Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Kicking Against Law & The Pricks of the Holy Spirit



We are really in a sad state of affairs in our modern U.S. society. We have more kinds of law than all the Commandments that God Himself gave to Moses! We have more kinds of law and regulation than was ever dreamt or intended in our Constitution, with which God allowed us to begin our new Nation. God is trying to tell us that we need to depend on HIM, rather than indulging our desire to make laws that we end up eventually breaking. One hundred and eight years of ineffective and broken gun-control laws have proven that principle "in spades!"

In Exodus, we see that the Jews had rebelled against God and didn't want to speak with Him personally, any more. So, they begged and pleaded with Moses that they might "just" have a bunch of laws to tell them what to do. They "promised" that they would obey the laws, hoping they could go on their way not having or needing to talk directly with God. Well, God told the Jews that they would not even be able to keep the Ten Commandments. But, the Jews insisted, and promptly failed to uphold their end of the promise... just as God had told them they would. This simply proves that dependence on making laws, and promising to obey them, gives people false hope and false direction. Instead, we need to focus on having a good, working, personal relationship with God, believing and doing what He says.

The Old Testament is filled with struggles of law and conscience. By the time that Jesus Christ came to live and sacrifice His sinless life among us, and to die for our sins, the Jews had manufactured hundreds of laws and interpretations based on the Ten Commandments. They were so much like we are today, wanting to find ways to have it their own way, some thinking to please God, some thinking to escape God. When conscience and the Holy Spirit told them to obey God's original Commandments, they'd run to a rabbi for yet another interpretive loophole. What a mess... just like our legal system, today! I'm not picking on the Jews, but using the holy examples that God has set before us in His Word.

As one reads history and the Bible, it should become clear that we human beings were created with a conscience by God, but that, from the almost the very start of our existence, we have chosen to do things our own way instead of in the ways that are best for us, according to God's omniscient wisdom. For anyone who honestly studies history and the Bible, it quickly becomes blatantly obvious that no matter who issues laws, whether God or mankind, the issuance of laws has never prevented crimes or immorality. Instead, laws have described the unholy, the immoral, and the criminal actions and the respective prescribed punishments for the breaking thereof. The point is that it is up to each individual, and always has been, to do that which is right, toward God and toward our fellow man. When we violate either of God's two Great Commandments we inevitably end up violating the other

Our sin nature often looks for legal or legalistic loopholes, trying to find ways to not anger others or God, or to just get away with what we want to do. Those who would lead us astray try to poke holes in what is right and good, as well. We all continually do that, hoping to do so without consequences. If we are caught we are usually more upset about having been caught than we are about the sin or crime. In our loophole hunting, itself, we sinfully deceive ourselves, hence we break the Law of God and Man, just by the desire and act of trying to find ways around what has already been prescribed as good for us by a perfect, righteous, holy, and wise God... and by those who adhere to His precepts and principles.

Our Constitution is a descriptive and proscriptive instrument, based on Bible truths and principles. Our Constitution is supposed to be the standard for our American society, with the Bible as its judge, foundation, and benchmark. The great majority of our early leaders recognized that standard and need. But, today, many of those who say they believe in God fail to stand on His Word that He has given to us. Too many of us, who call ourselves Christians, fail to share the Word, the salvation, the principles, the warnings, or the sinless lifestyle that was preached by Jesus Christ. Modern American Christianity is looking, for the most part, in its sin-loving acquiescence to worldly acquisitiveness and pleasure, like a rotting Swiss cheese, filled with unholy holes and spoilage, unfit for anyone to eat. It has become like this through one regressive sinful backsliding, pleasure-seeking, sin-ignoring step after another. Through social pressures, legalisms, and a general fear of worldly retribution that many Christians have lost their salt and neglected to shine the Light of Christ, to expose sin and evil. I'd even hazard that many Christians don't believe in calling sin what it is or that Satan really exists. They are happy for their religious trappings but neglect a personal relationship with the Christ of God, Jesus, by whose name they categorize themselves among world religions.

The more that Christians love and fear the world, the less we love and fear God. We become virtually ineffective for His use as we decay in our worldly corruption. All the laws in the world will not save us or our communities from our sinning selves or from other destructive influences. Even as a multitude of Old Testament examples demonstrate, it is our own failure to adhere to God's ways that bring down and spoil that which is good around us, just as much as the work of Satan himself. Adding and changing laws will not accomplish the work that real Christians need to allow God to do through us.

Also, adding an amendment to our Constitution, to create a national, extra-biblical prescription for marital conditions, is unnecessary and dangerous. People need to get their hearts and minds right with Jesus Christ before moral change can take place. Also, to open a constitutional convention would also open every article of the Constitution to attack by ungodly and immoral forces that seek to overthrow our formerly biblically aspiring way of life. Those of us, who believe in the God and Savior of the Bible, and in our Constitution, need to get off our fearful derrieres, out of our self-made closets, and start living and preaching the salvation and works that Jesus Christ preached, just as He commanded us. Without our active living and sharing of the Word of God and His Light in Christ, our laws, Constitution, and all moral aspirations, become meaningless. 

Those who have read the Bible, for themselves, and trusted Jesus Christ for His salvation know these things are true, and that we all need to 'step up our game' as Christians, putting aside our kicking against the Holy Spirit, just as Paul had to stop fighting Him. It is interesting that linked reference (above) also adds the OT verse Numbers 33:55 that points out that if the followers of God do NOT deal with evil, as commanded, that the evil we tolerate shall harm us in the end.

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