by Elizabeth | May 20, 2010 | Learning Story
I hope for you, as for me, it has been enlightening to think about how Christians ought to understand the Law. In one of those really cool God-things, even as I’ve been posting from Packer’s thoughts on it, I came across Luther’s preface to Galatians, which puts the law in perspective. So today, two paragraphs from Packer and one from Luther…and tomorrow, more from Luther:
“But the love-or-law antithesis is false, just as the down-grading of law is perverse. Love and law are not opponents but allies, forming together the axis of true morality. Law needs love as its drive, else we get the Pharisaism that puts principles before people and says one can be perfectly good without actually loving one’s neighbor. The truest and kindest way to see situationism is as a reaction against real or imaginary Pharisaism. Even so it is a jump from the frying pan into the fire, inasmuch as correctness, however cold, does less damage than lawlessness, however well-meant. And love needs law as its eyes, for love (Christian agape as well as sexual eros) is blind. To want to love someone Christianly does not of itself tell you how to do it. Only as we observe the limits set by God’s law can we really do people good.
Keep two truths in view. First, God’s law expresses his character. It reflects his own behavior; it alerts us to what he will love and hate to see in us. It is a recipe for holiness, consecrated conformity to God, which is his true image in man. And as such (this is the second truth) God’s law fits human nature. As cars, being made as they are, only work well with gas in the tank, so we, being made as we are, only find fulfillment in a life of law-keeping. This is what we were both made and redeemed for.” J.I. Packer, Growing in Christ
Now for Luther:
“Once you are in Christ, the law is the greatest guide for your life, but until you have Christian
righteousness, all the law can do is to show you how sinful and condemned you are. In
fact, to those outside of Christian righteousness, the law needs to be expounded in all
its force. Why? So that people who think they have power to be righteous before God
will be humbled by the law and understand they are sinners.”
by Elizabeth | May 19, 2010 | Learning Story
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.
by Elizabeth | May 18, 2010 | Learning Story
About 14 years ago, I fell in love with the Old Testament. Tremper Longman III did a series of lectures at the Theological Institute at our church and taught us to bring our hearts and minds to Scripture. He showed us the dominant theme of grace written by the Author God in the Old Testament, and I fell in love with the stories and law and poetry and wisdom and prophecy as I saw it as never before.
One day around that time, I walked in our living room and found our then 3-year-old son, Robert, “reading” Tremper’s book, Making Sense of the Old Testament. Study the picture carefully. To “make sense of the Old Testament,” he did not need to turn the book around — he just needed to read it through the grid of grace. Today, I bring Packer’s argument against the arguments that the Ten Commandments are merely ‘outdated’ laws:
Some read the Old Testament as so much primitive groping and guesswork, which the New Testament sweeps away. But “God … spoke through the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1), of whom Moses was the greatest (see Deuteronomy 34:10–12); and his Commandments, given through Moses, set a moral and spiritual standard for living which is not superseded, but carries God’s authority forever. Note that Jesus’ twofold law of love, summarizing the Commandments, comes from Moses’ own God-taught elaboration of them (for that is what the Pentateuchal law-codes are). “Love your God” is from Deuteronomy 6:5, “love your neighbor” from Leviticus 19:18.
It cannot be too much stressed that Old Testament moral teaching (as distinct from the Old Testament revelation of grace) is not inferior to that of the New Testament, let alone the conventional standards of our time. The barbarities of lawless sex, violence, and exploitation, cutthroat business methods, class warfare, disregard for one’s family, and the like are sanctioned only by our modern secular society. The supposedly primitive Old Testament, and the 3000-year-old Commandments in particular, are bulwarks against all these things.
But (you say) doesn’t this sort of talk set the Old Testament above Christ? Can that be right? Surely teaching that antedates him by a millennium and a quarter must be inferior to his? Surely the Commandments are too negative, always and only saying “don’t…”? Surely we must look elsewhere for full Christian standards? Fair queries; but there is a twofold answer.
First, Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17) that he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it; that is, to be, and help others to be, all that God in the Commandments had required. What Jesus destroyed was inadequate expositions of the law, not the law itself (Matthew 5:21–48; 15:1–9; etc.). By giving truer expositions, he actually republished the law. The Sermon on the Mount itself consists of themes from the Decalogue developed in a Christian context.
For further study:
Read the Ten Commandments, found in Exodus 20:1-17. Then read Matthew 5:21-48 and 15:1-9. How does Jesus develop themes from the Decalogue in the context of grace?
by Elizabeth | May 17, 2010 | Learning Story
Yesterday, after listening to a sermon in church on love as the distinguishing mark of Christians, I went home and spent some time in personal study. I discovered J.I. Packer’s Growing in Christ on my Logos. For some reason I was drawn to the section on the Ten Commandments. I’ll be honest — I have been one of those Christians who, in resistance to legalism, has marginalized the “Law.” Packer offers a beautiful discussion of the Commandments. I will post a few of his thoughts this week and encourage you to purchase this volume as an excellent study on many important issues. These remarks are from the preface to his discussion:
“We too are wonderfully made, complex physically and even more so psychologically and spiritually. For us, too, there is a maker’s handbook—namely, God’s summary of the way to live that we find in the Ten Commandments. Whether as persons we grow and blossom or shrink and wither, whether in character we become more like God or more like the devil, depends directly on whether we seek to live by what is in the Commandments or not. The rest of the Bible could be called God’s repair manual, since it spells out the gospel of grace that restores sin-damaged human nature, but it is the Commandments that crystallize the basic behavior-pattern which brings satisfaction and contentment, and it is precisely for this way of living that God’s grace rescues and refits us.
Suppose someone says: “I try to take the Ten Commandments seriously, and live by them, and they swamp me! Every day I fail somewhere. What am I to do?” The answer is: now that you know your own weakness and sinfulness, turn to God, and to his Son Jesus Christ, for pardon and power. Christ will bring you into a new kind of life, in which your heart’s deepest desire will be to go God’s way, and obedience will be burdensome no longer. That folk who take the law as their rule might find Christ the Savior as their Ruler is something to pray and work for.
God’s love gave us the law just as his love gave us the gospel, and as there is no spiritual life for us save through the gospel, which points us to Jesus Christ the Savior, so there is no spiritual health for us save as we seek in Christ’s strength to keep the law, and practice the love of God and neighbor for which it calls.”
by Elizabeth | May 14, 2010 | Learning Story
The Living Story May Newsletter is out! If you would like to be added to my mailing list so you receive news every other month, please send your email to etstory at earthlink dot net, or use the contact form.
It was early, and I kept the lights low in the kitchen as I began my daily ritual. While the coffee brewed, I grabbed the small sample bottle of anti-inflammatory medication I took to ease body aches. Without looking, I reached in to remove a pill. The cotton felt unusually thick and sticky. I shook the bottle and no rattling came. That’s when I turned on the light and tried to rouse my sleep-laden eyes to look. What I found did not surprise me as much as it might surprise you: there, stuck in the pill bottle, instead of cotton, was a large, white marshmallow!
This is an excerpt from the new Learning Story Bible study excerpted in the newsletter. To read the rest, click maynews
by Elizabeth | May 14, 2010 | Learning Story
A worldview that is. Fascinating article from the Director of Education at Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston, S.C., Colin Kerr. Here are a few excerpted paragraphs. The entire article can be found at The Post and Courier website.
We’ve forgotten the art of cultivating worldviews.
A worldview determines how we make sense of everything that we see and experience, from spirituality to sex, ethics to economics, purpose to politics. A healthy worldview ties it all together in a way that is consistent and self-reinforcing. It may hold tensions, but doesn’t contradict itself. Worldviews are inherently exclusivist to at least a degree, that is to say a worldview means declaring some beliefs, values and lifestyles are true while others are false. While that kind of statement can make our politically correct sensibilities squirm, it is nothing more than the rational acknowledgement that if we attempt to pluralistically approve all beliefs, values and lifestyles, we will have ceased to have any views at all and essentially will have given our brains a furlough.
We’re not in Kansas, or the 1950s, anymore.
Now, churches are tasked with educating their flock against a rising tide of culturally sanctioned materialism, relativism and general narcissism. Felt boards and warm, fuzzy sermons are no match for the thousands of competing worldviews attempting to convert us (both believer and nonbeliever alike) daily by way of media, advertising and culture. Cultivating a Gospel-centered worldview then, one robust enough to counter the systems that are out of sync with the way of life presented by Jesus, is now absolutely critical in a church’s educational framework. This is serious educational business we’re talking about here.
A Gospel-centered worldview is meant to put on the gloves and go all nine rounds.
However, it is important to note that this kind of biblically oriented worldview cannot be produced through religious indoctrination, a system of top-down learning designed to instill doctrine without a personal understanding and experience of its truth. Indoctrination is the fundamentalist’s primary tool for creating a worldview, but it is one akin to blowing up a balloon — a system of thought easily popped with sharp run-ins of reality. Indoctrinated worldviews are dependent on staying within the shelter of a protective group and rarely survive the scrutiny that occurs should an individual stray from the nest.
