Mark 10: 1 – 12
Marriage and Divorce Questions Answered
Then He arose from there and came to the region of Judea by the other side of the Jordan. And multitudes gathered to Him again, and as He was accustomed, He taught them again. 2 The Pharisees came and asked Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” testing Him. 3 And He answered and said to them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to dismiss her.” 5 And Jesus answered and said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. 6 But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.” 10 In the house His disciples also asked Him again about the same matter. 11 So He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. 12 And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
The apostle Matthew wrote about these comments of our Lord Jesus Christ also in chapter 19 of his book, so let’s also see what he put down on paper,
Matthew 19:1-9 19 Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings, that He departed from Galilee and came to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. 2 And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them there. 3 The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” 4 And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” 8 He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”
Our Lord Jesus now begins His ministry in Judaea. Each of the pronouncements that follow continues the theme of the teaching of our Master Lord Jesus. His pronouncement on divorce overturned the teaching of the Rabbis and stressed the permanence of marriage and His call to a new beginning,
Having stressed the importance of what is done in His Name, bringing out the supreme importance of His Name, Jesus commences His journey to Jerusalem by moving down into Judaea and Beyond Jordan.
Then He arose from there and came to the region of Judea by the other side of the Jordan. And multitudes gathered to Him again, and as He was accustomed, He taught them again.
The last journey to Jerusalem was now under way, although there was at this stage no sense of urgency, and our Lord Jesus therefore commenced a ministry in Northern Judaea and in Beyond Jordan where great crowds gathered.
Take a look again at the statement ‘And as He was usually accustomed to do He taught them.’ This indicates that He continued His ministry as He usually did. It reminds us that we should recognize that His ministry has been continual, even when not mentioned. So satisfied that His ministry in Galilee over a number of years was complete He had now returned South again. This small note emphasizes that our Holy Lord Jesus preaching ministry continued in progress even while He was teaching His disciples.
In the example of His ministry that now follows our Supreme Ruler Adoni Yeshua not only gives important teaching on marriage and divorce, but also stresses His position as One Who can speak with unique authority on the significance of God’s word. Indeed it cannot be overemphasized what a totally different view of life Jesus introduces as obligatory on all, the kind of life only livable by those who come under the Kingdom of God.
Before we take a look at what our Lord says about divorce and marriage I would like to comment about things that you are probably not aware of. As a Pastor, I get hit with a lot of issues on this subject. Some people come in quite wounded from the way other churches have handled their situations, while others should have been excommunicated from their churches. Some churches have let couples divorce because of all kind of reasons, abandonment, abuse, addiction, and mistakes. The list could go on and on.
I heard of this one statement which I think is very right on target on these subjects. A person once told me, ‘we [the church] minister to the ones that we should kick out, and kick out the ones we should be ministering to.’ Boy, does that statement ring true.
As our Great Teacher The Lord Jesus was conducting a teaching ministry it was inevitable that Pharisees would soon attach themselves to the crowd. It is possible that the subject of their question was with the hope of getting Him to condemn Herod as John had done.
What The Sovereign Lord Jesus is questioned about is divorce, but as we read on in the narrative it becomes clear that, while the Pharisees are totally wrapped up in the question of divorce, our Lord Jesus wishes to turn their question round and make a solemn pronouncement on the sacredness and permanence of marriage, while at the same time giving an authoritative answer to their question which sweeps aside the decisions on the subject which had been made by prominent Rabbis.
2 The Pharisees came and asked Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” testing Him.
There were two opposing views among the Pharisees themselves about divorce, which had been declared by two great Rabbis of the past who had taken up two different positions. Both, however, gave their interpretations based on Deuteronomy 24.1-4 which reads, “When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house, 2 when she has departed from his house, and goes and becomes another man’s wife, 3 if the latter husband detests her and writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies who took her as his wife, 4 then her former husband who divorced her must not take her back to be his wife after she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before the LORD, and you shall not bring sin on the land which the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.
The Rabbi Shammai and his followers, whose interpretations of the Law always tended to be stricter, interpreted the ‘some unseemly thing in her’ of as signifying adultery or sexual impropriety. While the Rabbi Hillel and his followers on the other hand taught that it should be interpreted more widely and could mean anything that her husband found unsatisfactory in her such as letting the food burn or losing her beauty. Thus both allowed divorce, but while Shammai did so only on a limited basis, Hillel was more free and easy and allowed divorce for almost any cause, and only too many had taken advantage of the fact. As Josephus could say quite glibly, ‘At this time I divorced my wife, not liking her behavior’.
3 And He answered and said to them, “What did Moses command you?”
I love how our Lord Jesus gives His answers. He tested them out in return. He turned their minds to the Law of Moses and asked what they commanded. He was preparing the way in readiness for establishing His own position, not only on divorce, but on marriage in general.
4 They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to dismiss her.”
Their minds automatically concentrated on Deuteronomy 24 verse 1, for that was the only place in the Law where divorce was mentioned. In that verse God, through Moses, had made provision for the protection of women who were turned out of the houses by their husbands. The decree was that they could not just be turned away, but had to be given an official Certificate of Divorce so that it was clear to all that they were seen as free to be able to marry again.
5 And Jesus answered and said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. 6 But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Our Lord Jesus’ reply was that they were misinterpreting Deuteronomy 24. He was the only one who considered it in its context, and He pointed out that it was a provision made because of men’s hardness of heart in divorcing their wives. God’s primary will and intention, He pointed out, was that once a man and woman had come together as one through sexual union they should be seen as inseparable because they had become uniquely one.
Let me stop and say something here about another area which branches off on this topic. In today’s world there are many people even within Christianity that are not getting married. They are co-habituating together. Some are in the relationship just for the sexual pleasure. They call this ‘friends with benefits.’ My heart is personally broken to see this path chosen by my young beautiful former assistant. Her particular internal time clock told her that she had to get married.
Now if you go back to the book of Job you will understand that the enemy of our souls observes all that we say and do. Here the enemy knew that this girls weakness was in her great desire to get married as soon as possible. So, what does the enemy do. I think all Pastor’s need to print out these next remarks and hand them to every single woman they have in their fellowship.
The enemy sends an attractive young man into the woman’s path. He is not a believer but the woman considers him very attractive and now begins the fatal compromise path. The bible warns us not to interact in romantic overtures with an unbeliever for the right reasons.
So, my former precious godly lady accepts the guys advances and goes out with him. After a few dates the guy uses the one statement that convinces the woman to now compromise her virginity. He tells the girl that he wants to marry her. He even goes along with the ruse when they are at the Mall by looking at rings. Now, remember they are looking, not buying.
The girl figures that this guy is going to be her husband so what the heck, she might as well allow him to taste of the fruit of intimacy. In some occasions the couple does go on and get married but I would say that the majority wind up splitting up leaving me the damaged goods to deal with.
By the way, in the case of my former co-worker, this Mr. America turned out to have a heavy addiction to drugs problem. This pathetic son of a wealthy business owner had every blessing he could get while growing up so he took to drugs for a kick. He was in our local rich area of Council Rock. This young guy was addicted to both heroin and cocaine. Two months after going out with this guy both of them were fired from good paying jobs and this rotten punk has my precious sister hooked on the same drugs. They have spent their separation pay package of sex and drugs and are both living together not being married. from one place to the other. I want to cry.
Our Great Majestic King tells them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart.’ It was because man was sinful and hardened his heart against God’s will and did divorce what he saw as an unsatisfactory wife that God spoke of a certificate of divorce in Deuteronomy 24.1. But it was never His strict intention that it be seen as permissive. It arose because unfortunately men disobeyed His commandments and did put their wives away, something which could leave the wives in a bad position as it might be questioned whether they were divorced or not.
Originally man and woman were made as one. There was no thought that they would ever separate, for they were seen as indissolubly linked, and such a thought was therefore not God’s intention. That is why when a man marries a woman he leaves behind his father and mother, and that household of which he was firmly and very much a part, and forms a new household, joined to his wife as one flesh as Adam was to Eve. The tie of marriage is therefore to be seen as stronger and deeper than the tie of blood, which is itself indissoluble. The thought was not that a man no longer had any regard for his wider family. It was that his regard for his wife should become the priority.
To seek divorce therefore is to seek to separate what God has joined together. It is not therefore something that a man should desire or permit. It is totally banned. We should not understate this argument. It is declaring that God has so instituted the union of a man and woman in a marriage relationship that there is a genuine, if invisible, way in which they become one, so that to engage in sexual relations with any other actually breaks a genuine, if unidentifiable, unity. It is not just a play on words. It is a genuine reality.
Mark is here bringing out God’s absolute purpose under the Kingdom of God as revealed in the words of our Lord Jesus. For this reason he does not bring out the exception mentioned in Matthew 19.9, ‘except it be for fornication’, for that exception arose because by illicit sexual union the guilty parties have themselves caused the sinful separation. But it was never God’s intention, and could only therefore be seen as an aberration. This brings out quite clearly that sexual union is seen by God as binding and total. His purpose was that man should be both monogamous and faithful. And His purpose in this was so that they might ‘go forth and multiply’. Anything that does not result in that intention is not marriage, for true marriage is a family forming relationship, not an exclusive bond between two self-centered people who think only of themselves.
You have to remember this key point. The stress on this faithfulness was so strong in the Law that an adulterer and an adulteress were to be put to death as we read in the book of Leviticus chapter 20, “The man who commits adultery with another man’s wife, he who commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress, shall surely be put to death.”
The result would be that the husband or wife would be freed from the marriage tie because of the death of the one who had broken the tie. This was the absolute position. But once the law on instant death had ceased to be put into practice through mercy or force of circumstances, the presumption was made that presumably he or she could be seen as ‘dead’, and treated as such. Thus the exemption.
So our Holy Lord Jesus was laying out the difference between God’s will and purpose on the one hand, something on which there could be no concession, and sinful man’s behavior on the other for which provision had to be made for the sake of the innocent party. Without the position laid down in Deuteronomy a woman could have been left in an impossible position because of a man’s hard-heartedness. This was the situation that Moses was commanded to alleviate. But it was never God’s intention that it be treated as a norm, nor did it mean that He had given permission for divorce, for most decidedly He had not.
Our Wonderful Lord Jesus thus turned a Pharisaic discussion on divorce into statement of the purpose of marriage, and thereby revealed that a new way of approaching life had begun under the Kingdom of God, a way that set aside the old weaknesses and excuses. A way that demanded a commitment to positive love and cooperation, sealed by marital faithfulness. It was one way in which the true people of God would stand out from all others, a foundation stone of the new life in Christ.
10 In the house His disciples also asked Him again about the same matter. 11 So He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. 12 And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
This was all so startling that it is not surprising that the disciples wanted clarification on the matter We see that Matthew tell us that they said, ‘in that case it is not a good idea to marry’, a logical but not very practicable idea.
The statement ‘Commits adultery against her’ caught everyone by surprise. The Jewish teaching did not go this far. A man could not in their eyes commit adultery against his wife. But The Lord Jesus went further than they did. He claimed that divorce was as wrong for a man as for a woman and equally for him a breaking of the commandment on adultery, for by it he forces the committing of adultery on the woman.
The words, ‘And if she herself shall put away her husband and marry another, she commits adultery. ‘are peculiar to Mark who charges both the men and women equally. If either one divorces their partner and marries another, they commit adultery – plain and simple to the point!
So this declaration on the significance and purpose of marriage, which swept aside all other rulings on the subject on the basis of the word of God, demonstrated His claim to unique authority. This was His first indication to Judaea and Jerusalem that a new age had come in which men would be turned back to how things were in the beginning before man had sinned.
