If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination. Proverbs 28.9

The Law of God, Paul insisted, is holy and righteous and good (Rom. 7.12). The Apostle John wrote that true disciples of the Lord Jesus will walk the path of obedience to God’s commandments, the path that He walked (1 Jn. 2.1-6). Jesus Himself said that keeping the Law, and teaching it to others, marks one out for greatness in the Kingdom of God (Matt. 5.17-19).

These being so, the present neglect of God’s Law on the part of preachers, teachers, and believers in general is rather difficult to understand. Being “under grace” seems to be an excuse for many Christians for not giving themselves, day and night, to meditating on the Law of God, like a righteous person might be expected to do (Ps. 1). Ignorance of the Law and of its application to the everyday situations of our lives is widespread among believers, and is treated as a thing to be avoided like the plague by those beyond the pale of faith.

The world doesn’t want to hear about commandments, statutes, rules, and the sanctions that accompany them. So the Church obliges, not only by eschewing conversation about the Law, or seeking to interpret it into public policy, but by turning its own back on the Law in a blind-leading-the-blind search for “morality” in an ill-defined commitment to “love.”

Ironically, Jesus said that where lawlessness increases, real love grows cold (Matt. 24.12). And the lack of real neighbor love, both in our nation and our churches, suggests that our neglect of the Law is producing precisely the fruit we might expect.

But neglect of the Law also makes our prayers an abomination in the sight of God. Can you imagine this? Your daily prayers, the prayers of your fellow believers, your church’s services of worship, all that spiffy and sparkling contemporary praise music – an abomination to the Lord?

We need to turn back to the Law of God, beloved, but as we do, we need to make sure that we understand how the Law is to be rightly understood. For only then will we be able to delight in the Law and to know the kind of love for God and our neighbors that the Law, in the hand of God’s Spirit (Ezek. 36.26, 27), can engender within us.

T. M. Moore

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