Following Jesus? You Have Heard That It Was Said – Part II – Sermon – Pastors Marlee and Dave Page

In the beginning divorce was inconceivable. Jesus quoted lines from Genesis 2:23, 24 to emphasize two things.  

First, the intimacy of the marriage relationship. He says “the two will become one flesh.” There is no other intimacy like it. It is deeper than one’s relationship to one’s own children. When my children were born, there was an amazing bonding that took place when I saw those girls. In the ensuing months and years the bonding increased, and my wife and I are very close to our children, interwoven with them. But we are not one flesh with them. The Scripture says that a man becomes “one flesh” with his wife. Marriage is the deepest human relationship. Remember how we said last week that this part of the message from Jesus is so much about Human Relationships.

After intimacy, the emphasis is on permanence.  There was no thought of divorce – ever!  God’s ideal was, and is, monogamous, intimate, enduring marriage. This is what he approves of. Anything less is a departure from the God’s intention. And the Fall did not change that ideal. We all know that some things possible before the Fall were not possible afterward. But regarding divorce, God’s standard did not change. We not only see this in the very first book of the Old Testament but also in the very last one:

¹⁴ You cry out, “Why doesn’t the Lord accept my worship?” I’ll tell you why! Because the Lord witnessed the vows you and your wife made when you were young. But you have been unfaithful to her, though she remained your faithful partner, the wife of your marriage vows.

¹⁵ Didn’t the Lord make you one with your wife? In body and spirit you are his. And what does he want? Godly children from your union. So guard your heart; remain loyal to the wife of your youth. ¹⁶ “For I hate divorce!” says the Lord, the God of Israel. “To divorce your wife is to overwhelm her with cruelty,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. “So guard your heart; do not be unfaithful to your wife.”

Tyndale House Publishers, Holy Bible: New Living Translation (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2015), Malachi 2:14–16.

God hates divorce! Whenever divorce occurs, it is a digression.  It is something that was not meant to be.  All of this talk about “creative divorce” that is so common in the world around us is false science, liberation theology that only leads down 1 path. This conversation between the Pharisees and Jesus is most enlightening.

The Pharisees have alluded to the controversy in Deuteronomy 24, asking if a man may divorce his wife for any reason at all. Jesus has responded by saying divorce is not God’s ideal. Now the Pharisees respond with another reference to Deuteronomy ²⁴:

“ ‘Why then,’ they asked, ‘did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?’ ”

(Matthew 19:7).  

The idea is this: “Moses made provision for divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1. How then can you say it is not part of the ideal?”  Note Jesus’ answer in verse 8: “Jesus replied,

‘Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.’ ”

Jesus’ answer corrects the Pharisees, for Moses only permitted divorce – he didn’t command it as the Pharisees asserted. What Moses did command was the granting of a divorce certificate for the woman’s protection. Without a certificate she could be subject to exploitation, even accusation. The certificate also prevented the man from marrying her again. Thus she could not be treated like chattel. Marriage was not something one could walk in and out of. The reason God allowed divorce was the hardness of heart to which the men of Israel had succumbed. It was a divine concession to human weakness – reluctant permission at best!

Understanding this, we come to the very center of Christ’s teaching and the heart of what He is saying on the mount – Matthew captures Jesus expanding on it later in Chapter 19 – as to when and why divorce is permitted:

“And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery”

(Matthew 19:9, NASB, emphasis mine).

Here everything rests upon the correct interpretation of the phrase “except for immorality” – and especially the single word, “immorality.” The Greek word here is porneia, something we actually touched on last week in a way. Porneia from which we derive the English word pornography. The Greek dictionaries tell us that porneia means unchastity, fornication, prostitution, or other kinds of unlawful relationship. When porneia is applied to married persons, it means marital unfaithfulness, adultery, and the like. We should note (and this is very important!) that all these offenses were originally punished by death under Mosaic Law. These sins terminated marriage not by divorce but by death. However, by Jesus’ time the Roman occupation of the country and its legal system had made the death sentence very difficult to obtain. Jewish practice had therefore substituted divorce for death. Thus, the Rabbis were not discussing whether divorce was permissible for adultery – that was taken for granted by everyone. The point is, Jesus was far stricter than the Rabbis interpretation because he superseded the teaching of Deuteronomy 24 and said that the only ground for which one may divorce his or her spouse is marital unfaithfulness. This is the simple, plain meaning of Jesus’ words in verse 9: “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” That is, divorce is allowed if your mate is guilty of marital unfaithfulness. But if you divorce for any other reason and remarry, it is you who commits adultery. This is likewise the meaning of Jesus’ similar statement in the

Sermon on the Mount:

“But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress [if she remarries], and anyone who marries the divorced woman [a woman who has been divorced for something short of unchastity] commits adultery.”

(Matthew 5:32)

Jesus’ teaching is clear. Some of the interpretations of these texts are unbelievably convoluted, but in this case, and I believe this fervently, we must hold to the plain, unadorned sense of the text. Jesus meant what he said!

The Lord Jesus Christ permitted divorce and remarriage on one ground and one ground only – marital unfaithfulness.

But notice that he permitted it – he did not command it. If you learn that your mate has been having an adulterous affair, it does not follow that you have license to seek a divorce. Too often couples eagerly pounce on the infidelity of their mates as the opportunity to get out of a relationship they wanted to end anyway. It is so easy to minimize one’s own behavior and to maximize the sins of the other party – honestly, that’s human nature. Many look for a way out instead of a way through the problems. I want to be careful not to minimize the sin of adultery like the man who said to his wife, “I don’t understand why you’re so disturbed. All I did was have an affair.” Yet I believe (this is my personal opinion) that we should not regard a one-time affair in the same way as a mate who persists in his or her adulterous ways and refuses to repent. Jesus’ exception clauses should be viewed like this: No matter how rough things are, regardless of the stress and strain, whatever is said about compatibility and temperament, nothing allows for divorce except unfaithfulness – and even then it is not to be used as an excuse to get out of the relationship.

Such teaching is radical today – We know this. It is out of sync with our culture. Today even Christian counselors are recommending divorce and remarriage on grounds that are in opposition to the clear teachings of Christ. In far to many situations – not everyone – marriage has been trivialized into a comfortable sexual union that dissolves at the first signs of trouble. But this is not the way the righteous person approaches marriage. According to Jesus, marriage demands total commitment that only death or the most flagrant, ongoing sexual infidelity can bring to an end. We keep our vows!

Speaking of vows, Jesus then approached the subject of truthfulness by introducing the subject of the use of vows and oaths among his people in swearing that they were going to do something or that such-and-such a thing was true by employing phrases such as “as God lives, it is true.” In verse 33 he perfectly summarized the traditional Old Testament teaching:

“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ ”

From this and the rest of the Old Testament we understand two things about swearing vows and oaths.

First, vows were encouraged! Deuteronomy 10:20 says, “Fear the Lord your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name” (emphasis mine). Not only were they encouraged to make vows and oaths, but they were encouraged to do so in God’s name! Jeremiah 12:16, 17 mentions that having to swear in God’s name will be a sign of grace:

And if they learn well the ways of my people and swear by my name, saying, “As surely as the Lord lives” – even as they taught my people to swear by Baal – then they will be established among my people.

Swearing in God’s name was not only presumed but encouraged in the Old Testament!

Secondly, what was discouraged was making a vow, swearing to do something, and then not doing it. Moses repeatedly emphasized this:

Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.

(Leviticus 19:12)

When a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said.

(Numbers 30:2)

If you make a vow to the Lord your God, do not be slow to pay it, for the Lord your God will certainly demand it of you.

(Deuteronomy 23:21)

Vows were assumed, even encouraged. But once made, they were not to be broken under any circumstances. The Bible taught that they were very serious business.

The problem was that in Jesus’ time the traditional, Biblical teaching had come under massive abuse. Somewhere along the line some rabbis (but not all rabbis) began to teach that an oath was not binding if it did not include God’s name or imply it. Therefore, if you swore by your own or someone else’s life or the life of the king (as Abner did in 1 Samuel 17:55) or by some object, but did not mention or allude to the name of God, you were not bound. The Mishna devotes one whole section called Shebuoth (“Oaths”) to an elaborate discussion of when oaths are binding and when they are not. The swearing of oaths had degenerated into a system of rules as to when you could lie and when you could not. The results were incredible. There was an ongoing epidemic of frivolous swearing, and oaths were continually mingled with everyday speech: “By your life,” “by my beard,” “may I never see the comfort of Israel if …” There was an inevitable trivialization of everyday language and integrity. It became common practice to convince another that you were telling the truth (while lying) by bringing some person or eminent object into reference. The deception was very subtle.

For instance, one rabbi taught that if one swore by Jerusalem one was not bound, but if one swore toward Jerusalem, it was binding – evidently because that in some way implied the Divine Name. All of this produced in its adherents a profound spiritual schizophrenia: “I’m not telling the truth, but I’m really not lying.” Their use of oaths was like children saying, “I have my fingers crossed, so I don’t have to tell the truth.”

The situation was utterly unbelievable – so Jesus gave them a piece of his divine mind:

“But I tell you, do not swear at all either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black.”

(vv. 34–36)

Jesus rules out making vows using references to people or objects as backup. The reason is, God stands behind everything. The entire creation is God’s, and you cannot refer to a part of it without referring ultimately to him. (Matthew 23:16–22 says the same thing in stronger language.) All such oath-taking, vowing, and swearing is wrong! It is sin!

But there is even more here. Jesus began by saying, “But I tell you, do not swear at all …” (v. 34a). Then he gave parenthetical information regarding evasive swearing (vv. 34b–36) and concluded with verse 37, saying, “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” (Compare the similar statement in James 5:12.)

Jesus’ opening and closing teachings taken together state his radical superseding will: “But I tell you, do not swear at all.… Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” Our Lord is saying that the radically righteous men and women of God’s kingdom do not need to swear that they are telling the truth and in fact should refrain from using oaths and vows. Here again Christ surpasses and supersedes the requirements of the Law. The radically righteous do not need oaths. Their word is truth!

Here we must pause and note what we all know is true: The need for oath-taking and swearing comes from the fact that we earthlings are liars. Dr. Helmut Thielicke puts it like this:

Whenever I utter the formula “I swear by God,” I am really saying, “Now I’m going to mark off an area of absolute truth and put walls around it to cut it off from the muddy floods of untruthfulness and irresponsibility that ordinarily overruns my speech.” In fact, I am saying even more than this. I am saying that people are expecting me to lie from the start. And just because they are counting on my lying I have to bring up these big guns of oaths and words of honor.

Christ calls us away from such cheapening of language, instead giving ourselves to radical truthfulness.

So, what do we do with these? First, we must resist the permissiveness of our culture and solidly take our stand against divorce on any grounds other than those taught in God’s Word as well as the manipulation of truth – remember our earlier discussion on purity of heart!

And then, toward those who have suffered divorce, we must be gentle and forgiving, like our Lord.
We must not call unclean that which he has called clean (Acts 10:15).

We must always seek to share the suffering of those hurt by divorce.

Truthfulness and a God honouring integrity is always the path to Kingdom living.

Whatever our circumstance in life may be, it should have no bearing on whether or not we live for Christ. Pleasing God and living for Him should be our number one goal in life.