How do you justify, biblically, this idea that God's initial law was not perfectly moral and good?
Hi Athee. Thanks for your response. I've made a reply. It's a bit long but it seems like you want details, so I've started by giving an assessment of why I think the Law exists in the first place. I hope you find it helpful.
Humanity is one long work in progress. God is teaching us in stages from the very first commands to name animals in the garden, to the discovery of Abraham. Abraham was an interesting test case, as there didn't seem to be any law for him. I don't know how God builds the souls that he puts into the body, but it's certainly not a cookie cutter method. There appears to be a randomness that God himself injects into the spirit and waits to see what pops out. Abraham appeared to be a rare gem in how he turned out and God liked it,
a lot. He wanted to use Abraham as the model for what all Israel should be like. The relationship with Abraham was quite interesting. God just kinda worked casually with him, I think because Abraham didn't need a law. He listened to God because he believed God knew what was best.
Then there were the "Children of Abraham"; the Israelites. They were only in captivity in Egypt in the first place because they were rebellious and then when Moses pulled them out they were still rebellious (just about every other chapter after exodus starts with "and the children of Israel went a whoring again".)
With Abraham it was easy, because he
wanted to be faithful to God, but real faith, by design, can't be mass produced. God could not count on having the same loose and carefree relationship with the children of Israel that he had with Abraham; they were simply too rebellious, so he gave them the Law (they were busy committing idolatry even as the Law was being given to Moses up on the mountain); a written list of rules to make his will clearly known in a situation where they were nowhere near as attentive at listening as Abraham was. It was only ever meant to be a temporary guide, just until they learned enough that they didn't need the Law anymore, like Abraham. It was God's way of starting slowly with them, much like we might write out a list of rules for kids.
Unfortunately, that's not how it turned out. People took the law and either became complacent with it or twisted it around to suit their own selfish desires and ambitions. The gospels are full of Jesus citing these examples. The gold of the temple had become more important than the temple itself. The sacrifice on the altar had become more important than the altar itself. The people loved the highest seats. They loved fancy robes. They loved fancy greetings of prominence and respect. The animals they killed to atone for their sins had become mere commodities to buy and sell. They had come to love wealth. They put heavy burdens on the people and they didn't lift a finger to help them. The Law was a near complete failure.
The "next phase" never came because the children didn't grow. God finally got tired of waiting for them and decided to move on without them; he started the next phase anyway and Jesus entered the scene.
Jesus made a lot of changes to the Law. Rather than killing our enemies, we should love them. All that fighting in the OT, where the Children of Israel trekked to the promised land destroying cities along the way was part of the learning process. God wanted the Children of Israel to be the shining example of "His People" to the world and part of that meant demonstrating that he would protect his people and that he should be respected as their guardian.
God isn't afraid to crush his enemies, but he's not a God of perpetual war, either. That phase of growth was only meant to be temporary, too and the results showed that just crushing through the land unstoppable did not guarantee faith, either from the children of Israel or those looking on. Fantastic, mighty, unstoppable displays of power also didn't guarantee faith.
But it was important for God to go through those motions to offset the idea of bringing change through love. Now we can look back on the OT and say, "See, that course of action doesn't work; God wants us to try love now". Or, when it comes to one particular group being "God's chosen" and expecting faith to come as a result of being part of the special group, we can look back and say, "Well, it didn't work for the Jews, why should we think it will work now". Being part of the special group does not guarantee faith. We need something more.
And that's why the introduction of the Holy Spirit as the fulfillment of the Law was so important. Even in our own lives we can experiment with how the Law fails. Try to write out a list of rules governing just one day of your life, and you'll quickly see that you will be more busy writing out amendments and new rules as you go along than just living your life.
The Law can be helpful, but on it's own it is incomplete and stunted. The spirit is flexible and always moving. The spirit is what will help us to know how to apply the law fairly.
So now, after thousands of years of trudging progress, we're living in one of the most spiritually advanced times of history. Compare all the possibilities of ethics and morality we have now to the very simple life Adam had in the garden, where the only ethic he had to deal with was "don't eat from that one tree" (and quite possibly not expecting Eve to do
all the tidying up).
I think it always comes across as strange when I say this, but Christianity is the purest form of anarchy. The Law is what Christianity is striving to get away from. We have things like "The Law" and even Jesus gave commands, but God wants us to get to the point where we don't
need rules and commands to tell us what to do. He wants us to do the right thing because we
want to and not just because we are told to. The Law, and rules, and guidelines etc are only important insofar as they work to make themselves obsolete as rules.
After the "Time of Jesus" (culminating in the Battle of Armageddon) there will be another phase. Jesus talked about the saints ruling the nations for 1000 years after he returns. We'll have new bodies, new relationships, and new authority. It will be time for us to put into practice all that we've learned in this life about faithfulness, fairness, and justice over the mortals who will remain.
And after that, there will be another phase of our learning. And after that, almost certainly another phase.
