In The Hardness of the Heart, I present Jesus in Matthew 19 not as overturning Moses, but as restoring the original clarity and power of a single, continuous divine message. Article 2 deepens this: “one flesh” as God’s unchanging intention in a world that has learned to live with fracture.
The Pharisees come “tempting” Him:
“Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” (Matthew 19:3)
They stand in an established religious system that has normalized broken covenant. Moses’ reluctant concession to divorce has become a technical domain where experts control the terms of failure. Jesus refuses to start there. He does not attack Moses; He exposes the disease:
“Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19:8)
This is not throwing Moses under the bus. It is honoring him as a true Messenger who, like all divine Educators, applied the same spiritual truth to a hard‑hearted people. The standard—oneness, faithfulness, covenant—never changed. The application met humanity where it was.
So Jesus goes behind the concession to the beginning:
“He which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife:
and they twain shall be one flesh.
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Matthew 19:4–6)
Here we see three fixed points of God’s intent:
- Created givens – “Male and female” are not accidents of biology or malleable symbols. They are part of the architecture of oneness.
- Costly covenant – Leaving and cleaving reorders life. Marriage is not an add‑on; it is a God‑joined bond at the center of identity and loyalty.
- Divine joining – It is God who joins; human beings are stewards, not owners, of this union.
In earlier eras, the dominant distortion was harsh legalism: men disposing of wives under religious cover, authorities managing divorce as a male prerogative. Today, an opposite but equally deadly distortion has surged: we are not merely loosening covenant; we are rejecting the very givens Jesus affirms. “Male and female” is treated as a fluid option; “one flesh” is reduced to temporary arrangement. This is more than moral drift; it is a new golden calf—human desire enthroned where only God’s design belongs.
Into both errors, the same divine medicine speaks. Jesus stands in a line, not on an island. From Buddha’s call to conquer selfish attachment, to Moses’ call to covenant obedience, to Christ’s call back to “the beginning,” and onward to Bahá’u’lláh’s call to the oneness of humankind, the spiritual prescription is unchanged: turn from the idols of self and society; return to unity with God and one another.
ʻAbdu’l‑Bahá captures this healing function of revelation:
“O ye friends of God! True friends are even as skilled physicians, and the Teachings of God are as healing balm, a medicine for the conscience of man. They clear the head, so that a man can breathe them in and delight in their sweet fragrance. They waken those who sleep. They bring awareness to the unheeding, and a portion to the outcast, and to the hopeless.”¹
This is the tone we must recover. The Teachings of God—whether in Genesis, in the words of Jesus, or in later revelation—are not spiritual opioids meant to dull our pain while the disease of hardness worsens. They are a “healing balm” applied by “skilled physicians” who will not pretend that sickness is health.
So in this article, the question is not merely, “What are the rules about divorce?” It is: will we let the divine Physician tell us the truth about our condition? Will we allow Him to say, with love but without compromise, “From the beginning it was not so,” and then submit to the surgery required to move from concession back toward intent?
The rest of this series will press that same medicine into other fractures: between body and soul, creation and Creator, religion and reason. For now, I’d invite you to consider personally: in what area of your life do you most sense God inviting you beyond what He has “suffered” in your weakness, back toward what He intended “from the beginning”?
