4. Guided by the Word of God
4
Guided by the Word of God
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
Psalm 119:105
Humor is a funny thing, in more senses than one; for though it may appear in the guise of a shift from seriousness to flippancy, the incongruities that are humor’s lifeblood regularly prompt all kinds of weighty questions, often weightier than those being discussed before the humor broke in as light relief. Thus: An American president was famously impassive and taciturn. When news came that he was dead, one wit, so we hear, asked, “How did they know?” Barbed and tasteless as it may be, this joke raises the weightiest question of all: what does it mean to be a human being, alive? With that question, the present chapter must begin.
In broadest terms, adult human life, into which children are to grow, is a compound of three things: discovery, direction setting, and decision making. Each of these involves us in some form of relating, communicating, imagining, and hoping. Discovery means the discerning of goodness, truth, and beauty or their opposites in the world order that surrounds us, plus the discerning of love and justice or their opposites in our relationship with other people, plus the realizing of how our responses, positive or negative, creative or destructive, to persons and to situations can achieve or miss goodness, beauty, truth, love, and justice here and now. Direction setting means fixing personal goals and embracing purposive action whereby we aim to bring in a future we shall welcome and avoid one we shall not. Decision making means the establishing of our various commitments major and minor, some involving change, some confirming continuance, some following our usual habits, some breaking with them, all being positive responses to whoever or whatever is confronting us each moment. The human being has in the past been defined as a tool-making animal. We here are defining ourselves, biblically we believe, as discerning, direction setting, and decision making creatures of God, and seeking to understand ourselves and our lives, first to last, in these terms. Our human life, we are saying, is marked by relationality, resolvings, and responsibilities—either for better or for worse, depending on how we handle ourselves in each circumstance. We know, as we are sure our readers do too, that in today’s decadent Western world, aspects of this account of ourselves get dissolved away in the reductionist acids of modern and postmodern philosophy, but trashing any part of what we have just said seems to us a willful evasion of what in our hearts we all know to be our own human reality; so on this basis we shake our heads, roll our eyes, and proceed.
The biblical view of our humanness takes for granted all that we have said so far and goes beyond it. The Bible, and with it the whole Christian church down the ages, tells us that our discernment must begin by acknowledging our Creator as present in everything and as both the source of, and the resource for, all that is good; then our direction setting must start by establishing the glory of God as our target in every endeavor; and our decision making must proceed on the basis that in all that we attempt we are to be guided by God’s revealed will. Thus we shall please God by practicing righteousness, and so display in daily life the reality of the divine image and likeness, as we are called to do.
What does it mean to be guided by God’s revealed will? To begin an answer to that question, four basic things must be said in sequence: namely, that we are to be guided by the commands of God, the book of God, the law of God, and the mind of God. To say these things as we think they need to be said will occupy us for the rest of this chapter.
Guided by God’s Commands
First: We are to be guided by the commands of God. Fundamental to Christian faith is the recognition that commands from God are a reality. Christianity views languages as such as a divine gift to our race, given not only so that we might communicate with each other and offer praises and prayers to our Maker, but also, and indeed primarily, so that he might communicate with us, in both the indicative and the imperative mood—in other words, so that he might tell us both what we need to know and what we need to do. He is essentially a God who commands his rational creatures. Non-Christian faiths, and the wide range of unorthodox Protestant opinions that we lump together under the name of liberalism, do not usually acknowledge this; whatever they say about God paying attention to our prayers, in which we tell him things, they assume (most of the time, anyway) that God does not use language to tell us things and give us marching orders. Wise souls are thought of in these circles as speaking for God in what they say about him, and in what they tell us to do to get close to him, but God is not believed in any sense to speak for himself, and so beliefs about the specifics of his will for us humans remain blurry. We, however, affirm that God does address us all in the command mode, and we see it as our main task in this book to show just how he does so. As Christianity from the start has taught what is called a divine-command ethic, so now we propose to teach, as one aspect of that ethic, divine-command guidance. This is our agenda.
To start with, historic Christianity, the faith of the continuing orthodox church, rests on the belief that God the Creator has given and kept and will continue to keep promises. Thus, Christianity sees Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, the Christ, the fulfillment of God’s many promises of a Davidic Savior-King that he gave throughout Old Testament times from Eden on. One who gives and keeps promises is necessarily a language-user, just as every monarch is necessarily a language-user every time he issues a command. God’s use of language in stating his promises and commands is the first thing we need to be clear on. Christianity acknowledges Jesus as the world’s Savior and Lord on whom we base personal faith and life by trusting promises from and about Jesus as our God-given lifeline. By stating the divine commitment to us who trust Christ, God’s promises shape our relationship with him, and that means that those whom God thus takes under his wing are also under his command so that both as our Creator and as our Redeemer he is entitled to say to us, “Now this is what you must and must not do.” We (his followers) recognize that and see his commands as linked with his promises to guide all who in every generation live by those promises. But standard Christian belief and piety would both be blown to pieces were faith in God as a promise-giver and promise-keeper negated, for, as we now see, it is this that holds Christianity together as the reality that it is, the frame of faith within which divine commands belong.
Furthermore, Christianity rests on the belief that Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate, the second Person within the divine unity. He came to save our lost race; he died, rose, reigns, and will reappear. On earth he was a speaker, a teacher, a lawgiver, and a prophet—a language-user, therefore; and central to his remembered utterances are promises and commands that he gave in his Father’s name to all who would follow him. By being a language-user he showed that using words to instruct is God’s way of communication. He insisted that response to his own words will determine each hearer’s destiny, for better or for worse—just as if a man built his house firmly on rock or else on shifting sands at the tide line (Matt. 7:24–27). Jesus said even more directly (and offensively), “The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day” (John 12:48). These and similar statements show that Christianity depends on the divine use of language—fact-and-duty language, promise-and-command language—and on our recognition of that language. As you cannot take the divine Christ out of Christianity, so you cannot eliminate his divine words. If Christ is real, then we may and must affirm that God talks and that denial of this is in truth denial of Christ.
Then, in the third place: Christianity rests on the belief that God through Christ enters into a covenant relationship with his worshippers, in virtue of which the church is right to identify itself as his covenant people. The Christian claim is that the church is the new, true Israel, inheriting in Christ an improved version of the relationship that God through Moses established with Abraham’s descendants at Sinai. Now a covenant is made precisely by an exchange of words: in this case, words of promise and command whereby God imposes his covenant, followed by human words of acceptance and pledged loyalty in response. So if God does not use words, his covenant with his people cannot exist, and from this standpoint historic Christianity falls apart. Thus it appears that God’s use of language, namely command language within the frame of his promise-giving and covenanting, belongs to the very essence of Christianity and must be acknowledged by all Christ’s true disciples.
The Bible displays God as one who commands and humans as required to practice obedience. This presentation starts in Eden, where God, having in effect established his covenant with the first human by the words he had already spoken, “commanded the man, saying” he must not eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:16–17). Later, God “appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you . . . to be God to you and your offspring after you. . . . You shall keep my covenant’” (Gen. 17:1–2, 7, 9). The Ten Commandments, given as part of the covenant-confirmation at Sinai, were and are basic to biblical religion (Exod. 20:1–17; Deuteronomy 5–6; see also Mark 10:17–19; Rom. 13:9). At the close of the book of Ecclesiastes we read: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12:13). Psalm 119 is 176 verses long, and is a sustained meditation on the blessings and joys of people who keep God’s commandments. Jesus, risen, is found at the close of Matthew’s Gospel giving his disciples marching orders on the basis that all authority has been given him in heaven and on earth: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:18–20). Paul adds that “neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God” is what counts (1 Cor. 7:19). How can we know that we belong to Jesus Christ? John suggests this test: “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments,” then quickly adds, “And his commands are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3).
Little stress is laid these days, even in the church, let alone in our supposedly Christian culture, on the reality and authority of God’s commands. But the fundamental dimension of being Christian people guided by God is that we labor to learn his commandments as he has revealed them, and to live by them in faithful obedience just as consistently as we possibly can. When, one day, we have to give an account of ourselves to God, it will be important for us to be able to say with truth that we sought to keep all his commandments throughout our Christian lives.
Guided by God’s Book
Second: We are to be guided by the book of God. The book of God is the Bible; but what is that? It is a composite document consisting of sixty-six separate pieces of writing, four-fifths in Hebrew, one-fifth in Greek, and a tiny bit in Aramaic. In translation it averages between 1,200 and 1,400 pages in most editions. Thirty-nine of the books are called the Old Testament and twenty-seven the New, and the full list, with its two sections, is called the canon. (Catholics espouse twelve additional books in the Old Testament; Greek and Russian Orthodox Bibles include a few more such additions.) This Old Testament collection took more than a thousand years to write; the New Testament was probably completed within a single generation. All of the books focus on God the Creator and human life in relation to him, viewed in the light of his ongoing purpose for humankind. All of them help to tell and explain the story of how God the Creator became God the Redeemer and how the Son of God, whose human name is Jesus, has become the Savior of the world, the Lord of history, and, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the object of love, praise, and service without end from the new community, which is the Christian church. The narrative of God’s dealings with a people defined by the figures of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus is the backbone, so to speak, of the Bible, and the prophets’ sermons, apostles’ letters, psalter (a 150-item hymn-and-prayer book), and wisdom writings are like so many ribs, each needing to be attached to the backbone in the appropriate place. Seeing the Bible this way makes it fairly straightforward to study—but the fact remains that in its totality it is a big book. There is a lot to it, and many who look to the Bible for guidance do not know it very well.
From the days of Christ and the apostles, Christians referred comprehensively to the Old Testament as the Word of God, plus whatever apostolic writings they had, and by the fourth century, virtually everywhere, that meant our full New Testament canon as well. Since then, it has been standard practice for everyone to refer to the entire canon, as such, as the Word of God. By this phrase “Word of God,” three thoughts have been expressed. First, all that the Bible teaches is truth from God, coming to us with all his authority. Second, God so overruled the processes whereby the sixty-six books were composed that every generation of the church, and every individual reader, should think of the Bible as a divine product, containing just what God wanted each of us to have so that we might understand his work, his ways, his will, and his worship and live in loving fellowship with him on the basis of this knowledge. Third, when the Holy Spirit opens the spiritually blind eyes of the fallen human heart, people perceive the divine source of the Bible in the same immediate and self-evidencing way in which they perceive the personal divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Spirit-taught people find themselves unable to deny either the one or the other. Academic persons sometimes lose their grip on these basic convictions, but they remain central, and rightly so, in the mainstream Christian mind.
A further fact that Christians celebrate is that when people read the Bible, or at least brood on what they know of its teaching, even when they are beginners who do not as yet know the sacred text well, messages from God come through to their hearts in a way that is both startling and encouraging. Bible readers sense again and again that God is speaking significantly to them, “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (the profitable purposes for which God has given Scripture, according to Paul in 2 Tim. 3:16). Arousing the expectation that this will happen and teaching Christians that each time they turn to Scripture they should have in their heart and mind the prayer “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Ps. 119:18), are key elements in good discipleship training. Certainly, the closer and more thorough one’s acquaintance with the Bible as a whole, the more clearly and fully will one discern its wisdom for living the whole of one’s life; but God is gracious and good—he meets people where they are, and often showers beginner Christians with insights for their personal guidance as they take their first hesitant steps in forming the habit of daily Bible reading.
Such experiences, no doubt, were the source from which arose the odd procedure called Sortes biblicae in Latin (meaning, chance selections from Scripture): literally, choices by lot. This practice was reverent in intention, and became fairly common, it seems, among eighteenth and nineteenth century pietists (Protestants, that is, who rightly saw one’s personal relationship with God as the top priority of their life, and who would go to extreme lengths to keep in step with God all the time). In moments of uncertainty about what to do, these folk would close their eyes, open the Bible at random, put a finger on the page, and hope to find the lead they needed in the verse they had hit. An often-told cautionary tale is of the man whose first hit was “Judas went out and hanged himself,” who tried again and whose second hit was “You go and do likewise,” and who on the third attempt found his finger pointing to “What you are going to do, do quickly.” This story makes the point that, however well meant, this practice of seeking guidance by using the Bible, in effect, as a kind of Ouija board, is superstitious and wrong. God never tells us, nor wants us, to act this way; we are not entitled to expect him to give us personal instruction by some kind of magic method, and to ask him to do so is not reverent at all—rather the reverse. This is emphatically not the way to be guided by the Book.
How then are we to draw from the Bible the guidance we need? Sometimes biblical imperatives and narratives of godly and ungodly conduct speak directly to our own situation and show us directly how we should behave, but more often the decisions we have to make seem circumstantially quite distant from anything we read in the Bible; so how may we find God’s guidance in those cases? The clue lies in the point already made, that Scripture contains God’s commands, which establish parameters and set limits for all our behavior. As God’s promises give direction to all of our hopes, so do God’s commands direct us in establishing attitudes and policies with regard to every aspect and department of our life-activities. It is often said that there is no life-problem involving in any way our relationship with God on which the Bible does not speak, at least in principle. We believe that to be a true though challenging statement, not at all an overstatement. We accept Scripture as our rule of practice as well as our rule of faith. Having made these strong all-encompassing statements, our goal to be guided by God’s Word now rests on solid footing, but the task before us has barely begun. To learn how to make detailed application of biblical principles to life we have to go further and dig deeper, and that brings us to our next section.
Guided by God’s Law
Third: We are to be guided by the law of God. What is the law of God? In simplest and broadest terms, it is the entire prescription for Christian living that the book of God yields. In other words, it is the formula God gives for making our personal story fit into his global story, thereby fulfilling the purpose of our creation, that we should glorify our Creator. God’s law is the applicatory interpretation of the Bible as a whole. It is the total message—factual and directional, informational and practical—that the Bible presents to us for the guiding of our lives.
In Hebrew the word for law is torah, which primarily means not public legislation but domestic instruction, the kind of admonishing, authoritative yet affectionate, that a faithful father gives his children and others in the household of which he is the head. The corresponding word in Greek is nomos, which in secular use meant only public legislation, but which had its meaning broadened by being used for torah in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, and which in turn carried this broader meaning throughout the New Testament. God gave Israel his law at Sinai, and much of it deals directly with community rights and duties in the way that public legislation today does. But the basis on which Yahweh spelled out this legal code was that, as Moses reported it to Pharaoh, “Israel is my firstborn son” (Exod. 4:22). God’s giving of his commandments was thus a family affair, just as the Solomonic admonitions to “my son” in Proverbs 1–7 are a family affair. And in both cases more is given than bare commandments: the sanctions and undergirdings of the commands are promises, assurances, and guarantees that declare God’s covenant commitment to Israel corporately and to each Israelite individually. The verbalizings and modelings of wise life in the wisdom books, and of the faithful, hopeful, praising, praying life in the Psalter, are law also. So the law of God comprises a full-scale philosophy of life for God’s people, a comprehensive declaration of how each one is to live in this world as a believer and hoper in God, and more particularly as a sharer in the fellowship of others who also believe and hope in the same way. Later, the apostle Paul, arguing against persons for whom the law meant simply things one must do, spoke of the law in the same narrow sense as they did and contrasted it with the promises of the gospel; but throughout the Old Testament God’s law includes his promises, and law-keeping means being an obedient believer.
The foundation of the torah is the decalogue, the ten directive “words” that God, we are told, wrote with his own finger on two stone tablets for Israel’s instruction as part of his covenanting action. (See Exod. 20:1–17; 31:18; 32:15–16, 19; 34:1, 27–29; Deut. 9:10; 10:1–5.) This spiritual and moral code (for that is what it is) calls for thoroughgoing loyalty to God and for equally thoroughgoing observance of the claims of one’s fellow creatures and fellow members of God’s family on one’s daily behavior. Since the commandments are not as well known, even among church people, as they should be, we briefly reproduce them here.
I am the LORD your God. . . .
You shall have no other gods. . . .
You shall not make for yourself a carved image. . . . You shall not bow down to them. . . .
You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain. . . .
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. . . .
Honor your father and your mother. . . .
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness. . . .
You shall not covet. . . .
Exodus 20:2–17
We might paraphrase the Decalogue in positive and Christian terms with something like this: “You shall worship your covenant God exclusively and wholeheartedly, according to his own self-revelation, regarding him with consistent reverence and setting aside regular time for rest and worship in his honor; you should respect those who have nurtured you, and labor to sustain the family unit; you must do all you can to safeguard the life, sexual purity, property, reputation, and well-being of all you meet; and, knowing that your God watches over you, you are to be content with what you have.” Jesus linked attitude and action in all law-keeping when he told a lawyer who had asked him which was the greatest commandment of the law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40, citing Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18). All the specifics of moral and political duty that the Bible spells out are, one way or another, instances or applications of these principles. Here, then, was guidance into godliness for the Israelites—and here is basic guidance for us too.
When Jesus says that the Mosaic legislation and the prophets’ exhortations depend on the twin love-commands (the verb “depend” is literally “hang,” as when a notice board hangs on a nail or Jesus hung on the cross), he speaks most momentously, and must not be misunderstood. Love in Scripture (agapē in the New Testament) is not in essence a feeling (which is often all that the word signifies in modern Western culture) but is rather a resolve of goodwill and a purpose of giving the loved one the best we can, to make the loved one great in whatever is the appropriate way. So wholehearted love to God will exalt his greatness by giving adoring praise, grateful thanks, forthright obedience, confident loyalty, and total trust. Psalm 108 illustrates: “My heart is steadfast, O God! I will sing and make melody with all my being!” (The Hebrew says with my glory.) “Your steadfast love is great above the heavens. . . . Be exalted, O God, . . . give salvation . . . grant us help. . . . With God we shall do valiantly” (vv. 1, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13).
Wholehearted neighbor-love will match our built-in self-love (a natural disposition before sin ever made it an egoistic excess) and take all possible steps to relieve need, as when the Good Samaritan cared for the mugged Jew and when Christians seize their opportunities to point others to the Savior (see Luke 10:25–37; Acts 16:11–40). Our neighbor, we must remember, is whoever we are with, whether our nearest and dearest or people we hardly know and perhaps wish we didn’t know or complete strangers. All the specifics of God’s law as taught by Moses and enforced by the prophets should be viewed, so Jesus is telling us, as guidelines that teach loving hearts to express themselves fitly and generously toward both our neighbor and our God.
If we know how God’s Spirit makes his Word effective in human lives, it will not surprise us when we read in Psalm 19:7–10:
The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the LORD is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the LORD are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the LORD is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the LORD are true,
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
God’s law, that is, his entire revelation in Scripture viewed as a design and prescription for living in covenant with him, transforms the lives of those who follow it, leading them along the disciple’s path of faith, hope, repentance, obedience, and love. Even the psalmist’s term “the fear of the LORD” refers to the worship and obedience that comes from taking God’s directives seriously. And whatever else changed when Jesus died and rose and the new covenant replaced the old, the inner reality of these virtues—graces, as the Puritans called them—did not. We should have this understanding clear in our minds as we meditate on Psalm 19, and especially as we move on to what Luther called “the little Bible,” Psalm 119, where all but one of the 176 verses celebrate the law of God as a source and means of unbounded blessing and benefit. The writer of this remarkable composition loves God’s law, cherishes it in his heart, turns it over in his mind, commits it to his memory, and, come hell or high water, resolves to live by it, seeking and expecting to find God through it, for as long as life shall last. In this, we urge, he remains a model for us all.
What it means to live by God’s law is made clear by Jesus’s reply to the Pharisees’ test question, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” Jesus’s words were, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:4–6). There are two points to note here. First, Jesus quotes the marginal observation of the human writer of Genesis as what the Creator “said.” Had he forgotten the context? Surely not; this is evidence, rather, that for Jesus (as of course for his opponents, and for all Jews and Christians until modern times) the text of Scripture, as such, is as truly God’s utterance and message as it is man’s utterance and message; it is the testimony of God himself, given in the form of the testimony of his chosen writer. Second, Jesus answers the question by transcending it, simply reminding his interrogators that God’s ideal for marriage is permanence and that this must therefore always be the goal. He does this on the basis of what he finds written in Scripture. Thus he models living by the light, and under the authority, of God’s law.
The law of God, then, as we meet it in Scripture, is first and foremost a law of loyalty and love toward the God of grace, with whom all believers are in covenant. Legalism is no part of this picture. Legalism (that is, looking to law-keeping to secure a status with God) was the basic perversity of the Pharisees, which Jesus was constantly challenging. Rooted in the pride and unbelief of the fallen human heart, legalism is always the besetting sin of religious people who do not know the grace of their Creator and Judge, the merciful God who for Jesus’s sake “justifies the ungodly” through faith (Rom. 4:5). Legalism is thus a spiritual blind alley, which we mention only in order to dismiss it from view. One big thing, however, is still to be said about the law, namely that it is, in the words of James, “the law of liberty” (James 1:25; 2:12)—that is, the path of freedom. Think for a moment what this means.
Freedom exists when not only have we been freed from whatever oppressed us, but are also now enjoying the state of dignity, happiness, fulfillment, and contentment that we were freed for. Freedom is thus two-sided. So it is when it appears today as a political ideology; so it was when God freed Israel from Egyptian captivity for shalom (peace and prosperity) in the Promised Land. The same two-sidedness was implicit when the Lord Jesus Christ told those around him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32), just as it is implicit when Paul tells believers, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore. . . .” (Gal. 5:1). Jesus explains that the freedom he gives his followers as they engage with his Word is freedom from sin’s dominion for life as a child of God, at home with one’s Father (John 8:34–36). So freedom is a supreme gift, inasmuch as it covers both our forgiveness and acceptance (justification, adoption, and freedom from final condemnation) and also the anchoring of us in the life of enjoying, serving, and pleasing our heavenly Father. The gift thus changes both our status and our state in relation to God. Constant batterings from circumstances outwardly and fears and temptations inwardly make the life of freedom a constant struggle for us, as anchored boats are tossed and made to strain at their cables by stormy seas. But our anchor holds, our freedom remains, and our deep joy and contentment in the knowledge of being limitlessly loved by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit continue within us as we labor to hold steady. This is a quality of life that only believers know.
James warns us that it is possible to miss this fullness of freedom by not paying enough attention to the pattern of freedom by faith and in obedience that the law paints. “If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing” (James 1:23–25). Being a doer of God’s Word—that is, in James’s understanding, one who trusts, obeys, and worships Jesus Christ the Lord—changes us. It makes us what Paul calls “slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:18–19; see the whole section, vv. 15–23). But this is the reality of our freedom and of our blessing from God, and Christians rejoice in it as such.
Being unable to forget that Paul told Christians, “you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14), often keeps believers from being able to take seriously our thesis that God’s law as we have analyzed it, including in itself the promises that undergird its directives, is to be our primary life-guide, giving us both our ideals to pursue and our restrictions to observe as we labor to glorify and please the God who loves and has saved us. But in those words from Romans it is clear that Paul is talking specifically about the law viewed as a system of salvation, a source supposedly of status and strength—which it never was, and in a fallen world never could be. By contrast, however, he speaks of the law as we are speaking of it when he describes himself as “not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ” (1 Cor. 9:21), and his statement reveals a relationship that is a fixed point for all believers at all times in every age. The law of Christ as a rule and way of life is a transhistorical, transcultural, transdenominational, international, intergenerational reality; whoever we are, and wherever and whenever we live, we who believe in Christ are under the law of Christ and must act accordingly.
So the moral and spiritual fundamentals of true religion never change. As God the Father and Jesus Christ the Lord do not change, so orthodoxy and orthopraxy (right belief and right practice) are always essentially the same. What was morally right and good yesterday remains morally right and good today, and what was morally wrong in the past does not become morally right in the present. True law-keeping, which has always started in the heart with God-honoring motivation, must do so still. True love according to God’s law continues to be a matter of keeping God’s commandments (1 John 5:3) out of loyalty to him and goodwill to our neighbor. True righteousness was and always will be a matter of avoiding all forms of known evil and all that is demonstrably less than the best for furthering God’s goals and his glory, and of doing what is fitting and fair as we deal with other people. True holiness remains a compound of willed separation and devotion to God, single-minded zeal in his service, and passionate care not to lapse from integrity and purity at anytime, plus humble straightforward acceptance of whatever pains and hardships may come our way as we seek to follow Christ our Lord. Living by God’s law takes us into, and keeps us in, this world of unchangeables, and living by God’s law, understood as has been stated, will never cease to be the basic form of divine guidance in our lives.
One further point now needs to be made.
Guided by God’s Mind
We are to be guided by the mind of God. How, we ask, does this point take us on beyond the last one? Is not the law of God itself a full and precise expression of his mind? Yes—and no. “Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” griped comedian Oliver Hardy over and over to his dim-witted peer Stan Laurel. Life is full of “fine messes,” and knowing what God wishes us to do in messy situations is often difficult. Messy situations are those in which there are no ideal answers, but whatever we do has sad side effects and some disagreeable risks and consequences. Many have heard of the Irishman who answered the motorist’s request for guidance by saying, “If I was going to Dublin I wouldn’t start from here.” This parallels what we regularly feel in messy situations of all kinds, where the most we can do is make the best of a bad job, for the honor of God and the good of neighbors, all of whom we are seeking to love in the way described earlier. What is required of us in such messes is not to go hunting for Bible texts that speak directly to our circumstances (there are not likely to be any), but we are to practice prayerfully the art of applicatory thinking, using logic before the Lord to determine by the light of biblical principles the course that promises the most good and the least evil. This is the casuistry of which we spoke earlier. We are not very good at this, and often have to acknowledge, when we look back on difficult decisions that we made as best we could, that we did not, after all, manage to discern the mind of God, that is, the better decision that Scripture shows we might have made. It is always the best decision that circumstances allow that expresses the mind of God. How to apply Scripture in “fine messes” so as to see our way, God helping us, to the best decision each time is the theme of this final section of being guided by the Word of God.
Our first move toward rightly applying Scripture is to grasp the old-fashioned distinction between moral and positive law. Positive as a quality of laws carries a meaning quite distinct from what the word means in everyday speech (affirmative, emphatic, trustful, confident, hopeful, and so on). Here it signifies laws enacted as means to end, whose binding force stems entirely from the legislator’s decision, and which can be changed at the legislator’s will as circumstances may require. Examples are the speed limits on the roads, the year-by-year level of income tax, and the powers given to the police, all of which are conceived as means to community well-being. Positive laws have sanctions attached to them, and must be observed under penalty for disobedience as long as they are in force.
There is much positive law in the Bible, marking the progress of God’s redemptive plan. Before Israel reached the Promised Land, God had already supplemented the Decalogue with his political law, which he gave to regulate community life in the forthcoming Israelite theocracy. (Theocracy is government in which God is the named ruler and his law is the governmental law.) The books of Exodus and Deuteronomy record this God-given civil legislation in great detail. More detailed still was the blueprint, also given in the wilderness, for the nation’s religious observance, namely the building of the tabernacle, the place of sacrifices, the establishing of priesthood, upkeep, and sacrificial rituals. Exodus and Leviticus provide the details. The writer of Hebrews explains that these things were all “types” (advance patterns of entities, agents and acts that would come later in God’s economy and have greater significance), pointing forward to Christ, and they were all superseded through his ministry. Christ, the divine-human priest-king, effectively did away with theocracy by bringing in the nongeographical, nonnational, eternally real faith-relationship to himself that is called the kingdom of God, and he ended the era of Old Testament priesthood and sacrifice by his own atoning death. Outwardly, both the theocracy and the sacrificial system ceased to be when the Romans obliterated Jerusalem in AD 70. In actuality, however, both had already lost their significance through the action of the Lord Jesus fulfilling and replacing them. Jesus Christ, the “antitype,” fulfilled these prophetic patterns and established a new and better order of worship and community in that form of the kingdom which, following the New Testament, we call the church. Thus God changed his positive law for Israel to the whole world’s advantage.
Typical too were the lists in Leviticus of creatures and conditions causing “uncleanness” that had to be purged away. What this ritual uncleanness typified was the spiritual defilement caused by all breaches of God’s law, all of which made lawbreakers abhorrent in God’s sight. Instituting rules about typical defilement appears to have been God’s educational strategy for inducing throughout Israel an indelible awareness that there is such a thing as the alienating defilement of sin that separates humans from God. This, be it said, is a truth that everyone everywhere needs to face up to and that we fallen human beings are all slow to learn. By Jesus’s day, after many centuries of living with these typical purity laws, this lesson, we may suppose, had been sufficiently mastered; at all events, Jesus, insisting that it is sin and only sin that defiles, explicitly canceled the category of defiling foodstuffs. (“Thus he declared all foods clean,” Mark 7:19.) This dispelled the whole concept of some created things and some physical states having defiling effects in themselves; the New Testament is entirely free of the idea, and Paul censures the notion that some foods are off limits, even though he had been brought up to follow precisely all of the Kosher rules (1 Tim. 4:3–4). Here, once more, we see God’s positive law repealed by God’s own action.
Clarity about the temporary nature of the Old Testament’s political and ritual laws clears our way through various uncertainties. Thus, for example, there are unhappy families in which for whatever reason Christian parents’ offspring are totally out of control and have become a danger to others. Deuteronomy 21:18–21 says that a son who is rebellious, gluttonous, and a drunkard is to be taken by his parents to the elders of the community for death by stoning. Even when this is seen to have been a permissive rather than a mandatory enactment, a last resort in a migratory theocratic community with no prisons or police, knowledge that God once legislated this can cause Christian parents sleepless nights as they wonder what they should do about (say) a son who is a drunk, a drug addict, wildly selfish, sexually licentious, and a layabout at home, paying them no regard save to bully them into giving him endless money to spend. Knowing that God’s ancient political law is no longer in force can be stabilizing to them as they try to work out what form “tough love” should take in their invidious situation. If they see reason to turn their son over to the civil authorities for a jail term, or drug rehab, or restitution for harm he has caused, it will be as a responsible act of neighbor-love, not a superstitious deference to the God-givenness of the book of Deuteronomy. So, too, it will ease the embarrassment that some women may feel about their menstrual cycle and some men about their nocturnal emissions of semen to know that the divine law that once tagged these things as defilements, needing ceremonial purging (Leviticus 15), is no longer in force. They will, however, like the rest of us, benefit from the reminder that worship is only acceptable when we approach God with hands and hearts made clean by confessing our sins and receiving his forgiveness through our Lord Jesus Christ. And they will benefit from remembering that the moral law, which directly reflects God’s own moral character, stands firm and never changes. Sin is the Bible name for breaches of it, and it is a fixed point that no sin is ever permissible or justifiable in the mind of God.
Our second move toward wisely applying Scripture is to grasp the true wavelength and inner unity of the moral law. Often God’s law is thought of as a series of separate commands, and because it is the nature of the human mind to concentrate on one thing at a time, we easily slip into pursuing one virtue, or practicing one imperative, at the expense of others. The truth, however, is not only that all our doings should express love to God and neighbor, as we saw Jesus insisting, but also that Jesus himself, the embodiment of all the virtues, must be our model, for he is God’s law incarnate. Law-keeping is in truth imitation of Christ, and vice versa: the two are one. The implications are far-reaching. To start with, we now see that the law is not telling us simply to do this or that, but rather to aim at being a certain type of person who behaves in a certain way. Ingenious Bible teachers have expressed this by saying that as all the promises of God to Christians analyze as beatitudes (so many assurances of blessings to come) so all the commands of God to Christians analyze as “be-attitudes” (so many calls for Christlike character), that blend of virtues that are all to be expressed in Christlike behavior. Within this frame, the question “What would Jesus do?” becomes pertinent over and over again. And now we also see that imitating Christ means more than merely aping him as comedians do when they impersonate politicians; for as the qualities of vivid imagination and sometimes breathtaking ingenuity and creativity appeared in Jesus’s dealings with the many people, and many sorts of people, whom his heart was loving all along, so we need to ask him to enable us to show the same qualities as we deal with others on his behalf.
For this we shall need a strong sense of who we are in Christ as our life, and with Christ as our Lord; and with that we shall need a strong awareness of the greatness of God’s grace in saving us and a strong passion to honor him for doing so. So we shall need a strong realization of the deceptions and distractions issuing from the world, the flesh, and the devil designed to keep us from consistent Christlikeness; and so too we shall need a strong sensitivity to the indwelling Holy Spirit whom we must trust to make us see on a moment-by-moment basis what to say and do in order to be Jesus-like in each developing situation.
This, and nothing less than this, is the true wavelength and unified thrust of the moral law of God.
Nor is Christian law-keeping an individualistic affair. John Wesley said that there is nothing more un-Christian than a solitary Christian, and we part company with the mind of God if we try to be Christlike on our own. Because none of us is omniscient and omnicompetent, we need each other’s help to discern the best course of action according to the fullness of the moral law, and we all should find it as natural as it is necessary to ask our fellow pilgrims such questions as: “What do you think God’s law requires me to do in this situation?” “How can I most faithfully witness to Christ, give help to the needy one(s), and glorify God as I follow up on this opportunity?” “Do you think the standards of God’s law are really an obstacle to accepting this proposal?” Whatever answers we may receive, it will be wholly in line with the mind of God that we should have asked.
Our third move toward rightly applying Scripture to our lives now comes into prominence. It is to grasp the principle of cultural adjustment, sometimes (dangerously!) referred to as cultural adaptation. Adaptation ordinarily involves changing the substance of something to make it fit into a new framework. What we have in view, however, is an adjustment of form that leaves the substance (the principle) intact: as will shortly appear.
In the Scriptures every bit of moral teaching, like every bit of doctrinal instruction, is given within a frame of reference, a context that is both situation-specific and culture-specific. Cultures change, as do situations, and in order to apply biblical teaching correctly to ourselves we must first make sure that we are understanding it within its own situational and cultural context; otherwise, we are likely to find that we have first misunderstood and then misapplied it. We have already made the point that the substance of biblical teaching is transcultural. But its form is situationally and culturally conditioned, and so our task is to unshell it from the situational and cultural casing in which we find it embedded in the biblical text in order then to apply it to our own more or less different circumstances; sometimes, indeed, with details changed in order that the principle may stay the same.
Here is an everyday example. Five New Testament letters end with the writer telling his readers to greet each other “with a holy kiss” (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26; 1 Peter 5:14). The ritual kiss is still a familiar formality among priests and monks in Eastern Orthodoxy, but acting on these words in a Western church would create red faces, averted eyes, acute embarrassment, and perhaps worse. The holy kiss in biblical days was a nonsexual expression of mutual welcome, goodwill, love, trust, and offering your service to the person being kissed. But our culture is such that kissing means only one thing, at least in popular estimate. A twenty-first-century kiss on the lips would disrupt worship and not carry Paul’s and Peter’s intended meaning at all. Half a century ago, J. B. Phillips in his paraphrase, Letters to Young Churches, saw the problem and substituted “a hearty handshake all round” for the holy kiss, because this seemed to him to be the modern gesture that carried the meaning that was required. So this paraphrase told us to do something different from what the apostles prescribed in order to keep observing the moral principle that the apostles taught, namely, that gestures of goodwill involving the whole congregation should regularly be made, family-style. Does Phillips’s rendering guide today’s Bible readers according to the mind of God? Quite likely, though some congregations might substitute with equal fitness the “holy hug.”
Another example, taken from something rather different: the second commandment forbade the Israelites to construct an image to worship. What was forbidden was precisely what they did when they adored the golden calf as the god “who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (Exod. 32:1–6, 19–20): that is, they demeaned God by picturing him as part of his own animal creation. Today’s stock-in-trade of unbiblical speculations about God is what corresponds: mental images have taken the place of metal ones. The principle underlying the prohibition is that our notions about God must match the fullness of his self-revelation, and not go a step beyond it, or idolatry results. Moderns with nonbiblical conceptions of God are as much idolaters as were the ancient Israelites on the plain below Mount Sinai: this continuity underlies all the cultural changes that have taken place in the world over the past three thousand and more years, and needs to be clearly discerned. All who begin, “My idea of God is . . .” or “I prefer to think of God as . . .” are ordinarily breaking the second commandment already, before they finish their sentence. We have to realize that lack of a firm grasp of the principle of cultural adjustment must sooner or later frustrate our desire to be guided by Scripture according to the mind of God.
Now to our fourth move, our last directive on discerning God’s guidance through rightly applying the principles of Scripture. Move four is to grasp the principle of double effect, or unintended and undesired consequences. This principle covers all those cases in which doing what we discern that we ought to do carries the risk, sometimes indeed the certainty, of unwelcome side effects. They may not be unforeseen, but they are no part of our intention, and we wish we were not so placed that we cannot do the right thing without triggering the unhappy fallout. Since it would clearly be disobedience not to do it, we go ahead, asking God to take care of the entire outcome and, in the startling phrase that Oswald Chambers uses, we “smilingly wash our hands of the consequences”—if we can! What we are doing is actually choosing the lesser evil in situations where not doing what one should because one fears the fallout would actually be choosing the greater evil.
Where some evil is unavoidable, choosing the lesser evil is always the right thing to do. But such choices can be, and often are, harrowing and heartwrenching to the last degree. An old film, The Cruel Sea, illustrated this. In this movie set during World War II, the captain of a destroyer escorting a convoy across the Atlantic has to decide whether to head at speed through the icy waters where desperate seamen, their ship sunk by a U-boat, are struggling, so that he can drop a depth charge that might destroy the U-boat as it lies on the sea floor waiting to attack the rest of the convoy. This is a course of action which is certain to kill some of the swimmers who are desperately hoping to be picked up. The alternative of course, is to stop and rescue as many of the swimmers as possible and leave the U-boat free to torpedo other ships another day. The captain goes ahead, ignores the swimmers, and drops the depth-charge, whether successfully or not he never knows; and he says afterwards that there are times when all we can do is guess at our best choice of action and then get down on our knees and ask God’s mercy. We along with our readers know that feeling: the realization, namely, that we shall cause others grievous pain whatever we choose to do linked with uncertainty as to whether what we have chosen really is the best option. When we look back at what we did and what came of it, the feeling recurs, and we are left wondering. With reason, then, will our thanks be more heartfelt that the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin and that Christians live precisely by being forgiven.
For a milder example of this dilemma, think of a Christian father who loves his children and has taken to heart Paul’s injunction against provoking one’s offspring to anger (Eph. 6:4). He is facing up to his teenage son’s declared conviction that his entire happiness depends on pursuing what his parents see as a patently unhealthy and potentially ruinous relationship with another individual. What is he to do? Inaction, as so often, is easiest, but would that be choosing the lesser evil, behaving as a father should, and so doing the best he can for his son? But if out of love for his son he acts to try to curb the relationship from further development, he can expect to make the boy furiously angry, and what will the fruit of that be? The pain is great in such cases, which in our fallen world are far from uncommon. The most we who seek God’s guidance can hope for is to be sustained by the knowledge that in good faith, according to what light we had, we have acted according to the mind of God, who always wills that we choose what appears as the plainest duty and/or the least evil, who never wills that we allow ourselves to sin, and whom we must ever trust to look after the consequences of our attempts to honor and obey him. But the scars of agonizing situations like these stay with us for life.
Progress Notes
It is now time to pull the threads together. What has this chapter shown us? We have seen, first, that Holy Scripture, the inspired Word of God, has been given by God to the church, the body of Christ, and to every Christian as part of that body in order to give guidance for all of life in the way that a maker’s manual guides one through all that is involved in using and caring for a complex piece of apparatus—a car, a computer, a two-seater aircraft, a fax machine, or whatever. There is a wise warning in the familiar one-liner, “If all else fails, read the instructions.” Neglect of the handbook’s directives can lead to costly misuses, malfunctions, and need for repairs; so too neglect by God’s sheep of God’s own handbook for living is bound to lead to unfruitful wanderings offtrack and making continual messes as we move through life under our Shepherd’s care. Though our gracious Lord restores those who have slipped when they repent, it is clearly better to let Scripture teach us how not to slip in the first place.
We have seen, second, that the canonical Scriptures, our God-given guidebook for living, set before us God’s commands, prohibitions, provisions, and promises within a frame of father-to-family admonition that the Bible itself calls law. Every Christian should repeatedly read and constantly study the Scriptures in a lifelong quest for ever deeper understanding of God’s law in this broad sense—for all the basic guidance into godliness that we need is set before us here. As we are taught to search all the Scriptures for pointers to Jesus Christ and the knowledge of his grace, so we should search all the Scriptures for their teaching, both by explanation and by example, on the way to live as a child of God.
We have seen, third, that though biblical interpretation is complex, as we would expect when the book comprises sixty-six separate books written over a period of more than a thousand years, many problems of how its various teachings apply to us as Christians today are resolved from within the canonical corpus. Bible teaching for Christian living is remarkably coherent and clear, as well as remarkably searching and humbling, once we learn to follow out these inner links. It is as we do this that we are truly being guided by the mind of God set forth in his Word.
And we have seen, fourth, that living in our fallen world is never so straightforward that true and authentic guidance from God guarantees an easy passage through the problems, as if all decisions about the right and the wrong thing to do are black and white and, if rightly made, will take us along a level and pain-free path. On the contrary, following God’s guidance with loyal tenacity will sooner or later lead us into troubles, sorrows, and hurts that otherwise we might have avoided. It was according to God’s mind that our redemption should involve the agony of the cross for our Savior, and it has pleased him to ordain grief and suffering for Jesus’s disciples too. As Paul told Asia Minor’s first converts, “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22), Paul’s own sense of guidance was very clear when he headed for Jerusalem, “constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me” (Acts 20:22–23). Similarly God’s guidance was very clear to the Lord Jesus in Gethsemane. We who believe can expect to find Gethsemanes await us also. Vitally important in themselves, these perceptions are fundamental to everything further that we are going to say.