The Organ of Meaning

I think most Christians don’t know what to do with the Law, by that I mean that we often speak about the regulations given to Abraham by God as if they are defective and somehow not good. The Law is full of things that we don’t get – when do you do this kill this animal this way, don’t mix fabrics, don’t grow a goatee (I’m looking at you youth pastors), don’t even touch your wife during her “special time”.

I’ve been reading a book that we got for free from Advance09 – Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community. Honestly, I didn’t expect that it would be a book that I would underline all that much, but I was underlining within 6 pages. One of the things that I underlined had hit me like a slap in the face:

The Law of Moses is given as the word by which God rules his people as they wait for the coming Savior. It is a liberating law given to bless God’s people. It was the lie of the serpent to portray God’s rule as harsh and tyrannical. The reality is that the rule of God is a rule of life, blessing, peace and justice. God rules through his word, and his rule brings freedom and joy.

The author is right! The thing that I do so often is portray the Law as something that was intended to be a limiting shackle on the people of Israel. Quite the opposite, it gave freedom by giving boundaries. Our Americanized idea of freedom says that where there are any boundaries there is no freedom, but real freedom requires boundaries; how free would we really be if there were no laws to restrain murder and theft? We’d spend all of our days protecting ourselves and our stuff.

The Law did the same thing.

In the nations that surrounded Israel, the polytheistic faiths gave no liberty – no freedom to live life unshackled by guilt and doubt. Think of all of the stories even of the ancient Greeks and Romans, they were always trying to appease some god or making sure they weren’t stepping on some goddess’ toes (I’m looking at you Hera); they were never sure if they were in good standing.

Think about it, you’re following a God that just held back the sea and then drowned the most elite soldiers of one of the most powerful nations on earth at the time, a God who had made a tangible darkness hang over the whole country, that turned the Nile into blood and supernaturally killed hundreds to set you free – and not just random hundreds, but only the firstborn and only in unmarked houses. You want to know whether or not you’re in good standing with that God. So, what does that God do? He gives you guidelines so you can know.

You no longer have to guess whether or not you’re doing things right, you have the Law to make reference to. You can know whether God is pleased with you or wanting a closer walk with you.

One thing to remember – unclean was not sin. You have this trichotomy of holiness. You have things that are clean (this is set apart or holy or able to be in God’s presence), you have things that are sinful (things that God is against and are an affront to him in some personal way) and you have the middle ground of the unclean (which is just common, banal, vulgar). The unclean was not bad (or else undertakers were never able to be in God’s good graces and the dead would just lie where they died), it was just common. The reason that this is talked about so much in the Law – God had called his people to be set apart, to be holy and a light that shined His holiness. They were not better than other people, they were just to imitate God more closely.

I think the lesson that I need to take from this is to understand why those in the Old Testament loved the Law.

Psalm 119:97

Oh how I love your law!
It is my meditation all the day.

How is it that the Bible seems to claim this? Don’t get me wrong, I really do believe in the Bible as the Word of God.

Spurgeon writes this morning:

Be wise and attend to the obeying, and let Christ manage the providing. Come and survey your Father’s storehouse, and ask whether he will let you starve while he has laid up so great an abundance in his garner? Look at his heart of mercy; see if that can ever prove unkind! Look at his inscrutable wisdom; see if that will ever be at fault. Above all, look up to Jesus Christ your Intercessor, and ask yourself, while he pleads, can your Father deal ungraciously with you? If he remembers even sparrows, will he forget one of the least of his poor children? “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he will sustain thee. He will never suffer the righteous to be moved.”

Right. But, someone in Ethiopia in the 80s or someone else in the course of history must have been a devout follower of the Living God and still starved to death.

I do understand that these passages, the ones that can be “proven” wrong in some specific cases are not being said in a sense that it’s an unbreakable rule and way of God’s ruling of earth. It is, perhaps, the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Perhaps.

One of the things that I’ve been pondering recently is the threads of the Western Protestant tradition that, while on the whole good, are not part of the Church Universal. The main one being the assumption that the Bible is a book to be read and understood on a one-by-one personal level; really this is a generally new (renewed?) understanding to the Scriptures. I can’t help but accept that for most of history the peoples who have followed the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob and Jesus have not had personal copies of the Scriptures to read and study in a personal way – they were read on the weekend at the Temple, Synagogue or Ecclesia.

While there is no question in my mind that much, if not all, of the Christian Bible has a personal application and message, it seems doubtful to me that that is the exclusive (or even the primary) audience. Deuteronomy was read to all of the Hebrews before the entered the promised land. Josiah read the Book of the Law to all of Jerusalem when it was recovered. Nehemiah read the Law before all of the people when they were dedicating the city again. The Epistles were mostly written to communities of Christians, with a very small portion written to individual people. The primary application and intention of much of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures seems to be to the community of the followers of God at large, with the individual application to follow close behind.

I guess that individual interpretation can’t be removed from the equation though. It seems dangerous to me to leave it exclusively up to the institution of the Church, whether it be a denomination or to local leaders – we have to look no further than the history of the Roman Catholic Church or to the Judaism of Christ’s time where the ecclesiastical leaders’ claim to executive interpretation led to the abuse and ignorance of the people of the laity. Even when it’s just a local gathering, when the pastor or teacher speaks authoritatively it needs to be taken, examined and “chewed through” by the congregation so that error can be confronted by the church on the whole and so that the teacher can be corrected by those who care for him or her.

Maybe I answered my own question. God does provide for the communities who follow him at large; there are exceptions, but He still doesn’t do anything capriciously and fully owns our sorrows and our pain when He allows them to occur.

Did not your father eat and drink
And do justice and righteousness?
Then it was well with him.

He pled the cause of the afflicted and the needy;
Then it was well.
Is this not what it means to know Me?
Declares the Lord.

But your eyes and your heart
Are intent only upon your own dishonest gain,
And on shedding innocent blood
And on practicing oppression and extortion.

To: America (her people, her government and especially the Church in her midst)
From: God
Courier: Jeremiah (22:3,5)

“Do justice and righteousness, and deliver the one who has been robbed from the power of his oppressor. Also, do not mistreat or do violence to the stranger, the orphan, or the widow; and do not shed innocent blood.

If you will not obey these words I swear by Myself, that this house will become a desolation.”