In his sermon, Paul Carrington discusses Jesus' teachings on marriage and divorce as presented in the Sermon on the Mount, focusing on Matthew 5:31-32. He emphasizes Jesus' call for righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, critiquing the legalistic interpretations that allowed for easy divorces under frivolous pretenses. Carrington explains the historical context, including a debate between Rabbi Shammai, who advocated for divorce only in cases of immorality, and Rabbi Hillel, who permitted it for any dissatisfaction. The sermon underscores the spiritual attack on God's word and institutions, such as marriage, as a cornerstone of society. Carrington highlights how marriage, from its inception, has been under attack, with modern shifts towards 'no fault' divorce contributing to its decline. He references Jesus' reaffirmation in Matthew 19 of God's original intent for marriage to be a lifelong union, emphasizing the damage done by divorce both spiritually and relationally. The sermon concludes with a call to uphold God's standards and preserve the sanctity of marriage.

Alright, well hello again. We are going to be in the fifth chapter of Matthew here this afternoon. We're going to be back in the Sermon on the Mount. So if you could please open up to Matthew chapter 5. And we're gonna be talking about marriage and divorce, looking at the Lord's words, and really what is life like in the kingdom of God.

And so I'm gonna actually just read the key that we've kind of identified, verse 20, as being the key to really helping us understand this section on the Sermon on the Mount. And then I'll get right into these two verses here. It's going to be verses 31 and 32. But verse 20 really helps us understand really what the Lord is getting at here. So he starts off and he says, "'For I say to you that unless your righteousness "'exceeds the righteousness of the scribes "'and the Pharisees, you will by no means "'enter the kingdom of heaven.

"'Furthermore it has been said, "'whoever divorces his wife, "'let him give her a certificate of divorce but I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery. Well let's pray. Lord we we do come before you here this afternoon and we thank you again for gathering us beneath your word Lord we pray that we would be helped and instructed Lord thank you for all that you've already done through the day today for the preaching of your word for the fellowship of the Saints Lord it's good It's so good to be in your kingdom to be your children Help us Lord to live the way you'd have us to live and to regard the things you would have us to regard in Jesus name Amen Amen. Well as we've been going through this sermon on the Mount, what we found is that the Lord is really on the offensive and what he's doing is he's setting things right and teaching God's Word as it has always really been. And so he's re-establishing God's standards of righteousness and decades after decades and centuries of it being muddied, he's uncovering it and he's showing you know this is what God intended really all along.

And we've now come to the third of the six antitheses where these truths that have been overturned and masked by the scribes and the Pharisees, he's setting right. And it's kind of natural that he would sort of piggyback on the last of the sections where he looked at the seventh commandment, which had to do with adultery and all that it entailed. This isn't one of the Ten Commandments, like the previous two, we looked at murder and adultery, but here we're gonna go all the way back past Sinai to the very garden and see what the Lord had to say on this matter. And really the way to think about this is that in Jesus' day it was the word of God that was really under attack. And that's a helpful way to kind of think about these antitheses.

God had said very clearly what he required and what he thought were the standards of righteousness. And then, as I mentioned, you've got these different sects and groups like the scribes and Pharisees coming in and muddying and Defacing what God had said, you know I was just reading a biography of a man a reformer named Pierre Verre and this is what he had to say Toward the end of his life. He says just as the soul gives life to the body, so faith is the life of the soul. And just as life cannot be maintained within the human body without nourishment, so likewise the life of the soul requires its own nourishment, the word of God. Satan is not ignorant of this.

He therefore applies all his energy and centers all his efforts around depriving us of his word. For well he knows that as soon as this food is taken from us, our soul shall weaken immediately and shall wane away little by little until it be left fully dead. And if he cannot remove this heavenly food from our mouth, he endeavors at least to poison it and mix his venom within it. And that's really what had been happening from a spiritual perspective. And if you think about marriage, particularly since the very inception, it really has been under attack.

Right from the very first sin, you had Adam and Eve obviously fracturing their relationship with God, but in that fracturing was their fracturing of their relationship between each other as well, where the very first thing Adam says when he's confronted, or second thing he says when he's confronted by God is, the woman that you gave to me, there's this division. And Satan has this perspective, ruin this, ruin all. Because it's really the foundation of all of society. And a good way to think about this is, you know, what God highly esteems, the adversary deploys all of his energy to the face. So it's a very simple way to really think about this aspect of marriage.

God holds it, regards it, He loves it, and so it becomes a primary, I guess, place of attack for the adversary. And so not long after Adam and Eve, you've got, we get a front row seat really into the trauma of a lot of the polygamous families, even among the patriarchs. And of course, that wasn't God's design. And then you fast forward, and just before the curtain falls on the Old Testament, even though the people of God, they've been restored back to the promised land, the temple had been rebuilt and all of these different things, all wasn't well. And the Lord, he wages war against those who were undermining his word, telling them that he ignores their forms of worship.

And what does he say in Malachi? He says, for the Lord God of Israel says that he hates divorce, for it covers one's garment with violence, says the Lord of Hosts. So it's a really interesting area. And of course, we all know how much marriage is under attack in our current day. We've experienced a little bit of a reprieve in the last couple of weeks and months with a return to normalcy, but if you look at our country on the whole maybe even the last 50 years, is there any institution that's been more heavily attacked than that of marriage?

You know in 1969, California it became the first state to institute no fault divorce. This was under Governor Ronald Reagan at the time. He was the governor. And he later says it was one of the greatest regrets of his political career that he was behind this no fault divorce. And the whole premise of this was that you could dissolve marriage for any reason or no reason at all.

You can just decide, hey, we need to get divorced, we want to get divorced. And it gutted marriage and set off what is called by many a divorce revolution since that time until the present day. It's state after state followed California down this terrible trail, making divorce the easiest that it's ever been really in history. And really the most common reason for divorce is under the term irreconcilable differences. Things just didn't work out and we can't sort them out or figure them out.

And so here we are, you know, as a nation and really it's an utter travesty. I was talking to one brother at lunch and Here's a staggering statistic that only 14%, one-four, 14% of Americans say that it is never acceptable for unmarried couples to live together. That means 86% of people just kind of collectively shrug, say it's no big deal. You know, 75% of marriages today are preceded by cohabitation, living together before marriage. And the current divorce rate right now is at around 42%.

If you look at marriages, every hour there's 230 marriages and 86 divorces. So it's epidemic. And of course, the design is to make it as easy as possible. And there are ads, when you go around the, I remember going to Florida, and especially in Florida, for whatever reason, you see divorce ads just on billboards everywhere, and you see some of them. One of them says, life's short, get a divorce.

Or double your closet space, get divorced. And we don't have time today, but to get into the attempt to even redefine marriage altogether with a BurgerFell, the travesty of what's gone on in these last 50 years and then just since 2015 it's hard to even even understand all that's happening. Nevertheless the foundation of God's Word stands sure and it will stand sure because he's the author. And really what's amazing is that this is the first institution that God ever planted in the earth and it's also the most common. Even though it's under attack, You go anywhere in the world and you find people that are married.

Isn't that interesting that it's not a Western thing or a cultural, it's a human thing. And it's the very cornerstone of human civilization. And even the church itself, as important as the church is, it cannot prosper when the marriages of its members crater. That's how dependent we are on this whole aspect of marriage. And so what was going on in the Lord's time, when he was actually physically walking on this earth, there was this raging debate between two groups within the Pharisees.

And really, he's addressing this debate head on. It says here, furthermore, in verse 31, it has been said, whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. Well, what had happened is that there was this debate really between these two groups, as I mentioned, around what Deuteronomy 21 says. Deuteronomy 21 verse 1, not so much Genesis chapter 2. And what Deuteronomy 21 says is this, 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 uncleanness in her, he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand and sends her out of the house.

That was what Deuteronomy 24 had to say on how to deal with this situation. And of course, the grounds of divorce, both groups agreed that divorce was legal. And the grounds for divorce are that the husband found some uncleanness in his wife, but the whole argument is what is uncleanness actually referred to? That was really the whole focus of the debate. And you had this one group, This one group was led by a man by the name of Rabbi Shammai, and he actually taught Deuteronomy 21 accurately, you know, that uncleanness meant that she was guilty of some form of immorality.

And they had this saying among his followers, actually, to really say, you can't divorce for just any reason. He said, this was the saying, let a wife be as mischievous as the wife of Ahab. She cannot be divorced except for adultery. But this man was in the minority. There was another rabbi, his name was Rabbi Hillel, and the Pharisees were really mostly followers of this rabbi in his school.

And his whole premise on this area was that whatever made marriage distasteful, Whatever made it unpleasant or just uncomfortable or boring or whatever was sufficient grounds for divorce. So they use the word uncleanness kind of as a catch-all for whatever you wanted it to mean. A wife could be divorced if she spoiled the dinner, and I'm not exaggerating, if she spoiled dinner by putting too much salt in the food, if she went in public with her head uncovered, if she talked to men in the streets, if she was a brawling woman, if she spoke disrespectfully of the husband's parents in his presence. You could go on and on if she was quarrelsome, the list goes on, whatever you wanted it to be, it could be. And they even took what Malachi said, remember what I read earlier, how God hates the putting away divorce for just frivolous reasons.

They turned it into, if thou hates, thou shouldest put her away. So they totally twisted the Word of God. But of course, true to the form of the Pharisees, they were extremely meticulous in the certificate. They weren't too much concerned with getting God's picture right, but boy, you better get that certificate dotted, every I dotted, every T crossed. And the whole idea of the certificate, of course, was that it couldn't be done privately, but you had to actually give a document and write it out.

And that was supposed to serve as some sort of deterrence, perhaps, not an encouragement, as the Pharisees had interpreted it. And the way this works is that they had brought this kind of manmade law into this where you had to write out your certificate in 12 lines, this holy number, no more, no less. And it was sealed by the husband and then sealed also by two witnesses and then delivered to her with two witnesses. And here's an example of one of these certificates, just to give you a taste of how careful they were. On the fourth day of the week, on the 11th day of the month of Chisleu, in the year 5454, from the creation of the world in the city of Amsterdam situated by the sea called Tyre, and by the river Amstel, I, Abraham, the son of Benjamin, surnamed Wolfius, and at this time dwelling in the city of Amsterdam, which is situated by the seaside, by my own free will, without any compulsion, I put away, dismiss, and divorce thee, my wife, Rebecca, the daughter of Jonas, the Levite, who at this time abides in the city of Amsterdam situated by the sea called Tyre and by the river Amstel, who was here to form my wife.

But now I put thee away, Dismiss and divorce thee so that thou art in thine own hands and has power over thyself to go and marry any other man whom thou pleasest and let no man hinder thee in my name for from this day forward and forever and lo thou art free to any man. Let this be to thee from me a bill of divorce, an instrument of dismissal, and a letter of forsaking according to the law of Moses and Israel. Sealtel, the son of Paltiel, witnessed. Colonymous, the son of Gabriel, witnessed. They were very, very, very careful to get all of this right.

But what of God's word and what of God's standards when it comes to this holy institution. Well in Matthew 19, the Lord, he gives us an expanded version really of his teaching on marriage. And of course you probably know this account where The Pharisees, they come to the Lord, but they don't simply have a question that they're looking to get information from him. It says that they were testing him. So they come with this idea to test him in an effort to discredit him and trap him and maybe make him, force him into a position on this polarizing debate.

The idea being he's gonna make somebody unhappy if we ask him this question. He'll get himself a whole new set of enemies with this question. And so they come to him and they ask him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason? But the Lord, as he's always so wise in his dealings with his adversaries, And he answers them by really refocusing the whole conversation. He says, in a way, forget all this legality that you guys are so worried about.

Let's get to the deeper question. What was God's design? What does God care about? And Jesus reminds them that God is the author of marriage and he takes them back to the very first day that marriage was created, his original design that we find in Genesis 20 verse chapter 2 and this is what Jesus quotes he says 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." And then he puts this exclamation point on it. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.

Very, very plain. You know, I was in our yard just about a week and a half ago and I was looking at some trees that we planted when we first moved to the property. And there was one particular tree that was always kind of falling down and you come out and it's on its side. So I ended up staking it with rebar. That was a year and a half ago.

And I went to go just check out the trees, make sure everything was good. And I went to this one tree that was staked with rebar, and what do you find? That the rebar is there, but the tree had grown around the rebar. So you can, I basically looked at this, I'm trying to figure out, can I take this rebar out? If I take the rebar out, and basically I conclude, if I take that rebar, I'm going to kill this tree.

They have become so intertwined that there's nothing I can do than just leave the tree and hopefully it'll grow well. And I couldn't help but thinking about that as I was thinking about what the Lord is saying here that whatever God has joined together, let not man tear asunder. I had a friend, a Christian friend, and him and his wife, they ended up getting divorced. And I remember what he explained to me. She had committed adultery and left him.

And I remember what he explained to me. She had committed adultery and left him. I remember what he explained to me. He says, Paul, he says, it's not like cutting material, but he says it's like tearing fabric. There's no clean portion at all.

It's just a jagged scar that's left. That's how we felt as a result of going through this terrible experience. And the whole idea of marriage, as we find in Genesis 2, was that woman was not only created out of the man, that's not it, only, but she was created for man. And the joiner of man and woman was God. It's this beautiful, beautiful picture.

And they thought they had him, because Jesus gave that answer, but they come back again, and they now refer to Deuteronomy 24, which we just read a few minutes ago. And they ask the question, we got ya. Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce and to put her away? Jesus, are you gonna defy Moses? Well, Jesus answers and he puts it back on them.

He says, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality and marries another, commits adultery. And whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery. You see, after 400 years of living in Egypt, they suffered the same hardness of heart that took down Pharaoh. That's what Jesus is basically saying.

This stubbornness of will and this callousness, it's your hardness of heart that's caused God in Deuteronomy 24 to make this exception, but it was never so from the very beginning. You know I read one comment