Matthew 19:3-8 “The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?" (4) And He answered and said to them, "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' (5) and said, 'for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh' ? (6) So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate." (7) They said to Him, "Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?" (8) He said to them, "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”
We have already established that God desires that the nations that He places into the earth should be just societies that enable their citizens to live peaceably. God knows the hearts of men however, and that those who are unregenerate are unable to live according the godly norms that govern His kingdom. Nevertheless He does know what they are able to live by, which is a substantially “watered down” version of His norms. Our Lord Jesus revealed that truth to us in the above passage of scripture, when He explained to the Jews why their laws were different to the laws of God. Our Lord told them that the reason was because of the hardness of their hearts. And so in this example we see that because of the hardness of their hearts, God allowed them to observe laws that didn’t meet heaven’s standards, for God allowed them to divorce their wives even though that was contrary to His standard of spouses not separating from each other. The hearts of the Jews under the Old Covenant are no different to the hearts of men in all the nations of the earth, and so God applies that same principle to all the nations of the earth today.
Michael E.B. Maher
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