Nielsen’s Nook

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

I. The Law of God

First and in a very cursory way, let us consider the Law of God. The Law of God is the verbal revelation written down for us as a lasting description of who God is essentially, at the core of His being. The Ten Commandments are not a prescription by which God must abide in order that He might be righteous. He is himself righteousness and the Ten Commandments describe this to us.

Second, the Law of God has always been concerned with the renewing of the heart. In Deuteronomy 10:16, God tells the Israelites that they must circumcise their hearts. In Joel 2 we find that God wishes that the people would ‘rend their hearts and not their garments’. At least these Israelites had reduced religion down to outward appearance and had thereby redefined it. Yet again, Deuteronomy makes plain that it would ultimately be God who would circumcise the hearts of His people and their offspring with the purpose that they would love the Lord their God (Dt. 30:6). Such language as ‘circumcision of the heart’ should sound familiar to us. It echoes the language that Jesus used with Nicodemus, telling him that he “must be born again” (Jn 3).

Further, while the Law of God has always described righteousness as something that God desires to find in us on a heart-level, it lacked the power – as a description – to renew the core or ‘heart’ of a person. Indeed, “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Ro 8:3-4). So we see that the LAW OF GOD was always a description of True Righteousness, while at the same time, as a description, it was powerless to transform us, to circumcise our hearts.

For now, let us keep this paradigm or framework of the Law of God in our minds. In this way, I believe we will begin to see the great incompatibility that the Law of God has with the Law of the Pharisee.