Opus 2025-334: Course Correction

As we look at each one of the great teachers in the Bible, each dispensation if you would, they are not giving a totally new teaching, at least that’s not the point.  The point is that the people who are supposed to be following God, are wandering off on a tangent, and need to be brought back on task.

Consider Moses updating the message of Abraham.  Abraham was called and given a promise that his seed would be a blessing to the world.  There wasn’t much more at that time except the ritual of circumcision.  I would suggest that Abraham was aware of Noah and the basic expectations of what has come to be known as the seven laws of Noahide.  The problem emerged when the children of Israel moved to Egypt and spent 400 years.  During that time they became slaves and my theory is that they forgot all about the God of Israel.  Moses had his work cut out for him.  That is why God gave him the law.  There were the moral and theological aspects of the law such as are found in the Ten Commandments.  There were also instructions on how to live like civilized human beings such as the banning of marrying your sister and basic sanitation.  Consider the difference between Christian culture today and pagan culture when it comes to the value of human life.  The groundwork was laid in the law.  

The lessons of Moses were constantly ignored until you get to David and Solomon.  That brings us the teaching that is done in the Psalms and Proverbs.  David is constantly praising the law.  He refers to righteousness and the loving kindness of God.  He prepares the way for Solomon to build the temple.  People seem to need physical things and now they had a place to worship Yahweh.

After David you had Solomon who started well but degenerated back to the level of the Canaanites by the time he died.  The history of the Northern Kingdom of Israel is one failed king after another.  In the South with Judah you had a mixed bag but the general tenor seemed to be that the people were constantly going back to the pagan gods and rejecting the standards of God.  The message of the prophets was a constant attempt to get them back on track.  The captivity got them to focus but they turned to legalism and ritual rather than the living God who called them.

Then we have Jesus.  Note that Jesus said he did not come to destroy but to fulfill.  We hear that but we don’t understand what He was facing.  Judaism had become Rabbinical.  The Rabbis were very serious and disciplined but they were locked into the Talmud rather than the scripture.  The oral law was superior to the written law.  They knew what the law of Moses said.  They knew about David.  In spite of that they kept adding new nooses to the law by adding to the Talmud with their interpretations.  We see it today in the fact that practicing Jews reject the idea of a cheeseburger.  Why?  Because the Bible says not to cook a baby goat in its mother’s milk.  What does that have to do with a cheeseburger?  In reality nothing, but in Rabbinical Judaism, everything.  

Jesus called Israel back to God and claimed to be the Messiah who would fulfill the law and the prophets.  As a reward He was crucified.  The church was born on Pentecost and began the journey of faith again.  Then we come to Paul.

Consider Paul with his teaching on grace.  He wasn’t negating everything before that.  He did not come up with something totally new.  He was getting the church back on track.  There was almost immediately a trend back to embracing the law instead of living by faith.  A group of Christians called Judiasers were teaching that Gentiles needed to be circumcised.  If allowed to continue it would have expanded to the whole law again.  Paul and the others we have in the New Testament could not allow that.  They were refining, and focusing what it meant to believe, and the eternal God and His son Jesus.

And all of my prior teaching, he said, focused on the Resurrection, because without the resurrection everything was empty.  We are now on the other side of the cross, the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit.  We now have it all.  As the angry parent yelled to his rowdy children down stairs, “Don’t make me come down there again.”

homo unius libri