Jesus is the personification of the Law. The curse of the Law was that it was so very difficult to wade through the Law to see the character of God. In Christ, that character takes on a human form. It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Review for a moment what I taught in Confusing the Two. The coming of Christ did not make eternal redemption any different than before His birth; it was always the sole initiative of God and nothing done here can affect it. Rather, Christ came to bring us the power of the Law without the obscurity. So we have to set aside this huge lie of Western Christianity.
The popular phrase “Jesus saves” does not mean what most people think it means. People did not suddenly start going to Heaven after the Resurrection. Jesus talked about people going to Heaven before He died, and talked about Hell, too. Those two elements of Bible teaching had been around for several centuries at least. It might not have been the common understanding of most folks in the Ancient Near East, but it was old truth when Jesus came along because His people had been aware of both as “places” people went long before His birth.
Let’s say it again: Jesus came to perfect what the Law was meant to do. The Law could never grant you eternal life, but it could grant you as much redemption in this realm as could ever be possible. It was always about the glory of God. The Law could give you the rich opportunity to claim the full blessings of the character of God within His Creation by walking in harmony with that Creation. Jesus came to earth under the Law and fulfilled its purpose. His death on the Cross did away with the ritual portion of the Covenant, and it ended the monopoly of Israel on God’s revelation. Christ came to spread that truth to all mankind. His work did not alter divine election to eternity.
So when we dig into the New Testament, we need to avoid confusion about the meaning of their use of the term “Law”. In the context of their day, there was the Law of Moses and there was the Traditions of the Elders (which eventually became the Talmud). Jesus said the latter as bullshit. It was contrary to the Law of Moses because it blinded people to the character of God. Judaism worships a false god, a perverted image of Jehovah. In some contexts, what the New Testament writers fuss about is this false, perverted image of God and the Talmudic teachings as “the law.” It was the valid law of the nation in a certain sense, in much the same sense that the High Priest was the legitimate civil ruler of the Jewish people. That is, those things were true in the sense of fait accompli — they were the facts of their human condition. They were not legitimate in the sense of God’s revelation.
Walking in the teachings of Christ did not change the awful situation of the Hebrew people under a deeply corrupted and perverted religious rule that itself was largely responsible for being under the oppressive boot heel of Rome. Walking in the teachings of Christ ameliorated the situation in the sense that you would have understood what was possible and what was not. You would understand what God really wanted from You to bring Him glory, and you would not have chased your tail in pursuit of things He was not going to do. You would understand quite well what battles to fight and which to avoid, and which you expected to lose even if you were supposed to fight. Your faith — your commitment to Him — would tell you the difference. Faith resides in the heart, not in the head. Your heart is what can be attuned to reality, the character of God. Your head can only organize and implement obedience to the heart or it can get in the way.
Your heart is what understands Christ and is what grasps the nature of the Law.
If I had a magic wand to awaken the hearts of men and women, I would have tried to wear it out by now. That thing would be in my hands day and night, twitching in my sleep. However much and however strong is my natural empathy, it’s enough to make me weep every day for how I watch people fighting God’s Law. The one thing most painful is watching twisted human relations.
Your sexual identity is not merely about your marriage or romances. It is fundamental to every encounter with all humans on this earth. It is fundamental to every waking moment of your harmonizing with nature. Your power to live on this earth in God’s glory starts with your sexual identity, because without some reflexive awareness of that in every move you make, you will make the wrong move.
Our biggest problem is that Western Civilization has learned to hijack the very language itself. That’s why we struggle when reading about what the Law/law can and cannot do in the New Testament. Western Christianity has hijacked the language, and those who established the entire frame of reference for Western Christianity learned from the Judaizers who hijacked organized Christianity. The Judaizers fanned out across the Mediterranean Basin with the intent to hijack Christian religion for much the same reasons their predecessors hijacked all the Old Testament scriptures and perverted the very language and thoughts of Hebrew people. Somehow they came to imagine that God had appointed them to correct revelation and bury the original. Our problem is that the particular flavor of lies we face are Post-Enlightenment in the sense of wholly controlled by how the Enlightenment welded together Aristotle and Germanic mythology.
From the very beginning, God has revealed that men and women are not interchangeable. Their fundamental design down to the very wiring of the system which transmits impulses through the body is different. How the elements of our nutrition are absorbed and used in the body is different. There might be a lot of overlap in effects, but the essence is different. Our hearts resonate differently. That’s because at the very must fundamental level of what holds our reality in place, it is God’s truth that men and women are different. If Western medical and biological science can’t tell the difference, it’s because that science is blind and damned. It’s for you, follower of Christ, to embrace what God made you to be.
