Jesus on Moses' Law: Hardness of Hearts and God's Original Will

Understanding Jesus' statement about Moses' law and the hardness of hearts

Jesus challenges the Pharisees' interpretation of the Torah

Jesus claims that God did not intend for the rule on divorce

Moses wrote the Torah based on his own understanding of God's will

This could be one of the most boring videos I have ever made. On the other hand, historically, it could be one of the most significant ones I have ever made as well. What I am about to say is pivotal in understanding Jesus, the Bible, and how all of this relates to truth and to the Creator of the universe. It is, in some ways, only one step in a natural progression that I've been moving through for several decades. Some will yawn and say, ''What's new? He's been saying that for years.'' But it is a frightening step nevertheless, because it moves me closer to heresy than I've been before, and I don't want to be guilty of that. It can be like that with truth. The sharper the blade becomes, the greater the chance of cutting yourself on it. What I am going to say stems from something Jesus said in the midst of a discourse about divorce and remarriage. Now, the subject of divorce itself is not important to what I'll be saying here, but the way Jesus approached the subject is all-important. The Pharisees were discussing the Torah with Jesus one day. In particular, they were discussing this passage from Deuteronomy. When a man has taken a wife and married her, and it comes to pass that she finds no favor in his eyes, because he has found some uncleanness in her, then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house." I want to get it very clear that the Pharisees were defending this. They were defending what was written here in the Torah. Some people say that the Pharisees distorted the Torah, and that it was Jesus who defended the Torah. They say Jesus came to actually promote the law, that he wanted to get people to return to some lost love for the Old Testament. But that is not true. The only way you can believe such a wild claim is by not reading the four Gospels and not listening to what Jesus actually taught. From start to finish, the Pharisees are the ones defending the Torah in the four Gospels, and Jesus is the one threatening the status quo with radically new interpretations and even outright changes to the Old Testament law. So anyway, this business of divorce came up. Jesus shook them to the core with a statement that could only be seen as blasphemous. And that claim is the basis for what I am going to say in this video, and for what will almost certainly qualify me as a heretic in the eyes of many as well. Jesus says in Mark 10, verse 5, "...For the hardness of your hearts, Moses wrote you this commandment." And then he goes on to say that God felt differently to what Moses wrote. What he says is that God never intended for there to be such a rule. In fact, God HATES putting away or divorce. According to Jesus, God considers it to be adultery to divorce someone who has not been unfaithful, because when you divorce your wife, you are trampling on her right to stay with you and your promise to care for her. Good or bad, clean or unclean, she is your wife, and you have made a commitment to her that must last for life. That is how Jesus explained it, and he challenged what was written in the Torah by doing so. Do you understand the full impact of this statement? Jesus was saying that Deuteronomy 12 was not written by God. It was written by Moses. More than that, Moses wrote it contrary to the will of God. We just read glibly over such statements these days and we totally miss the shocking implications of it all What Jesus has said here is fundamental to his entire ministry It is fundamental to the hatred that the Pharisees had for him, and it is fundamental to why he was killed. The High Priest himself said as much before he orchestrated the execution of Jesus. He said that Jesus NEEDED to be killed in order to save the entire nation from this radical, revolutionary new teaching about a kingdom that was greater than the kingdom of Israel and about an authority that was greater than the one who gave them the law. If they allowed Jesus to claim that Moses had injected his opinions into the Torah then the infallibility of everything else in the Torah comes under question. Did God, or did God not write, with his own finger, that which Moses delivered to the children of Israel? And if he did not write it with his own finger, did he even dictate every word of it to Moses? Or was Moses, perhaps, a fallible human being, doing his very best to lead a nation of people based on his own best experience and his own best understanding of the will of God. Did Moses SAY God spoke to him, much like people do today, meaning that he was passing on what he felt God was saying even if his own thoughts and feelings got into it at times? There are some of you who would say, Okay, in this one instance, or perhaps in a few other instances, it was Moses... or maybe even someone else... telling stories and making rules. But it was God himself who wrote the first ten rules, and God wrote them with his own finger on two stone tablets. So it can never be changed or doubted. Okay, that is what the book says happened. Moses went up to the mountain where he fasted for forty days without food or water. That's right, forty days without water. And then God wrote the Ten Commandments, miraculously, on two big flat stones. Then, according to the story, Moses went back up and fasted without food and water for another forty days and nights after he smashed the original tablets in anger. This time, Moses had to do the writing, carving out each letter from solid rock with some unknown instrument, or perhaps just with another stone. The words could all be clearly seen carved into the stones. The Torah worshippers want us to leave the Jesus of the New Testament and go back to this that we have from Moses. They say it was effectively written by God himself, not by someone just quoting his Son, like the four gospels are. Now, remember that the first two stone tablets were apparently smashed to smithereens out there in the desert and lost. Then, the second version, chipped into rock by Moses himself, was also lost hundreds of years later. However, in the 7th century before Jesus was born, a scroll was found in some secluded corner of the temple. This happened during the reign of King Josiah. This scroll became the most reliable copy of the Torah that was available anywhere after Moses' stones were lost. And this scroll came to be accepted as the infallible Word of God. Well, we don't have the scroll either, but we do have copies of copies, the same as we have with the most recent books of the New Testament. But in the Gospels, we hear Jesus saying, No, Moses wrote parts of it incorrectly, right from the start, because he knew you could not yet take the whole truth Many who have questioned the ongoing authority of Jewish ceremonial laws and many other Jewish practices still say that the Ten Commandments were perfect They should never be changed Not even God himself would change one word in what he wrote on them. Let me make it clear that I too believe the Ten Commandments and the ceremonial law came to us from God. I just don't think they are God, nor are they a perfect and immutable revelation of the will of God. In his great Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke about the Ten Commandments quite specifically, and what he said is on a par with what he said about Moses. With regard to the divorce rule, Jesus said, For the hardness of your heart, Moses wrote this. Moses. Not God, but Moses. Moses was a man of God, trying to do God's will, but he was not God. That was what Jesus said about Moses' role in delivering the Torah to the descendants of Israel. But what did Jesus say about the Ten Commandments, the part that was supposedly written by the actual finger of God after the original was smashed. What did he say about that? Listen! You have heard that it has been said. What? It has been said? Is that any way to talk about something that the Creator of the universe came down to earth and personally carved into a solid rock for his creation to follow? According to Moses himself, God often spoke to him face to face. Yet Jesus says of what was contained in those sacred Ten Commandments, "...it has been said." That is like saying today, rumor has it that we should not kill. People are saying that we should not commit adultery. We've always been told to keep the Sabbath day holy, but I say... Can you possibly imagine what a shocking blasphemy that was when good Jews first heard Jesus say it? Can you understand why even today, Jews...good Jews...hate Jesus with a passion? It has been said, Jesus stated, and then he finished with, but I say... and he would continue with a total rewrite for each of them. Now, his replacements were consistent with the spirit of the original. But they were not the original, and were not even close to being word for word. So Torah worshippers argue, if his father wrote the original, who was Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter's son, little more than a carpenter himself, How could this, this man, challenge the almighty finger of God that Josiah's manuscript wrote about? You see, the Torah worshippers make it a battle between father and son in which the father must surely win. The son could never be greater than the father. But Jesus saw it as simply as an argument between the son of God and Moses. Let that sink in for a little bit. If you were the literal Son of God, with word from your divine Father that differed from something which a guy named Moses had said thousands of years earlier, wouldn't you feel you had a right to challenge Moses? So what if Moses said, or if his followers said that he said that it was God who had instructed him on these matters, face to face no less? So what if Moses said that he had once had a solid rock in which the words had been miraculously carved out? You would just say, I'm sorry, Moses, but I am the Son of God, and I know what I have been sent here by my Father to say. It is mostly consistent with what you said, but it is better, whether you like it or not. I call it the fulfillment of what you said on your best days I think Moses himself would have accepted that In the opening chapter of John record of the life and teachings of Jesus he said, the law came through Moses. The law was a fantastic piece of work, and it did, in fact, reflect God's will in many places and in many ways. In it, one could find God's wisdom, God's justice, and even God's mercy. But it still came through Moses, and at least, at times, the humanity and the fallibility of Moses poked through. Through the grace of God, I believe that Moses spoke more truth than even he himself could comprehend. God empowered him to do that. But the bottom line, according to Jesus, if you are to believe Jesus, is that Moses was fallible, and what Moses wrote was fallible too. Jesus had something better. The law came through Moses, wrote John, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. This is the crossroad that the world is at today. Well, it is the crossroad that we have been at ever since Jesus' first arrival. But it is more evident now than ever before. We are being forced to choose between Jesus and Moses. All the pharisaical forces of religion are united in an effort to silence the truth in what Jesus taught, and to tarnish the reputation of anyone who would promote those teachings. But each of you viewing this video right now is being forced to make a choice on which the eternal destiny of your soul will rest. Either you will let yourself be broken on the rock of the teachings of Jesus, or those same teachings are going to come very soon to grind you to powder. If I must shudder your faith in the rest of the Bible, if I must smash your trust in Moses and his first five books in order to get your focus back onto the teachings of Jesus, then so be it. Let God be true and every man a liar. God has spoken most surely in these last days through his Son, Jesus the Christ. and he is reaching out to you today with both grace and truth. You will not get one without the other. Only those who are hungering and thirsting for the truth with all of their hearts are going to find the righteousness of God as revealed through the grace of Jesus Christ. Will you let go of the churchy, double-minded, half-and-half faith that is holding you back from real faith in Jesus? It's not a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of Moses. It's not a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of Paul. It's not a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of your pastor and your other church friends. Deception is everywhere these days, and people fall for it because of the hardness of their hearts. Please fall instead on the rock of Christ's teachings. Let him break your hard old heart, and let him have full reign over all that you own, all that you hold dear, and all that you are. Become a true disciple of Jesus Christ, going into all the world to preach this same message of God's love and provision until the day that you die. There is another powerful sermon on this channel called Abraham's Descendant, which also looks at the relationship between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament to reveal that they are not two different gods. You can see it by clicking on the link that appears above. Please write to me and share your thoughts after you've watched it. And while you're at it, please subscribe to this channel and click on the bell icon to be notified when new videos come out if you like what you've just heard. God bless you.

Playlist coming soon.