A recurring theme in my studies is how flipping hard it is for me to get anywhere in Leviticus, Deuteronomy or Numbers. The Law. Frankly it can seem downright ridiculous. My inability to understand what the intention of the Law is, has caused me a lot of doubt and frustration. It’s possible that I’m just not ready for it yet. My struggles point out my shortcomings, not the that of the Bible. This all points to my own bad perspectives, my desire to skew things to what I want them to be. I want the Bible to reflect what I want…not what it actually is. The Bible is the indicator of who God is, not who I am. The fact that The Law can seem so ridiculous is an indicator of how far we are Fallen. The Bible and the Law points to God’s perfection, not our own. God is unchanging. God did not change from Genesis 2 to Genesis 3...we did. As life proceeds the difficulty of the Law and our perpetual failures become more exaggerated. God is unchanged, but there remains the need to point to who he is, to what we were meant to be. Perfection was in our hand, ease of life and toil free, but we turned away from God, even just for a moment and Eden was shattered. We repeat that in our lives even now. Our failures remain not that we cannot uphold the law (which we can’t) but that we turn away from God.
As someone who has always had a sort of distaste for the Law, I think this is somehow easier to see. From about 13 years on, I never thought I could obey perfectly, so by 18 I gave up completely. Just because I ignored it doesn’t mean that the expectations went away. God remained unchanged. For someone who leans towards legalism (following the rules verses my desire to rebel), I think understanding can be a little trickier. The ability to uphold the Law becomes an attempt to point out your own perfection and point out your worthiness to God. If it is easier for you to “be good”, then it may be harder for you to understand what God really wants from you.
To properly Love the Law is to have reverence for God’s perfection. Like the two son’s of the Prodigal Son parable, we often get it wrong. We reject what is right completely or we define our own identity by how righteous we are. Either way we miss the point. If only there were someone who could make things more clear, who could point us to what our own hearts were meant for, who could point us to what God’s heart desires. If only there were someone who could take the Law and deflate the self-righteous, encourage the sinner, demand more and yet make it easier. Christ did all these things. It is one of the most brilliant things ever achieved. We were all made equal. We are all sinners. Christ did it not because he abolished the Law, but because he fulfilled it. (Matt5:17) To those who held their obedience to the letter of the Law as their identity, Jesus said, it’s more than what you do, it is what is in your heart. To the sinners and Gentiles, he said “I am the Way”, your culture, history and sinful nature are irrelevant. No one comes to the Father, but through me.
God remains the same. The Law remains in tact. The details and atrocious difficulty of the Law of Moses lays the groundwork for The Christ, the only “human” that could perfect the law, Jesus.
If there is something difficult in the Bible it may enter your mind that it’s not suppose to be there, that somehow someone made an error, that there is a miscalculation. This is absurd and arrogant. I don’t understand Advanced Trigonometry (yet), but for me to suggest that something is out of place in an equation is an indicator of the vastness of my ignorance. I can be learned in the scripture at my own level. God will meet me in the word. He will teach me the basics of addition and subtraction in the Psalms and Proverbs. Though simple, there is complexity there. He will give me the fluidity of multiplication and division in the Gospels. Geometry is in Job and Ecclesiastes and Hebrews and Isaiah as they tie all of the quadrants of the Bible together in axis and arcs. There is a lot there to be learned and discerned throughout the Bible. I think some of us have natural inclinations towards certain areas. I am afraid that there are such difficulties of the Bible that I will never learn certain areas. I may never fully grasp the Trigonometry of the Law, but that doesn’t change the Truth. It’s not going to make me stop trying either. Though it is difficult, God’s perfection remains. The Joy is that God has written the intuition of what the Law is within us. Grace is that he sent his son, the teacher, to show us how to retrieve it.
I close with a telling quote from my high school algebra teacher, “Scott, I’ll pass you if you promise NOT to take any math courses in college.”
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