Matthew 19

Everywhere Jesus traveled, He healed people. Why does Jesus not heal everybody now? I understand the loss that people feel when they pray earnestly and then something worse happens to them than they even imagined. God does answer prayer, and I am convinced that many of the things that we have asked for on earth are waiting for us in heaven even now, but Jesus was doing something very special in His healing ministry when He came to die for our sins. He displayed signs of the kingdom of heaven, where the fullness of healing is a reality. He showed us something about our life to come.

Jesus came displaying signs of a kingdom of great wellness, of the fullest shalom. This kingdom of heaven is displayed in marriage, since the final and eternal realm of life involves the most blessed marriage between Christ and His people. There were others all around Christ who were schooled in a different way of religious thinking. Even though they believed in the coming age of resurrection, their religious way of life and their understanding of how they could be right with God was sadly deficient. That led them to think of ways that God’s Law could be used so that they could be sure that they were right with God through their own obedience. They sometimes faced problems in their families like everyone else in this world. That meant that some of them faced the unhappy reality of broken relationships.

We understand that. Yet since they felt that their peace with God came through Law, they wanted to find a way to justify themselves in light of the painful reality of their broken marriages. They were trying to find a loophole either in the Bible or in their traditions that would allow them to say that they were in the right. Jesus does not give them any out. He was speaking of resurrection shalom. He was thinking of one man (Himself), and one woman (the church), and He did not want any way out, even though staying in this plan for marriage was going to lead Him to the cross. He wanted them to see the privilege of living out that bigger story in their own life of intimacy, even when that may at times and for seasons seem to be for worse, rather than for better.

They did not like this answer, so they brought Him a passage from the Bible that they felt gave them a loophole. Moses in the Old Testament Law did make provision for a certificate of divorce. That was for the protection of the abandoned party, so that she could be declared free from the one who abandoned the intimacy that was a gift to them both. God had not commanded the loss of marriage, but there was a recognition of the reality of that loss, and that in marriages there was always sin. God knows about our sin. Why else did Jesus die on the cross, if not to take care of our sin? God knows about sin, and He knows about people getting hurt by sin. He had provided some help for hurting people through the certificate of divorce in the Mosaic Law. The Pharisees, who thought that their peace with God depended on their own obedience, wanted to use that provision to make it seem like they had not sinned. Jesus’ answer to their question made that very difficult.

They were not the only uncomfortable people there that day. Jesus’ own disciples started to think that it might not be a good idea for anyone to marry. But our Lord has made it clear from the beginning of the Bible that most people are not gifted for the single life. It is a good thing to find a partner for life. It is a rich blessing to rejoice together, and even to suffer together, as that becomes necessary. It is a blessing to have children.

Once again, our Lord began talking about heaven, a real world that we cannot usually see, but without which nothing makes sense. Jesus says that heaven belongs to children, and therefore He belongs to children. He is happy to bless them, and happy to bless marriages.

This did not change the stubborn fact that there will still be many people who think that the way you could be part of a resurrection world, the way that you could have peace with God, was through keeping Law. Like the rich young man in our reading, they looked for loopholes in all of God’s laws, so that at the end of the day they could say that they had kept them all. It was, in fact, necessary for someone to entirely keep the commandments in order for anyone to enter heavenly life. Jesus knew this, because He knew that His death for us would have no meaning unless He first became our Substitute in His perfect obedience for us.

For us to understand and embrace this way of being right with God, through the obedience and death of Jesus, rather than through some way of law, we need to see that we have not obeyed the Law of God. Sometimes we need to have God speak directly to us, telling us to give up our everything for Him, in order for us to understand that we have not loved Him as the only God.

There simply is no way for anyone to get to that best of all marriages, that heavenly peace with God, while we still cling to something other than the Christ of the cross and the resurrection. You have arms for only one husband. That’s why we finally surrender to His love, and we follow Him. That’s the way that the impossible becomes possible: with God. With God all things are possible. With God it is possible for the guilty to be forgiven. It is possible for the abandoned to find a home. It is possible for the sick to be well. It is possible for people on earth to enter heavenly shalom.

These disciples who were nothing would be something in heaven. These ones who would lose so much to continue to testify to the truth of the resurrection of one man, would themselves have resurrection life, in a new society without sin, and with the best of all governance.