man and a woman, and then that leads to the dissolution of gender, and it's really because of like this, like these like two philosophers in 1874 that are why we have these modern notions of marriage.

And then you read the Bible and it's like, oh yeah.

I guess this is just kind of something we do.

Like we take the good institutions of God and we reduce them to just something we can just sort of make decisions about.

So perhaps it's not so modern after all.

Perhaps we're always trying in our sinfulness.

One of the ways we express our sinfulness is we're we're constantly trying to dissolve the most fundamental aspects of God's good creation.

So Jesus understands marriage not as just uh a contract that can be annulled at some whim, but as an institution so fundamental that it is baked into the very creation itself, the very nature of what it means to be a human contains within it the potentiality for marriage as a real thing.

So he says, from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female, quoting from Genesis 1.

So when you think Adam, when he was made, he was not made generically, and then he God creates Eve, and he's like, I guess we'll go back and we'll make Adam a male and we'll make her a female.

No, Adam was made a male when he was made first, which means that he's made with this potentiality for marriage with someone who will be the female, who is who is Eve.

There is no person who is not male or female.

This is the this is the what it means to be made as a person, is he made them male and female.

These are not these are not ad hoc categories.

Um these are the fundamental aspects of of what it means to exist as a human.

You exist in a category of male or female.

He did not make a homogenous humanity, he made a couplet, this dualist little mode of diversity that's wed together in the same way that the heavens and the earth are wed together.

And he he is so we see that in the very creation itself of our humanity itself is this potentiality for marriage.

And then he goes on to Genesis 2 when he says, Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So there's this other miracle.

There's this diversity at this most fundamental level of humanity, which is God made them, male and female.

You exist in this category of male and female.

But then this strange thing is able to happen, not in spite of this diversity, but even because of this diversity, they'll be they are able to become one flesh in marriage.

Therefore, man shall leave his father and mother, and they shall become one flesh.

This is baked into creation.

And so Jesus is teaching us how it is that we are meant to understand these stories in Genesis.

Many of us read Genesis and we read it like one of Kipling's just so stories.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

The uh there's one that um unfortunately became very popular in our house, which is how the camel got its hump.

And it got it because it was grumpy.

And whenever the camel was grumpy, he would say hump.

And then eventually that became that the camel had to have a hump because he was so grumpy and said humph all the time.

So now my kids love to say, humph, which is fine.

Say good, not great.

Um and so the point of those stories is to say, look, this these little incidents happen, and now things happen to be this way.

This is the way the world happens to be.

And so we often read Genesis like that.

It's like, uh, look around at the world.

There's men and women.

And look what they tend to do.

They tend to get married.

And look at snakes, they slither around on their bellies.

You know, there's this ancient story uh in Genesis, and it explains why things happen to be this way.

Uh, that there happens to be men and women, they happen to organize themselves in marriage, snakes happen to slither on the ground, there happens to be, you know, water and land and things like this.

But Genesis, as Jesus interprets it here, shows us that this is not a description of the way things happen to be.

This is not just a just-so story.

This is a description of the way things ought to be.

Because this is made by a creator who designed us to be male and female.

He created them.

That means there's an intention, and it is not a generic intention.

It is the intention of God, the one true absolute.

And this God who made the world with intention made us male and female, and then he instituted marriage.

Marriage is real.

And so Jesus is taking them in this context, and he says, you guys are talking about this as though it's some arbitrary cultural expression that if you just learn the right nuance, you can just get out of.

But what I'm talking about here is a fact of existence that goes back to the imagination of God when he first made everything that we're seeing here.

And he can say things like that because he was there when it happened.

So he knows what the intention is.

And he knows that what was made in the way things ought to be is good.

So when God institutes marriage, he's not saying this is some constraint that I'm tacking on to you.

He's saying that this is a mechanism of flourishing that I made into a good world that was meant to be received for its goodness.

Marriage is no less fundamental than maleness and femaleness.

The miracle of two people becoming one flesh is as miraculous as God creating from the dirt a man and creating from his rib a woman and breathing into them and them living.

And all of us becoming, being those things.

Marriage is like that.

It's real.

And then he goes on and he's saying, you know, you see, what's true of marriage in general, that this is a creation of God, is true of your marriage.

In Mark 10, verses 8 through 9, he says, So they are no longer two, but one flesh.

Mark 10:8–9

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

When uh we're not we're not very good at understanding that rituals connect with reality in our culture.

We think of them as two different planes.

And so when I'm doing marriages or or officiating wedding ceremony, the thing that I'm trying to convince people of is like this is this something's really happening here.

There's something that happens where God is joining you two together.

When we come up here and we just do this thing, you know, I I don't stand here, I stand here.

And you know, one stands, one walks, and there's rings and kissing, usually a magic trick.

That's some of you, that's the part that I call where it's like we light a candle, we pour sand together, and we there's some sort of magic trick, tie some magic knot or something.

Everybody loves to have a magic trick.

And the uh um make a sandwich and peanut butter, one jelly.

That's my dream.

Nobody's done it.

And and here's the here's what's amazing.

All though that stuff, those those things we do, God made those two people one flesh when they walk down.

And Jesus is saying here, what God has joined together, let no man separate.

What is he saying?

He's saying it's like it would be like unwinding all of creation to do that.

It would be like it would be like disintegrating the world, like a like a new sort of flood.

Say, no, no, no, where God separated the waters, just bring it back again.

Where God imagined maleness and femaleness.

Oh just wash it away.

It's no less an act of God.

Jesus sees this and he's like, look, you d you think you're talking about just like some little contract, this petty little you know, if you parse, if you parse what Moses said right, then you you'll see that really it doesn't matter here what we're doing.

If you've got your certificate, and Jesus thinks back to the creation of the world, and he says, God made this for good.

Look at how you handle it.

It would be like unwinding all of creation itself.

Well, God joined together, let no man separate.

And in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter, and he said to them, Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

Now, in Matthew 19, when this same story is told, the disciples' response to this is it is better not to marry.

When they hear the way that Jesus envisions mar marriage and they they understand the straight the stakes of it and what what is being called to here, the disciples say it's better not to marry.

You know, marriage is impossible.

Marriage as it's being described here by Jesus.

It can't be done.

What we're trying to do is it's like the marriage that he describes, it took place in a in a garden that was made by God with two sinless people that were made by God.

And there's a flaming sword that guards entrance to that garden.

And it's like we can't get back.

Marriage now is hard.

And there are marriages that end in divorce.

And this call of what marriage could be, where do you go to find that what's being shown and expressed in the disciples' response, and in this, in what Jesus is saying here, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

You see, the Pharisees thought, if we get the certificate right, then that's the end of the sinning.

And perhaps there's no sin even in that.

Jesus is saying, divorce is no means of preventing sin.

You cannot start unwinding, and then the unwinding would stop.

This is not a mechanism which prevents adultery.

This goes beyond the certificate.

This is the reality of the human heart on the outside of the Garden of Eden since the fall.

We do not know how to hold or handle good things.

So I want to look at this with a few words on marriage.

What if you're divorced?

What if you've lived in a way that denied the goodness of marriage in homosexual sin?

That desi that denied the reality of gender in transgendered sin.

That denied the covenant of marriage in promiscuity.

The bounds in pornography or in adultery or in wrongfully divorcing your spouse.

This is still the same Jesus who says, Neither do I condemn you.

Go and sin no more.

His grace is sufficient for those.

What is your response?

Repent.

Come to him.

His grace is sufficient.

His grace is sufficient.

This is not some magic category in which the grace of Christ is unable to reach.

What is your response to the recognition of sin in your life?

Come to Jesus.

He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, in steadfast love.

It is his mission to come into the world to atone for the sin of sinners so that they might be rescued and ransomed.

This is the Jesus that we are talking about.

And don't you see how different that is from the Pharisees who feign a high view of the law to mask their low view of the law.

That way they are able to be graceless towards everyone.

Jesus, what is the height of his view of marriage?

It is unimaginably great, such that to hear it outside, to hear it in our context, you know, the disciples themselves say it is better to not get married.

How high is Jesus' view of marriage.

But with this highest view of marriage, how great are the depths of the grace of our Lord?

Do you see how different he is?

Do you see how different?

It's not Jesus' low view of the law that makes him gracious towards us.

It's the highest view.

If you're not married, and you just heard me go on the spiel of the baked into ness, which is a nautical term, of creation and how marriage is baked into creation.

It is no sin to not be married.

It is no sin to be single.

Even to remain that way.

The sin is in that place looking at marriage and cursing it.

And saying that marriage.

Marriage is bad.

Our hearts are so prone to this that we we curse what is good in the world.

Marriage is good.

It is good.

Let's not curse what is good.

But let's learn to bless what is good and curse what is evil.

It is not wrong to be single and to long to be married.

Why would that not be wrong?

Isn't that just lack of contentment?

Well, God says that marriage is good.

It doesn't seem so wrong to want a thing God says is good.

Paul recognizes his singleness as this gift and finds deep contentment within it.

I wouldn't pit myself against the Apostle Paul.

What if your marriage is not sustainable?

What if you are experiencing abuse or neglect or abandonment?

Adultery from your spouse.

Those things I think are incredibly difficult to discern from the inside.

And so as just some pastoral counsel, oh gathers, gather some friends, a friend, someone who can who can help you see and who could who could perhaps listen in and hear and and be able to say, I think this is abuse, what you're experiencing.

I think that you're being neglected.

And pray, perhaps you might find a friend.

Look for a friend who, you know, our our culture, one of the there's a there's a couple of narratives in our culture, and we have we have liberation narratives by abandoning the goodness of marriage.

We have liberation narratives in our culture around divorce, where like to find to find a friend who just celebrates you leaving as a way of finally standing up and and uh oh you know, tending to yourself or whatever it may be.

I think those are like a dime a dozen.

Literally, I work at a coffee shop on Tennyson like every other day of the week, and I sit next to people giving each other relationship advice.

It's not good out there.

It is so much celebrating, uh dissolving of our commitments to one another.

So, so much as a demonstration of you grasping your own freedom.

Try not to find a friend like that.

They won't help you.

Because they'll celebrate uh uh when you need to mourn right now.

The the hand that that will walk you honestly out of the the marriage or recognize the the ending of this marriage in these legitimate circumstances will mourn with you on the way out because they understand what marriage is.

And they will say, this is like the unwinding of creation itself.

And lastly, marriage is impossible.

Just like church.

This is impossible.

It can't be done.

Why are you all here?

The leaves are beautiful, it's peak leaf, you fools.

You should be peeping.

It's impossible that we are brought together to love one another.

It is impossible that two sinners can operate in an institution that was designed for perfect people.

And yet, at the fall, God did not stop marriage.

At the fall, God saved this little slice of the garden.

And he calls us into it that we might participate in its goodness even now.

How can we participate in a goodness like that even now?

Well, you know, we are the adulterers.

And there is one who in the midst of our adultery came to us.

In the midst of our running, he found us.

He brought us in, he cleaned us up, and while we were yet sinners, he betrothed himself to us even unto death.

He took our debts upon us, upon him, just like he married us, and he blessed us with his riches, just like he married us.

And we look forward in him to the only eternal marriage.

How is it that we could be one with the Son of God?

That we could be referred to as in him, that he would be our head, we would be his body, that he would be our husband, we would be his bride, that we would be made clean for him.

It is only in the grace of Christ that you are given the possibility of having your temporary marriage here sustained, cared for, you're able to operate in grace towards one another.

Your marriage finds its meaning in that marriage.

All right.

Are there any questions today?

Guys are really not helping my podcast.

So the uh um uh.

Okay.

Our feast this morning looks forward to a wedding feast.

The wedding feast of the Lamb.

The one who laid himself down for us at great cost.

Marriage is a great cost.

Where will you get strength for such a cost?

You will get it from Jesus.

He can draw close, he can strengthen you, he can nourish you along the way, he can show you the sacrifice that's required for a glorious marriage.

He can teach you, don't lessen what marriage means in order to attain to my grace.

No, see it for what it is and trust my grace as you work towards it.

He will provide.

Paul says this, for I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Our Lord died for us, and it ended up being uh him being wed together with us for eternity.

When we feast this morning, we are drawn into the one eternal marriage.

It is from this that we have the strength for our marriages here, and to understand that even in your perhaps your longing for marriage, there will come a day where in Christ you will say, I never missed out on any of the goodness of marriage.

Like all things, they are found in Him.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this time and bless our communion, that we would see the glory of what marriage is, the heights of it in you, that we would not try and manipulate your law to justify ourselves or to let ourselves off the hook by some sort of clever, suspicious interpretation.

Lord, that we would love your law because of the grace that you've shown to us, that we might see that it is for our good, that you are good, Lord, that we would trust your grace as we seek to participate in the goodness that you have freely given to us.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.