Our Father, now our prayer is that we would decrease and Christ would increase. Oh Lord, keep us in the way of godliness and make Christ beautiful and believable, we pray. In his mighty name, amen. Matthew chapter five in verses 31 and 32, this is the word of God. It was also said, And whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the Word of the living God will stand forever and ever. Amen. One writer that I read recently remarked that 50 years ago, parents were likely to have a lot of children. But today, children are likely to have lots of parents. And we've all read the numbers, I'm sure, about the spiraling divorce rates in our country. Interestingly, those have gone down a little bit because people just aren't getting married anymore. So they're just living together, there's no thought of marriage and that's why we see a decline in divorce rates over the past five years. But we're tempted sometimes because of the bleak scenario which we see around us with respect to marriage to think that this is a new problem. And Jesus says it's not. And that's what he's going to speak to us about tonight, this age old problem of divorce. and an even older problem and blessing, if we could put it like that, of marriage. And this will be the first of two major sections in Matthew's Gospel that teach us about marriage. The next will be in Matthew 19. And as Derek has remarked in the morning services, it'll be a little while before we get there, so I'm sure I'll need a reminder by that point, and I don't expect anyone to remember when we're there either. But here we are in Matthew chapter 5, and there's a progression here that we've noted, the controlling verse that helps us interpret these verses is Matthew 5 20, where Jesus said those shocking words, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. And then he goes to six places in the Old Testament and corrects the Pharisaical misinterpretations of the law, and we come to the third of those this evening. And he's using this misapplication of God's law in the Old Testament relative to marriage and relationships because as he's teaching us what it looks like to follow him, he's dealing with the most intimate relationships any of us will ever have, namely that of marriage. And what I want us to see from these two verses is that Jesus corrects a false understanding of divorce and calls his disciples to radical marital faithfulness. He corrects a false understanding of divorce and calls us as his disciples to radical marital faithfulness. And those will be our two headings this evening. In verse 31, divorce, divorced. Divorce, divorced. And then in verse 32, marriage radicalized. Marriage radicalized. Look there again at verse 31. It was also said, whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. Typical of Jesus' teaching in this gospel there's an Old Testament background and I emphasize that week by week because it's easy for us as Christians to lose sight of just how Jewish the gospel is, just how much of the Old Testament is either cited or alluded to in the New Testament. And Jesus has in mind here Deuteronomy 24 and verses 1 through 4. Now that law was given and it speaks there about how if a man finds some kind of uncleanness in his wife, and the word there in the Hebrew means something like nakedness of shame in his wife, so something immoral has happened. The law there says let him give her a certificate of divorce, but if he all of a sudden has a change of heart and wants to take her back, he can't take her back. because then it would be committing adultery, because the marriage would be treated as never having happened. And what had happened by the time that Jesus starts teaching on this is the scribes had taken that law, the Pharisees had taken that law, and made it easy for people to get divorced. Now, the original intent of that law was to do two things. Number one, protect women. Think about the society in which that law was given. Women had very few rights. It would have been hard for a woman to survive apart from the protection and income of a husband. It's not like modern America where we can, you know, somebody can be single and a young lady and find a good job and provide for herself. That's not the way it was in the ancient world. So God initially meant this to protect women. And then secondly, he meant for it to make divorce hard, not easy. And so what the Pharisees had done is twisted that and come up with essentially the ancient equivalent of no-fault divorce laws. So that by the time Jesus is teaching, there's two rabbinical schools, there were two major rabbis that everybody would look to for instruction. And one was more strict, and one was more loose. And Jesus, when he gets to Matthew 19, they're going to try to trap him and fit him into one of those schools. But already here he's saying, I'm not like either one of them. My message is radically different. And that's why Jesus begins with this saying, it was said. Notice he doesn't say, scripture says, because it wasn't the scriptural teaching. And once again, it's a reminder to us of how easy it is. to twist God's law to meet our purposes. And I think that's nowhere more the case than when it comes to divorce and remarriage in our society today. People think very little of divorce. People think very little of marriage. Marriage all of a sudden becomes about the right kind of dress, who your caterer is, what your venue is, rather than what's actually happening and has happened countless times right down here. And that is this, and I tell every couple I do premarital counseling with, never forget that you are taking vows before God. And you might not feel any different after you take those vows, but your status has changed. You are no longer single. You have pledged your life to another human being. And God says to us over and over again, this is what he's going to talk about next week in the Sermon on the Mount, and that's keeping our vows. And we must never forget that. Marriage, as the old Anglican book of prayer has it, is not to be entered into thoughtlessly or heedlessly. How many times has that happened today? How many times did that happen in Jesus' day? And so we see the original intent of the law of God was to protect the institution of marriage, not make it easy to divorce. And that's why the scribes had divorced the whole concept of divorce. from its Scriptural background. And that takes us to the second point about marriage radicalized. Notice what Jesus says, but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. These are hard words, friends. We again think that it's a no fault divorce, right? That's the legal terminology. But what Jesus is doing here is taking us back to God's courtroom and saying there's only a few acceptable grounds for divorce. Now he's going to expand upon this in Matthew 19 and we have to be careful here that we are good Bereans. They were more noble than the Thessalonians Luke tells us in the book of Acts because they checked everything by the Scriptures. And we see in, for example, 1 Corinthians 7, 10 through 15, that Paul provides another ground for divorce. But they all have the same intent. What Jesus says and what Paul says were both given to us as the Word of God. And what Jesus is honing in on here is making a statement in such a way that the disciples will ask in Matthew 19, if that's the case, then it's better for a man if he didn't get married. In other words, what they're gonna say there is what they're thinking here, and what Jesus meant for us to think here. If this is true, then we better think really carefully about marriage and divorce. And when he speaks about sexual immorality, he uses a broad term here that can encompass all kinds of sexual sin. But the net effect is the same, he says. If you are divorced unscripturally, then you're automatically in an adulterous relationship. That's terrifying because he told us what happens if we're serial adulterers. We face the everlasting judgment of God. But we want to be careful here because hand in hand with no fault divorce laws comes a misunderstanding of what constitutes grounds for divorce. And what Jesus is saying here is that if someone commits adultery, it's a kind of cosmic treason against the most intimate relationship we will ever enjoy on this earth. And you see how these two passages from last week and this week are connected. He talked to us last week about lust in our hearts, but lust in our hearts rarely stays there. It usually ends up in the bed with someone else. Lust rarely stays in the abstract, it usually personifies itself. So that adultery in the bed began in the mind long before. And that's the natural consequence, isn't it, friends? What does the proverb say to us? As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. And the more that you have adulterous thoughts, the easier it is to make that leap from thought to action. And Jesus says that is one grounds for divorce, physical adultery. But other kinds of sexual sin are involved as well. Regular use of pornography in a marriage. That's sexual immorality, friends. And let me say if you're struggling with that, God wants to help you. He wants to give you hope. He wants to break that bondage in your life. Another ground of divorce that Paul's going to get into in 1 Corinthians 7 is when a couple, one of the spouses deserts one another. And closely allied to that is that there's been physical abuse. That happens more than we think. And it's such a psychological harm to the abused party that it's easy to cover up. And nobody wants to talk about it, but it happens more than we think. And let me say this, that if you're a husband who could ever raise your hand or put your hand on your wife, then let me assure you, you are not a Christian. And if your regular pattern is putting your hands on the one that God has entrusted to you, then the regular pattern for your eternity will God be putting his hand of chastening wrath upon you. And so that's another grounds for divorce. And yet, we're so twisted in our thinking and in our sin, we want to say, well, maybe I can get around what Jesus says here. Maybe I can find grounds for desertion in my own marriage. And if we stop and think about it, friends, we could see desertion around every corner, couldn't we? And this is why when it comes to marriage and it comes to talking about how the marriage relationship's supposed to be, the thing that has to be front and center at the outset is that when you come together with someone to be married to that person, you are not compatible. Do you know how we know that? Because we're sinners. Because the biggest marriage problem you have right now, irrespective, and I'm talking about normal marital problems, not the extreme cases that I just mentioned, but in the course of a normal marriage, the biggest problem we have is not the other person. The biggest problem in my marriage is me. And the biggest problem in your marriage is you. That's where we have to start. But so often today, how does the conversation quickly devolve? It devolves into, well, you know, my spouse just isn't quite the same. He or she doesn't look the same as when we got married. They're not as interesting anymore. One singer songwriter Jason Isbell summarized it well when he said, there's a couple in the corner of a bar and they've traveled life and clearly traveled far. She's got nothing left to learn about his heart and they're sitting there a thousand miles apart. That describes so many marriages today, doesn't it? And so as Jesus puts the lens on divorce, he's simultaneously putting the lens on our marriages, isn't it? He's asking us to take a close examination, if we're not married, about what it means to be married, and if we are married, what it means to stay married. And if there's one place where our lives will stand out as Christians, in the increasingly pagan culture we find ourselves in, it will be in our marriages. And that's why Jesus puts this, what we would say is extraordinarily harsh penalty, but it really begins to make sense, doesn't it? When we go back and look at what marriage was intended to be, we'll come back to that at the end. So then the question becomes for us here this evening as we think about what Jesus's words mean to us. Should I get a divorce? Maybe you're contemplating divorce. Maybe marriage is really, really hard for you. I have not been married that long. It's only been 15 years for Callie and I. We've got a lot to learn. But one thing we have learned is that there's a lot of irreconcilable differences between us. The question is, what do we do with them? The question is, how do we handle them? And that's what Jesus is focusing our minds on. Today, the default setting is the minute I'm not happy, I have the right to get a divorce. The minute that things begin to go wrong, I have a right to leave. And if that's our attitude, it betrays a shallow understanding of the gospel. Because as we've noticed again and again, one of the favorite metaphors in scripture to describe the marriage relation, to describe the relationship between Christ and his people is marriage. Again and again he says that to us. And so when we begin to think about marriage, it always takes us back to Christ. Go back to the prophecy of Hosea. I love that book. And how does it begin? Imagine being this husband. I used to have a friend in the ministry who said he was so thankful to be a minister in the new covenant and not a prophet in the old covenant. And Hosea's example proves that to be the case because God comes to him and says, you're going to marry a woman who's going to commit adultery against you. Marry her anyway. Because I have a lesson to teach my people through you, Hosea. And then the poignant scene there in the book of Hosea when she has given herself away to so many men, she finds herself being auctioned off and there's one bidder who goes higher than all the rest, her husband. Not her lovers, not the men who used her and threw her away like so much discarded garbage, but her husband. And why was that? Why did God do it that way? To give us a picture of what Christ is like to you and to me every day. And when we reframe our relationship to Jesus the way he tells us to, namely that of marriage, we begin to see why divorce is so wretched so much of the time. Might be right in a couple of instances. Might be really, really wise for you to get a divorce if it's scriptural. But so often it's not and we lose sight of the fact that we should be really thankful that Jesus does not treat us like we treat our spouses. Do you realize how many times today alone you've been unfaithful to your husband? Jesus, me too. Do you realize how many times every day we, as it were, cheat on Jesus? We go running after other gods. Just like the Old Testament says, and I love how the ESV does not sanitize that Hebrew verb, Israel's gone whoring after other gods. And we're the same way. And Jesus, The faithful husband is our Hosea if we are that gomer. He doesn't write you a certificate of divorce when you cheat on him. He keeps bidding higher and he goes even further than the prophet could have ever imagined. He says it will not be for silver or gold that I will redeem my bride, it will be my precious blood. That's what I'll give. She, my bride, gives herself away to so many other gods. I'll give myself for her on the cross. And it's that understanding of the gospel and that alone that can underwrite a truly biblical marriage. So if we come back to thinking about divorce, we're right back to grace. So if you are in a tight spot in your marriage, there's been arguments, there's been fights, and that's been exacerbated by the current circumstances, my friends, come back to Christ. Come back to the fountain of never-ceasing grace, and let's hone in on that a little bit. Do you pray together? Do you pray for each other if you're married? If you're not married and you're asking God for a spouse, what kind of a spouse are you looking for? Isn't it interesting that when we look through the Old Testament, whenever you want to find out if something's going to end poorly in the Old Testament history, just look at how the person is described. And if it's like, oh, they're tall and handsome like Saul, he'll be the right king. Nope. And we so easily slip into that same kind of thinking, don't we? You know, I want the spouse who's going to look the best, have the most money, the right social connections, and godliness doesn't ever enter into it. And as those of you who have been married far longer than I have know better than I do, the only way a marriage works is if the spouses love Jesus more than each other. That's the only way it lasts, friends. Because you see, if you're just in it for that beautiful woman that you married in her 20s, all of us are gonna get old. All of us are gonna look different. Time will get the best of you, no matter how much surgery you have, no matter how many creams you use, you will be a corpse one day, unless Jesus returns. God says, when you look different, the covenant doesn't. It's still there. Honeymoon ends, covenant never does. Or, if you're married to somebody because of what you think they can give you, then what have you done? You've transferred your selfishness to another person, and that's like trying to hang a cinder block on a thumbtack. You can't live up to those expectations. It won't work. You can paper it over for a little while, but sooner or later, especially in marriage, our true colors come through, don't they? So what are we doing in our marriages to prevent divorce? And if we're at a point where we think divorce is the only option, have we gone to Jesus with that? Have we sought out counseling? And I don't want to sound patronizing in any way here, but we have phenomenal counseling at this church. Josh Squires is one of the most skilled marital counselors I've ever had the privilege to learn from. And we have counselors at the counseling center. If you're a member here, and even if you're not, if you're just here, there's no excuse not to get counseling. We can help you. We want to help you. Jesus wants to help you. And that takes us to the last thing then. One author wrote that marriage means hearing both the words and the silences of the beloved. It means dreaming great dreams but also cleaning up the kitchen. It means sharing the deep concerns of the heart and the little bump on the toe. Close quote. How are we doing life together if we're married? How's that going? Are you seeking the Lord? Are you looking for ways to bless your spouse? Are you looking for ways to be even more faithful to your spouse? Has that crossed your mind? Are you beginning to learn what Jesus is going to say again and again through his teaching? And that is being a disciple of his means you're first and foremost all about him and then all about others and least of all about yourself. And that will show up first and foremost in our marriages. Are we doing that? And if there's marital strife in your homes, and how many Christian homes are like that, friends? How many Christian homes have their witness ruined by marital strife? How many of our children grow up in homes where marital strife is the norm? And one of the most convicting realities we can ever come face to face with is that we are teaching our children every moment we are with them, whether by words or by actions. And the older I get, the more that comes home to me. And therefore, as we think about these hard things, what we must never lose sight of is how faithful Jesus is to help us in our faithlessness. It's how amazingly patient he is with us. And how much he says, I want to keep you married if you're married. And if you're single, I wanna walk with you in that. And each trial is different for different kinds of people. And through it all, he says, I want you to see that by overcoming strife in relationships, discord in the home, you exalt my grace, my love, my mercy for you, my spouse. And isn't it interesting then to note that the Bible begins and ends with a wedding. It begins with Adam and Eve in the garden with the greatest officiant ever, God himself presiding over the vows. And then the Bible comes to a close in Revelation 21, Where, what is the new heavens and the new earth compared to but a bride adorned for her husband? As Jesus, as he promised in Ephesians 5 that he's gonna present his spouse without spot or blemish, comes down the aisle of history, made clean, not by her own works. not by her own doings, but by His grace and by His grace alone, such that history is closed out with a wedding. And the marital delight of eternity will be between Jesus and His people forever and ever. And as we begin to contemplate that, we once again come back to the fact that Everything we do as a disciple that Jesus is instructing us to be, everything we do must come from the grounding of His power or it's all for nothing. And so before we contemplate setting foot in the courtroom of an earthly magistrate to pronounce a marriage over, without scriptural support for doing so. Let's make sure we've gone to the heavenly courtroom and seen our heavenly spouse who stood before the bar of God's justice and said, for all of their unfaithfulness, I will pay. For all of their infidelity, I will be faithful. And for all time, Father, give them to me that I might make them blameless. Let's think about all of that before we think about divorce. Let's pray. Father, your words pierce us because they are true, and they humble us because we know our own desperate need of the Spirit, of the Savior, and of grace for our lives. So Lord, help us keep our marriage vows, Help us to be sexually pure. Help us to walk faithfully with you and help us to love you more than we will ever love any other person on this earth. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.