David: Hey, everyone, I'm David Bowden, and welcome to the Spoken Gospel podcast. We are back with our second installment of a different kind of format that we're trying out here we've done before, where I get to share a sermon that I preached with you all, and walk you through it a little bit, and, uh, just see what you think. I'm very excited to share this sermon.
It's a very personal one for me, and one that I had to walk through quite a bit to, uh, prepare for, both [chuckles] theologically and emotionally, and, uh, but it ended up r- to be a really sweet sermon for our local church. And so I'm really excited to share it with you. Um, but it is a bit of fine china that I'm handing off here to all of you, so, uh, grateful to do that, though, with you all.
Um, as I mentioned in the last episode, we're trying this new format out, where we share a sermon, um, that I've preached from a smaller passage of scripture. Um, right now, our local church is going through the Gospel of Mark, and so I've been preaching through Mark alongside a teaching team. And, uh, why I think this is really beneficial for us to do together with you, our podcast listeners, is because you're able to see the deeper dive that we take into how to read the Bible, the gospel-centered hermeneutic, how to map everything onto the story of scripture, and see that applied to very small sections of texts.
And this one, in particular, is very interesting because a lot of times this passage is preached topically because it's on divorce. And, uh, it's Mark 10:1-12, and it's Jesus's teaching on divorce. Or is it?
[chuckles] It's... O- of course it is, but that's kind of the idea, is that when we hear this passage preached, at least when I've heard this passage preached, it's all about the pragmatic, "don't get divorced" message, which you shouldn't, and that's true. Um, but there's more going on when we stay bound to the narrative of Mark, the context of scripture, and the story that's been developing through the whole Bible, and Jesus is pulling on a lot of themes, to the point where he's not only, or perhaps mainly, even talking about husbands and wives, although he definitely is, and I'll unpack that.
But he's also talking about the story of scripture, Israel as the bride, him and his Father as the groom, and the adultery and breaking of relationship that's happened to them and is happening to them in real time with Jesus and the Pharisees. And so it's a, it's a fascinating passage, um, and, uh, but it ties really closely into probably every single person listening. I'm sure there's no one who has not been affected by divorce or knows someone who's been affected by divorce, and so it's a very personal passage as well, and we can't ignore that.
So at the very end of the sermon, I share kind of my story, being a child of divorce, and so I'm honored to be able to share that with you all and what God has shown me through that. So thank you for listening to the episode today on Mark 10:1-12. I hope it blesses you.
Let's get into it.
Mark 10:1: "And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan." So Jesus has just come, geographically, we need to kind of understand this, because Mark uses geography a lot to talk about his points. Jesus has come from Capernaum, which is in the region of Galilee, and that area is known, especially in Jerusalem and in Judea, uh, to be kind of a spiritually compromised part of the Jewish world.
They don't quite do things the right way up there. And so Jesus is coming into Judea, which is where Jerusalem and the temple are. It's where the real Jews live, and he crosses the Jordan, which is this very famous boundary marker for the people of Israel.
Every time throughout the biblical story that someone would come into the land of Israel, they would cross the Jordan, and then they would be in the land, and it was always this big boundary marker. And so Jesus is doing that now. He's coming to those who should be the most ready to receive him, those most ready to embrace him, those most ready to love and follow him and believe him, and we're gonna see that's not the case.
"And crowds gathered to him again and again, as was his custom, Jesus taught them." So Jesus crosses the Jordan, and as he does, crowds are there, waiting, coming, and, and, and coming, coming around him, and as was his custom, he taught them. A- and you have to understand, Jesus is a traveling rabbi, so he's, he's walking around, and it's his job as a traveling rabbi, with his disciples there, to teach as people come to him with questions about, "What does the Torah say? What does the scripture say about this, that, or the other?" And oftentimes in these situations, these are pretty rambunctious, freewheeling, kinda Socratic back-and-forth conversations, where someone might lob a question, and Jesus would answer or maybe ask a question in return.
And so, uh, this is kind of the situation in which the Pharisees enter, and they also have a question to lob, but Mark clues us in to their intentions. They're not there to learn from Rabbi Jesus. They are there in order to test him.
Amen.
Verse two: "And Pharisees came up, and in order to test him, asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?'" Now, this is a very typical question that you might ask in a rabbinical debate of the time. The law is very clear about it, but there's some nuance about how to apply certain parts of it, and different rabbis through different time periods would write about divorce and marriage and what the Torah had to say about it in different ways.
And so these Pharisees seem to the crowd to be asking this rabbi, "What's your take? What do you think the law says? Is it permissible for a man to divorce his wife?
How do you read it, Rabbi?"
David: ... but we know that their intentions are not so pure. They're not there for educational purposes, they're there to trap him, and while I could go into a whole bunch of reasons why this is a trap, let's focus on one that's very close to Mark's context here. Because John the Baptist, Jesus' cousin, has just died for how he answered this question.
John the Baptist was beheaded for standing up to Herod and calling him out about how he and his family have been going about divorce and remarriage, and so John the Baptist was beheaded for saying that Herod and his family were a bunch of adulterers. And so Jesus is now asked the same question that his cousin John was asked and died for, and Jesus is, is, is- they're trying to trap him. Because if Jesus says, "Yes, it's, it's lawful for a man to divorce his wife," well, then he's dishonored- honored John, he, he's disagreed with John, and he's saying John died for nothing, and he's alienating the disciples of John, and maybe even proving that he's not really the Messiah that John said he was.
But then if Jesus says, "No, it's not permissible for a man to divorce his wife," then he is now in danger, and maybe the Pharisees have grounds to bring that to Herod, of bringing Jesus to the same beheading fate that his cousin went through. So the Pharisees think they're pretty clever here. They've trapped Jesus in the same trap that John fell into.
They want to publicly shame Jesus and ruin his credibility so that his claims at being the Messiah and being the Son of God would fall flat, and they could then calm down what they see as this cult rising up in Judaism. But in the flow of Mark's story, I want you to get this, 'cause this is like the story behind the story that's happening here. It's absolutely heartbreaking what the Pharisees are doing in this moment, 'cause a- as we, as we've titled the series, Mark i- is asking the question: Who is Jesus?
Who is he? And again, and again, and again, for months, the teaching team, we've been up here saying, "Mark claims that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the promised One of Israel, who would come and reconcile all God's people to himself. Jesus is the groom of Israel, come to marry his wayward people and bind them to himself so that they would never go away from him again." That's who Jesus is, and yet the Pharisees come to him, and they start looking for loopholes for a divorce.
They're trying to find a way to trap Jesus so they can find one little grounds to separate from him forever. They're trying to divorce Jesus while he's walking down the aisle to them in Jerusalem. Like, the wedding ceremony's happening, Jesus is walking to the cross in this part of Mark.
He's heading to his betrothal of his bride, and the Pharisees stop him at the aisle and say, "Let's talk about a divorce." This is heartbreaking for Mark's story. And so here's Jesus' answer. Verse three: Jesus answered them, "What did Moses command you?" Jesus is smart.
He knows what he's doing here. The Pharisees ask him a question, "Is it permissible for a man to divorce his wife?" And Jesus responds with a question, "Well, what did Moses command?" Because it's pretty simple, a pretty simple question. He's like, "There's no need for me to answer this, really.
You should know the answer. You guys are Torah scholars, so what does the Torah say?" Jesus is asking them what the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the books of Moses, what do they say about the question you've just asked? You guys are the Torah scholars, you should know the answer.
Why are you asking me? It should be pretty fr- straightforward, right? And here's their response in verse four.
They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away." So the Pharisees answer their own question, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" The Pharisees answer, "Yes, as long as they give their wife a certificate of divorce." But Jesus is going to show that both their choice of answer in saying yes, and the law, the scripture that they base it in, are both radically off base. But before we look at Jesus' answer, we need a little context of what law they are quoting. What is this certificate of a divorce thing?
What are the Pharisees talking about here? Well, the Pharisees are quoting a very clear law to them, what seems like a very clear law, in Deuteronomy 24:1, which I think we have here. Read this with me.
You'll notice it's an incomplete sentence, 'cause it goes on and on about remarriage and things like that, but the Pharisees isolate it. So if this feels like an incomplete thought, you're kind of getting it, why they were misreading it in one way, too. So here you go: "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 then it goes on to say what could happen next.
And what it, what it says will happen next is she can then go remarry someone else, and we'll, we'll get to that. But here's... This is the verse that the Pharisees isolate and say, "Here's our grounds for our answer to your question, Jesus, that we are allowed to divorce our wives if we simply give them this certificate of divorce that Moses talked about." There's a lot going on in this passage in Deuteronomy that I need to unpack for you, and the first is, what's going on [chuckles] in this story that Moses is talking about?
A- and I think a lot of the argument and the confusion hinges on this word, indecency, here. Because a lot of commentators, not all of them, but a lot of commentators, and I think the Pharisees maybe, and, and perhaps even you when you first read this, when you read this, it, it seems like the wife maybe has committed some kind of sexual promiscuity.... like perhaps she had an affair, or maybe she was an adulterer, or maybe, uh, she claimed to be a virgin at their marriage, and she wasn't. And so the man finds this indecency in her, which is, you know, w- you, would, you would- it'd seem like grounds for a divorce, and so he gives her a certificate of divorce and sends her away.
That's not what's happening here, and Jesus is going to prove it, but it's not what's happening here. What's happening here is what happened everywhere in the ancient Near Eastern world when the law was written, and happened a lot in the first century world, and happens in the twenty-first century world. And what Moses is describing here is a horrible thing.
It's an egregious evil that he's talking about here. When a man takes a wife and marries her, and she finds no favor in his eyes... A man marries a woman, brings her into his home, into her- his bed, and she's just not what he wanted.
She's just not as beautiful as I wanted, not as attractive as I wanted, not the kind of person I wanted. This is not who I wanted, and the word indecency there is just the word for exposure or naked. And so what's happening here is perhaps, you know, people wore a lot of clothes back then, so there's an exposure that happens in the wedding.
Maybe the man's not as happy as he thought he was gonna be, and so he wants to send her away. This is terrible! This is evil.
And it happened all the time. In Assyria, in Egypt, in Babylon, it happened all the time. Men would just send women away after one week, after ten years, when they were like, "I just don't find, you just don't find favor in my eyes anymore," and they would send their wives away.
And this was totally protected by law in every other society, until God built His kingdom in Israel. [chuckles] Amen. And He was saying, "You will not treat my women this way.
[chuckles] I am going to protect them, even though you're going to do this terrible thing." And so what the, what, what they had to do was they had to give their wives... If they did this terrible thing, they had to give their wives a certificate of divorce. And we actually know some of the content on those certificates because later rabbis quoted them and talked about them, and one of the main things that was on there was basically, that basically said, "This woman is able to marry whoever she wants." That is what it would communicate.
And what that would mean for the Jewish society is that the shame of divorce and the guilt of divorce was not on this woman, but on the man who sent her away, and that possibly this man is publicly shamed for doing this thing, and the woman has legal proof that she is exonerated from any claim her husband wants to put on her. And so this is a protection of women, not permitting men to act in this way. D- do we, do we see that?
'Cause that's very important for Jesus's argument. This is not permitting men to send their wives away. This is protecting women when they evilly do.
Got it? This really... I just wanna make that really clear, 'cause that's the crux of Jesus's argument here.
So this is also a really good time for us to remember passages like this can be confusing, because not everything the Bible describes does it prescribe. Just because the Bible says stuff like this happens, doesn't mean it's giving it its stamp of approval any more than it described Cain killing Abel, and it's like, "Oh, yeah, it's a good thing." Of course not! That was evil.
So is this. And God is giving commands to try to protect people from the evil of men. Okay, that's what's happening here, and yet that's the verse that the Pharisees use to answer Jesus's question.
They've missed it, and Jesus is about to call them out on it. Verse five: "And then Jesus said to them, 'Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.'" Guys, Jesus' response here is brilliant in so many ways.
We're gonna look at three. This is a brilliant response. First, Jesus rightly interprets this passage in Deuteronomy that we looked at.
He shows that the law wasn't given to show God's ideal for marriage, which is what the Pharisees are claiming. It's like, "Hey, w- what's God's whole thing on marriage, Rabbi?" And Jesus asked them the same thing. They go, "Well, you know, Moses said we could divorce our wives with a cer- a certificate." Like that was God's plan all along.
Like, that's not God's ideal for marriage. Divorce is not God's ideal for marriage. Certificates of divorce is not God's ideal for marriage.
A wife finding no favor in the sight of her husband is not God's ideal for marriage [chuckles]. That is not the ideal, and so Jesus rightly interprets it and shows that that law was only given because of the hard, evil hearts of the men of Israel, who were sending their wives away simply because they wanted to upgrade. Sick!
And Jesus knows it is, and He calls it out. And the women of Israel need to be, be protected from this, and so Jesus rightly interprets the law here. Second, Jesus pulls on a majorly important theme in the Bible in His answer to the Pharisees.
He brings up this term, hardness of heart. "It's because of your hardness of heart that Moses wrote you this command." The first person who's said to have a hard heart in the Bible is Pharaoh. Pharaoh was given a command by God, "Let my people go!" And he hardened his heart and started to hurt the people of Israel.
And so, because a hard-hearted man was hurting the people of Israel, God gave another command.... It was the Passover command. Go into your house, hide in here under the blood, and I'll protect you from all this evil that this hard-hearted man is trying to bring against you.
God gives a command to protect against hard hearts. Same thing happens to Israel in the Torah. God says, "Do not commit adultery," in the Ten Commandments, and soon after we're told that Israel now has hard hearts and stiff necks.
And so because God knows that these hard-hearted men will commit adultery, will send their wives away for no reason, He protects the women of Israel with this command.
Crowd: Amen!
David: So He pulls up this thing of hard hearts. Lastly, a- a- and maybe most devastatingly of all, especially for the Pharisees, look who Jesus says has the hard heart in His response. Jesus did not say it was because of their hard hearts that Moses wrote this command, like them back then, those bad guys in Deuteronomy.
Jesus said, "It is because of your hard hearts that Moses wrote you this command."
Crowd: Amen.
David: Jesus is doing a lot of cool interpretation there. Jesus is saying that the Pharisees are the ones who have the hard hearts like Pharaoh. Just like Pharaoh rejected God through his hard heart, the Pharisees are looking for grounds to reject their wives, and they're looking for grounds to reject God and Jesus.
They are the new Pharaoh in this story. Jesus has come to them with the command of, "I am the Christ. Believe in me," and they are hardening their heart and rejecting Him and pushing Him away, and that's Mark's point throughout the whole Gospel.
Who is Jesus? Will you believe in Him? And again, he is showing that the spiritual leaders of Israel are refusing to marry themselves to God, the groom come in the flesh, and instead are looking for loopholes for a divorce.
But then Jesus does something really kind. [chuckles] He doesn't just rebuke the Pharisees for their wicked question and their horrible interpretation of Torah. He then answers the question in a beautiful way.
He doesn't... Uh, a lot of times when the just, when the Pharisees try to trap Jesus with a question, He just ends up never answering it, but He actually does answer this one, which I, I find extremely kind. Verse six: "But from the beginning of creation." But from the beginning of creation.
Look where Jesus goes that the Pharisees didn't. The Pharisees go to the end of the Torah, to the, like, the back part of Deuteronomy, the fifth book, toward the end, and they find one little law to justify their stance. And these guys are Torah scholars.
They know what they're talking about. They're able to pinpoint a verse immediately. But look at the difference in how the Pharisees answer the question versus how Jesus answers it.
The Pharisees find one command that justifies their stance. Jesus instead grounds the whole thing in the story that God has been telling from the beginning. The Pharisees had a command that they were using to try to protect their wicked hearts, and Jesus is going to tell a story that prescribes His ideal for marriage.
Crowd: Amen.
David: And, and just the tiniest tangent here, we need to be careful how we interpret the Bible. So many of us wanna pull out one verse and base so many things on it, but as you just saw, when you do that, you are in danger of taking something that, like the Pharisees did, it's like, "Oh, you can just send your wife away. There's a c- certificate of divorce.
It says so right here." But Jesus is showing in the story that's not how to understand this text. So we need to understand that commands are always rooted in a bigger story that God is telling.
Crowd: Amen.
David: But then the bigger story always leads us to commands, but they... W- we need both. And so here is Jesus' ideal for marriage.
He's gonna set it up, and He's gonna go, like I think we always should when thinking about theology, He goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, all the way back to the beginning of the story, where God sets up a paradigm. He sets up the ideal. He sets up paradise.
That's what the word Eden means, paradise. He sets it up. Here it is.
Here's the picture. Verses six to nine: "God made them male and female. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and 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 no man separate."
Crowd: Amen.
David: So Jesus starts quoting from some of the first pages of the Torah to interpret and expound upon some of the last pages of the Torah. So let's look at it bit by bit here. "God made them male and female." The singulars are very important here.
God made them male and female. He did not make them male and females. It wasn't one for many, like God put Adam in the garden and gave him 20 women.
That's not the ideal. God gave Adam Eve, one for one. For, for, for Adam, Eve was literally the only person in the world for him.
[audience laughing] That's the ideal for marriage. That for you, for, for you husbands, for you wives, your spouse is the only one for you. That's the ideal.
It's like you're in the Garden of Eden with your Eve or your Adam. That's it! Male for female, one for one.
That's God's paradigm for marriage. "The man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife." This is another quote from Genesis in the Garden of Eden. Wh-...
Which is interesting that, uh, that he's saying, "For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife." Adam didn't have a father or mother in the garden, so it clearly wasn't written to Adam. This command was written to those he would father, which is all of us, which was the Pharisees. So this command was written to us.
And, and it's this, it's that the man will leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. Again, here's God's paradigm for marriage, that the husband holds fast to his wife. Never lets her go, never lets her get away, never lets her feel insecure or compromised or unsure, but holds fast to her.
Feel that, husbands? Yeah. That's the paradigm.
You got your wife, you hold fast to her. That's the Garden of Eden coming alive in your life, in your home, when you hold fast to your wife. And then this two people clinging to each other is then heightened with the next thing Jesus says, or that Genesis says, "And the two shall become one flesh." Now, I'm terrible at math, but this is not good math, that two people become one person.
Biologically, legally... You try passing this with the IRS, you see if they let you do this. [audience laughing] It's not gonna happen.
This is God math here, that two people, who are still two people, become one. There's something mystical and supernatural happening here in the marriage between a man and a woman. God has brought them together.
This is a God joining, which is why Jesus is right to interpret it this way when he says, "What therefore God has joined together." Jesus is doing that equation. He's like, "I understand you're two people, but God says you're one when you're married. Who can do that?
You can't do that, so who's putting the people together? God is." So Jesus interprets Torah again, and he says, "God has joined you two together." So he says, "Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man separate." If God is doing the joining together in marriage, then divorce is man trying to undo what God has done. Divorce is man against God.
It's not just man against woman or human against human, although it is definitely that. It is man against God.
Crowd: Amen!
David: What God has joined together, let no man separate. In marriage, in the Garden of Eden, God creates this beautiful thing, and through it, life would flourish around the world. He said to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply.
Fill the earth and subdue it." They were supposed to spread God's image, 'cause they were made in God's image, through other image-bearers, children, and they were gonna cover the world with God's image through marriage and through childbearing, and they were gonna cover the world with this beautiful thing that God made. Divorce, then, is anti-Eden. It is moving Eden backwards.
It's un-creating life. It's destroying the paradigm that God made to fill the world with goodness and beauty and fruitfulness in His image. So Jesus leaves us no room here for interpretation.
The answer is simple: What God has joined together, let no man separate. That's Jesus' answer to the Pharisees. He says, "Go back to Genesis 1, here's my answer.
What God has joined together, let no man separate." So is it permissible for a man to divorce his wife? Jesus' answer is simply no. Mark 10:10, "And in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter." [chuckles] So now the disciples still had a lot of questions about the ins and outs about Jesus' teaching on divorce, which I'm guessing is still the case for many of us in this room.
So we're not alone. The disciples are doing the same thing you're doing right now, if you're asking, "Well, what about this, and what about that, and what about this situation, and what about this extenuating circumstance?" Yeah, that's what the disciples were doing. They get alone with Jesus in a house and like, "Okay, but seriously, what about this, and this, and this?" [chuckles] And they just keep berating Jesus with questions about it.
Uh, I find comfort in that. A- a- and possibly one of the reasons they were doing this, um, is, is because, uh, the context of the passage that the Pharisees brought up in, in Deuteronomy 24, the- remember, it ended in that comma, it was an incomplete sentence. The next three verses go on to talk about what happens to this woman who was given a certificate of divorce.
She goes and she marries another man, and then that man also gives her a certificate of divorce, and then it says, "That woman can then not go back to the first husband that she married," and that's the whole passage. So really, it's a lot about divorce and remarriage, and what does that mean for the original man? What does that mean for the second man?
What does that mean for the, the woman? You can see the questions that they might have been asking, that you're probably asking. I'm gonna give you the answer Jesus gives, and I'm not- it's not Jesus' plan there, it's not Mark's plan in this passage, to answer every question you have or I have about divorce, and so that's not gonna be my intention here either.
Instead, I'm gonna try to highlight what Mark highlights and what Jesus taught his disciples, and it's found in the last two verses of our passage. "And Jesus said to them: 'Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her."... and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. I don't know the questions the disciples were asking, but Jesus makes it very clear about the whole divorce and remarriage thing that they might have been asking about in Deuteronomy 24.
He's saying that the man who divorces his wife, and, and you have to remember that he's thinking in the certificate of divorce manner, who sends her away, divorces her, doesn't want... Ha- ha- she had no favor in his sight. He sends her away.
She then goes and marries someone else, or he then goes and marries someone else, he is committing adultery. He's not free and clear in the law like he thinks he is. He thinks he did the legal thing, boom!
It's done. It's in writing. It's filed with the state.
I'm now free and clear to go marry someone else. Jesus says that's adultery. Okay?
Then something really weird happens. Jesus flips the genders and says, "And then, if the woman divorces a man and then marries another man, she commits adultery against him." Why is this weird? This is a socially impossible situation Jesus is describing for the time.
Women didn't send their wife- their husbands away. They didn't have this power legally. They were bound.
Crowd: Amen.
David: It's not like they could then just go and they could file their own paperwork with their husband. And so Jesus is saying, "But what if this woman does this to her husband?" Why is Jesus doing this? See, like, His disciples have been like, "Uh, Jesus, that doesn't happen." And I think we have to remember what Mark's main point here is, and what Jesus' main point here is, and who He was talking to with the Pharisees.
The Pharisees have rejected Jesus. Israel, throughout the Old Testament, was called the wife of the groom. She is often referred to in this feminine pronoun throughout the Old Testament.
Israel, God's people, are the her. Israel is the she in the marriage between God and man. And at the end of the Old Testament, divorce filings are made between God and this woman, and this woman has rejected her God, divorced herself from Him, and starts to marry other gods, other idols, starts partnering with other nations.
Or in the Pharisees' case, just don't believe in the groom that God sent, and instead believe in all their old traditions and things that Jesus is trying to fulfill and bring to completion. And Jesus says that, "If you..." Basically, what He's saying is, "If you don't believe in me, you're committing spiritual adultery. O bride of Israel, [chuckles] your groom has come.
If you send me away and marry another, you are committing spiritual adultery." So I think that is what Jesus was warning His disciples of then, what He was warning the Pharisees of, and what He's warning us of now.
Crowd: Amen.
David: If you have trusted anything, believed in anything, put your love in anything above Jesus, the groom, you're committing spiritual adultery. And Jesus says, "Come back!" [chuckles] Like, "I will receive you. Come back." These are strong words from Mark.
I, I don't think we can end our time together on this passage without addressing some practical concerns. So I wanna talk to three groups of people in the room who have been affected by marriage, divorce, adultery, remarriage. So let's do that now in closing.
Number one, I wanna talk to the Christians in the room. Regardless of your marital status, Christians in the room, this passage has such good news for every Christian in the room, regardless of, of if you're married, divorced, single, dating, doesn't matter. God's paradigm for marriage has been sh- has been shown, uh, in, in His relationship with His people, that, that the marriage of a husband and a wife is supposed to replicate and sym- symbolically show how God loves His people.
And He does this ultimately through the picture of Jesus coming to His wife in Israel. Jesus came, He walked down the aisle, He crossed the Jordan, right? But He did more than that.
He crossed from Heaven to Earth. He crossed from death to life. Jesus did everything He could to pursue His bride.
Jesus is the groom, and His deepest desire is to hold fast to you, right? In, in, in Genesis, it says, "For this reason, a man shall leave his father and hold fast to his wife." That's what Jesus did. He left the father of Heaven and the splendor and glory of Heaven, so that He could come here in the flesh and hold fast to you, His wife.
Jesus is the best husband. [chuckles] He is not hard-hearted. He will never send you away.
He will never leave you or forsake you. He will never send you a certificate of divorce. He loves you, and He is with you and for you.
So regardless of your marital status, where you've been, where you are, Jesus loves you deeply and has crossed Heaven and Earth in order to marry you and make you His own. Now I wanna speak to the married in the room, those currently married in the room. Number one, let me encourage you.
You guys are doing something beautiful. You are living out God's story, right? He...
Jesus is like, "What's the paradigm for marriage? Let's go back to the beginning. Two shall become one flesh.
They're gonna be fruitful and multiply and cover the earth with His image." That's what you're showing the world through your marriage. You are both the symbol and the strategy for how God is going to heal the world. You're a symbol of it.
When you love your spouse unconditionally through everything, you are showing the world how God loves us.... You are giving them a picture of what a real love between God and man can look like in the way you love your spouse day in and day out. You are a symbol to the world of God's never-ending, faithful love.
Thank you for doing that. [chuckles] Thank you so much for, for people who've been married here 30, 40, 50 years, thank you for showing us God's love for His people. Thank you so much.
You're a symbol of God's love. You're also the strategy of how God is going to heal the world. This is just like in the Garden of Eden when He was gonna make the man and woman fruitful, and multiply, cover the earth with His image.
Your love for one another is showing the world what true love is, and it's, it's healing the world around you. Don't you notice that? When, when you move into a neighborhood, and you're just doing your normal thing, you're not doing anything special, you're just two people who love each other and love Jesus, and now, like, when people come into your home or that you- your neighbors come over, they're like, "Something's weird about these people.
Something's different." And you're just- you're healing the world. And not only that, the children that you've raised, either biologically, through foster and adoption, go to the class afterwards, right? Or through evangelism and discipleship.
You're raising children that are covering the world. Imagine the children represented by the married people and, and, and the single people who are doing evangelism and discipleship, the children that are around the world right now because of the deposit that you've put in them as spiritual fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. You've covered the world with the glory of God because of your marriage.
Thank you for doing that. Your marriage is on a mission. It's worth it to keep it together, 'cause it's telling a better story.
Second thing I wanna say to the married: What God has joined together, let no man separate.
Crowd: Amen.
David: Stay together. Do not get a divorce. Some of you sitting here today, I'm not blind of this, some of you sitting here today might be fighting against this hard heart.
Maybe you've been looking for a loophole or a justification like the Pharisees were. Maybe you've thought, "We're just not in love anymore like we used to be." It's just, "She's not really satisfying me the way she used to." "He's not doing the things he used to do. I'd be happier with someone else." Or any number of other narratives that you might have told yourself.
This may have led you to entertain actions you previously never thought possible. Maybe right now, you're thinking about getting a divorce. Maybe right now, you're thinking about having an affair, committing adultery.
Maybe right now, you are actively committing adultery of the heart through lust and pornography. I think Jesus is speaking to us today about this. There is no loophole, no justification.
There's no way out for you here. Repent. What God has joined together, let no one separate.
The story of marriage that God wants to tell through you and your spouse is so much better than any narrative you could string together in your fantasies about what life would be like on the other side of the fence. What God has joined together, let no one separate. Now, some of you may be in a completely different situation.
Maybe you have been cheated on by your spouse. Maybe it's your spouse that's been struggling with pornography. Maybe it's your spouse that had an affair.
Maybe it's your spouse that brought up a divorce, and you feel blindsided, hurt, angry, confused. Maybe your spouse is being emotionally abusive, physically abusive, spiritually abusive. Brothers, sisters, friends, like I said, we can't handle everything here today, but in our ministry time after worship, we wanna talk with you, process with you.
We'll have elders, pastors, prayer team up here, ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with you. We've been in prayer for you. We're ready to serve you and hear your story and what you need.
And if some- for some reason you don't have time to come up here today, you can always reach out to us through the website. Just email us. We wanna come to your side, rush to your side.
If you're in trouble, if your marriage is in trouble, we're here for you. That's why we're here, to serve you. So let's finish with a word to those affected by divorce.
I originally had, "Let's speak to the divorced," but as I started to write it, I was like, "I'm just writing to myself here," [chuckles] and I'm not divorced, but I'm deeply affected by divorce. When I was going into the, my eighth-grade year of high, of high school... Wait, what is that?
Middle school, yeah. Um, [lips smack] my dad, we were raised in the church. Uh, we, uh...
My dad was a youth pastor, and, and everything seemed fine. And one, one, on, on- in summer, my dad drives me and my older sister, um, out to, uh, a Sonic near our house, and he's like: "Get whatever you want!" And so we get cheddar bites and slushies and things like that, and we're just having a grand old time. And then just sitting there, parked at the Sonic, he looks back.
I'm sitting in the back seat, my sister's in the front seat. He just looks back. He says, "I, I have something to tell you guys.
Um, I've decided to divorce your mom." Just like, it was like a nuke went off in the car. We drive home, I go to my room, and the, the, the only thing I can remember doing is grabbing my Bible and flipping to the back of the index and going to D for divorce, and then going, "What does God say about divorce?" Because I was raised to believe that whatever this book says, we do. That's what my dad taught me to do.
That's what my mom taught me to do. And so I start reading these passages. "God abhors a divorce." "I do not permit a man to get a divorce." "What God has joined together, let no man separate." I found this passage, and I run to my dad and I say, "Dad, great news!... you can't get a divorce!
[laughing] God says so. I was, like, so relieved. And, uh, at that time, my dad did not see it that way, [lips smack] and, uh, they went forward with the divorce against my mom's wishes, and it was really hard.
We were so hurt. And so I wanna talk to two groups of those affected by divorce, because I've been in both. The first are those dealing with shame and guilt.
It's so easy to feel shame and guilt if you have been affected by divorce. If you've been the one divorcing o- someone else, or if you've been the adulterer, or if you had the affair, or if someone cheated on you, you might think you're not good enough, you'll never be good enough, there's a, there's a stain no strong bleach could ever clean, and you just ... This is who you are.
You're a divorcee. You're an adulterer. It's so easy to feel shame.
Same for me as, like, a child of- I'm a child of divorce. It's so easy to let that label you, and say that that's who you are, and that you'll never quite be at the same status or level as all those normal people. But I wanna say something really clear to everyone here, and to my own heart: Jesus only marries adulterous divorcees.
Jesus only marries adulterous divorcees. The whole story of the Bible ends in the Old Testament with God's bride, Israel, divorcing their God, and yet this is the adulterous bride that Jesus comes to, and what does He call Himself? He calls Himself the bridegroom.
And then what does He do for this adulterous wife? He dies for her. Time and time again, Jesus brings divorcees, adulterers, and even prostitutes into His inner circle of His most trusted disciples, and these are the people He's gonna use to change the world with.
Think about John 4, when Jesus comes to the woman, um, at the, at the well in Samaria, and this is a woman who's been divorced five times, and is on a water break from having an affair right now with a man who's not her husband in her home. Anybody stack up to those numbers? Jesus says, "You qualify for my kingdom.
You're the one I wanna marry." These are the only people Jesus marries, are the ad- adulterous divorcees. He loves you, and it's because He does not leave your shame and guilt on you. Instead, Jesus took the penalty for an adulterous divorcee.
He was cast outside the city, exiled from His people. He bore the shame and guilt that we always try to pull off Him and get back onto ourselves, and He died under it, so that we could look and say, "There's my shame. It's hanging on the cross.
There's my guilt. It's hanging on the cross." And then, He rose from the dead to show that sin, and shame, and guilt don't define you anymore. Instead, His blamelessness, His love, His guiltlessness, His shamelessness, He now showers on you.
It's like the, the passage Tyler read at the beginning. He sprinkled your conscience with His blood, and says, "I don't see you that way anymore. You're my bride, and you're perfect, and spotless, and blameless, and I'll love you forever." [clapping] That's the only kind of person Jesus marries.
So that's my word to the, those feeling sh- shameful and guilty. Second, and lastly, I swear, are the hard-hearted in the room right now. I know you're in here.
Hi, I'm David. [laughing] I love you. [chuckles] For so long, I belonged to this group.
For a decade, I was in this group. My parents' divorce hardened my heart toward my dad, absolutely hardened my heart toward the woman he married, and frankly, my dad's heart was hard about the whole thing, too. For years, I never forgave or loved my dad, and my dad never repented to me, and my sister, and my mom.
Our hearts were hard. I didn't wanna forgive, he didn't wanna repent. But our path to healing, which we are way down the road on now ...
My dad and I are hanging out tonight to celebrate my birthday last week. I love my dad. God has brought healing, so much healing, and there's more healing to come.
But that healing path that we're on now only began when we came to Jesus and we said, "I got a hard heart. [chuckles] Can you soften it, please, with your love for prostitutes, and adulterers, and divorcees? Could you change my heart to love others the way you love us?" And so those of you with hard hearts here, who just really struggle to forgive others, to let it go, to, to reconcile, to, to, to find peace and love for them, Jesus is calling you today to bring your hard heart to Him.
That's okay. He can soften it, and He wants to do healing in your heart toward that person. Let me end with this, because there are another kind of hard heart in here, and it's the hard-hearted who did the sinning against.
You're the one who com- who had the affair. You're the one who filed the divorce papers. You're the one who caused the pain, and honestly, you're like, "David, it's all buried.
The dust is settled. The divorce papers are signed. Everything's buttoned up and legal.
Our family's moved on. I don't have to go drudge up the past. Like, it's okay." This is where my dad was for years, and it wasn't okay.
Everything was still broken and hurting. It wasn't okay. It's not okay.
You need to repent, seek forgiveness, confess what you did wrong, and then healing can begin. And also, Jesus loves you, too. [chuckles] He loves you so much!
Amen. He only loves people like you. [upbeat music] And for those of us who've been hurt by these kinds of people, maybe this will be the hardest thing I have to say, maybe not, but Jesus forgives the adulterer, and as those following Him, we must forgive them, too.
Outro: [upbeat music] Thank you for listening to the Spoken Gospel podcast. Spoken Gospel creates short films, devotionals, and podcasts like this one. Everything we make is free because of generous supporters like you. To see our resources, visit spokengospel.com or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for listening. See you next time. [upbeat music]
