SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/13/2023 9:39 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
“The Argument”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 19:7
Message of the verse: “They said to Him, ‘Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate and divorce her?’”
I believe that as we look through this section on
divorce that what we will be seeing from the Pharisees is the wrong thing, the
wrong teaching on divorce as they liked what they were doing and believed that
they had the right to do what they were doing.
One of the things that I don’t see in their argument is any reason for a
wife to divorce her husband as it was all one sided during that time period,
unlike what it is today in our own society.
The other part of their goal was to discredit Jesus in
order to make Him look bad in front of the following that He had. The Pharisees were not interested in what the
divine teaching of divorce was at all, as mentioned they liked the way that
they interpreted it. The Pharisees were classic examples of the natural man
looking for moral and spiritual loopholes to accommodate his sin.
The Pharisees were looking for help from the Scriptures
and so they went to Moses whom they said that Moses had given them the right to
write a certificate of divorce to their wives for any reason. I think that their goal in doing this was to
pit God’s great law giver against Jesus.
MacArthur writes “Because it is the only passage in the five books of Moses
that mentions any grounds for divorce, the passage to which the Pharisees
referred had to be Deuteronomy 24:1-4.
But the passage clearly does not command divorce, as the Pharisees
claimed. And all the other Pentateuch
passages that mention divorce simply acknowledge its existence (see Lev. 21:7,
14; Deut. 22:19, 29).”
I
want to look at Deuteronomy 24:1-4 at
this time: “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.”
Here is what the word “indecency” means in the
Hebrew:
“1) nakedness, nudity, shame, pudenda
1a) pudenda (implying shameful exposure)
1b) nakedness of a thing, indecency,
improper behaviour
1c) exposed, undefended (fig.)”
I
am going to try and look at this in the Septuagint:
24: 1 Now if anyone takes a wife and lives with her, and it shall be, if she does not find favor before him because he found a shameful thing in her, then he shall write her a bill of divorce and shall give it into her hands and shall send her out of his house, 2 and if, having gone out, she becomes another man’s 3 and the last man hates her, then he will write her a bill of divorce and give it in her hands and send her out of his house, or if the last man who took her for himself as wife dies, 4 the former man, who sent her away, shall not be able, having returned, to take her for himself as his wife after she has been defiled, for it is an abomination before the Lord your God, and you shall not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an allotment.
The
highlighted part of verse one helps us to better understand what is written in
the NASB95 version because that version translates the Hebrew into the English,
while the Septuagint has translated the Hebrew into the Greek, and then into
the English. I want to focus in on “because
he found a shameful thing in her.” I
think if you combine “a shameful thing in her” with what the Hebrew meaning of “indecency”
we can conclude that the shameful thing has something to do with sexuality,
perhaps the woman was not a virgin.
MacArthur
writes “A careful reading of the Deuteronomy 24 text shows that, far from
commanding divorce, the passage does not teach about divorce at all. Moses was giving a command with regard to a
particular case of remarriage. That
passage neither commends nor condemns the reason and procedure for the divorce
mentioned there. It states that the
reason was ‘indecency,’ without detailing what that might involve, and it then
mentions the giving of a certificated of divorce, without commenting on the
propriety of that procedure. The only command
in the passage relates to the issue of remarriage, not divorce. The command is simply that, if a divorced
woman remarries and that husband divorces her or dies, her first ‘former
husband who sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife,
since she has been defiled’ (v. 4). It
is to that commandment regarding remarriage, not a commandment to divorce, as
some have supposed, that Jesus refers here and in Mark 10:5.”
As
I mentioned earlier it was my opinion that there was something that was wrong
with the woman as far as a sexual thing, and that was because of what the
Hebrew word for indecency meant and then looking at in the Septuagint and how
the Greek word was translated, but certainly agreeing with MacArthur the
passage does not mean that one can divorce a wife for anything, but the point
of the passage was that of remarriage.
Let
me just say that from the beginning it was God’s plan for one man to marry one
woman for life, but after sin entered the universe God states that adultery was
the one reason for divorce. It doesn’t
mean a onetime case of adultery, but a consistent action of adultery. I can say that this happened to me in my
first marriage a very long time ago. I
can also say that it was a very difficult time in my life, but that was a long
time ago and my former wife has since died along with the person she
married. I did have an opportunity to
speak with her a few weeks before she died and she said that she was sorry, but
I then told her that the important thing we needed to discuss was where she would
spend eternity. I gave her the full
gospel message, and am not sure if she received Christ or not, but I am
thankful that God gave me the opportunity to talk to her.
As
I look at this last paragraph in MacArthur’s commentary I find that he has
something to say that causes me to think that he is agreeing with what I
wrote. “Because the penalty for adultery
was death, the indecency mentioned here obviously referred to some kind of
sexual looseness or lewdness that came short of adultery. And it was because such indecency, vile as it
might have been, was not sufficient grounds for divorce that the divorced wife
was defiled by remarriage and could not be taken back by her first
husband. Because here divorce from her
fist husband had no sufficient grounds and thus was invalid, she became an adulteress,
and therefore defiled, when she married again.
That is why John the Baptist declared that Herod and Herodias were
living in adultery. In God’s sight, she
was still ‘the wife of his brother Philip’ (Matt. 14:3-4). For the first husband to take back a defiled
woman would be unholy.”
2/13/2023 10:32 AM
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