What God Has Joined Together...

"Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." - Matthew 19:6 and Mark 10:9

This blog post started because I had this verse running through my head for several days. I sought the help of others in brainstorming the list below and I'm grateful for their counsel!

Everyone has heard this verse before - likely at a wedding. The context for the verse itself is marriage. The Pharisees are questioning Jesus about whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife and this is part of Jesus' response. With that being said, while the verse clearly applies to marriage, it seems possible that Jesus is stating a broader principle here. If you think about the context of what marriage is (an institution God himself created), and the way the metaphor is used throughout Scripture to describe the relationship between God and His People (covenant), it doesn't feel like a stretch to say that this verse can be applied to many things. By that I mean - there are many things that God has joined together, and my natural questions are a) what are those things and b) what have 'we' tried to separate?

Husband/Wife - no need to dig further here

Love/Obedience

Disobedience/Wrath

The Gospel/The Kingdom of God

Repentance/Forgiveness/Faith?

His People/Messiah Jesus

Righteousness/Salvation

Faith/Suffering

Suffering/Glory

Some of these pairs are obvious, some less so, but all of these things are things that God has joined together. Some that stand out to me:

Love/Obedience:

I've mentioned this in a previous post, but three times in John 14, Jesus connects LOVE with OBEDIENCE. Obedience, according to Jesus, is the very means by which we show and demonstrate our love for Him. Conversely, how can we say that we love Jesus if we are not obeying him? Jesus' commands are easy to find and they include things like, "Repent", "Love Your Enemies", "Seek first the Kingdom of God", "Don't be Afraid", "Forgive", "Love Your Neighbor", "Watch and Pray", "Make Disciples"...and many others. When asked by the Pharisees what the greatest commandment is (Matthew 22:36), Jesus replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." Given that love implies obedience, Jesus could have very well put it like this: "Obey the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind". This is in keeping with almost all of Jesus' other interactions with the Pharisees, where he is explaining to them that the purpose of the law was to get at the heart of a man, the inner man. It is not simply outer obedience, but rather a transformed heart that Jesus is after. Once God has the heart, he has the Man.

Disobedience/Wrath:

I lament in my spirit when I think about the ways modern philosophy has been separating the idea of love from obedience, because the opposites are also tied together. When someone says something to the effect of, "well, the Bible was written in ancient times so the things it commands can't possibly be relevant to today's modern world" - it makes me want to cry out! There is no mistaking Jesus' words - and it's not up to humans to decide what is right and wrong. Right and wrong is not a matter of one's time and place in history either! Our obedience to the words of Jesus actually does matter and that makes it important to know what God says is right vs. what God says is wrong. To be disobedient to Jesus' commands is literally to become an enemy of God (Matthew 12:30). God, in his great mercy, has given us all this moment to turn our hearts towards him in repentance, but if we do not do so, either before we die or before he returns in Glory, we will not get another chance. God embodies righteousness and because of that, he cannot be in the presence of evil - evil is antithetical to his very being. Therefore, those who are disobedient/evil ought to only have a fearful expectation of wrath. There is no middle ground - there is no halfway. There is much more to say here, but that's enough for now.

The Gospel and the Kingdom of God

I would wager that if you asked 10 people what 'the gospel' is, you would get at least 5 different answers. I would go a step further and say that if you asked 10 people about what the Gospel is, 9 of them wouldn't even mention the Kingdom of God. With the being said, the two are tied together inextricably in Scripture. Mark 1:14-15 - John the Baptist is put in prison and Jesus goes to Galilee preaching the good news...of the Kingdom of God. Throughout the Old Testament prophets, we know that the theme of The Kingdom of God comes up again and again. Jesus, in speaking with his disciples after his resurrection, talks to them for 40 days about the Kingdom of God. The Good News is that God himself is going to restore a Kingdom on Earth (Heaven) and that Jesus is going to be the King of that Kingdom. God has provided a way for us to be a part of his Kingdom by offering his son (the King) as a sacrifice for our sins - that if we lay down our lives (bend the knee), and put our hope and trust in Jesus, when He returns to sit on his throne and judge humanity, our identity will rest in Jesus and we will be ushered in to the Kingdom.

The tendency I've seen is that people try and say that the Gospel is something like, "Jesus died for you so that you could be with Him in Heaven". Aside from that being overly individualistic (in my opinion), it also lacks any anchor - a tie to reality that makes it meaningful. The flip side of that is something we see in Pharisaicalism, that the focus becomes entirely about the Kingdom, while simultaneously neglecting the truth that all of us fall short - that none of us deserve to be a part of it. God's Kingdom will be a righteous Kingdom and because of that fact, no unrighteousness can dwell there. Humanity is stained by unrighteousness and therefore undeserving of citizenship in the Kingdom - apart from the blood of Jesus, which God accounts to those who put their trust in it as righteousness. So, we could say that a focus on the Kingdom solely tends to lead to a lack of humility that a) it's not about us and b) we don't deserve it.

The good news has to be tied together with the Kingdom of God.

Repentance/Forgiveness/Faith?

One of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 51. It is a lament of David about his sinfulness and I probably like the Psalm because I can identify with it. David says,

"You do not delight in sacrifice or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, God, You will not despise." (Psalm 51:16-17)

Psalm 40 reads (also of David):

 "You have not desired sacrifice and meal offering; you have opened my ears; you have not required burnt offering and sin offering. Then I said, "Behold, I have come; It is written of me in the scroll of the book. I delight to do Your will, my God; Your Law is within my heart." (Psalm 40:6-8)

In these two passages is an important insight into the sacrificial system. Hebrews tells us, "For if we go on sinning willfully [other translations read "intentionally sinning"] after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgement..." (Heb 10:26-27). My point with these verses is that sacrifices were never the mechanism that removed sin - they were never the thing that caused forgiveness. As David points out, "the sacrifices of God are a broken and a contrite heart"...one might say, a repentant heart. Repentance, turning away from sin and towards God in obedience, is the mechanism by which God forgives sin. The sacrifice of an ancient Hebrew was the outward and public symbol of internal repentance. I once heard it said that repentance is the thing that makes our sin unintentional. It means that we intend not to do it again.

I tied in 'faith' here as well, because unless there is judgement coming, unless God is going to do what He said he's going to do, then why try to live in obedience? Why follow God's ways? In some sense, repentance is an act of faith. We believe that God will forgive us, we believe that he will remember our sin no more, and we believe that Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, and our trust in that sacrifice, will mean that when we stand before Him on That Day, there will be no charge against us.

Grace/Faith/Works
This is one that has really been on my heart lately - somewhat as a result of some sermons I have heard at my church. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one can boast." So, clearly, we are saved by grace, through faith. Amen - wholeheartedly agree. We do not earn salvation. Amen. Too many preachers stop there. Whether they realize it or not, their audiences are prone to hear, "what I do does not matter". You cannot preach a message about the Grace of God and the free, unmerited gift of salvation, while not also emphasizing the responsibility that the believer bears. To do so, in my opinion, is irresponsible - it is separating what God has joined together. The book of James, which we all hold to be Canonized Scripture, says,

"Someone may well say, "You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one [reference to the Shema]. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to acknowledge, you foolish person, that faith without works is useless? [...] You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. In the same way, was Rahab the prostitute not justified by works also when she received the messengers and set them out by another way? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead." (James 2:18-20, 24-26)

What James seems to be arguing here is that 'faith', or 'belief', in a theological sense, is a verb - it is in action. We know that someone believes something, or has put their faith in something, by what they do - more often than not anyway. Note that James here talks of justification, not glorification, which is what Paul is talking about in Ephesians. The key difference that James is talking about is that while our works may not save us, there is certainly a responsibility that one bears when walking out faith. Paul says, "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12). The Messianic Writings (New Testament) are full of exhortations to 'perseverance' and 'endurance' in the faith (Heb 10:36, Col 1:11, 1 Cor 10:13, Rom 15:5, Rom 2:7, 2 Thess 3:13, Eph 6:18, 2 Tim 2:12, Matt 24:13, and many others) - those words necessarily mean a continuing action. If no action or obedience was necessary, why exhort people to perseverance?
Salvation belongs to God - and Jesus will ultimately make the decision, but just because that gift is unmerited does not mean that we bear no responsibility. If I gifted you a car, you would still have to get it insured and would have to be a licensed driver.

Israel (The People of God)/Messiah Jesus

I can't claim to have had many conversations with people about The Gospel yet, but this is one of those things that has come up in almost all of them. As humans are prone to do, us Gentiles have tended towards making The Story about ourselves, placing ourselves at the center, or at best making ourselves a main character. I'm not here to say that the Bible has nothing to do with Gentiles, but I am here to say that its not about us and we are not the main character. Starting with Abraham, God chose the people of Israel to be His chosen people, set apart and special (Deut. 7:6-7). He made his promises/Covenants to that people and part of those promises created the expectation of an eventual King, from the line of David, that would establish his throne in Jerusalem, forever. We know that King was, and is, Jesus. But many people want to make it seem like Jesus came to start something new - that he came to blur the lines between Jews and Gentiles and start a homogeneous "Church". But there is no evidence of this! Jesus isn't who He is, in any full way, without the context of the expectation that surrounds Him. Without the expectation, he is simply God himself come to earth (which is still awesome), but his work and message become prone to misunderstanding or perversion without the context. If we try to separate Jesus from his Jewishness, we are falling into the very trap that Paul warns Gentiles about in Romans 11 - namely that we would become arrogant, deluding ourselves into thinking that God has given up on His People when in fact, it is the very promises made to Israel that we Gentiles NEED to be true - because without them, there is no blessing. If God is not faithful to them, why should we expect that He would be faithful to anything He has promised? The story of the Gentiles points to the great mercy of God, that he would even allow us to share in the riches of His grace. He allows us to "be grafted in" to the promises - that through Israel, we can have hope. So, it's not a story that doesn't have anything to do with us - but we make ourselves vulnerable to great error when we don't see things for how they are in God's eyes.