(4.) Our God is Accommodating: The Law of Moses
(4.) Our God is Accommodating: The Law of Moses.
“Who is able to understand the mind of Lord Yahweh? Who is able to be His teacher? We, however, have the mind of Christ!” (1 Corinthians 2:16).
An Accommodating Person is one who graciously changes plans for another’s benefit; who is willing to adjust in order to meet another’s needs; is open to adapting to changing circumstances; who is able to make concessions if needed; who makes allowances for others; who choose to oblige other and give them favors in order to be helpful; who is able to creatively shift from Plan A to Plan B if needed; who makes space for others to learn and grow; who welcomes others to fit into his own space; who makes reasonable exceptions to a general rule; who is comfortable in doing whatever it takes to be understood or to communicate effectively; who is willing to adjust expectations in light of reality; who is able to place limits on himself if it help others to flourish; who is able to step back in order to enable others to step forward.
Qualities of An Accommodating Person: Gracious; Humble; Sacrificial; Flexible; Observant; Farsighted; Insightful; Adaptable; Reasonable; Forgiving; Hospitable; Patient; Self-Effacing; Shrewd.
Our Accommodating God is willing, in His wisdom, to do everything described above, and then some. It seems to be in His nature to be an accommodating Soul, a part of His character since before Day One. God has been making concessions from before the creation of the universe, since creation itself was accomplished in the spirit of accommodation. God has also condescended to reveal His glory, agreed to His presence in the wilderness Tabernacle, made concessions to cultural realities in His Law, communicated in human language to produce holy Scripture, accommodated His word through His messengers, made Himself available through the Church’s sacraments, humbly revealed Himself with dreams and visions, and offered to us the ultimate accommodation… the Incarnation of His infinite Being to finite planet earth. God’s accommodations began before the beginning, during that eternal time before Day One, when Creator God filled everything, had always been present everywhere at the same time, and yet decided to make room for the universe. And the Lord has continued making concessions with His creation, with human beings, ever since. And that is the divine pattern to be found in our lives as well… to accommodate, to make space in our lives for God and for each other.
The Lord’s Accommodations in the Law of Moses. Yahweh wasn’t above going to Plan B as He often permitted temporary compromises in a nod to the cultural realities of the time and place, as well as the unfortunate frailties of mankind. Creator God knows full well that we are made of dust and sometimes in His wisdom makes allowances with that in mind. In the fallen societies of that era, the Lord tolerated certain realities and offered some concessions, such as with divorce, slavery, polygamy and human kingships. These were examples of God regulating rather than immediate abolishing, and it appears He dropped some moral seed into the culture that would grow, gradually breaking the ground sooner or later, and allow the consequences of some sins to be the teacher. God allowed human beings to see the obvious congruences of those things less than ideal, with the intention that people would draw their own conclusions that certain things are unwise and harmful and not what God wants.
The Temporary Accommodation of Divorce. “Suppose a man marries a woman and consummates the marriage but later finds her displeasing, because he has found her offensive in some respect. He writes her a divorce document, gives it to her and sends her away from his house.” (Deuteronomy 24:1). “The Pharisees sked Jesus, ‘Why did Moses allow a man to simply give a certificate of divorce and then send his wife away?’ Jesus answered, ‘Because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19:7-8).
Mosaic Law was clear in Deuteronomy 24: If a man wanted to divorce his wife for any reason, he could do so as long as he wrote up a certificate of dismissal, a “get.” This formal letter of divorce made it official and acceptable in the eyes of the Law of Moses and in civil law. A man didn’t need any reason in particular to expel his wife from the marriage. It could be that he didn’t like her cooking, or he didn’t like the way she looked, or whatever. A man could divorce his wife for any reason. During that time, of course, a woman could not divorce her husband. This part of the Law was actually a concession to the husband’s frailty and sinful tendencies. The Lord regulated the divorce process in order to prevent greater evils from happening in a troubled marriage, such as the man abusing the wife and ending her away, exploiting the wife out of sheer cruelty, or even to prevent something such as wife-swapping. The Law was supposed to help the wife from being unjustly or harmfully thrown out of the house. Moses included the law that when a husband served divorce papers, he was required to return his wife’s dowry. The wife could then leave the house with some financial support. Jesus expanded on his thinking regarding divorce and marriage in Matt. 19:1-9. In this story, the Pharisees wanted to entrap Jesus regarding this Law of divorce. They wanted Jesus to say something critical of Moses’ Law just to get him trouble with the Jewish authorities. In this passage, Jesus said that the Mosaic Law was only a concession to the hard-heartedness of men, that divorce so easily accomplished was not God’s intention when He ordained marriage. It’s interesting that Jesus didn’t cite Moses or other rabbis as his authority on this. Jesus went back to creation, quoting Genesis 2:23-24. Jesus said that God instituted marriage, and thus it was a sacred union between husband and wife. Marriage was nothing to be careless about. Marriage was intended from the start to be permanent and binding, a joining of a man and a woman, a union in which the two become one flesh. And thus it is not to be torn asunder by the whims of man. Jesus implied that in a divorce, it’s as if the unity of two as one is cut in two, like a body being torn in half. That’s how radical divorce is spiritually and emotionally. No one would want to tear a body in half, and so no one should want to tear asunder two-as-one. Unless it was profoundly needed, Jesus thought that divorce in reality looked like a major amputation. So Jesus sided with the conservative side on this issue. He believed that adultery, a major betrayal, was the only legitimate reason for a divorce, as serious as divorce is in God’s eyes. “What God has joined together, let no one separate,“ says Jesus in Matt. 19:6. Divorce is permissible only in profoundly serious circumstances, any act of betrayal such as abandonment, abuse, or unfaithfulness. Examples like those seem to be in the spirit of the law, as far as Jesus is concerned. The Greek word for divorce means “to break fellowship.” A marriage is the most sacred fellowship there is between two people, a sacramental union that is intended to last a lifetime unless dire circumstances unfortunately visit the marriage.
The Temporary Accommodation of Slavery. Our righteous God did not invent slavery, mankind did. Human lavery wasn’t God’s idea, it was man’s. In making a concesion to the cultural realities of that tiem and plac, the Lord clearly sought ot mke that entrenched part of the world as humane aspossible until it became outdated and obviouly againt the idea of man being created in God’ image. Djuring that biblical era, lavery had notnhing to do with kin color, or kidnapping, or racialy ujperiority alvery wa more of an economc shystem that included captive of war and thoe in debt. o God decided to regulate it and gradualy abolih it, iknce completely abolihing would hve been uch a foregign idea and not at all understood at that time. Human ownership of another person was undojubtedlhy a stench in God’s nostrils, so He established retriction, setting limits a ikt’ on it wayh out