fear of the law

lutherangerman

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Hello,

since I came to be a christian I am often afraid of reading certain portions of the bible, for example the law of Moses. In this writing there is so much death and destruction, the awful animal sacrifices, the harshness of punishments for small sins like not obeying the sabbath fully and such. I take deep comfort in Christ's changes to religion which had St Paul say the law has been done away with in Jesus Christ and His cross. I am often praying to Jesus to show me the cross and the resurrection. Do you have any further thoughts about how I can loose my fear of the law and the fear of God that results from the law? Paul wrote the law only brings disputes and anger. So why did God institute it at first to begin with? Why didn't God start with Christ's teachings and the love that Jesus always preached? Without love there is only fear and I am very dependent on love, like every human being. I adore the 10 commandments which in my interpretation are enough when it comes to laws, and the 2 love commandments. But I cannot live well with much of the rest of the law. The Jews speak about it humanely, they spiritualize the law and don't want to hurt anyone. Do christians do the same thing? How can we embrace Jesus' kindness deeper? How can we run away more from the mosaic law? How can we destroy the kind of hell legalism can bring you into? Is legalism the hell that Jesus came to rescue us from too?
 

FireDragon76

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Fear of the law is a good thing, IMO. It reflects God's holiness. The Torah was given to the Jews so that they could have a covenant with God, to commune with God while protecting themselves. To do so, they had to observe its rules. Especially the priests. God's holiness for them was not something moral, it was a metaphysical reality - literally dangerous or "radioactive" (look at the story of Uzziah and the Ark).

But for Christians- Christ is our high priest and he has made a perfect and eternal sacrifice for us. We do not need the Torah to have communion with God. But the Law still reflects his holiness, the chasm between God and man which was overcome in the Incarnation.

I think God started with the law because that is what people back then did- they thought of religion primarily as upholding the order of things, of making the sun rise and rain fall on crops. Usually by doing the right kinds of things. They needed rules. This goes back to Luther's teaching on the 1st use of the Law, to restrain evil, to create civil order. But also to give the Jewish people a functional way to commune with God and to hope for salvation. Only later, with Christ and the free grace he offered, is it revealed that the Law's purpose is to show us the real ontological/metaphysical distance between humanity and God, and our need for a Savior. Jesus actually makes the demands of the Law more intense than what the Jews had known. But while he does so, Jesus also offers mercy unconditionally. And that really frightens some of the people at the time- the people in power, so much so that they kill him for upsetting their religious order. They don't want him to be the new temple, they don't want the wrong sorts of people (sinners and outcasts) being offered access to God, and it burns their ears to hear it. They like being important people in their society, they like the honor and prestige that comes along with it. They like the clear distinctions between good and evil, clean and unclean. They don't want that to go away.

Jesus death exposes the problem with the Law - it shows us what it means to be holy but it can't actually make us truly good people. We have corrupted natures, we tend to twist the good things God gives us to evil ends. Time and again the Israelites did not obey the law, particularly the more subtle points of justice, such as caring for the oppressed - the things that really offended God. And as Paul points out in Romans, this problem with keeping the Law is not just a Jewish problem, it is a problem for human beings in general.
 
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lutherangerman

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What is holiness if we derive its meaning from the mosaic law? It doesn't seem to be something good, not something that would have to do with goodness or love. How does it make sense to draw near to God and become holy too if holiness would be something to fear? How could a child be holy? How could a loving person? St Paul writes in his letter to Timothy that the main sum of religious teaching would be to love. Should we believe then that God's secret would be to punish people severely for small sins, and if yes, how does our love mesh in there? Love entails mercy and sympathy, and I presume this should go hand in hand with God's mercy and sympathy for us. God's holiness is not radioactive, look at Christ on the cross, an outpouring of love and grace on that pale. God is love.
 
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FireDragon76

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I think I'm having trouble explaining my ideas.

Christ on the Cross was revealing God in a way different than the Old Testament did. In Christ, we have a new way of relating to God- because there is a metaphysical component, God himself comes to us and clothes himself in human flesh and hides his glory (he's no longer unapproachable to sinners). This introduces a way that deals with sin and communion with God without the strict observance of Torah (OT Law).

Torah is about what human beings do to commune with God, the Gospel is about what God does to commune with human beings.

Lutherans, and Protestant in general, seem to disagree a lot just how important the Law is, or how it should be preached.

By modern standards, the OT Law sounds harsh at times (it was written for a different culture), but there are a lot of things in there that point to the ethic of Jesus, such as commandments to care for strangers and the poor, to deal with people honestly and not to take advantage of people. I would not want to say the Jewish Torah isn't about love. But we tend to use God's law to hurt other people and to become our own gods, to serve God on our own terms (look at Jesus, he was arrested by religious men who believed they were doing what was good in their own eyes). We have a "sin addiction" that corrupts the good things God gives us. So God himself had to deal with this, that's why we need God's grace revealed in Jesus Christ.
 
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