Transcript

We’re going to go to Luke and then we’re going to go somewhere else. Luke chapter 16 and as we look at that for just a quick moment, we’re going to Mark 10 as we talk about “Marriage, God’s Grand Design.” In Luke’s account of the teachings of the Lord, he comes to just one what we’ve designated as one verse where he quotes the Lord but we’ll turn over to Mark and then even to Matthew eventually and look at a greater discourse of our Lord or a more expanded discourse of our Lord as recorded by those men. Have you ever wondered why there are four Gospels? It’s because men were recording what they saw and heard the Lord do and God in his sovereignty used different men to record different things and we get a whole and balanced teaching on our Lord that way.

Luke 16, verse 18, the Lord says,

18 Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery.

Now, go to Mark chapter 10. Would you do that? Mark chapter 10, verses 1 through 12. Mark 10, beginning in verse 1,

1 Getting up, He went from there to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan; crowds gathered around Him again, and, according to His custom, He once more began to teach them. 2 Some Pharisees came up to Jesus, testing Him, and began to question Him whether it was lawful for a man to divorce a wife. 3 And He answered and said to them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” 5 But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. 7 For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, 8 and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” 10 In the house the disciples began questioning Him about this again. 11 And He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her; 12 and if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery.”

In a tribe in Africa, there is a most fascinating marital custom: on the day that you are married, the women of the tribe give you a garment, a dress, and the law of that tribe is that as long as the dress holds together, you have to stay married to that man but once the dress begins to fall apart, well, then that’s symbolic and now you can leave your husband. It seems that you and I live in a culture today where the fabric of marriage is far weaker than that. What bizarre and perverse things are being taught today under the guise of marriage. By the way, there can never be the marriage of one man to another man or one woman to another woman. It’s impossible. That’s not marriage. It may be 1,001 things, the government may praise it and applaud it and the civil magistrates may perform that kind of a ceremony but God ordained them male and female and that’s the only marriage that there is. No other can exist, period. It’s just that you and I live in a culture that is post-Christian. This country was founded on the premise that the Judeo-Christian tradition would be the moral foundation stone for our culture, for our institutions, for a sane and behaving society. Now we’ve moved away from that, what some philosophers call sociological law. Instead of law based on the absolutes of the Old and New Testaments, now we come to sociological law where just whatever the culture or society begins to feel or think is good or right, well, they’ll make laws on that. So you and I are now in the minority, the strong minority. However, I believe there is going to be a pushback in our country. I believe that a lot of people do not believe what Hollywood believes, what the president believes, and what a lot of legislators believe. I believe they still believe in God’s definition of marriage and sexual morality, they’ve just been intimidated into quietness and silence. So I believe and I hope there’s going to be something of a conservative pushback. I wish it would come as a result of a spiritual revival and renewal but if not, I hope it comes as something of a cultural renewal. I have hope there.

Anyway, here we have in this text that Jesus is in this third phase of his ministry. He’s had the great Galilean ministry where he mostly taught and trained the masses and he performed so many miracles among them. He spent a season of time away from the masses in what you might call his retirement ministry where he in