The Rule of the Law
In July 2003, the Australian Government committed troops to the Solomon Islands to help restore the rule of law. The Government and people of those islands chose to accept Australia’s offer because they had been hopelessly crippled through an inability to control the lawlessness created by corruption and guns.
Several other emerging Pacific nations currently face similar problems, as our daily news testifies. Instability, despair and sheer danger are increasingly endemic for the ordinary person.
At a basic level, law is necessary for the survival of a society. The person on the street, however, often feels ambivalent about law.
In Australia, a convict heritage has ingrained into our national psyche resentment against control. Law was so ruthlessly and unfairly imposed during the early years of colonisation that people became justifiably wary of its abuse.
Nevertheless, without enforcement of civil laws, society would become chaotic and civilisation could not survive. Lifting our eyes above the limited scope of our society here on earth, we see we are only a small part of the wider cosmic society existing in the universe. Law is just as evident in that realm—and just as necessary. The physical laws governing the functions of the universe are the subject of continuous study, but the moral fabric holding the universe together is not always clear to us on Planet Earth.
God has not left us to discover these moral absolutes by speculation. On the contrary, He has revealed them to us in the Bible through the Ten Commandments. At first glance they appear to be couched in the framework of an ancient agrarian Hebrew society, expressed as a list of negative prohibitions. But deeper study reveals them to be a beautiful expression of the heart of God and guidelines for our happiness.
In one sense, the most important portion of the commandments is the introductory statement. They put God’s proclamation into a compelling perspective, beginning with His proclamation: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:1, 2).
In this setting, obedience to the Ten Commandments is clearly meant to be a positive, loving response from God’s people for His goodness—an expression of gratitude for His redemptive grace in delivering them from slavery. The grammar in this passage suggests these laws should actually be read as, “Because I have delivered you from slavery, you won’t even want to put any other gods before me.”
It is the style and language of a king of ancient times making a covenant with a nation he has just liberated. He offers to protect them and take care of all their security needs. In return, he outlines the heartfelt response he desires from them as a basis for his promises and commitment to them. If the people agreed, their elders would sit down with the king and seal the agreement with a covenant meal. All this was acted out in the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, including the covenant meal between God and the leaders of Israel (see Exodus 24). Such a meal was an invitation to intimacy with God that transcended any mere political protocol.
God on Mount Sinai gave the commandments. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist before that time in Israel’s history. The Old Testament makes it clear that these principles already existed from the creation of the world (see Genesis 26:5). Every one of the underlying principles of the Ten Commandments, and its violation, is spoken of before the time of Moses. God shared His laws with the patriarchs orally, and they were passed down through the ages. That indicates that the commandments were universal in their scope rather than limited to the Hebrew nation. God saw fit to write them down at Sinai because sensitivity to the underlying principles of God’s heart in giving His laws orally had been dulled through “transgression” (Galatians 3:19). God chose to write them down on stone with His own finger to establish them more clearly.
When Jesus stepped into history, a legalistic adherence to the law had become so entrenched, that its underlying principles needed a clearer manifestation. When He came, as the original author of the Ten Commandments (see Nehemiah 9:6, 13; John 1:1-3, 14), He not only expounded them in greater depth in His teaching (Matthew 5:17, 21, 22, 27, 28), but also embodied them perfectly in the way He lived and acted. In the life of Jesus, we see the underlying principles of the Ten Commandments perfectly demonstrated, both outwardly in precept and inwardly in motive and attitude.
The thousands of years since the creation of this world demonstrate that human beings are incapable of keeping God’s laws in a way that reflects the purity and holiness of His heart. All the law of God achieved, in whatever form it was expressed, was an undeniable revelation that we were totally incapable in our present condition of keeping it, and were hopeless sinners (see Romans 3:19, 20, 23).
This is the heart of the gospel—the good news from God. Our missing the mark in keeping the laws of God and the consequent alienation from God led to inner rebellion against Him. It was the doing of Christ in obedience to the laws of God that qualified His dying. The one person who was wholly obedient (John 8:46) became the representative of the human race. His obedient life was counted to our life, just as our disobedient life was counted to His death.
Nothing else but that one act for us reframes our attitudes and motives toward the inner principles of God’s law and guards us against any form of trying to justify ourselves before God with our own performance. Though still marred by the residue of sin within, our hearts are now moved by love to obey Him (John 14:15). The Holy Spirit writes them on the “fleshy” tables of our hearts and empowers us in the direction of a loving, obedient response (see Hebrews 10:15, 16). Then, the heart of God is reflected in our hearts.
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What if we did it God's way?
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