Hardness of Heart
What’s behind the Old Testament’s allowance of divorce? And what does it mean?
Jesus has been asked a question by some Pharisees and he has responded to it with a question of his own. Their question: “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” Jesus’s response was: “What did Moses command you?” In verse 4 we get the answer of the Pharisees.
Mark 10:4 ESV - They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.”
This is a bit of a concession on their part and shows they missed the point. Did you catch it? Jesus asked, “what did Moses command?” They answered, “Moses allowed . . .” and then they quote from Deuteronomy 24. Let’s look at the entirety of the passage in question.
Deuteronomy 24:1-4 ESV - When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man's wife, and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.
The words “sent away” or “put away” are a euphemism for divorce. Now notice what Moses said. He said, “if a man sends away his wife then he must write her a bill of divorcement.”
What is new in Mosaic Law, what this passage in Deuteronomy 24 adds, is the command to write out a bill of divorcement. Prior to this, in ancient near eastern culture, one only need send her away, and a woman once “put away” had no recourse for remarriage. She was no longer supported or cared for by her (now ex-) husband, and neither could she remarry. What the provision in Deuteronomy 24 did was ensure that she would be allowed to remarry. It was a mercy offered to people who were victims of spouses who broke their marriage vows. And that's important to understand.
Notice that Moses did not command divorce, nor did he explicitly condone divorce, he simply added regulations to it if and when it happened. Jesus explains this in verse 5.
Mark 10:5 ESV - And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.
What does Jesus mean by this phrase “hardness of heart”? We find a clue in Jeremiah 3 where the prophet describes the sins of Israel and of Judah in terms of spiritual adultery. He espoused them as chaste brides yet they have been unfaithful to him by worshiping the gods of all the nations around them. They have committed spiritual adultery. The beginning of Jeremiah 3 even quotes our passage from Deuteronomy 24 and says that because they have broken their vows, because they have been unfaithful, that God has written them a bill of divorcement. Take the time to read it if you’d like. Jeremiah 3:1-5
Then in Jeremiah 4:4 God says they must circumcise the hardness of their heart. In the Septuagint translation, which was the Greek Old Testament that Jesus and the disciples used and quoted from, it uses the same phrase “hardness of heart” that Jesus uses here. So Jesus is making an obvious allusion.
It gives the sense that because some people will break the marriage vows and stubbornly refuse to repent, then the certificate of divorce was offered as a mercy for the wronged party. It is the breaking of the vows and the refusal to repent that ends the marriage. The certificate simply frees the victim of the crime.
We live in an imperfect world full of sinful, fallen people. As Jesus is going to explain, God instituted marriage. Human beings instituted divorce. Because we live in this fallen world, and because men and women are both sinners by nature and by choice, marriage vows are often broken, and hardened hearts refuse to repent. Divorce is the inevitable result of that. The certificate of divorce frees the victims of the vow breakers to remarry.
If we had time this morning we could go to 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul states, unequivocally, that those who have been divorced are free to remarry. They don't have to, but they are free to do so if they wish.
Divorce ends a marriage and frees a person to remarry if they wish. When people say there is no such thing as divorce in the eyes of God they don't know what they're talking about. We know that this must be so, or it would never have been allowed in the Old Testament. The fact that divorce was both allowed by Moses and regulated (remember, God could have forbidden it, but did not) means that divorce does legitimately end a marriage in the eyes of God. And God himself states in Jeremiah that he must put away Israel and Judah for their continued and stubborn refusal to be faithful, though he has faithfully kept his vows to them.
That’s a lot to think about for today. There’s more, because Jesus has not yet finished answering the question. But we’ll leave that for tomorrow.