In response to my big teaching on the topic of divorce and remarriage,

I got this follow-up question from Leslie, who asks,

on Matthew 19-8, when Jesus replied,

Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts, but it was not like that from the beginning.

Could you give more thoughts on, quote, the hardness of your hearts?

I was divorced and remarried my ex-husband.

I feel like even though according to this I was

permitted to divorce I did because I found it so hard to forgive. Is Jesus saying

it's allowed but not ideal or what I'd like to see happen. We are blessed that

God eventually softened my heart. Also could you give your view on Roman Catholic

annulments and I'm going to save the annulment question for a future video

But let's handle your first question about hardness of hearts today. How do I explain that? Well there's a few different options as we try to like one thing to do in Bible studies to sort of survey your options.

You would look at a passage and you go, what are the possibilities for what this could mean?

And then you kind of try to weigh the pros and cons and look at the context and figure

out what the obvious meaning, hopefully it's obvious is.

Your Leslie your interpretation of this passage seems to be that having a hard heart is a reason

to get a divorce as in if your heart's hard, God is saying, I permit you to divorce.

And it seems like you're thinking Jesus is echoing this sentiment that he's thinking as well,

hey, if your heart's really hard, then it's okay to get a divorce.

One of the problems with this perspective, one of the cons of this perspective is that every divorce

is now valid.

I mean pretty much every divorce does stem you know from a situation where there is a serious

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