Yesterday, we were continuing our series in Matthew’s gospel and were looking at chapter 19:1-30. You can hear the whole thing here if you fancy it (along with the rest of our service – except communion which happens after we turn off the live stream – should you so wish). What I am going to say relates to that same passage, but isn’t drawn particularly from the sermon. You can read this without watching that.
In Matthew 19:1-12, there are several interesting features. For one, clearly Jesus isn’t looking to give his whole, unfiltered and fulsome teaching on marriage here. He is rather responding to a particular trick question – brought specifically to catch him out and cause him to lose support – or, worse, have him killed just like John the Baptist, who said much the same thing! That isn’t to say what Jesus teaches here is untrue or there are no things we can learn about marriage from him here, just that he isn’t really laying out his comprehensive view here but rather avoiding the trap being set for him by the Pharisees.
It is worth noting that Jesus has already told the Pharisees his views on marriage and divorce in Matthew 5 during his Sermon on the Mount. He had a fair bit to say about adultery more broadly, but some specific things to say about marriage and divorce too. The Pharisees know his teaching on this already, know it is much harder than theirs and are actively seeking to lead Jesus into a trap. Either he will affirm his harder stance and risk the ire of the crowds, whom he will in effect call a bunch of sinners who have all (most likely) made use of this easy-divorce culture or, as they spring their trap in v7, they will be able to cast Jesus as a false teacher who undermines the specific teaching of Moses. Either way, they are looking to put Jesus into a bind.
The other interesting feature (to me at least) is when the Apostles, hearing Jesus’ answer, insist ‘If the relationship of a man with his wife is like this, it’s better not to marry.’ For all the talk in our culture of easy-divorce (and I’m not convinced our divorce procedures are nearly as easy as some Christians insist they are), few today would genuinely think that a wife burning the dinner is legitimate grounds for an at-fault divorce, as the rabbinical school of Hillel argued which governed common practice in Jesus day (cf. France, Matthew, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, 2008, p.127). It is nevertheless quite surprising that it is specifically Jesus’ rejection of legitimate divorce for any reason whatsoever (as the Pharisees phrase it in Matthew 19:3) that the Apostles find so objectionable and determine it is probably better not to marry at all if those are the terms of engagement. I can only conclude that there is something about our Christianised culture which makes that seem particularly terrible a practice.
But the point I wanted to land on here is the one I think Matthew is driving us to see as the main point. The issue at stake is not really divorce, though that is how it seems on face value. The issue really is about God’s will. How do we know what God really wants? How do we figure out what God demands?
For the Pharisees, it was simple. The Law of Moses said divorce was legitimate so there we have God’s will. Case closed. They had even turned – as Jesus points out – something that God permitted in the law of Moses into a de facto command. It wasn’t just something permitted, but something actively commanded as if God would be particularly pleased by any given divorce on even the most spurious of grounds. After all, it’s what the law says!
Jesus takes a different approach and does a little bit of biblical theology with the Pharisees. They were right that the Law of Moses allowed for divorce, but they were wrong that this was a command and similarly failed to acknowledge that this isn’t what God originally designed. Jesus says we don’t figure out what God wants by looking at whatever the law permits; we figure out what God wants by looking at what he designed and originally intended. That doesn’t make the law wrong. It is just to say what God wants and what God permits are not the same thing.
True disciples want to honour God by seeking to do what he wants though they recognise there may be occasions when we, sadly and regrettably, must resort to what he permits because sin has brought about the conditions where there are no other options. In the case of divorce, sin is always at play somewhere. Either one person’s sin against their spouse leads to a situation in which it is entirely legitimate and appropriate to divorce or a person’s sin and selfishness means they are divorcing entirely illegitimately, as seemed to be the majority cultural view in Jerusalem at the time. But sin is always at play somewhere and God’s concession to the reality of sin in the world – which should always be regrettable when required – is not his dispositional will on display.
The applications of the principle that Jesus is outlining here are legion. We discover God’s dispositional will – those things that make God happy and with which he is ultimately pleased – by looking at his design and intention. We don’t discover what makes God happy by looking at what he says we can do when sin rears its ugly head. There is a difference between God permitting something, and not holding such actions against an individual pushed into that situation because of someone else’s sin, and God being particularly pleased by that state of affairs. God is pleased when we honour his good design; he is hardly jumping for joy when sin means – albeit in ways that he permits because of it – his good design is necessarily subverted.
The point for us, I think, is that we ought to seek to honour God’s design and do those things that comport with his dispositional will and over which he is actively happy rather than actively seeking to live in his regrettable concessions on our sin. There will, of course, be times where we cannot avoid taking God up on his permission and regrettably making use of his concession because of sin done against us or sin’s general existence in the world that now impacts us. If God permits us these things under such circumstances, we have no need to feel guilty when we must make use of what he permits. He permitted them, after all, for such times as these. But the aim isn’t to live in his concession to sin, his permission to do what might be necessary but regrettable, and seek instead to honour and pursue God’s good design for our lives. That way lies much happier marriages (the apparently immediate issue at play in these verses) but, moreover, much happier lives in general as we seek to honour the creator that made us by living in the way he made us to live which, in the end, is all to our good and for his glory.