Hey, my friends, it's Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and we're in the middle of a

two-day conversation we're having here about this passage in Matthew, chapter 19, where Jesus

gives a very difficult teaching about divorce and remarriage. Starting in verse 8, it says,

Jesus replied, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard,

but it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife,

except for marital unfaithfulness and marries another woman commits adultery. Very tough teaching,

but there's some very serious context behind this that we need to explore in order to understand

all of the nuances that go into this statement. So we're going to pick it up where we left off

yesterday and roll from there. So Jesus says, your hearts were hard, and that's why Moses permitted

a divorce. That's referenced in Deuteronomy 24, but then Jesus goes on to say, but it wasn't this

way from the beginning, I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness

and marries another woman commits adultery. Jesus is referencing back here to that stuff in Malachi.

He's referencing a practice that had been going on since the Jews had returned from their

exile in Persia under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah as a rubble of these characters that you

hear chronologically right at the end of the Old Testament. They get permission from Cyrus the

great, the emperor dictator king of the Persians to go back and rebuild. And even somewhat autonomously

govern themselves under their own religious law. And so they go back and they do this and they

make a new temple and they dedicate it, but kind of nothing happens. And it feels like God is

distant and even in Malachi chapter two there, you could hear the disappointment that people were

expressing it like, well, the temple used to work. We did sacrifices and it worked, but something's

gone wrong. There's an estrangement. There's a distance that has occurred in this time. And part

of that distance was a social hardening. Some Ick practices that started to develop that the

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