Reflect
Jesus spoke about divorce in the Sermon on the Mount to address the tendency in his day to trivialize marriage. Not much has changed. A friend once told me as they were coming to grips with their troubled marriage, "I took that which was precious and treated it as though it were not." It's so easy to treat something that's precious as though it were not, to regard as ordinary or common something like marriage that is holy and of inestimable worth.
Quizzed by some religious leaders about divorce, Jesus reverted to the original design of marriage: "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female (from Genesis 1:27), and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh' (from Genesis 2:24)? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate"(Matthew 19:3-6). Since God invented marriage, we should look to his Word to ensure we're not disregarding what is priceless.
Marriage is the forging of one new person out of two. In divorce, we don't simply 'break up' with another person. We break ourselves. We don't simply 'part ways.' We tear ourselves apart. It is a violent event, like an amputation. The way in which this sensitive subject impacts us will depend on our individual experiences. Some of us need to revisit the original design of marriage because we're trivializing the one flesh wonder that it is. Others of us live in the painful aftermath of divorce. We all need to be shown in the Scriptures that marriage should be regarded as precious, but we also need to be shown the glory and grace of the One who is precious beyond comparison, our Bridegroom who loved us and gave himself up for us. In order to experience genuine healing from injuries caused by divorce, our hearts need to experience Jesus, whose flesh was torn apart for us.
Leo Schuster is the Senior Minister at Christ the King.
Pray
Ask the Lord to grant you the grace to embrace Jesus' view of marriage and to treat as precious that which is infinitely so.
O Love that Will Not Let Me Go
words by George Matheson
1. O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
2. O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine's blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.
3. O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.
4. O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.
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