Let No Man Separate

When Jesus was asked about divorce, He answered with what marriage is made of.

The Pharisees came with a legal question, looking for the loopholes, and He took them back past Moses to the design itself, and what He said about the design is the single most important fact about your marriage.

What He said

"So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." (Matthew 19:6)

Two claims, and both are heavier than they sound.

First: you are no longer two. Jesus is not describing how married people should feel about each other. He is describing what they are. The joining happened, God did it, and a new single thing exists now where two things used to be. Your marriage is not a deal between you and her. It is an act of God with your names on it.

Second: let no man separate. Jesus does not forbid what nobody would attempt. Somebody will try to divide what God joined, and the word He uses for that somebody is man. Not circumstances, not chemistry, not a season. A man. Peter says elsewhere that an adversary is prowling and looking for someone to devour, but the hand on the seam in this verse is human, and the man closest to the seam is usually one of the two inside it.

The physics of attacking your own flesh

Paul takes the one-flesh fact and draws the conclusion that should stop every married man mid-argument.

"So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church," (Ephesians 5:28-29)

He who loves his own wife loves himself. Run the same logic the other direction and it still holds: the man who wounds his wife has wounded himself, by definition, because there is no longer a her to wound that is not also him.

This is why winning against your wife is a losing game every single time. I have never met a man who won one of those and kept the winnings. The crushing argument you constructed, the point you drove home until she went quiet, the cold week you made her earn her way out of. Score it however you like. One flesh means you did all of it to your own body, and you will live in the body you have been beating.

Nobody wins a war against his own flesh. There are only casualties with one address.

The separator's applications

Let no man separate. So watch how the applications for separator come in, because almost none of them look like divorce papers.

The separator applies as a schedule, two calendars that stop touching. He applies as a screen, two people eight inches apart in bed, each somewhere else. He applies as a confidant, the coworker or the old friend who slowly becomes the person you talk about your marriage with instead of your wife. He applies as a hobby, a ministry, even a good thing that becomes the place you live while she gets the leftovers.

None of those is an affair. Every one of them is a tearing in progress, a pulling apart of what God fused, done in steps small enough that no single one feels like tearing.

The command is not addressed to the separator. It is addressed to you: let no man do this. You are the guard posted on the seam.

Joined by Somebody who keeps what He joins

Now the part that holds the weight, because a command that size needs ground under it.

What God has joined together. The joining was His work, which means the marriage is not held together by your grip strength, and the enemy has been lying to you if he has convinced you it is. The same God who joined you is invested in the join. Malachi says the LORD was a witness between a man and the wife of his youth, and that she is his wife by covenant. Ephesians says the union preaches Christ and the church. Your marriage has a stakeholder senior to both of you, and He does not walk away from His own workmanship.

And He knows what it is to be joined to a difficult bride. Christ nourishes and cherishes the church, Paul says, a church that gives Him fresh cause weekly. The one-flesh union you are living in is a small copy of one He has kept at infinite cost. When you hold yours together on a hard month, you are not gritting teeth against nature. You are doing the family trade.

Guard the seam

Here is the assignment, and it is fence work.

Walk the seam of your marriage this week the way a man walks a fence line, and look for the pulling. Where have the calendars stopped touching? Who has been getting the talk that belongs to her? What has crept into the eight inches between you in bed?

Pick the one separation furthest along and reverse it one increment. Move the conversation back to her. Close the screen at ten. Put one shared thing back on the calendar and defend it like it matters, because it does.

You are not two people managing a relationship. You are one flesh with a guard assignment, and the seam holds where the man watches it. Let no man separate. Starting with you.