Faithbase

Good morning, and welcome to Thinking About the Bible. Today we begin the series Thinking About God's Law, and there are a lot of different things we need to talk about when we think about God's law. First and foremost, I want to emphasize that our understanding of God's law must be drawn from scripture itself, not from tradition or from maybe your favorite teacher or from the latest book that we've read or whatever it might be. Now, I'm not saying that you can't discover the truth about God's law in teaching or books or whatever, but we need to make sure that we go back to the Bible and think about the Bible, think about God's law as we find it there in scripture. One of the things we want to understand is that when we think about God's law, when we read about Paul's use of the term law in the New Testament, there is some different shades of meaning that he brings to the entire discussion. For instance, in the book of Galatians, Paul is not exclusively concerned with activity, behaviors, obedience to God's law, as opposed to faith. His primary focus is the culture, and I'm going to use the term the Mosaic dispensation, but the entire culture and entire atmosphere of the Mosaic dispensation was this Parenthal time period, as Paul puts it, that the law came in as a tutor until the coming of the Messiah. At that point, then, the law ceased to act in that particular capacity that it had before. What's important for us to grasp here is that Paul's use of the term law does vary a little bit from one place to the other, but primarily it's going to be that kind of a point of view that it's not just the moral law or the ritual law or the judicial, it's all that together, and how that was supposed to be a covenant marker, you might say, for the people of God. This is what set the people of God apart from the rest of the world, that they lived according to a particular set of rules, a particular culture, a particular lifestyle. Everything about them was supposed to be defined by this relationship that they had through the Mosaic law, the Mosaic dispensation. When we think about God's law, think about how it is being used in a particular place. In the Old Testament, the Old Covenant, simply speaking of what I'm calling today the Mosaic dispensation, and I use that phrase, by the way, those words, because it encompasses more than just behavior that is dictated according to what we would call moral behaviors, but it is the entire lifestyle, the entire worldview that was being presented in the Mosaic dispensation that the people of God were supposed to embrace that fully, that they might be set apart from the world around them. And so that's primarily how the term is used in the New Testament, that's always really how it's used in the Old Testament, that when the law is talked about or is mentioned, it simply means the word of God as given through his prophet Moses and through later prophets as well as they reinforce and explain and bring more clarity to that Mosaic dispensation. All right, so we're going to stop with that today, just barely scratching the surface today, but we'll get back to this tomorrow. Until then, God bless you.