Jesus Forgave Hard Hearts

What Did Jesus Do?

Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives,
but from the beginning it was not so.
Matthew 19.8

Do you know why God created erasers? Because people make mistakes. All the time. Big mistakes, and little ones. Many errors can be easily corrected with little or no harm done. A good eraser often comes in quite handy when you realize that 2+2 does not equal 5. Other mistakes are so costly it is impossible to measure their impact, and the scars, physical and emotional, are indelible. Punch a wrong digit on your cell phone and you end up speaking to someone you don't know and apologizing for bothering them. Put the wrong number in a particular engineering equation, and the bridge you're designing may be doomed to collapse. Mistakes, we all make them. Some mistakes the Bible categorizes as sin, but, unlike your every day mistake, there is no such thing as a “little” sin. God hates all sin, and the hard truth is that the Father sent the Son to atone for them all. Every transgression of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived was laid upon the Lord, because every sin is a mistake that must be paid for. The Good News is that all sins we confess and hand over to the Lord are forgiven, albeit at the terrible price of the Cross. But forgiven. All sins.

It has been my privilege to serve as a Spiritual Director on a number of Tres Dias spiritual formation weekends. I have had several people on these weekends ask me what I believe about divorce, is it a sin? Citing the Bible, I have always said that, yes, divorce is a sin. As you can imagine, this can be painful for someone who has been through a divorce. But I would ask them if they believe in the forgiveness of sin. And when they would say, “Yes, but...” I would interrupt their “but...” and ask them if they have ever read anything in Scripture to indicate that Christ died to forgive all sins but divorce? “Well, no.” Forgiven. Why, as Jesus pointed out in the above captioned verse from Matthew 18,God even made a concession with respect to divorce on account of the hardness of our hearts.

Now, the concession did not at all remove divorce from the list of sins that God hates. The Father's intention for marriage, that it should be a covenant of love and fidelity for a lifetime, still holds unbroken from the time He established marriage as a creation ordinance. But God knows how good all of us are at making mistakes, and He knows that, all too often, our mistakes can include making a bad choice of partners in marriage. When we realize our mistake the first thing we need to do is admit it to God, and ask for His help in trying to make our marital covenant work. Sadly, there are times when things are too broken, hearts are too hard, and marriages come to an end. Well, Christ died for every divorce, just as much as He died for every lie we ever tell, and every hateful thought, word, and action of ours, and every other sin.

The most important thing, I would tell the folks on the Tres Dias weekends, is that we recognize our mistakes/sins, confess them and repent of them, learn, and, as Jesus told more than one forgiven sinner, “Go and sin no more.” This is to say that I absolutely believe that God forgives divorce, the first time. But I strongly warned that the sincerity of one's repentance might be suspect when divorce follows divorce. And statistics have made it clear that the people most likely to get divorced are people who have been through divorce before. So re-marriage, for those who have been divorced, is an even bigger decision than marriage the first time, and should be contemplated only in the context of much prayer and transparency before God and one's prospective partner.

Mistakes can be corrected. Jesus knows the hardness of hearts. Forgiveness is found at the Cross. That's what Jesus did.

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4