Marriage Goes Back to Eden, but with Sinners and Weeds.

Class Outline:

Thursday July 24, 2025

 

Jesus’ teaching on marriage and money (Mat 19-20) is set under the framework of healing (MAT 19:1-2). His teachings are deep therapy or therapeutic. The teaching will be heard by those who follow Him, and they are the ones healed by Him.

 

It is significant that the disciple’s values are tested on the way to Jerusalem for in the city, the paradoxical values of the kingdom of heaven will be put to the ultimate test.

 

Text: MAT 19:1-9

 

The ethical stance of marriage Jesus already set forth in the Sermon on the Mount, but there it was a part of a wider teaching on the heart of the Law and here it stands alone and is more fully developed.

 

The Pharisees came to Him in order to test Him. The same word is used on the devil in MAT 4:3; peirazo: tempt, test, or try to trick.

 

What’s the trick? Is it lawful (biblical) for a man to divorce his wife for any reason (cause, charge)?

 

They likely know His teaching already, in MAT 5:31-32.

 

Divorce

 

Deut 24:1-4

"When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out from his house, 2 and she leaves his house and goes and becomes another man's wife,  3 and if the latter husband turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies who took her to be his wife, 4 then her former husband who sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife, since she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before the Lord, and you shall not bring sin on the land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance.

 

Only pentateuchal passage which directly speaks of divorce. It served as the basis for all subsequent Jewish teaching on the subject.

 

They assume that Moses “commanded” not only the divorce but the certificate. It is not a commandment.

 

What they missed or ignored was God’s will for marriage.

GEN 1:27-28

GEN 2:23-24

 

DEU 24:1 was cause for fruitful debate, “he has found some indecency in her.” (something shameful - literally nakedness / shame, a phrase which allowed a wide variety of specific interpretations.

 

Jesus’ concern is getting back to first principles, to God’s original intention for marriage, not as in DEU 24:1-4 with regulating what follows after those principles have already been broken.

 

If adultery occurred then “one flesh” was made with someone else and the union was violated and the original marriage dissolved.

 

God’s sovereign will:

 

From the beginning marriage is monogamous, heterosexual, and indissoluble and so this is not some sudden spasm of legalism or something new and radical.

 

It can also be assumed that it is the sexual union that makes the two people one flesh in a permanent union and not just the agreement or legal contract. Paul intimates this in 1CO 6:16 in which he also quotes GEN 2:24.

 

1CO 6:12-20

All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. 13 Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both of them. Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body. 14 Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be! 16 Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For He says, "THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH." 17 But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.  18 Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.

 

The joining of a man and woman is so profound that it creates a third reality in the world: one-flesh marriage.

 

Perversion by sin:

 

Perhaps we can begin to fathom the mess that fallen mankind has made of marriage. Not just in modern times, but from the beginning.

 

GEN 4:19

Lamech took to himself two wives:

 

GEN 4:24

If Cain is avenged sevenfold,

Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold."

 

Both marriage and brotherly love broke down together.

 

MAT 19:6

"So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate."

 

It might be argued that it is impossible to separate them. God makes them one flesh and that is its being. They are no longer two but one flesh is declarative. Let no man separate is present imperative.

 

He emphasizes this (God did from the beginning). He could say, “They are one flesh,” but underlining it by saying first, “they are no longer two,” and further added is the commandment, “let no man separate” because God Himself has joined them.

 

Application:

 

Not good for the man to live in isolation. God made us to become one as the Trinity is one, but in our case, with two. It is to be a union like no other.  

 

Jesus is bringing heaven’s ways to the church. The disciples do not understand them. They differ from the conventional. But they will.

 

Also, one might assume that the individualism of each is lost as they become one flesh, but think again of your marriage to Christ. You did not lose your individualism, you in fact found it.

 

It is a seeming paradox, but true, that the deepest interdependencies are where true independence flourishes. Isolation limits my options to exercise virtues.

 

Interdependence has to be a life-long commitment, which means that each must commit.

 

Our point of view is from Genesis.

 

We must not miss that it is God who joined together, not the participants, or the officiant, or nature.