(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)
2. Justice as Proposal
You can blow it off as a figure of speech, but the Bible takes this business of the sensory heart very seriously. It is impossible to understand, much less explain, much of what happens in Scripture using a mere cerebral approach. Relying on the intellect is the very substance of the Fall. Redemption is moving our lives back as close to Eden as possible. The guide to what’s possible are the various Law Covenants God revealed in the Bible.
They were not legislation in our modern Western sense, but were expressions of something far higher than what can possibly come across in any human tongue. They reflect the character of God, and the language He used for His revelation was never meant to restrict, as if language was just a vehicle for carrying truth. Rather, Hebrew language was used as sign posts indicating directions for further exploration.
If you committed yourself to carefully obeying all the written prescriptions in the Law Covenants, you would not have implemented divine justice. God’s Law is a proposal for personal commitment, not a proposition. The mythology of “propositional truth” is an entirely pagan notion dreamed up by Greek philosophers. It is utterly foreign to the ancient Hebrew people. Thus, Scripture records how such pedantic obedience never did much good, but that those who obeyed from the heart of commitment to God’s favor always managed to find His favor despite very real human failures.
Thus, the fundamental nature of divine justice is personal and relational. It is a personal commitment of the individual soul to the Person of God. This was the underlying assumption behind all the Law Covenants. Thus, our first reference to God’s revealed Law comes from the mouth of His Son, Jesus Christ.
And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:35-40 NET
In this, Jesus quotes a portion of a common ritual pronouncement taken from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and a portion from Leviticus 19:18. It should be obvious to anyone that the love Jesus said we owed to God is not any mere emotion, but a long-term commitment of the heart. It follows in standard Hebrew logic that you cannot love God and fail to love your neighbor. The passage in Matthew goes on to attack the Jewish concept of “neighbor” by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. In other words, Jesus restored the ancient Hebrew concept of neighbor that the Jews had abandoned long before Christ came. Jesus had this discussion with a Jewish lawyer who had been long and thoroughly steeped in the more recent Hellenized form of reasoning popular in rabbinical colleges, a solid departure from Hebrew intellectual traditions. (Hellenism refers to the Classical Greek intellectual traditions, a fundamental element in Western Civilization.)
The point Jesus made was that divine justice was personal, and could not possibly be objectified as Judaism had done. He was calling them back to their ancient Hebrew roots. This was a giant leap for Jewish minds, because it was twice removed. On top of the shallow rule-bound thinking of dead hearts, Judaism was also highly analytical and semantically dissected Moses’ writings in a thousand ways utterly foreign to Hebrew language. While the lawyer recognized what Jesus was saying, he found it completely out of his personal reach. Thus, we have here the summary of disjunction between legalistic reasoning that objectified God versus a very personal heart-centered commitment to God’s character.
So this is not about Jewish Law, because Jewish legalism is a frank rejection of the ancient biblical standard of justice. Whatever Judaism might have been in Jesus’ day, it was not Moses, and it has drifted only farther since then. At Sinai, Israel was told they were entering into a covenant of adoption as Children of God, heirs of His divine justice and His glory in Creation. Like Esau, they valued it only as it filled their bellies. The otherworldly focus was completely absent. Precious few in the Nation of Israel throughout her sordid history ever seemed to understand what a grand privilege it was to hold in their hands God’s own personally edited copy of revelation. They wasted no time in throwing aside their identity as Israel-the-Mission and clung greedily to their imaginary status for preferential treatment as Israel-the-Chosen race.
The starting point for understanding Moses and the national covenant is in the words of Jesus as He answered that lawyer’s question that day. A critical element in understanding our duty to glorify God is that we embrace His character and manifest it through our actions. All those rich promises were conditioned in part on conforming to the moral fabric of Creation. More than just observing the provisions in Moses’ Law, it was reaching through the Law to God’s Person and seeking His favor. Creation is pre-programmed to respond in some measure by cooperating with such a genuine effort. Love God and love your neighbor, and you can expect nature itself to be happy to see you and ready to make God look good by meeting your needs.
