Mark 10:5

But Jesus said unto them, For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.

In this, Jesus took account of the principle that earthly laws must sometimes take account of situations arising out of human perfidy and depravity. There seems to be here a differentiation on Jesus' part between the true law of God and the legal regulations delivered by Moses and made necessary by the problems of governing Israel. As Cranfield noted:

A distinction has to be made between that which sets forth the absolute will of God, and those provisions which take account of men's actual sinfulness and are designed to limit and control its consequences.[7]

Christ here was not critical of Moses, nor was he setting the commandment of God over against Moses. Furthermore, he was not brushing aside the Scriptures. Moses' permission, under certain circumstances of divorce could not mean, nor did it ever mean, that God approved of divorce, except in the very limited context of its being, under some conditions, the lesser of two evils. The same is true of divorce in all generations. It must never be viewed as something God approved; because from the beginning it was not so.

When our sinfulness traps us in a position in which all the choices still open to us are sinful, we are to choose that which is least evil, asking for God's forgiveness and comforted by it, but not pretending that the evil is good.[8]

Marriages indeed may fail for reasons of human sin; but there can never be any way to make the failures a good thing, nor change the ideal of marriage as God intended and purposed from the beginning of creation. Jesus stated at once the sacred ideal.

[7] C. E. B. Cranfield, op. cit., p. 319.

[8] Ibid., p. 320.