The Divine Intent and Sanctity of Marriage

And Jesus answered and said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation, God made them ‘male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.” [00:00:56]

Our Father and our God, as we now turn our attention to the sanctity of the institution of marriage, which You have been pleased to give to Your people for our well being, we pray that You would pierce through the hardness of our hearts, cut through the cacophony of noise that we hear from the secular culture, that we might understand these things concerning marriage according to your Word. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen. [00:02:14]

But let me say this to you in all candor. It’s a matter of course in the pagan society, but for Christians ever to cohabit outside the institution of marriage is a gross and heinous sin against God, and is something that should be absolutely unheard of in the Christian community. But you know as well as I do that this practice is now taking place widely within the church because so often even professing Christians take their cue not from the Word of God on how we should live, but rather from the culture around them, and what customs are acceptable in our culture, remember are pagan customs. And we are called as Christians to march to a different drummer. [00:05:37]

Well Jesus, you know, was never much concerned with appeasing public opinion or political correctness to appease the theologians or the politicians. His meat and His drink was to do the will of the Father. He was concerned for truth and for holiness, so let’s hear how Jesus responds to this question. He answered and said, “What did Moses command you?” He points them right back to the Word of God, and they answered saying, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and to dismiss her.” [00:15:35]

Now Jesus answered and said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart, he wrote you this precept, but from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife.” He’s referring now back to the institution of marriage in Genesis. “The two shall become one flesh, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore,” now here’s our Lord’s conclusion, “what God has joined together, let not man put asunder or separate.” [00:17:04]

There are many theologians and many churches who will not permit divorce on any grounds, and they will call attention to this passage, and they say, “Here in the text what Jesus does is abrogates the Old Testament provision that was given, as it were, begrudgedly by the Author of marriage, God, and He allowed this practice of divorce on certain grounds only because of the hardness of the hearts of the people” – that God accommodated human wickedness to let people out of marriages that were defined by hardened hearts and giving some respite to people having to suffer under such conditions. [00:18:40]

But Jesus then points them beyond Deuteronomy, goes back to creation, and said, “But that’s not the way it was intended.” When God instituted marriage originally, hear me,—not because you want to hear but because you want to hear Jesus – there were no provisions for divorce. None. Marriage was intended to be forever. The marriage vows did not say, “As long as we stay in love, as long as we get along, as long as we remain faithful.” The marriage vow is, “As long as we both shall live.” [00:19:39]

In Matthew’s account, we have here in the God breathed New Testament what we call the exceptive clause, where Jesus still permits divorce, but He defines what are the permissible grounds for divorce, and that the permissible grounds are defined in terms of Jesus’ interpretation of the Mosaic law, where Jesus interprets the “unclean thing” in terms of what the text I just read from identifies as sexual immorality. [00:22:37]

Many churches define that sexual immorality strictly in terms of adultery, marital infidelity. Any other grounds are denied except for those added by the Apostle Paul in the case of a marriage where one partner is a Christian and the other was a non-Christian, and the non-Christian leaves the Christian or abandons and deserts the marriage. And so there the other reason given for marriage in most churches is the desertion of the unbeliever. [00:23:16]

Now again, I said I wish everybody would agree on this, but now the debate is, even among churches that grant divorce on the grounds of sexual immorality, the question is what is encompassed in the term that Jesus uses here. The term that Jesus uses here is the Greek word “pornia” from which we get the English word “pornography.” So Jesus said basically, “The only grounds for divorce here is the commission of ‘pornia.’” [00:24:55]

And so we see that in any case where Jesus comes down on this is at the point of a sexual violation of the sanctity of the marital union. Let me just quickly say, why is it, why does God even permit that? One of the things that I deal with all the time in the church, it can be a man, it can be a woman, but one partner goes out and commits adultery. The other partner finds out about it and is ready to sue for divorce. [00:27:13]

But the big problem in our day is the problem of people, even in the church, getting divorced over every reason in the world other than the ones the Bible allows. That God allows us to end our marriages when they have been violated by sexual immorality is an amazing condescension to human sin, but that condescension does not go so far as no fault divorce or divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. [00:29:08]