Hidden within this journal entry’s passage that makes many people uncomfortable is a clue about how to avoid failing at God’s ideal in our most significant relationship. While many people shy away from these verses because they speak against divorce, also included in this passage is a clue about how to have a successful marriage.
This clue is found as Jesus finishes teaching us what God’s ideal is in verses 4-6. Jesus ends this description of marriage by saying, “God has joined the two together, so no one should separate them.”
The big idea here is that God is the one doing the joining, and if this is truly the case, God will be in the middle of a successful marriage. It will also be true that we must be connected to God in order to truly connect well with our significant other half.
A statistic I learned about recently confirms this idea: A Gallup Poll done in 1997 by the National Association of Marriage Enhancement showed the divorce rate among couples who pray together regularly is 1 out of 1,152. If we were to make that into a percentage, it would be 0.087% — Less than 1/10th of one percent.
In culture today, where divorce is more common than we want to admit and marriage is not viewed as “till death do us part”, it would seem like the missing piece in our equation is God being the connecting link. Most people who want to get married want it to last forever, and most of those who have faced divorce don’t wish for their failed scenario to be repeated by themselves or others in the future.
In this passage, Jesus seems to imply that God is actively involved in a person’s marriage; but He doesn’t recognize divorce. We see this in Jesus’ words about God doing the joining, and also in the warning about not separating what God has joined and in the reality that God views second marriage sexual relations as adultery.
This is not condemning those who are divorced or who have remarried, but instead, it expands the definition of sin to be anything that is outside of God’s ideal/will. We all have fallen short of God’s ideal, and that is why Jesus came.
God wants us to experience the best life possible, and that includes the best marriage possible if marriage is in our present or future life. In this passage that speaks about God’s ideal regarding marriage, Jesus shares the secret to what makes a marriage successful: Don’t separate what God has joined together. God is the one doing the joining, and only by staying connected to Him are we able to truly stay connected with our spouse.
This thought was inspired by studying the Walking With Jesus “Reflective Bible Study” package. To discover insights like this in your own study time, click here and give Reflective Bible Study a try today!
Read this article on the web on it's official page: The Secret to Marital Success: Matthew 19:1-12
QR code
Comments