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Welcome to today’s Daily Scripture Reading and Meditation covering Matthew 19:3-6 wherein Jesus reminds the Pharisees and us of God’s original intention for marriage.
And 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.”
Relationships are messy, but this isn’t God’s fault. Marriages fall apart every day, but that’s not because God didn’t come up with a good design. You almost get the sense in this account that the Pharisees are trying to take some high moral ground by paraphrasing a few words from Moses in Deuteronomy 24 and making marriage out to be something small or easily discarded if a guy feels like getting rid of his wife. It might be that they thought they were going straight to the source of what marriage is about by quoting something from the one who recorded the law of God centuries before. Certainly, they could corner the Carpenter with this. But in true Jesus fashion, He beat them at their own game, going back to the very beginning of all relationships and reminding them of God’s original plan before sin entered the picture. He tells them that God made man and God made woman, and He made them for one another in such a way that, when joined under His blessing, they were to be counted as one from that point forward. In just a few words, Jesus lets them know that marriage is serious, that it’s for life, and that man shouldn’t try to get in the middle of it and mess it up. It’s not that Jesus didn’t know that unfaithfulness would be part of the mix in our sin-torn world, and He actually acknowledged this in the verses following, but He told them that if they wanted to explore God’s design for marriage, they had better rethink some things and take another look at the Scriptures.
What I fear today is that, even in Christian circles, we’re looking at marriage more like the Pharisees than like Jesus. We’re looking at times for excuses to bail instead of seeking God’s heart in the matter. This is positively unacceptable. Like Jesus, we do need to recognize that there are times when there is simply nothing that one spouse can do when the other is unrelenting in reeking absolute destruction on the relationship. But as politically incorrect as this might sound, we’re not to look at the whole through the lens of the exception. What we need to be practicing and counseling is the permanence of marriage, which is also the intention of God. The concept of true oneness in marriage, where each partner breaks from their family of origin to begin and continue in a completely new one, is almost foreign in many circles and has been dying all around for some time. It is a shame that so much joy is forfeited and so many spirits crushed because we have entered into marriages with the idea that we have all the right to separate what God has joined together. Men: lovingly, exclusively hold fast to your wives. Women: don’t squirm.
Last 5 posts by Seth
- Matthew 28:18-20--Daily Scripture Reading and Meditation - April 24th, 2010
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