Required of the Law. - 01/01/2017

(SORRY THIS IS NOT EDITED AS WELL AS I WOULD LIKE, PLEASE DEAL WITH IT.)

WARNING PREACHY… 

We love New Year’s resolutions:  rules and regulations give us comfort because, I believe, we perceive security in them.

A guy I went to school with was greatly frustrated when the professor would not just tell him what to think or believe about a subject.  He was not happy with being taught “how” to think, he just wanted to know “what” to think.

We’re all prone to this.  That's why many of us had such angst in school when it came to writing papers that did not have a set number of required pages.  My father in law was a school teacher for many years and when his students would ask him how long a paper had to be he would tell them, "It needs to be likes a woman's skirt; long enough to cover the point but short enough to keep it interesting."  While I like the creativity of this answer, in the end the students still did not know how many pages they needed to write.

We like rules; they are unambiguous, definite, and defined.  At the end of the day we judge ourselves on how many of the 10 Commandments that we got right.

In this morning’s Scripture reading (Luke 2:21-40), Joseph and Mary are taking Jesus to the temple to be presented as is commanded by the Law.  At this 8^th day presentation the baby Jesus is circumcised and officially counted as a Jew.

I always question the need for Jesus to be required by the Law to be circumcised; was it really necessary? Martin Luther wrote about the circumcision of Jesus: how it is that sin is passed on from man to man, and why the Virgin Birth was necessary. 

However, it is certainly true that if the deity of Jesus did not require circumcision his humanity still was obligated to it. We see the same idea at the baptism of our Lord.

Matthew 3:11-15

 ¹¹ “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹² His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
¹³ Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. ¹⁴ But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”
¹⁵ Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.

Again, the deity of Jesus did not make a baptism of repentance necessary but his humanity of flesh obligated him to it.

And so Jesus, being God, did not need the things which the Law required but subjected himself, his humanity, to us in order to guide us to the Cross on Calvary. Likewise, Jesus, again, being God, did not need to go to his death on the cross for his own sins, but in his humanity he did so for the sins of mankind: because the Law required it.

Jesus was subjected to the Law of God in order to set us free from the Law.  In other words, he set us free from the 10 Commandments.

Philippians 2:5-11

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

⁶ Who, being in very nature^[a] God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; ⁷ rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature^[b] of a servant, being made in human likeness. ⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

⁹ Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰ that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Our lord subjected himself to the Law so that you and I do not need to and now we look directly to Christ and the leading not of rules and regulations but of the Holy Spirit of God.

This creates problems in our faith for us because we feel secure in the Law.  We like hard and fast rules and regulations (Heck, we even create rules for ourselves and call them “New Year's resolutions”. We crave defined and definite order with guidelines so we can have a crystal clear image of how to lice our lives of faith (or should I say; how many pages to write?)

But Jesus destroys the sin that requires us to live by law and statute because he gives us a new statute to follow; a statute of selflessness.

John 13:34

³⁴ “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

or

Matthew 16:24 

²⁴ Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Both of these verses require class of what “love” and “pick up their cross daily” actually means but neither requires the Law because Jesus has fulfilled the Jewish Law in its entirety as He said in Matthew 5:17.

And so Jesus gives us a new law to live by but one that is not guided by statute but by his Holy Spirit.  And we are not always comfortable with this.   Living life dynamically with a living and active God who gives us his personal Spirit, who requires relationship when rules and regulations do not.  

This is exactly why we brake when we see a police officer while driving.  The rule is merely a road sign and we are not concerned about it because we know it is not personally aware of our offense, but when the rule is between ourselves and a God who is personally active and on the scene, then we recognize the stark difference between simply being religious and having a living and active relationship with Jesus.

This is how it is when our faith is guided by Law versus being guided by God’s Holy Spirit.  One is impersonal and easy to ignore while the other is personal and not so easy to disregard out of hand.

Now today, as we consider this New Year, I encourage you to do so with an eye toward the Christ who lives and the guidance of his Holy Spirit.  It is likely that your New Year’s Laws (eh’hem, I mean Resolutions) will stay with you a few weeks but it will only be with your eyes firmly focused on Christ that you can know the victory that he has given us.

I close here with a final Scripture as our parting thought...

Galatians 2:15-21

¹⁵ “We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles ¹⁶ know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in^[d] Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.

¹⁷ “But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! ¹⁸ If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.

¹⁹ “For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. ²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ²¹ I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”^[e]