The Family Is God’s Blueprint for Relationship
(Deuteronomy 6:3-9)
God designed the family to be like base. It’s a safe place where we can exercise and test out how to relate with God. Scripture often refers to the family unit, God’s design of it anyway, in correlation with principles being discussed in the passage.
The basic commandments for a more fulfilling life are Love God and love others as yourself. All other commandments revolve around this concept. The Ten Commandments elaborated on them because they needed examples of what it meant.
If we look at the Ten Commandments, they were provided on 2 tablets. The first half talks about how to have a relationship with God; while the second half talks about how to relate with others. Both key and necessary for a fulfilling life in creation.
Our human tendency is to seek “rules” amongst scripture. Legalism we call it, and we don’t encourage it verbally amongst ourselves but we do it repeatedly when we read scripture.
What Does Jesus Actually Say?
(Matthew 19:3-9)
Matthew 19:3-9 is yet another example of this. We read this passage and walk away saying “divorce is a sin.” We then couple it with other out-of-context passages to reinforce the idea. But what does the Scripture actually say?
“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” — Matthew 19:3
The Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus into an answer they could use against Him. That intent alone should be enough to cause us to pause and seriously evaluate what is really going on in this passage.
Jesus tells us God made man and woman; this should tell us everything we need to understand about ‘how many marriage partners to seek.’ The term ‘seek’ indicates intent on our part.
The law was based on God’s design and intentions for mankind. Thus, Jesus tells us “in the beginning… God made them male and female.” The goal of this commandment must be seen in context with all the rest of the commandments and scripture as a whole. If, in fact, divorce was an unforgivable sin – God would have said so in the original 10. Thou shalt not divorce – if you do you can’t be part of the church or go to heaven. The blood of Jesus isn’t strong enough to cover it.
But Jesus clarifies – in the beginning, this was not how God designed it. Our world today is far from how God designed it to be. This is why we get the millennial reign of Christ so that we can see how it was supposed to work.
The family unit is supposed to be an extension of your relationship with God. The marriage – or joining of one to another is a picture of our baptism with Jesus – not the water baptism, the function of baptism which joins us to Jesus through the experience of his death, burial and resurrection – as the act of water baptism demonstrates. As indicated in Romans.
The point was never supposed to be yet another rule. The point was to show God’s design works perfectly to attach us with Him. The two shall become one.
The family unit is demonstrated in Jesus and His disciples. A close unit of people who must learn to work together even though they are different from each other, but in doing so can work toward the common goal of serving God as well as to provide a safe place when we go outside the family unit to try it on others. The church is filled with many different personalities and talents. We must learn to ‘work together for good’ just as God is known to do for us. Romans 8:28 tells us “In all things God works together for good for those who love Him.”
We Are the Problem.
So we see these are life principles and practices that demonstrate how to love and live for God. These are not rules and regulations we are required to live by.
But what about Matthew 19:9 “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except of sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” We call this the ‘divorce exception.’ An exception indicates there is a rule – but we already see this isn’t intended to be a rule, therefore it can’t be an exception. So, what then is it?
It shows us, yet again, that we are the problem. Jesus said Moses allowed it ‘because of the hardness of your hearts.’ Divorce was never meant to be in God’s economy, but because we don’t listen in the beginning and marry the wrong person instead of patiently waiting on God – and then we behave poorly in that relationship instead of listening to God’s guidance – we end up with a relationship that causes us grief instead of joy.
The point isn’t that we then follow some list of rules or guidelines on who we marry and when – the point is – in all things we don’t wait on God and we don’t listen to Him when we don’t agree. Thus we are the problem. This is yet another example for us to draw from regarding our own human nature.
Is God a taskmaster? Did He commission the Bible to be a book of rules and regulations that serve Him? Is that the God you serve? Is that the Bible you read?