In the whole Old Testament worldview, it's Israel against the nations,
Yahweh against the gods.
And so the law was a means by which you expressed whose side you were on.
While we're talking about the law, is that how people were saved in the Old Testament?
No, the law wasn't given so that people could earn
their way to heaven by accumulating good works.
There's no passage in either Testament that really says that if you do enough good works
then you're going to merit reward from God and salvation and things like that.
Paul, in the New Testament, really hammers at this
because even though he's the apostle to the Gentiles, he is a Jew,
and again, he has lots of pedigree, the Pharisee of the Pharisees and all this.
And he's trying to convince people that the law is not the means to salvation.
So one of the primary passages for this is Galatians 3.
He says, «Let me ask you only this [verse 2]:
Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?
Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain?»
Because they're under persecution here.
And he says, «Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you
do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith—
just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?»
This is something Paul wrote as well about in Romans, that Abraham was
accepted by God in this relationship prior to there ever being a law.
So the law is not the crucial element here.
And he keeps going in Galatians 3,
«For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written,
“Cursed be everyone who does not abide by
all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.”
Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law,
for “The righteous shall live by faith.”» And so on and so forth.
I mean, he spends a lot of time talking about this.
The law was really given to Israel to give them a means by which
they could learn the character of God.
Of course, it was going to lead them ultimately to their own failure
because they're not perfect.
It's going to lead them to the fact that our salvation in the afterlife,
our destiny is only by the grace of God.
God chose to be in relationship with us. He loves us.
Deuteronomy 7:7 and 8, God loved you because he loved you, Moses tells Israel.
And so our destiny is really rooted in the grace of God, because we're going to fail.
And so the law was essentially there to teach that lesson
and point them to something beyond, which of course would be the Messiah.
It was also a means by which they could express where their loyalty was.
So they learn the character of God, they learn that they need to depend on grace,
and they ultimately learn that we're going to obey this law to show not only our God
that we love him, that we believe that he is going to give us salvation.
We believe that he made a covenant with us and that he loves us.
We're going to live accordingly.
But it will also show that relationship to the rest of the world.
Remember, in the whole Old Testament worldview, it's Israel against the nations,
Yahweh against the gods.
And so the law was a means by which you expressed whose side you were on.
Okay, do we believe in the God of Israel?
Are we loyal in our belief to the God of Israel as opposed to some other deity?
You show that by the way you live.
And so you live under the law in that context.
It's to help them be what Exodus describes as a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation. Why?
Because ultimately, as God told Abraham when he called him after Babel,
after divorcing the rest of humanity, God's still interested in the nations
because he goes to Abraham and says, okay, I'm going to make you these promises.
But one of them is going to be that through you, through your seed,
ultimately, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.
And Paul writes in Galatians, the same book we've been reading from,
that the seed was Christ. He just says that point blank.
And so the law was a means by which to attract the other nations into;
this is what life should be like, you know, worshipping the true God.
This is what God intended.
If you follow the law, this is what's going to make you happy.
It's going to make you function better in society.
You're not going to do self-destructive things.
You're going to treat each other with justice.
You're going to treat each other like the fellow images you really are.
This is how it was supposed to work.
But it sort of gets perverted and turned into a system of earning God's favor.
And God says, no, that isn't the point.
I didn't choose you because you performed well.
I loved you because I loved you.
Deuteronomy 7:7 and 8.
God never gives up on the original plan.
Even when he abandons humanity at Babel,
he picks this couple, Abraham and Sarah, and says, we're going to start over.
I'm not giving up on the original plan.
And it's going to be through you that I'm going to get everything else back.
So the law has its own logic.
But part of that is not earning God's favor.
That's never what it was intended to do.