A joyous day, May 30, 1992

After 10 years of marriage and two children, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin (not pictured 🙂 ) announced in March of 2014 that they were divorcing, only they didn’t call it that; the phrase they used was “conscious uncoupling.”

The (former) Hollywood power couple was guided by the husband and wife team of doctor and dentist Dr. Habib Sadeghi and Dr. Sherry Sami, who believe that divorce can have benefits.

From a Today.com article:

“High divorce rates, the doctors write, should be viewed in the context of our ‘skyrocketing life expectancy.’ ‘Our biology and psychology aren’t set up to be with one person for four, five, or six decades,’ they write, though noting that couples who do reach those milestones are to be envied, and also writing that just because a marriage is long doesn’t mean it’s happy and fulfilling.”

Well, who knew?  According to the expert dentist on marriage and her doctor husband, we weren’t meant to be in long commitments. Well, some may turn to a dentist for wisdom on matrimony, but I would rather turn to the Lord Jesus, who clarified the truth about marriage in Matthew 19…

Here are 4 truths about marriage we find from the Lord in this passage:

1. God is the one who joins two people together. To the individuals who are married, it always feels like they have made the decision to tie the knot (and thus they feel they can make the decision to “uncouple”), but Jesus assumes that when two people are married, it is because God joined them together (vs. 6), and because that is true, no man or woman (either inside or outside the union) should try to separate them. In other words, to seek to separate a married couple, or to seek divorce from within a marriage, is to seek to undo the very work of God. The phrase Jesus uses from Genesis 2 is, “Hold fast.”  Let not man separate.

2. When God joins two together, they become one flesh. One reason that divorce is so incredibly painful is that it is spiritually ripping the one flesh bond apart. This ripping is one of the many spiritual things that we cannot physically see in life, but ask anyone who has been divorced or who has watched one up close.  It actually feels like you are being sawn in two.

3. Marriage is always between one male and one female. Into our sexually confused world, Jesus, the Author of Life, says that God made them male and female. And according to this Author Jesus, marriage is always between a man who leaves his father and mother, and his wife. Therefore, Jesus assumed what civilizations have assumed for thousands of years: marriage is always and only heterosexual.  Even more than that, twice in the passage he calls them “two”, not “three” or “four” or more, as might be the case for polygamous relationships.

4. A hard heart will drive people to seek divorce. Not always, of course. Divorce and the desire for it arise for a myriad of reasons. For instance, in this passage, Jesus gives the reason that divorce is warranted (sexual immorality), and Paul said divorce was permissible when an unbeliever had deserted (1 Corinthians 7), but many times, a man or a woman seeks divorce because they have a hard and calloused heart.  I remember meeting with a young woman many years ago who told me she had fallen out of love with her husband, but that she still considered him a good friend.  Maybe she didn’t know it, but she had just driven a dagger into her good friend’s heart.

And while we’re on the topic, this 2 minute video from Tim Keller gives a grace-filled and biblical Christian response to the question of homosexuality:

Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 28th: Matthew 20