(5.) Our Accommodating God: The Law of Moses
(5.) Our Accommodating God: 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.
(1.) The 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.
(2.) The Accommodation of Slavery. Our righteous God did not invent slavery, mankind did. Human slavery wasn’t God’s idea, it was man’s. In making a concession to the cultural realities of that time and place, the Lord clearly sought to make that entrenched aspect of the world as humane as possible until it became outdated and obviously against the idea of man being created in God’s image. During that biblical era, slavery had nothing to do with skin color, or kidnapping, or racial superiority. Slavery was more of an economic system that included captives of war and those in debt. So God decided to regulate it and gradually abolish it, since completely abolishing would have been such a foreign idea and not at all understood at that time. Human ownership of another person was undoubtedly a stench in God’s nostrils, so He established restrictions, setting limits and humane boundaries to the whole enterprise. The Lord seemed to ensure that His chosen people were building a society that better reflected God’s ideal than the other cultures did… Hebrew servants were freed every six years; there was to be no instance of abuse, exploitation or cruelty; servants were treated with respect as fellow human beings, even making sure they were given regular periods of rest from their labors; slaves were to be given an education if desired; slavery was largely a voluntary work in order to pay off debts and were granted freedom once the debts were paid; when the slaves were freed every six years or before, the master was required to send them away loaded with food and other supplies needed to survive on their own; slaves were given the option of choosing to remain with their master of desired, and the servant would become more like a member of the family. The Hebrew word for slave was “ebed” which was freely used to mean servant, worker, or even advisor. The “slave” in the Hebrew Bible is a completely different version of the word than the horrific slave trade that has been so prevalent around the world for much too long, including in America in our early nationhood.
(3.) The Accommodation of Polygamy. Plural marriages at this early stage in the biblical era may seem questionable to the extreme to us, but this appears to be another of those times when we simply have to trust the eternal wisdom of the Lord God. Why didn’t He just come right out and condemn polygamy right from the start? It doesn’t take a genius to notice that multiple wives for one man brought nothing but rivalry, jealousy, rebellion, family dysfunction, marital competition, playing favorites. The Lord apparently chose not to rebuke the polygamy of a long string of biblical heroes, including Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, Samson, David and Solomon. God’s supposedly chosen leaders, even “the man after God’s own heart,” seemed to marry on a whim with impunity just like the surrounding pagan nations, and somehow God didn’t even raise his finger in protest. On the other hand, actually, Creator God did in fact reveal His ideal of one woman-one man in sacred marriage way back in Genesis 2:24. And this was confirmed by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” Polygamy was never endorsed by God, but neither did that unhappy, unwise arrangement ever receive a divine blessing by God as was that first marriage in Paradise. God was very clear about his original vision for marriage right from the start. Polygamy was shown to bring nothing but negative consequences in the Hebrew Bible, nothing but heartache. Multiple wives brought nothing but trouble, so perhaps this was God’s way of showing His disapproval, the strategy of logical consequences. It appears that at least a part of God’s plan here was to reveal the inevitable pitfalls, the obvious consequences of veering away from God’s ideal. Perhaps the Lord chose the teaching strategy of helping the students to teach themselves by learning from experience, from personally experiencing the mistakes and learning the hard way. Okay, maybe the Israelites were slow learners here, just going along with what was common in their culture. but eventually they figured it out. For there was no recorded case of polygamy after the Babylonian captivity. After all, you’d have to be blind as a bat and dumb as a brick not to notice the foolishness of a plural marriage. Maybe in God’s mind this was another example of His progressive revelation. But on the other hand, polygamy reveals the weakness of man in which if God didn’t forbid something, it was assumed that it was okay. Evidently, as happens so often, if God didn’t put up the red light, man just assumed he had a green light. One other important point to mention, is that if a marriage between one man and one woman is God’s best way of giving us a picture of our spiritual union with God, a tangible glimpse of the union between Christ and His Church… How would polygamy figure into that image? Well, it wouldn’t. Christ is not united with many bodies, He is faithfully united with one Body, His covenant Bride, the holy Church.
(4.) The Accommodation of Kingship. “Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations!’ But the request displeased Samuel… And Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to him, ‘They have rejected Me from being king over them.” (1 Samuel 8:6-9). The Israelites were misled into believing at an early point in the Promised Land that they wanted and needed a human king. That proved to be a grave error, “You want a king to rule over you, when the Lord your God was your king!” (1 Sam. 12:12). So the Lord had earlier made a concession to their wishes, providing some guidelines for their kings instead of forbidding them altogether. Moses laid down the Law on what was required in their choosing of their king… The Lord would do the choosing of the king; the king would have to be an Israelite; he must not become wealthy with many horses or excessive wealth; he must not have many wives; he must write down the Teachings of Moses, read them faithfully, and obey them every day (Deuteronomy 17:14-20). Despite that dreadful mistake of replacing God as their king, Yahweh and His prophets never let them forget that God was their King, and thus He was more often than not worshipped as such.