Today's Devotion

Wednesday of Lent 3, March 11, 2026 - Mark 10:1-12

In the name of + Jesus. Amen.

When the Pharisees seek to “test” Jesus – and this is the same word for when the devil “tempted” Jesus in the wilderness (Matt 4:1), they are seeking to lure Jesus into a misstep, or hopefully, into sin. They are laying a trap for their enemy, like the “snare of the fowler” (Ps 91:3). And there are few minefields, then and now, that are more fraught than marriage and sexuality.

The very first human institution created by God after the creation of Adam and Eve was Holy Matrimony. Eve was literally taken from the flesh of Adam (Gen 2:21), and Adam verbally recognized this unity of flesh between his wife and himself (v. 23). And this confession of Adam is what led to Moses’s narration: “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (v. 24). And to Moses’s commentary, our Lord adds: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

But, of course, the paradise of Eden gave way to our broken world and fallen nature. The seamless integration of the sacred binary of male and female into one flesh that took place in the Garden has degenerated into the brokenness of our own Wilderness in the post-fall world. This dysfunction was itself part of the curse of the fall (Gen 3:16). Consequently, Moses also permitted divorce as a concession to this brokenness, as our Lord explains (Matt 19:7-8). This is not God’s will, but rather a realization of man’s “hardness of heart” (v. 8). And today, this hardness of heart even includes the denial of the sacred binary, redefining marriage to include the same sex: the blurring of the natural distinction between men and women – a life of which is its own punishment (Rom 1:24-28).

Our Lord calls us to see the sanctity of marriage as God instituted it, even though we have denigrated it through sin. Jesus says: “whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” As St. Paul teaches us, Holy Matrimony is a picture of how God relates to His people, for it “refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:32). Though our world is fallen, our God is not. Though our institutions have been broken, God’s “steadfast love endures forever” (Ps 136:1). God will not divorce His bride, and He bids us to likewise remain faithful to Him, not blurring the line between God and man (which Eve did when the serpent came to test her, to tempt her to forsake God’s Word (Gen 3:1-6).

In Christ, God has “married” the human and divine natures: His immortality to our mortality, His righteousness with our sinfulness. This “marriage” was consummated upon the cross, in which the Bridegroom “loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph 5:25).

“What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.