Marriage or Divorce: Where Is Your Emphasis? | Matthew 19:1-9

Introduction:
One of the ways that we ensure that we handle God’s Word accurately — one of the ways that we ensure that we are truly arriving at the truth (instead of fortifying our own thinking with bits and pieces of truth) — is that we examine what WE emphasize compared to what the TEXT OF SCRIPTURE emphasizes.
We consider the matter of emphasis. If we are really arriving at the truth, our emphasis will match Scripture’s emphasis.
Good interpreters of Scripture place foreground matters in the foreground, and background matters in the background.
What we find when examine the encounter that Jesus had with the Pharisees in Matthew chapter 19, is that the Rabbis, and the Pharisees who were giving voice to the Rabbis, were guilty of misplaced emphasis.
The Pharisees come to Jesus with a question — a question that betrayed their misplaced emphasis.
The question had another problem as well.
Their question was insincere. It was a real question in that it reflected a contemporary debate on the passage of Scripture in question, but the real reason for posing the question to Jesus was to put Jesus in jeopardy. That’s what it means when it says they were “testing” him.
This is what they did on multiple occasions. They would try to put Jesus into situations that would cause a significant portion of the populace to turn against him.
A COUPLE OF EXAMPLES:
ESV Matthew 22:15 abThen the Pharisees went and plotted how bto entangle him in his words. 16 And they sent atheir disciples to him, along with bthe Herodians, saying, "Teacher, cwe know that you are true and teach dthe way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone's opinion, for eyou are not swayed by appearances.1 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay ataxes to bCaesar, or not?" 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, "Why aput me to the test, you hypocrites?
ESV Luke 11:53 As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him to speak about many things, 54 alying in wait for him, bto catch him in something he might say.
And so, this is another way that we can examine how we approach Scripture — why are we asking our questions?
Are we asking so that we might really know the truth, or are we simply in search of someone affirming what we already believe? Or, could it even be that there some other motive at work, like embarrassing a person, or simply winning an argument?
But the emphasis issue is especially telling in Matthew 19, because their misplaced emphasis is matched by our misplaced emphasis.
I. CHRIST’S EMPHASIS IN THE DIVORCE QUESTION (vs.3-9)
The Pharisees come to Jesus with their testing question. The question is whether it is lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause.
Mark summarizes the question this way:
ESV Mark 10:2 And Pharisees came up and in order ato test him asked, b"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
A. UNDERSTANDING THE PHARISEE’S QUESTION
Mark’s summary leads me to believe that the emphasis of the question, on the part of the Pharisees might have been, “Are there any grounds for divorce in your view?” That would be different than saying, “Can you divorce your wife for just any reason at all?”
The way that Mark’s account conveys the question, it would mean, is a divorce lawful?
Now, right away, we want to recognize that there is one positive thing we can say about the Pharisee’s question. No matter what they personally believed about the question, they didn’t just assume that Jesus would say yes. They didn’t think that Christ’s view of divorce was one that assumed divorce was permissible.
We live in a time when no one even wonders if it’s lawful.
It’s assumed that divorce is permitted. In fact, this is one of the things that’s very troubling about the evangelical church of our time. Even though most pastors and churches would say that they acknowledge a limited set of circumstances in which divorce would be permitted, THEY PRACTICE a kind of permission that is without limits.
How many churches discipline members for the sin of divorce?
How many churches refuse to perform marriages if the divorce wasn’t on biblical grounds?

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