Among the Jews of Jesus’ time, the strictest keepers of the Law were the Pharisees. They asked Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” Jesus went back to the creation story to answer their question.
“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 they shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matthew 19:4-7)
This is the way God intended marriage to be from the very beginning. He made one man and one woman, and He intended for them to stay together until one of them died. He expects the same for us today—one man with one woman until one of them dies. In 1 Corinthians 7:2, Paul says, “But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.” This is the pattern that God established in the beginning at the time of creation. God’s pattern does not give room for multiple wives.
However, men made a mockery of God’s plan—they began taking more than one wife. They also introduced divorce. The Bible mentions the first man to take more than one wife. In Genesis 4:19, we find one of the descendants of Cain taking two wives: “Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah.” Then, in Matthew 19, we see the issue of divorce and why the Law of Moses allowed it. Jesus says in verse 8:
Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
Jesus takes us back to the beginning, to God’s original plan. God did not intend for people to divorce one another, but Moses allowed it because of the hardness of their hearts. That may be the same reason that he allowed polygamy. Now, Jesus calls us to a higher calling—what God intended from the very beginning.