The Covenant the King Guards

This morning, as we return to Matthew's gospel, we will be obviously picking up where we left off in chapter five. However, we are gonna begin this morning by reading our text a little differently than we normally do.

So I'd ask that you go ahead, if you have not already, make your way to Matthew's gospel in the fifth chapter. We'll be reading a short passage this morning, verses 31 and 32. And then I would ask that as you find your place, that you would stand in reverence for the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative, sufficient, complete, and certain word.

As we turn to Matthew's gospel, picking up in the 31st verse, reading verses 31 and 32, we find these words. Now it was said, whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.

And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Gracious Father, we come before you again, having heard your word. Lord, we ask now for the courage to look beneath the surface, acknowledging that this word searches us more deeply than we would naturally like to allow.

Although we know that it exposes not only our actions, but goes beyond our actions to our motives, our excuses, our desires, ultimately to the hardness of our hearts. Or as we consider these words this morning, guard us from bending this truth towards our preferences or experiences.

Grant us humble hearts that are willing to submit to you to the truth that has been spoken. Father, in this conversation, grant wisdom where the subject is difficult to us. Conviction where sin exists, discomfort where there has been betrayal, and hope where repentance is needed.

Father, above all of these things, cause us to see the faithfulness of Christ, the faithful bridegroom who has loved his church and has given himself for us. Father, we pray by your Holy Spirit that we would hear and obey the voice of our King.

Christ’s Righteousness and the Authority of the Law

We ask all of these things in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen. You may be seated. So as a brief reminder, our recent path is one that has brought us to a place where it's necessary that we keep in focus what we've been through so that we properly understand the text.

The text that we come to this morning is a text that has obviously been abused and mishandled many times by many people, made into many things that it is not. So it's important that as we come to it, that we recall what has led us to this point and that we understand what is the framework that we use to understand the message being conveyed by Christ here.

So if you'll recall back in verses 17 through 20 of chapter five, that's our anchor point, if you will. That's the place where as we begin unpacking verses 21 down through 48, which we're in the midst of, that's the point that we must continually refer back to.

So even in your private studies, it's necessary to refer back to these anchor points so that you are clear on what's occurring in the text. So we saw in verses 17 through 20 that Christ made it clear that he didn't come to abolish the law and the prophets.

He didn't come to change what had previously been given. What he actually did was to fulfill them. In that same passage, we saw him affirming the authority of the word, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, both all of scripture, right?

So we understand that all of scripture carries this authority with it. One of the things that we lose often in this world today is that the authority, we feel like it's gone somewhere, the authority of the Old Testament, and it's no longer relevant or important, but it is.

He warns us in verses 17 through 20 against loosening the commands. He warns us against not teaching the commands properly. He warns us against this life that we live and then tells us that unless our righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, we shall not see the kingdom of heaven.

And that's an important piece of that because it is that righteousness that Christ is describing in that final verse in verse 20 that he then begins to unpack and demonstrate for us in verses 21 down, I mean, yeah, beginning in 21 and reading down through verse 48.

And so we've seen that Christ describes murder, traces it all the way back beyond the shedding of blood and finds its root in the anger and discontent and contempt that we have in our life. We saw last week where he traced adultery back beyond a physical action to an action of the eye, an action of the heart and something that works into the imagination, affections and desires of each of us.

And so one of the things that we walk away with that from there is that deliberate cultivated lust is already adultery in the heart. And so what follows in verses 31 and 32 is not a move to a different command.

Christ is still dealing with the same one of the 10 commandments. He's dealing with it from a little bit of a different angle. Instead of looking at it from a desire that generates and violates inwardly, what he's now looking at is an action that may discard marriage outwardly.

And so as we unpack this, we again need to understand that the Pharisee or us in many cases, we're looking for that boundary that we can walk up to and not cross. So we're looking for that line that says, hey, how far can I go, but yet not sin, right?

And so it's the problem here is that when we approach it in that manner, then we've sinned already because we're already in a rebellious situation. And so Christ reminds us that God looks beneath that boundary, looks beneath the outward action and sees what the heart is doing.

And in this case with marriage, what the heart is doing with the covenant that God has established. And so that's what is gonna make this passage so searching. It's two verses, it's very simple. It's very easy to come to it, just take it at exactly what it says, read what into it we want to and walk away from it without ever really trying to dig into it at all.

So this morning, we're gonna take a little bit deeper look and we're gonna talk about the reality again that the righteousness that God requires cannot be resolved by simply following a procedure. This is not about a dissolution of just a worldly thing.

This is a heart issue. The giving of the certificate that we're gonna talk more about in a few minutes cannot, it may in the eyes of the civil world end something, but it cannot in the eyes of God because God is the one who has established and defined what marriage truly is.

Deuteronomy 24 Regulates Divorce Without Commanding It

So you'll notice in verse 21 Christ, I mean verse 21, in verse 31, Christ again begins with this same formula that you have been seeing. It's a little different. He doesn't say you have heard it said.

He says here in verse 31, now it was said. Now that particular formula and what he's pointing us back to here is actually comes from Deuteronomy 24, verses one through four and that particular passage is a passage in which Moses gives some instruction around a certificate of divorce.

And often it is referred to as a command regarding divorce and allowing it to be used to make divorce a legal matter. A careful reading of that passage, however, shows that Moses is not commanding a dissatisfied husband to divorce his wife.

What it is doing is regulating a divorce that has already occurred. So the situation already exists. Moses is giving the words of the Lord and they are regulating a situation that has already happened.

So it's a place that people had already gone to. The divorce had already occurred. Ultimately, that passage forbids the husband from reclaiming his former wife if she becomes another man's wife and then he passes away and then it keeps that husband from going back.

It's a difficult passage, but at the end of the day, what had happened by this time is the Pharisees had turned that into a command of Moses versus a concession. Moses, in the Old Testament, again, recording the words of the Lord, recognizes that this is a tragic reality of a fallen society and the words that we find in Deuteronomy are there to restrain further evil.

This is foundational. It's very difficult sometimes to fully grasp, but what we need to understand is Moses is not, the word of God is not, in any case, declaring every divorce righteous simply because a certificate had been issued.

Now, Matthew Henry states the matter clearly. He's not the only one. We also will later see Spurgeon give a very similar statement where Moses permitted it, but he did not command it. Moses permitted the giving of the certificate of divorce, but he is not commanding it, and the distinction is essential, again, because the Pharisees had moved, they had shifted the attention away from the covenant itself, and we're gonna come back to that covenant in just a few minutes, and gone toward the legality of the procedure.

In other words, their question was, did you give the woman a legal document? Meaning that everything's okay. Christ's question that he is driving at is by what right do you put her away for divorce? We look in Matthew a little bit later in the 19th chapter, verses three through nine, we find these words.

Jesus is having a conversation with the Pharisees, and this is what we read. And some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and saying, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

And he answered and said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 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.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. They, the Pharisees, said to Jesus, why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?

And listen to Christ's response. Because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another woman, commits adultery.

Now, if you'll notice there, the Pharisees ask whether a man may divorce his wife for any reason at all. And Jesus, in his response, well, and then they also throw in the fact that if that's the case, why did Moses command a certificate of divorce to be given?

But you'll notice that Jesus changes the word. They use the word command. Jesus changes it to the word permitted. Moses didn't command it. He permitted it, and he permitted it, why? Because of the hardness of their hearts.

You know, our own hearts are capable of the exact same maneuvers, the same thing that the Pharisees are doing here. We wanna know what we can do, kind of like I said a few minutes ago, how far we can go and yet still remain innocent.

How much can we push it without actually crossing the line? Earlier, as we studied through verses 21 down through 31, we saw kind of the same thing when it came to murder in a respectable sinner. We use that term, respectable sinner, someone who could say, well, I've never sinned because I've never killed anyone.

Yet the problem is not the physical act of killing. The problem, as we saw there, is the things that lead up to it. Same thing in the next passage where the respectable sinner can say, well, I've never committed adultery because I've never gone to that physical action.

Marriage as God’s One-Flesh Covenant

Here, it may be, well, I follow the proper legal process. I got the certificate. In each case, what we see is an outward fact that is true, yet the issue is our heart is still rebelling against God. John Calvin wrote that the bond of marriage is too sacred to be dissolved at the will.

And so the question exists. If marriage exists merely because we prefer it, then doesn't it stand to reason that the moment that our preference changes, then our marriages could end? The problem is our definition of marriage.

The issue is is that marriage was not created by human preference. Marriage is not identified, it's not defined by human preference. It is established and defined and initiated by the Lord God Almighty, which means that if God is sovereign, as we believe wholeheartedly that he is, as the word of God teaches us, then just like in any other thing, how can our will override his sovereignty?

And the truth of the matter is, is that we are not sovereign over God. Our will cannot override. And that goes to the covenant of marriage as well. But it's beyond that. So let's kind of walk this thing because if you'll notice in Jesus' response in Matthew 19, and we're gonna get to Matthew 19 later in this sermon series, and there's a lot more in that particular passage that we're gonna unpack, but we wanna look at just a little bit of it this morning.

His appeal doesn't go to a civil place. His appeal doesn't go to a marriage ceremony. His appeal doesn't go to Moses and him writing this thing about certificate. His appeal goes all the way back to Genesis.

You'll notice the words were that Genesis was the controlling principle. God created man and woman. God instituted marriage where a man would leave his father and mother. The old languages cleave unto his wife and the two should become one flesh.

That's a God-given, God-granted, God-defined covenant. And so in Matthew 19, we see the order, but creation establishes the norm. Creation defines, when God created, God defined what marriage would be, and then Deuteronomy simply regulates that covenant in a fallen world.

But it is a concession in Deuteronomy that should never be turned into a license. Why does all this matter? Well, it matters because we can look around us in society today and we see what happens when we begin to treat marriage as a private relationship or just a civil contract.

We begin to be able to define what marriage looks like and what marriage is built like. It becomes something that is here today and gone tomorrow, breakable. Yet scripture defines something much deeper, much greater.

Scripture is a creation ordinance that God has joined one man and one woman in one flesh. Malachi speaks regarding the wife of your covenant. Hebrews commands that marriage be held in honor. Ephesians 5 demonstrates for us that marriage goes beyond this picture that we see and points us forward to the covenant relationship, the covenant love that Christ had for his church.

So you see, marriage is more than what we think in society. Marriage is more than just this thing that we have the right or the ability to define. The Second London Baptist Confession, 1689, follows the same biblical order, defining marriage for us according to creation and its God-given purpose.

This is important. It's often hard to grasp sometimes why some of this stuff is so important, but often when we dive into the commandments, we are as people drawn to the negative aspect. We've talked about that a little bit already.

We see the command not to commit adultery and we see that as a singular command with only one side of the equation. But the truth is is that negative also has a massive positive. What's happening there is this prohibition of evil and protection of what God has declared good.

That's the positive side when we look at the moral law. It protects the one flesh union. It protects the dignity of the spouse. It protects the honor of God himself who instituted marriage. William Perkins reminds us that Christ, in this section of the text, is restoring the commandments to its true and proper meaning.

So he's not giving us a new statement. He's not giving us something that's different. What he's doing is unveiling for us and ensuring that we see the truth of the nature. He is showing us that this is not a correction of Moses, but a correction of the reduction of Moses.

They've taken this law that has negative and positive and they've reduced it down to if I don't do this specific act or if I do do this specific act properly, then I'm okay. This shows itself in a lot of other ways as we unpack the rest of this particular passage.

The Heart’s Self-Fulfillment Versus Covenant Faithfulness

But this is where the teaching of Christ really begins to confront the world. You see, our culture trains us. The world trains us. What the world is training us is to look after us, to look after self.

It asks these questions. Am I fulfilled? Am I satisfied? Have my feelings changed? Has someone else attracted me? If you'll think back, if you're a TV watcher, and you'll think back to just about any discussion regarding a divorce or separation that you find in television or movies, what you'll ultimately run into is an encounter where this adulterous relationship has happened and the statement you'll hear inevitably is, I just fell in love with the other person.

I wasn't looking for it. I didn't mean for it to happen. It just did. No, no, there was a lot more involved. It's a lot deeper than that because it comes from these same questions. Am I fulfilled? Am I fulfilled?

This is about me, right? This is a selfish, inward-seeking thing. Am I fulfilled? Am I satisfied? Am I happy? Right? I woke up next to that joker for the last five minutes. Five years. Am I really happy looking at his ugly mug?

I didn't think about it the day we got married. Guys, same thing. But the reality is is the situation that we run into really reveals real struggles. This is real life. Listen, I've been married for 30 years.

I can guarantee you that my life and my wife can attest to this, we ain't always agreed on everything. Anybody that's been married for more than six, eight months knows that it's not all sunshine and roses, that there are challenges, that there are difficulties, that real life gets involved.

The problem is is not that these aren't real issues. The problem is where we begin. You see, we begin with us. Christ began with God. What God has joined, what God requires within that covenant, what faithfulness should exist.

Listen, the truth about marriage is two sinners are joining their life together, and there is nothing more revealing to expose sin than two sinners joining their life together. Because real quick, you find out things like pride.

You find things like impatience, selfishness, wounded expectations, failures in tenderness, failures in forgiveness. All of these things become very visible in married life. And married life is difficult.

And married life can be complicated. And none of that truth should be minimized. But what should be focused on is that these difficulties by themselves are not covenant dissolving ground. While you may have grown apart, that's not a reason to separate.

It may describe a marriage in need of serious rebuilding, of serious repentance on both cases. But understand that it is not by itself what is necessary or what is right to overturn what God has joined.

And so Matthew 19 strengthens our understanding of Matthew 5. It does so because it gives us the spiritual diagnosis behind the reason for Moses giving the concession. And that is the hardness of our heart.

If you think back over the last several messages in this series, it should come as no surprise that this is where we land. Because quite honestly, everything that we've worked in, everything that Christ has done beginning, at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, has worked to the same end.

It has been exposing continually the issue that we have a heart problem. The outward sins may differ. The outward sins may look in complete difference to each other, anger, contempt, lust, dissolution of marriage, or casting off the marriage covenant.

But every single one of them has the same thing behind them. The heart. The heart that resists the rule of God and seeks some way to justify its desires. And so it's necessary that we keep the heart at the central focus of this conversation.

And we all need to understand, we're not talking about that muscle in your chest that's going ka-tunk, ka-tunk, ka-tunk, okay? When scripture talks about the heart, it's talking about the core of your being, who you are, right?

The thing that drives you, that motivates you, that gigantic ball of sinful flesh. Or in some of your cases, that little ball of sinful flesh, because you're not gigantic. But the truth of the matter is, it's still a heart problem.

When we encounter God's law, what happens is that law exposes what's in the heart. And as it exposes it, it often helps restrain it, but it cannot soften what the heart produces. Listen, the law can command grace.

The law can command humility. The law can command repentance. The law can command forgiveness. But let me tell you what the law can't do. It cannot change a rebellious heart. It is only the grace of Christ.

Matthew 5:31–32 Searches Every Marriage

Martin Lloyd-Jones is especially helpful here because he keeps this passage, and in fact, all of the working of the Sermon on the Mount must stay within the larger argument that Christ is moving towards.

The problem is a inner issue. It's Christ continually, if you start at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter five, you read all the way through the end, what you're gonna find, over and over and over and over again is Christ repeatedly dismantling these external righteousness and pressing inward, revealing our inner man, but then also pushing beyond that to say, this is what God requires in the heart.

This is how God requires us to live. And so the issue is deeper than whether our outward conduct can be defended. It goes beyond whether the, to the point of whether the heart itself has submitted to God.

And so as we look at Matthew 5, 31 and 32, first of all, we cannot just conclude that this is only for marriages that have ended. Some of us read this passage and we go, oh, well, that doesn't apply to me.

The truth is, is that it applies much more broadly than we often think. And so it's necessary that as we look at this text, we do so in such a way that we allow it to search every marriage. Because if we go back and we understand what being taught in Deuteronomy about this giving away of a wife, putting away of a wife and giving her the certificate, what we see is not something driven by adultery.

What we see is something driven by the desires of the heart. I'm not happy, I'm not satisfied. I woke up this morning, I didn't like the way she looked, so I just decided it was over, whatever. And so what we see is as we begin to evaluate this, we measure marriages by this passage and we see that a husband could stay home, remain in the house, remain in the relationship, but yet at the same time, he's withholding affections, he's withholding tenderness, he's withholding leadership, he's withholding repentance.

A wife could be in the same situation. She could also be there with bitterness that ultimately becomes settled hostility. And while on the outside, there's been no divorce, what's happened in the heart, what's happened in the inside is that the two have grown away.

And either spouse can feed comparisons or resentments that simply continue to hollow out this covenant love. And so the question is not, are you still married? This is what it presses beyond, right? This is where it kind of gets a little more difficult because we gotta look beyond the fact that what the passage says in the sense of, oh, it just uses the word divorce, so that means I'm good.

It's not the question of are you still married, it is the question of what is your heart become within the marriage God has given you? What's happening within that covenant life? Jesus then states the restriction plainly that everyone who divorces his wife except for the reason of sexual immorality bears responsibility for the adulterous consequences that follow.

Now this is another one of those things that's very hard for us in today's society to deal with because in our mindsets, when a marriage is dissolved by a civil agreement, then that's the end of it. There's nothing else to it, it's done.

The problem is that the civil dissolvement, again, does not end the covenant. And so the picture here that we see, first of all, let's deal with the term sexual immorality because oftentimes we wanna think, okay, well, this is adultery.

The reality is that this word is a broader word than the normal word that we use for adultery. So if you go back up to the passage prior, that word adultery is different from this word sexual immorality.

This is a broader thing, but in this context, it does refer to sexual sin that violates the exclusivity of the marriage covenant. That doesn't mean it's physical, that just means it exists. But at the same time, we cannot stretch this until every serious marital sin becomes grounds in our eyes for a disillusion of the covenant.

This is a genuine exception, not a blank check. But notice something else. This is a permissive command, a permissive statement, not a command. Just because that existence allows for marriage to become legal doesn't mean that it has to become, a divorce to become legal doesn't mean that it has to be necessary.

There are situations where real repentance, real truthful confession, real cutting off of sin, real submission to accountability, real credible fruit over time generates reconciliation that may occur.

And that reconciliation is a remarkable display of grace. However, we also must take care to note that forgiveness doesn't necessarily mean that we pretend that the betrayal never happened. Forgiveness also does not mean that we have the same restored trust being identical to forgiveness.

Over time, that trust may be restored. You can forgive before the trust is fully restored, if that helps make that a little more plain. In any case, here's something that we all need to understand regarding repentance.

Repentance includes patience with consequences and a willingness to walk in the light. Repentance includes patience with consequences and a willingness to walk in the light. When we repent, we must be willing to have patience with the consequences, we need to understand we can't expect it to go back to the way it was immediately.

We also must be willing to walk. We must be willing to open ourselves. Therefore, the whole counsel of God has to govern these things that we see in Matthew five. It has to govern the entirety of this conversation.

Desertion, Abuse, and Pastoral Judgment

We get to 1 Corinthians chapter seven, it commands believers not to abandon willing spouses even when the other spouse is an unbeliever. Religious difference alone is not a ground for divorce, yet Paul says that if the unbelieving spouse departs, the brother or sister is not enslaved.

So again, these are acceptable reasons. Historic reform theology has commonly understood irredeemable, irremediable, willful desertion as covenant dissolving. In other words, there are situations that do fit the scenario, although in every one of those, careful judgment, careful work is required efforts should be made before the category is applied.

Again, the same thing is true, we see oftentimes, well, I was commanded to stay in this relationship that was abusive. There's a difference between staying in the covenant and staying in the direct situation, okay?

In other words, don't stay in a situation where abuse is happening. But there should be a desire to seek this work if it is appropriate. It's a hard thing to grasp, it's a hard thing to comprehend, it's a hard thing to understand.

And so this care has to be taken. There's nothing in Christ's teaching that says to you or children to remain physically exposed to violence. I wanna make sure I'm very clear on what this is about. What this teaches because this is one of those places where often the teachings of the church and the teachings of scripture are misunderstood.

There's nothing here commanding you to stay in that situation in order to prove commitment to a marriage. Separation is one thing. Separation for safety, for lawful civil protection, it could even be church discipline.

There could be a lot of situations, the involvement with the authorities, all of those things may be morally appropriate while the covenantal facts are established. It's not a command to stay there. Faithfulness to marriage does not mean calling evil good.

Faithfulness to marriage does not mean calling evil good. There is a permanence that must never be weaponized against the person who has been sinned against. We cannot look at someone who has been abused and battered and beaten and blame them because it's not their fault.

These are difficult cases. They require careful judgment, but at the same time we cannot use those to obscure Christ's ordinary rule that what God has joined must not be casually torn apart. This is one of those situations where these are the exceptions, the greater, the outlier situations that are pointed to in order to avoid dealing with the real situation.

It's kind of like when you begin to have a conversation with someone who is pro-abortion. They wanna point at the small things that are less than 1 of the time versus the broader picture of we're killing humans.

The Consequences of Unlawful Divorce

And so as we move out of that and into the closing words of verse 32, we get to this point where Christ tells us that the man who puts his wife away without this biblical ground has identified, that Christ has identified, makes her commit adultery.

And then he adds that the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Now, this is not declaring that an innocent woman becomes morally guilty merely because her husband has rejected her. What Christ is pointing to here is the responsibility upon the man who unlawfully tears apart a marriage that remains binding before God and then creates circumstances in which a subsequent marriage could create violation of that covenant.

In other words, the first marriage is dissolved unlawfully in the eyes of God and they enter into a second marriage or situation that could create a violation of that first covenant. You cannot, the man cannot put his wife away and then treat the consequences of his covenant breaking as though they were unrelated to his own sin.

William Goud's writing on the unity created in marriage said that those whom marriage has made one are constantly to remain one and not to make themselves two again, which is why Jesus' warning extends to the subsequent marriage.

Mark 10, 11 through 12 states the principle reciprocally, stating that whether the husband or the wife wrongfully divorces and marries another, the new union is adulterous. Luke 16, 18 states the same thing because the first covenant has not been lawfully dissolved.

Charles Hodge expresses the principle carefully in his systematic theology where he writes regarding marriage that it cannot be dissolved by any voluntary act of repudiation nor any act of the church or state.

The point is, again, that the civil authority have no legitimate right or role to dissolve the divorce. They can recognize it, but human declaration cannot in itself make that occur. We cannot change it into something righteous merely because that's what we want to do.

This guards us from serious error because the fact that someone is divorced doesn't necessarily tell us who sinned against the marriage. Romans chapter seven, verses two through three reminds us of the ordinary binding character of marriage.

Again, in Matthew chapter 19, we see this exception that Christ himself gives. The fact that the abandoned spouse must not be made to bear the guilt of the covenant breaker, nor may the one who wrongfully ended a marriage escape responsibility because there's a simple civil ceremony that has been completed.

Therefore, the church must judge according to scripture, distinguishing the one who breaks covenant from the one who sinned against and is refusing either indiscriminate condemnation or the approval of what God calls righteous.

The Righteousness We Need Comes from Christ

I know this is very technical, right? The reason it's so technical, the reason it's so difficult is because it literally flies in the face of so much of what we've heard and been taught. But let me maybe help bridge the gap here.

I want to point you back up to Matthew chapter five, verse 20 for a second. I want you to notice what Christ said. Again, remember, this is our anchor point. Matthew five, verse 24. I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

So yes, when we read this passage and we expound on these passages, we run into things that are absolutely 100 contradictory to our natural human state. We see things that we go, there's no way that's what that means because that's not what we want it to mean.

We see things and we go, well, there's no way we can measure up to that, to which we respond, now you're getting the point. You see, we can't measure up. That's the whole demonstration Christ is getting us to.

This is the righteousness that is required, but it is not a righteousness that you and I are capable of. And if the story ends here, if the passage only showed us the holiness of God's covenant and the hardness of our hearts, then we would all have reason to be terrified.

We get so caught up in naming it, right? We get so caught up in, oh, well, I can't believe that scripture would allow this statement to be said or that statement to be said, and we forget that scripture is moving beyond those physical statements, the one that we wanna focus on, and it's dealing directly with our heart.

Listen, people may remember adultery, abandonment, selfish divorce, or some other covenant-breaking sin. Other people may have signed divorce papers and that still know the guilt of lust or bitterness or neglect or hardness.

Some people are still married and struggle every single day with some of these truths. Again, this is the righteousness that is required to enter into the kingdom, but it is not the righteousness that we are capable of producing, which is why J .C. Ryle writes that Christ's exposition of the seventh commandment teaches us our exceeding need of the Lord Jesus Christ's atoning blood to save us.

The point is to show us how much we need Christ. That's where this passage takes us. The answer is not to lower the command until we can deal with it. The answer is not to get into the weeds until we can say, okay, we're comfortable with that.