God's Rules

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One of the first things I noticed about the English Standard Version when I started reading it is how often it referred to God’s “rules.” Over 100 times the ESV uses the translation rules. This translation caught my attention because I have this  thing about rules.

The word rules makes me bristle. There is something about it that sounds judgmental. Not surprising since the Hebrew word the ESV translates “rules” is often translated as “judgments” in other versions.

We just began our study once more through Cycle 3 of our catechism with our 4-6th graders. This cycle begins with Question 73, “What is the duty which God requires of people?” The answer? “God requires of people the obedience that comes from faith, a summary of which is found in the Ten Commandments.”

So God has his rules and he requires us to obey them.

The Ten Rules

The rules that God requires us to obey, says the catechism, are summarized for us in the Ten Commandments. In these 10 “rules,” we see what God wants from us.

Most people are vaguely familiar with the Ten Commandments, though there is more here than meets the eye. But it would be good for us to pause for just a moment and see how good it is that God has made his rules known to us. We don’t have to guess at what God expects of us. We don’t have to wonder if he is making them up as we go along, or changing them to try to catch us in some violation. God has made it plain to us. In fact, he wrote them down for us.

This summer we bought our kids a Nintendo Switch, and they could easily spend the whole day playing games on it. We bought it for them, so we fully expect (and want) them to play it, but as school gets going, there simply had to be some limits. We needed to have some rules. So we started saying they couldn’t play for a certain amount of time or they couldn’t play until they did this or that, or they couldn’t play certain games on certain days. Pretty soon they couldn’t keep up with the rules. Honestly, neither could we!

So we wrote them down. And that helped. Of course there were questions, of course our rules are not perfect and will need to be adjusted. But it helps to have them written down so we can go back to them and see what the rules really are.

Broken Rules

But what if I break the rules? When it comes to rules, everyone wants to know the consequences for disobeying them. Will it matter if I don’t keep the rules?

God is serious about his rules. God expects us to keep his rules. God does not rejoice when his rules are broken. It is a big deal to break God’s rules. Any of them.

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. ~James 2:10

Everything that is wrong with this world is explained by disobedience, by our rebellion against God’s rules. When we do not act as God would have us act, things do not go as they should. To pretend that obedience to God is no big deal is to deny everything the Bible has to say about sin and human depravity. This is not going to make anything better for anybody.

Disobedience to God’s rules is not freedom. It is the worst kind of slavery.

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ~Romans 6:16

The end of disobedience to God (sin) is death. But the end of obedience is righteousness, which itself ends in eternal life (Rom 6:22).

Sinful Obedience

I grew up in a church and a Christian school with lots of rules. I went to a Christian college that had a lot—and I mean, a lot—of rules.

Rules were the reason a lot of people got in trouble. The bad kids.

And rules were the way many others stayed out of trouble. The good kids.

It is right for us to obey God. It is right for us to strive to obey God.

But if our obedience is motivated by a desire to stay out of trouble with God, then we have  missed the point of God’s rules. For our obedience is only a show, only a way to keep God at arm’s length from us. Our obedience in this case is not what God wants. Our obedience in this case is actually sinful. Our righteousness, in this case, is a polluted garment to God (Isa 64:6).

The Obedience of Faith

That’s why the catechism says that God requires “the obedience that comes from faith.”

The phrase is taken from Romans 1:5, where Paul says he “received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name along all the nations.” What is the relationship of obedience and faith? How do the two work together? The answer is found only in Jesus Christ. In Jesus both obedience and faith come together in perfect harmony.

In order to obey Jesus, you must trust him. You must believe that what he says is worth following, that it is the best way.

But in order to trust Jesus, you have to obey him. You cannot trust in Christ and then go on disregarding what he says.

Here’s how one commentator says it:

Paul called men and women to a faith that was always inseparable from obedience—for the Savior in whom we believe is nothing less than our Lord—and to an obedience that could never be divorced from faith—for we can obey Jesus as Lord only when we have given ourselves to him in faith (Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, 52-53).

So what God requires of us can be found only in Jesus, the Savior for the rule-breaker and the rule-keeper.

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