"WHY THEN THE LAW?"
Added 6/03/99
By: Dr. Kenneth Hart - 1999
Formatted By:
Haydn k. Piper - 1999
Discussion Proposals:
God's original ideal for humans was to live in complete freedom in the Garden of Eden in constant communion with God and the angels. We would have never known the horrors of sin and its consequences. After the fall, God's ideal was for us to learn to be like Him again and to share this knowledge with all around us. The better we know God, the more like Him we may become.
Because we have so often failed in carrying out God's plan for our lives, God has repeatedly had to depart farther and farther from His ideal to reach us where we are. Sometimes God has had to use "emergency measures" like giving us law upon law to protect us in our ignorance and immaturity, or destroying the whole world with a flood in order not to lose touch with the entire human race.
Bible Verses:
John 8:32: You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. (GNB)
Galatians 3:19: What, then, was the purpose of the Law? It was added in order to show what wrongdoing is, and it was meant to last until the coming of Abraham's descendant, to whom the promise was made. (GNB)
Romans 6:14: Sin must not be your master; for you do not live under law but under God's grace. (GNB)
Romans 10:4: Christ means the end of the struggle for righteousness by works of law, that everyone who has faith may be justified. (Phillips)
Galatians 3:24: The law was like those Greek tutors, with which you are familiar, who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for. (The Message)
Ellen White:
"In heaven, service is not rendered in the spirit of legality. When Satan rebelled against the law of Jehovah, the thought that there was a law came to the angels almost as an awakening to something unthought of.
In their ministry, the angels are not as servants, but as sons. There is perfect unity between them and their Creator. Obedience is to them no drudgery." Mount of Blessing 109 (1896); compare 1SP 261
"Every human being, created in the image of God, is endowed with a power akin to that of the Creator--individuality, power to think and to do. The men in whom this power is developed are the men who bear responsibilities, who are leaders in enterprise, and who influence character. It is the work of true education to develop this power, to train the youth to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other men's thought...Instead of educated weaklings, institutions of learning may send forth men strong to think and to act, men who are masters and not slaves of circumstances, men who possess breadth of mind, clearness of thought, and the courage of their convictions...
"Higher than the highest human thought can reach is God's ideal for His children. Godliness--godlikeness--is the goal to be reached. Before the student there is opened a path of continual progress. He has an object to achieve, a standard to attain, that includes everything good, and pure, and noble. He will advance as fast and as far as possible in every branch of true knowledge. But his efforts will be directed to objects as much higher than mere selfish and temporal interests as the heavens are higher than the earth." Education 17-19; MYP40; 1MCP 105; GW 95; FLB 44; 8T 63; SDG 348; DA 311; CT 365 "If man had kept the law of God, as given to Adam after his fall, preserved in the ark by Noah, and observed by Abraham, there would have been no necessity for the ordinance of circumcision. And if the descendants of Abraham had kept the covenant, of which circumcision was a token or pledge, they would never have gone into idolatry, nor been suffered to go down into Egypt; and there would have been no necessity of God's proclaiming his law from Sinai, and engraving it upon tables of stone, and guarding it by definite directions in the judgments and statutes given to Moses.
"Moses wrote these judgments and statutes from the mouth of God while he was with him in the mount. If the people of God had obeyed the principles of the ten commandments, there would have been no need of the specific directions given to Moses, which he wrote in a book, relative to their duty to God and to one another. The definite directions which the Lord gave to Moses in regard to the duty of his people to one another, and to the stranger, are the principles of the ten commandments simplified and given in a definite manner, that they need not err."
Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 1, pp. 264,265 (See entire chapter); Compare Patriarchs and Prophets 363,364; Spiritual Gifts, Vol. 3, p. 299; The Signs of the Times, June 17, 1880
Other Resources:
Tapes: Conversations about God, Tape # 11; Faith, Righteousness and Salvation, Tapes #11,12
Books: I Want to Be Free, p. 26 "God's Law and My Freedom"; Can God Be Trusted? , p. 32; Servants or Friends? Chapter 7, "Friendship and God's Use of Law".
GET YOUR OWN