The Ethics of Marriage - Mark 10:1-12

Back in 2012 I was in the middle of my senior year of college. I was serving in a local church heading up their AWANA program, and as a ministry leader and also a young man aspiring to a future in pastoral ministry, the pastor of the church invited me to attend the church’s administrative board’s annual meeting. The way this church was structured, they had these meetings where all the ministry leaders would gather and they would talk through the ministry agenda and hear from the elders about things they wanted to pursue.

Ahead of that meeting the pastor the church assigned a book for everyone to read and asked me to read it as well. The book was David Kupelian’s The Marketing of Evil. This book outlines how many of te various social ills that have come upon our nation have not occured by accident, but rather have been marketed to us, and quite successfully so, so that the masses have been drawn in by these things. The results have been devastating to society.

From pornography, to abortion, homosexuality, and other vices, the erosion in America is not because we’ve just slowly drifted as a society, but rather we’ve been pushed and intentionally so.

Kupelian recently expanded this work to include additional research and chapters on newer issues that have swept our nation since he authored the original work.

It’s an eye-opening book that reveals the sinister intentionality behind our cultural slide, and is full of primary source citations and quotations that should be shocking, and yet it has been said publically for literal decades. And we are reaping the fruit of that today.

One of the chapters in Kupelian’s book is titled “Family Meltdown: the campaign to destroy marriage”

It seeks to answer this question: how is that we have gone from having to prove infidelity or physical abuse in order to get a divorce to being able to pay a $250 fee and finalize a divorce in 90 days with no little to no questions asked?

How have we gone from viewing marriage as the backbone of society to the introduction of no-fault divorce, to a society that has watched the divorce rate jump above 50%

That’s a long and sad story. It’s interwoven with many other things so it is difficult to summarize here. But in summary, here are three key steps in the evolution:

1) there was an intentional push to destroy marriage from the feminist movement, as they considered marriage to be holding women back.

Listen to some of these quotes:

“We have to abolish and reform the institution of marriage…” Gloria Steinem in an education-focused journal article.

“Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession… the choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-making is a choice that shouldn’t be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that” Vivian Gornick, tenured professor at the university of Arizona.

“Like prostitution, marriage is an institution that is extremely oppressive and dangerous for women”

“Legal marriage enlists state support for conditions conducive to murder and mayhem” —professor of philosophy at University of Wisconsin.

These quotes come from people that to us sound extreme, but they are teaching at our schools, writing in influential journals, and speaking at events.

2) Ronald Reagan, in what he would later deem to be one of the worst mistakes of his life, signed a bill changing California’s divorce laws to a no-fault divorce position, making it easier for anyone to get a divorce for any reason, even if the other person did not desire the divorce.

With those factors at play, divorce rates skyrocketed over the next decade and remained high for several more decades.

Over the last few years, the divorce rate has fallen to fifty year lows. That might seem encouraging at first, but it is also coupled by historic lows in the marriage rate as well. Sure, people aren’t getting divorced, but they also aren’t getting married in the first place. Instead, hook up culture and cohabitation reigns.

This make it clear the way we view marriage as a society has not improved. We have a culture that looks at marriage as something that holds you back, that prevents you from exploring your horizons, that only complicates matters because you’re bound to break up with that person eventually anyway, so why make it worse with a marriage?

This view demonstrates that our culture does not value marriage. It does not honor marriage.

Today’s sermon is from Mark chapter 10:1-12. In this passage Jesus is going to teach about marriage and divorce.

In this text we have two direct teachings about the nature of marriage and divorce.

What is missing from this text are the usual exceptions that we usually think about when it comes to the topic of divorce. Matthew lists an exception, as does Luke and Paul.

Mark does not. I make note of that up front because as we go through this text today, it is common that our minds will naturally want to run to the exceptions. I will say things that are direct and pointed, and we might react to that by saying “yeah but...”

And I just want to have us pause for a moment.

I want us to see the positive ethic today. We’re not supposed to start with the exceptions. We’re not supposed to start with the specific cases. We are to start with the baseline. There is the biblical ethic for marriage and we embrace that.

Of course we exist in the fallen world where sin and hardship exist, but if we aren’t rightly embracing the foundational principles, we will not be properly equipped to handle the exceptions.

Because of the way Mark framed this teaching, this is not a sermon about the exceptions and specific cases. I’m aware of those texts and the teaching found there. Mark left that out, not because he didn’t believe there were any exceptions to what he was communicating, but because he wanted to drive a particular point home.

And that’s the point I want to drive home today. So let’s begin with reading our text.

Mark 10:1–12 ESV

1 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. 2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Setting the scene.

Let’s set the scene for a moment. After Jesus’ private instruction with His disciples, they travel on and come back to a familiar location in the region of Judea. The crowds gather to him once again, and once again, he teaches them.

And once again, He gets a visit from the local fan club, the Pharisees. Jesus has been on their bad side since chapter three, and things are only going to grow more intense. For now, the tactic is to ask him difficult questions in hopes they can trip him up.

As an aside, this is an incredibly foolish thing to do. Challenging the God-man to a battle of wits.

But they ask away, they ask a question that was common point of debate among the Jews. There were some schools of thought that believed divorce was only permitted in the case of adultery, other schools of thought that taught that divorce was permitted for any offense, including burnt meals.

So they ask Jesus to weigh in on the question.

First, Jesus asks a question in verse 3: What did Moses command you?

Let’s start with the basics. What has been written? What does the law actually say?

Jesus’ words and the response are important. He used the word command. But the reply from the Pharisees was about what Moses “allowed” and not commanded.

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

The text they would have been citing would have been Deut 24:1-4

Deuteronomy 24:1–4 ESV

“When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.

Notice what this text does and does not say. This passage does not command divorce nor does it say under what circumstances a divorce is permissible, but it acknowledges that divorce was a reality and puts certain constrains on the man

Divorce was a concession due to hard hearts

Marriage was intended to be permanent

Divorce and Remarriage is adultery

Now, allow me to address what I think might be common things going through our minds.

“Pastor, are you saying that my particular divorce and remarriage was adultery?”

It’s possible that it was. Scripture does list certain exceptions where divorce is permissible without adding the guilt of adultery, but again, this sermon isn’t about those texts. The baseline principles is that God takes marriage seriously. We don’t do ourselves any favors by avoiding the language of sin with our past. Let’s be willing to call a spade a spade. We can talk through the exceptions and your particular cases, but for now, embrace the ethic that God designed marriage to last and every time it doesn’t, something has gone horribly wrong.

“Pastor, I’ve come to the conclusion that my previous divorce and remarriage was sinful. Now what? Should I get another divorce and pursue reconciliation with my first spouse.?”

To this I would say, no. If that’s the conclusion you’ve come to, confess that to the Lord, thank Him for his forgivness, and pursue the ethic laid out in thie passage with your current spouse. We cannot undo the things in our past. They happened. We should not minimize that or gloss over that or pretend that sin wasn’t sin. We aren’t doing anyone any favors when we do that. But we can thank the Lord for His mercy and grace, and we can thank the Lord that despite the sins of our past he was worked through those things to bring us to where we are today.

I do not have divorce in my background, but I do other sins. In so many ways I wish those sins would never have happened, but God has used the refining process in my life to make the person I am today. I’m not a finished product by any means. Praise God I’m not what I once was. Praise God I won’t remain as I am today. Praise God that even through my sins God was at work.

“Pastor you’ve mentioned the exceptions. I’d like to learn more”

Let’s set up a time to talk about it. But before we get into it, I’m going to remind us the baseline principles that we must embrace before getting to the exceptions.

“Pastor, this conversation about divorce and the divorce in my own past leaves me feeling like a really rotten person.”

Well, we are all really rotten people. Sin produces guilt and shame in our lives. Divorce is a serious thing and it has had significant impact in your life. It is only the Gospel of Christ that can free us from that. In the cross of Christ you do not need to bear the identity of a divorcee, but a child of the King. There are no second-class citizens in the kingdom of heaven. Recognize the weight of has happened. And then recognize the greatness of the Gospel to free you from it.

“Pastor, I did not want a divorce, it happened to me” God doesn’t hold you responsible for the actions of others. Anything that you contributed to the process can and should be repented of, but if you did not pursue a divorce and they divorced you, you are not held responsible for that.