Jesus' Teaching On Divorce, Part 4

Matthew 19:10‑12

And again this morning, it's our great joy as we worship the Lord through hearing Him speak in the Word, to open our Bibles to Matthew chapter 19. As you know, if you've been with us the last several weeks, we have been examining this great chapter in our on‑going study of Matthew. We find that the first twelve verses contains our Lord's teaching on the subject of divorce. And that is a very pertinent subject today. And we've been examining exactly what the Lord says in this text and it's so important that we do that in order that we lay a strong foundation for our understanding of God's will relative to marriage and divorce.

Now, I want us to just return again to this text. I want to take you very, very hastily through the first part and then we want to pick it up at verse 10 where we left off. Keep in mind that the first two verses give us the setting. The Lord has finished the discourse on the child likeness of the believer which is recorded in chapter 18, given in Capernaum in a home there. And with the finishing of that discourse, we find the end of His Galilean ministry. For several years He has been there teaching, preaching, healing people, doing miracles, revealing His Messiahship, proclaiming the truth of God and now He's finished with Galilee and He begins His journey south. A journey which in a few months will culminate in His death and resurrection. But on the way, He crosses over the Jordan River to the east and goes into an area known as Perea, the beyond, it is called. And we have in chapters 19 and 20 what is known as the Perean ministry. Much like the Galilean ministry only much more brief, the Lord preaches, teaches, heals and the crowds follow Him. And no doubt, the majority did not believe but some did.

And so, in the midst of the Perean ministry as it begins, He is confronted in verse 3 by His archenemies the Pharisees, who are totally intimidated by Him and His teaching because both He and what He says are so contrary to them. And they ask Him a question that is really no question at all. In other words, by that I mean they had no intention of hearing an answer, they wanted no information, all they wanted to do was trap Him. And it says in verse 3 they were testing Him and they said, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for every cause?"

Now, the intention in asking the question was to publicly discredit Jesus because they knew that it was a popular view that you could divorce your wife for every reason. And that's the way it was in that world, and they figured if Jesus said no, it is not and they knew He would because He had taught that already, if they could get Him to be discredited among the people of Perea, they could immediately eliminate is ministry. And those people were use to divorce. It was part of heir culture. Everybody did it. It was just a free‑wheeling kind of thing and if Jesus drew a hard line, maybe the people would stop following Him, they thought.

And so, our Lord is confronted with a question in a time not unlike our own time. Because even in our time, to hold a strong view of marriage, a strong biblical view of divorce, is to be very unpopular. Not only outside the church, but in many cases even in the church. And so, they were attempting to discredit Jesus in the eyes of the people by having Him become a very hard-line kind of legalistic person.

Secondly, the ruler of that area was a man named Herod Antipas who had already beheaded John the Baptist for such a strong stand and they thought maybe they could do more than discredit Jesus, maybe they could even destroy Him if they could get Him to take a strong stand because He would be contrary to Herod Antipas and his own illicit incestuous marriage to his brother's wife and maybe that would result in the death of Jesus which would please them very much. And so, they asked the question, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for every cause?" That's what we called the attack. And it is an attack.

The second point we looked at was the answer. And Jesus does answer them but He doesn't answer them on His own, He quotes God. Takes them all way back to the book of Genesis: Genesis 1:27, Genesis 2:24. And He says to them in verse 4, "Have you not read?" In other words, your argument is not with Me, your argument is with God. I remember hearing old Dr. Bob Jones say one time, "If you don't like what I'm saying, don't call me, call heaven." God said this. Your argument is not with me, it's with Him. And that's true. And Jesus is saying the same thing, He's saying if you have an argument, it isn't with Me, it's with God. If you don't like the particular view, it isn't your argument is with Me, it isn't the debate with Me, it is God that you must approach. "Have you not read that God said one man, one woman," and He says it in Genesis 1:27, He made them a male and a female. In other words, it's obvious what God intended when He created. He made one man, one woman and no spares. And He intended it to be one man and one woman for life. That was the pattern.

Secondly, God said they were to cleave, that's the word glue or stick, strong bond. Then He said thirdly, they two would be one flesh and when two become one they're no longer two, so they can't be divided. And finally, marriage is an act of God for what God has joined together, let not man divorce.

So, the Lord says no, you cannot divorce your wife for every cause, for four reasons. God made one man for one woman, strong bond, one flesh, it was His creative work and you are not to divorce. Let not man divorce, the end of verse 6.

Well, they anticipated that Jesus would take this hard line no doubt. I don't know that they anticipated He would quote from Genesis, but they did anticipate His hard line and so they had a second question ready to confront Him with. And that takes us to the argument, verse 7. Here's their argument. "They say unto Him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement and divorce her?" If it's a no divorce standard that God laid down in the beginning, if God intention was no divorce, then why did Moses command divorce? Now you remember that we've discussed that. They took that from Deuteronomy 24 and they twisted it because in the text of Deuteronomy 24:1 to 4, Moses does not command divorce. There's only one command in that text and the command there is not to marry a defiled adulteress. There's no command there to get a divorce. You see, they were living the lie that God commanded divorce. And so they would divorce their wives and as a result, seem to be righteous. They were actually sort of advocating the self‑righteousness of divorce by turning Deuteronomy 24:1 to 4 into a command to divorce which it is not and we saw that. Moses tolerated divorce and that's what our Lord says in the affirmation of verses 8 and 9. He affirms again the divine standard.

"Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning," that is from God's original creative intention, it was never to be. So, He says it wasn't a command, it was a permission. And we looked into that in some detail. There was a permission in the Old Testament for divorce. And verse 9. Jesus reiterates it. "I say unto you, whosoever shall divorce his wife other than on the grounds of fornication and marry another, commits adultery and whosoever marries her who is divorced, commits adultery." In other words, Jesus reiterates the one Old Testament grounds for divorce, which was adultery, comes under the broad category of fornication or sexual sin. It was not that divorce was to be there if a person committed adultery and then repented from that, it was that divorce was an option where you had hard‑hearted adultery from which the person would not turn and repent. If they repented, they were to be taken back in love, as God would have taken back His adulterous wife Israel.

But in those cases where there was a continual hard‑heart and there was no repentance, and the adulterous person wouldn't cease their adultery, then the Old Testament permitted, as a merciful concession, to the innocent party a divorce. And it isn't that big of a concession because the fact is that an adulterer deserved ... what? ... death. And if God killed the adulterer, the innocent party would have been free to remarry anyway. So, if God by His grace spares the life of the guilty, we can see how reasonable it is that divorce should free the innocent to remarry. And we went into that in detail.

So, the Lord simply affirms the Old Testament standard. And so, their question is very simple, "Can you get a divorce for every reason?" He says no!... no, from the beginning, God intended no divorce. Why then did Moses allow it? He allowed it because of the harness of heart, but only for one reason was it ever allowed in the Old Testament and that is illustrated most graphically by our Lord Himself in Jeremiah 3:8 when after 700 years of Israel's spiritual adultery with idols, He finally says I divorce you. God divorced Israel for spiritual adultery. Now that doesn't mean you can divorce your partner for spiritual adultery, for something they do in their mind. When that filters down to human beings, it's for the adulterous union itself, the adulterous act itself and nothing less than that.

But God is the illustration of one who divorced on the basis of adultery. But divorce on any other grounds, says our Lord, causes people who remarry after that divorce to turn into adulterers and adulteresses, and you defile them all.

At that point, the Pharisees disappeared. The reason they disappeared was they had just been made into adulterers, because they were standing there, having had to face the reality that any divorce for other than adultery causes you to become an adulterer when you remarry, the fact is they had done that perhaps myriad times, represented by the group that were there and they were nothing but a lot of adulterers and they just fade. We don't see them anymore.

But by this time, the disciples literally are enraptured with this teaching of our Lord. And the scene moves into a house in verse 10. And the Lord sits down with the disciples and I'm sure they followed up on that discussion with a lot of other discussion about marriage. We wish we had that discussion. If there's any one category of truth that we think we'd like to have more of in the Bible, it's about divorce and remarriage. But we don't hear the conversation, we just get the response.

Now, they're in the house and the disciples are gathered around the Lord. And the strength of His teaching about marriage and divorce has left a tremendous impression on them. They're actually shocked by it. They're frankly startled by it, because Jesus has not extended the Old Testament law one wit, He simply reaffirmed it, no divorce. And, frankly, if God killed the adulterers with a capital punishment that He assigns in Leviticus, there never would be any divorce. But God in His grace has let some adulterers live and so divorce can be a merciful concession there only when that adultery is hardhearted and irreconcilable. There's still a place for forgiveness where there's repentance. But any other thing‑‑no divorce. "No indecency" is grounds, no ... no...no thing less than adultery. And so they are very, very curious about this because, you see, they have grown up in a culture where divorce was just rampant, very much like ours. And all that the Lord has said leaves them struggling and so we come to the fifth point in this little outline of these twelve verses and we call it the appropriation. How do these men appropriate to themselves this truth? How do they handle this? It's really provoked their minds. It is foreign to the experience of their day, the way they've been taught.

For example, they were raised in a culture where divorce was actually a virtue. Let me quote you from some of the Talmudic writings of the rabbis ... quote "Among those who will never behold the face of hell is he who has had a bad wife, such a man is saved from hell because he's expiated his sins on earth."

Here's another quote, "A bad wife is like leprosy to her husband. What is the remedy? Let him divorce her and be cured of his leprosy."

And then this, "If a man has a bad wife, it is a religious duty to divorce her."

Now, that's what they were taught. Could you imagine your children being raised under the teaching "if you get a bad wife, divorce her"? Well, that's the way they were being taught. And then the Lord comes along and says ‑ No divorce. And only mercifully will God concede a divorce. And all of a sudden the ... the obvious tension between what they're hearing from the Lord and what they've experienced in their society is so great that they're just nonplussed ... and they look at this very narrow, very hard standard and watch their reaction, verse 10: "His disciples say unto Him, If the case of the man be so with  his wife, it is not good to marry." You understand what they're saying? Boy, if you get into that deal and you cannot get out of it, you'd be better off never to get in it. That's what they're saying. To be tied to a wife that only her adultery could ever release and then to be compelled to put up with all the rest of her idiosyncrasies, short of adultery, I mean, if she's just a strange...or does strange things or...she doesn't make you happy and all that, you're stuck for the rest of your life‑‑forget it, better to be single.