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Jesus says, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen. Jesus is reflecting this morning for us on his gift of marriage. The Pharisees came and asked him, “Is it right for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” And Jesus asks what Moses has written. Then he rebukes them and says, “From the beginning, this is how it was.” He quotes Genesis 1, “God made them male and female.” He quotes Genesis 2, “that a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.”
And then Jesus even goes beyond this and he says, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” This is the key for our understanding of marriage, that marriage is the Lord’s work, that the Lord Himself takes husband and wife, bride and bridegroom, and joins them together as one flesh.
We normally think, or at least, I think we normally think this. It’s not only in the world, but also we in the church, we normally think that marriage is two people giving themselves to one another, two people making promises, two people giving vows, two people handing themselves to their bride or to their groom. But we are not authorized to do this. We were bought with a price. The Lord is the one who has us, and He is the one who gives us to one another.
And this is the main thing in marriage. This should be a review of every marriage sermon that you’ve ever heard. It’s simply this, that the Lord is the one who gives husband and wife to one another. That means you husbands can look at your brides and say, “You are a gift of God to me.” And you brides can look at your husbands and say, “You are the Lord’s gifts to me.” Now, you might say, “But pastor, have you met my spouse?” And that’s the point, because there are times that we look at each other sort of crossways, and we’re not sure if we are gifts from the Lord to one another. But listen to what Jesus says:
“What therefore God has joined together, what God has done, what He has joined, let no one separate.” So the Lord Jesus is fighting for the gift of marriage.
Now this is important for us for a lot of reasons. For one, we in our own culture are now in the midst or at the end, or somehow we’ve been fighting for a long time, a war regarding having sexual liberty and sexual freedom, so that the world would come along and would say that the Lord’s commandments, the sixth commandment especially, “You shall not commit adultery,” are like chains in which we are enslaved, and if we want to be free, we have to break free from that.
And we have been talking about this a lot, and maybe not as much as we should, but we often point to things like homosexual marriage or fornication or pornography or adultery or all of these attacks on the Lord’s gift of marriage. But oftentimes, I’m afraid, in the church we are silent about the most direct attack on marriage, which Jesus talks about here, and it is this: divorce. Divorce is the rending apart of a man and a woman whom God has put together.
And when we look at the statistics, and I just can’t have such a hard time believing that this is in fact true, but it seems like it plays out as we study it more and more that the numbers regarding divorce, and the statistics regarding divorce, are the same inside the church and outside the church for the Christian and the non-Christian. But this is missing oftentimes from our conversation.
And why? I suppose it’s just because it’s hard, because it comes close to all of us. I mean, you know this: it’s easy to confess the doctrine of hell as long as you don’t know anyone who’s going to go there. It’s easy to practice close communion as long as no one that we love wants to come to the Lord’s Supper and fusses about it. I mean, so it is with divorce.
It’s easy to think about and confess divorce until it comes close to us, and it has come close to all of us in our families; even some of us, our children, our parents, our siblings. Every family is marked by this divorce. And we try to then say, “Well, that’s a matter of people in their private lives.” But this is simply not the case.
There’s probably nothing that matters more for the health of a neighborhood, for the health of a church, for the health of a society than the health of marriage. It’s not a private act at all. Marriage is not a private act, neither is divorce.
So now let’s just speak as plainly as we can. Divorce is a sin. In fact, the prophet says that the Lord hates divorce. We also see that divorce doesn’t fix the problem. I think this is especially what Jesus is getting at when He says that whoever commits a divorce and gets remarried commits adultery. A woman who divorces her husband and gets remarried is an adulterer.
In other words, divorce doesn’t fix the problem. The problems continue. And divorce does damage. It does especially damage to the children, which I think is why Jesus follows or Mark at least follows up this text with a story of Jesus blessing the children. The children were coming to Jesus and the disciples were trying to prevent them, and Jesus says, “No, let the children come to me.” Divorce does damage to children. Divorce does damage to husband and wife. Divorce does damage to society, and divorce does damage to the church.
We know that marriage is more than just a man and a woman joined together for a family and so forth. We know more. We know that marriage is also a picture of how it is with Jesus and the church. When Paul is talking about husbands and wives, and we had this text a couple of weeks ago, he says, “Wives, submit to your husbands as unto the Lord,” and “husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and he died for her.”
Jesus is speaking about the mystery of Christ in the church, and that’s how it’s supposed to be in Christian marriage. That our own marriages are to be a reflection of how it is with us in Jesus. And what then does divorce say? Will Jesus leave you? Will Jesus forsake you? Will Jesus divorce you? Can He? When we break up marriages, we picture Jesus as if He is unfaithful to us. Jesus, your Jesus, your Savior Jesus, is a champion of marriage, and that means that He is an enemy of divorce. And His church, His people, you, are also set in this world to be champions of marriage and enemies of divorce.
Now what does this mean? First, for you who are married—and we’ll come back to the unmarried in just a second—but to you who are married, you commit now and always to strengthening your own marriage. To know that your relationship, husband and wife, with one another is an arena of spiritual warfare. To know that the devil is attacking that gift of God. And so you fight back against it. Fight for a peaceful home. And fight against the temptation to become bored with your husband or with your wife.
As I visit with people who are wrestling through marital difficulties, this is often the first thing that comes up, and it’s incredibly common, that the devil tempts husband and wife to become bored with one another, to lose interest in one another. It doesn’t seem like boredom is a sin, but we know that it is. If we become bored with the Lord’s Word, if we become bored with the worship in the Lord’s Church, if we become bored with our home, with our children, with husbands and wives, and if we become bored with one another, and then we start looking for attention and for conversational interest and satisfaction in other places, it just starts with boredom. So fight against it.
There are, and this is oftentimes a fun conversation to have with folks who are getting ready to get married. There are three different ways that husband and wife relate to one another, and it’s important to keep them all in balance. There is the tactical formation, which is husband and wife back-to-back, both with their heads on a swivel, trying to figure out how to make it through the world, how to get everyone fed and clothed and how to get to work and everything on time, so you’re just facing the world together and fighting against the world together.
That’s how we spend most of our time. But then there’s the shoulder-to-shoulder where we sit and enjoy the world together. We watch a play or a movie, or we sit and watch our children or our parents, and we have these moments of enjoyment of the world together. But then there is face-to-face, and I think this is the one that often gets knocked out of balance, where we look at each other, look at each other’s face, speak to each other, speak kindly to one another. And we need to cultivate that. We need to fight to love one another, to prevent the devil from making you an enemy and choking out love for one another.
And, and listen, please carefully, come to talk to me before it’s too late, before the papers are signed and the lawyer is paid and all this kind of stuff. Come early when you start to sense that something is going wrong. Talk to your parents about it. Talk to your friends about it. Talk to me about it. I have names of people that you can talk to. Do not let the devil get a foothold. And do not let the devil convince you that the goal of your life is your own happiness. That’s nonsense. The goal of your life is to receive the gifts of Jesus, and Jesus said that your spouse is a gift from Him.
And for you who are not married, you must commit to supporting the marriages that are around you. Even those who are married too, we have to all be in this fight together. We have to support one another. We have to care for one another. We have to pray for one another. We have to pray for our parents’ marriages, if the Lord has still let your parents be alive and married to one another, to pray for them. To pray for your children’s marriages, even if they’re not married, to pray for their spouses, that the Lord would be preparing a faithful spouse for them.
If you’re single or if you’re a widow or a widower, you, like Jesus, are also a champion of marriage and an enemy of divorce. You are fighting to support and strengthen all of the marriages that are around you. You’re asking people what you can do to help and serve them so that we can all fight this fight against the devil, knowing that what God has joined together, no one should tear apart.
And you who are single especially and who hope to be married, you should know this: your preparation for being married is not acting like you’re married but committing to chastity. If you want to make the devil mad, that’s the way to do it. Commit to chastity until the Lord gives you the gift of marriage and you will be ready for the spiritual attack which comes when you, in fact, are married.
Now this I think so far is probably a lot of law. It’s wisdom though, and hopefully, it’s courage so that we can see things clearly. But what of those who are wounded by the breaking up of marriage, those of us who are hurt by having divorce around us? Those who have been through that kind of tragedy, what do we have to say of that? Does divorce cut us off from the grace of God? Is divorce the unforgivable sin? No, by no means. The Lord Jesus has for us kindness and mercy. His blood forgives all of our sins.
Let God be true and every man a liar. If every marriage that ever happened on earth broke up, Jesus would still be the Savior of sinners and the faithful bridegroom of His bride, the church. Let the gospel cover all that is done. Don’t let the— You know how the devil likes to do it. The devil likes to have the law preached backwards and the gospel preached forward.
He likes you to look back on everything that you’ve done wrong and say, “How could you have possibly done that? You call yourself a Christian? God’s angry at you. He’ll never let you in.” Law for all that you’ve done wrong. And then He preaches the gospel to everything that’s coming on the way. “Oh, go ahead and sin. Don’t worry. Jesus died for sinners. No one will get hurt,” all this kind of nonsense. That’s exactly the opposite. The gospel stands in your past, covering all that you’ve done wrong, washing away all your sin, making you holy and right, what God has called clean.
Let no one call unclean. But let the wisdom of the Sixth Commandment and the instruction of Jesus guard your today and tomorrow. Guard your home and your imagination and your heart so that we can receive from the Lord the gifts that He wants to give.
Because, not only has Jesus given you husbands your wives as your bride and you brides, He’s given you your husbands as a gift, but Jesus has given to every single one of you Himself as the Savior of sinners. His body broken, His blood poured out for your forgiveness. And in life and death, this is our confidence. May God grant us this clarity, this hope, this wisdom, this courage, and this peace.
In the name of Jesus, Amen. And the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
