SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/14/2023 10:20 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Affirmation”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
19:8-9
Message of the verses: “8 He said to them,
"Because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your
wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. 9 “And I say to you,
whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman
commits adultery.’”
We
looked at what the Mosaic Law stated about divorce in recent SD’s stating
that it did not commend, much less
command divorce, Jesus affirmed that it permitted divorce under certain
conditions. Jesus then tells these
Pharisees that it was because of the hardness of heart that Moses permitted you
to divorce your wives.
MacArthur
adds “As noted above, even the scriptural permission for divorce is implied
rather than explicitly taught. In no Old
Testament passage, including the Deuteronomy 24:1-4 text to which the Pharisees
no doubt were referring, is specific permission for divorce given. One reason is not hard to surmise. If the Israelites so abused implied
permission for divorce, how much more would they have abused explicit permission?”
We
mentioned earlier that the penalty for adultery under the Mosaic covenant was death,
and we read about this happening in the early chapters of the Bible, but God in
His loving grace did not always exact the death penalty for adultery under the
OT Law. If that were the case then
David, Solomon and other OT characters would have been in a great deal of
trouble. Think about David’s adultery
with Bathsheba and then actually having her husband killed, and although David
was severely rebuked by the Lord, God did not put him to death. It was because
of Solomon’s hundreds of wives that he was in virtual unremitting adultery on
the basis of the one-man, one-woman standard of Genesis 1-2. Yet like his father David, he did not suffer
the death penalty. God is indeed
gracious.
In
Ezra’s OT book we find that after the Jewish exiles returned from Babylon to
live in Jerusalem that they desired to live like the OT covenant and therefore
they had to put away their foreign wives and the children that were born to
them because they had broken the Law of God.
"So now let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the
wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who
tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law”
(Ezra 10:3).
John
MacArthur writes about this : “There is
no record that this action was specifically approved by God, but lack of any
condemnation implies that the resulting divorces were permitted by Him. And the historical context supports the idea
that those divorces were on the grounds of adultery. Not only were all pagans of that day
idolatrous, which Scripture repeatedly refers to as spiritual adultery (see,
e.g., Jer. 3:8; 13:27; Ezek. 16:32), but most pagan religious systems involved
gross immorality as an integral part of their rites and ceremonies. It is therefore likely that most, if not all,
of the foreign wives the Israelite men had married were both physical and
spiritual adulterers, thereby giving their husbands legitimate grounds for
divorce.”
Lord willing we will continue looking at this
section in our next SD.
2/14/2023 10:46 AM
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