"Because of your hardness of heart" is an interesting answer to the written law handed down by Moses. I have generally heard this presented as part of a larger, progressive view of the Law. Basically, the view presented to me has been that the commands of God have always been more loving toward people than the surrounding culture, and that God had to start His people on little stuff like only hurting people back as much as they've hurt you before He could get them to the point where He was like "just turn the other cheek, guys, this is where we've always been going with this." Which may well be accurate, in general, though I suspect the truth is somewhat more complicated than that; but the point here is that I don't entirely buy the claim that that is what Jesus is saying here. That is, Jesus may not have meant that Moses allowed limited divorce because it was a step in the direction of no divorce, but that divorce was allowed because sin was already breaking the perfect plan of God for marriage.

So, look, this topic comes up a lot partly because of the people I know and partly because of some family background, and I've had need to step back and analyze what the Bible has to say about marriage and divorce and the answer I've come to over the years is that divorce is bad fundamentally because it breaks up what is supposed to be a representation of the relationship between God and His people, but not every divorce happens in a context where that image was still intact.

Remember that every human being is an image-bearer of God. Marriage, while carrying a lot of imagery itself about Christ and the church (and, in another passage, God the Father and God the Son), is still fundamentally a covenant between two human beings, and what they do with that covenant shows their understanding of what every aspect of that means. For our purposes right now, let's focus on one part: how you treat your spouse, the person to whom you have sworn undying devotion and who represents the role of God in your life more than anyone else outside of the church itself, is a glimpse into how you view God. If Christ could say with confidence that our view of Him is contained in how we treat strangers, how much more is our view of Him revealed in how we treat our covenantal partner in a relationship specifically designed to be an image of God's relationship with us?

I submit that when one cheats on a spouse, or abuses a spouse in any way, that person has attacked God Himself and has actively broken the covenant they had with their spouse. Now, the Christian ideal is always grace, always hope that the person can and will change, but this is still an ideal. And this is where we get back to Christ's words about the legal standing of divorce in scripture: because we, as fallen creatures, are hard of heart, there needs to be an out. When the covenant is broken, especially in a situation where their very value as a person is being threatened, there needs to be a way for the offended party to walk away, because the offender often will not change, not in any real way, as long as they know their spouse is stuck with them.

"But," some will offer, "what about the sanctity of marriage?" And this is a good question. Hear me carefully here: the sanctity of marriage is important, and it does not always look how we expect it to look. The sanctity of marriage is important enough that we should never break it without overwhelming reason; the sanctity of marriage is also important enough that we cannot demand that it be corrupted by forcing people to remain in a broken image where they live with a spouse who has already broken their vows. That is, sometimes, we must protect the sanctity of marriage not by staying married, but by showing that a corrupted form of marriage is not good enough for the term. That marriage is so sacred that the image of it must be protected both from unmerited divorces and from unrighteous marriages. Sometimes, when an individual breaks their covenant with a spouse, we have to remind them of the value of a covenant by allowing them to suffer the just results of breaking it, even if this means a divorce.

Job is a type of Christ, in that we see in him a picture of some aspect of who Jesus would be and how He would fulfill the promises of God. This is nowhere more apparent than in chapter 42.

​Job has gone through a great trial. A massive affliction that he did not deserve was laid on his head, costing him all of his wealth and family (except his wife, who turned against him) and drawing others to point to it as evidence of evil in his heart. He bore the marks of condemnation on his very body. He was raised up for them as a symbolic curse, a lesson for those who oppose God, though he never had and those who made the accusation did so based on a misunderstanding of who God is. Job is the essence of the suffering servant, the righteous one who endures great trial. But the imagery that ties Job to Christ does not end at his suffering. In chapter 42, we get some more very important details. 

There are a few things here worth noting. One, Eliphaz is probably a descendant of Abraham. Genesis 36:10-11 tells us that Esau had a son named Eliphaz to his wife Adah, and Eliphaz had a son named Teman. If he is not to be read as an archetype, then, Eliphaz the Temanite is likely from the clan of Teman and bearing a family name. Bildad the Shuhite may also be descended from Abraham, a member of the clan of Shuah, a son of Abraham by his second wife, Keturah, from Genesis 25. What we have in Job 42, then, is a descendant of Abraham who lives outside the promise made to Abraham receiving direct word from God that the only way he and his companions (another descendant of Abraham outside the promise, and a man likely unrelated to Abraham at all) can be made right before God is to go to the man they had scorned as cursed by God and welcome the sacrifice that he would make on their behalf. Through this, God did not directly promise to accept them, but did accept Job because of his sacrifice and, near as we can tell, accept the others on Job's behalf.

Why did Job have so much blessing at the end of his life? The end of the book records a massive amount of wealth and a broad family coming to Job, and I have heard it preached as though God was repaying Job for all that had been taken away from him. But the verse above seems to indicate another angle: God did not reward Job as a direct result of his suffering, but as a result of his sacrifice and prayer offered on behalf of the people who had condemned him.

Let's tie this all together. Job points forward to Christ not only as the suffering servant, but as the only way to find restoration to God for both the blood of Abraham and the gentile, especially because both parties have rejected and condemned him due to a misunderstanding of who God is. As a result of interceding and making sacrifice on their behalf, God not only accepts them but glorifies him. All of this is true of Christ.

We, by being born of the spirit and turning to the Christ that the world has rejected, are welcomed by God while Christ, who was perfect but suffered and offered his own life as sacrifice on our behalf, is glorified for His work to save us. The whole gospel is imaged in the Old Testament, if only we will allow ourselves to see it.

How many times have we heard atheists, when asked about what they would do if they actually met God, explain that they would demand answers about how the world is. "How dare you," general thrust of these questions tends to go, "how dare you allow a world that has these things in it?"​

When God finally addresses Job, starting in chapter 38 of the book named for him, He challenges Job to stand up and raise charges. He charges Job multiple times to "gird up your loins and stand up like a man" and lay out his case against God in the midst of his trials. Job, for his part, answers very briefly in chapter 40.

The theme of the day's reading is God's supreme power, but beyond that, God's supreme right to judge. God is the very foundation of the concept of justice, He is the cornerstone upon which everything we know and value rests. We cannot hold Him to a standard because He is the one true standard, and we can never know either His creation or the proper application of His law better than He does. He creates, He sustains, He tames the most powerful wild forces and humbles the most exalted mortal soul. Confronted with His glory, none may stand and lay a charge. If we allow ourselves for even a moment to believe that we have something to condemn in Him, then our idea of God is a pale comparison to the One revealed in scripture.

We must remember that this God we serve is so much greater than we can even imagine, and His methods are perfect on a scale we cannot comprehend. When we get lost in our concerns about the troubles we face in this life, we can come back to confidence in the knowledge that God has things under control, God knows what He is doing and what He is allowing, and that His promise that those in Him shall be glorified with Him will not be interrupted by momentary muck and mire. And we can look forward to the completion of His perfect plan and justice, and say with Abraham,

This will be short, as I'm coming down with something and it is deeply affecting my mental clarity. I'll just give an overview and some passages and encourage you to read them further.

The primary thrust of today's reading was about God marking and protecting those who are His. Psalm 91 is a general promise that God is with His people, to ensure that no evil lays hold of them. The motif of staying safe and secure while terror rages around the people of God is also found in Exodus 12, where Moses begins in verse 21 to direct the people concerning the first Passover, in which the people were marked as God's and calamity passed over them to afflict the Egyptians around them. While specific interpretation may vary, Revelation 7 begins with the account of 144,000 individuals marked as belonging to God. In Matthew 18, Jesus condemns anything that causes one of His people, especially a child, to stumble; even if the thing causing one to stumble is their own body. But this is all contrasted with the cry of Job in Job 3, when he curses the day of his birth and asks why he was even allowed to grow old if this was all that was in store for him.

Was God not protecting Job? Well, yes, He was. The most overt thing is that God places limitations on what Satan can do to Job in chapters 1 and 2, protecting Job from the full scope of Satan's trials. More to the point, though, none of these passages suggest that hard times and great trials will not come. Matthew 18 especially focuses on the fact that things will arise to be a stumbling block in the path of His people. But God will rightly judge all those things which cause trouble for His people, and will deliver His people ultimately out of the full scope of evil's reach. We will endure some pain in this life, but the greatest weapons evil has against us will never prosper. If we are His, He will see to our ultimate rescue.

One thing the Bible is very big on reminding its readers is that more of the story is happening behind the scenes than on the worldly stage. Today's reading included parts of Daniel 11, where King Darius is informed by Daniel that God has a great deal of the future planned in detail and knows who will be doing what; as well as the encounter between Zacharias and Gabriel, where the former is told about the coming birth of John the Baptist. Both of these sections highlight that God has a plan, and that what we see of this life relies on actions taken where we cannot see. But few books can match Job, a chapter of which was also in today's reading, for making our physical reality seem like a very small part of a much larger story.

Job spends the first couple chapters flipping back and forth between the spiritual conversations that govern what will happen in Job's life and Job's actual experiences. Then the book zooms in on just Job and his friends and briefly his wife, which seems very important and the focus of the whole story until God shows up at the end and reminds everyone involved that they have only a small fraction of the information about what is going on. And we, the readers, can get very comfortable with the idea that we really do know what was going on, because we got some glimpses at the scenes in Heaven. But we really have little more than Job did, if we're honest. We never get any more of an answer to Job's suffering than Job himself received, and even the brief glimpses at causes are only brief glimpses and we get nothing of that sort for most of the book.

Do we think this was only true back then? We so often look at our lives as if the answers will be apparent some time soon or that we have basically all the information about what is happening. We see something successful at a church and break down all the details on their programming and their personalities and the spiritual gifts and think we have a pretty decent idea on what made it work. We read book after book on how God is moving in our age on the assumption that anyone except God really knows much about it. We have no idea what God is up to, and how much of it will become visible in our lifetimes. How much do we rest in the knowledge that God knows far more than we do, and has a much larger plan than we can see? How often do we recognize His authority and control over circumstances without expecting an explanation?