“The Case for Christ: - Kingdom/God: Marriage”

‘For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My brother, and My sister, and mother.’ (Mk 3:35)

Even though Jesus had set His face toward the Cross to complete His redeeming work, He never lowered the standard of the Divine requirement for living life.

His appreciation of marriage and family, shown especially in the way He described it as corresponding to the kingdom of God, is in harmony with that Divine requirement.

He went so far as to make the relationships that exist between husband and wife, parent and child, the type and symbol of the kingdom of God, the subject we will start considering tonight.

Being ‘spiritually mature’, or being made ‘complete in righteousness’, even as your Father in heaven is perfect’, as we saw last week, goes hand in hand with all relationships, in the family as well as in His Church.
 
Jesus’ teaching is based on the assumption that one is learning to live life in His kingdom. 

So He did not teach the kingdom of God as being removed from life at all. 

Rather, He defended its requirements by clarifying the mind of God that, in cases such as that of marriage, was being shamelessly ignored.
 
But how did He bring the concept of marriage back into line so that His people could and would live according to the standard of Divine requirement in the marriage relationship?

I know there is much more involved in this passage, but - in as clear a way as possible - let me take you through His thought about it as He opened the Scripture to the Pharisees, and then to the disciples, in Mk 10 - Mark 10. 

In verse 2, it was the Pharisees who started the conversation from the standpoint of divorce.  

Trying to tempt Him, perhaps to say something incriminating or contradictory, they asked: ‘Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?’

But Jesus did not fall for their trap. He asked them: ‘What did Moses teach?’

And, they answered: ‘He said to write a bill of divorcement and put her away.’

Jesus did not deny what Moses did but He did explain the reason for it: it was because of the hard-heartedness of humanity, of the ‘faithlessness of that generation!’ 

In all of His teaching, He always made very clear that the Kingdom of God does not belong to the hard-hearted, the faithless, the rebellious, the arrogant, all those who set themselves against God’s will!

But the Pharisees had substituted human traditions for God’s intentions.

So their interest lay in keeping their law to its letter, not in doing God’s will.

How were they looking at these earthly relationships?

First, according to their system, in the case of adultery, if the wife was unfaithful, she was accused of committing adultery, no matter who the partner was.

On the other hand, if the husband committed adultery, he was guilty only if his act was committed with a woman married to another man, in which case, he was violating the other man’s rights.

In the laws of divorce, the same attitude of male superiority came out. 

If the wife did not find favor in the husband’s eyes, he could divorce her.

But the wife could not divorce her husband for any reason, except in certain extreme cases which the court allowed.

It was here that Jesus challenged their system  - a system of the unjust, domineering power of the husband and his superior attitude over his wife, forcing a cruel inferiority upon her. 

This was an area in which Jesus was one of the great champions of the woman’s rights.

He raised the standard of the woman’s place to a point of absolute equality with that of the man.

How did He do that?

He did it by declaring that, in marriage, the wife is on the same level as the husband: each has the same dispositions out from the likeness and image of God.

Thus, Jesus answered the Pharisees with the very revolutionary thought of: ‘Whosoever shall put away his wife and marry another, committeth adultery against her.’ (v 11)

It was an arresting declaration, a radical conception!

It removed the double standard by saying that the husband’s relationship with the second woman is adulterous too! 

It was such a jolting concept to them, so unthinkable, that - later on - even the disciples said: ‘If that is the case, then why bother to marry!’ 

The Pharisees had hung on to the statement: ‘Moses said a bill of divorcement was to be written’.

They were making God’s provision to allow it as His approval of it!

But, actually, it was just an accommodation of their own rebellion against God’s plan: it thundered back to them as ‘hardness of heart’!  

However, as far as Jesus was concerned, this subject was really incidental. Divorce was not the main issue to be considered.

But - what was?

The main issue was seeing marriage aright. 

And this is where Jesus turned up the power of His spotlight and focused it on what was important! 

What they needed was the light of the essential and eternal truth about marriage that would correspond to God’s heart about life.

The main point should be their outlook on it - an outlook as God had intended it to be.

That was the important thing. 

So Jesus took them right back to that principal point!

What eternal light did He give them about marriage that would help them see it all better?

When today, questions are asked about divorce, men do not usually begin here but this is where Jesus began.

In His thought, marriage was the ‘condition of the Divine expression to God’s creation act.’

The first essential truth, according to the Biblical revelation, was that God ‘From the beginning of creation, male and female made He them.’ 

And then, ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife.’

Lastly, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’
 
By answering their question in this way, Jesus directed their thinking away from their own view and interpretation of Moses’ law back to God’s thought. 

So Jesus said: ‘From the beginning of creation, male and female made He them.’

In effect: ‘If you want to discuss the question of divorce, let us get back, first of all, to the beginning and see what it is that God meant when He created male and female.

Let us start there first, and see that, through God’s divine decree, ‘humanity’, the human race, came into existence.

He was creating ‘humanity’ in a full, whole, complete being. 

He was not creating two separate units. It was a union of the two to make up ‘humanity’, Jesus was saying.  

It was ‘humanity’ made in His likeness by His own Hand.

It was ‘humanity’ made after His image by His own will to share Himself.

And of what did the image of God consist?

Male and female were created equally alike in His likeness and in His image.

It is an image of holiness with the blessing of divine life in it.

So the full idea of humanity is not represented in the man alone. 

Neither is the full ideal of humanity represented in the woman alone.

Neither one alone is a full and perfect representation of the Divine image and the Divine likeness so neither one is superior over the other.

But it is in the mystic union of the two becoming one that there is the full unveiling of God’s truth.

Thus Jesus went on: ‘For this cause, shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife.’ 

In the union, they are expressing the completed, perfect will of God.   

‘That is’, Jesus went on to say, ‘in this Biblical revelation, the union between the wife and husband is clearly a God-given relationship established exclusively for only the two together. 

The two are one, cleaving to one another.

In this highest and the most sacred of relationships, ‘the two shall become one flesh’.’

There is a union, a vital communion of heart and body in which the wife and the husband augment each other, building each other up, each making the other greater, each enhancing the other.     

In so doing, they complete the process of creation, using
this gift for the completeness of life, thereby, revealing the truth of God’s will in His creative act of marriage. 

So to the Pharisees, Jesus made it known that it would be absurd to think their divorce law and the condition they set down represented God’s will about this sacred union.

It would be like trying to divide one person into two halves, much like Solomon’s suggestion in settling the dispute between the two mothers over one child.

Husband and wife are so permanently joined one to the other that no human tradition can claim authority to override that fact.

‘Therefore,’ Jesus went on to say, ‘what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.’ (v 9 of Mk - chapter 10) 
  
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Jesus, then, declared marriage as a permanent union of husband and wife, equal to each other, coming out from God’s creation of His own likeness and image. 

It is His gift to man, arranged exclusively for husband and wife, each cleaving one to the other in the most sacred of relationships.

And - in that unity of the flesh there is the sacred character of spiritual union between the two in which one augments the other in fully representing the character and holiness of God.

That is what is to be honored.

That is the light - that is the essential truth that gives living its full purpose.

But sin shattered it. That was proven by the question the Pharisees had asked that started this discourse.

But Christ was here. He came to restore the new creation back to the image of God. 

He through the light of the glory of God in Himself and through His expression of God upon the earth, transformed man’s nature back into that image of God. (Heb 1:3; Col 3;10; Eph 4:24)

And with those called into His kingdom, His act of redemption renews after that image of God in the form of divine righteousness and knowledge through Jesus Christ.

For this reason, as husband and wife are ‘one’, so also the Church has been called to be ‘one’ as this representation of God’s likeness and image together.

It functions in the same way in relationship to its marriage to Christ: each one augmenting the other, each building the other up.

And - when Christ’s servants function in this light and truth, their living in His Kingdom is the true expression of His will being done upon earth.  

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With that, I close for tonight.

But I pray we will go on in Christ’s kingdom by setting our sights together to make the ‘doing of God’s will’ in all our relationships - in our marriages, in our families, and in this fellowship - the expression of His will upon earth! 

May the Lord grant us this prayer of our hearts!

Amen. 

Let us pray.