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The law of love

In heaven, doing what God wants will be second nature. Till then, reflection on God’s law is an indispensable part of discerning what it means in practice to love God and to love our neighbour.

By: David McIlroy, Cambridge Papers
Posted:
Friday, 25 July 2008, 21:39 (MYT)
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We also have problems because thinking about love alone does not give us much concrete guidance about what is right and wrong. The idea that love is all you need for decision-making gives rise to the sort of thinking that says ‘provided it feels right, and so long as nobody is obviously and immediately getting hurt, anything goes.’ This is a serious mistake, illustrated by statistics which show that just 8 per cent of married couples split up within five years of the birth of a child, compared with 25 per cent of those who marry after birth and 52 per cent of cohabitees.[18] The children get hurt, but so do the couples themselves, parents, relatives, friends, and future partners. The public commitment and community support involved in a marriage make a significant difference.

Finally, sinful human beings have an enormous capacity for self-delusion and to find rationalisations when they fall prey to temptation. If Christians today do not learn from Israel and from the New Testament churches how to develop biblical ethical standards, they will inevitably end up with worldly standards. Unless Christians reflect seriously on what the Bible shows us about God’s standards the Church is unlikely to be able to maintain a distinctively Christian morality for very long.

The relevance of the Torah as a practical guide to loving one another

For Christians, following Jesus is what matters. The priority of Jesus over the Torah and the Prophets was shown to his disciples in the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5). In working out how to love in practice, the first place to look is to look to Jesus. As Tom Wright puts it: ‘the creator God has unveiled his genuine model for humanity in Jesus the Messiah, and there are certain ways of behaving which just won’t fit.’[19] But in looking to Jesus, we need to reflect especially carefully on what he taught us about the Torah.

Jesus himself points us towards the Torah as part of the revelation of God through which we may discover what it means to love one another. Jesus’ best-known moral teaching and guide for life in the Kingdom of God, the Sermon on the Mount, is also an extended reflection on the Torah: exploring the commandments against murder (Matthew 5:21–26), adultery (5:27–32), bearing false witness (5:33–37) and coveting (6:19–24). Here Jesus is affirming the importance of the Torah by laying bare the moral principles which lay at its heart.

Far from abolishing the moral demands of the Torah, in fact Jesus radicalised them. Jesus taught that at the heart of the commands ‘Do not murder’ and ‘Do not commit adultery’ was an obligation not to cherish anger and lust in our hearts. Truly ‘Christian morality’ must be heartfelt obedience to God’s good moral laws under the Holy Spirit’s moral guidance. In order to make wise moral decisions we need to have internalised God’s law and to meditate upon it with the help of the Holy Spirit.

That Jesus’ teaching is the fulfilment of the Torah ought not to surprise us: both were given by the same God. Jesus was the one towards whom the Torah was pointing.[20] Paul says in Romans 7:14 ‘The law is spiritual’, by which he means that the Torah belongs to the Holy Spirit.[21] The Torah is a particular part of the revelation of God’s law, which is to be understood by Christians through the power of the Spirit in the light of the work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Copyright: Jubilee Centre www.jubilee-centre.org.

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