We’ve been shocked and horrified once again this week at the shooting of children by children, from Santee CA to next door in Pennsylvania. And the commentators and pundits are asking once again what kinds of laws we should pass to keep this from happening. Most are honest enough to admit that something is wrong with our culture. But nobody is quite sure what it is, except that there’s too much violence on TV and parents aren’t home enough. But we can’t pass laws about that, heaven forbid that we should interfere with first
amendment rights, or any of the other rights we’ve come to take for granted. So the argument goes back once again to what kind of laws we should pass. Of course, none of the gun control laws currently on the books - or even being debated in Congress - would have done any good in this case. So we find ourselves watching this teenager, whose friends describe him as “just an ordinary kid, a nice kid”, sitting in a courtroom with his lawyers about to be tried “as an adult” and facing a lifetime in prison. Like the 14-year-old in Broward County FL, who just got life for killing a 6-year old two years ago, practicing wrestling moves he’d seen on TV.
We’ve passed laws requiring children to be treated as adults because we didn’t know what to do with the increase in violent crime among our youth. We’ve passed laws requiring mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses because we’re losing the war on drugs. We have a higher percentage of people in prison than any other country in the world... because we don’t know what else to do with the disintegration of our society except pass more laws. We have more laws and more lawyers than we know what to do with... and yet sin continues to abound. Are we missing something?
You may remember that a couple of weeks ago the Presbytery voted against Amendment O, which would have prohibited Presbyterian pastors to perform same-sex unions. The day after that, I went’ to my regular monthly meeting of the Church and Society committee, with some trepidation, I must confess, because I’m the token conservative and frankly I didn’t want to get into another fruitless debate. I was, believe it or not, talked out. But we did discuss it, quite reasonably I thought, but during the discussion the chair said something really surprised me: he said “Conservatives seem to think that passing a law is the solution to everything.”
The reason I was surprised is that most of the laws out there are the result of people thinking that government is the solution to all social ills, from the major to the trivial: from racism to fanny-slapping, everything is covered under some law or another. And in the denomination, liberals wrote the provisions governing the
number of racial-ethnic minorities on every committee, and well, I could go on for hours. So why aren’t we all getting along?
Believe it or not, I came up with an answer. It might even be THE answer.
All the laws we pass don’t create a civil or just society because we no longer have a common idea of what a civil and just society should look like.
We live - we must live - in a society ordered by law. None of us want to live in a lawless environment... Sometimes those laws are frustrating and inconvenient. Be honest, now... have you ever run a red light at 2:00 in the morning when there was nothing coming from any direction? But on the other hand, if you’ve ever driven in Rome - or Istanbul or Djakarta which are even worse - you start being grateful for the traffic rules here at home.
Think about what kind of society one without laws would be like. It would be a society with no authority outside of the individual. Judges 21:25 describes such a situation: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes." When there is no objective authority or law, each individual must
develop his or her own law. The problem you have, of course, is that someone may decide that it is right to steal your possessions and kill you. Who is to say he is wrong, if there is no objective law?
We aren’t there yet, but that is where the idea that there is no absolute truth ultimately leads. This point of view is known as relativism. Taken to its extreme and ultimate conclusion, relativism permits everyone to do what is right in their own eyes. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes that first made popular the idea that there is no such thing as “natural law”, that is laws that are inherent in the nature of the created world. He believed that laws are only a merely a codification of political policies judged to be socially and economically advantageous... it is a tool for social engineering, at best.
But who decides how to engineer society?
Most laws in western society are derived from the Bible, God's Law. Of course, many would like to do away with the Bible, they insist on laws that leave any concept of God completely out of the discussion. The cry is, "you can’t bring religion into politics!" whether you want to teach values or outlaw abortion. Where do they think laws against murder come from? Where do they think laws protecting the poor or mandating fair weights and measures came from?
When we think of people who reject the law of God we naturally think first of non-Christians. Even Christians, unfortunately, are often guilty of this same offense. Proclaiming "we aren’t under law, but under grace" many who claim the name of Christ practically establish a religion of doing their own thing in Jesus’ name. Some liberals seem to be saying that following Christ means accepting any kind of behavior at all in the name of inclusivism. Others ignore the Old Testament completely, and only look at the New Testament (or their favorite
parts of it) for objective guidance. The error on the conservative side is to forget grace and become legalists, slavishly observing every letter of the law.
But neither of these is the answer.
Jesus said that He came "to fulfill the law, not destroy it." What does that mean?
It means that the law has a purpose beyond itself.
If carefully obeying every nuance of the law was all that God wanted of us, the Pharisees would have been sitting pretty. They would indeed have been on the road to heaven, and Jesus wouldn’t have gotten so upset with them. But the law wasn’t an end in itself. The law was a tool God gave Moses and the Israelites in order to form a people for himself. It was, in fact, social engineering of precisely the kind that our political classes are so fond of nowadays. The difference is that God knew what he was doing. He knew what people were like, he knew what
kind of society he wanted, and he knew what it took to herd them in that direction.
Legalists get part of it right. They know that the law is important. What they don’t know is why it’s important.
Now, the Jews of Jesus’ day meant several things when they used the word law. They used it both for the Ten Commandments and for the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The word also covered the Oral or Scribal Law. The phrase Jesus used, “The Law and the Prophets”, meant the whole of Scripture, the first five books, the historical books, the prophets and the psalms - what we would call the Old Testament - but not the Oral Law.
When the Pharisees of Jesus’ day spoke of the law, they meant all of them: the Ten Commandments, the Torah, and the Oral Law.
What was it, this Oral or Scribal Law? It was a vast system of rules and regulations that were intended to define and apply the law of God to every possible life situation. Around the middle of the third century A.D., a
summary known as the Mishnah was written. It contains 63 tractates on the law, and in English runs about eight hundred pages. Then they wrote commentaries to explain the Mishnah, known as the Talmuds. The Jerusalem Talmud is 12 volumes long; the Babylonian Talmud has 60 volumes. It sought to nail down the precise rules governing every situation in life. The ones Jesus used to get most incensed about were the Sabbath day regulations.
The principle God gives us is that we should have a day of rest. We shouldn’t work on that day. But the scribes, the teachers of the law, were not satisfied with that. No, they had to define what “work” is. One kind of work is “to carry a burden”. What is a burden? This is what the Scribal Law says:
"... food equal in weight to a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put upon a wound, oil enough to anoint a small member, water enough to moisten an eye-salve, paper enough to write a customs house notice upon, ink enough to write two letters of the alphabet, reed enough to make a pen ... "
On and on these regulations droned. Hours were spent arguing whether someone could move a lamp from one place to another or if someone could lift his or her child. Well, it all depends on what your definition of “work” is.
You can see why Jesus opposed this sort of thing. It isn’t the law of God at all. It’s a system for worshiping the law, not for following it. The scribes were so focused on the law as an end in itself that they forgot or ignored the God who gave it, his character and purposes and values.
And we have legalists in the contemporary church as well. Even though they may preach a theology of salvation by grace, they often seem to be very much more concerned with the rules than with God himself. The problem with legalism, however, is that it produces law-breakers, not law-keepers.
Jesus was not a legalist. He was a law-keeper. He did not come to abolish the law or the prophets. On the contrary, he held them in the highest esteem. But when Jesus said that He came to fulfill the law, he was not referring to the Scribal Law at all, but to the purpose for which God gave the law to begin with. Jesus was
pointing to a goal that transcended slavish adherence to a set of formal procedures.
Notice how He emphases the importance of the entirety of God's law. “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” [v. 18] The smallest letter to which he referred was a Hebrew letter about the size of an apostrophe. The stroke of the pen to which he referred was a serif, the little projection at the foot of a letter. There is no way that anyone can claim that Jesus’ gift of freedom means freedom from the law. Every part of the law, even the smallest, was and is important to Jesus.
Jesus makes that perfectly clear: “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” [v. 19]
Jesus is not teaching that the law was a means of salvation. This is not it at all. But God's law reflects God's character, his values, his purposes. And because those don’t change, God's law doesn’t change. No one can repeal God’s character or divert him from his purposes.
So it is very clear that God’s law is just as important today as it always has been. Even though the law doesn’t accomplish our salvation, it was given for our good. And those good purposes are twofold: first of all, following God’s laws creates a just and civil society. It creates an atmosphere of shalom, in which all people can grow and thrive.
Second, the law was given to point us to Jesus Christ. The old ceremonial laws which Israel followed from Moses to Jesus were makeshifts, temporary substitutes to follow until replaced by the sacrifice of Christ. But the moral law of God remains as much in effect today as it was before Christ came. And the reason for that is that God’s desire for his children, his intention, his design is that we should all become like Jesus.
The teachers of the law were wholly focused on keeping the letter of the law, but they never raised their eyes to see if they were headed in the right direction. It’s like someone being so concerned with the state of her engine that she doesn’t bother to make sure she’s on the right road. But Jesus goes on to say, "For I say to you, that unless your righteous surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." [v. 20] What the law does, and what Jesus points out during this entire sermon, is show us how incapable we are of following it. The law is a mirror. Through the law, as Paul says, we become conscious of sin. [Rom 7:7] The law shows us that the only hope we have of being righteous, according to God’s standards is by grace, the twin gifts of forgiveness and of the Holy Spirit.
God wanted righteous people in the Old Testament, too... John Wesley points out that “there is no [conflict] at all between the law and the gospel; that there is no need for the law to pass away, in order to the establishing of the gospel. Indeed neither of them supersedes the other, but they agree perfectly well together. Yea, the very same words, considered in different respects, are parts both of the law and of the gospel. If they are considered as commandments, they are parts of the law: if as promises, of the gospel. Thus, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart," when considered as a commandment, is a branch of the law; when regarded as a promise, is an essential part of the gospel; -- the gospel being no other than the commands of the law proposed by way of promises. Accordingly poverty of spirit, purity of heart, and whatever else is enjoined in the holy law of God, are no other, when viewed in a gospel light, than so many great and precious promises. There is, therefore, the closest connection that can be conceived between the law and the gospel. On the one hand, the law continually makes way for, and points us to the gospel; on the other, the gospel continually leads us to a more exact fulfilling of the law. The law, for instance, requires us to love God, to love our neighbor, to be meek, humble, or holy. We feel that we are not sufficient for these things; yea, that "with man this is impossible:" But we see a
promise of God, to give us that love, and to make us humble, meek, and holy: We lay hold of this gospel, of these glad tidings; it is done unto us according to our faith; and "the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us," through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
You see, righteous people keep the law because they are righteous on the nside. They don’t become right with God by following the law, but having become a particular kind of people due to their relationship with God, they keep the law not only in letter, but also in spirit. And the spirit within which all the laws are to be obeyed is the spirit of love, loving God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. God’s laws, and only God’s laws, work to create a just and civil society - when they are crafted by someone who knows us, someone who knows what we were created to be, who knows what justice and peace are, and who has given us hearts on which the Holy Spirit can work. All other systems will fail.
Our children are taught by society that there is no truth, that morality is what feels right to you, and that we create our own reality. They are taught that rebellion against authority is cool. If they’ve even heard of wrong and right, they don’t know what makes something right, or why it matters. And when nothing matters, anything goes.
We all want a civil and just society - including our kids. A civil and just society is a righteous society, and for that you need righteous people, and that means loving and obeying the laws of God. The only way there is through Jesus Christ.
