The Purpose and Pattern of Marriage
Text: Mark 10: 1-12
Proposition: As Jesus responds to the question of ‘just cause’ the purpose and pattern of Marriage and even Divorce and Remarriage are described.
Introduction: As I flew back from Ontario this week I was assigned a seat next to fellow who had just come through a particularly rough week. We talked for awhile as he filled in the details of what he did for a living and some of the challenges that had caused the turmoil. We talked for about half an hour and after a bit of a pause he asked what I did. I told that him that I am the pastor of a church. When I mentioned what type of work I was involved in it was still friendly yet there was a more aggressive tone in what was said next. Things like, “I don’t like organized religion”, I agreed with him. Things like, ‘How can there be a God with so much that’s wrong in the world’… good question. He had a lot of really great questions, they were so good that to him the idea of even being able to ask them seemed almost wrong. We must have talked for over two hours as we considered the difficult aspects of God, like the extent of His sovereignty or how God has said that there is no other god or how money can be considered a god and what was wrong with that kind of thinking. What causes me to mention this is the way that questions are sometimes presented as challenges, sometimes they are more of a test than a quest for information. Sometimes they lead to explanations that are different than what we thought. There were many times when Jesus was asked a question that was essentially a test. On one such occasion the question that was asked related to marriage, especially to the issue of what it meant to end a marriage in divorce. The answer that Jesus gave not only addresses the question and the test behind it but it also begins to layout the purpose and pattern that God has for marriage. Let’s look at Mark 10:1-12.
I. Jesus Speaks to the Intention That Is Behind Our Actions. In verse 2 it tells us that the intention behind this question from the Pharisees was not so much to settle an issue as it was to test the one being asked. They had very little intention of being directed by Jesus and much more intention in bringing about conflict. Their question begins with the somewhat neutral if not ambiguous phrase, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” It’s ambiguous because whose law is being referred to here. Certainly it wasn’t the Roman law of the land because to a Jew that held only minimal consideration. The test behind the question came from which of the two main schools of teaching did Jesus adhere to. The two most influential rabbis were Hillel and Shammai. The Hillel line of thinking was that divorce was permissible for almost any infraction whereas the Shammai school of thought held that divorce was only permissible under certain situations. The Pharisees test was to alienate Jesus to at least a fraction of the Jewish leadership and if possible to increase the distance between Jesus and those who have gone through divorce. The response of Jesus is what you need to keep your eye on. In front of the multitude and in front of the Pharisees Jesus does not prohibit divorce but rather points to the source of where marital tensions arise. When Jesus asks them to declare their understanding of the law of Moses on this issue they respond that Moses had allowed divorce by use of a certificate of divorce. The response of Jesus is significant, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.” The main cause of marital tension will always arise from our being unwilling to live within the intentions of God for marriage. The hard hearted approach saw self interests as the justification for conflict…if she wore her hair wrong or prepared the meals late or if he snored or left toe nail clippings in the sink then they divorced. Jesus exposed this wrong perception of divorce and spoke to the intentions behind them.
II. The Purposes and Pattern of God For Marriage. This is not an exhaustive list but it does nail down the heart of why marriage is:
1. The original creation of male and female- God issued the ability to be image bearers in a unique way to each sex. The creation of man and the creation of woman collaboratively reflect the glory of the God who made them. That is, God is more clearly seen and glorified because of the unique thinking and expressions of masculinity and femininity. It accomplishes what neither could do alone.
2. The cause of leaving and cleaving- not only was it not good for man to be alone because of isolation and procreation and community and even worship but the intention of God was for man to go forth into all the earth and subdue it. To ‘leave’ meant the separation geographically and influentially from the world of the parent in order to be able to cleave and create with the spouse. The ‘cleave’ word is made up of two Greek terms that essentially mean, ‘for the benefit of’ and ‘to glue or bond together’. Imagine bonding a sheet of paper with liquid glue to another sheet of paper. You now have a new two ply sheet, uniquely different and stronger than the either of the previous types. It’s why Jesus references the two becoming one, the bond between the two has created a new ‘one’ thing.
3. The bonding glue of one - the covenantal bond between a man and woman to say that they will live together in the intentions of God for marriage is done before God and thus in a sense invites Him into the covenantal agreement according to His intentions for it. It’s what is meant by, “What God has joined together…”.
These are the purposes but the pattern is also referenced to here. What I mean is that God doesn’t just do something for a simplistic purpose like the creation of a wonderful sunset so you can have a romantic moment. His purpose in all beauty is that the painter would be known through what is painted. The pattern of marriage has that same sense to it, it’s greater than the means for cutting down rent, for having the pleasure of sex or for engaging in the joyous tumults of parenting. It is the pattern for how He intends to join Himself to mankind. In the much greater sense, “It is not good for man to be alone”… alone in a sin nature, alone in a fallen mortality, alone in a darkened ability to know God. The union of humanity to God occurred at the cross where our husband Jesus Christ took our sin upon Himself and secured us to Himself, His righteousness becoming our righteousness through faith. Never again are we alone. Marriage is a pattern that God created to portray the binding union that He desires there to be between Jesus Christ and you.
III. What About Divorce and Remarriage? The Pharisees leave and Jesus and the disciples go into a nearby house. Now the disciples ask Jesus about the legitimacy of divorce. Jesus was definitely not of the liberal Hillel school that made divorce frivolous. He was of the Shaamai school that referenced Deuteronomy 24:1, “ 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 . . . he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house.", like Joseph had almost done to Mary. Divorce was meant to protect the woman from her first husband making any further claim upon her. It enabled her to marry and to avoid destitution and prostitution. John Ortberg points out that they also referenced Exodus 21:10,11 where it describes how a slave might be taken as a wife and then passed over for another woman. Here it says, “If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish [the first wife’s] food, her clothing, or her conjugal love. If he does not provide her with those three things, she is free to go, without payment of money" In other words the just cause for divorce was not only uncleanness or infidelity but also failure to provide care and shelter and the denial of marital love. These cover a wide range of issues of abuse today when a marriage experiences corrosion from harsh and abusive words and actions, unfaithful and absent expressions of love that are essential for a marriage in the original intentions of God. Perhaps the understanding that God is very familiar with divorce and the rejection and betrayal it originates from are often overlooked by the church. God had at one time considered Israel as an unfaithful wife who committed adultery through idolatry. In Jeremiah 3:8 He says, "I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce, and sent her away because of all her adulteries" Malachi states that God hates divorce, that’s because He knows the pain of it, He knows the hardness of heart that it comes from. Ortberg puts it like this, “God hates divorce because God is a divorcee. So he invented the first divorce recovery program. It started at a place called Calvary. The price was a cross. The program is still underway.”
The right of a Christian to legitimately move through divorce, to have the bond between husband and wife severed through divorce is there. The right of a Christian to either remain single the rest of their lives or to remarry is also there. This sermon does not seek to address all the defences for these but rather seeks to emphasize the wonder of what God desires for mankind in marriage. It is meant to invite us to seek to understand and live inside the intentions of God for marriage.