Challenging the Culture with Unchanging Truth

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Well, this morning I mentioned the election to you. And one of the things that politics and elections and campaigns, one of the things that they’re known for is the use of gotcha questions. And a lot of times the media is real bad about this.

The first question that always comes to mind when I think of example, or the first example that usually comes to mind is I think it was Ted Cruz that a reporter a few years ago asked, would you attend a ceremony for a same-sex union if you were invited? And now, I guarantee you that that reporter did not want to learn anything about his stance on the issue. His stance is pretty public and well-known.

The reporter wanted to ask him a question that was going to get him in trouble, either with the same-sex marriage crowd or with evangelicals. I believe it was him, and I believe his answer was, nobody has invited me to one. I thought that’s a pretty good political answer, pretty good way to sidestep.

The media, I mean, there are numerous examples of the media asking questions like that. I myself have been guilty sort of by accident of asking questions like that. I went to a several years back, I went to a candidate forum where several candidates were speaking and I was sitting in the in the crowd and a man got up.

He was running for a local race and I had read some things that he had written on the internet and I knew he was half out of his mind. So I leaned over to a friend of mine who was sitting there with me. I said, hey, John, I’ve got 50 cents in my pocket.

I’ll give it to you if you’ll ask him about the Jews. So then John stands up, and I didn’t think he was actually going to do it. John stands up and said, could you tell me what your stance is on our dear friend and ally in the Middle East, Israel?

That man launched into a 15-minute anti-Semitic tirade. Up until that point, everybody, and the only reason I said that about, I’ll give you everything in my pocket if you’ll ask him about the Jews, because he was sounding good to everybody, sounding sane, and people were eating it up. And I thought, this is not good.

So I said that to him. Well, he launched into that tirade, and everybody in the room just kind of, you know, they weren’t sure if this was for real or not. And I leaned over to my friend.

I said, you’ve got to learn when I’m joking and when I’m being serious. But, you know, it’s kind of a gotcha question, but I feel like maybe it was a public service a little bit because he didn’t win. thank goodness but those kind of questions come with the territory in politics and that’s the sort of thing that was going on even though it wasn’t politics I mean it wasn’t electoral politics but it was sort of politics that sort of thing was going on when the Pharisees approached Jesus one day to ask him questions about marriage and that’s what we’re going to look at tonight.

And I’m going to do my best to explain this passage in the cultural context and try to do so gently. But just remember, if at any point tonight the text makes you angry, that it’s the text that makes you angry, right? I didn’t write it.

I’m just the messenger, all right? Take it up with him. All right, so we’re going to be in Mark chapter 10 tonight, Mark chapter 10.

And we’re going to look at a time when the Pharisees tried to gotcha Jesus and tried to trap him on a controversial issue of their day. So here’s what it says in Mark chapter 10. If you turn there with me, and once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read from God’s word together.

If you don’t have your Bible, it’ll be on the screen for you. Mark chapter 10, starting in verse one, going through verse 12 this evening. It says, then he arose from there and came to the region of Judea by the other side of the Jordan, and the multitudes gathered to him again, and as he was accustomed, he taught them again.

And by the way, before we get into it, if you have the handout, I meant to put this on there. I did some research because Matthew and Mark both tell this story. One of them says that he went to Judea and the other side of the Jordan, and one says he went to Judea on the other side of the Jordan, and people have tried to make hay about that, that it’s a contradiction.

It’s not. There were evidently a few cities on the east side of the Jordan that were under the political rule of Judea at that time. So not a contradiction.

It says, the Pharisees came and asked him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife, testing him? And he answered and said to them, what did Moses command you? They said, Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and to dismiss her.

And Jesus answered and said to them, because of the hardness of your heart, he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate. In the house, his disciples also asked him again about the same matter.

So he said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. and you may be seated.

So what we need to understand right off the bat is that marriage was a controversial issue in Jesus’ day. I know that that’s hard for us to imagine, right? To live in a world where marriage is a controversial issue.

It’s actually a lot like our day. They were dealing with maybe not the exact same issues, but at the root they were the same issues. So marriage was a controversial issue in Jesus’ day, and the Pharisees were trying to use it to trap him.

So when they come to him asking him this question, it’s not a matter of, you know, we’d really like to understand your stance. You know, sometimes I’ll ask people questions. Where did you get that?

Jeff brought something to me a few weeks ago and said, have you ever heard this? I said, you know, that’s interesting. Where do you get that from?

And I have to be careful. My wife tells me, you need to tell people that when you’re thinking and listening, you look annoyed, and it doesn’t mean you are. I’ve had to tell the kids’ teachers that, because they thought I was upset with them.

So, but if you’re on the receiving end of those questions, and I’m saying, where do you get that? I look kind of annoyed. It may sound like I’m pushing back on you, when really, I’m just trying to understand and trying to learn where you’re coming from.

That is not at all what the Pharisees were doing. There was nothing in them that was curious about Jesus’ position on this. They knew what Jesus’ position was on this.

And they wanted him to come out and say something harsh that was going to cause him to run afoul of the authorities, that was going to cause him to lose popularity with the people. And so while he’s out there teaching the crowds, he’s healing the sick, as it says in Matthew, the Pharisees, they interrupted in order to pose a question. Not to ask, because they didn’t want an answer, but they posed this question.

In verse 2, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? And Matthew records their question in greater detail. It’s not that Mark is inaccurate.

It’s just Mark kind of gets to the point here and doesn’t record all the detail. And Matthew goes into a little greater detail. We see in each of these stories, usually there’s one of them that goes into greater detail than the others.

Matthew records the question in greater detail in Matthew 19. 3. Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?

And the reason for this question is that there was this burning question, there was this raging controversy in their society, a debate over two interpretations of the law, which is it? This hot button question came down to which interpretation of the law was correct. There was the school of thought that followed the Rabbi Hillel, which said a man could divorce his wife for any reason.

If for any reason you decide you don’t like her, you’re tired of her, you know, she didn’t fix her hair right, she embarrassed you. I’ve heard the example, she burned dinner, you could divorce her. That was the position of the Rabbi Hillel.

Then there was the position of the Rabbi Shammai and his followers, that a man could only divorce his wife if she had committed some kind of sexual immorality, some kind of indiscretion that would have interrupted the marriage covenant. And so this debate had raged in their society, and they want to pin Jesus down on the record. Not just because they want to see where he stands on the issue, but I suspect because they know where he stands on the issue, and it’s not the popular answer to the issue.

They were asking because they wanted to trap him, and so this was like the gotcha journalism. They knew what he believed, and they wanted to corner him into making a statement that was going to cause the people to say, maybe we don’t follow you after all. And also could get him in trouble with the authorities, because some of the things that he’s talking about, some of the practices that he’s condemning were going on in the family of Herod.

And John the Baptist, as a matter of fact, you may remember, was beheaded for pointing out that this was not okay with God. And so the Pharisees are doing their best to get at Jesus by asking this question. But what I think is important about this is for us to look, is not their motives for asking the question, but is to look at the way Jesus responds to the question.

Jesus appealed to the scriptures and affirmed their teaching on marriage. And when I say their teaching, I mean the scriptures teaching, not the Pharisees teaching. Because his first response was to draw their attention to the scriptures.

He didn’t say, well, you know, everybody says this. He didn’t even say, well, I say this. He asked them in verse three, what did Moses command you?

And again, it’s not that Moses is so important. He’s talking about the Old Testament law. Moses as the lawgiver who brought the law from God.

He’s referring back to the scriptures. What did Moses command you? In other words, what does it say in the book?

Which, by the way, that should be our answer to all the hot button issues that are controversial in our culture right now. What does it say in the book? And so they answered in verse four, Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and dismiss her.

So they’re taking this as anytime you want to just get rid of your wife, trade her in for a new model or whatever, you just write her the certificate and you send her on her merry way. That’s all you have to do. And I suppose they think that settled it.

But what they were proposing there by answering it that way was a misinterpretation of Deuteronomy 24, 1 through 4. Because if you go back and read what it says there, and I encourage you to do that, the law recognizes that divorce was going to happen in Israel. And recognizing that it was going to happen, and sometimes for frivolous reasons, do people ever get divorced for silly reasons?

No, that never happens, right? Recognizing that this was going to take place, it put some regulations in place, in particular to protect the women, and to show the husbands the seriousness with which God regarded the matter. Because there was also this teaching in those four verses about if you divorce her and she goes and marries somebody else and then they divorce, you can’t marry her again.

It was not only protecting the women, because if their husbands left them, if their husbands divorced them and abandoned them, it’s not like they could just go out and get a regular job, so they’d be left with no means of support. Many of them would have to remarry, but at any time somebody could accuse her of being an adulteress, being in an adulterous relationship, because there was no proof, if he had not given her a bill of divorcement, there was no proof that she had been divorced from him. And so she was constantly in this legal peril or in financial peril.

And so God said, if you’re going to do this as a protection for the wife, you have to give her a certificate of divorcement. And if you go through all this, you can’t take her back. It’s protecting her again from the back and forth.

Because men sometimes do that. I want you, I don’t want you, I want you, I don’t want you, and it depends on sometimes whether somebody else wants them or not. And so all of this was set up for the protection of the woman in this case.

But the law didn’t teach that this was the way things ought to be. That’s why he says in verse 5, because of the hardness of your heart, he wrote you this precept. He said it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

God recognized that divorces were going to happen because he says to Israel, you were hard-hearted because you decided that these wives that God gave you, you’re just going to turn your backs on them. And seriously, looking at what they taught at that time and what the school of Hillel believed, for some really frivolous reasons, they were just going to cast these women aside. God recognized that that was going to happen, and he put regulations in place to protect the innocent, but at no point was God saying this was a good practice.

And so Jesus’ second response after this drew their attention to the scriptures again. If we look at verses 6 through 9, it says, But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate. And what he’s telling them in these few verses here is he’s explaining God’s ideal design for marriage by citing the scriptures.

He’s pointing them back to the Old Testament scriptures and saying, this is what God designed, this is what it’s supposed to be like. We see in verse 9, he talks about what God has joined together and not letting man separate it. He’s pointing out that marriage is God’s creation.

And that honestly is my biggest objection to the redefinition of marriage, because we don’t have the right. We didn’t come up with marriage, God did. And if God designed it and said what it was, nobody has the right to redefine it.

I mean, it is what it is by definition. And I always said we don’t want to go down this, I mean, that was 10 years ago, but we don’t want to go down this road of giving the government unlimited power to redefine our reality. Because if they can say marriage that has existed for thousands of years is something it’s never been, then they can say there’s a four-sided triangle.

They can start redefining every bit of our reality. When you control the language, you control thought. And anyway, I could go off on a tangent there.

But marriage is God’s creation. And he’s saying, neither we nor they have the right to tamper with what God has designed. And then we look at verse 6, where it says that God created marriage to be between a man and a woman.

But from the beginning of the creation, God created them male and female. And he talks about joining male and female together in the marriage union. This is quoting Genesis 127 and Genesis 5 too, talking about making them male and female.

God designed it that way. By the way, God designed these two genders. And he put us together in the marriage union to complement one another.

And we find that to be the case because I’m not saying that all women are the same as all other women and not all men are all the same as all other men. But it is possible in many instances to paint with kind of a broad brush that by and large we men have a lot of similarities and by and large you women have a lot of similarities. And for some reason it just works, right?

My wife and I balance each other out pretty well. You’ve heard me say when it comes to raising kids, if we were both me, it would be the Wild West. If we were both Charlotte, it would be East Germany, but God put it together and it works, I think. It seems to be working.

I mean, nobody’s in prison yet, so fingers crossed, right? It seems to work. But the things that I, as a man, stress out about the security and the finances and wanting to provide and make sure everything in that area is okay are not the things that she stresses out about as the nurturer and the caretaker of the home and we’re going to get kicked off YouTube just for me saying things like this.

That’s all right. It’s God’s word. It just, it works.

And God designed the genders and put us together in the marriage relationship for that purpose to complement one another. And so Jesus points that out. God created marriage to be between a man and a woman, he also created it to be a covenant union.

He tells us this in verse 7 where he says, for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife. There is this bond that supersedes all others. It doesn’t mean that I stop being a son or that she stopped being a daughter, but it means there’s this new relationship that is supposed to take precedence.

As a matter of fact, some people, I think, get this backwards when they act like the children are supposed to come above the spouse. Now, we are supposed to be dedicated to our children, but I submit to you that we cannot provide the home for our children that we’re supposed to if we are not intimately bonded to our spouse. And so that relationship has to take precedence.

Doesn’t mean we neglect the children while we go off on date night all the time, but it does mean that that relationship, we need to be bonded to each other before we’re bonded to the kids or the parents or whoever else. And when he says, for this reason, a man shall leave and his mother and be joined to his wife, he’s quoting Genesis 2. 24.

Again, he’s pointing their attention to what do the scriptures say. And he created marriage to be indivisible. That was his design.

The two shall become one flesh, so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. That we’re not just two people leading parallel lives that, you know, we can peel off from each other whenever it suits us. But there’s supposed to be such a bond there that we shouldn’t just tear it apart.

And by the way, if you’ve ever tried to rip one piece of flesh into two, it hurts, doesn’t it? It’s because God designed this relationship to stay intact. And here again, he’s quoting from Genesis 2.

24, the two shall become one flesh. So Jesus’ response to all of this was to point their attention to the Old Testament and say, what does it say in the book? You want to know where I stand on this hot button issue of the day?

What does it say in the book? And here’s what we need to understand from this. Because we get so hung up on what Jesus says about remarriage and adultery and grounds for divorce and all this.

And it’s important. All of that is important. And we’ll deal with that in the course of things.

But I don’t want us to miss the big picture that Jesus’ teaching on marriage was deliberately countercultural. I think this incident makes a broader point about his view of truth. You see, the Pharisees objected to Jesus’ response in Matthew 19. 7.

It records, Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce and put her away? Jesus had already answered this. It was because of the hardness of your hearts.

But they’re so incensed by this. Well, then, why did Moses say it was okay? Why did Moses tell us to do this with the certificate of divorce?

Now, that question that they asked there, the question they started out with in verse 2, their misinterpretation of the law in verse 4, Their objection to Jesus’ response there in Matthew 19, 7, saying, then why did he tell us we could do this? And the fact that the disciples later on asked Jesus for clarification in private. You notice it says in verse 10, they went in the house.

All four of those things suggest to me that both the Pharisees and the crowds sided with Hillel. The popular view of things in their culture was, oh yeah, you can divorce your wife for any reason you see fit or no reason at all. That was the view of the crowds.

That was the view of the Pharisees. That was not Jesus’ view. Jesus reiterated to them, this was not the way things were supposed to be.

He said to them in Matthew 19. 8, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so. He said that, again, he’s not talking about Moses.

It doesn’t matter that Moses gave permission. When he says Moses, he’s referring to Moses, again, as the mouthpiece of God bringing the law. He says, in essence, the scriptures allow this.

The scriptures make an allowance here because you were going to get off kilter and you were going to mistreat each other, but that’s not the way God designed it to be from the beginning. He explained the importance of the covenant in marriage. He said in verse 9, I say to you that whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.

What he’s saying here is that God intended this to be a lifelong covenant. You know, when we take the vows and say, you know, I do, I promise these things, God intended us to mean that, right? And it’s a covenant that neither of us is supposed to break.

Now, God is able to separate the covenant in death. That’s why we promise to death do us part until death parts us. And he makes this allowance here, as Matthew records, that if one partner breaks the covenant through sexual immorality, then the other is free, okay?

Because they’ve already broken the covenant. In that case, the one divorcing the one who’s committed adultery is not breaking the covenant. It’s already been broken.

The Bible makes this allowance again because of hardness of heart. It doesn’t mean that we have to divorce if there’s adultery because God is a God of restoration. But in cases where there’s unrepentant, continuing severing of the covenant, God’s merciful toward the other one.

And so he says that’s the only one. And to these Pharisees who were just divorcing their wives willy-nilly and marrying whoever else they wanted to, he says this is adultery. And this is where I said, if you’re going to get mad tonight, get mad at the text, not at me.

All right? The Bible says what it says. I want to clarify, though, that he’s not telling us this to condemn everybody who’s ever been divorced.

He’s not telling us this so we leave out of here feeling bad about ourselves. He’s making a very specific point to a group of very self-righteous people. who thought that they were keeping the law perfectly when what they were doing was working little loopholes in where they could do exactly what the law said not to do and feel really good and really righteous about it.

And so to these Pharisees, he’s saying, not only are you not as righteous as you think you are, but in trying to keep what you think is the letter of the law, you are violating one of the Ten Commandments, and you are adulterers, is what he’s saying to the Pharisees. Now, I don’t see anywhere that his standard has changed, but I do want to tell you this. a lot of, because of the way the Greek verb tense is here, I think there’s a good argument to be made that the act of remarriage, if there’s not that adultery in the first marriage, that the act of remarriage may be an act of adultery, but it doesn’t mean the state of being married is a continual state of adultery.

Because I’ve heard some very legalistic Bible teachers say, well, if you’re remarried and you didn’t have biblical grounds, then you need to divorce your second wife. I’m sorry, I read somewhere the Bible, God hates divorce. And God’s not going to be any happier about breaking a second covenant than He is about the first. The purpose of this is not to condemn.

I want you to hear me on this. If a person has violated this teaching, there is forgiveness, there is redemption just like there is for any other. For any other thing that we do against His will.

And by the way, if you’re sitting there tonight saying, the preacher said, I committed adultery. Jesus said, if you’ve ever looked on somebody with lust, you’ve committed adultery. So he pretty well included everybody in that already.

Again, the point of this is not to condemn you. The point of this is not just so you walk out of here feeling low about yourself. The point of this is to make the argument that we cannot build these loopholes into God’s standards where we can do the opposite of what he wants us to do and try to work at where we get credit for doing what he wants us to do.

Does that make sense? Because that’s exactly what they were doing. I’ve never committed adultery.

I may be married to a different woman every week, but I’ve never committed adultery. Are you kidding me? He says, you think you’re following God’s standards because you’re adhering to the letter of this specific exception over here, but you’re doing the very thing he designed not to happen.

The purpose of this was to wake up the Pharisees. And if you’re a super religious person who prides yourself on keeping the Ten Commandments, who prides yourself on keeping every jot and tittle of the law, to have this rabbi come in your face and say, you’re an adulterer. Would that get your attention?

There you go. That’s what he was trying to do. And I think the bigger point here, and what I want to drive home, and by the way, that none of this was intended to call anybody out.

I know we’ve got some folks in here who are remarried. I don’t know everybody’s circumstances. Some may have biblical grounds.

Some may not have biblical grounds. But I think I know the hearts of the people in here, and I think if there’s something that was wrong between you and the Lord years ago, I see people that I think of as generally repentant. And I think if you’ve dealt with him about that, he’s put that away as far as the East is from the West, just like any other sin.

And I think churches by and large have done a disservice over the generations treating divorce like it’s the unforgivable sin. I think the bigger issue here is the point Jesus is making is that the Pharisees were not entitled to change God’s truth to suit their desires. And neither are we.

Because that’s what they were doing. We could take his teaching here about marriage and we could apply it to anything else they were doing.

We could apply it to the law of tithing that they had in the Old Testament, where they were sheltering some of their things so they didn’t have to tithe, where they were making sure they were enforcing the tithe on everybody else so that old women were doing without and yet they were living high on the hog he could have just as easily looked at them and said if you do this you’re a thief that’s one of the ten commandments also isn’t it jesus did that he did this in other cases he told the uh he told the the crowds that it’s not enough to have not committed murder because the pharisees they would never do such a thing but they had hatred in their hearts toward other people and jesus said it’s like murdering your heart so his point to them and to us is that our standards and his standards are not necessarily the same thing.

And we don’t get to change his standards just because we desire something else. So the disciples privately ask for clarification in verse 10 here in Mark. And Jesus summarizes this teaching in verses 11 and 12.

Some people have alleged a contradiction between Matthew and Mark. I think Mark is just getting to the point here when he doesn’t include the exception for adultery. Jesus is saying, I said what I said.

It’s sort of like if I tell the kids, tell one of the kids, when you’re done eating, I want you to unload the dishwasher and I want you to do the dishes. And they may say to me, I can’t go read books, because that’s their big thing. I can’t go read books.

No, do the dishes. Did I mean not to do the dishwasher because I didn’t say it the second time? Or am I telling them I meant what I said?

I think that’s the same thing happening with Jesus here. He tells them, I meant what I said, because what God says is true will always be true. And if you take nothing else away from tonight, I want that to be what we take away from this, that what God says is true will always be true.

I’ve gotten the question recently from a few people in this church saying, help me talk to my grandchild, help me talk to my cousin, help me talk to so-and-so. They’re saying, well, I believe the Bible, but what it says about marriage, that’s Old Testament stuff. Tell me where Jesus talked about that.

Now, first of all, my answer is if you believe in a triune God and you believe the Spirit inspired all of Scripture, then what Paul said in Romans chapter 1 came from Jesus. But if that argument’s not compelling to people outside, when Jesus was directly asked by the Pharisees about how marriage was supposed to work, did he say, oh, that’s Old Testament thinking, let me tell you what we ought to be doing now. No.

He said, what does it say in the book and he went all the way back to Genesis. You realize that some of the debates we’re having today and people even within churches that are saying, oh no, that’s Old Testament stuff. Jesus said the Old Testament definition of marriage is still in effect.

That’s what I’m saying. When he says, when he has this argument with the Pharisees, he’s making the case that what God said was true will always be true. It doesn’t mean that we are bound to follow all the ceremonial and civil laws that were given for Israel.

But when it comes to his moral law, every time Jesus is asked about it, every time Jesus is asked about it, he upholds God’s standard of right and wrong as it’s already been presented. And on top of that, he may correct their misinterpretation