Law Matters: The Law and the Scriptures (7)

…our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. 2 Corinthians 3.5, 6

Obedience to God’s Law is a matter of walking in the Spirit according to the path marked out by the commandments of God, but in a way that depends on the Spirit to go beyond the letter of the Law into its proper meaning. The story of the good Samaritan illustrates this way of life quite well, and it teaches us how to think about the letter of the Old Testament Law in the light of the reality of the New Testament and the Spirit (Lk. 10.25-37).

I have no doubt that the priest and the Levite who crossed the road to avoid the man victimized by robbers could have justified their neglect on the basis of some “higher principle” of the Law of God. They were off to perform some sacrifice, they might have said, and surely sacrificing to God takes precedence over helping a stranger in need? After all, the Pharisees of Jesus’ day rationalized not providing for their own parents by just such contorted appeals to the letter of the Law!

But the Samaritan illustrates the true Spirit of the Law. First, this was not even a man of his own country. Yet he stopped to help. The Samaritan owed this man nothing, but he gave of his own resources to restore his health and wellbeing – duties, under the “letter” of the Old Testament Law which should have been incurred by the perpetrators of the crime. But he even went beyond what we might expect as sufficient by putting the man up and paying for his healing until he should be wholly restored.

It was not hard to see that this man was the “true neighbor” to the fallen traveler. We are loving our neighbors according to the Spirit of the Law when we let the letter guide our thinking, but then lean into the Spirit to take us beyond the outward limitations of the letter into the true spirit of its requirement of neighbor-love. And the Spirit of God is at work within us to make us willing and able to go ever beyond, although never apart from, the Law of God in just such ways (Phil. 2.13; Eph. 3.20).

One more example: The elders gathered by Boaz in Ruth 4 to adjudicate his request could easily have said, “Well, there’s no specific letter in the Law to guide us here, so we’ll simply have to deny your suit. Case dismissed.” But they did not. Instead, reasoning from the letter of various Old Testament statutes, they conferred together and concluded that the spirit of God’s Law was in favor of justice and grace – toward the kinsman-redeemer, Ruth the foreigner, Boaz the neighbor, and whatever future offspring might ensue. And God blessed their wisdom and judgment, as He does all who learn to walk, not according to the letter of the Law, but according to its Spirit.

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