“Jesus; the Messiah of our Sklerokardia”

Matthew 19:8

Pastor Manny Ojeda

Have you ever heard of the saying ‘you can’t fight city hall’? The mere mention of this reality brings hopelessness to anyone who desires to be given a break. Trying to fight city hall is like trying to push a Mack truck with a Yugo, it is impossible to say the least. What is the reason for this impossibility? Well some may say that once laws and statutes have been written, they cannot be broken. I agree with that assumption and actually want to take it further than that. Let’s just say that city hall cannot be changed because its heart is hard. You’re probably wondering that city hall does not have a heart and although the people who are employed there do have hearts, the institution itself cannot be manipulated, cannot be influenced, nor can it be changed. That is what I call having a hard heart. Ok Pastor Manny your probably wondering, what does this have to do with me?

If you have a Bible, turn it to Matthew chapter 19. Here in chapter 19 beginning with verse 1, Jesus entered into a discussing with a group of Pharisees who asked Him ‘if it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason.” Jesus answered them by quoting Genesis 2:5 that “God made man and woman to be one flesh and that no man is to separate them when they are one flesh.”

Then quoting Moses as they usually did, the Pharisees asked Jesus why Moses himself commanded a man to give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away. As usual the Pharisees sought to involve Jesus in their social discussion in order to entrap Him. Jesus looked beyond the exterior molding of their reasoning and dove deep into the root of the problem. Jesus truly is a miner, He is able to enter into the core of our earthly hearts and discover the true situations that overtake our lives.

Let’s remember that Jesus is the true Messiah of our lives, in order for Him to deliver us, He must enter into our innermost being and divide our joint and marrow in such a way as to discover where our hearts truly are. (see Hebrews 5:12,13) That day, 2000 and some years ago, Jesus dove right in to the joint and marrow of the Pharisees, and in doing that he dove in to the joint and marrow of us today. Notice how Jesus responded again to the Pharisees in Matthew 19:8. He told them that “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard…” Let’s remember here my friends that Jesus, the Messiah of the family was again dealing with an issue that destroys families today. The million dollar question is what is a hard heart?

In our text of Matthew 19:8, Jesus dove right into the main problem, and it wasn’t that Moses had given them a way to divorce their spouses. The real problem was not that now divorce was legal. The real problem as Jesus saw it was that the people had sklerokardia. The Greek word for hardness is sklerokardia, now for those of you in the medical field, we know that sklero means hardness and kardia means heart; the hard heart that we are talking about here and that Jesus is finding so important to mention repeatedly is defined as a petrifaction of the heart. As a matter of fact, in Mark 4:47-52 as the disciples were crossing the dead sea, they encountered a storm and were greatly afraid; specially when they saw Jesus walking on the water and thought that he was a ghost. Here in verse 52, Jesus again uses the phrase ‘hardened heart’ this time this word is translated as petrifaction. The disciples’ hearts were petrified, in other words they learned and received nothing from what Jesus had done for them.

Sklerokardia is just as dangerous as the kind of heart disease that kills so many Americans today.  It is dangerous because it destroys our families as well. The condition of sklerokardia is not rare only to the New Testament, in Exodus 10:1, we read that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened and so he kept challenging God.  In the New Testament book of John 12:40, John quoted Isaiah 6:10 after Jesus had done many miracles and the people still did not believe.  Here he said, “he has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn-and I would heal them.”

So the condition of sklerokardia is a hardening of the heart; it is the establishment of a callous around our mind and heart that prevents us from seeing what God wants us to see. The problem with not seeing what God wants us to see is that in turn we lack understanding because we are blind. In Mark chapter 8:17 regarding the yeast of the Pharisees Jesus asked the disciples, “Do you not see or understand?  Are your hearts hardened?” For Jesus a hard heart could not fathom nor take in His truth. My friends when we have a hard heart, we can be given the solution to any problem and it will not soak through our minds because our hearts are hard, in other words we are in a state of spiritual callousness that prevents us from learning and changing.

This is the other problem with sklerokardia; it is a condition of inflexibility. When a tree is alive, it actually rocks back and forth in a wind, if you have ever climbed a tree during a stiff wind that is the first thing that you will notice. But when the tree is cut or dies and falls, after many years and after curtain conditions it becomes petrified, its flexibility is gone and it becomes a rock. That tree is no longer resilient to storms, instead of healing from a cut; it now shatters because it is petrified. Our heart my friend is the same way. When we stop listening to the voice of Jesus in our hearts, our hearts like a tree become petrified. We become inflexible, we stop seeing right, we stop understanding properly, and we stop listening.

This is not just a spiritual problem. For Jesus in Matthew 19:8, the problem was also a social one. Jesus in our text today fought back because he saw that the hardness of the people’s hearts was destroying families. Since Jesus is the Messiah of our families, he saw the danger in the condition of the hearts of the people, because if Moses was forced to allow for divorce because the people were loveless, what we are dealing with here is the disintegration of the family because of a whim. How often today we see that occurring. One term that I often hear is the term of ‘irreconcilable differences’ this is something that we especially hear from celebrities on television when they decide to divorce their spouses. Irreconcilable seems to me to mean that there is no solution found. If we truly love, if we truly have Christ in our hearts and within our marriages, is there such a thing as irreconcilable? When we truly want to keep our families together because it is our God-given responsibly, when we open our hearts to The Lord so that he can mold it, can there truly be an irreconcilable condition? Of course I am speaking of a family unit where both man and woman give their hearts to the Lord, it does take two to tango doesn’t it? Broken families usually occur because one is giving their heats over to an issue that substitutes itself for their families, then that one thing becomes god and the heart cannot be changed because it is petrified.

When we do not listen to God in our lives our heats become hard to the things of God. When we do not maintain our hearts in daily surrender to Jesus Christ, it becomes hard and inflexible.

A Native American and his friend were in downtown New York City, walking near Times Square in Manhattan. It was during the noon lunch hour and the streets were filled with people. Cars were honking their horns, taxicabs were squealing around corners, sirens were wailing, and the sounds of the city were almost deafening.

Suddenly, the Native American said, “I hear a cricket.”

His friend said, “What? You must be crazy. You couldn’t possibly hear a cricket in all of this noise!”

“No, I’m sure of it,” the Native American said. “I heard a cricket.”

“That’s crazy,” said the friend.

The Native American listened carefully for a moment, and then walked across the street to a big cement planter where some shrubs were growing. He looked into the bushes, beneath the branches, and sure enough, he located a small cricket. His friend was utterly amazed. “That’s incredible,” said his friend. “You must have super-human ears!”

“No,” said the Native American. “My ears are no different from yours. It all depends on what you’re listening for.”

“But that can’t be!” said the friend. “I could never hear a cricket in this noise.”

“Yes, it’s true,” came the reply. “It depends on what is really important to you. Here, let me show you.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a few coins, and discreetly dropped them on the sidewalk. And then, with the noise of the crowded street still blaring in their ears, they noticed every head within twenty feet turn and look to see if the money that tinkled on the pavement was theirs. A hard heart ignores all the things that keep our families together.

Jesus knows the tragic effects that a heard heart has on a family. So much so that in Matthew 11:28,29 he invites us to “come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.” My friend a human heart is truly a rock when it is not in Jesus. A human heart is a heart attack waiting to happen; a heart attack that kills all of those around it. Jesus invites us to come to him and take upon us His yoke, why? Because he has a heart that He would like to transplant into us that is humble and gentle. This heart is the opposite of what we have read, it is a heart that unites our families and keeps them together. Would you pray today and ask Jesus to put in you His heart; would you ask Him to transplant in you his own life.