In his sermon 'Let Not Man Separate,' Scott Brown offers an exposition on Matthew 19:1-6, exploring Jesus' teachings on marriage and divorce. Set against the backdrop of Jesus' travels to Judea, where the Pharisees challenge him with questions about divorce, Brown emphasizes the divine design of marriage as an institution created by God. He highlights the importance of understanding marriage as a covenant-keeping relationship, reflecting God's love and the Gospel. The sermon urges a high view of marriage, contrasting it with contemporary cultural norms that often prioritize self-fulfillment. Brown calls on both single and married individuals to recognize the significance of marriage, emphasizing its role in reflecting the Gospel through love, patience, and forgiveness. He warns against the cultural and spiritual challenges that can lead to divorce, advocating for the preservation and strengthening of marriages as a testimony to God's covenantal love.

Matthew chapter 19 verses 1 through 6. Now it came to pass when Jesus had finished these sayings that he departed from Galilee and came to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, and Great multitudes followed him, and he healed them there. The Pharisees also came to him, testing him and saying to him, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason? And he answered and said to them, Have you not read that he who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined his wife, and the two shall become one flesh? So then, they are no longer two, but one flesh.

Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate." Holy Father God, we rejoice in the words that you've given to us this morning. We rejoice, Lord Jesus, that you have communicated to us the deep riches of this amazing institution that you have given to us in marriage. Lord, we pray that you would by the power of your Holy Spirit open the eyes of our heart to receive your word, that you would bless Scott Brown as he preaches it this morning. Lord, may hearts be opened and softened. May marriages be restored and beautified.

And Lord, may we all walk out this morning with our minds more in line with the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Please be seated. As you know, our pattern in this church on Sunday mornings is to do sequential exposition of the scriptures. I've had to smile over the last couple of months at how these expositions have fallen in the right place.

It was the Internal Revenue Service Day April 15th that we just happened to be in the text on the paying of the temple tax and here here on Mother's Day we're we're we're in a passage that tells you what creates mothers and also you know our state has just gone through an enormously significant week as there was a vote on the definition of marriage. And here we are in one of the key passages of scripture that speak about the definition of marriage. We were struggling with issues of church discipline and we ended up in Matthew 18. What's next? What's the next text?

I hope no one's going to have a divorce next week because that's what we're going to deal with next week. So that here in Matthew 18 or 19, 1 through 6, we encounter the Lord's teaching to the Pharisees and also the disciples on marriage. And so over the next few weeks we'll be working our way through Matthew 19 in these texts. We started out thinking we would go all the way to verse 12, decided against it, and we're going to actually linger here for a while in this whole matter of marriage. So today The focus will be really on the positive meaning and definition, function and purpose of marriage in verses one through six, and we're going to laser beam focus on that.

And then next week we'll focus on verses seven through nine where Jesus gives instruction about divorce and and we'll also be incorporating first Corinthians chapter seven and possibly actually do a full exposition ultimately of first Corinthians seven because there you have the didactic texts that explain these things that are here. And then finally we'll deal with verses 10 through 12 which the Lord speaks about singleness. We have a lot of single people here today. In fact, we're in this text regarding marriage. I think we just need to recognize something that I hope is obvious.

There are way more single people here today than there are married people. And I'm grateful for that because there's no better time to understand the mind of God for marriage than before you get married. So you younger ones listen up. If you're not married, you know, get those notepads out, start scratching really hard here because this is really an important moment that God has brought you to. And he really does desire to train up a generation who knows how to be married.

And we'll get to the significance of how important that is as we move through this passage of Scripture. So there you have an outline in front of you. I'm going to deal with the context first that's really cast forth in verses one and two. We'll move into the question that the Pharisees ask, and then finally we'll answer the question the way that Jesus does in these three ways. Now no one ever had a high enough view of marriage.

You've never been the citizen of a nation that had a high enough view of marriage. You've never grown up in any family that ever had a high enough view of marriage. In your own thinking, you've never had a high enough view of marriage. There's no church that ever had a high enough view of marriage. There's no preacher that could somehow plumb the depths and climb the heights of the significance of marriage.

There's no husband who has ever been able to completely fulfill the grand vision of marriage that God has in his own mind, that he has demonstrated in his own kingdom and through the sending of his own son to rescue a bride. There's never been a wife ever, who ever existed, who had a high enough view of marriage, who really was able to grasp it in all its fullest because it is such a magnificent vision and it really is meant to draw us all up out of our own thinking, out of our own historical background and our own lives, the parents that we had, the marriages that we now have. God is always calling us up. And so here in this passage we have this call from God to come on up, come on up to a higher plane and understand my heart's desire for marriage. Now this instruction, interestingly enough, takes place in a pretty hostile, hot environment Because it takes place at a moment where the Pharisees are trying to trap Jesus for one single purpose, to kill him.

And so he has his plotters before him, the ones he know who desire to be his assassins. And yet, what does he do? He speaks of the greatest act of the love of God in the midst of all of this hatred. This is that the Lord Jesus Christ so patiently teaches the Pharisees that they cannot really even think for a single second about divorce until they think more clearly about what marriage is. And so you cannot understand the subject of divorce unless you understand what God has to say about marriage.

And that's the focus of our time here this morning. Now, the words before us are filled with very graphic and very beautiful imagery that guide us into our understanding of marriage. I'll just play my hand right now. My prayer all week has been somehow the beauty, the happiness of marriage, the greatness of it, that we would be able to grasp it. Maybe in a new way this morning.

I know only the Holy Spirit of God can open up minds to somehow be able to grasp something so wonderful and then to actually apply it, to actually live it out, to be a living picture of it. So my prayer is really for that. And just to recognize that The language here is so consistent with the language of the rest of scripture. When God speaks about marriage, He uses some of the most stunning images and words that you can imagine. For example, in Malachi chapter 2, the prophet calls marriage the Lord's holy institution, which he loves.

What a wonderful thing. This is a holy institution that the Lord loves. The Lord loves this institution that you have entered into. The Lord loves this institution that you most likely will enter into as a single person here today. The majority of you here now understand that the Lord loves this institution, and so He speaks so carefully and beautifully about it.

And what this passage again shows us, as we've been shown over and over and over again in the Gospel of Matthew is that God gives us types to teach us things about Himself. And He gives marriage as a type. And you might just think of how kind of God it is that he would give marriage as a type. He would give something that you can never get away from. There's not a single person on the planet that is somehow disconnected from marriage.

If you are on the planet today, somehow you are on this earth because of this institution, maybe even because of the violating it. But there's not a person in the world that can escape the imagery of marriage. God has so kindly placed that front and center to teach every person in the world about His love. And He's placed something so graciously before them that they absolutely cannot escape by virtue of their humanity. And I just am so grateful for the Lord.

He does that in so many ways. He gives us light, He gives us water, He gives us trees, he gives us rivers, he gives us so many things, he just places things before us so that we would know how glorious and how good he is. And so that we cannot escape the demonstrations of the visualizations of his love for us and for all mankind. And so what I want to say here, which is now actually turning into a very long introduction, is that Whether you're married today or not, that what Jesus says about marriage applies to you. Honestly, I mean, my heart really beats mightily for those who are not married, because I know how important it is to prepare your heart for such a great thing.

And I also know that many of the struggles of marriage that you couples are experiencing today, they have to do with the lack of understanding and preparation for this matter. So I just feel like we're in a very critical moment. That's why we're going to spend a few weeks on this subject. And I and I and I do so pray that those who are not married the majority of the crowd here would really dial in to what's here and get and get a real picture of what marriage has to do with. And what is marriage all about?

I'll just say it in the simplest terms as I can. Marriage is a picture of the patient and passionate rescue of a bride. In its most irreducible form, marriage is nothing less than a declaration of God's covenant-keeping love. That's why I hope that this morning is a very encouraging morning for you to just saturate yourself in the words and the principles that explain what God's covenant-keeping love is all about. So marriage, while it proclaims many things, it most centrally proclaims the love of God.

And that's why Marriage is a picture of the Gospel. Many of you attended a conference that I put on last year, Gospel-centered marriages for a glorious Church. That really speaks of the heart of God on marriage. Now, What that means though is that when you violate marriage, you violate the Gospel because marriage proclaims the Gospel in an everyday encounter with your spouse or perhaps even as you are preparing to be a spouse. Even your understanding of the gospel as a young person is so important for your future marriage.

If you do not understand the gospel, you cannot be the marriage partner that God has designed for you to be. And honestly, the greatest problems in marriage, you can always run a straight line to a violation of the Gospel. There's some violation of love. There's something that exists there that contradicts the Gospel. A broken marriage, an unhappy marriage is an absolute and complete contradiction to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

You may believe the points of the Gospel intellectually, but it's quite another thing to live the gospel. And the Lord Jesus Christ makes that very clear in this passage of Scripture. And in this passage of Scripture we learn the language of marriage. And the primary issue here that we're going to speak of is really summed up in the title that I've selected for this message, Let No Man Separate. So that's an introduction.

Now, when the Lord Jesus speaks these words, He's speaking them at a time of really significant controversy in Israel. Israel was split on marriage and that's the context as it is today. And so, Matthew 19 really gives us a window into the fierceness of this controversy and how the Pharisees wanted to capitalize on the controversy in order to trap the Lord Jesus to create grounds to actually kill him. So let's look at verses 1 and 2 to see the context out of which this teaching emerges. And the context is that Jesus is heading toward Jerusalem and he's healing the multitudes on the way.

In verse 1 we read, now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings. So Jesus had just finished at some time in recent past explaining to his disciples the importance of unlimited forgiveness. I think it's really interesting that at least in Matthew's logic he has the Lord Jesus instructing his disciples about forgiveness and then he turns to the most fundamental relationship where forgiveness is actually the hardest, marriage. And so there's this change. Now there's a complete change in geography here.

We've seen a number of geographical changes in the gospel so far. And now, after teaching the disciples about unlimited forgiveness, he now teaches them about unwavering devotion in marriage. And so the scenery has changed. This begins Jesus what is called Korean ministry he is in Korea and and they are they're traveling south avoiding Samaria they're on the eastern side of the Jordan River at this point And what we find happening here is so consistent with what we've seen over and over again, and that is that Jesus is healing the multitudes. He says that the multitudes are there and He healed them there.

And this is what Jesus does everywhere he goes. And I love this phrase in the text, and he healed them there because it so explains the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ for his sheep. And our Lord, the Son of righteousness, who's arisen with healing in His wings, is now healing them there. And He's always ready to heal and to save. He's always ready to heal the angry and resentful heart calling them to forgive.

He's always there to heal the marriage that's broken. He's always there to heal the relationship. And he says, if your brother's sins against you, go to him. And then if things don't work out as you would hope, then forgive him at least seven times a day, at minimum. And the Lord is always operating in order to heal and to save relationships of every kind.

Here now he's doing what he always does, he's healing. Now there never was in the history of the world anyone who healed more than Jesus Christ. And I'm just so grateful for the healing power of Jesus Christ. This is the heart of the influence of the gospel. And it ought to be the heart of the influence of the gospel here in our church, that we are a healing people.

Sin comes to the surface. We're reminded of things that need to be addressed in God, uses those things, even our sins against one another to work for the healing of one another. And so here the disciples and the Lord Jesus are on this mission and they are they're moving there and they're always there they seem to always be moving they seem to always be healing they seem to always be instructing in some way Christianity is a teaching religion and that's what they're doing they're just continuing to move and I just just want to pause and just ask us to consider our own lives. Where are you at in whatever stage of life that you are? We know here with the disciples, they're moving.

They have an objective. There are things that they must do. What about you? You know, your mission is really the same mission as the mission of the Lord Jesus Christ as you become like him and that is to bear the healing That is in the wings of your Savior. So whether you are very young and unmarried or you're older and unmarried or whether you're newly married or you've been married for a while or maybe you're an old person, you know, and your life is very different now.

The truth is, is that God has called us to a life of healing in exactly the same way that our Savior was living a life of healing. And so, however, not everyone appreciated the healing, not everyone appreciated the agenda of the disciples, nor did they desire their affections or their love. The Pharisees' hearts were not warm. Their minds were not comforted. Their lives were not sweetened by Him.

They hated Him. And that takes us to verse 3, where they asked the question, and the Pharisees also came to him, testing him and saying to him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason? The Pharisees are always very precise in their questioning, and they're testing him. They're not really interested in his answer. They were the grand loop-holers of the day.

They were the technicians of the avoidance of the heart of love that our Lord Jesus Christ represented. And so their hatred was actually expressed in the form of a question. And Christ takes their hatred And he causes all things to work together for good, and he uses that to explain the depths of his love. Now, this instruction about marriage and divorce hangs on two questions. There's this question in verse 3, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?

And of course, the Lord says no. And if the Lord says no, then they will catch him in one violation of breaking the law of Deuteronomy chapter 24. If he answers yes, then they'll accuse him of licentiousness and antinomianism. Either way, we'll get Jesus in trouble with one party or another, because as I said before, Israel was split on the matter of marriage and this question forces even greater division and splitting. And but At least you might say this, hey, at least they asked the right person.

No one knows more about marriage than Jesus. No one loves the family more than Jesus Christ. No one knows how to heal a family. No one knows how to bless a marriage like Jesus Christ. He designed marriage.

So the accusers have actually asked the wrong person. They've asked the designer of marriage. Who knows exactly what to say? And then the second question appears in verse 7, which we'll encounter next week. And they said to him, why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce and put her away.

So we'll deal with that question next time. Now, this whole idea of divorce I think you know just should remind us of a reality and that is that everyone is affected by divorce. There's not a single person in this room that is not affected by divorce in some way, that has a family member who was divorced or has a friend who was divorced or maybe you have been divorced yourself. There really is no crowd of people in America that you can speak to that does not have some very direct connection to divorce somewhere in their lives. They've had to grapple with it with blended families and all kinds of things like that.

So this subject is as relevant today as it was then. Because you have, I believe, from what I understand, some really similar conditions operating, similar principles that have gripped people's hearts in that day, that have also gripped people's hearts in our day as well. And, you know, it just bears witness to this great design of the serpent to destroy marriage. He has always worked to destroy marriage. And all of this just bears witness to a fact that we must really grasp in all of its gravity.

And that is this. There are homewreckers everywhere. The Lord Jesus had just said, stumbling stones will come. But woe to you. Woe to those from whom those stumblings come.

There are home records everywhere. You know, it was a few years ago I went into one of the local malls here. And I hadn't been to a mall, it seemed like, for a long time. And as I was walking through, I was shocked at what was being displayed in the storefronts. And one of the storefronts had a picture of a, it was a popular youth clothing store with a large window mural in front of it with a young man pictured and the caption was home builder by day, home wrecker by night.

Now that, I mean I think that really pictures our culture. There are so many homewreckers that are praised and paraded before us that we live in a culture that has a really hard time staying married because we are always We are engaging them. We look at them. We participate in the thoughts that drive the home-wrecking that exists in our culture. And as a result, we happen to be the kind of culture where you can stand up in any crowd anywhere in America and every single person has some some connection with divorce at some level.

So this is this is a very, very critical and important issue for us to deal with. So our Lord turns the question of the Pharisees. His answer runs completely crosswise with the way that they were thinking. And his answer really runs crosswise with the whole mentality of our culture that we live in here. Now, the mentality surrounding marriage in our own culture probably surrounds more the idea of self-fulfillment.

That marriage exists for self-fulfillment. And so we ask all kinds of questions of our marriages. Am I fulfilled? Are we compatible? Are my needs being met?

Am I growing? Have I outgrown my spouse? Do I have the me time that I need? These are the questions that people ask about their marriages. And they actually, I mean, they just bear witness to a corrupt and adulterous generation that doesn't understand marriage at all.

Those are not the questions that married people should be asking because they actually have nothing to do with the divine design of marriage. So one of the problems that we have in living in a culture that we do is that we ask the wrong questions and we give those questions the wrong answers. And as a result, there are so many homewreckers among us. Even our very thoughts are homewrecking thoughts. And so we have tremendous challenges here in our culture.

Now, the Pharisees here introduce a reason for divorce. This is why they phrased the question the way they did. The question, very carefully stated, was, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason? You know why they asked that question? Well, many people in the culture believed that you could just divorce your wife for any reason.

That's why. That was one of the great and popular schools of thought. And so this question was bringing a controversy to the surface. Now, we have to somehow grasp how controversial this was. Not only did you have two schools of thought that were popular in Israel, Let's remember where the Lord Jesus is now.

He has just passed into a completely different jurisdiction. Guess whose jurisdiction he passed into? Herod, Herod Antipas. Remember what happened with John the Baptist when he challenged the unlawful marriage of Herod, his head was chopped off because he said, you have your brother's wife. John the Baptist lost his life in this jurisdiction over this issue.

So you can see the great depravity of the Pharisees and really the strategic mindedness. These were not stupid men. They had him in a jurisdiction where you could get your head chopped off for having the wrong view of divorce and making it public. At the same time, he was there in a place where there was significant division. So the Pharisees expressed their depravity in this very scene here.

They're acting in a very careful way. The two views of marriage that really stand behind this question are, there are two schools of thought. There was the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai. The school of Hillel, taught that Deuteronomy 24, verse 1, meant that a man literally could divorce his wife for anything. Well, like, I mean anything, like talking too loud, like burning his food, or speaking ill of her mother-in-law, or infertility.

The school of Hillel pronounced that marriage didn't really have that much gluing power and that you could divorce your wife for about anything. Now it's like that today I was speaking with a friend of mine today just this last week who is in another state and in the laws of that state, you can divorce your spouse for anything. You do not need their consent. There's no fault. You can just divorce.

You can divorce your wife because you don't like the color of her hair. You do not need a reason to divorce in that state. It's exactly like the school of Hillel. It's alive and well today. It never really died out.

The school is ruling and raging, really, pretty much the majority view of those who live in our nation today. I mean, you can go to places like Sweden where they don't even get married anymore. So the school of Hallel has definitely gotten traction in the world. Hallel was a rabbi. He died about 20 years before Jesus' public ministry began.

And so this was the scene. The school of Shammai, however, taught that adultery was the only reason for divorce. And so these were the two traditions that existed. This was the controversy in which Jesus was answering this question. Now, let's just recognize that in every era, there are traditions of men that govern people's lives and the schools of Hillel and Shemai represent that here and it's always the responsibility of God's people to determine what is that tradition of man that is defiling the gospel and contradicting the word of God.

And that is a critical issue for our lives here in the world. We have to always ask ourselves that question. What traditions of men are strangling me? Because there are always traditions of men that are strangling the people of God. It's inescapable.

You might think that you have escaped them by becoming a part of a church or holding a particular philosophy of life. Not true. You cannot escape the traditions of men, which makes the glory of the grace of God so important for us, as the grace of God overwhelms our worst thoughts that we're not even aware of, are the traditions of men. So the devil has always approached marriage in attack mode, And it is for the people of God to recognize the traditions of men. This question that the Pharisees ask bears witness to this whole issue of the traditions of men overturning the commandments of God.

And in this case, it has to do with marriage. So Jesus, however, he bypasses Deuteronomy 24 in his answer, And he appeals to the original text on marriage in Genesis chapter 2. And he goes to Genesis chapters 1 and 2 where the positive will of God is revealed about marriage, where his intentions for marriage are qualified and they're clarified. Now, there are three principles that the Lord Jesus uses to instruct the Pharisees about marriage. And the first is the creation order of male and female.

And he answered and said to them, have you not read that he who made them at the beginning made them male and female. So the Lord begins his answer with four words, have you not read. That's really important by the way. Have you not read. He appeals to Sola Scriptura, he is he is harkening back to the very authority and the sufficiency of Scripture for all of life.

So he says, have you not read? And our Lord goes back to the same thing that he always goes back to. He goes back to Scripture. All of the important issues of culture are answered in Scripture. That's where we ought to go.

And our Lord, He does not invent, He just advocates what has already been established. Now our Lord has done this many, many times already in the Gospel of Matthew where He says, have you not read? He did it about the Sabbath in chapter 12 verse 5. He did it when the children were rejoicing in the triumphal entry in chapter 21 verse 16. He says, have you never read out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants have perfected praise?

There are a number of places that this phrase appears, and it appears here. Now, scripture is the benchmark. We have no other authority but the Bible. We have nothing to say but what is in the Bible. The Bible is the Word of God written in the words of man.

God has put his words in human words through human instruments. And for us to add or subtract would cause us to go astray. Why? Because the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure and light in the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean and enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

And by them is thy servant worn, and in keeping of them there is great reward." So the Lord Jesus Christ goes back to what is sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to explain to them what marriage is all about. And he goes to the creation order. He says that he who made them at the beginning made them male and female. So the Lord Jesus is answering the question by actually explaining what marriage is all about instead of just giving them a yes or no answer. And he returns to the creation order.

The Pharisees actually in the school of Hillel have made man the sole arbiter of things of marriage. A man can divorce his wife for anything. The school of Hillel only made maleness as the arbiter for divorce. Making man the authority. And here the Lord Jesus Christ in his answer saying that he made them male and female.

In other words, it's not a man's singular authority that governs divorce. It is God. And a man does not stand above a woman in this matter, in any way, shape, or form, Because he made them male and female. You know, this was, it was patriarchy run amok. And while the scripture says that the woman was taken out of man and that they are equal in their creation and salvation though they have different roles but they have the same value as a man.

The Lord Jesus is calling the question here And he's nailing them right between the eyes. Because femaleness didn't mean anything to the school of Hillel. But the Lord Jesus Christ contradicts that. He says, no, in the beginning he made them male and female, and thereby unraveling their principle. And so here there is an authoritative document to consult for all things considering marriage.

You know, it's interesting to me that this matter of it is male and female that enter into marriage, that this tax falls on the week that it has fallen. And thankfully, though, the state of North Carolina became the 30th state to vote to continue to define marriage as between a man and a woman. But the marriage amendment stated, marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that all that shall be valid or recognized in this state. Brothers and sisters I praise God for that that actually the majority of the people in our state stood for that principle. I think we should give thanks to God for that.

You know there were all kinds of statistical studies, you know, surveys going around, you know, saying that, you know, about 50% of the people in America support a homosexual marriage and yet in our state God God blessed us in this in this way and I'm so grateful that he did and you know even in last week last Saturday we you know we had probably 30 or 40 people down at the LGBT festival to go share the gospel to talk about the fact that man has made the image of God and that his greatest problem is sin and he should turn to Jesus Christ and believe in him and be delivered from this and all in this week and now we're in this text it's real it's really interesting to me what we What we learn here is that marriage is a work of God in the creation of male and female. And then, and out of this come the basic functions of marriage. The function of procreation, the function of sanctification, the function of the manifestation of the glory of the gospel. These are the basic functions of marriage and they come out of this fundamental fact of life that that man is made as male and female and that's what marriage is is all about.

And then not only that but the act of marriage is appealed to in verses 5 and 6. In the act of marriage, two become one. So again, the Lord is answering the question by not actually answering the question with a yes or no answer. He's teaching them about marriage and his disciples are now learning. Now let's recognize something about the disciples.

The disciples' minds had been significantly polluted by their culture Because when they hear Jesus say this, what they say is, I don't want that kind of commitment. I want to be able to get out of my marriage. Why would they say that? They had become children of their culture. And the Lord Jesus is pulling them up.

He's pulling them out. He's calling them away from this culture of divorce that has grown up. And so he says then in verse 5, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So then they are no longer two but one flesh. Now here we have what is the most central issue of marriage, oneness.

If you're a young person today and you want to say, hey, what's marriage all about? I'll give you one single word, okay? Oneness, that's it. That really actually, you can take everything about marriage and you can boil it down to that. And the challenge in marriage is to create and maintain oneness and to cause it to continue to grow.

And so our Lord is describing how it is that two people get married And first he gives the reason for this reason. And the reason is because God made male and female. Marriage exists because God did something in creation. He created marriage. He ordered creation to demand marriage.

And in the beginning, he made them male and female. And so the Lord Jesus is speaking of both male and female. By the way, the word that he uses for here for for man is anthropos. It's not it's it's it's neither neither a feminine or masculine, but a human being. And so marriage is the norm because male and female are the norm as it was God's design to bring male and female together.

And this is why homosexual is such an aberration to nature and why it's sinful because God did not design to bring male and male or female and female together. But what did he design the male and female to do? Well he will have them leave their father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So then they are no longer two but one flesh." So there are these three words here that are in verse 5, leaving, males and females are born into families and they are meant someday to leave and form a new home. And so what God has done with marriage is he's created a mechanism for someone to create something new, actually to escape their old life in their family.

This is the way God designed it. You grow up in a family, you see various problems. Some may actually want to escape, which is actually a sinful desire. However, there is a godly and holy aspect of this escape. Because God in his kingdom desires to do something new, to do something better, to sanctify it more thoroughly, to make it more beautiful.

Yes, God desires you single people to make a marriage far better than your parents' marriage. He wants you to leave. He wants you to escape and create something completely new, to set up a new government together. A husband and wife mingling their energies and their hearts together, their dreams together, their hopes, and then going and doing something new. It's such a fantastic thing.

Just this last week, my wife Deborah took our daughter Claudia back to California, and there she stood on the ground where I proposed her she took Claudia to the to the place where I proposed to Deborah and the place that we get the church that we got married and the and our little I call it our honeymoon house is our first house this little tiny house out in the country in San Diego County. And they were texting me these pictures this week. But it just, it brought back so many memories of our first years of marriage and planning together and working together and having both left our parents' homes and our parents being such a blessing to us by letting us go and not trying to put pressure on us or try to create their lives through us. None of that at all. They understood this principle that you leave, that you leave and you cleave.

And it's a blessed thing that God gives. He gives A new open field to young people in their marriage. And it's a fantastic thing. You should look forward to it. It's a blessing.

And the Lord Jesus is speaking about this leading and creating something fresh. You have been married for a while, right? Think of the ideas that you had when you first got married. How you wanted things to be. I mean, is it possible that it would be really helpful to go back and bring those things up again?

And maybe their hopes, maybe the hopes for them have been dimmed. Bring them back up. Bring them back up. And create that new thing, that new world. I mean, this does mirror a picture of the Gospel.

What did Jesus Christ do? He left his Father's heavenly glory to come and establish a new community, a new bride, to do something new, to bring a new covenant to a new community, to give them something better, to give them the Holy Spirit, to give them more of the Word of God, to make it far better. This is what Jesus Christ did when He left heavenly glory. You should have a glint in your eye for the creation of more glory. Get locked in on it, married couples, and get anticipating it, you who are not.

Because it is for the glory of God that you leave and you cleave in the same way that the Lord Jesus Christ left His father's glory. Now when he left his glory to rescue his bride, he did have to suffer, didn't he? Because every marriage requires some level of suffering. But every husband and every wife has a role to play in the midst of that suffering. That a husband loves his wife like Christ loved the church and gave himself for her and that a wife is a submissive and trustful, hopeful keeper at home in order to fulfill the divine pattern.

And by very virtue of these different roles, there are opportunities for suffering and disappointment and sinning against one another. And God has created marriage for that purpose. To declare His own glory, to declare the rescue of a bride in all the smoke and the fire and the difficulty that is involved in rescuing. When you rescue a bride, let me just say it takes your whole life long. When you are a bride, it takes your whole life long to learn how to love your husband.

This is the way that God designed it. And then leaving and then joining or the Old Testament word is cleaving. The word that the Lord Jesus used has to do with attachment, yoking in a yoke. In Genesis the terminology is to bond like cement, like to glue. So where you bond something with something and if you try to pull it apart it actually rips out part of the thing it was glued to.

And there's this gripping joining of union that God has designed in marriage. And then there is one flesh. The two shall become one flesh. By the way, the Greek word here is duo. The duo.

The duo shall become one. I like that. And to separate the duo is to tear them apart, to rip them in two. Now the Pharisees, remember, they didn't see any of it. They didn't see that it was the tearing of someone.

They just thought you could divorce your wife for any reason. But there was no tearing at all. That was false. And the Lord Jesus Christ is speaking of the seriousness of this union and how it must be preserved. We could speak of this whole matter of the joys of one flesh, of being one flesh.

Of course there's physical intimacy that's implied in this. And of course when we get to 1 Corinthians 7, we'll go in detail on the whole matter that the only reason a couple should ever not be intimate in their marriage is for the purpose of prayer and fasting, not for tiredness, not for loathing, not for headaches. All these things point to a malfunction in your life. And God has given you marriage to escape those malfunctions, to repent of those sins that are creating the abstinence that is not the will of God. Let the Roman Catholics keep their abstinence.

That's not for Christianity. The Roman Catholics created over 200 days of abstinence in the calendar for a couple. This is a wicked contradiction of the whole principle of intimacy. And, but in Corinthians we learn the husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife and the wife to her husband. And that the wife's body doesn't belong to her.

That sort of contradicts the whole feminist movement, doesn't it? Don't you think? And the man's wife doesn't belong to him either, by the way. It actually goes both ways. There's no one upmanship in this at all.

And that they cannot deprive one another except for mutual consent for a time that they may devote themselves to prayer, why? So that the devil doesn't come and tempt them. So the two shall become one flesh and that kind of physical oneness should be continuous and regular. If it's not, There is a sin standing in the way of it. And you have to ask yourself, what is that sin?

Irregularity, distance is created by sin. And it's very dangerous because it's a foothold for the devil. So if you're having difficulty with intimacy, let me just ask you as husbands and wives to do this one single thing. Each one of you ask, what sin is it in my heart that is causing this ungodly deprivation. Because it is an ungodly deprivation.

It completely contradicts the glory of the gospel, where there is oneness in Christ, where Christ is in you, the hope of glory. When you have a marriage that contradicts this, you are contradicting the gospel. It's that big of a deal. And so here the Lord Jesus is just taking one step at a time to explain how ridiculous and contradictory the Pharisees were to the love of God in Christ Jesus. And then there's not only this physical union, but there's a moral union, there's a spiritual union, there's an intellectual union, there's a strategic union where husband and wife are planning their lives in a particular direction.

God pairs people perfectly. He has paired you with the perfect partner by the way. This one flesh is so deep to try to grasp. Let me quote the Puritan, Thomas Hooker. People say the Puritans, you know, had a low view of intimacy.

Not true at all, actually. If you read the Puritans, They actually were sort of on the edge of their Roman Catholic society, who did not believe in days of abstinence. Here's what Thomas Hooker says. And I think this is so beautiful because it speaks of the endearment and intimacy that God desires in Mary. The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye, and apprehension when he awakes, He muses on her as he sits at the table.

He walks with her when he travels. She lies in his bosom, and his heart trusts her, which forces all to confess that the stream of his affection, like a mighty current runs with full tide and strength. The two shall be one flesh. So our Lord Jesus Christ left His Father's throne to create a new community with far, far more resources and beauty in order to be made one with His Bride, that he might be in them and they in him, that they may be one. And marriage is a picture of that.

You know, it's so interesting to me that the holiest things are so profaned in the world and belittled. But this is a very sacred thing. And then thirdly, the inseparability of a man and a wife. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate. The phrase, what God has joined together means that man is not the center of the marriage.

God is the center of the marriage. It is about what God did. You may go to the altar and say, I do, But let me just tell you, it wasn't you that put you together. It was God. He joined you together, not man.

And that's why he says, what God has joined together, Let no man separate or put asunder or divide." So he in no uncertain terms communicates his will for marriage. And whatever arguments you might want to raise up against the permanence of your marriage, you have to understand that this phrase contradicts it. And it is perfectly clear and it is permanently in force. And Jesus is saying that the breakup of marriage is a very, very serious matter. It actually is a usurping of the authority of God because when God is joined together, it should not be separated.

And of course, the Pharisees had misapplied Deuteronomy 24 and they had placed man at the center of marriage. And they believed that man could do anything he wanted with marriage because he was a patriarchal head, which contradicts the Gospel. Now, you may... Okay, here's the deal. So maybe you think you married the wrong woman.

Maybe you think you married the wrong man. Or maybe you think you made a huge mistake and it was mistakes that tripped you into your marriage. Or maybe you had a bad premarital process. Or maybe by all judgments in your own heart and all of your friends and your parents, you entered into this unwisely. Maybe that's true.

You may have had completely wrong thinking about marriage before you got married. You may have sinned in many ways that actually brought you to the marriage altar. All of those things may be true. But the Lord Jesus cuts through the smoke and the mirrors of all these kinds of thoughts and he absolutely simplifies the matter. And he's saying that when you got married it was God that married you but God has joined together let no man separate that's what I believe you got married God married you I don't care what kind of sins or lack of wisdom guess what Every single person who's ever been married in the history of the world had wrong thoughts about that marriage.

So you're not unique. Unique. Now with these words, our Lord Jesus has done at least four things. Number one, he has swept away the excuses and the loopholes for divorce. He put marriage back into its place of importance in a society that had lost it.

Number two, he established himself as the supreme authority to define marriage. Number three, he declared that the marriage union cannot be dissolved without sinful behavior. There is no ground in the heart of God for this practice. It always, when it happens, involves violations of his will and of his authority. When marriages break up, it's because there is rebellion against God.

Now, we're going to talk in detail about the permanence view of marriage, but I just want to say that I hold the permanence view in this sense, that anything that destroys a marriage compromises the permanence that God intended for marriage. That all divorces compromise holiness, they compromise covenant-keeping love, and they compromise the gospel. Number four, Jesus accepts Deuteronomy 24 and the exception is there. The Pharisees had misinterpreted this passage and they had slipped so far from it that they changed, they actually changed the very words that Moses used and they said that it was commanded, but divorce was never commanded the Pharisees were just word twisters and loophole seekers so we cannot we cannot simply condone divorce our Lord does along with Moses, in perfect consistency, provide for situations that are so messed up that there is a provision for it. And we'll talk more about that later.

But the Lord Jesus Christ first lays this foundation of the seriousness and the gravity and the importance and his authority over marriage. So we cannot condone divorce. We must fight for marriages like cats and dogs. Maybe some of you have friends who are about ready to get divorced. You cannot stand idly by those friends.

Risk your friendship. Risk your relationship with them to preserve something so much greater than your dinky little relationship with them that you're so fearful of losing while they actually go and defy the entire message of the gospel. That somehow your relationship with them is more important than that. That you're not willing to risk, you're not really willing to put your hands on their lapels and say, come back, don't go there if you have someone in that in your life please pursue them you may lose that relationship but they may gain the gospel now and finally Now, and finally, the words that the Lord Jesus has used are so wonderful to declare so many elements of the love of God. And so the question is, is your marriage a picture of the gospel?

Or another question, is it your desire to have your marriage, a picture of the Gospel, or is it really all about you and your needs and your fulfillment and everything like that? Marriage shows a sinful and wayward and adulterous humanity, a bride rescued by a husband. She falls into his arms, he carries her, he guides her, he nourishes her, he cherishes her. He provokes her to love him, he has mercy on her, he forgives her, he has patience with her, and she follows him, and she submits to him. Marriage was made for that.

And what the Lord Jesus is saying here in this passage is that everything including marriage is made for Christ. And so the question is, is your marriage like that? Is it a theater of the grace of God toward a sinner. And you single people, is this the way that you're thinking about marriage? Do you think of it as an opportunity in the future to show how compassionate God is, to show how merciful God is, to show how attentive and helpful God is?

Is that what you're thinking about when you consider marriage? So that you might exalt the riches of His grace. And so the meaning, this is the meaning of marriage. And this is why our Lord Jesus Christ declares, let no man separate. Let's pray.

Father, we pray that you would help us to understand how we might declare the glories of your name through our marriages, through all the preparations of marriage. Oh Lord, I pray especially for the young ones here who are not married that you would fill them with wisdom, that you would prepare them well through your word and there would be no need for anyone to say, have you not read? Because they have read and they do understand. Oh God, I pray you give that to us. Amen.