There has been so much confusion over the scope of the Old Testament Law of Moses. When God inscribed the Ten Commandments on the two tablets of stone, there on the top of Mt. Sinai, a new era was introduced to man. Before the Law, man was accountable to the moral law that God had written in the hearts of every man. Each and every person knew in their heart that lying, cheating, swearing, and murder were all sins. They felt a stab of their conscience, and simply knew that they had done wrong.

After the Law was given to Moses, no longer was man left to be judged simply by his conscience, there was now a written chronicle of those wrongs that offended a holy God. All of a sudden, man was made aware that he was guilty. He had already been breaking those commandments and often times didn’t even know it. Now, he stood condemned in the face of those commandments etched in stone.

Man set about trying to maintain a right relationship with his God by obeying God’s commandments. It wasn’t long, however, than man failed. It seemed the harder man tried, the worse he failed. The Law had become an oppressive reminder that he was a failure before God. Instead of relishing the gift God had given man in the Law, man instead despised it, and looked for ways to work around it.

Man quickly became adept at manipulating the Law to make it mean what He wanted it to mean. If he found himself at odds with a particular law, he could claim that it did not really apply to him. Man learned to justify his acts, even though they ran contrary to what was clearly implied by what God said.

If the law said, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness,’ the offender could interpret his sin as just stretching the truth. He could just as easily dodge the issue by declaring that the hearer simply misunderstood what he said. We have become masterful at skirting around laws and directives until we really don’t recognize what the truth is any longer.

We have somehow come to believe that the law can be congealed into one philosophy; that is, as long as what I do doesn’t hurt anyone around me, it is ok to do. We have rewritten God’s Law to make it into something no longer resembling His original. It is what we have made so we can do whatever feels good without having any guilt or ramifications. Society now has become tolerant of most every deviant behavior; the only thing no longer tolerated is the original version of God’s Law.

Though by our humanistic reasoning, that logic tends to make sense; the problem is it runs contrary to what God says in His Word. The Bible says in…

Romans 3:20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.

The only way man can become acceptable to God is through faith in the shed blood of His Son, Jesus. Man’s only hope is not his futile attempts at obedience; it is in trusting Christ.

Thank God for the Law of God, and thank God for Jesus fulfilling that Law in love.