What God Has Joined Together
May 31, 2026 · Daniel Coughlin · Mark 10:1-12 · Gospel of Mark
Sermon Notes / Transcript
Scripture: Mark 10:1-12
Speaker: Daniel Coughlin
Sermon: Mark 10:1–12 — Marriage, Divorce, and God's Design
Scripture Reading — Mark 10:1–12
Thank you for your singing. Our scripture today is Mark chapter 10. We're going to read the first 12 verses. This is God's word and it is eternally true.
And they said, Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away. But Jesus said to them, because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and the two shall become one flesh.
So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. In the house, the disciples began questioning him about this again. And he said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.
And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery.
This is the word of the Lord.
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, I pray that you would, that the words of my mouth and the thoughts of our hearts would be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.
A Hard Teaching — And a Trap
Well, this is a hard teaching. And it's hard on purpose because what were the Pharisees doing? The Pharisees weren't there as eager disciples ready to soak in God's word, right?
They were testing Jesus. But more than testing Jesus, they were trying to get him in trouble. And this, you know, you have to know a little geography in order to really understand what's going on here. And thankfully, there are things like commentaries that help explain the geography because I don't know much of geography in Israel.
Mark gives us the pointer here. He says, getting up, he went from there. He had been teaching in Galilee. And he went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan.
Now, if you were contemporaneous with Mark, you would know just like where that was. It's like, all right, they left Moral and they went over 75 Highway. You'd know we were where? In Sabetha. And so whose jurisdiction would we be under?
We wouldn't be under Attorney Kevin Hill's jurisdiction anymore. We'd be under the Nemaha County attorney, Brad Lippert, right? If you're nerdy like me. You know these things.
Or if we said, oh, we started out in Moral and we drove 10 miles north. You'd know you're not in Governor Kelly's jurisdiction anymore. You're in whoever the leader of Nebraska is, right? What's that? Thank you. Thank you. Yes. And so you'd be subject to different laws.
You'd be subject to different sensitivities, right? We talked about North Korea. And if you cross the border from South Korea into North Korea, your life is going to be vastly different. It's not dissimilar here.
The Perean Region and Herod's Jurisdiction
So where they ended up, and I'm going to get beyond the geography thing here in a minute, but is in the Perean region. And why that's interesting is because the ruler of Perea was King Herod. Do you remember a couple chapters ago when we talked about King Herod and his wife Herodias?
Why did Herod execute John the Baptist? And then you can get into the whole like, oh, because the daughter was dancing and all this stuff. But why did Herodias hate, hate, hate John the Baptist? Yes. Because she left her brother to marry Herod, right?
She left. And what did John the Baptist do? Did he, was he one of these preachers who sat very nicely in his office and only said nice things and never stepped on anyone's toes and only said what itching ears wanted to hear? No, Herod, I'm sorry, John the Baptist was like, you can't have her.
Like, that's wrong. That's wicked. You, you can't do that. And so Herodias hated John the Baptist. So does this give you a little bit of context for why it's so nefarious for the, for the Pharisees to come up to Jesus in King Herod's land and be like, tell us about this divorce thing.
You know, oh, we've heard some teaching. We'd like to hear it again. What do you think about divorce? What's the trap? They're trying to get Herodias against Jesus, right?
It's like, ah, we'll, we'll get, we'll get King Herod to do our dirty work for us. We'll tempt him. We'll test him. We'll trap him. Is he going to tell the truth? And the background of this is that there was, you know, it's always dangerous when I just throw my notes to the wind and I decide to go off script.
The Background — Deuteronomy 24
Deuteronomy 24 says this, this is the background. And if you don't know the background, it's hard to understand what, what the subject of the controversy is. So here's the subject of the controversy. Deuteronomy 24.
When a man takes a wife and marries her and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her. And he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out from his house. And she leaves his house and goes and becomes another man's wife. And if the latter husband turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies who took her to be his wife, then her former husband who sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife since she has been defiled. For that is an abomination before the Lord. You shall not bring sin on the land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance.
Now, that's a pretty specific situation, right? A wife leaves. She marries another man. He either dies or sends her away. Can the original husband marry the wife? But that's the context to our verse. Because that's what leads the Pharisees to ask, Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.
Jesus Goes to Creation
Now, Jesus doesn't exactly take their bait. Because he could have dived into all the minutia about permissive, unpermissive, exceptions, no exceptions. But what does Jesus do here? Jesus goes right to creation.
I mean, first he asks, what did Moses command you? Well, and then they say, Moses permitted this. And it's like, well, permission and commands are kind of different things, right? It's like, you might be permitted to do some things. That doesn't necessarily mean you're commanded to do them. Commanded means like a positive instruction. Like, you must do this. Permission is different. Okay, so they respond, right?
Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce. There's two things I want to highlight about how Jesus responds.
Christ's Patience in Teaching
I mean, the first is, he's so patient in teaching. Like, he knows their hearts. He knows their wicked schemes. He knows why they're asking this question. They don't have a sincere heart. It's not like they're sitting here thinking, I want to get married.
And so, or, you know, my wife has done this. And so I want to know if I can get divorced. Like, this is a test. This is a trap.
This is hard-hearted wickedness. This is, we're rejecting your authority, Jesus. We want to get you in trouble. And yet, Jesus teaches them anyway.
He's still willing to go back and talk about creation and give like the foundational building blocks about what marriage is. And this is how we should be. We should take Jesus' example, his great patience. I mean, with our children, right?
How many times do you have to teach your children the same lessons? With your wife, wives with your husbands. How many times do you have to go through the same problems? Going back to the same scriptural teachings, the same truths.
You know, I don't have adult children yet, but I imagine even with your adult children, like, you have some of the same conversations over and over and over again. And probably they have with you over and over again, right? Is this, you know, we're always tempted to want new things, right?
This is why, this is why social media, you have these endless scrolling things, right? There's always something new that will pop up. Like, have you ever tried using Facebook to find the thing that they just showed you a second ago that you scrolled past? And then like, you can never find it again, right?
Because it's always something new. They're always generating new things to like keep your attention going, keep your eyes on whatever they want to show you next. The reality is we need messages reinforced. We need teachings taught over and over and over and over and over and over again.
We don't just learn a thing once and then we instantaneously know it and know how to practice it. We need to keep coming back to it.
The Duty Is Yours — The Results Are God's
And I think the way that you're encouraged by this is knowing that the duty is yours. The duty to do these teachings, the duty to teach these things, the duty to remind people about God's word and his commandment.
That's your duty, your responsibility. Mothers and fathers, it's your responsibility to teach your children the scriptures. To bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Pastors and elders and deacons, it's your responsibility to be part of the reaching and equipping and training and helping.
You know, husbands and wives, your responsibility to sanctify and wash your wife in the water of the word. The result is God's, right? Men plant and water. And who gives the increase?
God gives the increase. And so don't get frustrated. Don't get frustrated. You know, when Pharisees come up and they lay a trap for you, you can be as innocent as a dove in that circumstance. And you can just answer their question.
And you could answer it with the sincerity of God's word. And you don't have to worry about the trap. Listen, people are going to be laying traps for you all the time. Classmates, bitter neighbors, you know, people who want your position, people who just like to watch people fail.
They're going to be laying traps for you all the time. And so should you be wise as serpents? Yes. Should you be as innocent as doves? Yes. And balance is never easy.
But what's always wrong is when you're getting worked up and frustrated over it. Like, God has brought you there for a reason. God has brought you there for your good, for your sanctification, for your training, for your growth. This is what Jesus exemplifies.
And they can't lay a trap for you that God can't undo, that God can't turn around and use for your good, for the good of your children, for the good of your wife, for the good of your family. Like, we need to trust that God is bigger than the traps people set for us.
So with sincerity of heart, as innocent as a dove, we can just lay out Scripture. This is what the honest truth is. This is what Scripture tells. This is the foundation.
Hardness of Heart and Scripture's Accommodation
Because that's exactly where Christ goes with this. I mean, at the end, let's not go to the end yet, let's start in the beginning. When the Pharisees respond that Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away, they were responding to the controversy of the day was between two groups of thought.
There was one set of Jewish teachers that taught. That meant really any inconvenience. Like, there's some commentaries, some Jewish commentaries from the time that it says, if your wife over-salted your food or over-cooked your food, you could write a letter of divorce and send her away.
Right? I mean, that's not much different than no-fault divorce. Right? And honestly, it doesn't even have... Like, you could write... The man wrote the certificate himself.
And so there didn't even have to be a justice involved. So that was on the one extreme. On the other extreme, or the other extreme, the other teaching was that it had to do with some... You know, why she was unpleasing had to do with some moral failure, some breaking of the Ten Commandments, some unfaithfulness.
So that's what they were focused on. Right? Like, any time you ask a question, it's an interesting thing. Any time someone asks you a question, think about what it tells you about them more than you wonder about what they're asking of you. And I don't mean to make, you know, I don't mean to make that sound like you're not going to answer their question.
But when someone asks you a question, especially if it's like a hypothetical question or a challenging question, like, just put yourself in their shoes for a minute and think, why are they asking me that question? Because oftentimes, that'll help you understand what's motivating them, what they're really thinking about, who they are, as much as they really want to know the answer to that question.
Verse 5 — Because of Your Hardness of Heart
But Jesus doesn't take the bait in that regard. Jesus says to them, this is verse 5, Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. So that gets a little hard, right? Because this is Scripture.
And so we're reading that Moses wrote Scripture that accommodates man's hardness of heart. It's because of his hardness of heart? Does that strike anyone else as strange to think about Scripture being given because of hardness of heart and wickedness? I think it should, all of us.
But it's fairly easy to explain. It did me, at least. And so maybe I'm the strange one. But how much of God's word is not given because of the hardness of our hearts?
I mean, think about all the examples in the Old Testament. I mean, they're all about faithfulness in basically wicked men. You look at all of the examples of godly men. David, a man after God's own heart.
And you see the wickedness in David. And it's real. His lust. His taking what wasn't his, what was another man's. His killing that man in order to keep Bathsheba. How much of Scripture is written so that we will see and understand our own hearts by seeing the wickedness and sinfulness in others?
Divorce, and Moses' permission of divorce, Scripture's permission of divorce, is an accommodation to man's sin.
Before the Fall — God's Design for Marriage
If things were like how they were in creation. Okay, we always have to have this framework in mind whenever I think about Scripture. There's creation before the fall. Before Adam, the fruit that Eve gave him. And he ate of it. And that brought sin and corruption to all of his progeny, all of his seed. And the curse that corrupted all of creation.
So there's before that happened and there's after that happened. And what Jesus does is Jesus takes the Pharisees back to before the fall. He goes, yes, you're talking about this divorce permission which was granted after the fall. But let's go back.
I'm paraphrasing here, right? This is what Jesus actually said. Verse 5.
But Jesus said to them, because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, before the fall, before sin and the curse, things were different. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh.
That's what was intended from creation. That was what marriage was always supposed to be. A coming together of two to become one. A male and a female in a lifelong monogamous relationship. That was always the intent of marriage. But then sin and the curse.
And so we have divorce. We have this permissive thing that happens. Because guess what? When you marry someone, you know who you marry? You, a sinner, marry a sinner.
They might be a Christian sinner. They might be a redeemed sinner. But you, and listen, we have plenty of younger people in the congregation today. Very young as well.
Probably too young to really grasp onto it. You're going to date someone, and you're going to think they walk on water. You're going to think they are amazing. Spectacular. He would never. She would never. And then, because this is what happens, right?
When you go to a car dealership, they take and they, you know, rub shiny oil all over everything. So everything looks great and smells great. And that's what dating is. It's looking great and smelling great.
And then you get married, and you can go look in my car, and eventually over time, right, what happens? Dust collects, and things get spilt and not exactly cleaned up. And life is real and hard. And so if you're young and unmarried, you need to know that you're going to marry a sinner.
The Purposes of Marriage
And that's intentional, right? God designed marriage before creation to be different. But God has continuing purposes in marriage even after the fall. Good purposes. You've probably been to a wedding ceremony, and they use some version of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
They might not say it, but just listen to this, and you'll probably be reminded.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together in the sight of God in the presence of these witnesses to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony.
Does that sound familiar? You've heard a minister say those words. Well, that ceremony lists three purposes for marriage. Three purposes in having sinners come together in marriage.
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Mutual society, help, and comfort — Marriage is given for the mutual society help and comfort that man and woman should have from the other, both in prosperity and adversity. So in good times and in bad, for richer or poorer in sickness and health. That sound familiar?
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Procreation of children — Marriage is given for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord and to the praise of God.
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A remedy against sin — Marriage is instituted as a remedy against sin, to avoid fornication, so that those who are married might live in the purity of marriage and keep themselves undefiled as members of Christ's body.
What's lovely about this is it recognizes the reality that we're sinners, that marriage is between two sinners. And so there's this intent here that marriage is for the sanctification one to the other.
A Word to Young People
And so here's the risk that you're going to have as, and again, sorry, I'm getting off, but this young people, you're going to want to think about the person you're marrying as a demigod, as, as, as some, yeah, I know that's weird, as someone perfect, someone glorious, someone without fault or flaw.
And that's going to blind you to ways that you can be helpful to that person. It's going to blind you to ways that you need to be helpful to that person. And, and if you're not thinking about Ron feeding Joyce in the nursing home, that's, if your marriage goes well, that's where you end up.
That's a good marriage. I'm not saying a perfect marriage. That's why we talk about sickness and health, because you're all young and healthy and life seems great. But listen, marriage is tough and people are tough.
The woman that you think is going to be your wife is tough. The man who you think might be your husband is either tougher than you think or weaker than you think, depending on what you're, what you think you want. So get help because in, in the, with a multitude of counselors, there is wisdom.
Seek God's approval. You know, obviously you're, you're a professing Christian. You should only be dating and marrying Christians. Like there's, there's some basic minimal things that go on here, but that's not enough. Pray and ask for God's approval.
Ask for God's guidance and wisdom. And then be careful that you don't expect too much from your husband or your wife. The way, the way marriage works is when you give of yourself for the betterment of your spouse, right? This is real clear for husbands.
Christ loved the church and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify it. — Ephesians 5
Husbands are called to do the same, but wives are called to do the same in different ways.
What Jesus Emphasizes — And Why
And so what's interesting is that Jesus doesn't go into detail about what the exceptions are. He says this, he wants to drive home the point that the intent of marriage, the creation purpose of marriage is a lifelong commitment. And he says this:
In the house, the disciples began questioning Jesus about this again. And he said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And she herself divorces her husband and marries another man. She is committing adultery.
There's other scripture that talks about when divorce is permitted. Jesus knew their hearts. He knew who he was talking to. And he didn't go into the details right then and there about that. And this is how scripture works. Scripture isn't a textbook, right?
A textbook is grouped by subject matter. If you've ever looked at like a manual for your car, right? You'll see, you'll look up like the instrument cluster section and it's like every, every light that could possibly go on is listed in order. Scripture is not like that.
Scripture is God's word to man, through man, through various circumstances. Jesus was here in a real conversation with real men and probably women. And this is what he focused on. This is what he emphasized.
Why did he do that? Why did he go into a list of all the exceptions when divorce is permissible? Why did he only talk about divorce leading to adultery? Well, he wanted to reveal the Pharisees' hard hearts that they didn't believe.
He wanted to double down that he wasn't afraid of Herod or Herodias. Here it is. Here is what marriage is. This is why it was created.
Start with the Foundation
Because if you come and you start asking about where the edge cases are, where the borderline is, is this sin, is this sin, is this sin? It's like, no, listen, we need to talk about what the foundational element is. Marriage is intended to be lifelong. Marriage is good. That needs to be this common understanding. That needs to be where we start the conversation.
Then, if need be, we get into the permissive situations. We get into the difficult situations that, you know, the exceptions that prove the rule, not the exceptions that swallow the rule. So there's other scriptures that talk, and we interpret scripture with scripture. And so there's more specific scriptures that talk about what happens in those situations.
That wasn't Jesus' focus that day. It was drilling home to the Pharisees. This is how God created marriage. God created marriage to be lifelong, monogamous, between male and female.
One Flesh — Verse by Verse
Let's just open it up and read it.
"God made them male and female." What does that tell us? Well, he's talking about marriage. So clearly, Adam and Eve, that was marriage, right? And Adam and Eve is the archetype of marriage. It means it's the example of marriage. One man, one woman.
"For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother." So you can't hold on to mommy's apron strings and get married, men. You have to leave father and mother and create your own household. Like that's how new households get created. By men leaving their mom and dad.
"And the two shall become one flesh."
"What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." (Verse 9)
Who's doing the joining here? God's doing the joining, right? So when you get married or when you got married, who did the joining? God does the joining.
Strange to think through the implications of that, right? Marriage is not just about who you like, who makes you happy, who you think you want to live with, make a life with. God joins men and women together in marriage. God instituted marriage for a purpose.
For purposes. And so seek his guidance. Seek his will. Because there's few things in this earthly life that can change your joy, your life, your trajectory, than who you marry. And so seek counsel. Seek your parents' counsel.
If you have wise parents, Christian parents, seek their counsel. Talk to the elders. Talk to me. If you're my children, talk to someone that you trust, other than me, as well. Because it's good to get more than just your parents' advice on things.
This is one of those monumental decisions.
Have Hope
And have hope. Have hope. Even when it's hard. Even when it fails. Have hope. Hope that God is working all things for the good of those who believe in him.
Even when you're hurt by your sin or someone else's sin. Because there's no situation in which our sin doesn't play a role. God is good and God is merciful.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, marriage is a good thing. Thank you for giving us marriage. Thank you for giving us a way to have community, company, sympathy right in our own households. Thank you for giving us an outlet for our desires and for the creation of godly children. For a man and a woman to come together. To become one flesh.
And Father, there is sin in this world. And there are those of hard hearts who reject you, reject your counsel. And Father, that is our reality. We must deal with it. We must not pretend that we live in a pre-fallen perfect world. That is not the case.
And so give us wisdom as we guide others, as we make decisions, as we select spouses. Hopefully just one spouse. Help us. Help us. Help us to navigate this, Father, for your glory and for our good. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.