1. The Law did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Consider that the Old Law did exactly what it was supposed to do. This point is important to stress, because many people have read statements about the Old Law in Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews and, while sincere, have gotten a little carried away with some of the language used to describe the Law. Here is an example:
Hebrews 8:7-8
7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second. 8 Because finding fault with them…
This verse clearly indicates that the Law of Moses attached to the covenant at Sinai was imperfect and had faults. This isolated statement about the Sinai Covenant makes it tempting to then pick up and cast stones at the whole system. But hold your metaphorical horses a hot second. It’s one thing to say that the first covenant was imperfect, it’s another thing to say that it failed. What if God’s very design for the first covenant and the companion Law of Moses was for it to be imperfect? That must have been God’s intention. Why else would God have included the remedial system established on the blood of bulls and goats that cannot take away sin (Heb. 10:4)? God knew from the onset that animal blood was imperfect for accomplishing atonement and redemption. He knew that and He ordained this system anyway. Why? Because He didn’t make the Old Law to be perfect. He made it imperfect so that it would prepare men for the perfect. Is this not what is implied by the Hebrew writer in 9:23-24:
23 Therefore it was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. 24 For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; 25 not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another…
Hebrews 8:7-8 is not teaching that God’s law failed to accomplish what it was made to accomplish. No. The old covenant/law was never intended to redeem sins. Because of this the old covenant/law was imperfect, but it was designed to be this way so as to lead men to Christ and His new, better covenant and law (Heb. 9:15; Gal. 3:21-25). Recall the eyebrow raising example of the preacher.
The takeaway from all this is:
Stop saying the Old Law failed!
Whenever we say the Old Law failed we misrepresent God’s divine law which actually succeeded in bringing us to Christ (Gal. 3:24). There are several consequences to this. People think that because the Old Law failed in their mind, there is little benefit from studying it. People just chalk up any seeming problems with the Old Law to the fact that it failed; “What do you expect?” People have a shortsighted and incomplete understanding of what passages like Galatians 3:24 mean: “Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.” Did the law only bring us to Christ through Messianic prophecies and types and shadows? Or were there other imperfections that paved the way to the throne of Jesus the King? We will come back to this last question under the third point to come: “Less-than-ideal provisions were God’s way of playing hardball.”
2. The Law was good despite being less-than-ideal.
The Old Law was good (Romans 7:12). Paul even says, “If there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law,” (Gal. 3:21). Basically, Paul is saying that, while the Old Law was established to prepare men for Christ by magnifying man’s inescapable position under the curse of sin (Gal 3:10); nonetheless, if there were to be a divine system of law before Christ that man could have kept perfectly and been made truly righteous, the Old Law was that kind of law. This is Paul saying again that the Old Law was good.1 Notice what Paul did not say. He did not say the Old Law was perfect. I am tempted to read that phrase into Galatians 3:21, but that’s not what Paul said. Paul said it was good. It was perfectly imperfect. No, it didn’t provide atonement and redemption; it was never intended to do those things. But what it did do, it did very well. It effectively convicted men of sin, showing him his need for God given salvation through Christ, even if the methods used were not the ones we might have thought up in our self-righteous laboratories.
This is where Matthew 19:8 comes into play. Jesus said, “Because of the hardness of your hearts, [Moses] permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” From the beginning of the marriage relationship as designed in the garden of Eden. If divorce was not figured into God’s original design for marriage, then how could God later make a divorce law and that not somehow make the Law itself unjust, unholy, and evil? Keep reading.
First, if God creates something, then as the Sovereign Creator, He retains the right to revise His creation. God created/ordained the institution of marriage, and thus, God has the right to revise the regulations attached to that institution. God and only God has that right of course. And if His intent in making revisions and provisions was to bring those under the Law to a painful awareness of their need for Christ and His New Law, then who is man to point fingers and accuse God’s Old Law of shortcoming and failure? Consider divorce. God could provide for divorce in the Old Law, and while this would not be ideal, it would not make the law in and of itself unholy. Divorce would never have been provided for had man not sinned against the marriage relationship. Seemingly, by permitting case laws for divorce that would protect the woman and ultimately teach Israel as a society through the painful consequences that are the result of choosing the hard-hearted route, God was not unjust or unholy. Again, it is true that the laws providing for divorce were less-than-ideal, but they were not unjust. Consider the monarchy. The same thing said about divorce laws could be said for the laws regarding the kings of Israel (Deut. 17:14-20). The provision for human kings was intended as a teaching tool to educate Israel on their sinfulness, and it taught them the better option of having God rule as their king through the future Son of David, Son of God. Was the provision made because of the hardened heart of Israel? Yes. Was the human king provision less-than-ideal? Yes. Was it allowed by God to bring men to Christ? Yes. It seems that this is one way in which the law served as a “tutor to bring us to Christ” (Gal. 3:24). It is my belief that lawful provisions such as divorce and the monarchy brought the Israelite to the threshold of Christ, ready to accept His better covenant of ultimate faithfulness, fidelity, atonement, redemption, and kingship.
Second, ask the question, “Have we placed an unfair restriction on God?” Have we unfairly assessed God’s less-than-ideal provisions under the Old Law as unholy simply because we have consistently overlooked valid reasons as to why God made such provisions? I think this is a very viable option. After all, it’s not like men have ever looked in the refrigerator to find the ketchup four or five times, only to later find out it was staring them right in the face the whole time. Men don’t make mistakes ***cough***. If it hasn’t crossed our minds before, then it’s not even a possibility, right? This mindset is somewhat reflected in Naaman’s words “Behold I thought” (2 Kings 5:11 ESV), and in Samuel’s words in 1 Samuel 16:6, “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed!” We typically have things figured out, so we think. What I am proposing is that some underlying false assumptions have had us going the wrong direction from the get-go. We must have a proper understanding of God’s purpose for the Old Law before we can start to appreciate how and why He made less-than-ideal provisions such as divorce, the monarchy, and potentially other controversial provisions like unto polygamy. In the spirit of transparency, I really don’t know what to think about the rightness or wrongness of polygamy under the Old Law. All I do know is that if it was permitted by God, then reconciling its lawfulness would be consistent with the lawfulness for divorce and monarchy laws.
3. Less-than-ideal provisions were God’s way of playing hardball.
When I think of hardball, my mind is taken back to being 17 years old playing wallball in the school courtyard. There was a range of young boys from freshmen to seniors that would play wallball after school, including myself. Without explaining the rules of wallball in great detail, it will suffice to know that if you made a mistake then someone would pick up the ball and throw it at your back while you ran away. That was the rule. And naturally, 15 to 18 year old boys always play nicely and politely with each other, never throwing the ball at full strength to the back of the fleeing person’s head. You can imagine, this would often happen, and if it was one of the seniors who got hit in such roughshod fashion, he would bow up and exclaim: “I see how it is! You wanna play rough?! I’ll play rough! Let’s go! Give me the ball!” And I don’t think you need me to tell you how the game went after that. That was typically the last time anyone threw at the back of Denton Simek’s head the rest of the day. The underclassmen learned their lesson real quick. Hitting Denton in the back of the head and his subsequent reaction is what we call “playing hardball.”
Playing hardball need not be so inhumane as in the example above. There are ethical and unethical ways of playing hardball. You might call the wallball story an unethical example. An ethical example might be when a parent grounds their teenage child for a week because they refused to clean their room after being told multiple times. The parent is saying without saying: “You wanna play that way?! I’ll play that way! You’re grounded!” Hardball.
A biblical example of this is in Isaiah 28:9-10. There Isaiah is teaching Israel’s leaders elementary principles (i.e., precept upon precept), using repetition, repetition, repetition (i.e., line upon line), all the live-long day (i.e., here a little, there a little), (see v. 10). In verse 9, Isaiah asks, speaking mockingly on behalf of the leaders of Israel I believe, “Do you think you’re going to teach us something? Do you think we are babies that can’t handle solid food?” Essentially God is saying: “If you are going to act like children, then I’ll teach you like children.” Isaiah 28:10 is parallel to 6:9-10.
Another biblical example of this is seen very well in the account of Israel asking for a king like the nations around them. They hard headedly ask for a king in 1 Samuel 8:6. God responds by saying, “You want a king?! I’ll give you a king! Let’s go!” (v. 7-9). He then goes on to explain that the king they have asked for is going to be just like the kings of the nations around them, and they are going to wish they had never asked for him before its over (read v. 11-18). But even after this response, the Bible says, “Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, ‘No, but we will have a king over us,’” (v. 19). God played hardball. Sometimes there is no other effective way to play. When someone is hard-headed, you beat them at their own game. God knew this would eventually transpire, and this is why he made provision for a monarchy in Deuteronomy 17:14-20 where Moses said, “When you come to the land which the Lord your God is giving you, and possess it and dwell in it, and say, ‘I will set a king over me…’” God made this provision, not because it was ideal, but because it was the best way to prepare the nation for the perfect king: Jesus the Son of God. This is one way in which the law was a tutor to bring Israel to Christ (Gal. 3:24).
The same thing could be said for the curses listed in Genesis 3 after the fall of man. God levied two curses on the woman and two curses on the man, a total of four curses on all of humanity that would follow (see Gen. 3:16-19). Was it ideal that man should physically die? No. Was it ideal that there would be perpetual struggle and conflict in the marriage relationship? No. But then again, ideally man would never have sinned. Nonetheless, because he did sin, God had to play hardball. There was no other way for mankind to be brought effectively to the feet of the Savior than by hardball.2
In all the examples we have surveyed, God is essentially saying: “You want to divorce? Okay. Divorce! In fact, divorce for just about any reason you want! See what happens!” “You want a king? Okay. Have a king! See what happens!” At the end of the story, any fair-minded evaluator can see that divorce only ends in disaster. Human kings never mete out absolute justice. Having multiple wives always ends in favoritism, envy, hatred and negative outcomes. Anything less than God’s ideal is disaster.
Conclusion
Remember from all that was said that God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8). And that’s a good thing. Because man’s ways always end in disaster, but God’s ways somehow always end in goodness prevailing and evil defeated. 1 Peter 1:10-12 indicates that those living under the Old Law were, to some degree, in the dark as to how all the things in the Law and the Prophets were somehow preparing mankind to accept the suffering Savior when He came. There were certainly things in the Law that, in those days, didn’t make sense. Divorce laws may have been one of them. But there was actual sense to them, the rationale just wasn’t obviously apparent at the time. Even 2,000 years removed and with the Bible readily in our grasp, we still have difficulty interpreting some of these finer nuances of the Old Law, partly for tripping over our own feet. Hopefully, this writing has helped guide readers through some of the marshes that are the Old Testament dilemmas of less-than-ideal provisions. Remember the following:
Summary Points
• The Law was good, it wasn’t perfect.
• The Law was imperfect, but it didn’t fail.
• The Law was never intended to bring about atonement and forgiveness of sins.
• The Law was meant to make men abundantly aware of the fact that they needed atonement and forgiveness of sins that could come only by God and His divine program that was tied up in the Son of God and His New Covenant.
• By making provisions in the Law for things like divorce and the monarchy, God was playing hardball with Israel.
• We need to be careful how we talk about the Law of Moses and the Old Covenant so that it is not misrepresented and underappreciated by the church. Talk about the Law exactly how the Holy Spirit talked about it.
Footnotes
1 In fleshing out this point from Galatians 3 about the Old Law, Kaleb Leonard offers this fuller explanation (quoted with permission). “Galatians 3:10 says, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law.’ If I were a Jew under the Old Covenant and I kept all of God’s laws perfectly (without any flaws or sins), then that law would have given me life. ‘For if there had been a law given which could have given life truly righteousness would have been by the [Old Testament or Mosaic] law.’ But because we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Gal. 3:22), we realize we need to be justified not by perfect law keeping. Instead we need to be justified by faith in Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament that happened by believing in God’s promises of what Jesus would do in the future and performing sacrifices which pointed to the sacrifice of Jesus. Now, in the New Testament, it happens through faith in what Jesus has already done: prospective vs. retrospective.”
2 Consider other examples such as Romans 1:24, 26, 28 where Paul says about the Gentiles “Therefore God gave them up to vile passion,” (v. 26). This is God playing hardball with the Gentiles.
