Does Scripture require sex to create a marriage?

Jesus references Gen 2:24's language about one flesh when he declares that God joins spouses in Matthew 19 and Mark 10.  But, does that mean sex is a necessary condition for marriage or that the unity of sex symbolizes the unity of marriage?

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Transcript

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When a man and a woman get married at a marriage ceremony, when are they married exactly? Are they married after they do the marriage ceremony and sign the certificate and everything for the government and they do all of that and they consent to be married? Are they married then or are they not married until after they're intimate, after the wedding ceremony? And that's what we're gonna address here today. What creates a marriage? What are the necessary conditions for somebody to be married according to the scriptures? Also, we're gonna end up shedding light on Mark uh 10.9 and Matthew 19.6 that actually come up in this conversation. And this is necessary because in some cases, whether or not two people are validly married is dependent on how you answer this question. So here's the myth. The myth is uh a couple has to be intimate after they're married before they can be considered actually married, right? So they have the wedding ceremony or whatever, and then after that, they're intimate on the honeymoon or whatever. And then some people believe, well, you have to consummate the marriage or they're not actually married from God's perspective. That's the myth that's out there. And I believe that actually what's happening is uh marriages are created when certain conditions are met, and sex is not one of those conditions that's required for two people to be married. So you have to have only two people, you have to have a man and a woman, have to be you have to consent to being married. That is, the the woman is given to the man, the man takes the woman, that's the biblical language. There has to be approval by the civil authority, um, and uh has to be not incestuous and then not adulterous, can't be an adulterous remarriage. So that would be a a case where a husband and wife were married, let's say they got divorced for irreconcilable differences or whatever, and the man remarried, that remarriage would be adultery, and that would be an invalid marriage. But that's a that's for a different episode. Right now we're gonna talk about uh the consummation question. So let's look at Mary and Joseph, and that'll help us kind of disprove this popular myth. All right, so we have Matthew chapter one, verses 18 and 19. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way when his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together. She was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit, and her husband Joseph, her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. Now notice three things. They're betrothed, not married. But with betrothed, they called them husband and wife. That's just how they use those terms at that time. So we we reserve the word husband and wife for people after they've actually been married. But they didn't do that at this at this time. If somebody was betrothed, which they're not married yet, they're betrothed, they would use the words husband and wife. And then the third point is that ending a betrothal, they would call it a divorce. They use a lot of the marriage language, even though they're not actually married yet. That's just how the language was used at that time. And you see that also in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 25 and following, if you want to look at that. But let's talk about the angel commands taking. That's the next part in Matthew. Matthew 1, 20 and 21. But as he, this is Joseph, considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife. For that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. Take Mary as your wife. The angel commands him to do that. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. The pri preceding verse said the betrothed, he's thinking about doing a divorce, he's the husband, but now the angel's saying, take her as your wife. That's right, because betrothed, they would use these mirror terms, like I said, but also after people are married, they would also then use those same terms, husband and wife, and all that. So he's he's saying here, take Mary as your wife. Matthew 1, 22 and 23, all this took place to fulfill what was uh what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which by which means God with us. All right, now the next passage tells us that Joseph takes Mary. So when Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son and called his name Jesus. So he took his wife. What does what does took his wife mean? They're already betrothed, so it's not betrothal. It's not sex because it's knew her not until later. Taking is getting married. That's the biblical language for getting married. And taking occurs before intimacy. This is not the only time we see this. For example, we have Pharaoh took Sarai, that's Sarah before her name was changed. Abraham and Sarah took Sarah as a wife. When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. This is Sarai. Later her name was changed as Sarah. And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken to Pharaoh's house, and for her sake he dealt with, uh dealt well with Abram. And he had sheep and oxen and male donkeys and male servants and female servants and female donkeys and camels. And the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife. So Pharaoh called Abram and said, What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Why did you say she is my sister? So that I took her for my wife. Now then here is your wife, take her and go. All right. And we have the same thing with Abimelech, took Sarah before intimacy. And Abraham, Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister. And Abimelech, king of Gerar, sent and took Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and saying, Behold, you are a dead man, because the woman you whom you have taken, for she is another man's wife. Now Abimelech had not approached her. So he said, Uh Lord, will you kill an innocent people? Also, Boaz took Ruth before intimacy. Ruth 4 13. So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. Wait. And he went into her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son. So that's take first intimity second intimacy second. And we have a couple of places in Deuteronomy that use taken in the same way. Here's a law from Moses. And is there any man who has betrothed the wife, betrothal first, and has not taken her? That's marriage. Let him go back to his house, lest he die in battle, and another man take her, right? If he dies, she's now single again, and another man's going to marry her. Genesis 24, 67 uses take similarly. Genesis 24, 67, then Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah, his mother, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. All right, now the priests had wives, uh, and their wives had to be virgins. So we have Leviticus 21, 13, and 14, and he shall take a wife in her virginity, a widow or a divorced woman, or a woman who has been defiled or a prostitute, these he shall not marry, but he shall take as his wife a virgin of his own people. So here's the point. If taking was sex, which it's obviously not, we see this over and over and over again so far. But let's suppose somebody said, Why I think taking is sex? If you thought that is a problem, because the priest could never take a virgin, because by the time he takes her, she's not a virgin. So that doesn't work. Also, we have the Leverite marriages, and you have to marry first, and the duty comes second. So Deuteronomy 25, 5, if brothers dwell together and one of one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband's brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her. So let me explain what the Leverite marriage thing was. What's going on here is you have uh two brothers, right? One of them is married. Then that brother dies. She's a widow. So they were worried about land and they didn't want the land to go outside the family. So they had this law in Deuteronomy 25, 5 saying, well, if he dies and she's childless, then she's gonna have to go ahead and marry that guy's brother. And so here it talks about that marriage. And when it talks about that marriage, it says he will take her to wife. Step one. Step two, perform the duty of a husband's brotherhood, which is they're gonna have sex so they can have a child, so they don't lose the land to some other tribe. That's the point there. All right, the Sadducees also use this took language. This is like all over the place. All right, we have Mark uh 12, 19 to 25, and you have the same kind of concept going on in Luke 20. So the Sadducees are going up and speaking to Jesus, and they're trying to trap him with a with a complicated question. And they said, Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. This is what we were just talking about there in Deuteronomy 25. There were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and then he died, uh, left no offspring. The second took her and died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise, and the seven left no offspring. Last of all, the woman also died. Uh, in the resurrection, when they shall rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife. Jesus said to them, Is this not the reason you are wrong? Because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven. So everybody's using this took-take language. Everybody knows what that means. That means you get married. And now Jesus, when he talks about this, he says, Neither marry nor are given in marriage. So the marrying is the taking, and the given in marriage is the giving. So that's the the woman is given and the man is taken. So Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham as his wife. So Genesis 16, 3. So after Abram lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abraham, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife. So there's the giving and there's the taking. So there's a bunch more examples I could go through, but the point is the man is taking a wife and the woman is being given to the man throughout the Old Testament. You see it everywhere. And so marriage is give and take, not just consummate. I know that rhymes. Okay. So here's the deal: the the process here is BMI, betrothal, marriage, intimacy. That's that's the pattern you see in the scriptures. If you thought that intimacy was required for marriage, you're kind of mixing up the steps here, and you're gonna have a moral problem with this kind of consummation required view. Let's look at that moral problem. Okay, if sex is required for a marriage, that is, let me explain what I mean by this. Suppose you have uh two young people, they're both 20 years old, and they and they get married and they have a wedding ceremony and they're married. Now, if you ask them at that moment, are you married now? Right? Uh, the answer is yes, they are married, right? After the wedding ceremony, and you know, that they sign the certificate from the government and they do all the things, they consent, all that kind of stuff. All right, they're married. Okay, that's my view. But some people would say, no, they're not married, not until they go on their honeymoon or whatever and they have sex. They have to consummate the marriage. That's consummation is required. So technically, if they got a divorce like the next day and they never consummated the marriage, some people would say they were never married. Now you might think, Chris, does this ever happen? Actually, yes. President Donald Trump, his first wife, claimed she never consummated the marriage with her first husband. So this is the thing that happens. She claims she didn't consummate it because she was trying to get uh out of Eastern Europe. Uh, he likes Eastern Europeans, I guess. Anyway, she was trying to get out of Eastern Europe uh behind the you know iron curtain there. And in order to do that, she did a whole marriage thing with this guy in order to kind of for citizenship purposes. So they never consummated the marriage. She claims, who knows? I have no idea. Okay, but here's the point this can happen. And so we need to actually find out is consummation required for marriage. Or what if you have two like old people who get married or somebody who's disabled or whatever, and they're not going to be consummating. They just want to be together and they can't consummate. You're saying you can't say they can't get married? This is a question we need to we need to answer, right? So if sex is required for a marriage, then you have some problems. Before sex, they're unmarried, right? Under under this view, before sex, they're unmarried. Intimate activity before marriage is sin. So they're so these two 20-year-olds just got married, right? Okay, they got married like legally, but they're not actually married, they're still unmarried, right, according to this view. So if they do anything intimate, that's sin, right? So therefore, if the couple is intimate before they have sex, they commit sin, right? Right. Once they have sex, the idea is they're married and they can they can be intimate, right? But before they have sex, they can't be intimate because that'd be sin, right? But consummation requires at least some intimacy, intimate activity before sex. Therefore, the sex required view requires pre-consummation sexual sin to be married. This doesn't make any sense. It's just, it's just it's an irrational view. You're going to require people to sin in order to be married. That cannot be the system that's going on here. And as we see, it's not the case with Joseph and Mary. They're married. He takes her as wife, and they're intimate later after Jesus is born. Okay, so where do people get this idea that consummation is required for marriage? They get it from the one flesh text. And let's let's take a look at those. So Matthew chapter 19, verses three through six. So the Pharisees came up to him, that's Jesus, and they're testing him. They're testing him by asking, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? And so Jesus answers. He answers, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? And said, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh, what therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. Now, Mark 10 is right there, you can read it for yourself, but it says basically the same, the same thing there. Okay. So now what's going on here? Okay, Jesus is quoting two passages from Genesis. He's quoting Genesis 1.27, and then he quotes Genesis 2.24. Let's read those. Genesis 1.27. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. Genesis 2.24, it's a little bit later on. This is all still before the fall here. This is all still like Garden of Eden stuff. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Right? So Jesus is quoting Moses to the Pharisees. This is important because the Pharisees are all like Moses, Moses, Moses. And Jesus is like, yes, did you read this part of Moses? So he's quoting Moses to the Pharisees in response to their question. He references the pre-fall period of time because he's trying to identify the ideal. He's showing them here's what the moral law is, here's what the design is, here's what the ideal is. And we would see that is before sin entered the world. You wouldn't figure out what the ideal is after sin enters the world, because like all the mosaic laws and everything are designed to uh regulate sinful behavior and like reduce it. And sometimes the regulation isn't like a mirror of the uh moral law, sometimes it's just trying to reduce immoral conduct. So if you really want to find things out, you want to look at pre-fall periods. That's what Jesus is doing here. He looks at the uh the pre-fall kind of ideal there. All right, now he quotes the beginning and the end of what we learn in Eden about the nature of marriage, the beginning and end. So here's the beginning and end, right? Male and female, he make they made them, and then one flesh is a thing that happens after people are married. All right, and the emphasis, he emphasizes the change from separate, male and female, to united in one flesh, right? So here's the question: what is the difference between the one flesh, human activity, and the joining that God does, God's activity? Let me just uh show you back where it talked about God joining. Okay, so if you look back here at Matthew 19, 3 through 6, right, you see in yellow, I've got you made a male and female. We just saw that in Genesis 1.27. And then he quotes Genesis 2.24, that therefore a man shall come together and uh uh with his wife, and there'll be one flesh, right? So the one flesh, that's what that's the human activity, right? They're having sex. And then you have the God activity of joining people together, right? So humans are being unified in the one flesh, and the humans are also being unified by what God does by joining them together. So what is what's what's the difference here? What is these two different kinds of unity by two different sets of agents, right? So you have the the one flesh unity being done by humans and the uh joining unity being done by God. So there's two different types of unity here. How do these two things relate to each other? Okay, so there's two theories on how these things relate to each other. So uh, and basically the question is which one is the cause and which one is the effect? So is joining, the joining that God does, is that the cause or the effect of one flesh? Let me explain what I mean by that. Okay. So there's two theories. I have it here on this chart. On the left, we have that the one flesh unity is the effect of joining. That's my view. And the other one is the one full one flesh unity is the cause of joining. Okay, so let's look at the one flesh unity is the effect of joining. So here's the idea: they're not joined in Genesis 1.27. You have a male and you've got a female, not joined. They're separate, right? Okay. Then I would say when they get married, God joins them. And then when they're intimate afterward, they're one flesh. Matthew 19, 5. So I think that's the kind of chronological order. You're not joined, then you're joined, then you're intimate. That's the order I think it goes in. The other side views it this way. They say people are not joined, they start where I start, they're male and female, not joined. Then they think they are one flesh, and then they think God joins them. Right. So it's just a question of which one comes first, chicken or the egg, the one flesh or the joining. That's the question there, right? So there's two types of unity, like I said, by two types of agents. God unifies by joining, spouses unify by sex. And so there's two options. One flesh is one flesh is unifying since God joins in marriage, like baptism, communion, and types and shadows, or the other ideas that one flesh causes or is a necessary condition for God to join to in marriage. All right, let me explain this. Okay, consider something like baptism. So baptism, I believe, is not required for salvation. And uh some people think it is required for salvation. I don't think it is, but just go with me here for a moment and understand, just so you can understand the concept I'm using here. The concept is this salvation is going from death to life. So that's what's actually spiritually happening to a person. And so baptism is a picture of that. They go, you know, if you do immersion, you're going under the water, uh, buried with him in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life. So baptism is a picture of what happened in salvation. And if you look, if you consider like the Red Sea, for example, uh, there's a passage that talks about how Moses and the people are going through the Red Sea, running away from the land of slavery there, right? And it's a type of baptism it talks about there in the scriptures. So that's a type of baptism. And then we have baptism in the New Testament, and baptism in the New Testament is a picture of uh salvation, right? Now, why is baptism, why is it like that? Well, there's water involved, so there's a Holy Spirit thing going on, and there's death, and there's life coming, coming up. So it is patterned after, it looks like it, right? And also think about communion. Communion doesn't save anybody, right? But what communion does is it pictures, it looks like it's a remembrance of what Jesus did, right? And we have bread and wine. Why do we have bread and wine? Why don't we just eat, I don't know, peanuts or something? Well, the reason is because there's body and blood. So it pictures it in a certain way. Uh, and so it's patterned after. So what's going on with joining is when people are one flesh, the one flesh is designed that way because it pictures the unity that is done by God when He joins two people to being married together. And he makes them family. They were not family before, they were separate, and they get married now, they're family. So that they're unified by God spiritually in reality. And then the life they have together, there's all kinds of unity going on. They leave their father and mother, and then they they live together. There's all kinds of unity that's that's happening there, and the one flesh is part of that. And all of that pictures the actual spiritual unity that they have when God joined them together. So, what Jesus is doing is he is inferring that at marriage, God joins them together. How do we know that? Because look at how God designed the marriage to be for people to be together. So it must be that the spiritual reality is that people are joined by God because look at the physical reality of how it's designed, how it's supposed to be unity together. So that's why I think it's supposed to be like they're not joined, then God joins them, and then they're one flesh, and that pictures and symbolizes what happened in the joining, and that's why it's designed that way. Rather than the other view, the other view is that the one flesh like causes a necessary condition. Like God's waiting, waiting. Okay, yeah, okay, I see they signed the certificate, and I see they went through the wedding ceremony, okay, but they still have to consummate, and I'm not gonna join them until they consummate. Uh uh, some people think it's like a necessary condition, but I don't think that's what Jesus is doing here at all. In fact, if you look at Matthew 19, Jesus is making an argument. He's are he's giving an argument to the Pharisees. He's trying to show them from Moses that there is a joining that goes on from God. And so Jesus is making an inference. He's not just making an assertion. Oh, you have to have sex before before God joins you. What would that have to do with can you divorce? Just making an assertion isn't making an argument. So it doesn't really work with the context that Jesus is giving an argument to the Pharisees based on what Moses wrote. Now, let's consider what about the husband taking the wife? We just talked about the husband taking the wife with Joseph and Mary and everybody else. Let's talk about how that applies to this question. Since taking creates a marriage, Marriage before intimacy, God's joining must occur before intimacy. When two are married, God joins them. The give and take, not the sex, makes the marriage. Therefore, give and take is when God joins them, not during sex. Therefore, God joining the spouses is the cause of one flesh being designed as unifying. Jesus' argument from one flesh does it say what I just said here. So Matthew 19, 6 says, So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. Therefore, that means he's making an argument. He's making a deduction or an inference, I would say, from what he quoted from Moses. So Jesus' argument goes like this Moses called sex one flesh. Therefore, sex unifies. The word one is really doing a lot of work here. Therefore, sex unifies. Therefore, when people are married before sex, God joins them. So how does Jesus get from two to three, right? We have a we have a deduction there or inference. Therefore, when people are married before sex, God joins them. How does he get to that, right? And it wouldn't make sense for sex to be unifying if marriage wasn't unifying. Therefore, God joins the spouses. That's that's the kind of the implied premise that's going on there. So Paul uses a similar argument like this to show the foolishness of idols. Let's look at that argument. Acts 17, 29. This is a different subject, but it's the same kind of inference that's being done. So here's Paul's argument in Acts 17, 29, he says, now this is a different subject matter, but it's, I just want to show the same kind of inference thing that is happening here. So Paul says, being then God's offspring, that's us. We're we're God's offspring. We're made in God's image. So we're another way of saying that is we're God's offspring. So being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the by the art and imagination of man. So Paul argues that since humans are God's offspring, we can see that the nature of the divine being is not like idols. Paul makes an inference about the nature of the cause, God's nature, by its effect, human nature. Similarly, Jesus leads the Pharisees to infer about the nature of marriage by its effects. Since sex is unifying, it must be designed as uh marriage must be designed that way because marriage is unifying. Therefore, God joins people when they are married. So, what other marriage unity signals are in the pre-fall text in Genesis? We have Genesis 2, 21 through 24, and the history goes there's Adam, God takes a rib out of Adam and makes Eve, and then he brings Eve to Adam, and then they get married. Eve came from Adam, which means before her creation they were unified. Marriage is a reunion. When she was created, Adam called her his bone and flesh. That's family language, and you can see that in Genesis 29, 14, where Laban says of Jacob, are you not my bone and flesh? It's family language at the time that Moses is writing. So Adam called her his bone and flesh. Again, a signal of unity. The father and mother text hints at the unity of two in their child. The name woman shows sameness, right? She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. So it shows sameness and unity there. But leave your parents and cleave to your wife show that spousal unity is above the parent-child relationship. This is a big deal because today people are getting married a little bit later, but back in the day, they were getting married young. So people, their core relationship was with their parents. So to leave your core relationship and then go be with somebody else and make that and elevate that relationship over your main relationship, that shows profound experiential unity with this other person. And the one flesh language is a callback to the bone and flesh, which is that family language that Moses has in Genesis. Look at Ephesians 5, 31 and 32. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound. And I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. So here, Paul, talking about marriage in the context, quotes Genesis 2.24. This is the same text Jesus quotes in the text we were looking at when he's talking about divorce and remarriage. But Paul quotes it here to help people understand the nature of Christ and the church, that relationship. So marriage, human marriage, is a picture of Christ and the church. So humanity and God were unified pre-fall, before the fall, right? We were separated by the fall and we're reunited in salvation and we celebrate. So in the same outline is present in, like, for example, in the prodigal son, father and son are unified before he rebels. They are separated by his rebellion and they are unified, and then they celebrate they're going to kill the fatted calf and give him a ring and do all the things. Paul quotes that text from Genesis 224. The Red Sea symbolizes baptism, as I mentioned. So baptism symbolizes uh salvation, right? And so the one flesh symbolizes joining, and the joining also symbolizes salvation. So you can see how there can be types that are one removed, two removed. Like the Red Sea is like two steps removed from uh salvation, right? Because the Red Sea pictures baptism and the baptism then pictures salvation. And so the one flesh symbolizes uh, you know, uh the joining in marriage, and then the joining in marriage symbolizes Christ and the church. All right, so now what about 1 Corinthians chapter six? It talks about one flesh also. And how does that how do we put that together uh with all of this? All right, so here's what Paul writes. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members with of a prostitute? Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, the two shall become one flesh, but he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. So there's two kinds of joining. There's joined to the Lord, we have that in the text here, and we have one flesh with a prostitute. So what's going on? All right, so Paul's argument is this since you are joined to Christ, you should not be joined to a prostitute. Nothing indicates here that the man and the prostitute were auto-married because they were one flesh. That's not what's going on. Sex does not create marriage. All right, rather, what Paul says is that the man and prostitute became one body. The unity is physical, and that physical unity is supposed to be reserved for marriage and which and that marriage then pictures salvation. It's not supposed to be done kind of aberrantly with some prostitute. That does that doesn't fit the picture, and that's what Paul is focused on there. What does this tell us about Matthew 19, 6 and Mark chapter 10, verse 9? I mentioned this is going to shed some light on those two texts that I think is really interesting. All right, so Matthew 19, six. So they are no longer two, but one flesh, what therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. Mark 10, 9 says something similar. Okay. Um, here's the question Is the same object joined and separated? All right, let's look at that text real closely. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. So Jesus is talking about there is something, there is something that God has joined together, and whatever that thing is, let not man separate. So the question is is it the same object, the same thing that Jesus is saying is joined that man is not to separate? Is it exactly is it the same thing? So if it is precisely the same thing, then the we have we have an interesting uh situation. The phrase let not man separate, that phrase means the man can separate what God has joined. Therefore, the argument goes, divorce ends a marriage. That's not my view, but that is a view. That's an argument people make. They say the object is the same. And if it's precisely the same thing, well, it's got to be that divorce would end a marriage there. Uh, but if not, uh then there are two types of joining that are going on. There's the God joins people supernaturally in marriage, and then spouses join naturally in their life together. And that's my view. I think God joins people supernaturally when they get married, that He makes them family. People can't make themselves family with like some other person, right? Like, like if your parents have another kid, like if my parents had another kid and it was a boy, that he'd be my brother. And and so that's just a fact of nature. But if my brother then grows up and he wants to become family with his, with a wife, with a woman, he's gonna have to marry that person, right? And so you're gonna need God to make them family because there's no like natural process to do that, unlike having a brother, for example. So so God's gonna have to join them together, which is what happens in marriage. So I would say that what's being referred to here uh in this passage where it says what God has joined together, let not man separate, there's two different types of joining that's going on, two different types of unity that's happening. One the supernatural one, and one the natural one uh by people. So when Jesus said let not man separate, he meant man should not unjoin their life together. Humans only separate what humans join. Uh humans can't unjoin a supernatural joining. So remarriage cannot be uh adultery in any sense of the word if divorce unjoins a marriage, right? So Jesus calls divorce and remarriage, he calls the remarriage adultery seven times in the New Testament. He calls it adultery. Why is it adultery? Mark chapter 10, he says it's adultery against her, that is adultery against the first spouse who the man divorced. So man divorced his wife, he remarried, and he commits adultery against her, against his first wife when he remarried. Why is it adultery? It's adultery because the divorce doesn't end the marriage, right? So when so when Jesus says the remarriage is adultery, what he's saying is you're still married to your first spouse. God views you as still married to your first spouse even after you got a legal divorce. God doesn't recognize the legal divorce because illegal divorce can't unjoin a supernatural adjoining, right? God supernaturally joined them together. You know, somebody went down to get some paperwork done at the courthouse. What does that matter? God didn't God doesn't recognize that people are still married. And so that the person then gets a remarriage, they're just cheating on their spouse. It'd be like if a man and woman were married, and the man like gets a girlfriend and moves in with his girlfriend, and then he tells everybody, oh, I'm remarried. No, you're not. You're just living in adultery with this other, with your girlfriend. And so it's the same thing with somebody who gets a divorce and remarriage because Jesus, uh, because God does not recognize that paperwork. The remarriage, uh, the Jesus calls it adultery, but the remarriage could not be adultery in any sense of the word if divorce actually unjoined a marriage, because there'd be nobody to cheat on, right? But since it is adultery, that means uh that divorce does not unjoin a marriage. So when it says there, uh what God has joined together, let not man separate, it is not saying man can separate what God has joined together. It's not saying that. It is rather uh it is saying that God joined them together, so they should live in harmony with that. They should continue to stay together uh and continue to picture what uh what God did when he joined them together. So here is the conclusion of the matter. Sex is not required for marriage. The process for being married, BMI is betrothal, marriage, intimacy. And I will say this: if you don't need betrothal today, you can just go directly to marriage. The necessary conditions for marriage are only two people, a man and a woman, consent to be married. That's the give and take language we see in the scriptures, approval by a civil authority, not incestuous, and it can't be an adulterous uh remarriage. And then Matthew 19, 6 and Mark 10, 9 uh uses the word separate to imagine a case where spouses end their life together. It does not teach that humans can unjoin a supernaturally joined marriage. I'd love to hear your comments. Go ahead and put them in there. Subscribe, like, do all the things. Also get a copy of my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. You get it on Amazon. I'll have a link to it in the description below, and I'll see you guys next time.