A hard saying

There are some hard sayings in the Bible, some from Jesus’ own mouth. It was a hard saying when He said we have to eat His body and drink His blood. In fact, just before abandoning Jesus in droves, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard saying.” Aware of their intellectual resistance, Jesus said, “Do you take offense at this?” Then he turned and asked his 12 apostles if they were planning to leave him too, prompting Peter’s famous confession of faith: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:51-68).

One of Jesus’ words that one might “take offense” at is the following, with particular attention to the phrase “or wife”:

“And he said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life’” (Luke 18:29-30).

For the sake of the kingdom of God, we can more easily see leaving houses, or brothers, or parents, or even children (grown ones especially)—but wife? This is “a hard saying.”

It is important to note, as I confirmed by a quick Bible concordance check, that in every other discussion of wives in the New Testament, God is bullish and positive and emphasizes its solemnity and indissolubility. One understandable exception is John the Baptist’s rebuke of Herod for having a wife that is not lawfully his but rather his brother’s—which only underscores the point of marriage’s importance. The other somewhat negative context regarding marriage is where a man uses it as an excuse for not coming to the banquet of God:

“But they all alike began to make excuses. … ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come’” (Luke 14:18-20).

Interestingly, it is farther down in this same passage where Jesus warns:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

But under what possible scenario, pray tell, would it ever be right to leave one’s wife, as Luke 18:29-30 suggests? None ever seemed imaginable to me until I heard a man’s life story, which he recently shared with me.

The Lord had called him to be pastor of a church in the Midwest, and the calling was clear. But the man’s wife was tired of being a pastor’s wife and desired to relocate to Florida. Because the man loved his wife and feared losing her, and because she had made it plain that she was going to Florida one way or another, the man acquiesced and they together moved to Florida. Five years later, his wife had an affair and left him anyway and remarried.

As I pondered this, I wondered: If the pastor had stuck to his guns and kept his calling, would this have been a case of rightfully “leaving” one’s wife for the kingdom of God—“leaving” in the sense of obeying the Lord, whatever the cost or fallout? I think so. It wouldn’t, of course, be him actually doing the leaving, but it would amount to the same thing. It would be, in other words, “leaving” in the same sense that the prophet Ahijah told Jeroboam’s wife that he had been “sent” to her (1 Kings 14:6), though in fact it was the queen who had done the actual traveling.

Professor John Frame once told me, when I expressed difficulty with a hard saying of Christ, that if I can imagine a scenario in which it could be applicable, that is enough. The above, then, is a scenario in which this hard saying of Jesus works for me.

Not that I should shrink the Word of God to the small measure of my finite understanding! The Word of God stands true, though every man a liar. It stands true though it may take me years to imagine the right scenario. And let me never say again that “what my net can’t catch ain’t fish.”