Law Matters: The Law and the Scriptures (2)

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” John 10.34

The really interesting aspect of this verse is that, in fact, that quote comes from Psalm 82. In Jesus’ mind the writings of the Old Testament were but an extension of the Law, the expression of God’s mandates, statutes, and will in a different literary genre and for a different time.

Paul demonstrates the same mindset in 1 Corinthians 14.21: “In the Law it is written, ‘By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.’” The quotation is from Isaiah 28.11, 12. For Paul, Isaiah was but an extension of the Law of God.

The Law of God is throughout the Scriptures and in them all. That is easy enough to demonstrate from the Old Testament, where the Law is constantly referred to as the standard of obedience. We see it also in the New Testament, both in the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Apostles. Jesus, to give but one example, commends the practice of tithing, and extends the meaning of the Law to include not merely such outward practices but the inward disposition of the soul which gives rise to obedience (Matt. 23.23). The Apostle Paul appealed to the Law in defense of his practice both before Jewish rulers (Acts 23.1-3) and Gentile congregations (1 Cor. 9.8-14). The other Apostles do the same.

Nowhere in the Word of God are we ever very far away from the Law of God. It should be clear why this is so. Since the Law is the roadmap for the life of faith and the acorn to the oak of divine revelation, Scripture writers in every generation would have wanted to demonstrate that their preaching and teaching was not disconnected from this foundational portion of Scripture.

What’s more, later writers help us to understand the true teaching of the Law within the unfolding framework of the plan of redemption. For example, as Paul demonstrates in 1 Corinthians 5, in the age of grace, when the Church does not bear the sword and the Spirit is ever-present to work repentance, capital punishment is, in some instances at least, substituted for by excommunication (cf. Deut. 22.30). However, even this adjustment to the letter of the Law appears to be anticipated in a passage from the Law like Exodus 21.14: “‘But if a man willfully attacks another to kill him by cunning, you shall take him from my altar, that he may die.’” Here it almost seems that “excommunication” and the death penalty are equated.

Thus, at any place we find ourselves in Scripture, we must look back to the Law – and ahead, where possible – in order to understand the meaning of any text for our own lives today.

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