If that’s true, then why did He make provision for divorce in the Old Testament? Jesus answered that in Matthew 19:8. He said, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard.”
Now I can think of a lot of reasons for permitting divorce, but I would not have come up with that one. “Because your hearts were hard.” What does that mean?
I scoured the Scriptures, looking for people whose hearts were hard. What did they have in common?
First of all, when your heart is hard, it is not open to God. You do not want to listen to God. You don’t want to hear His word. You don’t want to know about His plan or His design. And you certainly don’t want to listen to any correction.
A hard heart towards God separates us from God. It separates us from His wisdom, which allows us to become ignorant. It separates us from His light, which puts us in darkness. A hard heart loses its sensitivity. It becomes insensitive to sin. It starts to fill with pride and arrogance.
When you have a hard heart, life is all about you, baby. It’s about what makes you feel good. You don’t revere God or His word or His people. You don’t care too much about anyone except yourself.
Now let’s go back to that divorce provision in the Old Testament. Remember what Jesus said, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard.”
To me, Jesus is saying, “You want to know why that divorce provision is there? It’s because you won’t listen to God. You don’t care about His plan or His design. You turn your back on His word, and you put yourself first instead. You put your own plan ahead of God’s plan.”
And what is God’s plan? Well, it’s not even really a plan. It’s a fact. When a man and woman are married, Jesus said, “…the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one.”
Then Jesus makes an awesome statement. He says that when people get married, God joins them together. God is the one who takes the two and makes them one. And He concludes with this statement, “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
Now I know that there a host of things than can happen in a marriage. The list of problems is endless. It ranges from capital crimes to bad breath.
So no matter what your issues are today, let the words of Jesus echo in your soul. What I hear Him saying is, “Don’t become hardhearted.”
And listen, it doesn’t start with your spouse. It starts with God. Don’t let yourself become hardhearted toward God. How can we do that?
We must stay open to Him and His word. We must listen and heed what He says. We must take our eyes off of ourselves and fix our eyes on Him. We must humble ourselves before Him, and say, “Lord, not my will, but Your will be done.”
Go ahead and pray this simple prayer, “Lord, let my heart be soft towards You.”
Then God will soften our hearts, and along with that He will give us greater wisdom and understanding. We will see things in a new light. When we are hardhearted we become selfish, and minor things about our spouse irritate us. But when we are softhearted, God gives us new vision, and we can easily separate what’s important from what isn’t.
When we are softhearted, God can easily show us our own sin. Then we can repent and turn from our sin instead of allowing it to harden our hearts even further. Any sin that we hold onto, that we don’t repent of, that sin will harden our hearts.
Now let me skip back to this idea of God making the two one. Why did He set it up that way in the first place? Malachi 2:15 gives the answer: “Because He was seeking godly offspring.”
God put the husband and wife together and made them one so that they would raise godly offspring. That was His plan. The ideal is parents whose hearts are soft before the Lord, staying together and raising godly children.
Now I know you can’t control your spouse. But you can control yourself, and for your own good, and the good of your children, you must have a soft heart towards God.
So I don’t know what your marriage problems are today. Everybody’s got them, so what are we going to do about them? Here is one thing we must do, a key to a good marriage. We must soften our hearts before the Lord.
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May God bless you today! With Apples of Gold…I’m Doug Apple.
This article originally published on May 13, 2008.
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