If the Law is killing us, what hope is there?
The Law does a good job of pointing the way to death- and produces a theology that is all too familiar. If we are good, we think, God will like us and may decide to be gracious to us. But if we are not, if we fail to keep His commandments, then we have only ourselves to blame when our lives go wrong.
This was the thinking of Job's comforters, who assumed that the reason his life fell apart and terrible tragedy surrounded him was his failure to keep the commandments of God.
In Job 4:7 his friend Eliphaz offers his explanation for the troubles that Job was experiencing:
"As I have seen, those who plough iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.
By the breath of God they perish,
and by the blast of His anger they are consumed."
This thinking was still evident in the New Testament, when a blind man met Jesus. The disciples asked Jesus,
"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
It is not surprising that many people have given up on God, when it seems that no-one is capable of living up to His standards. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins publicly scorn God: in 'The God Delusion' he writes
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction...
If all we were given by God was the Law, we would have a clear idea of what not to do, but not much hope of working out what to do. Even when we do work out what we should be doing, again and again we find ourselves unable to do it. How many of us this Lent have vowed to give up chocolate, recycle our waste, do an act of kindness every day, or take up jogging...and now, only 2 weeks later, realise we have already failed? I write from personal experience, having failed yesterday to find time to write.....
Paul writes, in Romans 7:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.
For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7: 15, 22-25
Paul writes of the struggle of being a flawed human being who knows what 'good' looks like but can't achieve it- but he also writes as one who has found that there is hope.
We are not doomed to live in this hopeless cycle of trying to keep the law and failing.
The message of Easter is that there is a way out of the sentence of death.....
This was the thinking of Job's comforters, who assumed that the reason his life fell apart and terrible tragedy surrounded him was his failure to keep the commandments of God.
In Job 4:7 his friend Eliphaz offers his explanation for the troubles that Job was experiencing:
"As I have seen, those who plough iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.
By the breath of God they perish,
and by the blast of His anger they are consumed."
This thinking was still evident in the New Testament, when a blind man met Jesus. The disciples asked Jesus,
"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
It is not surprising that many people have given up on God, when it seems that no-one is capable of living up to His standards. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins publicly scorn God: in 'The God Delusion' he writes
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction...
If all we were given by God was the Law, we would have a clear idea of what not to do, but not much hope of working out what to do. Even when we do work out what we should be doing, again and again we find ourselves unable to do it. How many of us this Lent have vowed to give up chocolate, recycle our waste, do an act of kindness every day, or take up jogging...and now, only 2 weeks later, realise we have already failed? I write from personal experience, having failed yesterday to find time to write.....
Paul writes, in Romans 7:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.
For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7: 15, 22-25
Paul writes of the struggle of being a flawed human being who knows what 'good' looks like but can't achieve it- but he also writes as one who has found that there is hope.
We are not doomed to live in this hopeless cycle of trying to keep the law and failing.
The message of Easter is that there is a way out of the sentence of death.....
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