Question: Why is the Law of God so harsh?

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” Matthew 19.8

Divorce is not in the plan of God for His people. Nevertheless, protocols for divorcing one’s wife are included in the Law of God (cf. Deut. 24.1-4). Why is this?

Jesus explains: “Because of your hardness of heart…”

In other words, certain aspects of the Law of God do not fully or completely represent the will of God for His people. This suggests a kind of hierarchy of enforcement within the Law of God which is placed there, for a particular time and cultural context, in order better to serve the cause of justice and love.

God would prefer that His people not divorce; but, hard of hearts as they were, He would rather allow a space within which divorce could be practiced than, say, to sanction adultery or spousal abuse because no separation of disagreeing spouses was permitted by His Law.

This insight from the Lord Jesus suggests that, in certain ways, the harsh measures included in the Law of God, being specific to a particular historical and cultural situation, are rather like martial law today, which is sometimes imposed for the sake of maintaining justice in extraordinary social circumstances.

The harsh provisions commanded in certain of the statutes of the Law can be difficult to explain or justify, at least to the modern mind. But the modern mind is the beneficiary of two millennia of social stability and human flourishing, much of which is the result of principles based on God’s Law which have become embedded in the social order, and the workings of grace and the Spirit of God through His ever-advancing Kingdom.

The Law of God, in its original form, was given into a time when no such accumulation of legal precedent and no such spiritual power were present. The pagan peoples of Canaan were passionate and violent, with no or few written laws and a social order that was maintained by, among other things, continuous war and pillage and human sacrifice. The people of Israel had no experience with freedom and, lacking the inward restraints of the Spirit of God, were prone to self-seeking of the vilest sort. The Law served the people of Israel in a way similar to how martial law preserves social order during times when that order has been broken or is violated. Its harshness was only temporary until the time when a greater order could be attained.

T. M. Moore

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