You’re running late for work. You don’t want to get docked and you don’t want to have to work late to make up the time. What to do? You come up with the most natural answer – drive fast! If the speed limit is 55, why not go 75? Besides, the speed limit is just a suggestion, right? And if there aren’t any police around, have you really broken the law anyway? It’s only breaking it if you get caught. And it’s just a speed limit. It’s not like it’s a real law, like murder or burglar or something nasty like that.
Not only that, but we all know that the only reason they make silly laws like that is because our governing leaders don’t want us to have any fun. They just can’t wait to rob us of our joy and freedom and control everything we do.
I know that my story is probably a bit of an exaggeration. We all know that there are usually good reasons for the laws we live under. But seriously, don’t we sometimes feel that way about God? Don’t we often see Him as a lawgiving killjoy? It’s an image of Him that is often ingrained in our psyches at a very young age.
Think about it for a moment. When you were a child, how often were you told that God might punish you if you didn’t obey His commandments? Or how about all the Bible stories you heard about bad things happening to people who broke God’s laws. So what conclusion would your young mind reach? You better be a good boy or girl or else.
With that image of God thoroughly ingrained in our developing brains, many of us carry that image forward into our adult years. But is that who God really is? Is He some crazed, lawgiving Scrooge who just can’t wait to stomp on our good time?
Once again, we turn to Jesus Christ. As a reminder, Paul said of Jesus, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” (Colossians 1:15) Just one chapter later, Paul also declared, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” (Colossians 2:9) And the writer of Hebrews stated, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” (Hebrews 1:3)
Get the picture? Once more we see in unmistakable language that what we see in Jesus is an exact picture of who God is. So again, what we see Jesus doing and what we hear him saying is exactly what God the Father would do and say.
So let’s take a look at Jesus and see if he fits the image of a harsh, lawgiving killjoy.
Now there’s no question that the Old Covenant law was given to Moses by God. Just a casual glance at the account of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 makes that perfectly clear. So the question isn’t whether God is a lawgiver; He certainly is. The question is why did He give them the law. Did He give it to them to control them and to prevent them from enjoying life?
In Jesus’ own words, he connects the law to one of the purposes of his life on earth. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17-18) So he makes it clear that he was not coming to abolish the law that was given to Moses about 1,500 years before him. Instead, he was coming to fulfill them. Why? Could it be because he knew that no human being could fulfill them? Certainly no human being up to that time ever had. So if that was his reason, would that not suggest then that the law was never given as a means to salvation?
And yet just two sentences later, we find Jesus saying to his disciples and the crowd, “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:20) I don’t know about you, but this sounds like that it could be a contradiction of his previous statement. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were the most “righteous” people in Jesus’ time. They were big on observance of the law. They had the first five books of the Bible memorized and could quote the law forward and backward. They even added more rules and restrictions to God’s original laws for purposes of clarification or to try to ensure that they wouldn’t even flirt with accidentally breaking any of the laws. If ever there were a people guided by living a moral life, they certainly had to be chief among them. And now it sounds like Jesus is saying that we must be better at observing the law than they were.
But is that what Jesus meant? Was he saying that we have to live more morally pure lives than the Pharisees and teachers of the law in order to be declared righteous? Let’s see what he had to say.
There was an occasion in which Jesus and his disciples were eating some food with unwashed hands. To the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, this was an absolute no-no. Observing this, they asked Jesus why they didn’t follow the traditions of the elders and do the ceremonial washing of their hands before eating. Jesus’ reply provides key insight that will explain what Jesus said in the Matthew passages above. “He replied, ‘Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’” (Mark 7:6-7)
Take special note of what Jesus said. The Pharisees and teachers of the law honored God with their lips but their hearts were far from Him. The heart is the key to matter. The Pharisees and teachers of the law were very good at external observance of the law but their hearts were not right. Observance of the law and being a wonderfully moral person is not what God is after. That’s why Jesus called them hypocrites.
God instead is after something else. It is possible to be very good at following and obeying the rules but still be missing what God desires most. And what He desires is both a reflection of His true nature and provide us a greater understanding of why He gave the Israelites the law in the first place. So what is it that God desires most? That’s what we will dive into in the next article.
Essential Grace 