In ancient times God gave Moses the Law to bring to the people of Israel. Many of us think of this Law as the Ten Commandments, but there were actually 613 separate commandments. Over the centuries, the people of Israel tried to follow the Law. And they found they could not follow the Law. No one could.
Was it too complicated? Was it too difficult? Were 613 commandments too many demands?
No, for later on the Apostle Paul pointed out that no human appears capable of completely following any system of laws. Look at yourself – at some point in your life, I bet you’ve said to yourself – “I would never do this” or “I would never do that”. That’s your own personal law. But if you think about it, if you have set up more than one or two laws for yourself, you have broken one or more of them. For example, you may say “I will never eat a cookie before supper.” Yet haven’t you eaten cookies before supper? Of course you have. In fact, that’s the reason you said to yourself “I will never eat another cookie before supper.” You broke the law even before you made the law.
Have you ever borrowed a pencil, a piece of paper, an eraser without asking? You’ve stolen, even if you replaced it, for you did not have permission. Have you ever driven faster than the speed limit, even for just a few seconds? You’ve broken the law. Have you ever watched a television show you shouldn’t watch, even for a minute? You’ve broken your personal moral law. And God, who has the perfect video camera of everything you’ve ever done, even in total darkness – knows exactly what you’ve done. Can you imagine how much money you’d owe in fines just for speeding if God prosecuted you for every time you’ve broken the speed limit? Can you imagine how many years in jail you’d get if God prosecuted you for every time you imagined beating up someone or hurting them in some way? For God knows your thoughts as well as your actions, and Jesus made it clear that your thoughts can break the Law also. Ne told us that hating is considered by God to be the same as murder, and looking at someone with lust is the same as adultery.
There is something about being a human creature that leads us to break the law. Yet most of us do not simply recognize this in ourselves, but instead we get all worked up when someone else we know breaks the law. We point fingers, we yell, we shout. We complain when they make mistakes, we complain when they break a rule, we complain if they are not perfect. Yet if the truth were known, we have done the same thing or something just as bad and we are thankful we did not get caught. Yet who are we fooling? God caught us. God always catches us. That’s one reason we should always forgive people who make mistakes, act badly, or say mean and nasty things. Very soon, we may fall into the same hole.
And so when we realize just how badly we have behaved, how many times we’ve broken the Law, we begin to carry around a tremendous burden of guilt. It isn’t just a psychological guilt – we really are guilty of those crimes against God. When I was in high school, you wouldn’t believe the number of other students I punched out - in the safety of my own mind! In my mind, I punched and I kicked and I beat them in revenge for what they had done and said to me. And so I am guilty in God’s eyes of those crimes, for the only thing that kept me from actually doing those crimes was the sure knowledge of human punishment. Yet God is not bound by human eyes that cannot see a crime committed in the privacy of your mind. God can see those crimes being committed.
That guilt becomes a real burden, for we know that we've done wrong. The ancient prophets wrote that it was like putting a heavy wooden yoke on an ox. For those of you who don’t know, a yoke was a heavy, carved piece of wood that was connected to the tongue of a wagon and forced the ox to pull the heavy wagon. The only way for the ox to get free was to break the yoke.
By the time of Jesus, some people known as Pharisees were adding to the weight of the guilt on people. They looked at poor people and said, “Don’t you realize you need to be wearing a robe that was made a particular way?” The poor people looked back and said, “But I can’t afford that robe.” The Pharisees said, “Then you aren’t following the Law and you are a bad person.”
The Pharisees looked at other people and said, “You aren’t supposed to eat pork or shrimp or lizards.” The people looked back and said, “The only meat we can afford to eat is pork or lizards.” And the Pharisees said, “Then you aren’t following the Law and you are a bad person.”
The Pharisees looked at still other people and said, “You aren’t supposed to live in the same house as someone you aren’t married to.” And those other people looked back and said, “I can’t afford another place to live.” And the Pharisees said, “Then you aren’t following the Law and you are a bad person.”
And then, Jesus arrived.
Jesus said that He had come, not to destroy the Law but to fulfill it. Jesus said that He had not come to get rid of any of the 613 commands. He even said that not one of those commands would go away.
And then He made a very scary statement.
Jesus said that you would have to be even better, even more righteous than the Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
If a Pharisee, who seemed to live right, who dressed right, who ate the right food couldn’t get into the Kingdom of Heaven, then who could?
The answer, you see, was no one. No one could get into Heaven on their own righteousness. No one except Jesus.
In our translations, we often translate passages such that we say “faith in Jesus “ gets us into Heaven. But, according to Timothy Luke Johnson, the literal translation of these passages is often “The faith of Jesus” gets us into Heaven. In Greek, pistus Christus.
Jesus, you see, had tremendous faith in the love of God. Jesus knew God because Jesus had been with God since before the Beginning of Time. And so Jesus simply pointed out – "If you will follow me, If you will be my loyal follower, If you will try to do what I ask of you, I will get you into Heaven, because I know that God loves us both so much God will find another way."
And so God did find another way.
Jesus was sacrificed upon the cross to pay the fine for everything we’ve done wrong. Jesus was sacrificed on the cross to set us free from the burden of our law-breaking. Jesus was sacrificed to break the yoke of guilt that keeps our heads down – and now we are free to do good, to follow Jesus, to truly live!
The Law is still the law. Following the Law will lead you to a better life. For example, the Law says to not eat ham. And we have now found that eating too much ham is bad for our health, our cholesterol levels, our sodium levels, our blood pressure. And we’ve found sound reasons to follow the other commands of the Law. But, you see, Jesus fulfilled the Law. Jesus showed us that someone human can follow the Law – but He also showed us that the Law isn’t how you get to Heaven. Instead, the Law is meant to show us just how messed up we truly are – and to lead us to admit that weakness to ourselves and to God. Because of Jesus, we humbly admit our weakness and bow to God - or we point out that Jesus cheated because He was the Son of God - and bow to Jesus as divine, giving Him the respect of listening to His words as Truth. And either way, we have come to bow before God.
Instead of trying to follow the Law to gain Heaven, we now know that the way to Heaven is to believe in the promises of God. As the Apostle Paul pointed out, over 400 years before Moses and the Law, God gave Abraham a promise, a promise of many descendants, as many as there are stars in the sky. Abraham believed God and so God declared that Abraham was righteous, that He was “good enough” for Heaven.
Now, we are to believe the promises that God gave us through Jesus Christ. Chief among these promises is that people who choose to follow Jesus, the Son of God, will be resurrected, brought back from the dead to live eternally. Our yoke to the Law was broken, we do not have to sweat about following every one of those 613 commandments exactly all of our lives – we simply need to follow Jesus, to find God’s Will for our lives and to follow what the Holy Spirit tells us to do, like an ox who now has learned to do what the farmer wants done and so he no longer needs to carry a heavy yoke which keeps him attached to the wagon, or like a dog that no longer needs a leash because he has learned his master's will.
And just before Jesus was sacrificed on that cross, the night before He died on that cross, Jesus called His students, his disciples together and said, “I need you to remember this always, for it is very important for you.”
That evening, He took bread, broke it, and shared it with his friends and said, “This is my body which is broken for you.”
He took wine, shared it with his friends, and said, “This is my blood which is shed for you.”
For you see, it is important that we remember that Jesus was the One who broke the yoke. It was Jesus who set us free. Only Jesus had the faith in God to completely follow the Law and become the sacrifice for us. Now, we need to learn to follow Him with our whole heart.
As the Apostle Paul wrote:
This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words.
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.
We have the mind of Christ, God who walked on this earth, given to us by the Holy Spirit we received at baptism. Let us listen to what the Spirit has spoken. Let us do what Christ directs us through the Word of God and the gentle whisper of the Holy Spirit. Let us learn to do good each minute in each situation rather than blindly follow the Law.
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