The Conflict of the Ages series of books begin and end with the words “God is love.” That is the central issue in the great controversy. That is the issue that needs to be demonstrated to the universe. That is the core of God’s character. That is the core of all upright character.
One of the foundational problems of New Testament Pharisees was the atomization of SIN into a series of actions. Because the Pharisees of old did not understand SIN and LAW they could not correctly understand RIGHTEOUSNESS. The entire NTstands against their misunderstandings.
Beyond unity, a second aspect of biblical law is that it is essentially positive rather than negative. Jesus plainly indicated that negative religion is not sufficient when He told the story in Matthew 12 of the person who swept his life clean and put it in order but failed to fill it with vital, outgoing Christianity.
The final condition of that person, claimed Jesus, was worse than in the beginning (verses 43-45). “A religion which consists only in thou shalt not’s,” writes William Barclay, “is bound to end in failure. “
The essentially positive nature of biblical law is also seen in Jesus’ dealing with the rich young ruler, who came to Him, saying, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?”
Jesus met him on his own ground, saying, “Don’t do this and don’t do that.”
“Ah ha,” the young man replied, “I have already stopped doing all those things. What else have You got?”
Jesus said, “Well, if you are really serious about this whole business, if you really want to be perfect, why don’t you go out and sell what you have and fully serve your neighbor.”
The young ruler wasn’t expecting that kind of an answer. He liked the “limited realm” of righteousness where people stop doing things. He stepped back when Jesus pointed him to the “continuous realm” of righteousness where there is no limit and no end of really caring for other people.
Jesus had pointed beyond the negative ten, to the positive law of love. That, of course, was more than the young ruler was ready to commit himself to. He felt relatively comfortable with the negative law.
He was good at not doing this and that, but he was not ready for the unlimited reach of God’s LAW into (Very area of his life (see Matt. 19:16-22).
I am personally very uncomfortable with this whole concept of being a Christian as Jesus explained it. I am a Pharisee by nature. I am very happy with negative approaches to law because I like to know where the limits are.
I feel more comfortable when I can see the extent of my obligations. That brings limo to the les son of Peter in Matthew 18. Peter was concerned about how many times he should forgive his neighbor. Peter knew what the rabbis had to say on the topic. They had read the hook of Amos.
They had concluded that the Lord forgives three times, and the fourth time He lets sinners have it. Well, rabbinic logic suggested that you cannot be more generous than God. Therefore, they concluded, three times should be the limit of human forgiveness.
Now Peter had recognized that Jesus was not a minimalist. So he doubled the rabbinic three forgivenesses and added one for good measure, coming to the conclusion that seven forgivenesses would be quite generous.
ILL.And that is a lot of forgiveness, if you start thinking about it. If I backed into your car seven times in the next seven days in the church parking lot, you would think that seven is probably about six times too many. But Christ bowled poor Peter over. He said, “Peter, Peter, not seven but 490.” Try that sometime. By the time you get to 490, you’ll not have a car. You will also have lost count (see Matt. 18:21, 22).
In actuality Peter was not asking “How much can I love my neighbor?” but “When can I stop loving my neighbor?” That’s a very human question. I like that question. When can I stop loving my neighbor? That is where we are as natural people.
When can I be pensioned off from all this niceness and give people what they deserve? I don’t like grace. Grace is giving people what they don’t deserve. I don’t mind getting it, but I don’t really like passing grace on to others.
Christ comes back with an answer as to when Peter can stop loving his neighbor. His answer is the terrible story about the two debtors. One man owes one hundred pennies, and the other owes ten thousand talents. The one hundred pennies equals one hundred days wages. That is a stiff debt but not impossible to pay. By way of contrast, ten thousand talents is an absolutely impossible debt to pay. In fact, it would take 160,000 years if one worked seven days per week.
Yet the king by grace forgives that huge debt. But the forgiven man refuses to pass on the forgive ness to his fellow, who owes him one hundred pennies. As a result, the king’s forgiveness is revoked.
The punch line of the story is that sinners, who have been forgiven an impossible debt, must pass on God’s mercy to their fellow humans, just as God has had mercy on them.
Thus Peter learned that there is never a time when he could stop loving his neighbor or stop passing on God’s grace (Matt. 18:23-35). The frightful fact is that there is no limit to Christian love.
Like Peter, we are much more comfortable with the negative than the positive approach to law. We want to know when we have fulfilled our quota of goodness so we can relax and be our normal selves.
The negative limits the scope of righteousness and makes it humanly manageable and achievable. Thus legalists of all stripes must of necessity focus on the “thou shalt not’s” and the “small sins.” Continuous love of all of one’s enemies is goal beyond human reach.
ILL. Legalists love to talk about negative and minute behaviors. That thought reminds me of a lady described by Dr.George Knight in one of his presentations. He was together with some friends after an afternoon seminar, and they were discussing the sin of David, when she said,
“Well, some people have that problem. Mine’s eating granola between meals.” From one perspective, she had almost arrived at perfection. Unfortunately, that negative approach to law falls far short of the New Testament ideal.
There is a type of righteousness that picks on smaller and smaller units of action. The NT is the reverse. The Christian way is the endless righteousness expressed in caring for God and humanity that one finds summarized in the two great commandments.
It was that very ideal that drove the rich young ruler (with his smaller-and-smaller mentality) away from Christ in utter frustration.
But we like to define sin as some small negative action, because anybody can overcome a habit if he or she tries hard enough. On the other hand, I have an impossible time loving all my neighbors all the time.
I can get the victory over cheese, peanut butter, or “granola between meals” any old time, but it takes God’s grace for me to love all my neighbors all the lime, particularly when my neighbor is defined by Jesus in a manner that includes enemies. And those neighbors have dogs barking all night long. That takes empowering grace.
So we want to know the limits of love and Christian living, so that we can know when we have arrived. Human perverseness loves the merely negative approach to law because it limits the scope of righteousness.
It makes it humanly achievable. Strangely, many think that an emphasis on the two great commandments is a watering down of the demands laid upon the Christian in daily living. Christ repeatedly demonstrated the opposite to be true.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus expounded on the principles of the law and began to demonstrate their far-reaching inner meaning. It is the “principles,” Mrs. White noted, that “remain forever the great standard of righteousness.”
The negative approach to religion stems from a negative approach to law. The world has seen too much negative religion.
ILL. A young pastor once told me that for many people “the major qualification for being a Christian is the ability to say ‘don’t.” Unfortunately, that caricature is all too true for many people who need to come to grips with a higher standard. It is a relatively simple thing for me to avoid theft, murder, or adultery compared to the unending challenge of caring for all my neighbors as myself.
The negative precepts of the Ten Commandments certainly inform me about aspects of love to God and my neighbor; but important as they are, they are only the tip of the LAW itself.
One can never be saved or become perfect by not working on Sabbath or avoiding theft. In fact, no one will ever be saved because of what he or she has not done. Christianity is a positive, not a negative.
Whether we like it or not (and the Pharisees of old certainly did not like it), Jesus put the standard of righteousness higher than “normal” people care to reach. And most legalists are normal humans.
In fact, it is their emphasis on human accomplishment that proves their normality. They have merely shifted their pride from human accomplishment in worldly endeavors to human accomplishment in spiritual things.
THE LAW IN THE DAILY LIFE.
OK, you may be thinking, you got your point across about the LAW being positive and unified. What you have said is good and helpful, but what does it mean for my life? Well, I thought you would never ask. But I’m delighted that you have, because the practical application of the topic stands at the very center of Christian living
How individual Christians relate to the law is not only important but complex. Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:8 1 - “the law is good, if...one uses it lawfully/properly.” He thus implies that the law is less than good if it is used improperly.
I would like to suggest that one of the greatest dangers the Christian laces is the wrong use of God’s law. A person cannot come into a saving relationship with God through just keeping the law, like Pharisees.
We also know that the function of God’s law is to point out our sin (our nakedness) and thereby drive us to Christ for forgiveness and clothing. Beyond that, we are aware of the tact that the law provides us with both a standard and the standard of God’s judgment.
What we often tail to realize is that we can be quite zealous in keeping God laws while utterly and totally failing in keeping God’s LAW.
Too many keep the Sabbath as like were a penalty for being a Christian rather than the high point of the week. We have the correct day, but too often we have lost the principle of the law of love and the relationship to the God of love that make the day meaningful. The Sabbath becomes a weekly burden rather than a weekly delight.
I think A. T Jones in the 1890s was right when he said that there are THREE TYPES of Christians as they relate to a day of worship.
- There are Sunday keepers,
- Saturday keepers, and
- Sabbath keepers.
The distinction between the last two is crucial to note. Anyone can be a Saturday keeper. After all, it is the right day. But it takes the infilling of the Holy Spirit to be a Sabbath keeper.
Only in loving relationship to the God of the universe do we discover the true meaning of Sabbath. Keeping Saturday is right, but keeping Sabbath is spiritual.
To make my point another way, I could say that when the LAW of God is in our hearts it will be natural and normal to keep God’s many laws. But the reverse is not true. One may keep God’s many laws and still not be keeping God’s LAW.
That is, a person can have outward obedience but not have God’s love in his or her heart. Or to put it yet another way, one can keep the right day but be as mean as the devil.
The predicament of outward obedience accompanied by a lack of inward Christianity is one of the most spiritually dangerous situations we can be in.
After all, people who are deceived at that point may feel quite satisfied with themselves spiritually because they are doing what is right. Like the prodigal son’s older brother, they may never “come to themselves” and see their true condition.
That was the problem with the Pharisees of old. Never forget that they sincerely kept the laws but broke the LAW and put Christ on the cross. There has traditionally been a spirit of mean ness among those who focus on laws rather than on the LAW.
That meanness is especially aimed at those who disagree with them theologically and/or who may not be as zealous as they are on particular laws or rules or regulations. The spirit is not new. Jesus had to face it. And Ellen White called it “the spirit of the Pharisees,” “the spirit of Minneapolis”.
God’s plea is for us to get our priorities right. He wants us to keep His LAW so that we can truly keep His laws. The order is absolutely essential and crucial. The correct order keeps us away from a legalistic bookkeeping approach to salvation that recreates God into the image of a first-century Pharisee.
The point to remember is that if we are safe in Jesus, He will live out His life in us. That means that not only will our love be refocused from our self to God and others, but it means that the wellspring of God’s love will undergird out every action.
“This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel aller those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Heb. 8:10).
Christianity is not just an improvement on the old life. It is a total transformation of a person’s way of thinking, acting, and living. The Christian is not only in Christ, but Christ is in him or her through the softening power of the Holy Spirit.
We can know that we are safe in Jesus when His PRINCIPLE of love becomes the guiding motivation in our lives. One of my favorite texts on the topic is John 13:35:
• “By this,” said Jesus, “all men will know that you are my disciples, if you keep the Sabbath.”
• “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you pay tithe.”
• “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have the proper diet.”
I preached on that text (using the above distortions to illustrate my point) one time and had a brand-new Adventist come up to me. “My Bible,” he exclaimed, “doesn’t read that way in John 13! Where can I find that text?”
He was after the ultimate Adventist proof text. In his exuberance, he had missed my emphasis on the actual reading: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
How I treat my neighbor is the acid test of Christianity. Too long have Adventists applied John 14:15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” to the Ten Commandments. Read John 13, 14, and 15, and see what the context is. “I command you,” Jesus says over and over in these chapters, “to love one another.
Out of that principle and only out of it comes a meaningful keeping of God’s laws.
• Because I love my neighbor, I will not covet my neighbor’s car, house, wife, or husband.
• Because I love my neighbor, I cannot use him or her as a sexual object for my own pleasure.
• Because I love my neighbor, I will want experience the joy of being safe in Jesus.
• Because I love my neighbor, I will want share the delights of the Sabbath.
Love to God and neighbor is the centerpiece of Christianity. It reflects the LAW that undergirds the laws. Neighbor love, as we will see in the rest of this book, stands at the center of sanctification, the emulation of Christ’s character, judgment, and Christian perfection.
“By this,” said Jesus, “all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
