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rest of the parable. But the Lord was not teaching new truth, for this was embodied in the
Sermon on the Mount (5: 23-26; 6: 14, 15), where He taught that an unforgiving spirit
would lead to exclusion from the kingdom when set up. We have seen that this Gospel
revolves around the conditions for entry into the kingdom of heaven or being shut out of
it.
When we come to the later revelation concerning the Body of Christ, we are assured
that each member has complete forgiveness by God, "having forgiven you all trespasses"
(Col. 2: 13), and Eph. 4: 31, 32 teaches:
"Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away
from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one
another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you."
Here we are not asked to forgive because otherwise we shall forfeit God's forgiveness,
but rather to forgive because we already have complete forgiveness by God. If an
unforgiving spirit is cherished by any member of the Body of Christ, then this is "walking
after the flesh", the sinful old nature that we all possess, and no one can do this with
God's approval. Loss is bound to occur and the prize or reward is endangered.
The next section of Matthew's Gospel (chapter 19:) deals with the knotty question of
divorce. The Pharisees again attempt to trip up the Lord Jesus by asking Him if it was
lawful to divorce a wife for any and every reason (19: 3). He refers back to the creation
of Adam and Eve and the fact that God had joined them together and it was not for any
man to separate them (6). They replied by quoting Moses' permission to divorce. The
Lord answered:
"Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it
was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife,
except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery" (19: 8,
9, N.I.V.).
This agrees with His teaching in 5: 31. At this time there was a dispute between two
theological schools over the meaning of Deut. 24: 1. The school of Shammai took the
strict and unpopular view of divorce for adultery alone, while the school of Hillel took
the liberal and popular view of easy divorce for practically any reason real or imagined
by the man. It is clear that the Lord agreed with the Shammai school and there is no
doubt that, at the beginning, God's will for marriage was that it should be permanent, for
life. He made one man and one woman, each for the other. He did not create more
women than men so as to provide for divorce. But the weakness of the flesh spoils God's
original purpose and we cannot believe that Moses who was faithful to God, would have
been allowed to have modified it without the Lord's permission. The law originated from
God, not Moses, and breaking the law in any particular was counted as disobedience to
God, not Moses.