Amen, and please be seated. If you have a Bible, let me invite you to turn with me to Matthew chapter 19. Matthew chapter 19, this morning we'll read verses 1 through 12. Now as we turn from chapter 18 to 19, it should come as no surprise that we turn from a parable about mercy and forgiveness, which we studied last week, to the subject of marriage and divorce, because the place where mercy and forgiveness are tested most is so often in our most intimate human relationships.
Let me invite you to hear God's holy word from Matthew chapter 19 verses 1 through 12. Now, when Jesus had finished these sayings, He went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, and large crowds followed Him, and He healed them there. And Pharisees came up to Him and tested Him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? He answered, have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 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.
So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. They said to him, why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce? He said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so.
And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and Mary's another, commits adultery. The disciple said to him, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to Mary. But he said to them, not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, let the one who is able to receive this receive it.
Amen. This is God's work. May he write it in our hearts. Let's pray together.
Our gracious Father in heaven, we ask that you would speak the truth in love to us. We ask that by the Spirit, you would drive home to our hearts, the truth of this word. And we ask, I ask that you would help me grant that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be acceptable in your sight, our Lord, our rock, and our redeemer. In Jesus' name, amen.
The subject of divorce and its proper justifications was hot debate in Jesus' day, and divorce itself was a common practice and a common problem among people, as it is in our own generation. Do you know that among all the 50 states of the United States that Arkansas has the highest divorce rate? And I suppose most of us have a friend or family member, a child, a parent, a sibling, if not ourselves, who have suffered the agony of divorce. We need to hear Jesus' words about this subject.
Now, what I had originally planned to do was take verses 1 through 12 in two sermons. And upon reflection, I realized now there are probably three sermons here, and then earlier this week I realized, well, there are four sermons here. Jesus references at least three different scripture passages and then speaks about singleness. And so we're going to take them one at a time, one sermon about male and female, one about marriage, one about divorce, and one about singleness.
And the reason to begin this way is because Jesus begins his answer to the question about divorce by quoting Genesis 1 and God creating us, male and female. And if we don't address that, we may very well miss the elephant in the room and fail to speak to in a helpful way our current cultural moment. Now, there might be a temptation for some to think that the pastor is some kind of ideological hobby horse here or an ax to grind about our culture's view of males and females and gender identity. And if you're visiting with us today, I can see how you might be tempted to think that as well.
But if you know us here at Redeemer, you know our practices to walk passage by passage through books of the Bible and take what comes our way from God's Word and make it the focus of our sermon. I'm not zealous to wade into controversial waters on issues of gender or marriage nor to wade into painful waters on things like divorce. But I am zealous for us all to believe what's true and not embrace what's false. That is, because what's true corresponds to reality and what's false runs fundamentally contrary and it odds with reality and to believe what's false is both dangerous and painful.
Now, for some of us, these next few weeks are going to raise perhaps all kinds of questions and even taking it in four parts. I can't possibly address all the questions that might come to mind, but I would be happy to sit down with you or visit with you or email and exchange thoughts and wrestle with what is Jesus saying, what is our culture saying, and what maybe even our own hearts and minds? What are they saying? Questions, of course, aren't always bad.
I'm inviting you to ask questions. Questions are good, although notice in this passage the bad question. That is, the Pharisees ask a question, but it's entirely insincere. They've asked the question to test Jesus.
Did you notice that when the Pharisees came to him verse 3, they came to Jesus, they asked him the question, is it lawful to divorce one's wife or any cause? Now look, they couldn't care less about the marriages of the people around them. They weren't asking this question out of a genuine concern for people in difficult marriages. Their aim was to test Jesus in hopes of catching him in a trap.
They wanted him to speak to a controversial issue and perhaps say something that was wrong according to Scripture, so the crowds would dismiss him or to take a controversial position so the crowds would be against him because they hated Jesus. That's the agenda of the Pharisees. They don't have concerns for people's souls here, but throughout the passage, Jesus does have concern for our souls, and we need to see what he has to say, because Jesus is going to say some things that are difficult for us to hear, and as well Jesus knows that some of us may find marriage to be one of life's greatest sorrows, or we might end up in divorce at experience one of life's greatest agonies. Jesus knows this about us, and we see that he truly cares about us, and he wants us to see that God cares for us, and he wants us to see in the midst of all of this God's good gifts to us.
So I invite you to think about this morning, even just verses 1 to 4, and I want you to see three of God's good gifts to us, which evidence his love for us. The first one is this, and verses 1 and 2, Jesus shows us God's love and care for people by healing them. Now it's a simple thing, and it'd be easy to pass over, but it's contextual, verse 1, now when Jesus had finished saying these things, he went away from Galilee, and he entered the region beyond the Jordan, and large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. His healings here prove once again that Jesus is large-hearted towards needy people.
He knows that for many of them their bodies suffer the miseries of this life, disease or injury, or they were malformed from the womb, their minds and their emotions are deeply afflicted and distressed, and he has compassion on them, and he heals them. So then, don't imagine that his teaching, which follows his healings, is motivated by anything other than his love for people, because he loves us, because he does, he tells us the truth. Now notice also where he's ministering, he's ministering in the border regions now on the other side of the Jordan, and let's just ask this question. Were the Pharisees out there ministering?
No. I mean, were they out there caring for the multitudes? No. They went out there pointedly to test Jesus.
But again, Jesus was out there pointedly ministering to people, healing them. He's no ivory tower theologian, he's not aloof from the practical cares and concerns and hurts of people's hearts. He loves people, and his healings here, of course, show us that he has power to restore people to wholeness, and his healings then function for all of us as a hope. That is, that he can and will do what he's promised for us, for all who trust in him, that he will completely heal us one day in the resurrection which is to come in soul and body forever.
May whole. And this is a kind of foretaste of that and a promise of that. And his teaching you remember in chapter 18 was about healing their relational rifts, about repentance and forgiveness and reconciliation. And his ultimate purpose is to heal us of our relational rift or estrangement from God by his death upon the cross.
And here we're reminded that he can heal us of our alienation from even ourselves, more on that in a bit. Now the Pharisees felt threatened by Jesus and they weren't asking an honest question. They were hoping to discredit him as religious leaders in our own day often do likewise. They seek to discredit Jesus.
They won't receive his teaching. They want to, they want to discredit his teaching from Genesis 1 and from Genesis 2 and even from the Law of Moses. And I would simply say to all of us beware of siding with the Pharisees and modern unbelieving religious teachers who are actually standing against Jesus. Because Jesus is the lover of our embodied soul.
So let's think about these things. The first is that his feelings show his love and care. But second, notice his other good gift here that Jesus shows God's love for people in pointing us to God's word, verses 3 and 4. They asked the question verse 3 and he answered verse 4, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?
Now we'll come back to this point about God creating the male and female. It's the elephant in the room. But first do you see how Jesus begins? Have you not read?
He says to them. Now what's he doing? Well he's got to point them to Genesis 1 and chapter 2. But he's subtly rebuking them for not paying attention to the word of God.
For putting their faith as they had done more in their human teachers than in God's plain teaching. And he's taking them down a notch. They're so certain they're right and that he's wrong. And these Pharisees you know that as a group they prided themselves on being known as students of scripture.
But of course Jesus exposed that they continually missed the point of scripture. And so he says to them, you've got a question. Have you read the first chapter of the book? Now what he's also doing here is he's showing them that what we are to believe about ourselves and about marriage and about divorce and about singleness comes to us by revelation.
God has plainly revealed these things to us. And this is important to note the current debate about gender and sexuality. Right? There are many in our day who think that the way to know things is not by revelation from God but by the reasonings of man.
That man's reason alone apart from God's revelation supremely is really how we know things. And in the western world especially, this is an idea that goes back at least a few hundred years to what's been called the enlightenment. And the key idea of the enlightenment is individual freedom and liberty. The liberty of the individual to think what they want to think and believe what they want to believe and to throw off God's word as authoritative ultimately.
And that has led down through the centuries to our present day of what's clearly a culture of hyper individualism where every person is encouraged to decide issues of truth for themselves and independently of God. Even issues of what it means to be human, what it means to be male or female. How did our culture get here on gender? Well even to pose the question that way is to give away part of the argument.
You know that up until about the 1970s no one spoke of the gender of men and women. They spoke of the male sex and the female sex. Sex was the term applied to whether you were male or female and it was based on basic biology. Gender until the 1970s was a grammatical term used by English teachers to identify certain nouns especially in languages like Spanish and others where some nouns are masculine, some nouns are feminine and some nouns are neuter.
You know like a mego, a male friend, and a mego, a female friend. It has a masculine and a feminine form. That's the gender of the noun. But along came some folks who wanted to disconnect male and female from biology.
They wanted people to be able to define themselves not by their sex but by their psychology. That is not by the biological facts about themselves but by the psychological thoughts and feelings they had about themselves. Now look I'm getting this from a book on transgender that's simply quoting that the transgender folks themselves on this issue. Okay.
There's nothing surprising in that and I think that would be entirely fair to what they're saying. That we don't want people to identify by the biology but by the psychology so to speak. How we think. How we feel about ourselves.
And today of course some people are working over time to force everybody to use gender pronouns based on the personal individual feelings and thoughts we have about ourselves instead of the biological sex of our body. And of course when you make how an individual thinks or feels about themselves the measure well you open a floodgate of possibilities. Those on the cutting edge of this kind of reclassification of what it means to be human have asserted besides male and female some have what they say are 72 different genders. Just as an example of a person thinking this kind of way American feminist and controversial as Camille Paglia has said I consider myself neither gay nor straight neither male nor female neither human being nor animal.
The widespread embrace of this kind of gender ideology has of course led to some very sad, very dangerous and very unjust outcomes especially for women. I mean we could pile up examples but you know that women in women's sports men identifying as women are resetting records robbing women's victories, honors, scholarships and financial compensation not to mention in some sports the physical dangers of competing with males biological males and in the realm of public facilities men identifying as women are being invited into women's locker rooms and bathrooms making them very uncomfortable and unsafe places and in the realm of prisons men identifying as women are gaining access to female exclusive prisons exposing women to dangerous situations which they literally cannot escape from a prison and in the realm of health care of course some physicians and hospitals are running a massive and massively lucrative experiment seeking to transition males into females and females into males and hooking them for life on expensive medicines to perpetuate it and then of course this new gender identity language is reshaping law as advocates are seeking not only to overturn thousands of years of established language but to force everybody into conformity to their exotic views under the threat of the law and what I want us to see is that when Jesus confronted a group of zealous self-righteous proud educators called Pharisees interested not in the truth or in God's truth but simply in asserting power to get what they want and get rid of Jesus the response of Jesus was what to say to them haven't you read don't you know the first chapter of God's revealed word Jesus says look don't just take it from me hasn't God's word which you already have as La Ferris he did hadn't already given them God's perspective on these issues he who created them from the beginning Jesus quotes made them male and female and so on our own day we should as Christians certainly ask ourselves why should I listen to the voices of those who reject basic biology why should I listen to the voices of those who've only just embraced in the last year or two or half decade or even a decade in terms of world history a view of reality that's contrary to the entirety of world history and then also we should ask this question why should I listen to my own thoughts and my own feelings of even about myself when they run counter to the body I have been given what gives me confidence that I'm thinking or feeling in a chord with reality after all we all perceive ourselves in various ways contrary to what's really true about ourselves you know when I was growing up I was a toe head blonde as an elementary school kid probably some bleached blonde in there I swam so much in chlorine spent all my days outside but you know by the time I got my first driver's license and they asked me my hair color and I admitted it was sandy blonde that's what I told them just a few years later of course my hair was completely brown but that was obviously a long time ago but for years my hair having turned completely brown I continued to describe my hair sandy blonde until somebody saw my driver's license and challenged me on it what are you talking about sandy blonde I wasn't perceiving my own reality correctly we do this a lot I mean some of you think you're still an athlete because what 40 years ago you were or or some of us who think we are really very talented or gifted at all but but the people who know us and love us are astounded by at times our talents and our gifting we just don't see ourselves the way other people see us and my point is this other people are often better at seeing who or what we are than we are ourselves and God sees clearly we are either male or female and he says so in his word which is his good gift to us to help us embrace that reality now look I am no expert on gender dysphoria and certainly not counseling or treating folks who've been through it I'm not an expert on the feelings of incongruence between a person's biology and their psychology there are some free resources available and they're supposed to be here but I left them at home they'll be here next week on the literature rack including a book called Transgender by von Roberts a helpful introduction to the subject and a little book called gender is calling the gospel and gender identity it's a report of the Reform Presbyterian Church of North America oftentimes this confusion of our biology with how we feel even about ourselves occurs during childhood and oftentimes it also disappears according to Vanderbilt University and others some 70-80 percent of children who experience these feelings and receive no medical or surgical interventions find that these feelings spontaneously disappear during adolescence but of course for some people they don't disappear they just persist you see different stats on it one and every 10,000 to 13,000 males one and every 20,000 to 34,000 females are diagnosed with gender dysphoria the kind that just keeps persisting where there's this incongruence and the question becomes of course what should be done the world's answer here to this painful incongruity is not to bring the person's thoughts and feelings into conformity with their biological sex that was the old answer now it's rather to bring the body rather than the mind and feelings it's the body that's treated with hormones and surgical alterations to bring the body into conformity to the mind and the feelings what our modern world then is as von Roberts put it I think quoting another is it has a Lego kit view of the human body where you can plug and play different parts upgrade you know to different models of parts and pieces and reprogram the machine so to speak because that is all we really are in the words of the old Lego advertisement the only limitation is your imagination but instead says Roberts we ought to take quoting another the art restoration view of things because we're not machines we're flawed masterpieces and in this view well an art restoreer this is what they do respects the work of the artist and knows that their job is to bring out the artist's original intention they work to show the artist's original intention in all its glory and this is what God offers us in the gospel that we can be transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit through his word by the renewing of our minds and so God to restore us after the likeness of his son after the true likeness of what it means to be human after the glory of the masterpiece which God intended from the beginning which is male and female and Jesus calls us to embrace God's good gift of God's word which tells us so and then there's another and final good gift here at verse four Jesus shows God's love for people in making us in making us male or female verse four have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female now Jesus here quotes a portion of Genesis 1 26 and 27 where it says then God said let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth so God made man in his own image in the image of God he created him male and female he created them now this is a wonderful truth about what it means to be human and what it means to be male and female those are a few things first God has himself created us we're not self creators we didn't bring ourselves into being it's God who gives us life and God who sustains our lives until death and so our lives are in his hands which is wonderful of course because we don't have the power to create ourselves or to keep ourselves alive second we are the image and likeness of God says Genesis image and likeness are synonymous what's an image it's a representation of another you know that when the old Soviet Union dominated eastern Europe they wanted everybody to be constantly aware of who was in charge around here so they set up metal images of Russian leaders and Russian soldiers all over eastern Europe in all the public places and those images represented Russian leadership were in charge after the fall of the wall the Berlin wall and the destruction of the Soviet Union people pulled those Russian images down right now listen when God wanted living images of himself set up over all the world to represent him to the world and to exercise dominion over everything else in his world what did he do he made us he made you he made me he made male and female that ought to lead us to one of the one one of the most profound sense of dignity we are the image of who of God we all have inherent worth and dignity because we're all made in God's image it also ought to lead us to humility because we are only an image we aren't God and as the rest of the bible teachers were a fallen marred image because of our rebellion now thirdly when God did this he made us notice male and female after his image he didn't make males after his image and leave females out and he didn't make females after his image and leave males out God made humanity binary he made males and females to be the same but different to be fully human fully his image yet distinct from one another God made us equal in our essential nature as human but he also made us different expressions of that essential nature as male and female reflect different ways of being human so we can't say to one another you know I'm better than you I'm more godlike than you I'm more important than you no no no we're made for each other we need each other and we're very different than one another and this too is God's gift he didn't make us male or female so that we could look down on the other he didn't make us male or female so that we could envy the other and he didn't make us male or female so we could try to become the other he made us male and female to represent him and of course to have the capacity as a husband and wife in union to procreate and fill the earth with more image bearers as he should give them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and so for instance a man simply cannot have the incredible privilege of conceiving a child in his own body and having that child grow within him he cannot give birth to a child nor can he sustain a child at his breast for a year or two or more being the source of its nourishment life this is basic biological reality and a god created distinction between the sexes no it doesn't mean that every adult woman must have a child or that every adult woman will have a child but no male can have a child by god's desire he he contributes to the life of a child in a in a different way and in marriage we're to be then a mutual help to one another as male and female which is where Jesus is going with this what's the point of marriage it's the union of a male and a female and so then to raise children as God gives them to us as a biological male and a biological female a dad and a mom helping our child understand well what those things mean so that they can better understand themselves and better understand the opposite sex and be nurtured by both so male and female genesis one says and Jesus reiterates is God's idea and God's good gift it's not merely an ethical imperative telling you how to live it's first of all a good gift to be thankful for if you're female to lighten being female if you're male to lighten being male fourthly notice that male and female is not a result of the fall Jesus said notice that language he who created them from the beginning that is he's thinking before the fall from creation it's part of God's original design original plan and that's why we can say it's a good thing that there are distinctions between men and women those distinctions didn't come about because of the entrance of sin and misery in this world God designed the world this way of course though those distinctions had no conflicts in the created order there was perfect harmony between male and female and there will one day be once again a future perfect harmony between male and female in the glory that's to come but in the fallen world in which we live those distinctions are exploited they cause tension in male-female relationships whether at home or in church or in society but it's not the maleness and femaleness that causes or is the source of the tensions it's sin that is the source of the tensions between man and woman and the reason again that Jesus quotes this passage is in preparation for his quote in Genesis 2 about God then bringing one man and one woman together in marriage so that the two might become one flesh more on that next week but doesn't all this show what a great mess we humans are there's something profoundly wrong with us isn't there we're arrogant and full of ourselves as if we're our own creators and sustainers we also degrade ourselves we love me people more than the God who made us and we fail to represent God to others properly we worship one another or we curse one another we belittle women we belittle men and we fight sometimes like cats and dogs even in marriage and sometimes we are confused and sometimes profoundly confused about what God has made us to be either as male or female have you felt the frustration of being a fallen person unsure of what it means to be male or female and feeling and thinking like you just aren't at home in the body you've been given of course people feel frustration and alienation even from themselves the fall has brought both sin and misery to the human condition the misery of alienation from God we're estranged from him until we're reconciled to him by Jesus who made peace by the blood of the cross and we're alienated from others we get sideways with one another or worse all the time and we're alienated from the created world I mean thorns and thistles and suffering and sorrow dominate so much of our life and the animals either fear us or they terrify us it wasn't that way before the fall and we are alienated from ourselves we're born with bodily defects DNA chromosomes hormones that don't function the way they would in an unfallen world and we have thoughts about ourselves that aren't true to reality and we sometimes wish that we were something other than what we are and so we don't feel at home in this world and sometimes we don't feel at home in our bodies if you've ever wondered whether you are what your body indicates it's not surprising yet the good news includes this that God cares about us in soul and in body Paul told the Christians in Corinth 1 Corinthians 6 the body is meant for the Lord and the Lord for the body your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who lives within you you are not your own you were bought with a price so glorify God in your body and because we haven't not like we ought not on one of us God sent his son in the likeness of sinful man to be sinned for us that God might be the art restorer of his own images and renew us after his image even as males and females you see God's good gifts you embrace them his healings promise our perfect wholeness of the life to come his word reveals to us reality to transform our thoughts is making us male or female after his own image dignifies us and through union with Christ through faith the artist remakes us after his own image not fully here but fully and finally in glory put your hope in Jesus let's pray Father we do need you we grant us to be thankful for your good gifts to us thank you that every good gift is from you and especially thank you for Jesus our Redeemer who loves our soul and our body and promises us glory help us man through our own miseries in Jesus name we pray amen amen let's stand together and sing