… the law won.
or did it?
i’ve always wrestled with what the law meant.
i read something the other day where someone said we needed to hang people and we needed to televise their hangings in order to put an end to crime.
when you start looking at punishment as a deterrent, it really can only go so far. you get to the point where any crime is a capital crime.
and every punishment is capital punishment.
we make graduated sentences that try to equate the punishment with the severity of the crime. we implement mandatory sentences so that the criminal knows ahead of time that he will receive the full agreed-upon sentence for his crime regardless of the circumstances surrounding him or his crime.
so as the criminal code is made harsher and harsher with the intended purpose of preventing crimes from occuring, you reach the point where every felony and every misdemeanor has a mandatory sentence of death.
there. THAT’LL stop ‘em.
which, in a lot of ways, is what the old testament law looks like.
murder somebody?
we murder you back.
have sex the wrong time, the wrong place, with the wrong partner, in the wrong manner?
it ain’t, ‘bailiff, whack his peepee.’
nope.
stone ‘em. to death.
there. THAT’LL stop ‘em.
now, we try to turn that mosaic code into the means by which we more accurately determine how bad our sin – any sin – is, in the sight of God. in fact, with the concept of original sin, and the normal view of Jesus’ death as an ‘atonement’ for sins, one can argue that the proper view of crime and punishment is that any felony – any misdemeanor – is a crime deserving of death.
and that’s why Jesus died – because from God’s point of view even the most minor sin of omission, comission, admission, submission or permission is a complete affront to His holiness and has to be atoned for by the death of something.
a ram.
a pigeon.
some grain.
a lamb.
a God.
but is that really the right way to look at it? or did God perhaps look at man’s repeated attempts to control each other with various laws and codes and say, well, let’s take this as far as we can, shall we?
or maybe God didn’t even write all those laws. maybe they were intentionally written so harshly so that someone could have complete control over a hundred thousand griping desert wanderers.
or maybe someone thought that, if man’s laws were tough, surely God’s laws would be the ultimate picture of not sparing the rod to keep the child from being spoiled, and the obvious end game was that every little misstep took one off a steep cliff like the coyote falling once again to the canyon floor, soon to be followed by the acme safe that would land on top of him.
it’s like when they said – ‘give us a king – we want to be like everyone else!’
God said, you don’t really want a king.
but if you insist on having one, here you go. and the record of israel’s kings is spotty at best.
maybe they cried, ‘give us some laws to make us different from everyone else!’
God said, I don’t really want to relate on the basis of dos and don’ts.
but if you really want a law, I’ll make it severe to the point of almost being absurd.
there. THAT’LL stop ‘em.
we can always set a bar that no one can reach. not reaching the bar doesn’t necessarily pass valid judgment on the one that cannot reach it.
the bar may not be a valid judge of the worth or character of a person. it may be able to make a too-narrow statement about someone’s skills or abilities or talents or discipline in a certain area.
the bar can always be raised.
or lowered.
sometimes it seems that we set bars for others that are just out of their reach.
and that’s not always a bad thing. it helps to be stretched sometimes. teachers don’t give the same test over and over and over to a class. there’s always new material. there’s always something different to ask to see how well a subject has been learned.
it is always the teacher’s prerogative to give a test which everyone is certain to fail.
but it may say more about the test – or the teacher – than the students taking it.
God, i suppose, was fully within His rights to set up whatever laws He wanted. and, being God, He probably was not bound to set up any laws at all in the final analysis.
so the law had to have some purpose.
was that purpose to set a bar we could never reach? that’s one way to look at what paul wrote. he said the law was set up to show us our sin – to make us know in our minds the things that were wrong to do.
now, i would wager that millions of people who have never read exodus or deuteronomy have a reasonable degree of conscience that guides them in what is right and wrong regardless of whether or not they know the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, or the three pep boys (manny, moe and jack, for the record).
i think the better way to see the law is that God set a high bar for us to aspire to. if all He was interested in doing was setting up rights and wrongs so that punishment could be meted out – and even punishment He’d ultimately mete out on Himself – then our betterment would never even figure into the equation, would it? is ‘look how much you hurt Jesus!’ a proper way to get someone to be motivated to change sinful behavior? to help them see a need for salvation?
. we all belong to the i-want-mine-first group.
