Matthew 19

Today’s Passage: Matthew 19

The long Galilean ministry is over. Matthew closes it with one of his familiar seams, “when Jesus had finished saying these things,” and the Lord turns south, down the eastern side of the Jordan toward Judea, and every step from here is a step toward Jerusalem and the cross. The crowds come with Him and He heals them, as He always does. And then the questions begin, four of them, and each one exposes a heart. The Pharisees come first with a trap about divorce, and instead of taking a side in their argument He goes back past Moses to the first pages of Genesis and puts marriage where God put it. His own disciples hear the answer and blurt out that in that case a man is better off unmarried, and He speaks a quiet word about those who never marry at all. Then parents bring their little children, and the disciples try to shoo them away, and Jesus says the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. And then, immediately, a rich young man comes running up with a question about what good thing he must do, and hears one sentence that finds the one thing he cannot give, and walks away sorrowful. Watch the two scenes side by side. Children who have nothing to offer are carried in and blessed. A man with everything to offer turns and goes. The disciples are staggered by it, and Peter asks the question underneath all of it: what about us, who left everything? The chapter ends with a promise so large it can only be received, and a warning that the order of that day will surprise us.

As you read, hold this: Jesus takes marriage back to what God made in the beginning, welcomes children who bring nothing, and lets a rich man walk away, because entering the kingdom is impossible with man and possible only with God.

Matthew 19:1–6 (BSB)

¹ When Jesus had finished saying these things, He left Galilee and went into the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. ² Large crowds followed Him, and He healed them there. ³ Then some Pharisees came and tested Him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” ⁴ Jesus answered, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ ⁵ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? ⁶ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

They came to test Him, and He would not be tested on their ground. Watch what He does, because it is one of the loveliest turns in the Gospel. They ask a lawyer’s question about the grounds for ending a marriage, and He answers with a question about the beginning of one. “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’?” He reaches back over every rabbi and every certificate to the sixth day of the world, when God made humanity in His own image, male and female, and He puts two texts of Genesis together as one word from God. Marriage is not a social arrangement that a culture invented and a culture may therefore revise. It is something the Creator made, and He made it as the covenant union of one man and one woman. And He built it out of three movements that are still the shape of it: a man leaves his father and mother, which is a public and costly departure, not a private feeling; he is united (κολλάω) kollaō, pronounced kol-LAH-oh. Strong's G2853, to join fast, glue, be united. The verb in the Greek Old Testament of Genesis 2:24 and here on the lips of Jesus is kollaō, and it is the plain word for gluing, welding, cementing one thing to another so that it will not come apart. It was used of joining timbers and of soldering metal. In the New Testament it turns up when a starving prodigal attaches himself to a citizen of a far country, when Philip is told to go and join himself to the Ethiopian’s chariot, and, most wonderfully, when Paul says that the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. That is the picture behind marriage. Not two lives set beside one another like chairs at a table, easily rearranged, but two lives bonded so that separating them tears something. And notice who does the joining in verse six. Jesus does not say what the two of them have joined together. He says “what God has joined together.” A wedding is not merely a couple’s promise and a community’s witness, though it is both. It is God Himself making one flesh out of two people. Whatever else that means, it means a marriage is holier and stronger than the two people inside it ever feel it to be on an ordinary Tuesday, and that its permanence rests finally on the God who made it and not on the strength of anyone’s affection. to his wife, which is a binding, not a mood; and the two become one flesh, which is a new reality God Himself creates out of two lives. See also what Jesus is not doing here. He is not scolding. He is not handing down a rule. He is lifting the whole subject up out of the mud of their argument and showing them something good that God made, and telling them that they have been quarreling about how to break it when they have never yet looked at how beautiful it is.

That is why the sentence lands the way it does: “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate (χωρίζω) chōrizō, pronounced kho-RID-zoh. Strong's G5563, to separate, put asunder, divide. Chōrizō means to put space between, to divide, to set apart at a distance, and it was an ordinary word for departing from a place or a person. Paul uses it in Corinth for the marriage situation exactly, telling a wife not to separate from her husband. But the place where the word will do your soul the most good is the end of Romans 8, where Paul asks who shall separate us from the love of Christ, and then piles up trouble and hardship and persecution and famine and danger and sword, and then height and depth and every created thing, and answers that not one of them can put any distance at all between us and the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Set the two uses side by side and you can see what marriage was made to picture. God joins, and God does not separate. He is a covenant keeper by nature, and the union He made in Eden was always meant to show the world something true about the way He holds on to His people. Every faithful marriage that quietly endures a hard decade is preaching that, whether the couple knows it or not. And every reader whose own experience of covenant has been broken can still put full weight on the one covenant that never will be. .” The logic is airtight and it is not a piece of legislation. It is a conclusion drawn from what a thing is. If God made the two one flesh, then a man tearing a marriage apart is not simply breaking a contract he entered. He is taking apart something God assembled, and he has no authority to do it. Hear the tenderness in it as well as the weight. Jesus is standing up here for the woman in that culture who could be handed a certificate over a burnt meal and put out the door with nothing. He is telling a roomful of men who held all the power in the matter that they do not, in fact, hold it at all. God does. And every married reader who has ever wondered whether the covenant they made is really as solid as it sounded on the day should hear the Lord Himself say that the joining was God’s own work.

Matthew 19:7–12 (BSB)

⁷ “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses order a man to give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” ⁸ Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of your hardness of heart. But it was not this way from the beginning. ⁹ Now I tell you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” ¹⁰ His disciples said to Him, “If this is the case between a man and his wife, it is better not to marry.” ¹¹ “Not everyone can accept this word,” He replied, “but only those to whom it has been given. ¹² For there are eunuchs who were born that way; others were made that way by men; and still others live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

They think they have Him now. If marriage is that permanent, then what about Moses? And listen to how they put it: they say Moses ordered it. Jesus corrects the verb, and the correction is the whole answer. “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of your hardness of heart.” The law in question reads like this:

"If a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds some indecency in her, he may write her a certificate of divorce, hand it to her, and send her away from his house." Deuteronomy 24:1 (BSB)

That is a regulation of something already happening, and its actual purpose in Deuteronomy is to protect the woman by making the man put it in writing rather than simply throwing her out. It was never a command to divorce and never a blessing on it. It was God fencing in the damage that hard hearts were already doing. And then Jesus says the sentence they never expected: “But it was not this way from the beginning.” Moses is not the standard. Eden is. The concession tells you what people are; the creation tells you what God made. That distinction is worth carrying into a hundred other questions. There are things Scripture regulates because we are sinners which it never once approves, and it is a poor reader who mistakes God’s patience with our hardness for God’s approval of it.

Then verse nine, and here we must speak plainly and also carefully. Jesus says that a man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and He adds the words “except for sexual immorality.” The Greek behind that phrase is porneia, a broad term for sexual unfaithfulness. Faithful Christians who love this text and submit to it have not agreed on the precise scope of that exception, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Some understand porneia as adultery in an existing marriage, so that persistent unfaithfulness may dissolve what God joined, and the innocent party is free. Some read it against the Jewish betrothal custom Matthew has already shown us in chapter one, where Joseph planned to divorce Mary quietly before they came together, and take it as unfaithfulness discovered during betrothal. Some read it of unions that were never lawful marriages at all. Christians also differ on whether remarriage is permitted after a divorce, and on how Paul’s word about an unbelieving spouse who leaves relates to what Jesus says here. Manna Praxis will not settle for you what the church has weighed for two thousand years, and no one should be made a stranger over it. But do not let the honest disagreement at the edges blur the thing Jesus says at the center, because He could not have said it more clearly: God joins, God intends permanence, and the hardness of the human heart is the reason there was ever a certificate at all. If you are reading this with a broken history behind you, hear that Christ is not standing over you with that paper in His hand. He is the One who welcomes the children and calls the weary to come. Take the high view of marriage from Him, and take His mercy from Him too, because they come from the same mouth.

The disciples’ reaction is almost comic, and it is very human: “If this is the case between a man and his wife, it is better not to marry.” They had grown up inside a system where a man always had an exit, and the moment the exit closes, marriage looks to them like a trap. Jesus does not argue with them. He does something better. He takes up their own throwaway line and turns it into a real vocation. “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given.” Then He names three kinds of people who do not marry: those born that way, those made that way by other men, which in that world meant the brutal practice of making court servants of captives, and “still others live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” That third group is the surprise. There are people who forgo marriage, not because they failed to find anyone, and not because marriage is second-rate, but freely, for the sake of the kingdom, and Jesus dignifies them by putting them in the sentence at all. He Himself never married. Paul never married. In a culture that treated singleness as a misfortune to be pitied or fixed, the Lord calls it a gift given to some. “The one who can accept this should accept it” is not a command laid on everybody. It is an open door for those to whom it is given. Praise God for a kingdom with room in it both for the covenant of marriage and for the ones who lay it down freely to serve Him.

Matthew 19:13–17 (BSB)

¹³ Then little children were brought to Jesus for Him to place His hands on them and pray for them. And the disciples rebuked those who brought them. ¹⁴ But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them! For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” ¹⁵ And after He had placed His hands on them, He went on from there. ¹⁶ Just then a man came up to Jesus and inquired, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to obtain eternal life?” ¹⁷ “Why do you ask Me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

Picture it. Parents pressing forward with toddlers on their hips, wanting nothing more than for this Teacher to lay His hands on their children and pray. And the Twelve, who by now have some sense of their own importance, push them back. They are not villains here. They are simply managing a schedule and protecting a great man from a small errand. It is one of the sharpest rebukes in the Gospel: “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them!” Mark tells us He was indignant, and He had reason. What does a small child bring to Jesus? No achievement, no learning, no money, no reputation, nothing whatever to put on the table. And that, says the Lord, is precisely the point: “the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Not because children are innocent, for anyone who has raised one knows better, but because they receive. They are carried in. They are given to. And He did not merely speak about them, He touched them, laying His hands on each one before He went on His way.

Now watch Matthew’s hand, because he has put these two paragraphs together on purpose. The children go out blessed, and “just then” a man comes up who is everything they are not: grown, capable, respectable, and, we will learn, rich. And he asks a question with a fatal little word buried in it. “Teacher, what good thing must I do to obtain eternal life?” What must I do. He is not asking to be carried; he is asking for the price so he can pay it. Jesus answers first with a question of His own, “Why do you ask Me about what is good? There is only One who is good.” That is not the Lord distancing Himself from goodness. It is Him gently lifting the man’s eyes from a list of good deeds to the God who alone is good, and, if he has ears, inviting him to think hard about what he just called the One standing in front of him. Then Jesus meets him exactly where he stands: “If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.” That is not a new way of salvation. It is a mirror, held steadily in front of a man who believes he can manage.

Matthew 19:18–22 (BSB)

¹⁸ “Which ones?” the man asked. Jesus answered, “‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, ¹⁹ honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.’” ²⁰ “All these I have kept,” said the young man. “What do I still lack?” ²¹ Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” ²² When the young man heard this, he went away in sorrow, because he had great wealth.

“Which ones?” is already an answer, of a sort. A man who thinks the law is a checklist wants to know which boxes are on it. Jesus gives him the second table of the Ten Commandments, the ones about how we treat other people, and rounds it off with the great summary, love your neighbor as yourself. And the young man says it without a blush: “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” He is not lying, as far as he can see. He has never killed anyone, never stolen, never perjured himself, and he has honored his parents. But notice which commandments Jesus did not list, and notice too that the young man never notices. There is nothing here from the first table, nothing about having no other gods, and nothing about coveting. And notice the ache in his own question. If he has kept everything, why is he still standing here asking? Something in him knows the ledger does not balance. That “what do I still lack” is the most honest thing he says.

So Jesus names it, and He names it in one sentence with surgical accuracy. “If you want to be perfect (τέλειος) teleios, pronounced TEL-ay-oss. Strong's G5046, complete, mature, fully grown. Teleios does not mean flawless in the modern sense of a life without a single blemish. It comes from telos, an end or goal, and it means brought to completion, having reached what a thing was made for, whole and undivided. It is what Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount when He said to be teleios as your heavenly Father is teleios, in a passage about loving your enemies rather than only your friends: love that stops at the boundary is love that has not gone all the way. James uses it of a believer who lacks nothing, and Paul of the mature in Christ. So when Jesus says “if you want to be teleios,” He is not raising the standard from good to impossible in order to crush the man. He is telling him that his religion is unfinished, and putting His hand on the exact place where it stops. The young man had a life that looked complete from every angle but one, and one reserved corner is enough to leave a soul divided forever. The word invites a searching and hopeful question rather than a fearful one: not “am I flawless,” which none of us is, but “is there a room in this house that I have kept locked against Him?” Christ still asks that in love, and He asks it in order to give Himself. , go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” Understand what is happening. This is not a general command for everyone who reads it to liquidate their belongings. Jesus never said this to Peter, or to Zacchaeus, or to Martha and Mary, or to Joseph of Arimathea, all of whom had houses and means. He said it to this man, because He knew this man, and because money was the god the young man did not know he had. He had just claimed to keep the whole second table. Very well: sell what you have and give it to your neighbors, and let us see whether you love them as yourself. And He said it in love. Mark, who tells the same scene, records something Matthew leaves out, and it is worth reading slowly:

"Jesus looked at him, loved him, and said to him, “There is one thing you lack: Go, sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”" Mark 10:21 (BSB)

That was not a trap and not a rebuke. It was love, putting a finger on the one chain and offering to break it. And the last four words are the true offer: “Then come, follow Me.” Everything else was clearing the way.

And then the saddest sentence in the chapter: “he went away in sorrow, because he had great wealth.” He does not argue. He does not sneer. He is genuinely grieved, and he goes anyway. There is a kind of sorrow that drives a person toward Christ and a kind that walks off with the sorrow in its pocket, and this was the second. He came running with a question and left owning the answer he did not want. Do not read past it too quickly, and do not read it with any satisfaction either. He is a warning, not a villain.

Matthew 19:23–26 (BSB)

²³ Then Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴ Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” ²⁵ When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” ²⁶ Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

You may have heard that there was a low gate in Jerusalem called the Needle’s Eye, through which a camel could squeeze if it knelt and was unloaded. It is a charming story and there is no ancient evidence for it whatsoever; it appears only many centuries later. Jesus is doing what rabbis did, taking the largest animal anyone in Palestine had ever seen and the smallest hole anyone could picture and setting them against each other, and He means exactly what it sounds like. It cannot be done. That is why the disciples are not thoughtful but “greatly astonished,” and why their question comes out the way it does: “Who then can be saved?” Remember what they believed. Wealth was the visible mark of God’s favor, and the rich man could afford the sacrifices and the alms that the poor could only wish they could give. If the ones God has plainly blessed cannot get in, then nobody can. And here is the wonder of it: their panicked question is right, and Jesus does not correct it. He confirms it, and then He turns it into the best news in the chapter. “Jesus looked at them” first, which is a small detail worth keeping, and then said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” There is the answer to the whole scene, and it is the hope of it. No one enters the kingdom of heaven by managing it, whether by wealth or by a clean record or by keeping the commandments since childhood. The camel does not get through by dieting. Salvation is not difficult for us and possible with effort; it is impossible for us and possible only with God. Which is precisely what the little children had been showing them ten verses earlier while the disciples were busy pushing them away. Blessed be the God who does the impossible thing, because if He did not, the door would be shut to every one of us.

Matthew 19:27–30 (BSB)

²⁷ “Look,” Peter replied, “we have left everything to follow You. What then will there be for us?” ²⁸ Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, in the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on His glorious throne, you who have followed Me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. ²⁹ And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for the sake of My name will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. ³⁰ But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

Peter says the thing everyone was thinking, as he generally does. A rich man has just refused to leave his possessions, and Peter looks around at the fishing boats and the tax booth they walked away from and asks, “What then will there be for us?” It is not a beautiful question. There is bookkeeping in it. And the astonishing thing is that the Lord does not slap it down. He answers it, and He answers it with a generosity that dwarfs the question. He speaks of the renewal of all things (παλιγγενεσία) palingenesia, pronounced pal-ing-ghen-es-EE-ah. Strong's G3824, regeneration, the renewal of all things. Palingenesia is a compound of palin, again, and genesis, beginning or birth. It appears only twice in the New Testament: here, and in Titus, where Paul calls salvation the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Put the two together and you have the whole scope of God’s saving work. What He does inside a person when He makes them new, He will one day do to the entire creation. This is not the world being scrapped and replaced with something unrelated. It is the world being born again. Paul says the creation itself groans, waiting to be set free from its bondage to decay, and Peter preached that heaven must receive Christ until the time comes for God to restore everything. Every good thing you have ever loved in this world and watched decay is included in that word. Every grave is provisional. And notice that Jesus sets the twelve thrones inside the palingenesia, not before it. The reward He promises is not a better arrangement within the old order but a share in the new world under His glorious throne. Lift your eyes. The Christian hope is not merely that we go somewhere else when we die. It is that the King is coming to make all things new, and that He has said so with His own mouth. , when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne, and He promises these very ordinary men that they will sit on twelve thrones. Think of who is hearing that. Men who will shortly argue about who is greatest, fall asleep in the garden, run away, and in Peter’s own case deny that he ever knew Him. He knows all of that, and He makes the promise anyway, because the promise rests on His faithfulness and not on their performance.

Then He widens it past the Twelve to take in everyone. “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for the sake of My name will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.” Nothing given up for Christ is ever lost, and the return is not modest. A hundredfold. Ask any believer who has been cut off by their family for the name of Jesus and then found themselves surrounded by brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers in the household of God whether that arithmetic is real. And then the last line, which is the Lord’s gentle hand laid on Peter’s bookkeeping: “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” The kingdom will not be arranged by our rankings. The apostle who counted up what he had left will find the accounting turned over, and the men who were sure they were near the front may look around on that day and find children and beggars and thieves saved at the eleventh hour standing ahead of them, all of them there by the same impossible mercy. It is a warning against pride and it is a comfort to everyone the world has put at the back, and Jesus will spend the whole next parable unfolding it.