15
Jan

God’s Law Word

   Posted by: Joshuah   in General

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. ” (Deu 29:29)

On this page, we collect what people say about the Law, about it’s purpose and continuing validity for modern day believers.

Let’s start with what Michael S. Heiser has to say in his new, not yet published book “The Myth That Is True”:

“All of Israelite culture was shaped by the Law: marriage and family relationships, social welfare, work and charity, sacrifice and ritual, personal and community holiness, foreign relations, and worship are some of the broad areas defined by the Law. But more fundamentally, the Law is about teaching a few basic ideas to Yahweh’s earthly family about living in his presence, and in the presence of their otherworldly heavenly brethren. The Law reinforces the separation of the divine and earthly spheres while laying out the rules for their co-existence in the process of working back to Yahweh’s Edenic goal of divine-human rule on earth.”

Now let us hear a few words of Rousas John Rushdoony on the matter. I quote from a an interview with Rushdoony conducted by Joseph McAuliffe, transcribed and edited by Jay Rogers and published on Roger’s website The Second American Revolution:

“Law is the will of the sovereign for his subjects. Thus Law represents the word of the God of the society. Now whose Law you have, He is your God. So if Washington makes our laws, Washington is our God. As Christians we cannot believe that. For centuries, God’s law has functioned wherever God’s people have been, whether in Israel or in Christendom. This is a new and modern thing that we turn to the state’s law. One professor of law, the dean of a law school, told me that he found that even into the 1840s, courts in the United States, decided cases out of the Bible — out of God’s Word, out of His Law — because He is God.

Now we do not recognize God as God over the United States. The oath of office for the president of the United States used to be taken on an open Bible on Deuteronomy 28 invoking all the curses of God for disobedience to His law and all the blessings of God for obedience to his law. Now basically you can have two kinds of law: theonomy — God’s law, or autonomy — self-law. That’s what it boils down to and autonomy leads to anarchy, which is what we are getting increasingly.”

And this taken is from our New Geneva Study Bible:

The Law of God

Human beings were not created autonomous (that is, free to be a law to themselves), but theonomous – subject to the law of God. This was not a hardship, because God had created man in such a way that grateful obedience would bring him the highest happiness. Duty and delight would have coincided, as they did in Jesus (Joh 4:34; cf. Psa 112:1; 119:4, 16, 47-48, 97-113, 127-128, 163-167). The fallen human heart hates God’s law, , both because it is a law and because it comes from God. Those who know Christ, however, find not only that they love the law and want to keep it, both to please God and out of gratitude for grace (Rom 7:18-22; 12:1-2), but also that the Holy Spirit leads them into a degree of obedience that was never theirs before (Rom 7:6, 8:4-6; Heb 10:16).
God’s moral law is abundantly set forth in Scripture, in the Decalogue (Ten Commandments), other statutes of Moses, sermons by the prophets, the teaching of Jesus, and the New Testament letters. The law reflects God’s holy character and His purposes for created human beings. God commands the behavior that pleases Him and forbids what offends Him. Jesus summarizes the moral law in the two great commandments, to love God and to love your neighbor (Mat 22:37-40). He says that on these two depend all the Old Testament moral instructions. (…)

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