Transcript: Understanding God's Law

PHI 230 Transcription of the Video: Understanding God’s Law 

The audio with transcript: https://cdn.clmedia.org/ethics/understandinggodslaw.mp3 

A preacher friend of mine was pursuing a Doctor of Ministry Degree at a prominent Seminary. One of his classes was on Christian Ethics. Now, this class included 37 ordained preachers most of whom already had Masters Degrees. The professor announced that he wanted to start the class with a quiz to see how much these preachers already knew about Christian ethics. The quiz was this, write down the Ten Commandments. Wow, what an easy quiz for pastors with Masters Degrees. Any preacher could do that, right? Wrong, out of those 37 preachers only 10 could list the Ten Commandments in order. Of those pastors, another 7 at least got all the commandments but in scrambled order and the other 20 pastors couldn't list all Ten Commandments so more than half the pastors ordained already with master’s Degrees in a postgraduate class couldn't list the Ten Commandments all of them. Now, when you ask bible believing people who profess to be evangelicals less than half of them can list even five of the Ten Commandments. I guess we shouldn’t fall over in shock if people who profess to be evangelicals don’t know the commandments if their preachers don't and, in a society, where the people who say their Bible believers don't know the Ten Commandments what’s the general population think? Well about 13% of Americans in general think all Ten Commandments are still binding today so when we talk about Christian Ethics and if we think of the Ten Commandments as quite foundational in Christian Ethics. We have a long way to go beginning with the pastors and then with the pew sitters who claim to believe the Bible but don’t know one of his most basic passages and then of course those to whom were witnesses are not going to know very much at all about God’s will if those of us who are professing Christians don't know God's will very well. 

Christian Ethics it is about following Jesus and that means spirit directed and heartfelt obedience to Jesus’ rules so there's more to it than rules but not less. Jesus has commands. Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) God promised that when his new covenant came he said “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33) He didn’t just say I’ll ditch my law entirely and my commands aren't going to matter anymore. He said, “I’m going to put them not just on paper or on stone but on their hearts.” The apostle Paul said, “You are a letter from Christ written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” (2 Cor 3:3) and so Christian Ethics is this spirit-directed heartfelt obedience to Jesus’ rules as we become more and more like Jesus. 

Now, some people are eager to have monuments of the Ten Commandments on public property controlled by the government. Now that might be okay, but shouldn’t we first have preachers and church goers who know the Ten Commandments. Monuments of the Ten Commandments on public property can’t replace having the Lords commands in our hearts. If we want a culture shaped by the Ten Commandments and by God’s revealed rules, we don’t need government monuments nearly as much as we need people who are letters from Christ whose hearts and lives are scripted by the Holy Spirit of the living God. Why push for monuments on government property when most churches don't even have the Ten Commandments posted in their own building? When many churches seldom or never read the Ten Commandments as part of worship. When many church people don't post the commandments in their own homes and when far too many church people are as likely to violate the Lord’s day, commit adultery, lie or covet as many of their non-church neighbors. The most important thing that Christians can do to promote the Ten Commandments is not monuments on public property but to memorize those commandments, to cherish them and to obey them joyfully as they seek to become more like Jesus Christ.

 Now, as we think about God's commandments let me first talk a little bit about some different kinds of Old Testament laws. The Ten Commandments are very fundamental and basic but there are other kinds of laws in the Old Testament as well. 

One kind is Ceremonial. These are rituals that point ahead to Jesus and that are now fulfilled in Him and these are no longer required Christians. The Old Testament has many laws about sacrifices for instance and all those are fulfilled in the sacrifice of Jesus and we don’t need to do those sacrifices anymore. It has laws about food and drink restrictions and of what is permitted and all of those have been removed with Jesus Christ and the fulfillment in Him. Circumcision is a ritual and certain feast days those are all part of the Ceremonial kind of Old Testament laws that pointed ahead to Jesus, are fulfilled in Him, and are no longer required of Christians and are to be read as pointers to Jesus when we read the Old Testament rather than as abiding requirements on every follower of Jesus. 

A second kind of Old Testament law is Civil Law, and these are case laws for governing the old covenant people of Israel and these laws still today can provide valuable information for a just society but they're not for every nation and every people in every age. For instance, there are some laws about regulating the institution of slavery. Those laws don’t approve of slavery they just regulate it in that particular setting or laws regulating divorce we know from the Old Testament from Jesus himself that God never approved of divorce, but there were some Civil Laws for regulating divorce when it did happen. There were the laws of Jubilee where land would go back to its original owner’s family after fifty years and so forth. There is a variety of Civil Laws from which much can be learned but they are not all binding in detail for all believers in all nations in all ages. 

So, you have the Ceremonial Laws, the Civil Laws but then also in the Old Testament you have the Moral Laws and that’s God’s timeless will for loving him and loving our neighbor in all times and in all places and for the rest of this talk and throughout the rest of my teaching on Christian Ethics my main focus is on God’s Moral Law, his timeless will. This Ten Commandments are one of the great summaries of that along with the command to love God above all and love our neighbor as ourselves and then there are other commands as well that are clearly of moral intent about our relationship to God and our relationship to others. And I want to focus on Gods Moral Law and understanding it and on what it does in our lives. 

Now how do we come to know God’s Moral Law? The first and clearest way is to listen to what God says. Scripture has God speaking clear commands and commands in the Old Testament that are repeated as binding in the New Testament are very clearly Gods continuing and abiding will for his people. So, we can know God’s Moral Law simply based on what God has told us in the scriptures. And part of ethics then is thinking through those commands and trying to apply them to the various kinds of situations that arise. 

Another way to know God’s Moral Law is the way God stamps certain moral matters on our hearts through conscience. Romans 2 says “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.” (Rom 2:14-15) So, God’s word is written on their hearts and their conscience is telling them something that they kind of know because God plants it in them even though they haven’t necessarily read it in the Holy Scriptures. 

A third way to know God’s Moral Law or at least know some aspects of it is simply the design of the world, how the world and humans function. For example, in the area of sexuality it’s quite obvious that when people sleep around and you don’t have a one man and one woman faithful to each other it has very bad consequences for child poverty, it has very bad consequences for sexually transmitted disease and the like. But the design is seen in how it functions when God’s law is obeyed well. We can tell from male and female anatomy what parts fit together that ought to give us some clues about what is right sexually and what is wrong. When we look at the way many other things in society and in our own lives work normally this gives us an idea of what’s right and wrong. It’s not infallible like God’s word is but we can see how things are designed quite closely related to that then are the consequences. When we see that something usually results in health and benefit for example when parents are loving toward their children and are firm with them often their children grow up with a very healthy sense of themselves and sense of their place in the world. When parents are abusive, cruel and don’t show any love or when they are just total wimps and never discipline their children for anything it often results in children who don’t have a sense of decency or who don’t flourish. And so, you can tell from consequences and from the design of things what the right thing to do is. Above all though, scripture is the main way to know God’s Moral Law and then these other things; conscience, observed design of things in the world, or the results and consequences of certain behaviors are to be evaluated in light of God’s Moral Law revealed in scripture. So, those are ways to know God’s Moral Law. 

What can God’s Moral Law, as revealed in scripture, do for us? Well one thing God’s law can do is teach us sin. That is maybe a bit of a downer but that is one of the main purposes of God’s law is to show us what is wrong with us. We can lie to ourselves, we can fool ourselves, we can pretend we’re pretty good people until we really hear and understand what God requires and then we say “Whoops, I am not as good as I thought. In fact, I am in a world of trouble.” God’s law can show unsaved people their sinfulness and their desperate need of a savior and drive them toward Jesus. That is an extremely important and valuable function of God’s law. 

Now, one thing God’s law doesn’t do. It cannot help us to earn God’s favor or save ourselves. We simply cannot undo the results of our own sin. We simply cannot make up for sins that we have already committed. We can’t just change our own character by trying a little harder. Sure, we can change a few behaviors but who we are just cannot be changed without God giving us new birth and new life. Our past record can’t be taken away except by the blood of Jesus Christ so whatever the law can do for us one thing it can never do is earn God’s favor and save us by our own efforts. It can teach us our sin and it can show us the pattern of love. Once we are saved God’s law shows thankful, saved, spirit-filled believers the pattern of love towards God and towards other people. So, the two main uses of the law are simply that it teaches us our sin and our need of Jesus Christ. and that’s an important reason to study ethics is to show how far short we fall of the glory of God and how desperately we need Jesus and then it can show us how we can become more and more like Jesus as his spirit enables us to follow his commands and his patterns for love.

Now we have mentioned that the law can’t save us, but it can show us our need for Christ. The apostle Paul says in Galatians chapter three. “Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe. Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So, the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith.” (Galatians 3:22-24) Let me read that last statement again. The law was put in charge to lead us to Christ so that we might be justified by faith. So clearly to be right with God comes through faith in Jesus Christ and the purpose of the law is to lock us up as prisoners. 

Now, what is it that imprisons us? This passage we just read says that sin imprisons us. The whole world is a prisoner of sin. Jesus said everyone who sins is slave to sin and so sin is what imprisons us. But it also says we are held prisoners by the law. The law imprisons us. And when you hear those two statements side by side right in the same passage that the world is a prisoner of sin and that we are held prisoners by the law you might ask well, is the law bad like sin? I mean it sounds like a jailer just like sin is a jailer. Well think of it this way. One way of talking about why people go to prison is we say crime puts people in prison, but we also say police and guards put people in prison and when we say that we are not saying that the police and the guards are crime. They are the enforcers who deal with crime, and so it is in relation to sin and the law. Sin is the bad thing that makes us guilty and deserving and addicted and puts us in a prison and then the law is the enforcer that shows us the badness of it and locks us there. So, the law is actually holy and righteous and good and yet it acts as the police and the prison guards to lock us up where our crime has put us.

Now the law as a prison or as a guard does it save? We’ve already answered that but lets just think about that again in terms of this prison picture. Does spending time in prison really “pay a debt to society”? Sometimes we speak of a person going to prison and paying their debt to society. What really happens actually society spends many, many, many thousands of dollars every year to lock them in prison and gets poorer, because they’re in there. They haven’t payed any debt to society by sitting in prison. You can’t make up for your crimes just by sitting in a cell for a long time, but that’s how we punish people. My point here is that if the law holds us in a prison that does not mean that the law paid for the wrongs we did toward God and others. Does the penitentiary create penitence? That’s the word that it comes from. Does a penitentiary create penitence or is it just “the pen”? The place where your locked and held up and doesn’t create penitence. Do “correctional institutions” really correct? Do “reformatories” really reform? Well, here’s the answer. Does prison save? 75% of prisoners will commit another crime after they are released. Okay I am just talking about prison life. I worked with the prison ministry for a good number of years and my father has been involved in visiting prisoners and mentoring them on their release. Three-fourths of people who are in prison for a crime will commit another one when they get out. Fourteen percent of people who were discipled in the way of Jesus Christ while they were in prison will return to crime. So those are just some general statistics about what prison itself will do often times prison is just a graduate school in crime. You are hobnobbing with other people who are maybe even worse than you are and leading you into terrible things. So, prison itself won’t save you but even in terms of prison life when people come to know Jesus Christ, he changes them on the inside. Now apply all of that to God’s law; God’s law does not save us it shows us our sin. “What shall we say then? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, You shall not covet.” (Romans 7:7) 

There is a lot of things that we do wrong that we don’t know they are wrong until we are told one of them is coveting. It is natural to want what is not mine and what I don’t have a right to. I want it, nothing wrong with that, oh yes there is. The bible says when you covet you are doing wrong. Some people use God’s name in vain every other word. “Oh my god” is not a prayer it’s their way of exclaiming things. They don’t know “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.” “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” They ignore that commandment if they do know it, but they see nothing wrong with that nothing wrong at all. Or some people will bow down to images of their God or bow down to an image of Jesus Christ and pray toward that image and if you told them it’s wrong to worship images they might say, “says who.” Well, the Ten Commandments say so. And in one case after another there are commands that we break that we might see nothing wrong with, but that God’s law shows it to be sinful. And Paul said, “I wouldn’t have known coveting was wrong if the law hadn’t said you shall not covet.” 

How do you know your misery? The law of God tells me. Sometimes you feel your misery from things going wrong or from your guilty conscience but sometimes the only way you know misery is when God just plane says so. He says, “this is wrong” and then you discover for the first time that you are at odds with God. Now, God’s law doesn’t just show sin and show wrong things that we do but you wanna know what it actually stirs up sin. I remember back in my college days. One of my friends was a chemistry geek. You know, he was a nice guy, but he was a geek, and he did know a ton about chemistry and this guy one day decided to brew up a concoction of foul-smelling stuff. It wasn’t actually harmful. It wouldn’t kill anybody. It would just make you wish you were dead if you smelled it and he put it in a jar and he screwed the lid on the jar of that horrible smelling potion very tightly and then he wrote three words on that lid. Do not open. Then he took the jar and put it in the hallway of the dormitory. Well guess what hallway smelled like less than an hour later. Some dunce had to go ahead and open it because it said, “Do not open”. Do you have little children? I’ve had a large family; we have 8 children that we brought up. You tell a little child don’t touch this. Ooh, you’d almost have been better off not saying don’t touch it because as soon as you tell them don’t touch it, or don’t mess with this, oh they gotta touch it, oh they just have to touch, oh how can I live without touching it. It just seems that when something is forbidden, we want it more and that’s because we are sinners and the moment, we hear a command from someone outside ourselves we want it. When something is commanded to do, we would rather not do it. When we’re commanded not to do it then all of a sudden, we want to do it more than we ever did before. We wanna have self on that throne. God’s law therefore it actually stirs up sin it makes us worse than we might otherwise be in many cases. “Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! (…it didn’t cause the death I was gonna die anyway cause of my sin) It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.” (Roman 7:13) 

One of God’s main purposes for the law was not only to show us how sinful we are but actually make us even worse so that we can’t fool ourselves that we’re really good hearted. Our hearts come out in the way we react to commands that we don’t happen to like it stirs up sin and makes us worse and sometimes when we’re told somethings right and even when we start to agree it’s right, we some how get addicted and the good that I wanna do I can’t do and the bad stuff I don’t wanna do I keep on doing and having the law hanging over me can almost deepen my addiction. The law then is a teacher of sin. God’s law shows us sin and even stirs up sin, it is evidence of how bad we really are. “The law was added because of transgression until the Seed, until Jesus, to whom the promise referred had come…So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ so that we might be justified by faith.” (Gal 3:19) I remember a letter from a man who said “If I hadn’t come to prison, I would still be caught up in the black hole of evil. Prison actually rescued me from myself.” Now he didn’t actually mean that prison had saved him, he meant Jesus had saved him, but he would never had met Jesus if he hadn’t had gone to prison, because then he realized, finally, what path his life was on and how rotten a person he had become and prison helped him to see his sin and his desperate need to change, to be forgiven, to have a savior and that’s what God’s law can do for us. We are caught in a black hole of evil and when we finally discover it, and God’s law shows it to us we’re ready to turn to Christ. 

Well, if we don’t have God’s law and if God’s law is not preached by pastors anymore or if people are not reading God’s word anymore, after a while the Gospel doesn’t make much sense. Without a sense of God’s law in our own guilt who needs a savior. C.S. Lewis wrote about this extensively and he observed that in modern western society people focus on God’s duties to them, not their duties to him. If something unpleasant happens to them they say, “How could God let this happen to me?” When they’re just going about their lives sinning like crazy from day to day they don’t ever say “How can I be doing this to God?” People focus on God’s duty to them because they don’t know God’s law, they don’t know that they’re in the presence of the Holy God. “A sense of sin, says Lewis, is almost totally lacking.” “Moderns approached God Himself as his judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether God can be acquitted for creating such a world.” Lewis says, “We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.” And Lewis did that in a variety of ways his Mere Christianity which began as a series of radio addresses on the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and then later was published as the book Mere Christianity. Lewis set about in his first section by talking about right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the Universe and he did that in part to say, you know when you have this inner sense of right and wrong it’s pointing to something or somebody who’s out there and so right and wrong is a clue that there is a God who defines right and wrong but Lewis’ real reason for focusing on that wasn’t just to give one more evidence for the existence of God but to show us what a pickle we’re in before that God and in his presence. He wanted to set people up for their need of a savior and show us our sin. Who needs a savior? You know the bumper sticker, I say this often, the bumper sticker “Jesus is the answer” and then the bumper sticker that came along “If Jesus is the answer what is the question?” We need God’s law in order to know the question. The question is How can I be saved from such a mess? How can I be forgiven and transformed? So, God’s Moral Law can teach us sin and yet it can’t save us only Jesus can do that. And then once it’s taught us sin and has driven us to the savior there is another extremely valuable thing that God’s Moral Law does. It gives us this pattern of love and shows us thankful, saved, Spirit-filled believers the pattern of love toward God and towards other people.

What’s the greatest commandment in the whole bible? Well Jesus was asked that question and he said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. He was quoting from Deut. 6 and then he added the second. He said the second most important is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself” quoting from the book of Lev 19:18. “All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40) So love, love for God, love for neighbor are the two greatest commandments and all the law and the prophets hang on those two commands. Now the word love doesn’t appear in the Ten Commandments. Is that because the Ten Commandments are not about love at all? Is that because none of them have anything to do with love? No, it’s because all of them are about love. As Jesus said, “All the law and the prophets hang on the commands to love God and to love our neighbor” and if you study the commandments you find that the first four commandments are about loving God and the other six commandments are about loving people. Those are sometimes called the two tables of the law. The first four about our relationship to God and the last six are about our relationship to people. And we just don’t understand God’s commands apart from love nor do we understand love apart from God’s commands. Although love is a deep inner affection it takes a definite outward form. Love isn’t just some formless fog it has shape it has boundaries. The Ten Commandments define the shape and the boundaries of love. If we love the God who saved us, we will not serve other Gods. We will not make images of God. We will not misuse God’s name. We won’t cram the Lords day with our own work, or hobbies or what have you. If we love people, we will honor our parents and value family. We wont kill. We wont commit adultery. We wont steal. We wont lie. We won’t covet and wish that someone else’s blessings can be all ours instead. That’s the shape and the boundaries of love. Love comes from heaven but it’s down to earth. Love comes from the eternal God, but it shows up in day-by-day obedience to God’s commands. The Ten Commandments and all other related commands show us the pattern for love in real life. 

The Heidelberg Catechism has this question and answer: 

Q. No one in this life can obey the Ten Commandments perfectly; why then does God want them preached so pointedly? 

A. First, so that the longer we live them more we may come to know our sinfulness and the more eagerly look to Christ for forgiveness of sins and righteousness. Second, so that, while praying to God for the grace of the Holy Spirit, we may never stop striving to be renewed more and more after God’s image, until after this life we reach or goal: perfection. (Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 115) 

That’s why the commands have to be preached. That’s why Christian Ethics must be proclaimed. When we do not preach God’s will and God’s law people after a while say “*yawn*Who needs Jesus?” and they have no sense of sin and if there are believers and they don’t hear God’s will and God’s rules and the path of ethics in the way of Jesus, then they do not make progress in becoming more and more like Jesus and so we need to proclaim God’s law, to drive people to Christ and recognize their sin and then once they’ve been saved to become like Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the guidance of those very commands from God’s word. 

What can God’s law do? It can teach us our sin, it can’t save us, it can show us the pattern of love as Spirit-filled believers. So welcome to the study of Christian Ethics. When you study Christian Ethics with me, I am afraid you’re not going to be able to at the end of the course say I don’t know the Ten Commandments and get away with it. You’ve gotta memorize the Ten Commandments. You’ve gotta memorize the fruit of the spirit. You’ve gotta memorize the Armor of God for fighting against Satan’s strategies. It is important to know these things and hide them in your heart. Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15) and we want to get that law not just on paper, not just on some lecture, “we want God’s law and his commands in our heart” (Jeremiah 31:33), so that we become “a letter from Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 3:3). One that is written not just with ink but God’s letter to the world around us so that when people see us, they see something of Jesus Christ Himself living and working in us.