Mark 10:2-12 God's Commands and Promises Concerning Your
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Mark 10:2-12 God’s Commands and Promises Concerning Your Marriage October 14, 2012 Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” “What did Moses command you?” he replied. They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate.” When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.” (NIV) During the summer we often drop Dish Network for a few months and save quite a bit of money. However, they continue to give you whatever the free preview channels are at a certain time. This summer one of the channels had frequent reruns of Frasier. I was reintroduced to the storyline of Niles Crane's secret attraction to Daphne Moon, the housekeeper of Niles’ brother Frasier. Over time, Daphne had a secret attraction to Niles as well. After a number of seasons of this, Niles married a plastic surgeon named Melanie, while Daphne was about to get married to a lawyer named Donny. Frasier decided to get involved by revealing to Niles and Daphne their attraction for one another. The show ended with Daphne leaving Donny at the altar and running away with Niles in his father’s Winnebago. That is, the show ends with basically two divorces. The show ends with two people destroying their marriages, breaking the lifelong promises they had made to others. The original storyline aired 12 years ago, so perhaps I have forgotten--but I certainly don't recall any societal outcry concerning this episode. And while perhaps memory has become somewhat hazy, I highly doubt there was one. I don’t know percentages--and they differ according to who you talk to--but in a nation in which a high percentage of adults have gotten a divorce, you wouldn’t have expected there to be a wailing that the show Frasier would soon cause a decline in the nation’s morals. And the fact is that the show probably didn’t cause a decline in the nation’s morals. It was probably too late for that. If the producers of Frasier had intended to be cutting-edge trend-setters, they didn’t choose their subject matter very well. Far from setting the standard for the nation’s morals, attitudes, and beliefs concerning marriage and divorce, the show simply reflected them. But what I did find interesting is that there is one area in which the writers of the show were cutting-edge, one area in which they stepped outside of the usual pattern for sitcoms. And the fact that they felt free to do so is, I think, instructive of the attitude of American society. Since the people who produce television tend to be shameless manipulators of our emotions, you would have expected that Niles and Daphne would have been married (or, in Daphne’s case, engaged to be married) to tyrannical, overemotional, uncaring, completely dislikeable people. TV writers typically do this so that we waste no energy mourning for the other parties in the broken marriages, instead spending our emotion on rejoicing at the fact that the two are finally free of their brutish (or shrewish) spouses and have finally found each other. The writers of Frasier didn’t bother with that. While Melanie and Donny both had their flaws as human beings, they were not the monstrous caricatures that we have come to expect in such situations. It appears that the show’s writers decided the American public no longer needed to have divorce justified by having the characters being treated unfairly in their current marriage. It appears that now it is no longer necessary for the characters to be involved in a marriage that “can’t work” in order for them to be justified in getting a divorce. Now the American public simply needs to suspect that those characters might come closer to “finding themselves” and “self-actualizing” in another marriage. Let’s say it. In the land of television, the mere possibility that an individual might be happier in another marriage is now good enough reason to break off the current marriage. That’s the case in the land of television, it is more and more becoming the case in the land of what we call “real life”, and it is, I fear, becoming more and more the case in the minds and the thoughts of those who call themselves Christians. Test yourself. When Daphne showed up in that Winnebago, did you find it to be a happy ending? Were you pleased that the show had ended with these two people whom destiny had been trying to bring together for years--finally together? Or, if you’re unfamiliar with Frasier, how about this–when you saw the movie Titanic, did your heart feel as though all was right with the world when Kate Winslet and Leonardo Dicaprio finally had sex? Was there just something that felt “so right that it couldn’t be wrong” when Kate Winslet cheated on her fiancee’, the one to whom she had made a solemn promise to get married, with someone she had known for all of a couple days? More to the point, how many of you have a friend that you have thought should dump their spouse because they were being “held back”, their “spirit was being restrained”, or a whole host of other phrases which are often used? In fact, have you sometimes wondered if you wouldn’t be happier in a different marriage than the one you are in? Have you even perhaps considered pursuing “outside interests” with an eye open towards the possibility of abandoning your current marriage? Have you even told yourself that something that feels so right and makes you so happy can’t possibly be wrong? Whatever your thoughts and plans are in this area, you ought to clear them first with the one who is in charge of your marriage. That’s not you. That’s not your spouse. No, the person who is in charge of your marriage is God. Let’s hear what he has to say about your marriage. We read that the Pharisees came up to test Jesus by asking him whether it was OK to get a divorce. If Jesus were to say that it was OK, I suppose that people could have responded in 2 ways. They could have immediately marched home, kicked their wife out, and told her that the prophet Jesus said it was OK. Or, perhaps the more likely of the two with this group, they would have declared him a false prophet for speaking contradictory to the words of God in Malachi: “I hate divorce.” (2:16) But at the same time, if he were to say that it was not OK to get a divorce, they could then accuse him of opposing Moses, someone very near and dear to the heart of every Israelite. For in Deuteronomy 24 Moses had indeed made provisions for a man divorcing his wife. Jesus anticipates all this and answers with a question of his own : “What did Moses command you?” Perhaps twisting the question a bit, they don’t speak about what Moses commanded. Rather, they tell what Moses permitted , saying, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” Indeed Moses had, but Jesus answers tells them why Moses had done that. He says, “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law.” In other words, “Moses saw that in the past you had chosen to get divorces, and he knew that you were going to continue to do so in the future. Therefore, in order to keep things orderly and in order to limit the damage that could be caused by such divorces, God had Moses institute some rules and regulations by which this would be done.” Our government takes a similar approach today, offering “no-fault divorces” in which both parties agree to simply end the marriage, without needing to provide any justification for doing so. But was that ever OK in God’s eyes? Was that ever God’s plan for marriage? Not at all! Jesus goes back to the beginning of marriage, back to the Garden of Eden when God set up marriage and said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” Jesus then goes on to say, “So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” Jesus is clear. It does not matter if you get divorced with the intention of marrying the “true” love of your life. If you choose to get a divorce for any reason other than the two reasons permitted in Scripture--marital unfaithfulness and desertion--you...are...sinning. Keep this in mind as you counsel friends whose marriages are struggling. Ponder this carefully if you yourself begin to even consider a divorce.