Matthew 5:31 Commentary and Bible Study

(Synoptics: Matthew 5:31-32) In connection with marriage, Christ exposes a further error in the teaching of the Pharisees. He refers to the procedure introduced by Moses in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 in the case of those who wanted to divorce their wives. As he says, in refuting the Pharisees in Matthew 19:3-9, Moses suffered them to put away their wives because of the hardness of their hearts, but when God originally ordained marriage there was no such provision. In choosing to make Israel his people, even though the majority were not converted, God became the God of a people who mostly did not have his law within them and whose hearts were hard. They obeyed him reluctantly or not at all. In his wisdom he gave them laws that were sufficient to hold together the nation and to impose some order on it, but which were not truly in accordance with his will. His will had been expressed in the original commandment, but God knew that in their sin, many of them would not obey the law of marriage and would want to divorce their wives in spite of what he had said. It was important that the people respect the law, and no law which has any prospect of being respected can impose standards that the people have no intention of keeping. God therefore took into account the hardness of the hearts of the people when he gave this provision for divorce. It was better that there should be some regulation and limitation of this evil practice, than that the people should simply do whatever came into their heads. The certificate of divorce prevented a worse situation in which a wife moved from one man to another, and in which a man might put away his wife so that she became another man’s wife, and then, when the second husband died, take her back again. That was forbidden, even though the death of a husband normally left the widow free to marry again. She must not go back to her first husband.However, this was a regulation for the sake of hard-hearted Israelites. Christ had come into the world to preach the kingdom of heaven, and within that kingdom there was to be a restoration of the original standard, for all who belong to the kingdom have been born again and have had the hard heart of stone removed and replaced with a heat of flesh (2 Corinthians 3:3). They no longer need a statute which is accommodated to fallen human nature. They can be expected to obey God from the heart and love his laws.