Medical misdiagnosis is a serious problem.  Recent studies have estimated that as many as 12 million adults a year seeking outpatient care are misdiagnosed.  Worse yet, diagnostic errors may result in as many as 10% of patient deaths — more deaths annually than breast cancer.  To be fair, diagnosis is incredibly complex.  And patients place extraordinarily high expectations for accuracy on their doctors. 

Add to that the perennial philosophical debate regarding whether diagnostic focus should be on “root cause” or “symptom management.”   Patients often bet their lives on the opinions of their doctor.  When those opinions are inaccurate the prescribed treatment will fail to address the real condition and may even make the condition more acute.  

Misdiagnosis is a serious problem. But it is nothing compared to the misdiagnosis of a deeper sickness that affects us all – a spiritually terminal condition the Bible calls sin.  This condition is congenital and inherited.  It is always fatal.  Every one of us has it.  Yet it is often misdiagnosed.  Or its symptoms merely palliated with legalistic or hedonistic opiates. 

Doctors of skepticism dismiss that any sickness exists. While doctors of philosophy are more concerned with classification than cure.   Doctors of psychology declare this sickness to be a non-fatal dysfunction, easily resolved with the right therapeutic tweak.   Doctors of religion prescribe a course of works, coupled with a regimen of rituals and outward piety.  But with all these prescriptions, the cirrhosis of the heart and soul continues unabated.

The prophet Jeremiah expressed this most poignantly.  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) The ancient word heart used in this verse is an inclusive idea, encompassing the heart, soul, mind, knowledge, thinking, reflection, memory, inclination, resolution, will, conscience, the seat of appetites, emotions and passions and convictions and courage.   All these, Jeremiah says, are treacherous, rebellious and incurably sick.  Yet, we cannot see it. 

 And one pundit acknowledged.

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.” ― Malcolm Muggeridge

The prophet Ezekiel rightly noted that a transplant was the only remedy.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. – Ezekiel 36:26-27

A rock-hardened heart is always fatal.  Only a transplant will help.  But the religious leaders of Jesus day tried to manage their sin by building a containment fence around it based on expansive, ‘keepable,’ interpretations of God’s law.  A strategy of symptom management that Paul, the “Pharisee of the Pharisees,” sharply condemned.

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” – Galatians 3:10-11

The Pharisees cherished both their sin and the good opinions of men.  They were concerned only with superficial conformity to a version of God’s law eisegeted by their self-serving desires.  They sought eternal life in legalism and misdiagnosed their condition thus misjudged the remedy.   In Mark 10 they came to Jesus and with a difficult legal question about divorce and remarriage.  Not because they wanted his answer, but because they wanted him speechless. 

As is often the case, they sought to lay a trap.  But as always, he easily slipped their Gordian knot and revealed the real issue at stake.  Bringing out God’s plan for marriage, he noted that divorce is always a result of the “hard-heartedness” of a husband or a wife or both.   And here Jesus used a word found only once in Mark’s Gospel, “sclerocardia,” hard-heartedness.  God’s laws regarding divorce and remarriage were only gracious concessions to the fatal diagnosis of sclerocardia.  

And in a passage that is still much debated among Christians, we are warned to ask the right question about marriage and divorce, assess the right problem in our relationships, and see the gracious remedy for marital brokenness.

Join us as we examine Mark 10:1-12 and consider what is really at issue when our deepest, most intimate relationships seem broken beyond repair.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube.