In the latest issue of ‘Good News’, Stephen finishes his series on ‘The Law of God’. You can read the article below. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
There was a time when my ideal birthday present would have been a Swiss Army knife. And of course, the defining thing about Swiss Army knives is that they don’t just have one function. As well as a knife blade or two you get a screwdriver, a bottle opener, scissors and more. Well, just like a Swiss army knife, God’s law has a number of different purposes. It’s to be used in different ways in different situations. For example, whether we are believers or not, one of the main purposes of the law is to show us our sin and drive us to Jesus. However from what we’ve seen in our first two articles, it should already be clear that God’s law is for more than that. It’s actually to be lived out in our daily lives. The Ten Commandments have been in place from the beginning of creation. They’re based on who God is, and he doesn’t change. That means that if we are to live in this world as God would have us, we need by his grace to structure our lives around them. They are the instruction manual for our lives; to try and live without them will ultimately bring frustration and despair.
When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he replied ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets’ (Matthew 22:37-40). What Jesus did there was to summarise the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments are about loving God, and the rest are about loving our neighbour. So if you as a Christian want to know what it looks like to love God and to love your neighbour, you need the Ten Commandments.
On his last night on earth, Jesus was preparing his disciples for life on earth without him. And one of the things he said to them that night was: ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’. And what are his commandments? They are these same Ten Commandments which have always been God’s standard.
In fact, the Ten Commandments aren’t just the ten most important of God’s laws. They include all of God’s other commandments as well. Think of the Ten Commandments as a filing cabinet with ten drawers. Every single one of the commands of the Old and New Testaments fits into one of those drawers. For example, Colossians 3:23 says: ‘Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men’. That in itself isn’t part of the Ten Commandments. But the fourth commandment, which is about keeping the Sabbath holy, also says: ‘Six days shall you labour and do all your work’. So you could keep Sunday holy. You could spend the whole day as it’s designed; worshipping God, spending time with his people, and thinking about him. But if you’re half-hearted in your work Monday through Friday, you’re not keeping the commandment.
That’s true of all the rest of the commandments as well. Jesus says all the law and the prophets depend on them. So the command about not murdering is also a command about taking active steps to preserve life. Most of the commandments are in the format ‘You shall not’ because it’s easier to state the negative – but they also include the positive. If the commandments were to start: ‘You shall…’ they would go on indefinitely. But we are still to understand them as including positive duties as well as negative prohibitions. Think of how Jesus summarises them – they’re about loving God and loving our neighbour. Can you love your neighbour just by not murdering him and not lying to him? No! You also need to do things for him as well! And so for each commandment we should be asking not simply ‘what does this stop me from doing?’ But ‘what does this mean I should be doing instead?’
It’s also very important that we don’t think about the Ten Commandments without thinking about the work of the Holy Spirit. Our Confession of Faith, which sums up what we believe as a church, says that obeying the law isn’t contrary to the grace of the gospel, because the Spirit of Christ enables us to do freely and cheerfully what the will of God revealed in the law requires to be done. That implies that if we leave the Spirit out of the picture, then any attempt at law-keeping will be contrary to the grace of the gospel.
This part of the Holy Spirit’s work had been prophesied by the likes of Ezekiel (36:27), when God had promised: ‘I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules’. Part of the Holy Spirit’s work in our hearts is to enable us to obey God’s commands.
Before we’re Christians, we’re not able to obey the Ten commandments. Yes, we might be able to outwardly keep some of them, but our motivations are wrong. But once we become Christians, we become able to keep them. Not perfectly of course – we still break each of them every day. It’s only in heaven where we’ll keep them perfectly and no longer be able to sin. But now, it is possible for us to keep them. Not by relying on our own strength. But by the help of the Holy Spirit.
Going back to the Swiss Army knife illustration, the law has one further purpose which we haven’t time to consider in these articles – and that is to restrain evil. It’s no coincidence that when God’s law is sidelined, society begins to quickly fall apart. Although the law itself cannot change the heart, when it is implemented in society and backed up by punishments, it helps hold back evil and maintain civil order.
Our focus in these articles however has been to focus on the law’s relevance to us as individuals. And let us always remember that if we’re Christians then we receive God’s law as individuals who have been redeemed. The law was originally given to those who had been redeemed from Egypt – but that was just a foretaste of a greater redemption that lay in the future. In the words of Sinclair Ferguson, believers today ‘receive the moral law in Christ who has fulfilled its ordinances and suffered the penalty of its breach in our place, as well as in the power of the Spirit who energizes Christ’s people to fulfil it in their own lives’. May that be the experience of each of us.