I used to think the Star Wars prequels were the worst. And then the Star Wars sequels happened. Now I don't really know how to talk about the prequels anymore because they seem so innocent and pleasant and fun. Now, whatever the case, the one guy who was definitely having a hoot the whole time in the prequels, and really in all of them, was Ian McDermond. Am I saying that right? He's the guy who played the Emperor. Well, he's the Emperor, and then he's like the Emperor, because he has these two different roles and is surprised, he's the bad guy all along. And he's always yelling about stuff and going crazy. And when he's doing political things, he famously says, I think it's in episode one, I will make it legal. And I think what he means by that is like, I am the law, I can do whatever I want. And because I have the power to make things legal, if legal is what you really need to feel good about the crazy things that I'm gonna do with my creepy monster face and my lightning hands, cool. Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm gonna do things that are completely evil here, but if legal is what matters, yeah, I got that for you here. Let's move some paperwork around or whatever, and we'll bribe a couple people and we'll have a couple votes and we'll call it legal. There. But stop me if you've heard this one before. But it turns out that morality and legality are not actually the same thing. The one doesn't make the other and the other doesn't make the one. Morality is this whole other better thing, and legality sometimes just happens to correspond to morality. But then a whole lot of other times it happens to correspond with, as you know, regardless of political persuasion, the special interests of this group or that group or the other thing, whoever paid for a law. And do I have a cynical view of government? Well, yeah, the reason that I would cite for that, mm, all of history. And the emperor is just a screaming, monstrous, vile, evil manifestation of this reality that morality and legality are not the same thing. Morality is better. Well, if you understand that goofy little scenario from a story about space wizards from 20 years ago, you'll have no trouble understanding the rationale that people were using in this shocking passage in Matthew chapter five that is really troubling to people, especially when they read it at first, especially divorced from a divorced. Ha ha ha. Look what I did there. Especially divorced from its immediate context. I think the original audience would have heard this differently than you're about to hear it. Okay, Matthew 5. Jesus is going to be the fulfillment of the law. He talks about that on a whole bunch of different levels. And now we get into some actual specifics where he goes through elements of the law that people are kind of upholding externally or only in a not doing bad thing sense, and he's fulfilling it one at a time by demonstrating that no one really lives up to the point of these laws, that no one is really innocent, and that to truly obey God with the values of the kingdom is to not just not do naughty things, but to proactively do kingdom value things, to love other people, to love your enemy, to be patient, to forgive, to show grace, to persist. And so what he's doing here is he's setting up what I think is this beautiful row of pins that really all relate to each other. And he's just setting it up and being like, Oh, you're pretty good at that, are you? Flick, and he knocks it down. Oh, you're pretty good at not having sex with people you're not married to, are you? Well, flick. And he knocks that one down. Well, here is this one that to us seems like, what? But to them, I think would have made sense. All right, here we go. It has been said anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery. All right, we're gonna pump the brakes here, and before emotions start interpreting this passage for us, let's just bounce around, let's look at the larger context here, and let's try to understand what's going on. The first part is not that tricky. It has been said anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. Oh, okay, that's simple enough. This is probably a reference to something else in the Bible because he said it's been said, people would know that. Look in the notes here. Deuteronomy 24, one through four. I'll just turn over there here in my Bible, and I'm gonna read it to you. Okay. If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her certificate of divorce, gives it to her, and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house, she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her certificate of divorce and gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband who divorced her is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. Do not bring sin upon the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. I don't know if that actually clarified that much. But we got a trick for that, right? If something doesn't clarify it, we just go to the bigger context yet. So what's going on here around Deuteronomy 24? Okay, well, in my Bible, the note starting in Deuteronomy 23 and verse 19 says, protection for the weak. Oh, well, that's framed a little differently because when I just read that with my 21st century brain on, it sounded like something that was just mean to women and prudish. So let's see here. Okay, uh, don't charge your brother interest. Oh, okay, so you're supposed to be generous with each other. Let's try the next one. If you make a vow before the Lord, don't be slow to pay it. Oh, okay. So when you when you borrow from people, make sure you don't take advantage of whoever was kind enough to lend. Oh, okay, so uh kind of both directions here. We're trying not to take advantage of other people. Uh, if you enter your neighbor's vineyard, you may eat all the grapes you want, but don't put any in your basket. Oh, it's like eating at Who Hot. You can go back through the line as many times as you want and make that delicious Mongolian walk. This episode, not brought to you by Who Hot Mongolian Grill, but you can't throw that in a box. So don't bother loading up so much that you take advantage of the good people at Who Hot. All right, then we get the whole thing about the uh marrying a woman and marrying some other guy and divorce certificates and stuff. We'll come back to that. Okay, uh, if a man is recently married, you can't send him off to war. Oh, yeah, because he needs to set up his house and I got it. Okay, you probably have some errors there. Okay, don't take a pair of millstones. Not even the upper one is a security for a debt, because that would be taking a man's livelihood as security. Oh, okay. So you can make a deal, but some deals are just off limits because you could wreck somebody if that was allowed. Wow. Every single one of these, as I scan through them, is not about being mean and controlling. It's about looking out for people who are in vulnerable situations in this society. Well, interesting. Okay, so that reframes this whole thing about the woman getting divorced. All right, so a man finds the woman displeasing, like there's something indecent, it says, and he writes her a certificate of divorce. Okay, I think what this means then is she's not supposed to be just bounced around between people because you did the official paperwork. So you don't get to just do a thing like you wife swapping or getting rid of some lady to upgrade to a younger model, but I made it legal, I did the paperwork, and now it's all okay. No, this allows for okay, stuff broke in the relationship, there's something wrong here that doesn't work. The guy officially does the certificate of divorce, which seals and officializes them not being married anymore within the community. Everybody knows that's a deal. And if she wants to go and marry somebody else, she's free to do so because this certificate has been issued. Okay, so what this does is it effectively, uh, kids, plug your ears. Kids, seriously. No, I'm talking to you, kid, plug your ears. Thank you. So, what this officially does then is it protects men from putting their wives out essentially as prostitutes or forcing them to live in that way as women with disreputable jobs that would destroy them in society. And with the men being in the driver's seat the way they were in this society, if there wasn't restriction put in place to protect these vulnerable wives, they could be in a really bad spot. It doesn't sound like an act of mercy with my 21st century brain, but it is an act of mercy. Okay, well, I'm tracking a little bit better. So this whole marriage thing, we know that it's supposed to be permanent. Oh my goodness, I flipped right to it. That was awesome. Genesis 2, 24. Seriously, that's like a Christmas miracle. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and will be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. That has something of an air of permanence to it. And we know that God doesn't like divorce, and in fact, this one's really easy because that's in Malachi. Malachi is right before Matthew, and we're in Matthew, Malachi, Malachi 2, 16. I hate divorce, says the Lord God of Israel, and I hate a man's covering himself with violence as well as with his garment, says the Lord Almighty. So guard yourself in your spirit and don't break faith. Oh, okay, God hates divorce. So if God hates divorce, why is he allowing divorce? Ah, it's almost as though God kind of gets it, and the divorce thing is a concession, not because there's something wrong with the rule that God made, or there's something wrong with God's take on divorce, which is that he hates it, it's because there's something wrong with us. And living in a fallen, broken world and dragging around our baggage and being victims of things and also being idiots and victimizing others, sometimes relationships are gonna break. And all this is not desirable, and God in fact hates that and values marriage very much. He has built into the framework of his system some allowance for divorce. And specifically here, we get told that there's something unique about divorce that happens in the case of marital unfaithfulness. Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress. And anyone, that's the part that gets weird, isn't it? Causes her to become an adulteress. And anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery. But again, you and I are thinking about this in Western 21st century terms of courting, dating, love, marriage, sex, sexuality. And so we're thinking in terms of, well, you do the paperwork with the government, and then the government says you either are married or that you aren't married, and then you just you can go on to the next thing or whatever. But here, there's a religious element, there's a social element. These communities are very small and tight-knit. And what's going to effectively happen here is that dudes who were in the driver's seat here were skirting the spirit of the law, and they would do this by going and getting this simple little bit of paperwork that was issued for a healthy clerical fee by, what do you know, the religious leaders? And so the religious leaders could grant these things to a dude, and then effectively he could just upgrade to a younger, cheaper, hotter model for nothing more than a clerical fee. Everybody makes a little bit of money, everybody says hello down at the religious courthouse, and now we're on to the next thing. Well, what happens to the lady who just got divorced? What happens to her kids who maybe aren't the kids that the guy really loves? Well, the dude effectively has just relieved himself of the burden of this aging woman who's not hot, like the new one he just went out and got. Yeah, is it immoral? Well, it would be if it weren't legal, but we made it legal. So nothing that's legal could be bad, right? Well, wrong. And Jesus is pointing out that if you go and do that to your wife, taking advantage of someone you've made vows to in this vulnerable situation, and then if you participate in doing that by going and marrying that person or even doing cheap little bits of paperwork to be able to maneuver women around, you're doing something enormously destructive. Whatever the case, what we clearly see here is that there was an abuse of this system that was obviously going on. And Jesus is calling out that abuse and clear violation of the principles that were behind it. The whole certificate of divorce thing was something that was built so that women wouldn't be taken advantage of. And instead, it was being weaponized against women of low power situations to take advantage of them. So for you and me, this would not appear number three on our list: murder, adultery, divorce. Wait, what, huh? There's like a hundred things that people do that are pretty screwed up and weird. But if people from the first century warped forward in time to now and saw what our top five list was of things that are really controversial, hot button moral issues, the first one would be murder, and after that it would get really, really confusing and disorienting for them as well. Clearly, in this culture, this was a burning issue that Jesus could bring up, and a whole lot of people were going to start feeling real awkward because they had made everything legal and they had behaved very legally, but they'd behaved very immorally. And unfortunately, it looks like the religious leadership was in on this thing, whether it was as a way of making some easy money on the side for doing some slick paperwork, or whether it was moving wives around in this same ugly way. Jesus calls it out, and everybody who'd been involved in this practice would have felt super gross guilt. What should you do if you get married and then you get divorced and then you decide to get married to somebody else? I'm not in charge of that. I'm not the arbiter of divorce and remarriage. I would direct you to the Bible and to think about it a whole bunch and to do what you think makes sense is and is in keeping with the values of the kingdom. And in the meantime, I just like everybody and want to keep thinking about this with you. So it might sound like I'm making light of that, but I'm really not. That's just not something I want to own for you. It's not something I feel like I'm in a good position to own for you. So I really would just bounce that back to you, my friend. But the bigger picture here is this is yet another example of Jesus going directly against the cultural trends of the day and holding up the values of the kingdom. And that is what everybody can take away from a passage like this.