The Pharisees came up "to trap Jesus" and they asked him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" Jesus in response asked them what Moses had taught, and they replied correctly that Moses had said a man could simply give his wife a certificate of divorce and that was all there was to it. (Deuteronomy 24:1-4, was designed originally to protect the wife and guarantee her a certain amount of freedom.) Jesus was between a "rock and a hard place." If he answered "yes" to the question he would be promoting marital irresponsibility, and if he answered "no" to the question he would be disagreeing with Moses, the greatest patriarch of Israel.

However, Jesus would not permit the question to be turned into a contest between himself and Moses. So he set the question in the context of God's purpos…