Have you ever contemplated the incredible power of
words? The process of taking sounds
formed by specific combinations of lip shape, tongue activity, and the movement
of air, crafting those sounds into a recognizable library of letters, arranging
those letters into particular sequences called words, and placing those words
deliberately into the structure of a sentence, is truly an awe-inspiring
ability that God has granted to mankind.
Verbal speech is one of the hallmarks that sets man apart from the
animal kingdom. However, with this
unique and noteworthy ability comes great power and therefore a great burden of
restraint. Our words have the power to
help or to hurt. They can build up the
soul. Or they can tear down the psyche. They inflict wounds that are arguably more
deadly than physical ones, and without question more insidious, because the
damage cannot be seen. But, a crushed
spirit is just as real as a broken arm.
Beyond that, words have the incredible capacity to conjur up
images in the human mind. These images
can be either implanted fresh or recalled from memory. For example, the title of this essay is “The
Heart of the Law.” That word, law, has
probably already done its work in your mind, instantaneously, as you read
it. Perhaps you associate law with
rules, structure, judgment, or even oppression.
For those among us trained as attorneys, law may bring to mind countless
hours of study or grueling testing or even stress filled courtroom scenes
played out in the theater of the mind’s eye.
In the context of the biblical record there is another angle
to the word law. For a Christian, often
when we hear law in the context of the Scriptures our thoughts travel
immediately to The Law; the covenant that the Lord God made with the
descendants of Jacob at Mt. Sinai, delivered through God’s servant, Moses. This Law towers above all others for the rest
of Scripture. Through both the Old and
New Testaments, the human writers of the Bible refer to the Law of Moses
repeatedly, in various contextual situations and manners of application.
Because of how well known this Law is to Christians, they
probably bring many pre-conceived notions to bear on it. Some may find it to be outdated. Others would consider the Law non-applicable. Still more would perhaps find it harsh in
many of its aspects. Those well versed
in the letters of Paul might say that the Law is capable of bringing only
death.
But I believe there is a characteristic of the Law of Moses,
the Law of God, that we may tend to overlook as we consider its relevance for
our lives and our relation to it.
Namely, I believe the Scripture is clear that the very heart of the Law,
the foundation upon which it is built, the soul that gives life to its
component parts, is love. The heart of
the Law is not rules. It is not
judgment. It is not death. It is not even holiness, although holiness is
critically important to the Law. No, the
heart of the Law is love.
To demonstrate this, we will consider the source
material. The book of Deuteronomy is one
of the five building blocks that make up the Pentateuch, or the first five
books of both the Hebrew and English Bibles.
This is an excellent place to look in order to find out what really makes
the Mosaic Law tick. The name Deuteronomy
means “second law” in the Greek. This
book is Moses’s attempt, as the nation camped on the plains of Moab, just prior
to his death and the entry of his countrymen into the Promised Land, to
summarize, recount, and even provide commentary upon the entirety of the Sinai
Covenant.
The Law as a whole was essentially the constitution for the
nation of Israel. But it was also a
record of the contract or covenant between the Lord and His chosen people. In this capacity, it stands as an indelible
historical account of the interaction between the Hebrews and their God. Furthermore, Deuteronomy, because it is a
sort of second look at the whole of the Law, encapsulates within just a few
chapters an overall summary of this divine and human relationship.
For example, in chapter 7 we find that the Law began with the
Lord Himself. In verses 6 to 8 we read
the following: “For you are a people
holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your
God has chosen you to be a people for His treasured possession, out of all the
peoples who are on the face of the earth.
It was not because you were more in number than any other people that
the LORD set His love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all
peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that He
swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and
redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of
Egypt.”
Moses is telling the Israelites that it was not for any
reason in and of themselves that God chose them. Rather, it was purely because He loved
them. He loved the Hebrews and desired
to keep the oath He had sworn to their forefathers. It was because of God’s love and His
faithfulness to His own covenants that He rescued them from slavery in Egypt
and made them a people holy unto Himself.
This is a magnificent picture of salvation. In fact, it is the standard and only mode of redemptive
interaction between God and mankind, His wayward rebel children. We are hopelessly lost and enslaved to sin. But just as God “redeemed Israel from the house of slavery” solely because He loved
them, so He sent His only begotten Son into the world that He loved, so that
the world might be redeemed through Him.
Furthermore, it is by no means due to any righteousness or
loveliness in us that He does this.
Again, Moses tells the tale in chapter 9, verses 4 and 5: “Do not say in your heart, after the LORD
your God has thrust them out before you, ‘It is because of my righteousness
that the LORD has brought me in to possess this land,’ whereas it is because of
the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out before
you. Not because of your righteousness
or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but
because of the wickedness of these nations the LORD your God is driving them
out from before you, and that He may confirm the word that the LORD swore to
your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and to Jacob.”
It was not the uprightness of the Hebrews that caused God to
give them the land of Canaan so that they could go in to possess it. It was because of the wickedness of the
Canaanite nations that He did it. The
Israelites were just as wicked and stubborn as the nations they destroyed. Moses makes this painfully clear in verses 6
through 12 of the same chapter. So, in a
very real sense, it was not about Israel at all. They were just the tool in the hand of the
Lord to, one the one hand administer justice and judgment against the evils of
man, and on the other hand to enable God to glorify Himself and demonstrate His
faithfulness in the fulfillment of His promises to the patriarchs.
In the same way, those who come to faith in Christ now do not
do so because of any spark of holiness within themselves. A Christian, who has trusted Christ as his
Lord and Savior, only does so because God loved him and set His favor on him
and called him to repentance and quickened his heart so that he might
believe. We should never delude
ourselves into thinking that we came to Christ of our own accord. The truth is that Christ came to us through
the ministry of the Holy Spirit. All we
did is respond to His irresistible call with inevitable faith and
repentance. There are many New Testament
passages that teach this accurate view of salvation unequivocally. But it is utterly compelling to me that the
foundation of this crucial New Covenant teaching is presented here in
Deuteronomy as the very nucleus of the Mosaic Law.
Amazingly, there is more to it! The love that God initiates upon those He
chooses produces a love in the one so chosen that can then in turn be directed
back at God. This is unmistakable from
the text as the clear motivation for obedience and the upholding of the
statutes and commands of the Lord. In
chapter 6, verse 5 we read that Israel was to love the Lord their God with all
their heart, soul, and might. It is
fascinating that this is the very factor that will enable the people to keep
the Law. Apart from a genuine love for
God it is impossible to remain faithful to His statutes.
The sequence in chapter 6 builds from one layer to the next
like a house rising up from its foundation.
The love for God in verse 5 produces the binding of His commands on the
heart in verse 6. In turn, the
treasuring of God’s commands in the heart results in the desire to teach those
commands to children in verse 7a. In
fact, the worshiper of God falls so much in love with the Lord and with His
ways that they begin to think about them and talk about them at home, on the
road, when they lie down, and when they stand up (verse 7b). The lover of God begins to immerse him or
herself in the law of God so thoroughly that they create reminders for
themselves because they want to luxuriate in the richness and splendor of the holiness
of God that is revealed in His law. So,
they do things like writing statutes on the doorframes of their homes. They put up plaques on the gates of their
property. They carry the commands with
them wherever they go because they never want to be far from them (verses 8 and
9).
So, the heart of The Law of Moses, the Law of God, is
love. Jesus Himself taught this. In Matthew 22:37-38, in response to the
question “Which is the great commandment
in the Law?” Christ responded, “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your mind.” Jesus was not
teaching something new. What He was
doing was fulfilling and upholding and explaining the real point of the Law to
a people who had grossly distorted it in their own minds for centuries. Are we sometimes guilty of doing the same
injustice to the Mosaic Law? Do we make
the mistake of thinking that the Law is not important to us because we are
under the New Covenant in Christ’s blood?
Nothing could be further from the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment