Mat 19:3-10 | Family | STEP | Tempting him ; for the purpose of ensnaring him, in order to get him into difficulty. For every cause ; whenever he chooses; as some of their teachers said that he might, and as they often did.

Matthew 19:3-10

Tempting him; for the purpose of ensnaring him, in order to get him into difficulty.

For every cause; whenever he chooses; as some of their teachers said that he might, and as they often did. Have ye not read; Ge 1:27. In matters of religion, the appeal must be to the Bible; and an intimate acquaintance with it, and a cordial obedience to its laws, will give one a great advantage over his adversaries. Marriage is an institution of God; honorable in all, ministers of the gospel as well as others; sacred in its obligations; and unless these obligations are violated by one of the parties, not to be dissolved till death. One flesh; they are so united as to be no longer two, but one, each being a part of the other. Compare the apostle's words: "He that loveth his wife loveth himself." Eph 5:28. Of course they ought to be one in views, affections, and interests; and for a man to break such a union as this by putting away his wife for every cause, is wrong. Thus the question of the Pharisees was answered. A writing of divorcement; De 24:1. Suffered; he did not direct it, or suffer it in any such sense as to imply that God approved of it, or that it was right. It was a civil regulation of a civil government, suffered for a time on account of the wickedness of men, and in order to prevent the greater evils which that wickedness would otherwise have occasioned. It was a regulation as to the mode of putting away; not to justify that wrong practice, but to lessen, in some measure, its evils.

Not so; from the beginning, and in all its stages, this putting away "for every cause" of one's wife was a violation of the will of God, as manifested in his works and his word. That God suffers the adoption, and for a time the continuance of practices, on account of the hardness of men's hearts, is no evidence of the moral rectitude of those practices. Nor is the giving of directions about them, and the adoption of regulations to lessen their evils while they continue, any evidence that God approves of them. The practices may still be a violation of what has been the will of God from the beginning, and obedience to him may require them to be done away. I say unto you; I give you the right interpretation of the will of God in this matter.

Fornication; here in the sense of adultery. If the case of the man be so with his wife; if a man, to obey God, must live all his life with one wife, provided she lives and is faithful, whether he is pleased with her or not, then it is not good for a man to marry.