Matthew 19:1-22

Beginning at Matthew 19:1

Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings, that He departed from Galilee and came to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

 

What sayings had Jesus finished? The ones we’ve seen in chapters 16–18.

He’s now finished saying what He wanted to say in Galilee, and He’s moved south into the borders of Judea, beyond Jordan, meaning the east bank of the Jordan River.

You can see this journey on one of our many maps on our website. Just go to “Resources” on the main menu of the website, then open “Bible Maps”. Look for the map called Jesus’ Final Journey to Jerusalem”.

The movement through Matthew now shows us the physical road He’s taking to His ultimate purpose, the payment for man’s sin on the cross.

When He was in Caesarea Philippi He announced to the disciples that He was going to Jerusalem to die. The we saw that He moved down into Galilee, and He spent time in that area around the Sea of Galilee.

Capernaum was His headquarters, and He even crossed over into Gadara but now He’s on the border of Judea.

 

Verse 2

And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them there.

 

Here again we see that there were multitudes healed. Not just the odd person here and there while the majority went away as sick as when they’d come, multitudes were healed. This is so far removed from the so called healing ministries of today. Anyone who wanted healing was healed. He’s the one we go to today and when we do we go on the basis of His will and His will alone.

 

Now we see in verse 3 that the religious rulers came to Jesus with a question regarding divorce., but as we’ll see it’s not from a genuine desire to learn something that they came with the question, it’s to try and trap Him and condemn Him.

The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” 

 

See, the Pharisees came to tempt or to test Him.

They were after Him, trying to put Him in opposition to the Mosaic system.

They brought a problem which is just as difficult today as it was then.

 

It could’ve been the multitudes that followed Jesus for healing that alerted the Pharisees to His whereabouts, and like a pack of wild dogs, they began to close in, hoping to trap Him by His words.

 

They asked if divorce was legal on any and every ground. No matter how He answered, He’d infuriate some of those Jewish leaders because there were two main schools of thought relating to divorce.

The first was centred around a Rabbi by the name of Rabbi Shammai who taught a very strict and unpopular view.

The second was the school centred around another Rabbi, Rabbi Hillel which was less strict and was a more popular view. So, one school took a very liberal attitude toward divorce; another was extremely strict.

 

To the Jews of that day, marriage was a sacred duty. If a man was unmarried after the age of 20 – except to concentrate on the study of the law – he was guilty of breaking God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

It’s said that they believed that by not having children a man killed his own descendants and had lessened the glory of God on earth.

 

However, even though the Jews of that day had a high ideal of marriage, they had a pretty low view of women, which meant that this high ideal of marriage was constantly being set aside.

Rabbi Hillel put into law, human law not God’s law, such things as a man could divorce his wife if she spoiled his dinner, if she spun, or went with unbound hair, or spoke to men in the streets.

If she spoke disrespectfully of his parents in his presence, or if she was a woman whose voice could be heard in the next house.

One Rabbi, Rabbi Akiba even said that a man could divorce his wife if he found a woman he liked better and considered prettier.

It may also be that these Pharisees hoped Jesus would say something that’d tie him up in the King Herod-Herodias affair where Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, married his half-brother’s wife, Herodias, while his half-brother was still alive. This was considered a violation of Jewish law and was widely criticized, so if Jesus was forced to condemn Herod he might be jailed and beheaded like John the Baptist.

 

The Pharisees words “For just any reason” were at the center of the question.

Each school of thought understood that the Mosaic law gave permission for divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1. Let’s read that,

When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favour in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house… 

Each side knew and believed this verse in Deuteronomy, but the question was, “What’s the meaning of uncleanness?”

 

The school of Rabbi Shammai understood that uncleanness meant sexual immorality and said this was the only valid reason for divorce. The school of Rabbi Hillel understood uncleanness to mean any sort of indiscretion; even to the point where for some rabbis, burning a husband’s breakfast was considered valid grounds for divorce.

The Rabbis had many sayings about bad marriages and the bad wife. They said that the man with a bad wife would never face hell, because he has paid for his sins on earth.

They said that the man who is ruled by his wife has a life that’s not life or that a bad wife is like leprosy to her husband, and the only way he could be cured is by divorce.

They even said that if a man has a bad wife, it’s a religious duty to divorce her.

The Book of Proverbs even says a lot along those lines like Proverbs 21:19,

Better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and nagging wife.

Proverbs 27:15-16,

A quarrelsome wife is as annoying as constant dripping on a rainy day. 

Stopping her complaints is like trying to stop the wind or trying to hold something with greased hands. 

 

So, you see in asking this question, the Pharisees had rather cleverly tried to get Jesus to side with one teaching or the other. If He agreed with the less strict and more popular view of Rabbi Hillel, it was clear that Jesus didn’t take the Law of Moses seriously.

If He agreed with the strict school of Rabbi Shammai, then Jesus would become unpopular with the multitude, who generally liked the easy divorce way, especially King Herod.

The religious leaders really thought they’d caught Jesus because both options had negative consequences, and it was going to be difficult to decide which one to choose.

See how deeply these blokes must’ve conspired between themselves to trap Jesus. They must’ve patted each other on the back and celebrated when they came up with that idea.

 

Verse 4 to 6,

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE,’ and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’? 

So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.” 

The Lord Jesus’ reply is remarkable, not only for the wisdom and courage with which He met their attack but how He took them back to the very beginning, back to God’s ideal of marriage.

The Mosaic Law had permitted divorce on a broad basis as we just saw in Deuteronomy 24 verse 1.

As far as the Mosaic Law was concerned, a divorce was not as bad as was marriage to a stranger, a stranger being a foreigner, non-Jewish.

For instance, if the priest’s daughter married a stranger (foreigner), she was shut out from the nation Israel.

As time went on, the Mosaic Law was made meaningless, and the granting of divorce was done on the flimsiest basis and as a result, there was a heap of discussion relative to divorce at this time.

 

Our Lord took them back to the original plan of God for man and woman before sin entered the human family. Divorce was not in God’s original plan. Why? Because sin was not in God’s original plan, and divorce is always a result of sin. It’s there somewhere in the relationship, sometimes hidden away and sometimes very obvious.

 

Verse 7

They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?”

 

Well, Moses didn’t command it, he permitted it and made away to formalise it.

 

Verse 8

He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 

 

Why did Moses permit it?

Because of the hardness of their hearts. You see, marriage was given to mankind to be the tenderest and the sweetest of human relationships.

Also, the marriage was to represent the future relationship between Christ and the church.

When bitterness and hardness of heart enter in, then that marriage becomes a hollow shell of what it was intended to be and it’s no different for Christians.

Because of the hardness of the human heart, God permitted divorce. God’s merciful to us, but His ideal is never divorce.

The background of divorce is always sin and all of us are sinners. Since God can forgive murderers, He can also forgive divorce, but we need to be honest about the root cause, especially in ourselves. It’s sin.

 

Verse 9

And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.” 

 

And I say to you!

This takes us back to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5 where in Matthew 25:27-28 Jesus says,

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.’ 

But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 

Remember back there how we saw that Jesus is speaking to Jews who are still under the dispensation of the Law and Jesus has taken that law regarding adultery to the very highest degree? So much so that no human being listening to those words could say he was innocent. Everyone was guilty.

This is the exact reason He’s giving these passages, to make all mankind aware of the impossibility of ever trying to work their way into God’s acceptance by their good works. It is, in fact, the entire point of why Christ had to come and why He had to be the one and only being that could fulfill the Law and make it complete for ever so that man wouldn’t need to be condemned by breaking it.

 

Then, two verses down from that teaching on adultery, he does exactly the same thing with divorce.

In Mattew 5:31 He says,

Furthermore it has been said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ (that’s the law as Deuteronomy 24:1 has it.)

But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery.

 

See, again He takes that law in the supernova level and it’s identical to what we’ve just seen Him say here in chapter 19 verse 9.

He’s still teaching what the law states and then taking to the highest degree, and He’s still talking to Israel.

The Gentile nations knew nothing about the Mosaic law. It wasn’t given to them, stroke, us.

It’s interesting to note how closely these two laws, the law on adultery where every person has obviously broken it, and the law relating to divorce are placed. Almost next to each other. It forces the question, “If every person has committed adultery by looking with lust at another person, and they have, then every marriage under the dispensation of the law must have adultery in it!”

 

Now, we note that Jesus puts forward here only one ground for divorce, sexual immorality.

The Greek word here is word porneia (por-ni’-ah) from where we get the English word pornography and when you look up this word in a concordance, especially Thayer’s concordance, I warn you it’s a real head turner.

When we look at this definition we realise that under the Mosaic Law, divorce was, and the word notice the “was”, only permitted in the most extreme case of female sexual immorality, which you would have to think would be virtually non-existent. It’s interesting that the Mosaic law made no provision for a wife to divorce her husband, even in the same extreme conditions.

Again, this is the lifting of the Mosaic law to the highest possible standard, one that’s unable to be met while sin remains in the heart of man.

In the relationship between Israel and God this word, porneia (por-ni’-ah), means the worship of idols or being defiled through idolatry by eating the sacrifices offered to idols.

 

We need to keep on coming back to the fact that between Matthew 5 and Mathew 19, where we are at the moment, nothing’s changed about who The Lord’s speaking to and the dispensation He’s speaking in. It’s to Israel He’s speaking and He’s speaking in the dispensation of the law.

We must be careful not to lay the Mosaic law on the Body of Christ. The most so-called holiest of the Jewish religious leaders couldn’t keep the law and the Jewish nation was who the law was directly given to, so how could it ever be possible that the Gentile nations who were not under the law anyway, be expected to fulfil the level of perfection it portrays.

We must always keep in mind what the law’s intention was, why it was given in the first place; to reveal how far away from God’s righteousness man was and is. It’s God’s standard of righteousness and the standard we’d need to keep, without breaking it a single time, in order to be righteous by our works. Clearly impossible. Why is it that churches teach us that we’re free from the law of sin and death, which we are, then teach that we need to keep the law in our daily lives. We get this sort of mixing of law and grace. No wonder there’s confusion amongst many Christians where the law’s concerned.

 

There’s a whole new doctrine relating to marriage as it relates to the Body of Christ and it can be found in the Pauline, Paul’s, epistles. These are the doctrine for the Church, The Body of Christ today.

Here’re just some examples, 1 Corinthians 7:1-40, Ephesians 5:22-33, Colossians 3:18-19, 1 Timothy 3:2, Titus 1:6.

What we see in these passages is that God’s Heart, His will, is NOT that we get divorced.

However, in reading Paul’s letters closely and in context, do we see a threat of punishment, or do we see wise and wonderful council as to how believers should behave? What we see is a standard of works that occurs because we’re free of the law of sin and death not to make us free. We now want to do what pleases God to the best of our ability, and there’s a universe of difference.

We’ll see that when we get to those epistles.

 

Verse 10

His disciples said to Him, “If such is the case of the man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” 

 

The wide popularity of the free and easy views on this whole subject is obvious from the reaction by the disciples.

They weren’t prepared for this level of strictness, and they suggest that if that was the true standard under the law, better not to marry at all.

 

Verse 11

But He (Jesus) said to them (the disciples), “All cannot accept this saying, but only those to whom it has been given: 

 

This is very important, especially in our day. In the verse that follows, our Lord puts down a great principle that even today the Roman Catholic church is wrestling with.

 

Verse 12

For there are eunuchs who were born thus from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who is able to accept it, let him accept it.”

 

A eunuch is an impotent man either from being intentionally made impotent by castration, or by natural means, he just can’t reproduce or have intercourse, or by choice.

There are some men and some women who do not need to marry. They get along very well by themselves, but that’s not for everybody, in fact it’s not for the vast majority.

Some churches make a rule that people who hold certain positions are not to marry but they have no right to do that.

Should a preacher get married, or should a Catholic priest be unmarried? Here’s where God puts down a principle. He says that it’s up to the individual. We have to make that decision for ourselves.

 

Now to Matthew 19:13-15

Then little children were brought to Him that He might put His hands on them and pray, but the disciples rebuked them. 

But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” 

And He laid His hands on them and departed from there. 

 

The Lord delights in children!

It’s interesting that children are introduced shortly after the discourse on divorce. They’re the ones who suffer most severely from broken marriages.

Parents brought their little children to Jesus to be blessed by the Teacher-Shepherd.

It was a Jewish custom to bring a child to the elders on the evening of the Day of Atonement ‘to bless them and pray for them’.

The disciples were annoyed at this, and rebuked the parents, but Jesus cut them short with words that have made Him admired and loved by children of every age. “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

 

There’s some important lessons in those words.

It’s important to reach children with the Word of God when their minds are most open.

Children who wish to come to know the Lord Jesus should be encouraged, not held back.

At the same time, they should never be pressured into making a false choice. They’re as open to influences to know the Lord just as much as they’re open to rejecting Him.

The goal of teaching children is to get them to think as adults. That’s our responsibility as parents.

When they don’t think like adults we understand why, it’s because they’re children. But we show them where they’re wrong and press on toward the goal of producing mature persons.

From the way many children are taught today, you’d think that some parents want them to stay children forever!

These children never grow up as they get older. Children don’t magically like to study when they get older either.

Children don’t have to become adults to be saved, but adults have to have the humility and teachability of children as we saw in Matthew 18:3-4.

Many scholars and Bible teachers believe that these words of our Lord, particularly, “of such is the kingdom of heaven”, answer the question of what happens to children who die before they reach the age of accountability, that’s the age at which they’re capable of making their own spiritual decisions. They believe that the passage shows that the children were already possessors of the kingdom. This passage has been a great comfort to many who have lost little children.

 

Sometimes this passage is used to support the baptism of young children in order to make them members of the Body of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom. However, the parents didn’t bring the children to Jesus for child baptism and there’s not a hint of that in the passage. It would need to be severely twisted out of all reality to make it mean this. Jesus did not baptise them, He blessed them.

Some denominations teach the baptism of infants because it puts them under the protection of the church or because you yourself are part of that particular religious tradition, and you’re under the priests of the pastor or some other supposed spiritual benefit.

Thinking we’re a Christian, that an individual is saved because of a tradition or by our upbringing is to reject the gospel of grace for wrong and false gospel.

 

To Matthew 19:16-17,

Now behold, one came and said to Him, “Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” 

So He said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” 

 

We’ve just seen that the kingdom of heaven belongs to little children, now we see how difficult it is for adults to enter.

Notice how this young fellow approaches the Lord Jesus. He addresses Him as Good Master. He’s willing to concede that He’s good, something that Jesus enemies wouldn’t have done.

In answering, “Why do you call Me good? There is no one good but One, that is, God,” Jesus was not denying His own deity, but was providing the man with an opportunity to say, “That’s why I call You good. You are the promised Messiah, God.”

Then Jesus said to him, “But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Our Savior wasn’t implying that the man, any man, can be saved by keeping the commandments.

He was using the law to produce conviction of sin in the young man’s heart. As we’ll now see, the young man was still under the delusion that he could inherit the kingdom on the principle of doing.

 

Verse 18 to 21,

He said to Him, “Which ones?” Jesus said, ” ‘YOU SHALL NOT MURDER,’ ‘YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY,’ ‘YOU SHALL NOT STEAL,’ ‘YOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS,’ 

‘HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER,’ and ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ ” 

The young man said to Him, “All these things I have kept from my youth. What do I still lack?” 

Here we see in this young bloke’s response both the problem and the reason he still feels inadequate to inherit the Kingdom. It’s no different than the problem of humanity today.

It’s a belief in his own self-righteousness. He believes he’s a quote, “good person”. He’s blind to who and what he really is by his own sense of self-righteousness. It’s like asking a random person on the street today are you going to heaven when you die?

They answer, yes. You ask them why and mostly they’ll say because they’re a good person. When you ask what makes them good they’ll say things like well I’m not as bad as so and so or I haven’t done bad things, or I go to church occasionally.

However, if you ask them if they’ve ever lied, they must answer yes. Have they ever stolen anything, even a pencil from work, they’ll answer yes. If you asked them if they’d ever looked at the opposite sex with lust, they’ll say yes and if they don’t they’re a liar anyway.

Then if you were to point out that even if they broke just one of God’s commandments just one time they’re guilty of breaking them all.

Leviticus 19:37, Deuteronomy 27:26 and James 2:10 tell us that to break one part of the law is to be guilty of all.

The law’s like a chain of links. Break one link and the whole chain’s broken. God doesn’t allow us to keep the laws we like, and break others.

That random person would then have to admit that they’d broken God’s commandments and were under punishment or cursed.

You see we can’t compare ourselves to some of the evil people that we share this world with, it’s a false comparison, we compare our selves to God’s standard and when we do we see how far short of true righteousness we really are and that we desperately need a Saviour.

In this young man’s boasting that he’d always kept these commandments he was claiming he’d fulfilled the law, clearly a ridiculous idea and yet inside himself he knew something was terribly wrong!

 

Verses 21 and 22,

Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” 

But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. 

 

Our Lord then exposed the man’s failure keep the law to love his neighbour as himself by telling him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. Then he should come to Jesus and follow Him.

The Lord didn’t mean that this young fellow could be saved by selling his possessions and giving them to charity. There’s only one way of salvation and that’s through faith in who Jesus is, The Lord.

But in order to be saved, a person must acknowledge that they’ve sinned and fallen short of God’s holy requirements. They must have a grasp on who and what they really are.

This fellow shows that that’s not his thinking at all.  His unwillingness to share his possessions showed exactly where his heart really was. Possessions or salvation, this world’s temporary blessings or eternal life, follow the God of creation or the god of this world.

The challenge is no different for this young man than for any one of us.

If this young ruler was really concerned for his eternal security he would have responded to the Savior’s instruction and he would have been given the way of salvation.

What was the motivation behind the original question this fellow asked? Was it to strut his stuff, his own righteousness before this quote “good Teacher”? Did he really want to know what he lacked for salvation? Did he see eternal life as the most important issue that confronted him? We know the answer because this young man did what most of the world does, he turned his back on the only One Who could redeem him from the curse of the law and give him eternal life, salvation.

Instead, he went away sorrowful yet still loving his thing collection, his possessions, his temporary stuff more than eternal life.

 

There’s no better illustration of this than Luke 12:16-21,

Then He (Jesus) spoke a parable to them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. 

And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ 

So, he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. 

And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.” ‘ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you (in other words, tonight you’re going to die); then whose will those things be which you have provided?’ 

“So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Until next time my friends when we finish Matthew chapter 19 may God open His Word to you and you to His Word.