Law and Lord

                                                                           IIb.


It should have worked.

They were given the Law.  It told them how to live in a way pleasing to God.  A way to at least ease the pain God felt about their sin.  It told them they could have a relationship with God because He wrote the Law for them.

"This is how to obey Me."

But, let's face it, everything should have worked that went before.

The Garden. Eden.  It should have worked.  Perfection.  Perfect temp.  No disease, no death.  The animals.  The lions and tigers and bears, oh, my.  They obeyed Adam and Eve.  Humanity was  the caretaker.  We keep hearing this was our world.  It was always God's world and ours to tend.

WE don't know how many left Eden.  We of two for sure.  We know God left it there.  They could look over at it from a distance.  At night, they may have  seen the flaming sword of the angel guarding it.  Perhaps they could get close enough to stare inside and remember.  An dream, dream of when humanity lived thee, dream of what they lost.

John Eldridge and others think they hark back to it with Wild at Heart.  With the hunt, the guns, the hiking, the tents and the cabins.  They are wrong to a degree.  We miss the outdoors, but what we miss is the Garden, growing things, tending to things, the dog or cat at our side. Like the lion and wolf once were.  The cat tamed to keep the rodents down; the dog trained to hunt by our side.  The tomato or carrot or lettuce we must now tend and water and fertilize where before we merely had to harvest from the vine or the tree.  We miss sleeping in the open.  We miss being with someone who was so much a part of us that...well, she actually was a part of Adam.  The first story I ever read on clones suggested they would share personality traits so thoroughly they would have an even deeper bond than twins.  If that was so, then, yes, something in our own DNA may hark back to that connection as it does to the Garden.  To when God gave us everything and we REALIZED He gave us everything.

And he even let Enoch be the example to the new civilization.

But they built that civilization east of Eden, away from it, perhaps to keep it out of their minds.  to think they could build something as good without the ache  of the Garden so close.  The Cain race wanting so much to establish itself without God.

And only Noah survived.

Then Abraham and the lineage.

Then Moses and the Law.

But that's the way we usually see it.  In the flow.  In the following of the time stream as we perceive it.  Rolling along in a wave of ur live, from beginning to end.  We get the Kurt Vonnegut notion of traveling back and forth in  time, living our lives in this spurt and that spurt, seeing the Bible, any story, as memory.  We can dip into that event, of those events, touch and reach our goal of learning from that moment.  The time the kids ganged up on me.  the time I whipped one of my oppressors and they left me alone, the way I can walk and have dangerous anger behind my kindness.  The time I caught a crowbar on the brow,  The time I mat my wife.  The births of my children.  I'm there in every event, seeing it again, regretting, cherishing, recalling.  I could be so much better.  I'm there in every...event.

None of the events is really separate, none disjointed.  it is all my ife flowing there together in a soup arriving at me.  Now, in the events going on now.

And that limited vision makes us miss things,

Below is one way we miss them and don't even see we do.






We get this notion, because of the time stream, that somehow the Law came before Jesus, as if he were just one of  an alignment of revelations about God rather than actually God.

"He fulfills the Law."

Which He does.

Or we get this notion of things:



http://biblehub.com/topical/t/the_law_of_moses.htm

Condensed Biblical Cyclopedia

The Law of Moses

By the phrase "law of Moses" is meant all that was revealed through Moses. The New Testament treats it with great fullness and perpiscuity:

1. Typical Aspects. The law of Moses was only the shadow of good Things to come (Colossians 2:17; Hebrews 10:1).
2. Fulfillment. Jesus Christ declared His intention to Fulfill every word of the law (Matthew 5:17,18), and He did it (Luke 24:44).
3. Its Weakness. The law could not,
   1. bring about justification (Acts 13:39);
   2. produce righteousness (Galatians 2:21);
   3. produce life (Galatians 3:21);
   4. bring about perfection (Hebrews 7:19);
   5. or free the conscience from a knowledge of sin (Hebrews 10:1-4).
4. Impossible for All Men to Keep It. The law was given to and for Israel only (Exodus 19:1-20:17; Malachi 4:4; John 1:1-17). Take two proofs of this:
   1. All the males of the Hebrews were commanded to appear before the Lord at a designated place three times a year (Exodus 23:14-17; Exodus 12:4-16);
   2. those to whom the law was given were commanded, on penalty of death, not to kindle a fire throughout their habitation on the sabbath day (Exodus 35:1-3).
5. Abolishment of the Law. It is declared,
   1. that the law is abolished (2 1 1 Corinthians 3:6-13; Ephesians 2:15);
   2. that Christ is the end of the law (Romans 10:4);
   3. that it was the ministration of death (Exodus 32:1-28), and that it is "done away" (2 1 1 Corinthians 3:7);
   4. that Jesus took away the first that He might establish the second (Hebrews 10:5-9);
   5. that it was nailed to the cross (Colossians 2:14-16);
   6. that those who had been under it had been delivered from it (Romans 7:6);
   7. that they were dead to it (Romans 7:4);
   8. that they were not under the law, but under grace (Romans 6:14);
   9. that they were no longer under the schoolmaster (Galatians 3:24,25);
   10. that they were not required to serve the law (Acts 15:1-24; Galatians 3:19);
   11. that the Christian who sought justification under the law had fallen from grace (Galatians 5:4);
   12. and that now the righteousness of God is revealed without the aid of the law (Romans 3:21,22).
6. Contrasted with the Gospel.
1. The law was intended for one nation--Israel (Exodus 20:1-17 Malachi 4:4); the gospel of Christ is intended for the whole creation (Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:15,16).
2. The first covenant was dedicated with the blood of animals (Exodus 24:6-8), the new covenant was dedicated with the blood of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:18,19).
3. The first institution was administered by frail men--the Levites (Leviticus 16:1-34; Hebrews 7:11-23); the second is administered by Jesus Christ, who was made priest, not by carnal commandment, but "after the power of an endless life" (Hebrews 7:16).
4. Circumcision in the flesh was a sign of the first (Genesis 17:1-14; Leviticus 12:1-13); circumcision in the heart and spirit is the sign of the second (Romans 2:25).
5. The law of Moses guaranteed to the obedient Hebrews temporal blessings (Deuteronomy 28:1-6); the gospel of Christ guarantees spiritual blessings to those who live up to its requirements (1 Peter 1:4).
6. The law of Moses guaranteed to the Hebrews the land of Canaan (Deuteronomy 30:5-10); the gospel guarantees eternal life beyond the grave to those who honor the Lord (1 John 5:20).
7. The law of Moses required obedience to the one true God (Exodus 20:1-5); the gospel emphasizes the Fatherhood of God (Matthew 6:9).
8. The law of Moses prohibited the people from taking the name of the Lord in vain (Exodus 20:7); the gospel requires that out communications be "yea" and "nay", declaring that everything beyond is evil (Matthew 5:37).
9. The law of Moses required the Hebrews to remember the Sabbath day (Exodus 20:8-11); in apostolic times, the people of God remembered the Savior in the feast that He ordained (Matthew 26:26-30; 1 1 1 Corinthians 11:23-29) on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7).
10. The law of Moses required children to honor their parents (Exodus 20:12); the gospel requires children to obey their parents in the Lord (Ephesians 6:1-4).
11. The law of Moses prohibited murder (Exodus 20:13); the gospel prohibits hatred (1 John 3:15).
12. The law of Moses forbade adultery (Exodus 20:14); the gospel prohibits even lust (Matthew 5:28).
13. The law of Moses prohibits stealing (Exodus 20:15); the gospel prohibits stealing and requires benevolence (Ephesians 4:28).
14. The law of Moses forbade the bearing of false witness (Exodus 20:16); the gospel requires us to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).
15. The law of Moses prohibited covetousness (Exodus 20:17); the gospel requires us to do good unto men according to our opportunities (Galatians 6:10), and love our neighbors as ourselves (Romans 13:10;

 That the Law was somehow, again, a separate part of the Plan, a foretaste ONLY.  

But we have seen to ADD to those notions.

1) There has always been some portion of Law.  Don't eat the fruit.  Make sacrifices for sin.  Walk with God. Be circumcised.  Join the family of Israel.  Loose rules, but always some part of the Law.  

As Christians, we have  the "Royal Law" as James  calls it  to live in Love,   


Jas 2:8 But if you keep the greatest law of all, as it is given in the holy Writings, Have love for your neighbour as for yourself, you do well:
 9 But if you take a man's position into account, you do evil, and are judged as evil-doers by the law.
 10 For anyone who keeps all the law, but makes a slip in one point, is judged to have gone against it all.
 11 For he who said, Do not be untrue in married life, is the same who said, Put no man to death. Now if you are not untrue in married life, but you put a man to death, the law is broken.
 12 Let your words and your acts be those of men who are to be judged by the law which makes free.
 13 For the man who has had no mercy will be judged without mercy, but mercy takes pride in overcoming judging.
 14 What use is it, my brothers, for a man to say that he has faith, if he does nothing? will such a faith give him salvation?
 15 If a brother or a sister is without clothing and in need of the day's food,
 16 And one of you says to them, Go in peace, be warm and full of food; but you do not give them the things of which their bodies have need, what profit is there in this?
 17 Even so faith without works is dead.
 18 But a man may say, You have faith and I have works; let me see your faith without your works, and I will make my faith clear to you by my works.

 (BBE)



Jesus has his expansion of that in what we so scholarly call the Beatitudes.  

Mt 5:21 You have knowledge that it was said in old times, You may not put to death; and, Whoever puts to death will be in danger of being judged:

 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be in danger of being judged; and he who says to his brother, Raca, will be in danger from the Sanhedrin; and whoever says, You foolish one, will be in danger of the hell of fire.

 23 If then you are making an offering at the altar and there it comes to your mind that your brother has something against you,

 24 While your offering is still before the altar, first go and make peace with your brother, then come and make your offering.

 25 Come to an agreement quickly with him who has a cause against you at law, while you are with him on the way, for fear that he may give you up to the judge and the judge may give you to the police and you may be put into prison.

 26 Truly I say to you, You will not come out from there till you have made payment of the very last farthing.

 27 You have knowledge that it was said, You may not have connection with another man's wife:

 28 But I say to you that everyone whose eyes are turned on a woman with desire has had connection with her in his heart.

 29 And if your right eye is a cause of trouble to you, take it out and put it away from you; because it is better to undergo the loss of one part, than for all your body to go into hell.

 30 And if your right hand is a cause of trouble to you, let it be cut off and put it away from you; because it is better to undergo the loss of one part, than for all your body to go into hell.

 31 Again, it was said, Whoever puts away his wife has to give her a statement in writing for this purpose:

 32 But I say to you that everyone who puts away his wife for any other cause but the loss of her virtue, makes her false to her husband; and whoever takes her as his wife after she is put away, is no true husband to her.

 33 Again, you have knowledge that it was said in old times, Do not take false oaths, but give effect to your oaths to the Lord:

 34 But I say to you, Take no oaths at all: not by the heaven, because it is the seat of God;

 35 Or by the earth, because it is the resting-place for his foot; or by Jerusalem, because it is the town of the great King.

 36 You may not take an oath by your head, because you are not able to make one hair white or black.

 37 But let your words be simply, Yes or No: and whatever is more than these is of the Evil One.

 38 You have knowledge that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

 39 But I say to you, Do not make use of force against an evil man; but to him who gives you a blow on the right side of your face let the left be turned.

 40 And if any man goes to law with you and takes away your coat, do not keep back your robe from him.

 41 And whoever makes you go one mile, go with him two.

 42 Give to him who comes with a request, and keep not your property from him who would for a time make use of it.

 43 You have knowledge that it was said, Have love for your neighbour, and hate for him who is against you:

 44 But I say to you, Have love for those who are against you, and make prayer for those who are cruel to you;

 45 So that you may be the sons of your Father in heaven; for his sun gives light to the evil and to the good, and he sends rain on the upright man and on the sinner.

 46 For if you have love for those who have love for you, what credit is it to you? do not the tax-farmers the same?

 47 And if you say, Good day, to your brothers only, what do you do more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same?

 48 Be then complete in righteousness, even as your Father in heaven is complete.

 (BBE)

Every one of these acts sets us apart and as such defines us as holy (Recall we've showed that definition before). 

Yes, He abolished the law as applied to us.  The human law that had been added to it, the things which foreshadowed His arrival.  But the Law remained alive for purposes of Judging those who never accepted Him.  And the Heart remained for us to live, the Royal Law which means a spoken command by the King, even as an Earthly king like Pharaoh would issue an Earthly command bout mud and straw into bricks and it would be obeyed without question.  

There remains, even for us, a Law.

2) Jesus has always been there, even as the Law has always  been there, in one form or another.

Remember the Angel of the Lord.  We harped on it.  You likely thought, "Alright, already, enough!" But we need to hear it over and over, that He was there at the beginning.  John, dear John: 

John 1:1 From the first he was the Word, and the Word was in relation with God and was God.

 2 This Word was from the first in relation with God.

 3 All things came into existence through him, and without him nothing was.

 4 What came into existence in him was life, and the life was the light of men.

 5 And the light goes on shining in the dark; it is not overcome by the dark.

 (BBE)

He was there in the Garden.  There with Cain.  There to meet with Abe, to walk the pact for him.  There in the burning bush for Moses.  There to insult false prophets.  There to fight on battlefields, to go before them in war.  There to comfort and guide. He was never NOT there. the notion of a God of anger in the OT and one of love in the NT isn't reality, any more than the idea of my not having a temper because I love my kids is true.  I made sure my kids got medicine when they were young so I have grandchildren today.   I didn't do it to have grandchildren; I had no sense of that event ever taking place.  But I did it because it was good for my children THEN.  So they lived to have those grandchildren. 

God however looks at a person and saves them so they will, centuries later, have a descendant who will be there to swat a mosquito who would have had eggs that would hatch to yet another mosquito who would have gotten the malaria virus and bitten Pete as a child and he would have died and never been there for Jesus. 

Time means nothing.  Our sense of time means nothing.   So our ideas of Law and Jesus have no meaning and are inherently flawed and, worse, we don't have the tools to explain them adequately.  It isn't a matter of no Law, but of what applies NOW.  It isn't a matter of Jesus being there at the cross, He was at the cross from the moment He created the universe and was meant to be at the cross to glorify God and the act of creating a universe in which He had to die to glorify the Father was an act the Father condoned even as He faced the idea of a second in eternity when they would be apart, even as he always knew for His eternity that the moment would happen, MUST happen, for everything to be as it is/was/will be meant to be.

Years ago, there was a TV series about a serial killer named Dexter.  He kept microscope slides with drops pf the blood of his victims so he could think back on his crimes, the serial killers he  killed, making him a kind of hero/anithero.  The blood was his trophy of victory.  He was like all us humans. We keep some mementos.  We try to recall.  

We have movies.  When my folks died, I found old film that had been stored for years.  I sent it off to be developed. and converted to video and what came back was maybe a couple minutes on video.  Dad in his waders waiting to get in the water and fish, just a flash of Mom.  Black and white.  Photos get burned up.  People tend to rescue photo albums before wallets in those fires. Floods decimate and people mourn the loss of their lifetimes. Our minds function that badly.  I still forget the faces of people I went to high school with.  In the TV series, Dexter even lost a dead body and forgot where he put it after a car crash.  

God forgets nothing.  He has us etched in the palms of his hands, right where those nails pierced. Every one of the millions. Hairs on our heads counted.  His Son created all of us after all.

Yes.  Grasp that if you can.  Wrap your own small mind around it if you can.  I can wrap mine around myself, we seem so designed. With a stretch I can get my wife and kids and grandkids in there.  I barely move my coworkers in.  I've had clients in there, the sick and the ill.  I've made room for them and it nearly killed me.  

Why are we so limited?  We want to be God.  We scrape all this stuff together so we can see the news and make the news and we want to be president and run  things and think we are in charge.  So why does God let us fail so badly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua5a-3861xs

We are supposed to be caretakers.  Caretakers.  We are NOT God and were never meant to be.

Jesus walked with us in the cool of the day.  He guided our ancestors.  Build that altar.  Build that Ark.  Write down that law.  Build that nation.

We are fond of saying He created everything and we seem to skip the fact He created US. We are wounded by our failures, by others letting us down, by us letting them down, We fail and we deceive ourselves into thinking we have answers, that we can put things together after we tear them apart.  We deceive ourselves with the notion God lives in us so WE are therefore God. We forget that God living in a place of rotting flesh that has its' limit.  Jesus has trouble getting through if we are so busy trying to be Him we don't let Him be Him in us.  

Or if the unsaved don't let Him in to be Him in them.

Because He's always there, inside us  humans  or outside us humans.

3) They are both a part of God.  

When we dissect the Plan, the bits and pieces, we keep missing the Plan itself.  Our educational systems have always done  that.  We need to quantify.  We need tests to show someone deserves that degree. So what part of this is mixed with that isn't really an option.  My old chem prof once said the definition of a PhD is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he gets to know everything there is to know about nothing.  I made have repeated that remark before. PhD's DO know an awful lot about their nothings and humanity gets a lot of benefits from the nothings. But we can't get so nitty on the picky that we forget both came from God.

The Creator of everything ties everything together.

Recall he told us we were to be nomads in the "curse".  Humanity tried settling in the Sahara area and the Sahara is the result.  Recall that post?   Arab nomads existed there for centuries. They knew where the oases hid and knew secret water supplies, which cacti to forage for moisture.  Where to find desert animals for food.  Then the modern world arrived, with nations and ideals beyond the tribe and the idea of borders in the world's largest desert.  So the tribes stopped being nomadic and cites were established and starvation, overpopulation, failed farming and wars as based on the old tribes as much as the nations erupted.  And so Norther Africa begins to disintegrate.

The Native Americans who are themselves not really native, apparently coming here over the land bridge that is now the Aleutian Islands, built an ecologically friendly lifestyle of moving from one hunting ground to another, killing the animals they needed for survival, using all the animal that they killed, worshiping nature and the animal instead of the Lord who gave them the animals.  They were treating the land right but also worshiping the creation.  The arrival of "civilization" meant that nature was no longer worshiped but an enemy to be conquered, subjected to the needs of farming and cities and...We killed off the predators rather than sharing with them and  now those who hold nature sacred again in the "civilized" world now face the rodent populations that our cats keep down only to a degree and decry the killing of deer to keep the population under control and that current laws and the lack of hunting fail to do.   So that there are times when driving near a forested area is risky.  Oh, and civilization also decimated that native population with new diseases and advanced weaponry.

And now may be threatening to change the climate in a way threatening all life.

Did we also point out that Cain was the one who founded cities way back when?

That the "curse" was also part of the Plan?  Part of the Pre-Law that we ignored.

And it all built toward two events.

The Cross.

And the End Times which include the Rapture, the Second Coming, the Millennium and the New Earth.