This question was also addressed during our weekly Read the Bible in a Year discussion group today. To see what the Bible means by "the Law," go here.
God's moral law cannot save us from sin and death.
Yet God's demand that we obey the Law stands.
These two facts would otherwise leave us eternally condemned and without hope. But as Saint Paul wrote to the first century church at Rome:
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 3For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:1-4)
So, what are the uses of God's Law today? Lutheran theology identifies three.
First: God's moral law acts as a hedge, protecting human beings, even those who refuse to acknowledge God's existence, from themselves and from one another. Human beings have an understanding of what is right and wrong. As C.S. Lewis points out in the opening chapter of Mere Christianity, the reason that human beings "quarrel," attempting to prove each other wrong and themselves right, is that, without even articulating it, they each believe in some baseline understanding of what is moral and what is immoral. Good governments and despotic ones alike, explain and justify their laws based on this moral law, encompassed in the Ten Commandments, whether they know the commandments or God or not.
Paul talks about this in Romans 2:14-16:
When Gentiles [non-Jews and particularly, Paul refers to Gentiles who have no awareness of God's moral law], who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. 15They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them 16on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.
Without the law written on our hearts, the world would be in an even bigger mess than it is. Nothing would act as a hedge or curb against our inborn sin turning every piece of this planet into total anarchy. Luther said that were it not for the law curbing human impulses, believers in Christ would be like "lambs among ravenous wolves."
The second use of the moral law is to act as a mirror. God's moral law shows us how far we are from God's expectations for human beings. We see ourselves as we are and know that we are condemned to death by our sin.
Paul says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).
Another New Testament writer, James, says, "Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it" (James 2:10).
Passages like that should give us pause, helping us to see ourselves truthfully and driving us to the God revealed in Jesus Christ for mercy and forgiveness.
The third use of the moral law is to act as a guide for those who already are living in relationship with Jesus Christ. This is the use the psalmist had in mind when he wrote:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me to the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)
This side of our own death and resurrection, believers who have been made into Christ's new creation must nonetheless live with our old sinful selves. Without attention to God's commandments and submission to Christ's authority over our lives, it becomes easy to slide into sinful patterns which, if left unchecked, could take us into unbelief or willful sin. The third use of God's moral law helps believers face the truth about themselves and to keep turning to Christ for forgiveness and new life.
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
Colossians 1:1-14 This past week brought the seventieth birthday of Ringo Starr, drummer of the Beatles. Several days before his big day, an interviewer asked him what he might like people to do to celebrate. At noon on that day, Ringo said, he wanted everybody to hold up their hands in peace signs and say, three times, “Peace and love.”
It’s absolutely silly, of course. Humanity has known for centuries that “all you need is love,” but having that knowledge and even engaging in gestures like Ringo Starr suggested in order to remind us of it will do nothing to make us all the loving people who, in our heart of hearts, we really want to be and who we often pretend to be to the outside world.
There’s a lot of hatred in the world, much of it done in the name of God, some of it done specifically in the name of Jesus Christ. That’s not only tragic and sad, it’s sinful and demonic.
When I speak of hatred, I don’t have in mind just the sort of hostility we may harbor for someone we feel has betrayed our trust or hurt us. Those Cleveland Cavaliers fans who now say, as one was quoted as saying in the Columbus Dispatch this past week, that they’ll hate LeBron James forever, harbor a deep passion (I would say a way too deep passion) about LeBron, the NBA, and sports, in general. You see, at some level, those now professing their hatred for LeBron James once passionately loved him, his sport, and the promise of a championship that he seemed to carry away with him to the South Beach of Florida.
That kind of hatred is born of love and disappointment. We see it all the time. A jilted lover can harbor a deep hatred for her or his ex, precisely because of the love they felt for that person. An assembly line worker who has thirty years on the job who suddenly finds his work shipped elsewhere or eliminated altogether, can feel hatred toward the company precisely because he loved his job, its income, its routine, and all that it brought into his life.
But there is another kind of hatred, one that is far more widespread than the hatred of overt hostility born of love and disappointment. It’s the hatred of indifference, of looking out for number one without regard to others. It isn’t hostile, mind you. It simply doesn’t consider others.
We’re rightly outraged and mystified by what we might call “passive hatred” we see, hear, and experience in our real-life world. And yet I personally have to admit my own culpability for this very sin.
A few weeks ago, Ann and I were walking across the parking lot of a Starbucks when a woman pushing a child in a stroller approached us. She said that her baby’s father was being released from jail the next day and she needed money to move to a different place where he couldn’t find her. Was she telling the truth? I don’t know. But I didn’t give her a chance to repeat her story. I dehumanized her by simply refusing her request and moving on. The image of that woman and her child has haunted me since.
This is an example of the hatred of indifference and I confess it to you, really, with shame. I should know better.
But it pleases me that I recognize it for what it is: a sin, a violation of the great commandment that we love God totally and love our neighbors—all our neighbors—as we love ourselves.
The reason it pleases me that I recognize this indifference as sin is that it shows that, despite my imperfections and flaws, a powerful seed has been planted within me. It’s the seed of the gospel—the good news of new and everlasting life that belongs to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ. The messiah Jesus brings those who trust in Him forgiveness of sins and ushers us into His kingdom here and now. I don’t think that I would recognize the subtle hatred of indifference as a sin of mine if Jesus weren’t working within me, working in spite of my faults and frailties to make me part of His new creation.
Today we begin a short sermon series on the New Testament book of Colossians. Colossians is a letter written jointly by the apostle Paul and his assistant, the young pastor Timothy, to a church in western Asia Minor, what is today western Turkey, in the town of Colossae. Paul was imprisoned, probably under house arrest, at the time of the letter’s writing. Some think that he was imprisoned in Rome; others say he was held in the nearby town of Ephesus. Whatever the case, the letter was probably written in the early-60sAD, several years before Colossae was destroyed by an earthquake.
By the time Paul and Timothy sent this letter, Colossae had fallen on hard economic times. Its major industry, the production of dark red dyed wool, had nearly died out. Colossae sat in the Lycus Valley, near the Meander River, and was largely forgotten by the greater Roman Empire beyond it.
But Colossae and the Lycus Valley weren’t forgotten by God! (Anymore than any of us are ever forgotten by God. God is never more than a prayer away, something I have learned again beyond all doubt in recent weeks.) Paul had sent a member of his ministry team, a Colossian named Epaphras to start a congregation in Colossae. There, under the daily pastoral leadership of Epaphras, a congregation composed of Jews and non-Jews (Gentiles, like us) had taken root and grown. But it wasn’t just an organization that had taken root and grown. Paul says that the very word of God’s truth, the gospel, had born fruit in them and was displaying itself in their love: in love among believers, in love of the believers toward others.
In the original Greek in which Colossians, like the rest of the New Testament, was written, the word that Paul and Timothy use for love is agape. In secular Greek writing, the word agape for love was rarely used until the second and third centuries. When the early Christians used it, they had a very specific understanding of love in mind.
Agape love is self-giving love.
Agape love is also in-spite-of love, given and acted upon in spite of how one may feel about the person to whom they’re loving at the time.
Agape love is about actively looking out for others, even when you don’t know them or when you don't approve of their behavior or know that God doesn't approve of their behavior.
The ultimate expression of agape love, of course, is Jesus Christ. On the cross, Jesus gave His life to wipe out the power of sin and death over our lives and He did so in spite of the fact that at that moment the world’s hatred—our hatred—in the forms of both hostility and indifference—were the very things that pounded the nails into His flesh and forced the crown of thorns down on His head.
But Jesus is more than an example of agape love. Seeing representations of His death on a cross—while it may build up our faith—won’t necessarily have any more power to turn us from the hatred of indifference to agape love than will holding up peace signs and saying, “Peace and love” three times.
It’s only when we trust—when we have faith--in Jesus and give Him access to our hearts, minds, and wills each day that He can plant the seeds of His love in us and make us and every part of the world we touch different, better, more human, more divine.
In the opening verses of Colossians, our second lesson for today, Paul exults and thanks God that Jesus’ word is growing in the Colossian Christians and showing in their lives of tough agape love! That's what happens when the Good News of Jesus takes hold in people's lives.
A few years back in our former community, a strip joint opened. Some churches got together and demonstrated, protesting the existence of the place. They were concerned that it would breed prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse. But they did more than demonstrate. Demonstrators befriended the dancers, found out about their lives, and set up schedules so that while the women were working at night, volunteers from the churches babysat their kids. Why? Christ’s agape love lived within those Christians. They refused to be indifferent or hostile to people who, just like them, needed Jesus Christ living within them.
And this is no isolated incident. Tony Campolo is a Baptist pastor and a sociologist. I tease that he's so cool, he could be a Lutheran and Campolo, in fact, often speaks at our Lutheran gatherings. One evening before a presentation in Hawaii, he and a colleague walked into a diner that turned out to be the gathering place of prostitutes before and after they went out onto the streets. Campolo struck up a conversation with these women. When it was clear that he wasn’t interested in buying what they were selling, they asked questions about him and his work. He explained that he was a Christian and a pastor.
As they talked, Campolo learned that it was the birthday of one of the prostitutes. No one would send her a card or give her a cake and she would spend the evening in her humiliating trade. Campolo found out that this woman and the other prostitutes all would return to the diner at 3:00 in the morning. So, he and his friend went to a bakery to buy a cake. They bought streamers and hung them in the diner. When the prostitutes returned, they were stunned, especially the one whose birthday it was. "What kind of God do you believe in?" she asked. Campolo answered: “The kind of God Who throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:00 in the morning.” The God we know in Jesus Christ is the One Who fills us with His tough, self-giving, in-spite-of agape love to share with the world!
I thank God for the strong agape love I see and experience in the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church.
I thank God that I am privileged to be your pastor.
I thank God that I'm given a front row seat on the kingdom of Jesus I see growing in you each day.
And, I thank God that He has made me a grateful beneficiary of your agape love for me, imperfections and all.
My message for you today is as simple and as direct as the one we find Paul sharing with the Colossians in our lesson this morning: Keep trusting in Jesus and keep allowing Him to grow His self-giving, in-spite-of love for all, not just in your sentiments and attitudes, but in everything you do, in every decision you make, and in every word you speak.
All the world needs is love. And that love is found only in Christ Jesus. Amen!
