Happy March everyone! This month our blog theme is on God’s law. I know, I can just sense the excitement when I mention the word law… haha. We don’t typically like that term. It often gets a bad rap. We tend to perceive this word as restrictive, punitive, and negative. But is this true? What if the law is a good thing?
In order to determine this, we need to ask ourselves what the purpose of law is. I would say the purpose is protection. If we look at civil law, it was created to provide protection from chaos. It serves as a boundary to protect from the chaos and anarchy that ensues when human behavior has no boundaries. Our current laws wouldn’t exist if there hadn’t been behavior that warranted those limits needing to be put in place. Due to our sin nature and natural propensity to engage in destructive behaviors, when left to our own devices we run rampant and engage in actions that destroy ourselves and each other. Our natural instinct is to do whatever pleases our flesh having no regard for the consequences.
However, the consequences for these destructive behaviors are very real. Even the ones we don’t always perceive as destructive. Take lust for example. People have many different definitions of this and many differing opinions on whether this is harmful or “harmless fun”. But Jesus tells us in Mathew 5:28 to not even look at a woman with lust. The common perception to that command is “really, Jesus? Don’t even look at a woman? That seems a bit extreme. What harm can that do, looking isn’t sleeping with her”. But just look at how many destructive behaviors result from a seemingly innocent look: comparison, jealously, porn addiction, adultery, divorce. These are some pretty painful consequences to such a “small action”.
That is why God’s law is necessary. We humans need boundaries. We need a measuring stick to tell us what is right and what is wrong. We need a boundary to help keep ourselves in check and to save us from our natural sin nature. The fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden made God’s law necessary because we lost our moral authority and are no longer able to distinguish what is good for us and what is not. So we need help. Which is why God’s law is actually a good thing, a form of God’s mercy.
This month we are going to dig deeper into understanding how God’s law is a good thing that provides us help and protection. To begin, I ask you to reflect on your own life and see if you can identify choices that you thought were harmless in the moment, but ended up resulting in negative consequences. Can you pinpoint where there may have been a violation of God’s law?
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