Mark 10:3-9 “‘What did Moses command you?’ he replied. They said, ‘Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.’ ‘It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,’ Jesus replied. ‘But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.’”

Do you notice the word play going on? Jesus asks about a command. The Pharisees come back with a permission. They are skipping past the rule to get to the exception. Jesus himself offers exceptions to the rule in other places. He recognizes that unfaithfulness kills a marriage and provides grounds for divorce (Matthew 5). He inspired Paul to write about desertion and the freedom to end a marriage (1 Corinthians 7). But exceptions don’t make the rule. They should not become the rule. They are the exceptional cases.

Jesus recognizes what Moses wrote. But even that is a call to repentance. “‘It was because your hearts were hard.” Not everyone wants to live like a child of God. Sometimes I don’t want to live like a child of God. Our hearts are hard. But then the problem is not with God or the commands he has given for the human institutions he has created. The problem is with our hearts that won’t accept what God has given us.

So Jesus takes us deeper into God’s purpose for marriage, so that we can understand. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

Where Jesus is not Lord of the family, or Lord of a marriage, many people cannot even recognize rudimentary truths. How many genders there are, or how many genders does it take to have a real marriage? Jesus makes it clear that the answer in each case is “two.”

So why did God create these two genders and then bring them together in marriage? Why did he have men and women leave the homes where they were loved and nurtured all through childhood and loosen their attachment to mothers and fathers? Because marriage is a unity, two joined together as one flesh. Marriage is not just a commitment between two people, though commitment is certainly important for making it work. It is not just a relationship of love, though love is usually a foundational feature. It is far more than a contract between independent parties laying out obligations and expectations for them to get along.

Marriage is a union of body and life. It is the union of the two genders, with their unique gifts and strengths and inclinations. More than a new relationship, it is more like a new entity. It’s stability and endurance are necessary for the purposes for which God invented it: not only the production of children, but a secure environment for their development; the quintessential training grounds for teaching and learning sacrifice and selflessness; the foundation on which any functional society can be built.

Even more, God often uses marriage as a picture of his love and grace to us. We are the bride, Christ is the groom. He sacrifices himself to make us holy. He doesn’t abandon us because we have sinned. He bonds himself to us forever.

Why would you want to mess with that? This is the rule according to the Lord of marriage: What God has joined together, let man not separate.