Welcome to Timeless Truth with Pastor Jim Thomas. In season 2, Pastor Jim is leading us in a study of Mark. Today’s passage is Mark 10:1-12
The Pharisees asked a question about divorce. Jesus answered by turning the focus back onto marriage.
What did Jesus have to say about marriage? This isn’t all the NT teaches on the subject but there are at least 4 core principles we can extrapolate from this passage on the subject:
- A Divine Creation Design v.6 “from the beginning of creation God made them”
- A Complementary Union “male and female”- that is an intimate and comprehensive union of two different kinds: one male and one female, there is an amazing unity in this diversity which is physically illustrated in their sexual union and this complementarity is affirmed in that it takes both a male and a female for a couple to procreate
- A Covenant Promise: “leaving and cleaving” = united in a covenant relationship, an intimate and permanent union, living life under God’s authority, living for something higher than self-fulfillment, living life together to reflect God’s glory.
- A Sacred Union “What God has joined together, let no man separate.” We must remember that our marriages can only be held together by the grace of God.
Feelings of love come and go for all of us. Love as a covenant commitment to future love and for the glory of God will last forever. Dry spells will come and go but over time, the dry spells will become less frequent and less dry; and along the way, your feelings will find the steady calm that is the fruit of faithfulness and trust.
Hardness of heart is the inability to tune our heart to God’s will, God’s ways, God’s purposes and God’s plans.
“The Bible sees GOD as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.”
Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Finding Happiness in Your Most Profound Relationship
Do you want to live your life constantly out on the margins of what is permitted? Or, do you want to live your life with Christ at the center, where you are committed to God’s glory, pursuing God’s purposes, and walking in the transforming power of the Holy Spirit?
“If we don’t have a sense of the primacy of God, we will never get it right, get life right, get ‘our’ lives right. Not God at the margins; not God as an option; not God on the weekends. God at center and circumference. God first and last.”
Eugene Peterson
