On the mission field, when people move from a pagan social order to a Christian social order, we need to be aware of the problem of transition. We tend to say that some rules are eternal in the heavens and must be ful filled, whereas actually the thing that is eternal in the heavens is not the particular set of rules for a particular society, but that which is eternal is an insistence on activity which is good and lovely and integrated and wholesome. We should be careful lest in the name of a moral order we, in fact, injure the new believers as individuals by confusing these complementary phases of life and truth. That is what the fifteenth chapter of Acts teaches us. But for a few exceptions, the Holy Spirit did not fasten specific forms on those converts. “ Now, therefore, why provoke God, by laying on the necks of these disciples a yoke?” (Acts 15:10, Weymouth) There are things that we must teach because God requires them, and hence a Christian must do them. But we don’t want our children or our converts to think of God as a reasonless tyrant—although He is indeed our boss. We want them to learn that the commands of God are all meant to us for good, because He loves us. We want them to know that what He requires of us, He requires not because He is Boss and bigger, but rather because He loves us and that it is for our good. We know the character of God by looking at Jesus Christ. What we see of the character of Jesus Christ we know to be true of the Father. We never have seen Jesus acting like a tyrant, demanding homage. He was meek and mild and had no jealousy or envy of worship. Jesus Christ, the meekest of all, requires those things of us because they are good for us. For that same reason He built into our genetic equipment a generalized response to a moral order. When we learn to operate within that moral order, as taught us by Jesus Christ and through the Scriptures, then we’ll be ready to live abundantly (John 10:10). But life abundant can only be had within a system; it can’t be in a vacuum. An abundant life has to be played in terms of a symphony with its integrated chords, its counterpoint. It has to have its melodies and its harmonies. All this requires rules which hold us into a uniform, operating, total harmonious society into which God has come and in which He became incarnate. That’s what He came for. It was not to bind us with the chains of arbitrary eternal moral rules. The rules which He gives us He teaches us because without them we cannot have a happy integrated game. If we can understand this, it may free us from the frenzied care as to whether or not we have kept some particular detail of life’s ritual. We may be free from worry about details as such and can be vigorously happy as we try to do good for others, knowing that if we are trying to do what is right, unselfishly, we don’t have to worry about overlooking some legal detail. We should teach new converts to be concerned that they do what is good and right and helpful. This does not free them from the requirements of detailed honesty, of carefulness of others in the home, and of faithfulness in the home. That is a part of the rules that are required for the good of society— the best kind of society. Perhaps it can all be summarized by Deuteronomy 10:12, 13, “ And now, Israel, what doth \he Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for th y good ?” That’s why there is a moral code. Laws were made for man, not man for laws.
necessity for it to be ordered in heaven, it must be related to earth and not to eternal angels or to God. Therefore it seems clear to me that the law was made for the good of man and his society. Now we look at Galatians 5:14 (Weymouth). “ For the entire Law is summed up in the one precept, ‘You a r e t o l o v e y o u r n e i g h b o r a s y o u r s e l f .’ ” And in Matthew 22:39 Jesus also said, “ Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Why is the law fulfilled by loving one’s neighbor? Because love seeks the neighbor’s good positively, whereas the law prevents the neighbor’s ill negatively. These are opposite sides of the same coin. One side of the coin says that we are not to injure our neighbor; we are to refrain from doing him ill; we are not to step over into his orbit for harm. According to the other side of the coin we are required by God to do our neighbor good positively, to step into his orbit for his good. This, then, is the reason the law is fulfilled by love. Notice that it has nothing to do with permanent details of' an eternal moral law as such. Rather it has to do with the ultimate purpose behind the moral order, that is, to maintain society for the good of its members. If we seek to maintain the good of the members of society, we are fulfilling the law. Galatians 5:18 gives us a similar point of view. “ But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.” Why aren’t we under law if we are led of the Spirit? Because if we walk in the Spirit, we have positive control of our inward states and attitudes. If we walk in the law, we have negative control, avoiding bad attitudes in wardly. If we positively control our mental state and our actions arising from this inward mental state, then there will be no negative state to be taken care of. There fore the law would not be needed. We would not be under the law. It would not be aimed at us if we were consistently, positively led of the Spirit. Verse 23 implies that there needs to be no law concerning goodness—law is designed as a negative control of the bad. Love is the positive doing good to others which eventually reflects on society, and also reflects on one’s self. Galatians 3:24 says, “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.” Why do we need a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ? Specifically, how does the law bring us to Christ? For the answer, let’s look at an example from linguistics. If we want to learn a language we’ve never studied before, we have to learn various sentence patterns. Perhaps we can think of a sentence pattern as being made up of a series of empty cups— a “ subject” cup, and an “ object” cup, and so on. We fill these cups with the meaningful words we choose for each occasion. If the empty sentence-forms are utilized adequately in context, then the total context plus the words take on total meaning, total communication, but we have to have the pattern into which we can pour the meanings. I have the feeling that the law is somewhat like this. If a person learns the law, then he has a pattern for social behavior. He has an available structure, ready to be filled with deeds significant for living and communi cating with others, and for living and communicating with God. I think that it is in some such way that the law is a schoolmaster bringing us to Christ. How does this relate to the way we teach our children? Well, to some extent we teach them law. We spank them to help them to acquire a form of honesty. It’s an empty form, an empty cup, a general principle at first, in that it doesn’t have the meaning content that it even tually should have.
OCTOBER, 1960
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