Our reading today starts off kind of odd. It doesn’t seem to appear to be anything in the text that would have caused the Pharisee to ask such a question. He asks “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause” this is shortly after many came to Jesus and He healded them.

So Jesus answers the question, and what a shocking answer it is. He says unless for sexual immorality. Now, this is a very debatable topic. But I think I may have adopted Piper’s view on marriage, though I am not 100% there, my thoughts would most likely fall upon those lines. You can find that here, so I will not focus on what I think Jesus meant, I want to speak to the culture today.

Today we have songs that are chart topping pop and R&B charts. The name of the song is called “Papers” by Usher. It is song in which the hook says “I am ready to sing them papers, papers”. I would not be concerned if Mr. Raymond were not a Christian as he is not bound by the New Covenant; however, he is bound by the New Covenant, thus his song ignores Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and the righteous requirement that is to follow those who say they are in Christ. But not to get sidetracked….

“Singing them papers” is the disposition of most today in our culture. Even among “conservative” evangelicals the divorce rate has hovered aroung 50% or so for the last 15-20 years. This is a disgrace and an outright rebellion against Christ and His teaching found in Matthew 19.

Because Eve was taken out the side of Adam, she was “flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone” and God gave the command even then (penned by Moses himself) that “the two shall become one flesh”. There is a strict permanence in mind here. Paul then goes on to use this in describing our relationship to Christ. Christ is permanently married to His bride and we have become “one flesh” with Him.

You see before sin so clouded our judgement and obscured the face of God, marriage was to be permanent. One man and one woman were to live forever, a sign of that covenant may be sexual intercourse. It is funny that Avatar catches this theology when Jake and Neytiri choose each other as mates. However, we have failed to acknowledge such a theology. The one flesh comes before the fall and thus is the standard of God! Sin interrupted that fellowship, but today we are not slaves to sin but to righteousness and because of this we are to restore and repair and reconcile what has been broken by the fall.

One way to do this is my Christian marriage. Christian marriage is one of the most beautiful witnesses we can portray to the world; however, we find ourselves persistently and even wrecklessly disobeying our Lord, because “God wants us to be happy”. I have even heard such false teaching from pulpits and even from “conservatives.

I don’t want to dig deeper, but I do want challenge you in an area. We have to take this more seriously than we do. This is not just another cultural thing. The marriage union for those who are in Christ is a picture of Christ and His bride. The way we love and submit, serve and give, sacrifice and live for, will show the world how Christ relates to His bride. For those who are “pastors” and constantly remarry those who have been divorced disobediently, maybe should ask who are they trying to please.

In closing we love to fight against gay marriage but will not fight for Christian marriages. I think we are more concerned with the image of marriage versus the purpose of marriage and who marriage actually belongs to. Let the world do what they want, God will judge them. But as Paul said we are to judge those in the church (I guess that “who are you to judge” is a bit overkill).

And so it goes with today’s reading.

So far we’ve seen a  lot of deception from Jacob and his kids in their attempts to take justice in their own hands. Jacob deceives Laban for justice. Levi and Simeon deceive the Shechemites for justice for Dinah. The brothers deceive one of their own, Joseph….but not for justice–for jealousy! Interestingly though, when we look at Joesph’s story in today’s reading, he had plenty times to take justice in his own hands (because he was truly innocent), yet he waives his rights in order to honor the Lord God and to serve others. (Potiphar, Potiphar’s wife, the prisoners, the cupbearer, and the baker). Doesn’t that remind you of Someone we know?

Jesus Christ was innocent, yet he waived his rights in order to serve others and to ultimately redeem us, his family/co-heirs. Joseph has suffered greatly in his own innocence, and in the next few chapters of Genesis, we will see that Joseph also redeems his family through his own suffering. What an amazing precursor to the ultimate of redemption!

Speaking of family…when we lean over into our NT reading, Jesus is very clear and deliberate about defining what family means in the kingdom of God. It is marked by:

• being a follower of Him (Matt. 10:37-39)
• unity (Matt. 12:25-30)
• treasuring the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12:30-32)
• bearing good fruit (Matt. 12:33-37)
• forsaking all other former ideas of family for His own. (Matt. 12:46-50)

In the OT, everything rests on the biological lineage of a family. Posterity, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, mothers, fathers–all of that is majorly important. Jesus comes in and smashes that. Only those who are willing to follow Him can be considered His family.

Today’s reading plan contains the beginning of sin, grace, promise, the implications of sin, two curses, two acts of God’s grace, worship, false worship and the implications of these and finally we begin to see a promise fulfilled in the birth of Jesus the Christ.

After God has now called everything good and Adam has a wife and a law was given (don’t eat of the tree) with a promise of life if obedience was practiced, we are introduced to a “serpent”. We later come to find out that this serpent is named the Devil, Satan, Adversary or the prince of the power of the air. He enters the scene quickly and he gets right to his duties of being the enemy of God.  He convinces them to eat of the tree, their eyes are opened and we now have something called “sin” (not sins) and everything God promised would happen began to happen. There was a death, we later come to find out this death is spiritual one (Ephesians 2:1) though they will also die physically and that everyone has been infected by sin (Romans 5:12-15). God pronounces a curse over all of His creation and it doesn’t take long to see this curse working in and through humanity (Genesis 4:8-16 and Genesis 4:23-24)

Yet in spite of this we see a promise in the midst of the chaos. In Genesis 3:15 we see a promise of a seed that will crush the head of the serpent. My friends this is the beginning of what is known as redemptive history (we see a genealogy that follows the Godly Seth versus the cursed Cain) and we see this “seed” unfold to be a promised prophet, king, God with us, and later fully as the Lord Jesus Christ.  In our New Testament reading Matthew 2:1-6 the child being born to Mary and Joseph will “shepherd” the people (you will see this shepherd language throughout your reading of the Old Testament).

I want to point out a few things that we begin to see that will be clearer as we read throughout this year. We first see a picture of “substitute”. Two animals are killed in our readings. The first in Genesis 3:20-21. An animal is killed to clothe Adam and Eve (no animal has died before this point). Next we see an animal being a satisfying offering to God as worship. We read this in Genesis 4:1-7. This will become more apparent as to why the slaying (blood) of animals is necessary to worship God. We also see dissatisfaction of false worship. God will not allow false worship and Cain is angered (just as many today are angered by the Gospel) and kills his brother because of it. We see early on that God has a very SPECIFIC way to be worshipped and nothing else is accepted (today many believe they can worship God how they please, and that is because God has been created in our image not His revealed image).

Finally we end with the birth of a King, so we are left with a cliff hanger. What will this king do? He is only a child yet he is being worshipped by Magi from the East who followed his star. We see again false worship. There is another king who does not want this new king to be worshipped, so he goes into deplorable depths to ensure that this child king does not grow up to become an adult and take his rightful place as the true king., God’s king. Well we have to continue reading to see how this unfolds and how it harmonizes itself with our Old Testament readings.