RULES, RULES

I swim at a really nice pool at the Senior Citizens Center with multiple lists of rules posted everywhere.  They serve to make my eyes roll back into my head.  The only rule I like is the one about not getting into the pool with open sores.

But you know what I mean.  The place seems over-regulated and who reads 'em, anyway?  Besides, my fallen nature tends to hear what I can't do and chomps at the bits, wanting to do it.  What good is the law?

The book says God gave us the law as a tutor to bring us to Christ.  It sets God's standard (like a mirror) in front of our faces.  When I see I can't measure up to His standards, I know my need of a Savior.  Then I can (as Tim Keller says) "make peace with the wrath of God".

Our Father is the champion for cutting through the fat.  He made a concise list of ten commandments for man to keep, and then reduced those ten to only two (love God/love others).  Still...no.can.do.

Our church fathers had had much to say about the law over the centuries.
Reaching waaaay back to the man who wrote most of the New Testament, Paul said this in Galatians 2:19 (The Message).

"What actually took place is this.  I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work.  So I quit being a 'law man' so that I could be God's man."

Augustine (died 430):

"Through the law, God opens man's eyes so that he sees his helplessness and by faith takes refuge to His mercy and is healed.  The law was given in order that we might seek grace, and grace was given in order that we might fulfill the law."

Martin Luther (died 1546):

"The law and the gospel are given to the end that we may learn to know both how guilty we are, and to what again we should return."

Matthew Henry (died 1714).  When I need a commentary, I reach for Matthew Henry:

"There is no way of coming to that knowledge of sin which is necessary to repentance, but by comparing our hearts and lives by the law."

The fiery Jonathan Edwards (died 1758):

"What good is it to have godly principles yet not know them?  Why should God reveal His mind to us if we don't care enough to know what it is?  Yet the only way we can know whether we are sinning is by knowing His moral law: by the law is the knowledge of sin."

Charles Spurgeon (died 1892):

"If men do not understand the law, they will not feel they are sinners.  And if they are not consciously sinners, they will never value the sin offering.  There is no healing a man till the law has wounded him, no making him alive till the law has slain him."

D.L. Moody (died 1899):

"This is what God gives us the Law for, to show us ourselves and our true colors."

William Booth (died 1912).

William Booth was the founder of the Salvation Army;  he preached and served the poor in London's slums throughout his life.  

When General Booth died, there were 40,000 mourners who turned out (see below).  Queen Mary slipped into the great hall and sat at the rear, unrecognized.  

General Booth made an interesting remark about our times when he said of the Law:

"The chief danger of the Twentieth Century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God...and heaven without hell."

A contemporary thinker who always challenges my thinking...the passionate John Piper (born 1946):

"If we don't understand why the law was given, we can kill ourselves with it."

Amen.