God Thoughts
God Thoughts
Recently I heard a pastor say, “God loves you more than He loves His commandments”. I think I know what he was trying to express: religion has a whole boatload of traditions and rules that are so off-putting to so many that they often give up and go away, or they aren’t interested in the first place, and they lose the peace that God’s love brings to our lives. But there’s a very common misperception here, so I thought I’d make an attempt at sharing my thoughts on the subject.
The misperception has to do with the nature of the commandments we’re talking about, and also the nature of the ‘old covenant’ and the ‘new covenant’ that God made with His people. Many schools of Christian doctrine teach that since the Israelites repeatedly broke the Old Testament covenant with God, God sent Jesus to make a new covenant, and so the laws of the old covenant, including the 10 commandments, no longer apply to Jesus followers. That belief is commonly expressed by the saying, “I’m no longer under the law, I’m under grace”. Let’s go back to the beginning and see.
There are two sets of laws given in the Old Testament. There was the Moral Law, God’s 10 Commandments, spoken in His own voice from Mt. Sinai, and written with His own finger on two tablets of stone (twice, because Moses broke the first set when he came back down from the mountain with them and found the Israelites partying around their newly-forged golden calf). So let’s take a look at the Moral Law.
The Moral Law has existed from the beginning of God, (whenever that was) and will continue to exist as long as God exists. (If you don’t believe that God exists, you may as well stop right here!) He says, “I am the Lord, I do not change”. (Malachi 3:6.) God is love. That’s a hard concept for a lot of people because of all the suffering in the world, but that’s a topic for another post. This Moral Law is the law of heaven. It’s the Will of God. When we pray ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, we’re praying for that Moral Law to be in effect in this world. These 10 Commandments ARE God. They are the written, outward expression of His character, LOVE. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us … .” (1 John 4:7-10.)
The first four commandments teach us how to love God. Don’t have any other gods but Him. Not money, power, position, pride, any of the temptations of this world. Don’t make any images of anything and bow down and worship them. Don’t show contempt for God or Jesus by taking their names in vain. Remember the Sabbath, resting and spending time with God, because He’s our Creator and Savior. Do these ask way, way, way too much from us? And when I learn to respond to God’s love, how do I show my love for Him? Do I just say thanks and go my merry way? How do I express my love? “My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.” (1 John 3:18.) I express my love and gratitude by obedience, just as I expected my children to do because they love me.
Remember the Beatles’s song “All We Need Is Love”, which became an instant mantra? We still hear it, whether it’s a sincere request or just used to sway opinions. Believe it or not, the operating instructions to get that love are found in the last six commandments, sometimes bundled into what we learned in childhood as the Golden Rule. Don’t murder your neighbor. Don’t steal from them. Don’t sleep with their wives or husbands. Don’t tell lies or gossip about them. Don’t be jealous of what they have. Pretty much every misery in this sorry world falls into one or more of those categories. I’ve left the fifth commandment for last (honor your father and mother) because I’m struggling how to express myself in light of so much child abuse, but notice God didn’t say love or like your parents, He just said honor them. I looked up the definitions of honor and one of them was ‘adherence to what is right or to a conventional standard of conduct’, much the way I would ‘honor' a promise or a contract I made as an adult. So that’s the Moral Law, God’s 10 Commandments, in effect yesterday, today, and forever.
Now let’s look at what is known as the Mosaic Law, the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible, the “Book of the Law”. When God sent Moses to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, they’d been slaves there for four hundred years. They were almost completely assimilated into the Egyptian culture. They worshipped Egyptian gods, ate the same foods, and had pretty much forgotten the traditions and practices of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So imagine Moses’s consternation when, after God had drowned Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, he was faced with 600,000 scared, whiny, angry, rebellious people that he was responsible for shepherding through the desert for forty years. A people who had been slaves for so long they had no idea how to govern themselves. His father-in-law, Jethro, helped him put together a system of judicial governing, then God helped him with the necessary tribal organizations, where each tribe would be located in the encampments, the order they were to step out in when they started their journeys, sanitary laws, dietary laws for their health, and most importantly, God dictated the specific ceremonial laws to teach them how to worship Him again, and focus them on their promised Messiah. Moses wrote all these into the Book of the Law. And it’s also important to note that the Moral Law, on the tablets of stone, written with God’s finger, was placed into the Ark of God, in the compartment under the mercy seat where God sat when He communed with Moses, while the Book of the Law was placed in a pocket on the outside of the Ark, signifying the precedence God placed on each.
Over the centuries, as always happens when humans think they control things, laws and traditions were added and subtracted to the Mosaic law. These were what Jesus railed against: “Then the Pharisees and scribes asked Him, ‘Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashed hands?’ He answered and said to them, ‘Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men - the washing of pitchers and cups, and many other such things you do.’” (Mark 7:6-8.) And in Matthew, He taught that the 10 Commandments were still to be observed: “He answered and said to them, ‘Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition? For God commanded, saying, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ … ‘Thus you have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition. Hypocrites!” (Matthew 15:3-4, 6.) “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:17-19. Again, Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments.” (John 14:15.) What were Jesus’s commandments? “Jesus answered him, ‘The first of all the commandments is: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31.) How do we figure out how to do them? The 10 Commandments are our operating instructions. According to Jesus’s own words, it was the Mosaic Law, the ‘ceremonial law’, that Jesus came to nail to the cross, not God’s law. That was the ‘good news’ of the Gospel. The people were freed from all the traditions of men that separated them from the love of God and their Savior.
And here’s the difference between the ‘Old Covenant’ and the ‘New Covenant’: “So Moses came and called for the elders of all the people, and laid before them all these words which the Lord commanded him. Then all the people answered together and said, ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do.” (Exodus 19:7-8.) The Israelites entered into that first covenant with God based on their trust in their own selves instead of putting their trust in God; ‘all that the Lord has spoken we will do’. I think God said to Himself, “Yeah, we’ll see how that goes”. And the commonly accepted thinking on the ‘New Covenant’ is that it only came into being when Jesus began His ministry, in the New Testament, but it was actually in the works during Old Testament times. “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah - not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them,” says the Lord. “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” says the Lord: “I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” (Jeremiah 31:31.) He will put His law, the Moral Law, in our minds, meaning we will know and understand it, and He will write it on our hearts, meaning we will obey it because of our love and gratitude for His great love and mercy toward us. God says “I will do this.” We won’t be keeping this covenant trusting in our own efforts, we’ll keep it trusting in God’s grace to strengthen and support us in our obedience, and that the blood Jesus spilled for us on the cross will cover us when we stumble.
In closing, I think to say He loves me more than He loves His commandments needs a little clarification, so that people aren’t mislead into believing that because God loves them, His 10 Commandments are no longer in effect, and they can trespass them at will because they’re ‘under grace’. As Paul said, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?” (Romans 6:1-2, 15-16.) God loved Adam and Eve, but His commandment to them took precedence over that love when they disobeyed Him. God loved Lucifer, the first and most beautiful of His creations, yet when Lucifer started the war in heaven, he was defeated and cast out. God loves us, but like Paul says, obedience to His law is still the test of our love for Him.