SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/25/2020 9:16 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “The
Teaching of the Scribes and Pharisees”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:31
Message of the
verse: “31
“Furthermore it has been said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a
certificate of divorce’” (NKJV).
We have talked about the words that
Jesus said “It was said” in previous SD’s and have mentioned that He is
speaking about what “the ancients” have said, and in this case in verse 21, the
rabbis and scribes who had developed the commonly accepted Jewish traditions
over the previous centuries which happened primarily during and also after the
Babylonian Exile. MacArthur adds “This
is our Lord’s way of setting in place what is antithetical to the teaching of
God. I want to insert why I have used
the NKJV of the Bible in some of these Spiritual Diaries instead of the NASB
which I usually use. In the NASB they capitalize
sections that come from the Old Testament, and as we are learning Jesus is
talking about what the “ancients” had said, and so I don’t think that this is
really a quotation from the Old Testament.
In our last SD we mentioned four
different views on divorce and remarriage and in the case of the scribes and
Pharisees of Jesus’ day on earth their view was the most liberal as their only
requirement was the giving of a “certificate of dismissal.”
During this time period a man could
dismiss his wife for burning his food, something that simple, and this had to
put a lot of pressure on the wife to make sure that she continued to please her
husband in every way.
So where did these Rabbi’s get this
justification from? They had an
erroneous interpretation of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 which we find the Bible’s first
mention of a “certificate of dismissal.”
“1 "When a man takes a
wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes
because he has found some indecency
in her, and he writes her
a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her
out from his house, 2 and she leaves his house and goes and becomes another man’s
wife, 3 and if the latter husband turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce
and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter
husband dies who took her to be his wife, 4 then her former husband who
sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife, since she has
been defiled; for that is an abomination before the LORD, and you shall not
bring sin on the land which the LORD your God gives you as an inheritance.”
John
MacArthur comments on this: “The focus
on that passage is not the question of whether or not divorce is
permitted. It does not provide for divorce,
much less command it. It is rather the
statement of a very narrow, specific law that was given to deal with the matter
of adultery. It shows how improper
divorce leads to adultery, which results in defilement. Through Moses, God recognized and permitted
divorce under certain circumstances when it was accompanied by a certificate,
but He did not thereby condone divorce.
God’s permission for divorce was but another accommodation of His grace
to human sin (see Matt. 19:18). ‘Because
of your hardness of heart, ‘Jesus explained to the Pharisees on another
occasion, ‘Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it
has not been this way’ (Matt. 19:8).
“The
certificate did not make the divorce right, but only gave the woman some
protection. It protected her reputation
from slander and provided proof of her legal freedom from her former husband
and her consequent right to remarry.
“A
literal rendering of the Hebrew word translated ‘indecency’ in Deuteronomy 24:1
is ‘the nakedness of a thing.’ Some
interpreters say it refers to repeated indecent exposure, but Alfred Edersheim
(Sketches of Jewish Social Life
[Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996], pp.
157-158) says that the word includes every kind of impropriety and describes a
generally poor reputation.”
MacArthur
goes on to explain that the only other place in the entire Bible where we find
that Hebrew term mentioned is in Deuteronomy 23. “13 and you shall have a spade among your
tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall
turn to cover up your excrement. 14 “Since the LORD your God walks in the midst
of your camp to deliver you and to defeat your enemies before you, therefore
your camp must be holy; and He must not see anything indecent among you or He
will turn away from you.” “Anything
indecent” comes from the same Hebrew word as ‘indecency’ in 24:1.”
We
conclude this SD by stating that the meaning of this word found in Deuteronomy
24 does include every kind of improper, shameful, or indecent behavior that
would be unbecoming to a woman and thus an embarrassment to her husband. MacArthur states that this “cannot refer to
adultery, because death was the penalty for that, even if it occurred during
the engagement period (Lev. 20:1; Deut. 22:22-24).” So we would wonder what kind of indecency
then would lead to this “certificate of dismissal?” It perhaps could have been what we may call
flirtation and this word means “behavior that demonstrates a playful sexual
attraction to someone.” Now as seen in
our verses from Deut. 24 that if this woman marries another man and that man
dies she could not be remarried to her first husband, and the reason was
because she had been “defiled.”
8/25/2020 9:58 AM
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