We’ve fed on the 10 commandments. But how, if at all, do we feed ourselves on the old testament’s minor laws, such as we hit now in Exodus 21? `The law of the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul’, sings David in Psalm 19. `Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long… My soul is consumed with longing for your laws!`, sings Psalm 119. Really? How does that work??
Well, first thing: these sections probably aren’t ones to read slowly. These are best speed-read, say three chapters a day. (So, Leviticus in nine days.) But alertly! Listening for the Spirit to flag up four things:
First, listen out for the cross. One thing we can’t miss in the old testament law is the centrality of blood-sacrifice. Continual; gruesome, and not pretty; so was Calvary. Sin matters, and without the shedding of blood to pay for its penalty – what eventually happened, massively, at the cross – there can be no forgiveness, says Hebrews 9:22. Feeding on God’s law will train our heads in that.
Then, some of the laws are an imaginative training in another way: to train God’s people in the mental habit (alien to the surrounding nations) that there are two kinds of things in the world and you don’t mix them up, the holy and the unclean. Hence Leviticus’ long list of clean animals they could eat, and unclean ones they couldn’t; hence too the laws atheists sometimes mock, that forbid ploughing with two different animals, mixing two kinds of seed, or wearing clothes made of two kinds of material (Lev 19). Why these? To train our imaginations: it’s not true that `everything that lives is holy`; there’s the holy, and the unclean (Lev 11:47), and it’s disastrous to muddle them. Probably rabbit, pork and camel could have been ok to eat rather than being declared unclean (and once the clearer revelation of the new testament comes they are, Mark 7:19); but the mental training and discipline (including, If God says it, then I will do it) is the big point here.
And then: these sections deserve attention because old testament Israel was meant to be a worked example: a theocratic community helping us all grasp what God desires and rules out, and also how much right and wrong matter. Just once in history, a few things like adultery carried the death penalty (although we don’t know whether that penalty ever had to be implemented). The principle of the universe is that sin cuts us off from the life of God, and in the long run that means death (Rom 6:23). So there are many things I’ve done of which the consequence is death, and I hide from that fact; and God is merciful, and He doesn’t teach me this directly. But just once in history He did, with just one nation, for a short time, and He ensured that it was brilliantly recorded so that all of us could learn from it for thousands of years to come. And so for example there are a very few sins, sexual and other, that carry the death penalty; these laws make very clear to us how God feels about them, and it’s vital that we grasp that. But the death penalty there (for adultery for example, or homosexual practice) would only apply (if indeed it was ever implemented) in a theocratic state, which is clearly not God’s plan for us now; Jesus‘ kingdom now is `not of this world’ (John 19), and physical sanctions don’t apply in His spiritual kingdom. (Indeed in the NT era the unforced freedom to follow or disobey Jesus is the most crucial thing in anyone’s life; so there has to be freedom now, even to worship a false God without state penalties.) (Inside the church, however, church discipline is a very different matter, 1 Cor 5:11-12.) So we learn how the Lord feels about these things, particularly about those that were serious enough to carry the death penalty; but the legal consequences He created to make these things clear no longer apply in our situation. They were designed as a teaching aid for a specific, very unique situation, to show Israel, and us, how God feels about some particular things.
And lastly some of these laws were simply regulating the lives of imperfect people. (We’ll have a separate posting about slavery, because in Exodus that word doesn’t mean what we think.) They were written for a crowd of people deeply scarred by the experience of brutal servitude in Egypt, and now living together in a desert; and so sometimes, as Jesus said, what the laws command had to be `because your hearts were hard` (Matt 19:8). What God really wanted for people with the Spirit He’d make clear later, especially in the sermon on the mount; but for now we have to trust Him that He saw what was best for a horde of escaped slaves who had neither the Word nor the Spirit to shape their actions.
So then: because Christ is the `end of the [old testament] law` (Rom 10:4, Matt 5:17), its letter doesn’t apply to us in that way (see Galatians especially, or Col 2:16-17). As God’s kingdom spread in Acts, He saw to it that the whole place of the OT Law was raised again (Acts 15), and He made clear that its entire role was changed. But as the epistles show, it still embodies many wise principles of God’s justice and compassion, that really are worth `meditating all day long`, as Psalm 119 says. `All Scripture is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training`, says God in 2 Timothy 3:16; and because we believe Him, we will still want to learn from the OT law in the ways above. But we’re only called to obey it in its specific old testament form if the new testament so restates it; it’s then that it becomes our agenda, the Spirit’s agenda, defining clearly what it means to follow Jesus. So for example the NT restates that `porneia`, which our Bibles translate as `fornication` or `sexual immorality`, is utterly wrong, and we obey that rule because God reaffirms it in the NT. (However, here’s another use of the OT law: when we want to know what `porneia` actually means in the new testament, we go back to the old testament, particularly Leviticus 18 and 20, and there we find it means any kind of sex outside marriage between man and woman.)
So let’s finish with the instruction that God chooses to put at the very start of these chapters (20:22-25). No gods of silver and gold, He begins: and then comes this command – do not make God a sacrificial altar of dressed – skilfully carved – stones. Why?
Well, as we reflect it becomes clear. The centre of God’s worship is absolutely not a place for any human craftsmanship; it’s a place reached by His grace alone, not by any abilities or actions of ours. So does that mean there’s no room for artistic skills in worship? Certainly it doesn’t. In fact ten chapters later we read for the very first time in the Bible of somebody filled with the Spirit, Bezalel; and he is filled with the Spirit precisely so as `to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze.` What’s more, God’s tabernacle (from ch25 onwards) is full of artistic beauty. (Schaeffer’s little book Art and the Bible is great on all this.) There’s plenty of space for the glory of the arts, God-given human skills, in God’s service. But – and this isn’t always easy for Christian artists to remember, because art is about self-expression, and our self hates to be constrained – at the centre, the absolute centre, there’s place only for something else: God’s sacrificial grace alone.
A very helpful, practical lesson (and one I’ve watched all too often being badly needed in churches). Next time more examples of the sheer wholesomeness of the old testament law…
