I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 10-11.

    Today’s passage starts out with Jesus’ teachings about marriage and divorce. I often skip over this because His teaching on the issue is so short and to the point. Yet, even among Christians it seems to be something to which not enough attention is paid. As I was reading it today, I realized that our society makes much the same mistake which those who asked Jesus did. They put the priority on divorce. That is their question was, “Is it OK to get divorced?” When the real focus needs to be on what marriage is. Jesus tells us that God made us male and female. The result of being created in this way means that a man leaves his father and mother, is joined with his wife, and the two become one. That joining is something accomplished by God. It is wrong for anyone to attempt to divide that which God has joined. Even when we do look at this passage we tend to focus just on Jesus’ teaching about divorce, but really there is a lot more there. The New International Version translates Jesus as saying that God created people as male and female at the beginning of creation. He did not create us male, female, and other. Jesus’ teaching on divorce follows implicitly from that. Of course it works the other way as well. As we become more casual in how we deal with divorce, we lose our understanding of the importance of a man leaving his parents and becoming one with his wife (and a woman leaving her parents and becoming one with her husband). From there we become discontent with the way in which God made us. Which is another angle to look at this issue. If we approach marriage from the perspective that God made us the way we are, and made the other person the way they are, we have a different perspective on marriage. Marriage becomes about fulfilling God’s purpose for our lives and our spouse is someone God created as our equal.