Who Needs the Law of God?
“Knowing this, that the Law is not
made for a righteous man, but for the
lawless and disobedient, for the
ungodly and for sinful, for the unholy and profane
and irreligious, for murderers
of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers.”
1 Timothy 1:9
Do you think you might ever walk
into an elementary school classroom and find a
large poster in front of the children
that reads, “It is a law that you must like ice cream”?
Who needs a prominent law to tell
someone to do something that already is the natural
longing of one's heart?
By the same token, can you imagine
large posters attached to the walls of the New Jerusalem warning the inhabitants
that stealing gold from each other's mansions is strickly forbidden? In
our original condition, as well as in our restored condition, God didn't
and won't need to tell His people what to do or how to behave. His Law
was and will be written on our hearts.
[See Hebrews 8:10, 10:16]
When human hearts went astray from
their Lord, and thus from His wise Will, it became necessary for Him to
warn us, to guide us, even to command us to live in certain responsible
and healthful ways--to protect ourselves and others from pain and destruction.
It was no
longer natural for our hearts to
do the loving and wise thing. God clearly identifies in His word just who
it is that needs His Law: It is people who would not otherwise live
by its principles. The Law cannot change one's inner values, but it can
and does point out the need for a Christ-wrought inner change.
Many Christians have believed that
the Law serves only to pass condemnation on us, and that once Jesus has
given us a legal covering of “declared Righteousness”, the need for the
Law vanishes. But in reality the Law changes its posture, its means of
working. It moves from external to internal, from a statement of what one
must
do to a description of what a loving person will do when bonded
to Jesus through Faith. As the Scriptures declare, “Are
we then undermining the Law by this insistence on Faith? God forbid: we
put the Law in its proper place.” [Romans 3:31, Phillips]
That proper place, of course, is
written on the heart. For the Law is an expression of God's character,
a restatement of His values. Those who adoringly behold Jesus Christ will
become like Him in their hearts, in their thoughts, and in their lives
because, through God's Word, His Spirit of Life dwells in them.
[John 6:63]
“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster
to bring us unto Christ, that we might be
justified by faith. But after that
faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.” [Galatians 3:24,
25]. There are many Christians who believe
that the moment they believe and accept Christ into their lives, they receive
their diploma from the School of Christ and the Law of God is now [for
them, at least] nailed to the cross and it is no more binding upon their
lives. Let me ask those who believe in this way this question: When you
were in school and you graduated from a teacher's class and you loved that
teacher dearly, did you go out into the world and forget all about the
principles that your beloved teacher had taught you to live by? Of course
you didn't. You didn't go out and live just any way you wanted because
the principles you learned from your beloved teacher were what made
him or her the lovable person that
you cherished in your heart.
It is the same way in the School
of Christ, once we graduate to another class or to
a higher Faith than that of our
own, if Jesus Christ is our beloved teacher, we won't
discard the Principles that He
taught us and that He, Himself, has always lived by. The beloved teacher
we had in our earthly school may not be our teacher anymore, but even though
he or she may live thousands of miles away and we haven't seen them for
years, in
our hearts they will always be
our dearest friends. If this is so with our earthly teachers,
how can it not be so much more
so with our heavenly Teacher?
“But now has He obtained a more
excellent ministry, by how much also He is the mediator of a better covenant,
which was established on better promises.” [Hebrews 8:6]. Did
God break His promises to Israel or make faulty promises to them in the
Old Covenant? God forbid any would even think such thoughts! It wasn't
God's Law that was faulty in the Old Covenant, it was the broken promises
of the people that annulled the Old Covenant. The “better Covenant” and
“better Promises” of Hebrews 8:6 for
modern Israel today are the “for sure and for certain” Promises of our
beloved Teacher and dearest Friend, Jesus Christ, whose character and principles
are cherished in our hearts.
* ~ adapted by Jon Zwayer
from 'God's Healing Love' by Dick Winn, pg. 278
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