Another in our series on the Law from J.I. Packer — it’s PERSONAL. It is not about keeping law so we earn grace. It is about how to live the relationship of love for God and love for neighbor that has already been given by grace. Let me highlight one sentence from the paragraphs below:
“Law-keeping (that is, meeting the claims of our God, commandments 1–4, and our neighbor, commandments 5–10) is not an attempt to win God’s admiration and put him in our debt, but the form and substance of grateful personal response to his love.”
Here it is in context. Make sure you reread the Commandments, in Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Pay attention today to how it is only possible to live this law of love through the gospel:
Now, the Christian’s relationship with God the Creator is a personal, “I-you” affair throughout. To him God is not, as he is to some, a cosmic force to harness, an infinite “it” claiming no more from him than the genie of the lamp did from Aladdin. Christians know that God has called them into a relation of mutual love and service, of mutual listening and response, of asking, giving, taking, and sharing on both sides. Christians learn this from watching and listening to God incarnate in the Gospel stories, and from noting the words of invitation, command, and promise that God spoke through prophets and apostles. And the twice-stated formula of the Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17, Deuteronomy 5:6–21) makes it particularly plain.
For the Commandments are God’s edict to persons he has loved and saved, to whom he speaks in “I-you” terms at each point. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out … you shall … ” The ten directives, which embody the Creator’s intention for human life as such, are here presented as means of maintaining a redeemed relationship already given by grace. And for Christians today, as for the Jews at Sinai, law-keeping (that is, meeting the claims of our God, commandments 1–4, and our neighbor, commandments 5–10) is not an attempt to win God’s admiration and put him in our debt, but the form and substance of grateful personal response to his love.
