God, The Law, and the Lawyers..

​God, the Law, and the Lawyers

I have a lot of friends who are lawyers, so I say this with all the affection I can muster:

Lawyers have apparently always been a problem.

God gave Moses the Law.

It was holy. It was just. It was good.

Then the lawyers got hold of it.

And, as lawyers are prone to do, they started asking questions.

What exactly does God mean by “work”?

What constitutes work?

How much work is too much work?

What if my ox falls in a ditch?

Before long, God’s Law had definitions, interpretations, traditions, exceptions, applications, and what amounted to a substantial body of case law.

To be fair, most of this didn’t begin with bad intentions. These men weren’t necessarily scheming about how to make following God more difficult. They were trying to answer a reasonable question:

How do we make sure people obey God?

And therein lies the problem.

They thought God’s Law needed their help.

Come to think of it, maybe this isn’t really a lawyer problem after all.

Maybe it’s a human problem.

Because two thousand years later, Christians are still doing it.

The Law Wasn’t the Problem

Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, there was nothing wrong with God’s Law.

Paul said:

“Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.”
— Romans 7:12

The problem was never the Law.

The problem was us.

Paul explains it plainly:

“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son…”
— Romans 8:3

The Law was good. But it was powerless to make sinful people righteous because its weakness wasn’t found in the commandments. It was found in the flesh of the people trying to keep them.

The Law could tell us what righteousness looked like. It couldn’t make us righteous.

It could identify sin. It couldn’t cure it.

“By the law is the knowledge of sin.” (Romans 3:20)

The Law showed us the holiness of God and, in doing so, showed us just how far short of that holiness we fall.

But human beings being human beings, we decided maybe God’s Law needed a little help.

Enter the Lawyers

By the time Jesus walked the earth, generations of teachers had spent enormous amounts of time interpreting, applying, explaining, and expanding the Law.

The New Testament frequently refers to scribes and “lawyers.” These weren’t lawyers in our modern courtroom sense. They were experts in the Law of Moses.

Their solution was to build fences around God’s commands.

If God’s boundary is here, we’ll draw another boundary several feet back so nobody accidentally crosses God’s boundary.

Then we need to explain that boundary. Define the exceptions. Determine how it applies in different circumstances. And eventually we need another interpretation to explain the interpretation.

Before long, the fence begins to attract more attention than the property it was built to protect.

Jesus confronted this directly:

“Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition.”
— Mark 7:13

They weren’t throwing away God’s Word. They were explaining it, protecting it, applying it and clarifying it.

And somewhere along the way, their explanations began to obscure the thing they were supposed to protect.

Jesus said:

“For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders…”
— Matthew 23:4

God gave the Law. Man gave commentary on the Law. Then commentary on the commentary.

But there was a deeper problem.

If God’s perfect Law couldn’t transform the human heart, what made us think adding more rules would?

You Can’t Fix the Flesh With More Law

The Law wasn’t powerless because there weren’t enough commandments.

Paul doesn’t say, “What the Law could not do because God didn’t explain it thoroughly enough…”

He says:

“It was weak through the flesh.”

The problem wasn’t insufficient instruction.

The problem was the human heart.

You cannot regulate a dead heart into life. You cannot build enough fences around sin to make a sinner righteous.

And that is exactly why Jesus came.

God’s answer to the failure of human flesh wasn’t a better rulebook.

It was His Son.

The Mystery

God had already hinted at something radically different through the prophets.

Jeremiah said a day was coming when God would no longer merely put His Law before His people:

“I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.”
— Jeremiah 31:33

Ezekiel promised a new heart, a new spirit, and ultimately God’s own Spirit dwelling within His people.

Then Paul gives us this extraordinary description of the mystery:

“Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
— Colossians 1:27

Not merely Christ for you.

Christ in you.

Christianity is not Judaism with an updated compliance manual.

It isn’t God’s improved system for producing better-behaved people.

It is life where there was death. It is a new creation. It is God Himself taking up residence in His people through His Spirit.

And somehow, even with something that magnificent, we still can’t resist the temptation to improve it.

So We Build New Fences

We Christians can shake our heads at the ancient lawyers while doing something remarkably similar.

The Gospel sometimes seems almost too simple.

Christ crucified.

Christ risen.

Christ in you.

The Spirit of God transforming you into the image of Christ.

Surely people need something a little more practical than that.

So we help God out.

Five habits of successful Christians. Seven steps to a better marriage. Three ways to overcome anxiety.

And let me be clear: there may not be anything wrong with any of those things.

That’s what makes this dangerous.

The problem isn’t always that what we’re teaching is false.

The problem is that something secondary, useful, practical and easily explained can slowly take the place of something primary, mysterious, powerful and divine.

We start preaching Christianity primarily as a better way to live.

And before we know it, Jesus has become supporting material for another self-help program.

An Appearance of Wisdom

Paul warned about this.

In Colossians 2, he describes religious regulations:

“Touch not; taste not; handle not.”

And then makes a fascinating observation. These things, he says, have:

“A shew of wisdom…”

They look wise.

Rules and systems give us something measurable and explainable. Something we can put on a PowerPoint slide and send people home with.

But Paul says they ultimately have no power against the flesh.

Then comes Colossians 3.

Paul doesn’t introduce a better system.

He says:

“If ye then be risen with Christ…”

There is the difference.

The answer isn’t a better rule.

It’s a risen Christ.

And our life in Him.

What Are We Preaching?

This brings me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Paul told the Corinthians:

“For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
— 1 Corinthians 2:2

Paul certainly taught Christian behavior. His letters are full of practical instruction about relationships, money, sexuality, forgiveness, worship, work and discipline.

So Paul clearly wasn’t opposed to practical teaching.

But practical teaching was never the center.

Christ was.

The instructions flowed from the Gospel rather than replacing it.

That distinction matters.

Because a sermon can be completely biblical, morally correct and genuinely useful and still leave the hearer with little more than:

Here’s what you need to do. Now go do better.

And if that’s all we’ve done, I’m not sure we’ve preached Christianity.

We may have simply created another law.

Maybe a good law.

Maybe even a biblical law.

But law nonetheless.

The Foolishness of Preaching

Paul said:

“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness…”
— 1 Corinthians 1:18

Maybe part of the reason the Gospel seems foolish is that we keep thinking it needs our help.

Christ crucified seems too simple.

Christ in you seems too mysterious.

Grace seems too dangerous.

The Holy Spirit seems too difficult to put into a program.

So we give people something we can explain, something they can do, something they can measure. Something we can measure in others..

And somewhere along the way, we can preach an entire sermon about living the Christian life without spending much time talking about Christ.

That should bother us.

Because the Gospel isn’t advice about how to become a better person.

It is good news about what God has done in Christ.

There is a fundamental difference.

Law says: Do this and live.

Self-help Christianity says: Do these things and become better.

The Gospel says: Christ has given you life. Now walk in Him.

The order matters.

We obey because we have been made alive.

We love because He first loved us.

We forgive because we have been forgiven.

We aren’t working our way toward Christ. We are walking out the life of Christ already dwelling within us.

Maybe God Doesn’t Need Our Help

I don’t want to make cartoon villains out of the ancient lawyers.

Doing so would allow us to miss the warning entirely.

Many of them probably genuinely believed they were helping people obey God. They were explaining, clarifying, applying and protecting.

Making God’s commands practical.

And perhaps that is precisely why we ought to recognize ourselves in them.

Because Christians still have an incredible ability to take something God has given us and improve upon it until our improvements obscure the original.

The Law was holy.

We couldn’t keep it.

So men added more law.

It didn’t work.

Then Christ came.

He fulfilled what we could not fulfill. He died the death we deserved. He rose from the grave. He gave us His Spirit. He made us new.

And He now lives in His people.

Christ in you, the hope of glory.

God gave us a mystery.

Maybe we don’t need to form a committee, hire a lawyer, and write a policy manual to explain it.

Maybe we just need to preach it.

Maybe we need to trust that the Gospel really is “the power of God unto salvation.”

And maybe we need to resist the very human temptation to improve on what God has perfected.