“The Graciousness of God’s Law”

Exodus 20:1-17

Matthew 5:17

Matthew 5:17-18 (The Message): Don’t suppose for a minute that I have come to demolish the Scriptures – either God’s Law or the Prophets. I’m not here to demolish but complete. I am going to put it all together, pull it all together in a vast panorama. God’s Law is more real and lasting than the stars in the sky and the ground at your feet. Long after stars burn out and earth wears out, God’s Law will be alive and working.”

[prayer]

In this morning’s Gospel Reading Jesus is very clear about his high view of Scripture. He has not come to tear it down but to make it complete. When we read the Sermon on the Mount in its entirety we see what Jesus means. He isn’t just repeating the same-old, same-old. He’s addressing God’s original meaning of the Law. In some cases he is making it tougher than before.

We know from Scripture that Jesus did more than preach and teach the Law of God. He lived it, but he did so in some unexpected ways, especially as he dealt with the Sabbath Law. To put it bluntly, Jesus broke the socially and religiously accepted rules concerning the Sabbath. He healed people. He let his disciples pick some corn. He was, in the eyes of the Pharisees, not a very good boy!

Did not Jesus explicitly say that he had come fulfill the Law and the Prophets? Yes, that is exactly what he said. But then he broke the rules. Did that make him a liar? No. He came to fulfill the Law. He did not come to enforce the rules. There is a big difference.

Later on the Apostle Paul would make it very clear that neither keeping the rules nor obeying the Law could save us. He had some very strong words for those early Christians who wanted to put certain rules back into the equation of Christian living. There is no salvation in the rules. Nor can there be salvation in the Law. Furthermore, as Paul further made clear, we’re not capable of keeping it anyway. We are saved by grace through faith in the Word made Flesh. There is no salvation outside of Christ.

Does that reality then render the Ten Commandments, in fact the entire Old Testament, useless? Well, no. Jesus didn’t come to fulfill something useless. The question remains, however, what do we do with the Ten Commandments? Why even bother?

Some words from “A Declaration of Faith:” “God bound himself to his people in Covenant. Freed slaves became the people of God when they accepted the Lord’s Covenant. God charged them to respond to his rescuing love by obeying his commandments. Their life was to express the justice and compassion of their holy God.”

That goes back to why God gave these Commandments to Israel in the first place. Hear now why he still gives them to the Church: “Since we, too, are the Lord’s covenant people, we know we must be holy as the Lord is holy. We must keep God’s commandments, not in order to earn or compel the Lord’s favor, but to reflect the character of God and to be his grateful and loving people.”

Furthermore: “We declare Christ has freed us from trying to save ourselves by obeying the law. He restores to us God’s law as a gift and a delight. The law describes concretely the shape of our freedom. When we accept its discipline, it keeps our personal lives from being chaotic and increases our effectiveness in the church’s mission.”

God’s Law cannot be reduced to a set of rules and regulations. Nor can it be limited to a system that teaches us and others to be good citizens. The Law was never meant to be a burden on God’s people: not Israel, not the Church. In its original setting it was definitely not given to Israel as something to inflict on others. As fulfilled by Jesus Christ it is not given to us as something we are to impose on non-Christians. It defines the parameters of our life in Christ. When we accept the gift of Christ we accept the responsibility of living Christian lives. Because he loves us, we love him by obeying his commandments.

More than that, keeping his commandments enables us to obey that new commandment Jesus gave his disciples on the night of his arrest: “Love one another.” In his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson made this statement concerning why God gave his Law to Israel: “The Ten [Commandments] establish the conditions necessary for a free, loving, and just community of God’s people to develop and flourish. The three adjectives – free, loving, just – are basic to community.” What was true for Israel still holds true for the Church. Our life together as the Body of Christ is a life lived freely, lovingly, and justly. Obeying the Ten Commandments sets us free to love one another – and the neighbors, strangers, and even enemies we encounter every day – and to be just in all our dealings with all those whose lives intersect with ours, regardless of how they might deal with us.

In an article in a recent edition of Sojourners magazine Joe Roos, one of our Mennonite brothers, wrote: “The Ten Commandments don’t begin with ‘Here are ten commandments, learn them by rote’ or ‘Here are Ten Commandments, obey them.’ Instead they begin with a sweeping announcement of freedom: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’ We will probably always think of the declarations that follow as the Ten Commandments. But we could, and probably should, think of them as invitation to God’s liberation. Because the Lord is your God, you are free to not need any other gods. You are free from the tyranny of lifeless idols. You are free to rest on the Sabbath. You are free to enjoy your parents as long as they live. You are set free from murder, stealing, and covetousness…”

In essence those words to first the Israelites and then to the Church pretty well sum up these statements from two different Presbyterian Confessions: “In life and in death we belong to God” and “The chief end of [humankind] is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” We are God’s people. In Christ he has set us free to be his people – in this life and the next. Even death cannot take that freedom away from us. In Christ God has set us free to not only glorify him but also to enjoy him – now and forever.

The Law was never meant to be a burden. It was given to us by God and fulfilled in Christ to set us free to work toward becoming the people God has created us to be. It was given to us as a means of glorifying God and finding joy in our relationships with him. The law isn’t a burden; it’s a gift and a delight. It sets us free to love God and one another. It sets us free to model a joyful and inviting holiness to the world around us. It sets us free to live the kind of lives that will draw people to Christ. We are free of any need to post the Ten Commandments anywhere, because we are free to live in the world as flesh and blood. testaments to their delightfulness.

Over the next few weeks we will be taking a serious look at each of the Ten Commandments on an individual basis. We will be examining them in light of God’s original intentions. We will be looking at them in light of how Christ fulfilled them. We will be interpreting them in light of the Sermon on the Mount. Let us learn better how to obey them. More than that, let us learn from them how to better enjoy our relationship with God and our relationships with one another. Amen.