Trinity Baptist Church

The Book of Mark

The Truth about Divorce

Mark 10:1-12

 

We are continuing our series of lessons from the Lord as He prepares His disciples for their ministry.  So far He’s talked about faith, humility and discipleship.  But when we get to chapter 10, the lessons take on a different tone. 

 

Mark 10:1-10 

 

I find it interesting that right in the middle of His lesson plan, the Lord includes this teaching regarding divorce. 

 

It helps to remember that He is making His way to Jerusalem.  In fact, we are just one chapter away from His arrival there.   And over the last several chapters we have been able to track His pathway to Jerusalem as He travels near Samaria and through Jericho and eventually to Jerusalem.   

 

I mention that because of the crowds we encounter in chapter 10.  The region where He is had a large Jewish population that had developed during the reign of Herod the Great, the father of the current ruler, Herod Antipas.  Keep that in mind as we progress.

 

According to verse 1, the crowds have surrounded Jesus and He did what He normally did.  He began to teach them.  Matthew adds that He was also healing people. 

 

 

Apparently, His steps are being dogged by His relentless enemies, the Pharisees, who never let Him alone. They want to discredit Him with the people and they want to destroy His popularity and even take His life, according to what we read back in chapter 3.  And here they are with their familiar sinister intent. In verse 2, we have

 

 

Verse 2

 

Obviously they are not looking for information on the subject.  As the text says, they are testing Him. 

 

Obviously this is not a random question. This is a very calculated, deliberate confrontation.  The reason for that was because divorce had become so common, particularly with the leaders.  It had become, much like our day, a matter of convenience. 

 

The Old Testament standard had been long removed and in its place, an attitude of accommodation by the rabbis was in place. In fact, the Pharisees were the spiritual examples and they were leading the parade of free divorce. The reigning opinion in the matter was given by a rabbi named Hillel. And even though he had died about 20 years before this, his view prevailed and he said, “For any reason, unload that woman.”  No matter how trivial the reason, men could divorce their wives with no repercussions. 

 

If your wife for burned your dinner or whirled around so somebody saw her ankles or let her hair down in public, or spoke to a man who was not her husband, or made a negative comment about your mother, any of those were divorceable situations. 

And you were obligated to divorce her if she was infertile. That was the reigning view.  And no doubt, some of these religious leaders had heard Jesus say anyone who divorced his wife without reason causes her to commit adultery and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.    

 

Jesus was a hardliner in a very permissive society and they wanted Jesus to be viewed in that way. 

They would love for the crowd to turn on Jesus and see Him identifying them as adulterers and adulteresses.

 

But it was more than that. Remember where they are. They’re in Perea and that’s the place ruled by Herod Antipas. Herod Antipas was one of the sons of Herod the Great.  And even though he was married, he got to carrying on with his brother’s wife who was also related to him and they wound up getting married. 

 

And that led to the encounter with John the Baptist we saw back in Mark 6.  Herod himself had John arrested and bound in prison because John told him it wasn’t lawful for him to have your brother’s wife.”  And that confrontation of the sin of Herod and Herodias eventually got John the Baptist beheaded.

 

So this is a pretty clever plan by the Pharisees.  Here they are in the front yard of Herod,  Maybe they can be successful in getting the same thing done to Jesus that happened to John the Baptist.

This is a very sinister attack to discredit Him and even destroy Him. Notice how Jesus responds.  Let’s call it

 

 

 

verse 3

 

With that one statement, He discarded tradition and every man-made opinion and popular social trend and went immediately to Scripture. What did Moses say?  And even more to the point, what did God say?

 

verses 4-9

 

They wanted to halfway answer, but Jesus quotes the entire passage directly from Genesis.  And in so doing, He reminds them that God hates divorce and there are four reasons for that. 

 

By the way, Matthew adds that Jesus said, “Have you not read?” Can’t you read Scripture, you experts of Mosaic Law? A little bit of sarcasm is always appropriate!  Then He lists the reasons. 

 

First, males and females were created for the purpose of marriage.  Now what’s important about that is there is no provision for any other option, including polygamy, homosexuality or divorce. 

 

God created husbands and wives for each other and no one else.  Their union was complete and unique and Adam and Eve are the pattern for all to follow.  Every marriage, if it is a legitimate marriage is between one man and one woman and cannot be separated.

In the case of Adam and Eve, divorce is not only inadvisable, it is not only wrong, it is impossible where there isn’t anybody else for either of them to marry.

 

 

verse 7

 

This is Genesis 2:24. This is the God-ordained view of marriage. It is an independent strong union. You leave father and mother. You break the prior family bound. And in the language of Matthew 19:5 which is taken from Genesis 2:24, “You cling, or cleave, to your wife.”

 

The idea of that word is glue.  You’re literally stuck together. It is not an arm’s-length relationship or a test the waters and see if it works out arrangement.  You are glued together.

 

Cleaving is an extremely graphic word.  It carries the idea of pursuing hard after. It is two people unbreakably connected together, glued together and pursuing hard after each other to be united in mind and will and spirit and body and emotion.

 

Marriage is an indissoluble union in which people are unbreakably glued and as such they pursue one heart, one mind, one will in everything.

 

God hates divorce not only because He designed it to be between one man and one woman, and He designed it to be a strong, unbreakable, covenant relationship,  consecration, but, thirdly, because

 

 

verse 8

 

This takes the idea of leaving your family and cleaving to one another to a whole new level. 

 

And I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it this way, but one is an indivisible number.  You can’t divide one. And that oneness, that indivisibility is seen in the product of the one flesh relationship. 

 

The child is the one that comes out of the two. It is an indivisible oneness that manifests itself in the offspring that are the ones that come from the two.  And even in twins and triplets and so forth, there is still an individual that is uniquely one. 

 

And then there’s a final reason why God hates divorce and that is because marriage is His own work.

 

Verse 9

 

That is a very interesting statement. Marriage is a work of God. We’re not talking about Christian marriage but every marriage is a work of God.

 

Every uniting of two people is a work of God because within the purpose of God’s plan for marriage is the propagation of life on earth.  And in that context, every marriage is an act of God by which He bestows upon a man and a woman the common grace of marriage and children. I

 

t’s an act of God. He puts two people together. And out of those two come the offspring who have been foreordained to His own ends.  So you certainly don’t want to put asunder, separate what God has joined together. Let me put it simply.

Don’t break up your marriage and don’t break up somebody else’s marriage either, or you are interfering with, not just an institution of God, but a specific union of God.

 

It was God who made the union possible. It was God who issued the command, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth.” It was God who said, “It’s not good for a man to be alone, I’ll make a help for him.” It was God who brought Eve to Adam. It was God who designed marriage to be an honorable union. 

 

Thus, every marriage is God putting a man and a woman together. It doesn’t go for living together, living in fornication. But where there is a covenant union, God is involved.

 

So who wants to undo a work of God? This is strong testimony to the permanent union of marriage. No wonder God says, “I hate divorce.”

 

 So why does it happen so much?” The short answer is because we are all sinners. We live in a fallen world and we are fallen ourselves and one of the realities of marriage is the conflict that the union creates. 

 

So how did such corruption of God’s ideal come about?  How did we get from the plan of God that Jesus has just repeated, straight out of the book of Genesis, to where they were then and where we are now? 

 

Well, Genesis gives us the answer to that as well.  The conflict that exists in our marriages that ultimately leads to divorce roots back to the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. 

Genesis 3 records the tragic results of the fall and it affects the serpent, man and woman as God pronounces a curse of all of them.  Verses 14 and 15 are God’s response to the serpent.  He will be cursed above all of the animals and will crawl on his belly and eat the dust of the ground and eventually his head will be crushed by the Seed of the woman. 

 

Verses 17-19 are for Adam as he discovers he never had it so good.  And unfortunately, now the ground that was blessed will be cursed and he is going to come home tired in the evening from a long day’s work that is filled with sweat and frustration and then he’s going to die. 

 

Verse 16 is for the woman as the woman is cursed in her relationship with her husband the responsibility of childbearing. 

 

Verse 16

 

Notice in particular the part of the curse that deals with the husband/wife relationship. 

 

God says, “Your desire shall be for your husband.”  Now that doesn’t sound like a curse at first glance.  In fact, our response might be, “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”  A wife’s desire is supposed to be for her husband in love and affection.” 

 

And even the second part where God says, “He shall rule over you” could certainly mean that a wife would desire her husband to lead and she would honor that. 

 

And all of that is right and we can look elsewhere in Scripture to document that teaching. 

But the problem with this text is that’s not what it’s talking about.  Remember, these words from God are found right in the middle of a curse.  The “desire” found here is not talking about normal romantic attraction to your husband or even responding to the physical and spiritual leadership a husband might provide in protecting and caring for his wife.  This is a curse.

 

So what was God saying?  Well, let’s start with the “he will rule over you” part of the verse.  The word used here carries the idea of being installed in an office or elevated to an official position.

 

So here’s the curse God pronounced over the woman:  “Whereas you were once side by side, working together as a team, equally responsible for the care of the earth and being fruitful and multiplying and tending the garden, ruling together over creation and all that, now it’s not going to work that way.  Now your husband has been installed as ruler over you to subdue you.”

 

And keep in mind, it was never intended to be that way and it’s not the way God designed the relationship between a husband and wife to work.  But because of the curse, that’s the way it is. 

 

Then notice the next phrase, “And your desire shall be for your husband.”  So what does that mean?  The word translated “desire” is only used one other time in the writing of Moses and it’s found in Genesis 4:7 where God is speaking to Cain and He says, “Sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.”  It is exactly the same terms using the same language with the same meaning. 

Sin wants to control you and you have to master it. That’s the same language as the curse in 3:16. She wants to control you and you have to master her.

 

And what that means is there’s going to be a battle in the house. As the woman seeks to be independent, seeks to be dominant, seeks her will and seeks her way, and as the man tries to control the revolt, there is this conflict between the husband and the wife.  And because both the man and the woman are fallen and sinful, it gets ugly.  Anybody want to testify?! 

 

And when you think about it like that,, it’s not too difficult to see why things have gotten so far away from God’s ideal.  This conflict in the home that many times leads to divorce is due to fallen woman, cursed with selfishness and strong will, wants her own way and rebels against the ungracious, insensitive, unkind, dominating attitude of her husband. 

 

And it’s a whole lot easier to just bail out, break up and get it over with.  I don’t like her anymore. I don’t like him anymore. I don’t want to live with her. I don’t want to live with him. And I saw somebody that’s much better for me.  After all, we are incompatible.  I got news for you:  We’re all incompatible!

 

And into that kind of environment, very much like we live in today, Jesus steps up and says,, “Go back to the Old Testament standard of God.  While we acknowledge the conflict, that doesn’t change the fact that God’s design is one man, one woman, entering into a permanent bond. 

God hates divorce. Even where there is conflict and challenge and there will be because we are fallen, you stay together, you pursue hard after that oneness and God will bless that union.

 

So are there any grounds for divorce? We’ll find about that next time.

 

Let’s pray.