Biblical Marriage
Notes
Transcript
Go ahead and grab your copy of God’s word and find Mark chapter 10. We will be in the first 12 verses today. We are going to be looking at the topic of divorce in our passage today. But it is more than that. Because if we are going to be talking about divorce, we need to look at what biblical marriage is.
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.”
Prayer
If you know me well, you know that I love history. I can blame my dad for that. I loved it so much that I went to my senior world history class and slept every day and made an A in the class because I already knew the material from watching the History channel. Within history, I have probably enjoyed learning about WW2 more than any other time period. There are just so many intricacies within WW2.
One of them is the Japanese joining the war. In September of 1940, the Japanese officially joined into the war. A little over a year later, they attack Pearl Harbor. This sets off a chain of events in the Pacific. 6 months later there was the Battle of Midway. A year later was the Battle of Guadalcanal. This goes on for several years. And this is not an agreement of what happened, just facts, but the United States in August of 1945 set off 2 atomic bombs in Japan.
This led to Japan giving up a month later. These atomic bombs were not aimed at the Japanese leadership who were controlling the actions of the military. They were not aimed at only military. The result of these atomic bombs was the death of nearly 200,000 civilians.
You might wonder what the atomic bombing of Japanese cities has to do with the topic of divorce. See, after the bombings, life in Japan was never the same. There were survivors that had to live with the decisions of others. These bystanders had nothing to do with the war, yet their life was changed because of these bombs.
Divorce is like an atom bomb. You think that the divorce will leave nothing behind but what it leaves behind is pain and heartache in people that had nothing to do with it. It is often said that divorce is harder to deal with because both the victims and the perpetrators are still alive and often have to still be around each other.
If I were to ask you to raise your hands if you have been affected by divorce in any manner, most everyone in the room would raise their hands. In fact, you would think that the church would be a safe place and would have some level of immunity to divorce, but those who are inside of the church have just as high of a divorce rate as nonbelievers.
If you think that this sermon is going to be some sort of rant belittling people who have been divorced, it is my prayer that it is not taken this way. There are instances, and we see it in scripture, where divorce is permissible. I will say that if you are in physical danger of your spouse and you are being physically abused, you need to get out of that home immediately.
We also need to understand sin here too. Is it a sin to get a divorce for any reason other than what scripture tells us is permissible? Yes it is. So if you are someone who got a divorce already, it would be silly of me to think that a sermon about not getting a divorce is going to fix that. We don’t have a time machine to go back and fix it. But, just like any other sin, God forgives sins. Just like Jesus went to the cross for murder, he went to the cross for unwarranted divorce. If you have been affected by divorce, remember that and be encouraged by that. God forgives sin.
In our passage today, Jesus is not dealing with a married couple that is debating getting a divorce. I think this is important to realize. Jesus is responding to questions from opponents that were trying to bait him into saying something incriminating. As we work our way through this, we need to understand this aspect of the situation but also we need to understand how God views divorce. So we will be looking at both of these things.
They leave Capernaum and this is where we pick up.
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?”
The Pharisees, like I said, are trying to bait him. This is not the first time that they have done this. So we should not be shocked. Over time, the Pharisees have become acquaintances with Herod. If we go back earlier in the book of Mark, we find John the Baptist speaking out against Herod’s divorce and remarriage to his brothers wife. This led to the arrest and ultimate death of John the Baptist. After this, Herod had been keeping an eye on Jesus and had even thought at one time that he was a resurrected John the Baptist. So this question from the Pharisees had other motives too besides wanting to know about the law.
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.”
I love that Jesus answers the question with a question. Is it lawful? What did Moses command you?
