God's Original Plan for Humanity | Dr. Hahn and Dr. Bergsma

So, the only place in the five books of Moses where divorce and remarriage is permitted is in Deuteronomy 24, 1-4. And without going into a lengthy exposition, when Jesus says Moses permitted that because of the hardness of your heart, he is basically summarizing an accurate way of describing Deuteronomy. Because Deuteronomy is itself the book of the law of Moses, 40 years after Sinai. When you go back 40 years to Mount Sinai, thou shalt not commit adultery, period. And so, there's no divorce after remarriage permitted by the Lord God speaking from the fire atop Mount Sinai. Only 40 years later, in Deuteronomy, is the source of law. It's inspired scripture, but there's no theophany, no divine voice. It's Moses at the age of 120 going on with certain concessions for the hardness of the hearts of the Israelites. Forty years earlier, Pharaoh and the Egyptians had hard hearts. Forty years later, Israel has been basically exposed for having the same thing. And so, that's so important to recognize that the law itself is self-correcting. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for making that clarification, Scott. And it gets back to Matthew 5-17. I've not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill. I have all my New Testament students memorize that verse. It's their first memory verse of the semester. In fact, in a couple of days, they'll be tested on it in my class. But what it shows us is that Jesus is not arbitrary in kind of going through it. Ah, well, you don't have to do that anymore. Oh yeah, this other thing, we're going to toss that out. Kind of capriciously overturning or rejecting aspects of the law of Moses is not what's going on. And as you so rightly state, he's using Moses to correct Moses. He is a good rabbi. He is showing that if you read the books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy carefully, you can observe that there's a hierarchy of principles. And those principles of human conduct that are the highest and of greatest and closest to the true and divine intent are revealed to us in the early chapters prior to the fall into sin. So when we read Genesis 1-2 about marriage and a man shall leave his father, mother and cling to his wife, that word davach in Hebrew, you know, has no sense of ever loosening one's grip. By its very nature, it suggests indissolubility. And this reveals what God's intention was for humanity from the beginning before things were marred by human sin. After things are marred by human sin, there are some concessions that are introduced because of the weaknesses of human nature and the disorder that is created by human sin. But again, there's a hierarchy of revelation within the books of Moses where when we read carefully, we can see what the purest and highest intent of God was for humankind. And that was, again, in the case of marriage and indissolubility. And there's other applications that we can draw from that as well. But yeah, so there is a logic to what Jesus is doing. He's observing the different gravity of commandments that are issued over the course of these five books and showing the correct interpretation of Moses rather than, again, just kind of like the analogy used earlier, like a hippie going around saying, yeah, don't trust anybody over 30 and don't trust those authority figures like Moses, etc. No, there's a rationale, there is a method to the message that our Lord has come to bring.