FROM THE PASTOR’S HEART OP-ED BY DR. ROBERT KENNEDY
When I worked as a professor and taught ethics at a college in Massachusetts, each evening on my drive home, I looked forward to listening to the attorney and radio personality, Neil Chayet, as he discussed the complicated questions under the title “Looking at the Law.”
His political views were never always up my lane, but I was careful to listen to him because, amidst the complicated question on the law, he helped me to understand that some laws that politicians were passing and declaring to be very simple were not as simple as they were being made out to be. I gathered that often enough, the laws, despite the explanations, were influenced by self-interest.
Over the last few weeks, I have been listening to some attorneys trying to explain many of the new laws being passed in various states regarding voting rights and ballot security, mask-wearing and banning abortion. And I am chagrinned how they are presenting questions of equality, justice and freedom. Many of the explanations reveal that most, if not all, of the laws, are constructed to serve self-centered motivations and efforts to maintain power and oppressive positions.
Thanks be to God that his laws are different. The laws of God are not built on self-centered motivations but on love which is the total reflection of the character of God, namely that “God is love.” In 1 John 4:16, we read this, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.”
When a certain scribe came to Jesus to ask him, which is the greatest commandment in the Law, Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40 NIV).
One would wish that those who are making the laws of the land, and those of us who are saying that we want to live by the law, would spend more time studying the love of God. The Law of God reflects love, and it is a tragedy that more attention is not given to love, instead of all the attention given to making laws to gain an advantage over one another.
Let me give the invitation to anyone who has an interest in God to take a careful look at the Law of God as the Apostle James invites us to do:
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing (James 1:22-25 ESV).
We must not forget that the Law is like a mirror – for both God and human beings. The Law is seen as the truest reflection of the divine character. The reflection reveals that God is holy, loving and just. But just as a mirror cannot take the dirt from our faces, so the Law cannot. The Law reveals our sins, but it is not a cleansing agent. We must therefore ask the Lord to give us his cleansing love to transform us.
What God did through the cross in giving his Son to satisfy the Law is something we need to understand, namely that laws alone will not change our world; we need the love of God in our hearts to transform us. For this reason, God offers the Covenant Promise that he will put his laws into our hearts. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33).
Might I suggest that we ask God to seat the Law in our hearts and that we spend more time looking at the Law so that we can have stronger moral sensibilities for love and justice and for the boundaries of freedom that God intends for all of us humans.
