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October 18, 2026 • 4 Minute Read
Broken Down Cities
Proverbs 25:28
Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls. As good Kuyperians, when it comes to the various authorities that God has set in place in this world, we speak of sphere sovereignty. In the sphere of the home, the husband is called to take up the good work of ruling well over his wife and children, taking up the sacrificial responsibility of protecting, directing, and equipping them for their work. In the sphere of the Church, the Lord has entrusted the keys of the Kingdom to the elders—we are presbyterian, that is, rule by presbyters, from the Greek word for elders. We are called to shepherd the flock for their good and to the glory of God. In the civil sphere, the civil magistrate is appointed by God to protect their citizens and fend off the wicked. These are all legitimate God-appointed authorities, each faithfully carrying out their task in their own sphere. Each ruler is entrusted with authority and responsibility for directing and shepherding those under their care. So we know this, but we can forget that all three of these sovereignties assume one thing. They all assume that the ones in charge first and foremost rule over themselves well. Before we can instill in our children, in our congregants, in our citizens a spirit of virtue and self-control, first and foremost we have to be self-controlled. How you rule—or don’t rule—over your own appetites, your own passions, your own desires and emotions, over your own body and mind and soul—that says a lot about how you will rule over others. And if you are a man without any self-control, as our proverb says, you are like a broken down city without walls. You are like a broken down city without walls, and therefore, how can you expect to train your wife to exercise restraint in her emotions? How can you train your children to obey right away—all the way—and cheerfully, if you do not obey even your own conscience right away—much less all the way—much much less cheerfully? Men, we are called to discipline ourselves first and foremost. That means not giving way to anger—or whatever you want to call it; we are tempted to call anger by another name because, of course, the Scriptures condemn the anger of man (Jam. 1:20). And so we call it frustration. It’s irritation. It’s a slight annoyance. As it happens, not only does the anger of man not produce the righteousness of God—neither does the frustration, irritation, or annoyance of man produce the righteousness of God. Discipling ourselves means not letting our hearts grow cold toward our wife, our kids, our brothers. It means setting a guard over our tongue, not simply apologizing after we set the place on fire. It means confessing our complaints and grumbles to God, not giving vent to them to whoever will listen. It means exercising moderation on how much we eat and drink, maintaining—but not obsessing about—a healthy body so that we have strength to serve others. It means, like Job, making a covenant with your eyes, refusing to be enticed by the forbidden images. It means riding roughshod over your heart when it whines like one of your toddlers, saying, “But I don’t want to.” I don’t care that you don’t want to. As the great Puritan, John Owen, put it: “Let a man not think that he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts. He who doth not kill sin in this way takes no steps toward his journey’s end.” So here’s the charge: Daily walk over the bellies of your lusts. Kill your sin. Be king over your own spirit first. Exercise self-control. Be a city with walls. Then you will prove a good king, capable of training up others to do the same.
October 15, 2026 • 15 Minute Read
A Theology of Community & Why Individualism is Bad
Introduction As we get started, I want to give a brief introduction to this series of Men’s Forums we’ll be doing this year—Local Christendom. I want to get to some definitions, but first I want to tie this into last year’s series, How to Rule Well in the Home. This series builds upon that one. A well-ruled home is the basic building block of Christendom, but it’s not the end of the matter. Well-ruled homes will be productive—that is, they bring blessing to those outside the home—and Christendom is built up by well-run, productive households laboring together for the Cause of the Gospel. If that’s clear, then onto some definitions. What do we mean by “local Christendom”? First, Christendom—as we’re using it—means the Kingdom of Christ on earth, taking on physical shape and physical dominion in this world that Christ came to save and reign over. Recall the Lord’s Prayer: “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We pray that prayer, and we labor to see it brought to pass. The Kingdom that Christ rules over will become incarnate over every square inch of this world. It will be seen in the homes we build, the roads and bridges, in art and literature, in music and films. Its banner will hang in our schools and hospitals, auto-shops and restaurants. Christ came to save, redeem, and wash this world, and He does so by saving, redeeming, and washing mankind—and then, from this renewed mankind, energized by His Spirit, we build up the City of God. It will be imperfect here. The work will be gradual, with setbacks and obstacles, with frequent skirmishes against the City of Man. But as Christ promised, the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. So that’s Christendom, and when I say local Christendom, I’m talking about that physical incarnation of Christ’s Kingdom around us—that part of Christendom with a 83815 zip code or 838-something, that part of Christendom being built up in the area that we inhabit. Outline Tonight our focus will be on Mission & Vision. In two weeks, October 25th, we’ll focus on Education as Christian Paideia. And then in November, our focus will be on building Christendom—involving politics, the arts, ministry, business, and all that stuff. A Theology of Community, and Why Individualism is Bad This evening we’re focusing on Mission & Vision. The overall mission that we’ve been tasked with is, again, to pray that the Kingdom of the Lord would come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven—and to labor to see that prayer fulfilled by our Spirit-filled labors. Our mission is to see the world converted to Christ and built up in Him so that all that we do—all that mankind is and does, all that we produce, all that we think and love and create—so that all of it is in accord with the will of God and glorifies Him through Jesus Christ, by His Spirit. It’s a grand mission. A great commission. And it’s the work of generations and generations. That’s our mission. In setting vision for how to carry it out, I want to focus on the necessity of community. My talk is entitled, “A Theology of Community and Why Individualism is Bad.” Why Individualism is Bad So why is individualism bad? First let me define my terms. Let me define individualism. Individualism is the mindset that defines mankind by the individual person—or individual household. It is the political, economic, theological independence of the individual from everyone else. With such a focus, individualism stresses individual initiative, action, and interests. In other words, it says, “I am going to do this—I am going to do this, my way—I am going to do this, my way, for my benefit.” Individual initiative, action, and interests. Individualism falsely views mankind as the collection of individual men and women. In this case, mankind is not greater than the sum of its parts. There is not a great goal or telos for humanity beyond the individual’s own interest and welfare. Rather we interact with one another insofar as you are useful to me—insofar as you can help me achieve my individual goal or aspirations. But that’s bad news. Bad news all over. It’s bad news all over—first and foremost—because it’s not true. This kind of doctrine is a false doctrine. Mankind is not merely a collection of individual men and women. But mankind is a whole. We are an integrated body of men and women. There is a great goal and telos for humanity. And we can carry out that goal only by working together. In a moment I want to elaborate on this biblical vision of mankind, but first let me give a litany of reasons why individualism is bad. I have five for you. First. Individualism is bad because it fosters arrogance. Arrogance is the vice of thinking of yourself more highly than you ought. Humility is the virtue of sober judgment, of thinking of yourself accurately. The particular strain of arrogance that individualism trains us in is this: we are trained to think of ourselves as independent of others. But this is to think of ourselves too highly. We are not independent of one another. We need brothers. We need their gifts, their corrections, their encouragement. We need their rough edges. Think of Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.” We need their accountability—we need them to pull us back when we’re starting to drift, and we need them to push us when we’re thinking of giving up. We need their labor. We need their strengths, and we need their weaknesses so that we might utilize our strengths. We need their wisdom and their pushback. We are not self-sufficient islands, having in ourselves all that we need. And that won’t ever be the case. So we shouldn’t aspire to it. Individualism fosters arrogance—it teaches us to think of ourselves wrongly. That’s bad. Second. Individualism also trains us in selfishness. Since humanity is simply the collection of individual men and women, we come together not for a communal purpose and goal, but simply because, as I said earlier, you are useful to me. I am willing to work with you so long as that fits me and my own interests. But once that calculation goes into the red—once you are a liability, in other words—that relationship is severed. That’s selfish thinking. It’s calculating. It’s stingy, just like we read in Proverbs 23:6–8: Do not eat the bread of a man who is stingy;
do not desire his delicacies,
for he is like one who is inwardly calculating.
“Eat and drink!” he says to you,
but his heart is not with you.
You will vomit up the morsels that you have eaten,
and waste your pleasant words. Individualism trains us to think in this way since the overarching aspiration it lays upon your life is—plain and simple—your best interest. Your profit. Your benefit. Or, at most, your household’s. But Scripture calls that selfish. So individualism fosters arrogance; it trains us in selfish greed. Third. It produces quarreling and strife. James writes this, James 4:1–3: What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. A society given over to individualism will not remain a society for long. It dissipates, as in our day, into tribalism—and then into sheer anarchy, where everybody seeks after his own interest, his own profit, using others in a calculating and greedy way. There is no loyalty. No mutual bond that binds you to your brother. If you’ve read Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, you’ll recognize this as his world. It’s an all against all—and why? Because according to the doctrine of individualism—a doctrine Hobbes himself embraced—leads to that. In his view of mankind, as in our day, there is no natural common good to mankind. In other words, there is nothing to hold us together apart from our usefulness to one another in getting at our own individual goals and interests, and so it leads to anarchy. So it leads to fighting and feuding. (Also consider Lewis’ depiction of hell in The Great Divorce.) Fourth. Individualism hamstrings our efforts. Not only does it lead to quarreling, it hinders mankind from doing what only mankind can do. We not only need one another for our own livelihood, to meet our basic necessities. We need one another in order to accomplish the mission we’ve been entrusted with—again the mission of seeing the world subdued to Jesus Christ. That is not a solo project. That is not the work of a few. It is the work of a united, baptized, coordinated mankind. It is the work of the whole church—and it is a generational work. But individualism cannot aspire to any of this, and so it weakens our labor. It atomizes our work, atomizes our homes, atomizes our missions. When individualism permeates the church it leads to scattered effort. We do a group huddle on Sunday, but then we’re off on our own during the week. We regroup once again, and then scatter once again. In this case, the body worships together, but it does not work together. But the labor we’re called to is not a scattered effort. That wouldn’t accomplish much. It is not the effort of the professional or super-holy saints. It’s not the effort of individual households, like islands separated from others. It is a joint, communal effort. The body that worships together should also work together. Related to this, individualism also limits our ambitions—that is, what we hope to accomplish. When you consider your own strengths and abilities, and what you yourself can do, that’s pretty limited. Think of the sort of stuff a single man, or a single household can do. But then think about what a town could do—a town all operating toward the same goal. How about a city? How about a nation? How about all of mankind? But the work we’re called to involves a new mankind, not a bunch of renewed individuals going about their own missions. So individualism doesn’t scale. It hamstrings our efforts; it fences in our ambitions. Fifth and finally. Individualism leaves us vulnerable. It makes us easy for the taking. If you don’t have a people, you are easy prey. History gives us a great analogy—consider how Caesar conquered Gaul. Caesar conquered Gaul through a series of campaigns in the first century BC. In Gaul there were dozens of Celtic and Germanic peoples (these were loosely known as Gauls); and these Gauls were tribalistic. Individual households and clans and small tribes constantly going their own way—at war with one another—each seeking their own self-interest. Seeing this, what did Caesar do? He took advantage of all their divisions and conquered them tribe by tribe. He’d feign friendship with one tribe, give them what they wanted—use them against another tribe—then turn on the first group. They were divided—and Caesar conquered them. That’s a good picture of what individualism does to a society. It divides. In so doing, it leaves us as easy prey to a greater villain—a villain against whom we would easily defend ourselves, if we weren’t all given to our own self-interest. That was the strategy used by Caesar, and that is the strategy being used against us today, both in the Church and in society at large. We’re being conquered and we don’t even know it yet. And why? Because we’re all given to our own little ambitions and interests, at odds with others, with no loyalty, no common good to unite us. A Theology of Community Now to the second part. That was largely by way of warning. What I’d like to do now is consider how Scripture understands mankind. I said individualism is the mindset that defines mankind by the individual person—or individual household. It stresses individual initiative, action, and interests. It pictures mankind as a collection of individuals—not a whole. It is like a pile of stones, each distinct and separate from the other. But Scripture views mankind as something more like a house—or really, as a body. That’s one of the most significant metaphors the Holy Spirit uses. Mankind is a whole; we are a unit. We are in Adam, or in Christ. We are members of Him and of one another. Paul writes this in Colossians 2:19, that: “From the Head [Christ] all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with an increase that is from God.” You as an individual do not exist apart from Christ. There is no you apart from being a member of the Lord Jesus Christ. You’d be like a cut-off toe. That toe doesn’t have a use. It’s not alive. It’s just a cut-off toe. This means that mankind is not merely the collection of individual persons, each with his or her own so-called rights. Mankind is a united organism or person summed up in Christ—or, for the unbaptized, summed up in Adam. That is a much different view of mankind than what individualism teaches. This metaphor of the body really has to baptize our imagination. It needs to shape how we relate to Christ. For instance, it’s how we understand His atonement of our sins. Jesus was not merely an individual offering up a sacrifice for a bunch of individuals. No, He died—and we died in Him. But He also was raised from the dead—and we were raised with Him. His atoning death was our death; that’s why we don’t have to bear our sins, because in Him we already have. It also has to shape how we think of one another. Throughout the apostolic letters, we are exhorted to treat one another—not according to our own individual rights, or out of respect for each one’s autonomy—we are exhorted to treat one another as our own members. For instance, Paul says in Ephesians 4:25 that we all have to “put away lying, let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor.” Why? Is it because lying is bad? It is. Is it because lying doesn’t respect our neighbor’s right to the truth? That’s not what Paul says. He says, “Put away lying, speak the truth to one another—for we are members of one another.” In other words, it’d be like lying to yourself, thus hurting yourself. That’s stupid. That’s suicidal. So this metaphor needs to baptize how we relate to Christ, how we think of one another, and it needs to shape how we think of our mission. We have not been commissioned to a solo mission. We have been commissioned as the people of God to corporately pray for the Kingdom of God to come, and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven; and we are commissioned to labor in the Spirit, to labor as a body, to see that prayer fulfilled. Christ has called us to build Christendom and to take dominion over every square inch of creation that His rule might be incarnated everywhere. The devil knows the only way we can accomplish this lofty goal is by laboring together in the work: as one body, united to our Head and united to one another. I’ll conclude by contrasting this Christian mindset to the sort of mindset produced by individualism. Contrary to individualism, this theology of community fosters in us humility, not arrogance, for we know that we depend on one another, and we have our part to contribute. It turns us away from selfish ambition and toward a communal aspiration—toward the common good that our Lord directs us, one and all, to. It guards against strife and quarreling—for we are one, we are bound together by faith, by mission, by the Lord we serve, the Spirit that fills us, by the work we’ve been given. Also, our labors are not hamstrung, nor our ambitions constrained, for our strength only grows as we prevail, for we gain more and more members, all pulling toward the same holy ambition. And finally, as this united whole, pressing toward the same goal, we are far from being vulnerable; we are the true Leviathan. Or much more, we are Christ incarnate. The Church is His body, as Paul writes in Ephesians 1:23, “the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” So the charge is this: Be done with individualism. Have your imagination baptized and get to work. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
October 11, 2026 • 4 Minute Read
On God’s Covenant Promises
When we baptize infants and small children of Christian parents, we don’t baptize them on their own profession of faith, but rather on their parents’ profession of faith. Now, some from a more baptistic background might find this strange, even unbiblical. Is this cheating? Are we sneaking our children in through a side door? Is that the case? The short answer is No. The fuller answer centers on God’s covenant promises. For instance, in just a moment I will ask these parents, “Do you trust in God’s covenant promises concerning your child and do you look in faith to the Lord Jesus Christ for his salvation, as you do for your own?” We baptize the children of Christian parents on the basis of these covenant promises. You would be right to ask what we mean by this. What are these so-called “covenant promises”? Let me give you a few examples from the Scriptures. First, the Lord promises to be God not only to us, but to our children. This is the central covenant promise. When cutting covenant with Abraham, this is what the Lord said to him: “And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you” (Gen. 17:7). Second, also to Abraham, the Lord promises the land to him and to his descendants: “Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:8). As with all of God’s promises, this promise is expanded. In the new covenant, God promises not merely the land of Canaan—but everything. The heavens and the earth made new—it belongs to us and to our children. Third, the Lord promises to sanctify and renew us, and to also carry out this work in our children. This is found in Deuteronomy when the nation of Israel was about to go into the promised land: “The LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deuteronomy 30:6). These promises are not only present in the Old Testament, but they are expanded and renewed for the Church, sealed in the blood of Jesus Christ, thus making them even more certain. But don’t trust my word for it. This is what Peter says after his inaugural Pentecost sermon: “For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call” (Acts 2:39). Therefore, since the covenant promises are for us and for our children, we as parents do not presumptuously set our hope in a secret side door, sneaking our children in hoping God won’t mind it. No, quite the opposite. We come boldly in faith, bringing our children to the Lord, through the entrance of the Church, with a heart fully trusting in His sworn and blood-sealed promises. We bring our children to be baptized, even as Abraham circumcised his sons: hoping in nothing less than our Father’s faithfulness, Jesus’ bloody sacrifice, and the Spirit’s renewing power to save not only us, but also our children. And so we cast our children upon God from birth (Psalm 22:10), for He has promised to be their God, to give them the inheritance, and to cleanse and renew them by the blood of Jesus and the renewing presence of the Spirit.
October 11, 2026 • 4 Minute Read
Cultivating Fruitful Community
Hebrews 10:24–25
Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching. In Hebrews, as in all the apostolic writings, the Lord calls us to cultivate community—to build one another up, to be in each other’s lives, to consider one another, to stir one another up to love and good works, and to exhort one another so that nobody is taken away by the deceitfulness of sin. This is a call to thick community, to cultivate that rich soil where true, spiritual life can grow and bear fruit ten, fifty, and hundredfold. With this in mind, I have four things we ought to cultivate in order to make this thick community fruitful. First and foremost, let us all be committed to worshipping the Lord. We must each and all commit to drawing near to God steadfastly, in season and out of season. As the Apostle exhorts us, we must not forsake the assembling of ourselves together before the Lord, as is the habit of some. The truth is: if you are not committed to worshipping God with His people, then you cannot expect the blessing of God. If you are absent, if you take the worship of God lightly, if you have a false heart or a guilty conscience, or if you’re hollowed out by unbelief, and do not regularly draw near to God together with God’s people, then quite simply, what are you doing? Where are your priorities? I’m not saying that there are not extraordinary Sundays where you can’t worship with God’s people, whether here or wherever you’re at. But beware of studying reasons to miss church. The Westminster Divines warn us concerning divorce, saying that men are prone to study reasons for divorce. And the same is true of the Lord’s Day. Beware of studying reasons for skipping worship, for being away from your covenant Lord. It is a slippery slope. And the end of both divorce and of forsaking the assembly of the saints is unnatural, for it cuts against God’s design for humanity. So that’s the first habit that really must be in place: prioritize worshipping the Lord with His people. Second, pursue brotherly affection. Paul writes of Christian love, in Colossians 3:14, “Above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection.” Love binds us to one another. If it doesn’t, then there’s no hope of cultivating distinctively Christian community, for the Spirit who animates Christians is the Spirit of Love. If we are bound together simply by similar interests, or the latest doctrinal fad, or our favorite podcast, or by our shared grumbles about all the other churches or even society at large, that’s not going to last. Only Christian love for one another creates the actual loyalty, commitment, generosity, charitableness and joy where Christian community thrives. Everything else is sinking sand. Cultivate love for your brothers and sisters. Put to death all that would rise up against it. Third, we need humility. The humble man does not think of himself as having arrived. But also, he is not full of self-pity—that’s only pride in disguise. The humble man knows he is a work in progress, and he trusts that the Lord is sanctifying him. And so he welcomes others to weigh in on how he is doing. The Apostle calls us to encourage and exhort one another—which means sometimes you are going to need to be encouraged and exhorted. You cannot always be the encourager and the exhorter. You have blindspots, too. You are also in need of sharpening words and faithful wounds of a friend. But how can you receive these things well, if you’re not humble? So cultivate humility. Fourth and finally, we need patience. Christian community takes time. You must be patient with yourself. You must be patient with your wife and family. You must be patient with your brothers and sisters. You must be patient with your pastor, and your elders and deacons. Hebrews describes the Christian life as a long obedience and a long pilgrimage to a heavenly country. We are all going the distance, and like Israel out of Egypt, we are all going together with families, with small kids, with men and women, with the weak and strong, the young and old. This means we have to be patient. So in summary: we are called to this work—to cultivate rich, thick Christian community—and in order to do this, we need to prioritize worship; brotherly affection and humility; and we must be patiently long-suffering in this work.
October 4, 2026 • 4 Minute Read
A Nation’s Shame
Proverbs 14:34
Righteousness exalts a nation,
But sin is a disgrace to any people. Abortion is an abomination. Generations after us will look back on our time as a blot upon the history of mankind. We will be remembered as those who perfected the systematic slaughter of our own children. Abortion is our shame and our disgrace. I do not think I need to convince any of you of this. We all agree that abortion is evil. It is the murder of the most vulnerable among us. Yet we can be tempted to fall into another ditch: the ditch of feeling largely unaffected by it, as though it doesn’t concern us. That temptation can run so deep that we fail to see the need to vote against a proposition that will spell death for thousands. “After all,” we say, “I would never kill my children. It is wicked that they would kill theirs, and God will judge them for it. But I’m not doing it.” This is the voice of individualism, or of libertarianism—the “Don’t tread on me, and I won’t tread on you” mentality. The problem is that this is not how the world works. Individualism is a lie. We are not alone in this world. Our actions are interwoven. The world is like a mosaic, or a fabric; our lives and our actions are threads that make up a tapestry. Individualism pictures a different world, one in which every man is an island and what happens on another island doesn’t really concern him. That mentality produces the times of the Judges: a world in which every man is free to do whatever is right in his own eyes, and every woman is free to do with her own body—and with the life growing within it—whatever she wants. That is anarchy. It is a world that dissipates into chaos. It is the world of the Judges, and it turns into the land of Sodom and Gomorrah. Consider Abraham’s nephew Lot. He was a righteous man, yet he lived in the midst of a wicked people. He himself did not abort his children. He himself did not participate in their pride parades. He himself did not get into gunfights. He himself did not beat his spouse. Yet he reaped the whirlwind of his neighbors’ sin. His whole life was swallowed up by the destruction God brought upon these abominations—his home, his children’s futures, his marriage. He was snatched out of the fire; his own skin was saved, and that of his two daughters. But that was all that made it out of the wreckage. The point is this: individualism focuses on me and on you, not on us. Mankind is an us. We are a people—a people that either pursues righteousness and is exalted, as our proverb says; or a people that pursues sin and is put to shame. We do not have the option of being unaffected. We must act as a people, drawing our more reluctant neighbors along with us in the direction of God’s Word, so that we might be the salt and light of the world; and so that we might in fact be a blessed people and not suffer the same fate as righteous Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah. We have an obligation to one another, and we carry out that obligation by entering the fray, by supporting and endorsing good laws for our state, and next month by casting this bloody proposition down to the ground in contempt. Go cast your vote. Encourage others to do the same. Rally the troops. Let us cast this wickedness out of our state in the name of Jesus.
September 27, 2026 • 5 Minute Read
What God Has Joined Together
Mark 10:2–9
“The Pharisees came and asked Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” testing Him. And He answered and said to them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to dismiss her.” And Jesus answered and said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. 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.” In our passage, our Lord is once again debating with the Pharisees, and in particular debating the grounds of divorce. The question they pose to Jesus was a live question among the Jewish teachers of the time. Jewish law at the time permitted divorce, as the Pharisees go on to say, quoting from Moses in Deuteronomy 24. The question was on what grounds is it permissible—on what grounds is it was lawful. So far as the law was concerned, the matter was somewhat ambiguous. Moses writes in Deuteronomy 24:1 that a man who takes a wife and marries her may write her a certificate of divorce and send her away if it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her. The grounds of a lawful divorce in Deuteronomy 24 center on a wife finding no favor in her husband’s eyes because of some uncleanness. There were two different schools of thought at the time, each taking hold of Deuteronomy 24 at opposite ends. The stricter school, following the teacher Shammai, emphasized the uncleanness part, saying that a man may not divorce his wife unless he found unchastity in her. In other words, unless she was guilty of adultery, of infidelity. The other school of thought, the more liberal one, following the teacher Hillel, stood at the other extreme. It emphasized the “no favor in his eyes” part, arguing that a man may divorce his wife simply if she has no favor in his eyes anymore. So she burns his toast in the morning—there’s the door. It wasn’t quite a no-fault divorce, but the faults were small and petty, and they turned on the husband’s mood that day. This was the broader context, the larger debate. The Pharisees hope to pull Jesus into it. They want Him to take a side. But what does He do? He cuts their legs out from beneath them. The debate centered on Moses in Deuteronomy 24, and the Lord says that yes, that command was given. Divorce was permitted, but as a concession, and as a concession because of the hardness of their hearts. While the Jewish religious authorities were acting like lawyers, quibbling about the letter of the law and how to get around it, Jesus returns us to the heart of the law, to the heart of God’s original design for marriage. In the beginning of creation, at the very institution of marriage, divorce was never part of the design. God’s design for marriage was a one-flesh union. A man leaves his father and his mother, and he is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh, so that they are no longer two but one flesh. So Jesus concludes, saying: “Therefore” (not on the basis of Moses’ concession, but on God’s original design) “what God has joined together” (not Moses, not the father and the prospective husband, not the state), “let not man separate.” Divorce was never part of the plan. Marriage between a man and a woman was never meant to be dissolved. Marriage was designed to be an earthly picture of God’s love and devotion, His union with His people, and His people’s loving devotion to Him. But just as sin broke the one, so also sin breaks the other. The fruit of both—our break with God and our break with our spouse—is devastating. It is misery and sorrow and chaos, and not just for the spouses, but for all involved: the children, and even society at large. Just look around us. But the good news is this: Jesus came to renew God’s good creation, including mankind, including our marriages. He came to unite us once again to our Maker, renewing covenant with us, and He came to heal the wounds and holes and broken bones in our homes, in our marriages, and in our families. We try to heal these wounds lightly, or we try to study reasons to make them permanent, to justify and excuse the breaches in our union, as the Jewish authorities did in Jesus’ day. But in Jesus, God has made known His way. Our breaks with God and our breaks with one another need blood: blood and confession, blood and humility, blood and forgiveness. Let us therefore resolve today to love God’s design for marriage, to strive to glorify and honor and preserve that design in our own homes, and in so doing to join our Lord in renewing and rebuilding the ruins of a society wrecked by the sin of infidelity and spousal treachery, and by the plague of no-fault divorce. This begins by coming humbly before our God, confessing our own hand in this, and imploring Him for mercy. Faithlessness of every kind is a great sin. Infidelity toward your spouse, disloyalty toward your brothers and sisters, dishonesty with your coworkers and teachers and clients—all of this is transgression against God, first and foremost. Let us therefore confess to Him our faithlessness so that He might forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
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