SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/15/2023 9:13 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “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.’”
The story of Hosea and his unfaithful wife Gomer
speaks to what the children of Israel had been doing to the Lord, as the Lord
had taken Israel as a wife, and she was unfaithful to the Lord by worshiping
pagan gods and worthless idols. Isaiah
50:1 says “Thus says the
LORD, "Where is the certificate of divorce By which I have sent your
mother away? Or to whom of My creditors did I sell you? Behold, you were
sold for your iniquities, And for your transgressions your mother was sent
away.” Now we want to answer the question which is in the highlighted portion
of Isaiah 5:1: “The answer, of course, was that God had not given such a
certificate, because, just as Hosea with Gomer, God was not ready to put Israel
away, despite her constant spiritual adultery committed against Him. She had no freedom from her relationship to
God that would allow her to consummate relations with other gods” (MacArthur’s
commentary on Matthew).
God
had been pleading with Israel for 700 years not to commit adultery against Him
by worshiping other gods, and to return to Him.
It was now the time of Jeremiah’s prophecy to be written and in the beginning
of his book the Lord told him to prophecy to the children of Israel, and in
this case it was the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and the Lord told him to speak
to them, but that they would not listen to him, and as you read through this
rather long OT book you find that they did not listen to him. We see something rather startling in Jeremiah
3:6-8 where we read “6 Then the LORD said to me in the days of Josiah the king,
"Have you seen what faithless Israel did? She went up on every high hill
and under every green tree, and she was a harlot there. 7 “I thought, ‘After
she has done all these things she will return to Me’; but she did not return,
and her treacherous sister Judah saw it. 8 “And I saw that for all the
adulteries of faithless Israel, I had sent her away and given her a writ of
divorce, yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear; but she went and was a
harlot also.” God did finally give a
certificate of divorce to Israel (the Northern Kingdom), and after that He
thought that Judah would see what happened to them and would not worship idols,
but Judah learned nothing, and did continue to worship idols.
When
Judah returned to their land some 70 years after being taken captive to Babylon
they finally did learn not to worship idols, and to this day they have not done
that. In a very important prophecy from
Jeremiah 31:31-33 we see what will happen to the house of Judah: “31 “Behold, days are coming," declares the LORD,
"when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the
house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the
day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant
which they broke, although I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. 33
“But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after
those days," declares the LORD, "I will put My law within them and on
their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My
people.”
I will conclude this SD with a quotation from John
MacArthur’s commentary on Matthew: “In
light of God’s spiritual divorce and eventual remarriage to Israel, it is
surely not possible to claim that Scripture recognizes no grounds at all for divorce and remarriage,
and some ancient rabbis claimed and as some Christians still claim today God
does not give us illustrations of His own righteous behavior that we cannot
follow. If He finally divorced
idolatrous and unrepentant Israel, after long years of forgiveness and mercy, it
cannot be wrong for a man or woman to divorce a continually adulterous and
unrepentant partner after long years of tolerance.
“Before
Joseph realized that Mary ‘was with child by the Holy Spirit…being a righteous
man, and not wanting to disgrace her [he] desired to put her away secretly’
(Matt. 1:18-19). Had his assumption about
her been correct, that is, that she was pregnant by another man and therefore
an adulteress, Joseph, who was only engaged to her, knew he had legitimate
grounds for divorce. The engagement was
by a legal and binding contract, though the union was not yet physically consummated. The context suggests that, because he was ‘a
righteous man,’ he felt he was obligated to divorce her. To protect her reputation, however, not to
mention her life, he planned to do it privately.”
Lord
willing in tomorrow’s SD we will look at the meaning of “Hardness of Heart.”
2/15/2023 9:46 AM
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