The Law of Liberty

This past year I’ve learned a lot about grace versus law.  I wrote about it some on my old blog, so if you’ve followed me  from over there, this is a subject I’ve looked at a few times.  Yet, it seems to keep coming up and is relevant to us today.  As I studied this past year, mainly I learned freedom from the law.

And then I studied James.  James was the half-brother of Christ, early Christian church leader who was Jew through and through, and as such followed the Law.  And the book of James reflects that.  Something I began to think about and had never thought through before was the things that happened after Jesus’s death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, Pentecost, and the formation of the early church.  Studying James will aid you in your views on grace and help you to better understand Paul too.  Paul and James worked together, although mostly from a distance, in the early church and their writings are complementary, to work together not oppose one another, although their writings if read apart from one another, create dissonance.  When read hand in hand, they create harmony.

First of all when I think about people surrounding the formation of the early church, I am amazed that they obviously did not have eyes to see and ears to hear because they could not understand the significance of what happened with Christ or was currently happening at that time with the church.  It is surprising that people still today do not see the significance of how history changed in the years surrounding the church’s formation.

One of the most surprising elements of the early church was that Gentiles were saved and added to their number and that men were called by God to preach to the Gentiles.  Now in case you do not know Gentiles are all parties who are not Jewish.  So that is most of us.  Up to this point, God’s chosen people were the Jews.  You can look back into the Old Testament and see how God has always had a heart for those outside of His chosen people, but it might not be so obvious to the chosen.  If you were Jewish, well, one of the elements that set you apart from others is circumcision.  So in the early church, there was confusion on whether or not Gentiles who came to the faith should be circumcised.  Early leaders, including Paul and James, decided that Gentiles did not have to be circumcised.  In a sense, they decided to treat them like Jewish proselytes, which was a very rare thing, because up to this point Jews were not expected to try to convert others to their faith.  Proselytes did not have to follow all of the 613 laws.  And early Gentiles who became Christians simply had to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality.

This means that Gentiles are not bound to the law of the Old Testament.  However, those laws are not totally null and void.  If we decided to learn nothing of our Jewish ancestry or of the laws they are bound to, we do ourselves a great disservice as Gentile brothers and sisters united in Christ.  We may never understand Christ, as even he said he came to fulfill the law not to nullify it.  Deciding to ignore the law and/or the Old Testament could potentially leave you clueless about the character of God and His unchanging nature throughout the Bible.  However, apart from the Spirit of God, the law is useless.  And this is the point of grace.  We receive on the basis of undeserved favor.

Under the spirit of grace, then, we are not dictated by laws, but by the Spirit of God.  Often, though, as humans, we like rules and regulations, so we make our own laws, much like the Pharisees of Jesus’s day (yes, there are modern-day Jewish Pharisees).  And being led by the Spirit, we may find He gives us personal laws to follow.  Case in point, the Holy Spirit may tell you not to practice yoga for all of its eastern forms of thought.  In your humanity, you may decide to enforce this law on others telling them yoga is wrong.  Yoga is not wrong in and of itself.  Under the law of liberty, there are not 613 commandments to follow; there are numerous convictions to follow, and we do not get to decide how the Holy Spirit will work in our life or in the lives of others.  We can share how God has moved us, i.e. not to participate in yoga, but we cannot condemn others who go to yoga and do not have the same conviction as us.  That is what the law of liberty is:  the freedom to abide in Christ apart from the law of the Old Testament but in the Spirit.

This law is alive and living and cannot be written down except on human hearts, wherein the specific laws written on my heart may differ from the law written on your heart.  Of course there are two universal laws written on the hearts of every believer:  love God, love one another.  Those two laws determine all else.  Only God decides how our love for Him must play out, i.e. a willingness to give up yoga for Him, remaining single all our lives, dedicating our child to God’s service, etc.

I did not include Scripture references in my text, but I’d be happy to provide them if needed.