Jesus had been out there healing multitudes of people and delivering them from all kinds of bondage. This irritated the legal-minded fault finders so they had an agenda to shut Jesus down, and to be legally free to do what they wanted to do. They came to him with a question about divorce. They knew the law said it was permissible to divorce, and they wanted to trap Jesus into saying something that would go against the law which would help condemn him to death and justify their own lusts.
Jesus’ reply went straight to the foundation of the original spiritual operation of what it means to be married. True marriage is the man and the woman both committing their lives to God and to one another, thus allowing God to be in control of their lives so that he is free to “join them together” with divorce not even in the picture – “what therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19: 3-9). The original Greek meaning of “joined together” refers to a union by “association, companionship, process, resemblance, possession, instrumentality, completeness.” Jesus is saying that if you truly always allow God to be in control of your lives, he will weld you together with a companion so that divorce is not necessary. He said divorce comes out of the hardness of your heart. A heart hardens through the deceitfulness of sin and a breakdown of communication. Keeping a tender heart before God and before each other makes for a lasting and ever-increasing heaven-on-earth relationship (Deuteronomy 11:18-21). That means between the man and woman there is to be continued openness and communication and faith in the cleansing blood of Jesus, being filled with and led by the Holy Spirit. By this, God can do the work to bring two together and keep them together as one cohesive unit, complete in every way. This is God’s design of operation because he wants the life of Jesus to be manifested in the home itself, and, so that home can be an instrument through which Jesus can continue to heal and deliver multitudes of people from sicknesses and bondage. What God joins together is good. Two cooperating together with God will keep it good.
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