Matthew Ch 19 Vs 1-9 - Marriage The Highest Ideal. (Episode 491)

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The Highest Ideal. (Matthew 19: 1-9)

Introduction.

1 Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings, that He departed from Galilee and came to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. 2 And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them there. 3 The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” 4 And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to Him, “Why then did Moses’ command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” 8 He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for]sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”  (Matthew 19: 1-9)

The Jewish Idea of Marriage.

Here Jesus is dealing with what was in his day, as it is in our own is a vexed and burning question. Divorce was something about which there was no agreement among the Jews at that time and the Pharisees here were deliberately not only try and trap Jesus, but they were also trying to involve Jesus in the controversy. At this point in world history for 200 years now, no nation had ever had a higher view of marriage than the Jews. Marriage was a sacred, to remain unmarried after the age of twenty, except in order to concentrate upon the study of the Torah, was to break the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply, as they saw it." The Tanach taught, “He who had no children lessened the image of God upon earth."and  "When husband and wife are worthy, the glory of God is with them." The Jewish laws of marriage and of was based on the Old Testament scripture, (Malachi 2:16), where God declares, "I hate divorce”.  But this hight ideal and actual reality did not go hand in hand. In the time of Jesus there had developed two dangerous and damaging elements.

First, in the eyes of Jewish law, a woman was a thing. She was the possession of her father, or of her husband as the case might be. Technically she had no legal rights at all. Most Jewish marriages were arranged either by the parents or by professional matchmakers. A girl might be engaged to be married in childhood and was often engaged to be married to a man whom she had never seen. There was one caveat that when she came to the age of twelve, she had one chance to repudiate her father's choice but that was almost unheard of except in the most rare and extreme of case. 

However,in matters of divorce, the law as it was interpreted said the initiative must always lie with the husband. The Pharisaic law said: "A woman may be divorced with or without her consent, but a man can be divorced only with his consent." The woman could never initiate the process of divorce; she could not divorce, she 

had to be divorced. By and large, the law was that the woman had no legal rights, and the right to divorce lay entirely with the husband. 

The Jewish Idea of Divorce.

Second, the process of divorce was incredibly easy. T

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