And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you?
Mark 10:3 is Jesus asking the Pharisees what Moses commanded about marriage and divorce, framing the divorce question around Moses' command and beginning his New Testament law on divorce. The verse stands in Mark's account of the rich young man who came to Jesus to know what good thing he should do to inherit eternal life, parallel to Matthew 19. When Jesus saw this young man he loved him, showing the young man was in many respects lovely and promising, uncorrupted by many leading sins of his age, thinking he had kept the commandments and trying to keep them as far as he understood them, with a sincere desire to be saved. The wording of Jesus asking what Moses commanded, connected with the following statement that Moses commanded and wrote the law, shows Jesus taught that Moses was the human author of the Pentateuch.
The question points marriage back to its original foundation by connecting what Moses commanded with the creation account of marriage in Genesis, presenting marriage as a divine institution established at creation that is holy and sacred. In the beginning husband and wife were united by God as one, the twain one flesh never to be separated, a bond that no one but God can break. That union of equals who differ, united in their own life and in their offspring, is the foundation of the home. When men departed from God and his law was forgotten, loose conceptions of marriage prevailed, so that even in the nation with the highest moral practice a man could put away his wife for any cause. God suffered that past blindness, but in the increased light of Christ men must come back to first principles of lifelong union.
In Mark 10 Jesus points to Old Testament histories as living chart lessons of types and precedents for admonition upon whom the ends of the world are come. The experiences of Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon with plural and mercenary marriage are held up as examples of ruin, sorrow, and humiliation from violating the marriage relation, and of the worth of one true, loyal, unselfish love, that later generations may learn from them. The teaching that follows the question does not attempt to change any Jewish civil statute but is addressed to the individual soul, setting what is right in God's sight under primal law that no man should divorce his wife except for fornication. Heeding that instruction does not violate civil law, because men cannot be converted or saved through civil law.
That New Testament law sets a strict standard against divorce, under which ordinary disagreements are not grounds for divorce. Divorce and remarriage are governed by Scripture, not by personal whim or passion, and remarriage after divorce on grounds other than scriptural ones is rejected. Roman Catholic doctrine and practice on divorce keeps that strict standard more closely than the Protestant churches have kept it, to the shame of the Protestant churches. Protestant churches should bring their practice nearer to that New Testament standard, honoring the authority of Scripture instead of belittling it to follow human ideas and human standards.
Mark 10:3 is Jesus asking the Pharisees what Moses commanded about marriage and divorce, framing the divorce question around Moses' command and beginning his New Testament law on divorce. The verse stands in Mark's account of the rich young man who came to Jesus to know what good thing he should do to inherit eternal life, parallel to Matthew 19. When Jesus saw this young man he loved him, showing the young man was in many respects lovely and promising, uncorrupted by many leading sins of his age, thinking he had kept the commandments and trying to keep them as far as he understood them, with a sincere desire to be saved. The wording of Jesus asking what Moses commanded, connected with the following statement that Moses commanded and wrote the law, shows Jesus taught that Moses was the human author of the Pentateuch.
The question points marriage back to its original foundation by connecting what Moses commanded with the creation account of marriage in Genesis, presenting marriage as a divine institution established at creation that is holy and sacred. In the beginning husband and wife were united by God as one, the twain one flesh never to be separated, a bond that no one but God can break. That union of equals who differ, united in their own life and in their offspring, is the foundation of the home. When men departed from God and his law was forgotten, loose conceptions of marriage prevailed, so that even in the nation with the highest moral practice a man could put away his wife for any cause. God suffered that past blindness, but in the increased light of Christ men must come back to first principles of lifelong union.
In Mark 10 Jesus points to Old Testament histories as living chart lessons of types and precedents for admonition upon whom the ends of the world are come. The experiences of Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon with plural and mercenary marriage are held up as examples of ruin, sorrow, and humiliation from violating the marriage relation, and of the worth of one true, loyal, unselfish love, that later generations may learn from them. The teaching that follows the question does not attempt to change any Jewish civil statute but is addressed to the individual soul, setting what is right in God's sight under primal law that no man should divorce his wife except for fornication. Heeding that instruction does not violate civil law, because men cannot be converted or saved through civil law.
That New Testament law sets a strict standard against divorce, under which ordinary disagreements are not grounds for divorce. Divorce and remarriage are governed by Scripture, not by personal whim or passion, and remarriage after divorce on grounds other than scriptural ones is rejected. Roman Catholic doctrine and practice on divorce keeps that strict standard more closely than the Protestant churches have kept it, to the shame of the Protestant churches. Protestant churches should bring their practice nearer to that New Testament standard, honoring the authority of Scripture instead of belittling it to follow human ideas and human standards.