We’re a nation of laws, maybe more than any other country. When we elect men and women to the House and Senate, we refer to them as ‘lawmakers,’ and that’s exactly what they do – make laws.
We have traffic laws, zoning laws, housing laws, parking laws, and education laws. Laws for banking, food and drugs, marriage and families, animals, noise, and advertising. Even laws for enforcing laws. We have criminal laws for dealing with people that insist on breaking the law.
You’d think that with all our laws and regulations, society would be orderly and law-abiding. ‘Here are our expectations. Here are the boundaries. Now do as you’re told.’ That’s hardly the case.
Child abuse. Domestic abuse. Burglary. Robbery. Murder. Scamming. Lying. We have countless laws concerning these and other forms of bad behavior, but they persist.
Whenever I hear someone saying something like, “We need stricter gun laws,” I wonder about the copious laws we already have regulating the use of guns. The problem is the folks who pay no attention to them. The late Charlton Heston, when he was president of NRA, observed: “There is no such thing as a good gun. There is no such thing as a bad gun. A gun in the hands of a bad man is a very dangerous thing. A gun in the hands of a good person is no danger to anyone except the bad guys.”
If we want to consider the power of laws to control behavior, all we need to do is look to ancient Israel. Besides the Ten Commandments (listed in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), God gave His chosen people many other laws. Reading through the Old Testament, it seems the Israelites delighted in how many of the laws they could ignore and how frequently they did.
Even “heroes” of the Old Testament, people like Jacob, Moses, Samson, King David, King Solomon and Hezekiah, had an amazing propensity for disobedience. They knew the laws yet defied them in many ways.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have laws. They’re important and we need them. Without speed limits on our roads, some drivers would exhibit reckless disregard for the safety of others and themselves. There’s a reason we have laws against taking merchandise from stores without paying for them. But no matter how stringent, those determined to break laws will continue doing so.
The problem isn’t that laws aren’t clear enough, or we don’t have enough of them. It’s more basic than that. The problem is the perpetual presence of evil, as it’s been from the beginning of history. Adam and Eve were given one simple law, “…you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17).
It wasn’t that there were too many laws to keep up with. They had one law, just one. God said they could eat of any other tree in the Garden of Eden. So, what did they do? They ate fruit from the one that was off limits.
Since then, every individual born into this world has been doing what seems to come naturally: Rebelling against God, His laws, precepts and statutes. “But we’re only human!” is the excuse. In one sense that’s true. We read in Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Perhaps there’s a spiritual component to our genetic makeup and we’re behaving according to a ‘sin gene.’
In the words of the old hymn, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” we’re “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” This wandering is a result of the perplexing appeal of evil. As has been stated more than once, “If sin wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t want to do it.”
How do we respond? Forget about making laws? Resign ourselves to people just doing what they’re going to do? From what I hear, that’s kind of the conclusion some states have made. But there’s a better answer.
In Jesus Christ, who called Himself “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6), we find the capacity to turn away from evil, to say no to sin. When we become born again as new creations in Christ (John 3:3, 2 Corinthians 5:17) we step outside the “I’m only human” box. The Lord not only gives us new life spiritually but also the desire to pursue right and reject wrong.
The apostle Paul expressed it this way in Romans 8:2-4, “…through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering…that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.”
This isn’t saying we should cease making laws since our “sinful nature” doesn’t like obeying them. But it also doesn’t say the only reason for pointing people to Jesus is to get them “saved” and assured of going to heaven when they die. He wants us to become living, breathing, law-keeping examples of what a life transformed by the power of Christ looks like.
Other stanzas from “Come Thou Fount…” say it well:
“Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wand’ring from the face of God;
He, to save my soul from danger,
Interposed His precious blood….
Take my heart, oh, take and seal it
With Thy Spirit from above.
Rescued thus from sin and danger,
Purchased by the Savior’s blood,
May I walk on earth a stranger,
As a son and heir of God.”
No comments:
Post a Comment