The law is only necessary because of lawbreakers

The second speeding ticket of my life occurred at 8:20am.  I know this because had it been 8:30am I would not have gotten the ticket.  I was driving home one morning after working out at the YMCA and I entered a school-zone.  The speed limit had been 40 mph but between 7:30am and 8:30am the speed limit dropped in the school-zone down to 25 mph.  I was pulled-over and given a ticket for going 45 in a 25.

Here's an interesting thing the speeding law I broke:  If people always drove less than 25 mph in school zones we would not need a law punishing people for going above 25 mph.  Laws are required only because people do bad things.  If people did not murder we would not need laws punishing people for murder.  If people did not steal we would not need laws punishing people for theft or burglary.

In Matthew 19:3-8, a group of Pharisees asked Jesus, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?"  Jesus responded, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his 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."  The Pharisees were testing Jesus and wanted to catch him in conflict with Moses.  So they asked, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?"  Pay attention to Jesus response here:  He said, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so."

When Jesus said "from the beginning it was not so" he meant before there was sin in the world there was no divorce.  The sanctioning of divorce by Moses was a result of the Israelites' sin--what he called "hardness of heart".  The law permitting divorce was given only because there was sin in the world, but it is not the way God designed it from the beginning.

It is revealing that to answer the Pharisee's question about divorce Jesus did not refer to the Law that was given as a response to sin--the Mosaic Law--but to the pre-sin design that God ordained from the beginning of creation.  When God created Adam and Eve the creation was good and it existed in perfection.  As Christians that is our goal, our ideal, and so the "Law" we appeal to for guidance in our relationships with other people and God himself should be the design that was in place from the beginning--what Jesus did when he said "from the beginning it was not so."  The two greatest commandments: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself are the linchpins of God's pre-sin design.  That's why Jesus said, "On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:40)