Deuteronomy 24:1-5 -

Permissive legislation.

No treatment of this passage can Be appropriate which does not set it in the light thrown upon it by Matthew 19:1-12 . The heading we have given to this outline indicates a point on which special stress should be laid whenever an expositor has occasion to refer to it. In the course of time, men had come to regard this passage in the light of a command . Hence the wording of the question in Matthew 19:7 . But our Lord informs us that it was simply permissive . Divorce, under the circumstances here named, was tolerated a while by Moses owing to "the hardness of men's hearts," but that the original Divine arrangement contemplated the indissolubility of marriage. The entire principle of the Mosaic Law was that of educating the people out of a semi-degraded state into something higher, Its method of doing this was by giving the people the best legislation they could bear; tolerating some ill for a while rather than forcing on the people revolutionary methods. The more gentle and gracious, though the slower process, was to sow the seed of higher good, and to let it have time to grow. The following Divine teaching on marriage may well be brought forward with this passage as a basis.

I. That the marriage bond is holy in the eye of God, and ought ever to be recognized as very sacred by man.

II. That by God's own declared appointment this most sacred of all nature's ties is indissoluble.

III. That however, owing to the degeneracy of national habit and thought, civil legislation may suffer the legal cessation of the marriage bond, yet it can in no case be severed, save by death, without heinous sin on one side or on both.

IV. That the claims of married life are such that, with them, not even the exigencies of military service are unduly to interfere ( Matthew 19:5 ).

V. That the highest and purest enjoyments of wedded life come to perfection only when it is entered on and spent in the Lord Jesus Christ. The law was but a παιδαγωγός εἰς χριστὸν (see 1 Corinthians 7:39 ).