In Matthew 22:36-40, Jesus taught that the purpose of the Ten Commandments was to instill love in the hearts of men first for God and then for one's fellow man. Thus, God in Christ confirmed the truth of Deuteronomy 6:5. God gave the Ten Commandments directly to Moses, but God allowed Moses to write the rest of the law. Jesus confirmed this fact in Matthew 19:4-9. Jesus affirmed that the law of divorce, written by Moses, directly contradicted God's original law that one man should be married to one woman by God for life.
Contradictions in God's Word never invalidates it. God allows contradictions in His Word for a holy purpose. Through contradictions, God affirms His gift of free will to man. God never allows sin, but God does allow each person to choose whether or not to sin with every temptation. For this reason, God allowed Moses to allow his people to divorce even though it is a sin. God manifests this same truth throughout the Word of God. Fear of sin causes humans to get some wrong ideas about it. Humans believe that sin can cause irreparable harm to some of God's creations. Humans forget that God is Almighty. God knows exactly how to handle sin and exactly how to get rid of all of it forever. God knows how to put pressure on the one who sins in order to cause that person to repent and return to making the right choices. God also knows how to handle those who refuse to repent. Despite any choices humans may make, God still maintains complete control over man's history and destiny. People who refuse to obey God do not hinder God's control of history. God simply eliminates them, or He raises up people to replace them who will obey Him.
God allowed Moses' law to be a part of His Word. God can make man's word a part of His Word by His approval. In Acts 17:28, God allowed Paul's quote of a pagan poet to become a part of His Word. God has a holy reason for sometimes allowing man's word to become a part of His Word. In the case of Moses' word, God desired to demonstrate how feeble man's attempts could be in trying to explain God's Law. Moses' law could make sense in some regards, but be silly and senseless in others, just like man's laws of today. Moses' law was also unduly harsh in that it always required the death penalty for adultery, sodomy, and incest. But Moses began to get a sense of what God's Law really meant when he wrote Deuteronomy 6:5.
God demonstrated that His Law was also one of love and mercy in Numbers 15:22-29. In these verses, God commanded that anyone who violated God's Law or Moses' law could find God's forgiveness if they sinned through ignorance and if they made the right animal sacrifices. The Hebrew word for ignorance here meant "an inadvertent mistake;" that is, to sin because of weakness. All sins of weakness stem from Eve's sin in that in her innocence the wicked serpent deceived her into believing she could have something better. God understands man's weakness for sin, and therefore, He always immediately cleanses and forgives all repentant sinners who put their faith in the sacrifice and shed blood of Christ. God got rid of all sin forever through the death, burial, and resurrection of His Son. Any sinner's willingness to repent demonstrates to God that his sins resulted from weakness. That part of any person who absolutely refuses to repent forever equals total evil and deadness which God can never forgive and which He will consign to the lake of fire forever. John 1:29; I Timothy 4:10; Revelation 20:15; Revelation 21:8.
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