so that they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.
The Pharisees, the religious teachers of the day, asked Jesus how easily a man could divorce his wife. He answered by going back to the day God made the first man and woman, which raises the real question: who does the joining, and what may man undo?
Behind the law to the beginning
The Pharisees framed the debate around Moses and what he permitted. Jesus refused to argue on that ground and went further back.
The Lord goes back behind the law to God's first institution: "He who created them from the beginning… from the beginning it was not so." So Christ's authority restores God's natural order. That order is the relationship He formed, and it is the source of every other human relationship. He returns to God and to God's institution for man. The name used is God — not "the Lord," not "my Father" — and that is an important point. The law came later, as a temporary measure.
Moses wrote both the permission to divorce and the account of the first marriage. The two do not carry equal weight.
The first was a provision "for the hardness of their hearts." Men no doubt often used it without the reason Moses required: "because he has found some indecency in her" (Deut. 24:1). The second (Gen. 2:24) taught the sacredness and the real character of the tie.
Who does the joining
The verse does not say the couple joined themselves. It says God joined them, and that decides who may undo it.
The two are then recognized before God as being "one flesh." It is God Himself who has joined the two together. Therefore man has no authority to divorce them. Governments today of course ignore God's decree in this matter, but the word of God will not change to suit men's preferences. From the beginning God meant marriage to bind two people for as long as both are alive.
Because the joining is God's, no human office can perform it or claim credit for it.
A minister may pronounce a couple man and wife "on behalf of the church." That is simply wrong. Neither the true church of God nor the churches of men have any authority over marriage… When God joins, He does so without the help of any man.
What "one flesh" settles
The phrase is not poetry about feelings. It draws practical lines around the relationship.
God set a clear order in creation. So it was right that a man should leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. This verse settles many questions. First, when marriage takes place, the man (or woman) is no longer in the place of subjection to parents. Second, he holds fast to his wife — one wife only, so bigamy and polygamy have no place in Scripture. Holding fast to his wife means real love for her, faithfulness and devotion.
The one case Jesus names
Commentators do speak of one exception. They explain it as sin having already destroyed the "one flesh."
Where someone sinned against the relationship, it was not really an exception. By then the one man and one woman had stopped being one flesh, because a human will had cut across God's. Sin broke the bond.
Apart from that, the bond holds. What makes it hold is where it came from, not who entered it.
God's will is that marriage cannot be broken… This is true not only of marriages between believers, but of every marriage.
Comfort under strain
Marriage began in God. So the same God who started it meets the strains that push couples apart.
Why should a person's circumstances, failures, the difficulties along the way, incompatibility or anything else interfere with what came from the heart of God? … Couples will find that the love which first gave us marriage can hold them up.
Summary
- God joins. The verse names who acts: not the couple, not the state, not a minister. God Himself joined them, without any human help.
- God's order. Jesus stepped past Moses to creation. The law's permission was temporary; the beginning is the standard.
- God makes one. "One flesh" ends the child's place under parents, rules out more than one spouse, and calls for love and faithfulness.
- God binds. The union cannot be broken. Where the Lord names an exception, sin had already broken the bond — no one's decision did.
- God sustains. The love that first gave marriage carries a couple through failure, hardship and difference.