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Hi, this is Pastor Tom Holliday and I want to welcome you to Daily Drive Time
Devotions, Mark 10 this week, day one of our look at this chapter. We're going
to be looking at verses 1-12 today, and as you remember from last week, Jesus
has been teaching his followers about how to live the life that he wants us to
live. He just has a few weeks left with these disciples before he's going to go
to the cross, and so he's teaching them.

He's teaching them through experiences, through questions, through failure,
through relationships. In this chapter, we're going to see Jesus teach them
through confrontations, through conversations. First, he has a confrontation
with the Pharisees.

It's a confrontation about divorce and marriage, and in this confrontation, he
teaches us some extremely valuable and deep truths. Now, as we start this
passage, just a few words before we start this passage. These verses are about
marriage.

There are other verses in the Bible that are about being single. Paul tells us
that God uses times of being single for all of us, and that for some, he chooses
a life of single ministry, but these verses happen to be about marriage. That
doesn't mean that God doesn't have a message for singles.

We'll come to that in other parts of our Bible study as we go through the New
Testament. It's also very important to realize as we go into these verses that
God tells us that he is the one who ultimately meets all of our needs. Marriage,
and Jesus is going to tell us here that marriage can be, should be, a wonderful
relationship, but it cannot fill the God-shaped vacuum in all of our hearts.

Only God can do that, so never expect, even with all the value that Jesus gives
marriage here, never expect it to do in your life as a relationship what only
God can do in your life through your relationship with him. And also realize as
we go into these verses, Jesus is going to talk about divorce, that God hates
divorce. He tells us that in Malachi.

He hates it, not legalistically. He hates it because he loves, because it hurts
his children. God is a forgiving God.

He is a God also who speaks to us honestly about life, and in these verses,
Jesus speaks to us honestly about the deep value that God places on the
relationship of marriage. Here's what he has to say, beginning in verse 1. Jesus
then left that place and went into the region of Judea and across the Jordan.

Again, crowds of people came to him, as was his custom, he taught them. Some
Pharisees came and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his
wife? " "What did Moses command you?

" he replied. "They said Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce
and send her away. " "It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you
this law," Jesus replied.

Now, first get what's happening here. These Pharisees, these teachers of the
law, had come again to trap Jesus. If Jesus stood with the law, then the people
wouldn't like him because of what he said about divorce.

If he stood with the people and said things about divorce that the people were
saying, then the law would condemn him. Either way, they thought that they could
get Jesus condemned here. Now, the truth of the matter is, even these teachers
had arguments amongst themselves in that day about divorce.

There were basically two schools on this issue of divorce in the day of Jesus.
There was the Hillel school and the Shammai school. These two schools were named
for two different rabbis.

The Shammai, the rabbi, believed that divorce in the Old Testament was only
permissible because of sexual immorality. Hillel believed that divorce was
permissible for any reason of a wife displeasing her husband. By the way, in
that day, a wife could not divorce a husband.

A husband could only divorce a wife. That was the unfairness of that day. This
Hillel school said, "Any displeasure that comes, it could be the displeasure of
a badly cooked meal," even it was said by some of the rabbis.

In fact, even one rabbi said, "It could be the displeasure of you found another
woman who you thought was more beautiful. " This is pretty crazy thinking, but
as you can imagine, the way people think human nature, Hillel was a lot more
popular than Shammai because divorce was so easy. Jesus says, when you're
thinking about divorce and marriage and you come and you ask me this question,
Jesus says to those teachers in that day, "You're asking the wrong question.

" The question they were asking was a legalistic question, "Is divorce lawful? "
And Jesus says, "Get your eyes off the letter of the law and get your eyes on
the heart of God. To get your eyes on the heart of God, he will help you with
this issue, whatever pain you might have faced, whatever temptations you might
have faced, whatever challenges, whatever hurts, whatever joys, get your eyes on
the heart of God.

" Jesus asked the Pharisees, "What did Moses command? " Now, I want to be clear
here, he's not pitting Moses against God. What did Moses say instead of God?

When he says, "What does Moses command? " that refers to the first five books of
the Old Testament. It's like us saying, "What does the Bible say?

What does the Bible say to you? " He's saying, and they say, "Well, Moses
commanded," and Jesus corrects them. In essence, he says, "Moses permitted.

" What Moses said, he said, in verse five, is because you have hard hearts.
Here's the heart of God in this. God allowed for divorce in the Old Testament
because sometimes people stubbornly refused to change, either one person or both
people in our day.

But in that day, it was one person. And so divorce was allowed in that day. But
Jesus says it was just allowed not because of God's legalistic way of dealing
with things, but because God knows us and he knows that we stubbornly refuse to
change sometimes.

But then Jesus turns the whole issue on its head. Instead of focusing on the
problem, Jesus focuses on the plan of God that grows out of the heart of God for
his people. Whenever you begin to think legalistically, like, "What's permitted?

What's not permitted? What can I do? What can't I do?

How far can I go in the Bible? How far shouldn't I go in the Bible? " Get your
eyes off of the law, Jesus says, of the line, and get your eyes on the heart, on
the heart of God that results in the plan of God.

Jesus talks about that plan in verses six to nine. "But at the beginning of
creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man will leave his
father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore, what God has joined together, let
man not separate. " Now, how important are these verses for us to understand in
our marriages?

Because we're all going to face challenges in our marriage if you're married. A
survey in Christianity Today, the Christian magazine, was done, and of the 28
percent in that magazine who answered and said that they had strongly considered
a divorce, nine out of ten said that belief in Jesus's teaching about marriages
would help them to keep their marriage together. Only one in ten said it was
intervention by a family member or friends that was a factor.

So understanding what Jesus teaches here can save a marriage, can take a
marriage through the tough times. And what is Jesus saying? Jesus says that
marriage values God's creation, how God made things to be.

Marriage is God's idea. It's not a government program. It's God's idea.

It's not a social experiment. It is God's idea, and it's an idea. It's a plan
that grows out of God's love for us.

It was God's idea to create men and women. Genesis 1, 27, so God created human
beings in his image. In the image of God, he created them.

He created them male and female. That's God's idea. And then in Genesis 2, the
Bible gives us a more detailed description of why God created men and women and
marriage.

And Jesus quotes those verses here when he says, "A man will leave his father
and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. "
That's God's plan for marriage. It's not God's plan for every one of us to get
married, but for every one of us who does get married, his plan is the two will
become one.

God created men and women to be very different. Have you noticed that? He
created us very different.

And then he planned for us to be married. Now, depending on the day, you could
think, "What a wonderful God," or you could think, "What a cruel joke that God
would do this. " These differences between men and women put together in a
marriage, in the oneness of a marriage, they bring delight and they bring
disaster.

The same spark can set off fireworks, but it can also start a forest fire. Now,
why did God do this? God did this to reveal what he's like.

He created us male and female to show the world what he's like, but he also did
this because he wants us to grow. God uses our differences to grow us. And one
of the greatest moral choices that you can make in any marriage is to value the
differences, value the fact that God made your husband different than you, that
God made your wife different than you.

When things start going bad, you begin to think, "Why aren't they more of the
same? Why can't they see things just like I do? " But God made us to be
different, because that's how we grow.

Now, this was a challenge even in that day. Listen to what happened in verses 10
to 12. "When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this.

He answered, 'Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits
adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she
commits adultery. '" This was a challenging thought for the disciples.

And so they began to ask Jesus, "How serious are you about this? " And he
answers, "I'm very serious about this. " Now, let me just say, in other places,
as Jesus teaches about marriage, he talks about except for the cause of sexual
immorality, and he talks about some reasons, some causes for a divorce, but
that's not what he talks about here.

And so I'd like to focus on what he talks about here. There are obviously times
when Jesus says, "Divorce is permitted and remarriage is allowed," but the focus
here is on somebody who is tempted to leave their marriage for somebody else.
You divorce someone with your eye on somebody else, and no one else may know
that your eye is on someone else, but you know it.

And Jesus says, "When you do that, you're causing that someone else to commit
adultery with you. You're not only hurting yourself, you're hurting that person
that you're chasing after. " That's how serious it is, Jesus is saying.

Now, if you've made that choice in your life and you know it, seek his
forgiveness. He is a forgiving God, but if you're on the edge of making that
kind of choice, seek his strength. Seek his strength not to put you and that
person that you think you love, if you really love them, you're not going to do
this to them, into that situation.

You see, Jesus says God values marriage because it values the way he made us,
and it values the fact that he created us to be one. In God's value of marriage,
that means he will support your marriage. You're not alone.

In any marriage, there are not two, there are actually three. There's you, the
one you're married to, and there is God. It's amazing how when we look at each
other and all we see is each other, oftentimes there are conflicts, but when we
look together to God, there is something powerful about looking together to him
that can draw us together.

Now, I'd like to end this time with a time of prayer together, and I'd like to
invite you, whether you're married or single, to thank God for marriage, just to
thank him that he created marriage. Even if God has called you to a life of
being single, you can thank him for the fact that others are married and what
that means in their lives. And as you thank him, pray, just take a few minutes
right now to pray for the marriages of those close to you, beginning with your
own marriage if you're married, and then going to people in your family, people
in your small group, people that you know at church, people at your work.

Pray for the marriages right now. Just call them to mind. God, would you
strengthen them?

God, would you grow them? God, would you use their marriage to show the world a
little bit of what you're like? Pray for the marriages of those that are close
to you.

Jesus, we do pray. We pray with a sense of praise that you value our
relationships, and because you value them, you are at work in our relationships.
We are not alone, and I pray particularly for someone who feels alone right now.

Help them to know that you are right there with them, that they're not facing
this alone. I pray this, Jesus, in your name. Amen.

Well, join us tomorrow. We're going to see Jesus welcoming the little children.