Love and Law

When you take away familial warmth from a society, you destroy everything. That destruction is seldom immediate, so most people lack the ability to understand this with their intellects; it requires a heart-led consciousness. The problem for us today is a long history without any covenants, so that we have built a massive society with no rooting in reality. What people regard as “reality” is one big, massive lie.

In place of covenant identity, Western civilization as a whole is under a deeply oppressive structure of materialism. Instead of beloved covenant family, we associate with each other as physical economic assets. We have given birth to a mentality of the secular state, in which a very impersonal government hive-mind owns everyone, and everything you think/do/say is subject to government interference. You are an asset of the State, and you must be constrained by the demand of the State for profit.

The State is composed of the hive-mind of the worst dregs of society. Not social outcasts in terms of resisting social order, but the lowest of our society in terms of not giving a damn about anything except the most basal hedonistic creature comforts. It’s a mind of fear, fear that such comforts might recede out of reach. It’s better by far to enforce uniformity in having just a little than to take any risk at all.

Thus, we see people claiming to be concerned about your welfare, when “welfare” is defined as being useful to the State and its hive-mind values. It becomes your moral duty to remain profitable for the State. Everyone walks through their day with a mindset of what they owe the State. We might say “the people” but what we really mean is hive-mind, “the State.”

This is why we think in terms of contracts instead of covenants. It’s a serious hard struggle to get that turned around in your head. This is why we reflexively think of “law” as something cold and harsh, rather like fate or things inevitable. We read the Bible and references to “Law” not as the personal attachment of God to us, but as an impersonal and implacable standard we already know instinctively that we cannot sustain.

God’s Law is His grace for us. The act of revealing His Law for us is the most loving thing He could do. So when you see the New Testament writers talking down “law,” most often they refer to the Talmud and the Jewish attitude of implacable and impersonal constraints. That attitude is what Aristotelian reasoning makes of divine revelation. Instead of the blessing of helping us see the nature of the situation in which we exist, it has perverted Law into a pile of restrictions from a capricious outsider who is just looking for an excuse to damn us all to Hell. Who doesn’t long for escape from that?

God’s Law is His love for us. He goes to the trouble of revealing for us what we need to know about the fundamental nature of His Creation, which in turn is based on His divine moral character. Biblical Law is a term we use to designate the mystical body of understanding written in our hearts — our convictions — by the finger of God. It is equivalent to the personal character of Jesus as the Son of that same Father God. It is manifested in the Law Covenants of Scripture, but it is the same Covenant of Christ we all should know about.

So revelation is giving us a break. It is taking into account our weakness in our fleshly nature, and placing that gateway to a deeper understanding someplace where we can see it, where we can find it and explore what’s behind it. And in that certain sense, all revelation is Law; all Law is divine revelation. It becomes for us a mental reflex to contrast human law against divine Law. We recognize the latter as a personal effort from God Almighty to reach out to you.

And in that reaching out, He exposes to us the very personal and individual revelation carved in our souls in the form of convictions. The consistency of divine revelation between each of us remains something we can recognize with our hearts, but struggle to put into words. It provokes in us the kind of love God has for us as His children, so that we can love each other. This leads to yet another contrast for us, between what mankind calls “love” and what God says it is.

Divine sacrificial love is the Law, and the Law is love.