Thursday 24th September 2020 Devotion
Scripture:- Matthew 19:3-12
Topic:- Did Jesus Have A Wife [5]
Text:- Revelation 21:9
H. There Was A Question Raised:
- That Jesus is not capable of answering or dealing with marriage problems since He did not marry.
- Truly, Jesus when on earth did not marry as other people did. There was another heresy that Jesus had a secret wife or lover which was Mary Magdalene. This heresy is scripturally baseless because there was no account anywhere in the Bible of such record. It was one of the lies of the devil that generated from the pit of hell.
- So it was evidently clear that Jesus, when on earth did not marry.
I. Some Suggested Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Marry: - Why Jesus did not marry is because getting married and having children was not the purpose of His coming to this world but He came to the world voluntarily to die for mankind in order to give us salvation and thereby reconcile us back to God our creator. See Mark 10:45.
- Why Jesus did not marry is because He came to this world as God-man and not as man-God as we humans are. See John 1:1, 14. So what kind of child or children would He have given birth to if He married? See John 1:1,14; 10:30; Genesis 6:1-15.
- Why Jesus lived a single life as a man when on earth was because He was a sinless man. How would it have been possible for Jesus who knew no sin to go ahead and marry a sinful woman i.e. all humans are born with sinful nature while Jesus was born sinless [by the Holy Spirit through a virgin lady (Mary)]. Hence, to marry means that Jesus will become one flesh with His wife and thereby stained with sin. See Genesis 2:24; I John 3:5.
- Jesus did not marry because He Himself must have been one of the eunuchs He referred to in Matthew 19:12.
- He did not marry so as not to occupy Himself with the problems in marriage and that is why he said in Matthew 19:3-12 in which His disciples concluded that it is better not to marry See I Corinthians 7:1, 7.
- Another reason that made Jesus not to marry was that it would be sad if Jesus died and left the wife as a widow at a tender age. For Jesus to die at about 33 years of age, definitely if He married, the wife will be so young to remain a widow for the rest of her life or thereafter, therefore she will need to re-marry. See I Corinthians 7:8, 9, 39.
- Jesus did not marry because the Church which is the Christian body is His bride. Therefore all those who profess that Jesus died for their sin and thus give their life to Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, are all the wives of Jesus. See Ephesians 5:23; Revelation 19:7; 21:9.
J. Another Possible Reasons For Jesus’s Remaining Unmarried: - He may have intuited that once he started his ministry it would be short or even meet a disastrous end. As a Jew, knew the fate of other prophets. Jesus may have foreseen the difficulty of caring for a family while being an itinerant preacher.
- Perhaps his celibacy was another manifestation of his single-hearted commitment to God. After sifting through the facts, Meier lands on the last reason: “The position that Jesus remained celibate on religious grounds [is] the more probable hypothesis.”
- Other theories, where Mary Magdalene is proposed as Jesus’s wife, are also rather far-fetched. Most women and women disciples in the New Testament are referred to, by the convention of their time, as “the wife of” or “the mother of.”
- In a patriarchal world, they were most often identified through their associations with either a husband or a son (or sons). So we read of women like “Mary, the wife of Clopas” and “Joanna, the wife of Chusa.”
- Consequently, it is more likely that if Mary Magdalene were married to Jesus she would be called not “Mary of Magdala,” but “Mary, the wife of Jesus.”
- Also, in terms of the Passion narratives, which Christians will read during Holy Week, the Gospels place several important women at the scene of Jesus’s death, at foot of the Cross.
- The Gospel of John, written in roughly AD 100, reports the following women as present at the Crucifixion: “his [Jesus’s] mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene.”
- An even earlier Gospel, Matthew, written around AD 85, says that there were “many women,” and then lists those the Gospel writer considers important: “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.”
- Were Jesus married, not mentioning “the wife of Jesus” in either the stories of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection would be odd indeed.
- Nearly every scholar believes that Jesus was unmarried. So do I. As I said, my faith does not rest on his being unmarried–but my reason tells me that he was.
Prayer Point:- Oh Lord God, help me to understand You better and be intimate with You henceforth by fire, in the name of Jesus Christ.
Have A Glorious Thursday!