The Loopholes?

Good morning church! It’s so great to see you today. We are rocking into week 3 of this series called The Theme of the Kingdom. We discovered the first week that the Kingdom of God that Jesus preaches is centered around the heart of man. Man’s heart is sinful but it is that very heart that God changes to resemble his ways over time.

Today we move to the next set of verses beginning in Matthew 5:31-37.

As you turn there, let’s have a heart to heart...

This is my first time to be the teaching pastor of a church. In the past, I only preached when I was asked to or wanted to. In most of those situations, I could preach from any passage I wanted and on any topic I wanted. I was not one to avoid difficult subjects intentionally, but I had a natural tendency to preach on things I was passionate about and understood well.

Before I came here to pastor, I knew things needed to change. If I was going to be your pastor, I wanted to preach differently. Part of that is as often as I can, getting into a particular book or part of a book and move through it. Sometimes we will move theme by theme like we did through 1 Corinthians in Jan and Feb, and other times we will move more section by section without really skipping a single verse. That’s what we are doing with the Sermon on the mount.

Today, we are tackling one of those sections of Scripture that, at least part of it, I want to skip. Just being honest. Jesus addresses a topic today that I know many of you have walked through and felt the pain of. I love you enough to be careful with how we talk about it. But I love you enough to not skip over it either. OK?

Let’s walk through it together.

Let me read the passage out loud, i’ll pray, and then we will start looking at this.

Matthew 5:31–37 CSB

“It was also said, Whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. “Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, You must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. But I tell you, don’t take an oath at all: either by heaven, because it is God’s throne; or by the earth, because it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great King. Do not swear by your head, because you cannot make a single hair white or black. But let your ‘yes’ mean ‘yes,’ and your ‘no’ mean ‘no.’ Anything more than this is from the evil one.

PRAY

When we started this current series, I told you there were 6 statements from the Old Testament or popular rabbis of the day that Jesus is addressing here. We can really think of them in pairs. The last two weeks we have looked at the first pair and we saw that the BIG sins that God commanded us not to do, have been broken by most if not all of us, because the real sin is in the attitude behind the sin. IT BEGINS IN THE HEART. We spent two weeks on that.

Now we get to the second pair that deal with divorce and telling the truth. And just as the first two have a connection, so do these two!

Jesus is partially doing the same thing he did last week. He is correcting a bad interpretation of the Law of God.

1. Jesus CORRECTED their interpretation of DIVORCE

God had spoken to his people through Moses in Deuteronomy 24 and given directions for a “certificate of divorce.” This verse can appear ambiguous and it can seem to be saying something that it is not. There are two corrections that Jesus makes. To fully understand the nuances of Jesus’ teaching on divorce, we will look at the framework the Jews had for marriage and look at other places Jesus’ speaks on the topic. So bear with me!

Again, there are 2 Corrections to the theology of the day:

a. God may ALLOW it, but it isn’t His DESIRE

It can be easy to read verses in which God is making an allowance or concession for a sin and think God is good with it! But that’s bad bible reading!

It’s why Jesus, when he is asked about divorce, he goes back to Genesis 1-2. Read along in Matthew 19 with me...

Matthew 19:3–6 CSB

Some Pharisees approached him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on any grounds?” “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that he who created them in the beginning made them male and female, and he also said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Jesus is dropping some truth bombs that should have been foundationally cemented into the minds of the Hebrew people! They viewed the first part of the first book in their Scriptures to be vitally important to who God is and how he interacts with his creation; however, they had allowed the weight of this image to be lightened over the generations: THE TWO BECOME ONE FLESH.

When Jesus is asked about whether divorce is alright, this is the first thing he says and the only thing he says! We should think about that. Jesus says that upon marriage and intercourse, the two bodies, the two people, the two lives become ONE! Just as God takes man and makes two. He creates a relationship between humans that is the reverse of that. He took one and made TWO. Marriage is the two becoming ONE.

Jesus seems to really believe that this happens! it’s not just poetic and pretty like we talk about it weddings. IT IS REAL AND IT IS INTENSE and it should be taken seriously by those entering into marriage and those already in it.

When two people come together they are becoming one flesh through a physical, spiritual, and emotional connection that God designed. He is involved in it! It’s his thing! He built the whole system.

And if those two people are being put together by God through the process he ordained, then there is nothing that should separate them! When we allow the marriage bond to be broken, Moses tells us in Deut. 24 and Jesus confirms in Matthew 5 that it blurs the lines of sexual immorality and can cause sin on the heads of more people than just the two divorcees! It makes a huge mess! They don’t event get into the financial, emotional, and physical toll it can take on both parties!

If you have been through a divorce or you have a close family member or friend who has, you can testify, it causes all kinds of problems!

So, hear me when I say this… God is not pleased when a relationship is broken. When a marriage relationship gets to the point that the husband and wife see no repair for their marriage and they divorce, that is not God’s plan A! Broken relationships is NEVER God’s perfect plan for us! He is a God of reconciliation and restoration and has called us to be the same in the world (see 2 Cor. 5). When we allow bitterness and resentment and all that junk to build up in any of our relationships, that’s not good!

Just because God told the people about this certificate of divorce, doesn’t mean that he would be please when they did it!

So, why did God even allow divorce to go on? Why didn’t he just outlaw it!? Then a husband or wife would have to pull around the back of some sketchy Piggly Wiggly and meet a guy in a van to get some official paperwork. But no, God provides the resolution himself. Why!?

This is where I get to correction number 2. Jesus seems to want his disciples and the Jewish people at large to recognize that

b. The allowance was INTENTIONAL and NARROW

As we just talked about, God made it clear in Genesis 2 that a husband and wife were one flesh and should never be torn apart. The truth already existed, however, by the time of Moses, that adultery would sometimes occur among a married couple. You can see the theological issue this presents, right?

If a man has a wife and is clearly one flesh with her, but also has an affair with another woman. Is he also one flesh with this new woman? Can you exist as one flesh with two women in this case?

That’s the conflict that was going on! Adultery became the one theological allowance for divorce because it destroyed the very real truth God had set up in the marriage relationship: two become one flesh.

The world in this Old Testament time period was a heavily man-centered culture. So, most of the choice of divorce was on the man. The woman didn’t have as much right back then to pursue this. But if a man wanted to divorce his wife for whatever reason, before the law of the divorce certificate, he could divorce her and “put her away.” This would be a somewhat public mark on the woman. Everyone would naturally assume she was unfaithful and she would be left to fend for herself and do her best to earn a living in a society led and sustained mostly by men. That would be tough!

Along comes Moses, right? With this piece of law in Deuteronomy 24. He says that whatever reason you divorce your wife, give her a certificate of divorce before you send her away. The reason isn’t given in the text, but it seems clear through the cultural context of the day that this would have been a life saver for the woman! If the man had no real reason to divorce her, he would have nothing much to write on the certificate! She would have written proof that she wasn’t cheating on her husband and, therefore, would not be ostracized from the Jewish culture that was based on a perceived morality.

This is why the Bible gets a bad rap! People believe it is just an archaic piece of male chauvinistic garbage. However, the Bible on many occasions outlines protection for the most vulnerable in a society: widows, orphans, diseased, and HERE divorced women.

The allowance was intentional so that these women would be protected. But it was also narrow.

Deuteronomy 24 appears to be pretty ambiguous as to the reasons a divorce could occur.

Deuteronomy 24:1 CSB

“If a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, he may write her a divorce certificate, hand it to her, and send her away from his house.

At first glance, this can seem like a man can divorce a woman for any reason he wants. However, the word “indecent” is tied totally towards nakedness and immorality. Though the law doesn’t come out and say it, it seems to be similar to what Jesus says many years later.

Over time, however, one very popular Jewish rabbi began to interpret this very loosely. He interpreted from this verse we just looked at that a man could divorce his way for ANY THING he didn’t like about her. By the time Jesus is on the scene, this is the most widely accepted interpretation. We know that it was even being said that a man could divorce his wife for something as simple as “she burned dinner.”

You can see now why Jesus was backed into a corner and asked in chapter 19 “Can a man divorce his wife for any reason at all.” It was a touchy subject in the day.

They had such a bad interpretation of these verses that Jesus felt it necessary to correct it. He helped them see that...

God may allow it but it’s not his desire...

And this allowance by God was to help women in particular and to narrow the reasons to really just one as adultery.

Now, let me say a couple things here...

First off, we can’t be guilty of doing the same thing with Jesus’ teaching that the Jews did with the Law. We can’t take Jesus’ concession as a command.

When Jesus says that divorce is allowed in the case of sexual immorality, he isn’t saying that when there is sexual immorality in a marriage you should divorce. God’s desire is always for reconciliation and restoration first.

Second thing I want to say to you...

If you have been through a divorce, I can’t imagine how painful it was for you! I have had relatives go through it and I’ve ministered to many teens as a youth pastor and to families who are going through this. Divorce is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone! It is TERRIBLE!

And if you gone through a divorce, it’s not an unforgivable sin. You aren’t marked for the rest of your life to live a less than joyful life in Christ. You aren’t living some subpar existence in the margins of God’s grace.

God wants to use you to bring glory to his name where you are now! Don’t live defeated because of that. Get after it for God’s glory, amen?

The second interpretation correction was on OATHS.

2. Jesus CORRECTED their interpretation of OATHS.

I won’t do this whole thing again necessarily, but the idea of oaths was just like the certificate of divorce. We all know what oaths are, right?

It’s something added to a statement in an effort to ensure you are telling the truth. It’s a promise with collateral.

“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”

That’s a common one from my childhood.

It is saying, if I am lying then let this happen to me or let this person I speak of in the oath deal harshly with me.

In light of that definition: let’s read Jesus’ words again here...

Matthew 5:33–37 CSB

“Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, You must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. But I tell you, don’t take an oath at all: either by heaven, because it is God’s throne; or by the earth, because it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great King. Do not swear by your head, because you cannot make a single hair white or black. But let your ‘yes’ mean ‘yes,’ and your ‘no’ mean ‘no.’ Anything more than this is from the evil one.

Jesus here doesn’t give a direct quote from a particular passage, instead shares a general idea that is found in several places, maybe most notably in..

Leviticus 19:12 CSB

Do not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God; I am the Lord.

In the law, God made it clear that if you use his name in an oath, you better doggone well keep it!

It was clearly a common practice in Jesus’ day to swear by lots of things. Jesus mentions three: heaven, earth, and your own head. However, Jesus shoots each one of those down and simply says, “Let your yes, be yes, and your no, be no.”

Jesus says there is no reason to ever swear by anything! Do you really lie that much that no one would believe you when you told the truth? So you have to bet a lot on the statement to get them to believe you!? This is the only need for oaths!

You see, just as God allowed a concession for divorce because he knew man was sinful and he wanted to provide a way forward for those involved, he also knew that man was a bunch of liars. And if we were ever to be able to have relationships at all, he should allow a way to prove truthfulness by ones own words.

But this was not God’s plan A. God wants you to live a truthful life. So that when you interact with others, they will believe you. Be a man or woman of your WORD. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. This is the ideal. Tell the truth! What a novel idea!

The simple application points are these: fight for your marriage and tell the truth.

But surely there is something else here, right?

There are tons of concessions that have been laid before us, and sadly, we often take advantage of those and stretch them as far as we can.

We know that God has called us to be like Jesus, but we know that’s impossible and that all people sin, so we often dive headlong into an obvious temptation to sin, because well, “Nobody’s perfect!” Right? We all sin.

But here’s the truth: God HAS called us to live like Christ. We will talk some more about this at the end next week, but for now, let me say we can’t overlook this calling and make excuses for ourselves just so we can follow our own sinful desires. That can’t be a thing for believers!

Today, let me ask: Have you been excusing your sin away because everybody else sins? Have you been just skating by being blatantly disobedient to the things of God, because the grace of God allows you to? You have been forgiven anyway!

Just as the Jews had misinterpreted two ideas in the Law, so we too can be guilty of misinterpreting the teachings of God’s Word in such a way that we excuse our own sin!

A next step for you may be to begin to pray what we did two weeks ago, God change my desires so that they match you and not me!

And if you have never trusted in this Jesus that whose teaching we studied tonight, I need you to know that he wasn’t just a good teacher, he was the savior of the world. Because of our sin, we are separated eternally from God. We can’t get back to him on our own because of that sin we have talked so much about tonight. But this Jesus lived the perfect life that you and I couldn’t pull off. And he actually died a cruel death on a cross because people were terrified of his teaching and power. And on the cross, the Bible tells us that all of your sin and mine was placed into the body of Christ as he died. That means that the punishment for our sin has already been paid in Jesus. You and I can walk freely into the presence of God through his grace and love. The Bible tells us that Jesus took our sin and gives us in exchange his righteousness or his good-ness before God. And he didn’t stay dead. God raised him up as evidence of his power and as a means to give us life in salvation.

If you will turn from your sin and call out to Jesus as the only one who can save you and will trust fully in him alone to make you right with God, you can be saved today! We will have decision counselors and I’ll be down front to receive you as well during this time.

If you haven’t been baptized and would like to talk with us about that or if you want to talk with us about joining this great fellowship of believers, you can talk with our counselors about all that.

And as always, you can bring your needs in prayer where you are seated or at the altar.

PRAY