The Faithful Bridegroom

What God Has Joined

Matthew 5:31–32 (with Matthew 19:1–9) — The Marriage Behind Every Marriage

OPENING — THE WRONG QUESTION

We're continuing through the antitheses this morning. "You have heard that it was said... but I say to you." We've sat with anger. We've sat with lust. This morning Jesus comes to marriage — and specifically to divorce.

Before we read, I want to name something that lives in every one of us. It sounds like wisdom. It sounds like diligence. But it is the question of a heart looking for an exit:

"Where is the line?"

How far can I go before it's technically sin? What are the legitimate grounds? When am I free? When have I done enough?

▸ The Pharisees built an entire religion on that question. And when they bring it to Jesus, he will not answer it. He will not give them a line. He will give them a design. He will take them all the way back to the beginning — and so will we this morning.

Read Matthew 5:31–32. Pray.

✦ "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery."

A PASTORAL WORD BEFORE WE BEGIN

Before we go one step further, I need to say something, because I know this room.

Some of you have walked through divorce. Some of you are children of divorce. Some of you carry it as the deepest wound of your life. And you heard that verse read and your stomach tightened.

▸ This text is not a club, and I will not swing it like one. There is almost no grief like the grief of a marriage that died. Jesus is not piling shame on the wounded this morning. He is exposing the hard-hearted — the ones holding a certificate in their hand looking for permission to break what God made.

▸ And if there is failure in your story — on either side of it — the same gospel that has met us in every one of these antitheses is going to meet you here, at the end, where it always does. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Stay with me to the end and you'll see why.

MOVEMENT ONE — THE DEBATE JESUS WALKED INTO

Two Schools, One Verse

In Jesus' day there was a live, public argument running between two schools of rabbis — the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel. They were fighting over one verse,

Deuteronomy 24:1–4 ““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.”

, which mentions a man finding "some indecency" in his wife and writing her a certificate of divorce.

▸ Shammai took the strict line: "some indecency" means serious sexual sin. That's the only ground.

▸ Hillel took the loose line: "some indecency" means anything that displeases the husband. She burned dinner. He found someone prettier. Any cause at all.

You can guess which school filled the pews.

The Test

Now hold that fight in your mind, because Matthew gives us the fuller version of Jesus' teaching in chapter 19, and we should read the short version here in chapter 5 in the light of the long version there. Turn with me to Matthew 19.

✦ "And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, 'Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?'" (Matthew 19:3)

Hear the question underneath the question. They are not asking because they treasure marriage. They want Jesus to pick a school — Shammai or Hillel — and the moment he does, they've boxed him into a controversy. It's a trap baited with "where is the line?"

Jesus Refuses the Question

And Jesus will not take it. He answers their question about divorce with a sermon about marriage:

✦ "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." (Matthew 19:3–6)

▸ They asked, "When can I get out?" Jesus answered, "Do you know who built this?" They came looking for the exit. He took them back to the blueprint.

This is the hinge of the whole morning. The Pharisees are standing at the back end of marriage asking about its dissolution, and Jesus walks them all the way to the front — to creation, to God's own act of joining. He quotes two verses out of Genesis, and we are going to do exactly what he did. We're going to go back to the beginning.

We’ve all heard of the image of a marriage as a house. We look at the house and condemn it because it’s unlivable. Jesus is saying the solution isn’t a new house, it’s to build up the current one the way the blueprint lays it out.

MOVEMENT TWO — CONCESSION, NOT COMMAND

But first — finish the conversation, because the Pharisees push back.

✦ "They said to him, 'Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?'" (Matthew 19:7)

Catch the word. Command. And notice the scribal teaching Jesus quoted in our text does the same thing — "let him give her a certificate of divorce" — as though the paperwork were the point. Get the certificate right and you're clean.

But go read Deuteronomy 24. The whole passage is one long if-then. If a man divorces his wife, and if she remarries, and if that second marriage ends — then the first husband may not take her back. That prohibition is the only command in the passage. There is no command to divorce. No encouragement to divorce. There is a reluctant regulation built around human sin — a guardrail, largely to keep a woman from being passed around like property.

And Jesus names it for exactly what it is:

✦ "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so." (Matthew 19:8)

▸ Allowed. Not commanded. Divorce is a concession to the hardness of the human heart — never God's design. And then the line that should echo through this entire series: "from the beginning it was not so."

The Pharisees had taken a concession to sin and turned it into a right to be exercised. That's what hard hearts always do with the law of God — they mine it for permissions.

▸ Jesus does give one exception — the case of sexual immorality, where the one-flesh union has already been torn apart. He permits divorce there. He does not command it. He does not encourage it. But that single exception is not the point, and if we make it the point, we have become the very Pharisees Jesus is rebuking. Because the kingdom citizen's first question about marriage is never "when may I leave?" It is "what did God make, and how do I keep it?"

So let's go ask that question. Jesus pointed back to the beginning. Let's go to the beginning.

MOVEMENT THREE — GOD'S DESIGN FOR MARRIAGE

Made in His Image, Male and Female

✦ "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27)

This is the first thing the Bible tells you about being human and the first thing it tells you about being male and female: you are an image. A reflection. Marriage is woven into a creation whose entire purpose is to display the Glory of the God who made it.

▸ This is exactly the verse Jesus reached for — "he made them male and female." Before marriage is about you and your spouse, it is about God. It was designed to show something true about him.

The One-Flesh Union

✦ "Then the LORD God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.'" (Genesis 2:18)

The first thing in all creation that God calls not good is a man by himself. And his answer is not a second man to work alongside. It's a wife. One who corresponds to him, completes him, stands face to face with him.

✦ "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." (Genesis 2:24)

This is the other verse Jesus quoted. Three movements in one sentence. Leave — a public, decisive break from one family to form a new one. Hold fast — cleave, be welded, glued, bound. One flesh — a union so total it makes two people one.

✦ "And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." (Genesis 2:25)

Naked and unashamed. Total exposure, total acceptance, nothing hidden, nothing feared. That's the design. That's Eden.

What God Has Joined

And now hear Jesus' own commentary on these verses, the words he adds that aren't in Genesis:

✦ "So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." (Matthew 19:6)

▸ The word "joined" is a yoking word — God yokes two people into one. God does it. Not the officiant. Not the county. Not even the couple. When two people marry, an invisible hand reaches down and does something that no human hand is authorized to undo.

▸ This is why "where is the line?" is the wrong question from the very start. The moment you ask when you may dissolve your marriage, you've revealed that you believe it belongs to you — that it's yours to manage and yours to end. Jesus says it never was. It was God's joining from the first day. You are not the author of your covenant. You are a steward of his.

Now, I want to be careful here. We are speaking today about God’s design for marriage. This is also the kind of language that an abusive spouse would use to keep his spouse in the marriage. This is the unfortunate reality that we live in today. There are circumstances where, even if you do all that depends on you, marriages still fail. Couples still divorce. It is never something to be celebrated, when a marriage covenant is broken, but this is also something that the blood of Jesus is more than sufficient to redeem. I want to deal carefully here, because I recognize how sensitive a topic it is that we’re touching, and I want you to know that this passage is not meant to condemn you. It can’t, because God has promised that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

MOVEMENT FOUR — GOD'S PURPOSE FOR MARRIAGE

Okay, so if that's the design — one flesh, joined by God, imaging him — then what is it for? Why did God make marriage at all?

Many of you have been through To Becoming One and if you haven’t, I highly recommend it. So this is going to sound familiar — and that's good. I want to lean on what you already know, because it's true, and because it comes straight out of the two chapters Jesus just sent us back to. Go back to Genesis 1, the blessing God speaks over the first marriage:

✦ Genesis 1:28 “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.””

There's the purpose of your marriage, spoken over the very first one. Three things.

One: To Reflect His Image

We already saw it — male and female, made in his image. Your marriage exists, first, to put God on display. The covenant love between a husband and a wife is meant to be a living portrait of the covenant love of God for his people. Your marriage is an apologetic. The watching world reads something true about God off of it — or something false.

Two: To Reproduce a Godly Heritage

✦ "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth..."

Not merely to have children — to raise godly children. Listen to how the prophet Malachi puts it, in the middle of a passage about marriage and divorce:

✦ "Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth." (Malachi 2:15)

▸ What is God after in your marriage? Godly offspring. A heritage of faith handed down. Hold onto that phrase — "a portion of the Spirit in their union" — we're coming back to it, because it's the whole secret.

Three: To Reign Over His Creation

✦ "...and subdue it, and have dominion..."

Husband and wife were made to rule together — to take dominion, to cultivate, to build, to steward God's world side by side as co-laborers. Not a man with an assistant. Two image-bearers reigning together under God as one flesh.

The Marriage You Drift Toward

Now here's why this matters so much, and here's where To Becoming One names something every married person in here has felt.

There is a kind of marriage we all drift toward without trying. Call it the 50/50 marriage. I'll do my half if you do yours. I'll meet you in the middle. As long as you carry your weight, I'll carry mine. It feels fair. It feels reasonable.

▸ But look at what it actually is. It's a contract. And a contract always comes with the fine print — performance clauses and exit clauses. I'll keep loving you as long as you keep earning it. And if you stop holding up your end... where's the line?

▸ Do you see it? The 50/50 marriage and the Pharisee asking about divorce are the same heart. One treats marriage as a contract with an exit. The other treats it as a contract with conditions. Both have missed the same thing: marriage was never a contract. It is a covenant — and its purpose was never for your spouse to serve you and earn their keep. Its purpose is for the two of you to reflect God, raise a heritage, and reign together. Your spouse's first job is not to make you happy. It's to love you the way Christ loves — and that, it turns out, is a standard no husband and no wife can reach on their own. Which is exactly where Jesus takes us next.

MOVEMENT FIVE — THE CALL WE CANNOT KEEP

So what does this covenant actually ask of a husband and a wife? Paul tells us, and when he does, he quotes the very same Genesis verse — and then pulls back a curtain we'll come back to at the end.

To the Husband

✦ "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her..." (Ephesians 5:25)

Men, hear the standard. Not "love your wife as much as she loves you." Not "love your wife as long as she's lovely." Love her as Christ loved the church — which means love her the way a dying man loves, the way the cross loves, sacrificially, completely, giving yourself up for her good with nothing held back and nothing owed to you.

▸ Can you do that? I can't. I have not loved my wife like Calvary for a single full day of my marriage. The command is not a ladder I'm climbing. It's a mirror, and I do not like my reflection in it.

To the Wife

✦ "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord... Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands." (Ephesians 5:22, 24)

✦ "Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them." (Colossians 3:18–19)

Wives, hear the standard. Submit as to the Lord — as the church submits to Christ. Joyful, trusting, whole-hearted. Not because your husband has earned it. As unto Jesus.

▸ Can any woman do that perfectly? No more than any man can love like the cross.

The Point of an Impossible Command

Now watch what these two commands do when you lay them side by side, because this is the heart of the matter.

▸ Both commands are inescapable. Paul doesn't offer them as suggestions for the spiritually advanced. They are the standing law of Christian marriage, and there's no version of obedience that gets around them.

▸ And both commands are utterly unreachable. No husband loves like Christ on his own power. No wife submits like the church on her own power. Which means God has designed marriage so that, at every moment, in the most intimate relationship of your life, both of you are driven to your knees before Jesus. The command doesn't terminate on your spouse. It runs straight through your spouse and lands you back at the foot of the cross, both of you, every day, equally undone.

▸ And here's what that does — it kills the favorite sentence of every struggling marriage: "The reason my marriage is hard is my spouse." No. Stand in front of this mirror honestly. The reason your marriage falls short of Eden is that you have fallen short of Eden. Not as a stick to beat you with — as a scalpel to open you up. Before you diagnose your spouse, the command turns you inward and asks: where have I failed to love like Christ? Where have I refused to trust like the bride? Where, in this union, have I been depending on my own strength instead of the Spirit of God?

To the Unmarried

✦ Pray for the marriages around you. Pray for the marriages in this room. Tell them where you see Christ in their marriage, or in their children.

✦ Encourage them and partner with them in the upbringing of their children. ✦ I’ll say that I am so thankful for this community, where all of you serve as examples of Godly men and women to my children. For them to hear in our home who Jesus is to Marissa and I is one thing, but for them to come here and hear the same from all of you is reinforcing everything we’re trying to accomplish in our home.

✦ And one last thing. They look at all of you as their friends. We had a couple over for dinner this week, and Marissa told Theo that we had some friends coming over. He asked, “Can they be my friends too?” She said, of course buddy, they are your friends!

MOVEMENT SIX — THE THIRD STRAND

Because here's the secret hiding in plain sight, all the way back in Malachi. "A portion of the Spirit in their union."

▸ A Christian marriage was never meant to be two people. It was always meant to be three. And the third is not a quota you fill or a feeling you summon — it is the Holy Spirit of God, given to dwell in his people, doing in your marriage what neither of you can do for yourselves.

▸ This flips everything. You cannot manufacture a Christ-like love for your spouse by trying harder. And — this is the relief — you cannot earn a Christ-like love from your spouse, either. You can't perform well enough to make your husband cherish you or your wife respect you. That change, when it comes, is not the wage of your performance. It is the fruit of the Spirit's sanctifying work in their heart. The softening of your spouse is something God does, not something you negotiate.

▸ Which means a thriving marriage starts in the most intimate place imaginable: it starts with you and Jesus, alone. Your own walk with Christ. Your own submission to him as Lord. Your own love for him and his church. A marriage doesn't get healthy because two people finally get the 50/50 math right. It gets healthy because two people are each, individually, being conformed to the image of Christ by the Spirit — and that overflow runs downhill into the marriage. You can't give your spouse Christ if you don't know Him.

[Personal story slot — the fixer-upper years, three kids, the seasons where the math broke down and the Spirit carried what we couldn't.]

▸ So when you look at God's design this morning — one flesh, imaging him, a heritage of faith, two people reigning together, a love like the cross — and you feel how far your marriage is from that, that ache is doing its job. The gap between your marriage and Eden is not meant to crush you. It's meant to drive you to the only One who can close it. And that brings us, finally, to the most beautiful thing in the whole text.

MOVEMENT SEVEN — THE MARRIAGE BEHIND EVERY MARRIAGE

Remember the curtain Paul started to pull back? Here it is. He quotes Genesis 2:24 — the one-flesh verse, the same one Jesus quoted — and then he says this:

✦ "'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church." (Ephesians 5:31–32)

▸ There it is. Marriage was never ultimately about marriage. From the first wedding in the garden, it was a type — a shadow, a portrait built into creation itself — of Christ and his bride. Every "leave and cleave," every one-flesh union, every vow at every altar has been pointing past itself to a greater Husband and a greater Wedding.

This is the thread that runs the length of your Bible. Israel is the wife of Yahweh. The church is the bride of Christ. And the whole story is racing toward a wedding day:

✦ "Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready." (Revelation 19:7)

The Husband Who Would Not Leave

So follow the logic all the way down. If your marriage exists to image that marriage — then what kind of Husband is being imaged?

Go read Hosea. God tells his prophet to marry a woman who will betray him, to live out in his own home the agony God feels with his unfaithful people. And when she runs, when she ends up on the auction block, God's command is:

✦ "Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel..." (Hosea 3:1)

Go again. Buy her back. Love her again.

▸ Here is the Husband that marriage points to: a Bridegroom who had every ground for divorce — whose bride has been unfaithful in heart and eye and deed, the very things we've been exposing for three weeks now — and who refused to take it. Instead of handing us a certificate of divorce, he wrote a new covenant in his own blood.

✦ "And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD." (Hosea 2:19–20)

You Are Already in That Marriage

So hear this, all of you — married, single, divorced, widowed, every one of you in Christ:

▸ The deepest truth about you this morning is not the state of your earthly marriage. It is that you are already betrothed to a Husband who will never leave you and never forsake you. You are already promised to the only perfect Bridegroom, already bound in the only union that cannot be broken.

✦ "Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." (Revelation 19:9)

▸ Your earthly marriage cannot create that. At its very best, on its best day, it can only reflect it — a shadow pointing to the substance, a portrait of the real thing. And for some of you, that earthly marriage has failed, or never came, or was taken from you. Then hear it especially: the marriage that defines you is the unbreakable marriage that Christ secured at the cross. He is faithful even when our faithfulness fails. That is the gospel.

LANDING — COVENANT KEEPERS BELONG TO A COVENANT KEEPER

So pull it all the way back to where we started.

▸ The Pharisees came asking, "Where is the line?" And Jesus refused to give one — because the people of his kingdom are not the people who found the line and stayed barely on the right side of it. They are people who have been remade in the image of a covenant-keeping God. They keep their vows, they cling to their spouses, they pour themselves out in love and submission — not to climb their way to God, but because they already belong to him. This is what kingdom people look like, because this is what their King is like.

▸ And when you held up your own marriage against God's design this morning, you were exposed. The mirror did what the mirror does. But every one of you who is in Christ has a Bridegroom who kept the covenant you could not keep. He loved his bride all the way to the cross. And he is coming back for her — and on that day the symbol of marriage gives way to the thing symbolized, the portrait to the face, and we sit down at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Until then: love your spouse, pray for them, keep your vows, and depend on the Spirit to do in your marriage what you never could because you already belong to the Groom who will never leave you or forsake you.

Pray.