We want everything Jesus has to give us.

We do not want people to go to hell.

Are we losing our vision of the unseen realm or just trading it in?

Poetry sneaks up on you

God spoke to Job out of the tornado.

The secular world may be more ready for God's Law than we think.

This is Life!--“Keeping” or, more literally, “guarding” the Law of God begins in the soul,

The Rule of Law: Government of the Soul (7)

This is the way we’re meant to live.

“You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the LORD.” Leviticus 18.5

“Keeping” or, more literally, “guarding” the Law of God begins in the soul, as we daily strive, in the Word and by God’s Spirit, to keep our affections, thoughts, and values subordinate to God’s revealed will, beginning in His Law. Such constant vigilance can be arduous, it’s true. Thus, the Scriptures refer to living this way as work, warfare, running a race, doing battle, and so forth. But though life on God’s terms is difficult, it is not onerous (Matt. 11.30).

Only God is able to define life on the most blessed and beneficial of terms, life in the fullness of joy and with pleasures forevermore (Ps. 16.11). All our vain attempts to find our way in life apart from God will only leave us disappointed, or worse (Prov. 14.12). Real life is through faith in Jesus Christ, by dying through Jesus to the wrath of God’s Law, and living in Him unto the righteousness of that Law (1 Jn. 2.1-6). Jesus is the life we seek, and we know His life through faith and obedience, from the inside-out.

So let us guard our hearts, minds, and consciences against the destructive influences of the world, the flesh, and the devil, by filling our souls with the Law of God, leaning on the Spirit to search, teach, and form us into the image of Jesus Christ, walking in daily obedience to God’s Law, and exhorting all around us to do the same. Thus we will know the greatness of God’s Kingdom and fullness of life in Jesus Christ (Matt. 5.17-19).

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Book Store.

True Righteousness--Jesus surely must have shocked His hearers by telling them that they could have no part in the Kingdom of God unless their righteousness exceeded that of the scribes Pharisees (Matt. 5.20).

The Rule of Law: Government of the Soul (6)

Here is true righteousness, indeed.

“And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us.” Deuteronomy 20.25

Jesus surely must have shocked His hearers by telling them that they could have no part in the Kingdom of God unless their righteousness exceeded that of the scribes Pharisees (Matt. 5.20). All their lives these people had believed they could never measure up to the righteousness of their leaders. Now Jesus was telling them they had to exceed even that standard.

He was simply telling them what Moses had been saying all along, that true righteousness begins in the soul, where the heart, mind, and conscience work together, under the tutelage of God’s Law and Spirit, to bring forth love that is genuine and sincere (1 Tim. 1.5).

Doing “all this commandment” surely implied doing it from the heart (Deut. 6.4-9). Only when Israel’s love and obedience flowed from within could they expect to know the promised blessings of the Lord. Only as we thus love and serve the Lord can we expect the same.

The righteousness that Christians begin to realize is the righteousness of Jesus Christ, formed in them by God’s Word and Spirit as they “put on” Jesus in every area of life, beginning with their renewed souls. When our hearts love God supremely; when our minds are in sync with the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2.16); and when our consciences value supremely His highest priorities – seeking the Kingdom and building His Church – then our lives will reflect His righteousness in all our words and deeds.

But the soil in which this righteousness grows to fruition is the reading and study of God’s Law. Unless we are governed in our souls by the Law of God, and by all the subsequent revelation of God elaborating, clarifying, explaining, and applying that Law, we will never see the righteousness of Jesus Christ take shape and come to expression in our everyday lives.

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Book Store.

The Necessity of the Spirit--God knew that His people did not have the kind of inner strength they would need in order to be governed in all their affairs by the Law of God.

The Rule of Law: Government of the Soul (1)

We cannot submit our hearts, minds, and consciences to God’s rule apart from His Spirit.

“And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may truly live.” Deuteronomy 30.6

God knew that His people did not have the kind of inner strength they would need in order to be governed in all their affairs by the Law of God. The history of Israel throughout the Old Testament bears ample witness to their failures of soul. Loving themselves and the world more than God, the people of Israel consistently repudiated His covenant, despised His Law, and forfeited His blessings.

We continue doing the same to this day.

Yet, even as Israel was preparing to invade the land of promise, God held out yet another promise for them, which they would realize only after much suffering and hardship: He would circumcise their hearts so that they would be truly holy, would love the Lord their God as He intended, and would enjoy all His promised blessings as they walked in obedience to all His Law (vv. 9, 10).

As the Lord explained through Ezekiel and Jeremiah, this new heart would come with the new covenant, as God sent His Spirit to establish a pliant, living soul within His people, that they might know the fullness of His presence and power for blessing (Jer. 31.31-34; Ezek. 36.26, 27). Only the Holy Spirit can bring the inward renewal unto life that is essential for God’s people to be governed in their souls by His Law. He dwells in them and teaches them God’s Word, convicting and transforming them by His inward presence, and empowering them outwardly to live as witnesses for Jesus Christ.

If we would know the rule of God’s Law in our souls, therefore, we must be filled with the Spirit of God. Conversely, if we possess the Spirit, and if we are truly filled with Him, we must expect that our inward life will be such – heart, mind, and conscience – as to produce glad obedience to God’s Law in all the outward expressions of our lives.

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Book Store.

All Your Conscience--

The third component of the soul is the conscience.

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Living by God’s Law must be our highest priority.

“You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Deuteronomy 6.8, 9

The third component of the soul is the conscience. The conscience is the seat of the will, the locus of our highest values and priorities. The conscience thus functions something like a “referee” of the soul, arbitrating between affections and thinking, mediating impulses of the heart and ideas of the mind in order to achieve a response of the soul consistent with the teaching of God’s Law.

So important is the conscience to the right functioning of the soul that God has, by some mysterious means, written the works of the Law on the consciences of men – even the unredeemed. By so doing He has, out of the enormity of His grace, provided a means for us to know a measure of His blessings even before we acquire the new heart which is essential for covenant renewal (Rom. 2.14, 15).

But even in the redeemed of the Lord the conscience is vulnerable to the law of sin. It must be guarded, reviewed, honed, tuned, and exercised according to the Law of God and the priorities of His Kingdom, or it will become hardened, seared, and encrusted with wicked values. We must “bind” ourselves to the Law of God, both in every aspect of our outlook and all the works of our hands. The Law of God must be put in place as the determining value of our home life and culture, as well as of the communities in which we live. We must “bind” the Law and “write” it, intentional acts designed to establish, declare, and defend the priorities by which we are called to live.

When the teaching of God’s Law is the determinative force in our consciences, it will keep in check the fickle sentiments of the heart and the flighty soaring of the mind, so that we may truly submit to God’s rule for our lives from the inside-out.

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Book Store.

All Your Mind--Just as nowhere do we find the Scriptures speaking explicitly concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, neither do we find it addressing the components of the soul conveniently all together in one place

The Rule of Law: Government of the Soul (3)

We must submit all our thinking to God’s Law.

“Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul…” Deuteronomy 6.5

Just as nowhere do we find the Scriptures speaking explicitly concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, neither do we find it addressing the components of the soul conveniently all together in one place. The nature and function of the soul must be deduced, like the doctrine of the Trinity, by comparing Scripture with Scripture from various places as the Holy Spirit leads and enables (1 Cor. 2.12, 13).

While the Hebrew word for “mind” does not appear in Deuteronomy 6, it is sufficiently well implied, so that, when in other places the “renewing of the mind” is called for, we should have no problem in anchoring such work to this text. The soul, we have seen, consists of heart, mind, and conscience. Only the heart is specifically mentioned in this text. We may assume, therefore, that the term, “soul”, intends to embrace the other two components.

This seems evident from the fact that the Law of God consists of certain intellectual content which is to be taught and discussed (vv. 6, 7). Moses anticipates that children will have questions about the Law begin to form in their thinking, and that they will turn to their parents for further elaboration and to clarify their understanding (vv. 20-25). We are to love the Lord and be ruled by His Law in all our minds, just as in all our hearts.

In the soul the mind performs the various functions of thought: it receives, analyzes, processes, and stores information; it puts together ideas and plans; it employs the rules of reason and logic to draw inferences and conclusions; and it recalls data and prepares it for orderly presentation or use. All these functions, and all the information on which they act, are to be subordinated to the Law of God. Only thus can the mind fulfill its intended function of bringing us to the blessings of God.

To submit our minds to the rule of God’s Law we shall have to apply ourselves to reading, study, and discussion of the Law, so that we become persuaded in our thinking, as well as in our hearts, that this rule is, indeed, the way to blessings.

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Book Store.

All Your Heart--Love for God, which is God’s intention in giving us His Law, as we have seen, begins in the heart.

The Rule of Law: Government of the Soul (2)

The heart is the heart of the matter in the life of faith.

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart…” Deuteronomy 6.5

Love for God, which is God’s intention in giving us His Law, as we have seen, begins in the heart. The heart is the primary component of the soul, for from it, Solomon explained, flow all the issues of life (Prov. 4.23). In Scripture “the heart” sometimes stands for the whole soul; more often, though, it speaks to a particular aspect of the soul, that region which generates and discharges the affections.

The soul consists of heart, mind, and conscience – three distinct regions or components with three distinct functions, each overlapping and interacting with the other in a continuous dialog, the fruit of which is the actions that come out in our words and deeds. The heart is that part of the soul which inclines us toward something or which leads us to avoid or resist something. Its dossier includes nurturing and deploying the various feelings, attitudes, sentiments, aspirations, and hopes which give definition and direction to our lives. In its natural, unredeemed, state, the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, so that we desire, love, and pursue all the wrong things in life (Jer. 17.9). In redeeming us, the Lord, by His Word and Spirit, according to the Gospel, gives us a “new heart”, so that we might begin to love Him as He intends (Ezek. 36.26, 27).

Unless we have such a “circumcised” heart, we shall not be able to keep the Law of God according to His design (Deut. 30.1-10). Hence, the importance of “keeping watch” over our hearts and of allowing the Law of God to instruct us concerning what to love and what to hate. We must focus our love, first and foremost, on God, in gratitude for His redemption, and with a determination to please Him as our ongoing expression of such gratitude.

The Law thus appropriately begins by instructing us to have only this God and no others as our focus of devotion. Moreover, not only must we strive to keep the focus of our hearts clear and constant; we must also work to improve the intensity of our affections, until we are increasingly learning to love God with all our hearts, all our affections oriented to Him and moving us ever more continuously to seek His Kingdom and righteousness in all things.

Loving God with all our hearts means not only continuous vigilance over our affections, but willingness for God to search our hearts by His Word and Spirit, as we wait on Him in prayer, and to renew our hearts wherever necessary, so that He might rule our souls by His Law unto our benefit and His glory (Ps.139.23, 24; Ps.51.10).

For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the life of faith, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.ailbe.org and click on our Book Store.