Faithbase

Good morning and welcome to Thinking About the Bible, and we're going to be thinking about God's law again today, and as we continue this discussion of God's law, I want to touch on what might be called the traditional division of God's law into the moral, the ritual, and the judicial. And it's traditional to suggest that the ritual and judicial are no longer valid, have no bearing really on the Christian walk today. The ritual, obviously I agree with that, because Jesus Christ completed and fulfilled all the ritual requirements, sacrificial requirements, the food laws, and all those things find their fulfillment or their clarification, I guess we could say in some cases in Jesus Christ he said all food is clean, you eat it, it goes into your digestive system and you eliminate it, and all food is therefore clean. But in the sacrificial system, obviously Jesus is the final and full sacrifice, there is no longer a sacrificial system that is incumbent upon the people of God to observe in any way, shape, or form. So obviously that's not part of what we need to concern ourselves with, except for the principles that we find there, and we'll talk about that in just a minute if we have time today, if not, we'll touch on that tomorrow. Now when we look at judicial law, again it's somewhat tradition among especially the older commentators to suggest that the judicial law was just for the people of God during the Mosaic dispensation, and what we see there has no bearing on our behaviors today. And then they would say that the moral law of course does, but let's look at that for just a moment. The moral law is summed up by the Ten Commandments, but we're going to look at that a little bit later and discuss how the Ten Commandments are really something of an outline. But thou shalt not kill, for instance, thou shalt not murder is a moral law, and we all agree that that's valid. But the judicial law of the people of God during the Mosaic dispensation dealt with that as well and imposed the death penalty on those who violated that moral law. So to have this sharp line of demarcation between moral, ritual, and judicial is really not feasible. It's not something that we can really do. More so, that's obviously easy with the ritual law, but even there, for instance, the law of the Sabbath, to break the Sabbath resulted in the death penalty, so we have again an overlap between the ritual and the judicial. But because that ritual law has been set aside, Paul says, for instance, that whatever day a person determines is the day for worship of God and keeping with worship, and he's probably talking there about days other than the first day of the week for worship. But nevertheless, he says that those days and weeks and months and years, those things are something that we need to be concerned with as far as a continual and mandatory behavior. But again, so we have an overlap between ritual and judicial, and what we're going to see as we go through this series is that our best approach is to look at the text, to understand it as the original audience understood it. This is what we always do, by the way, when we interpret the Scripture. And then pull the principles that we see there into our setting and discover how they apply to us now. Some of them are very easy, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery. Those things are very obvious. Those don't change from one era to the next. But as we get into the principles that we want to see in the ritual law that has been completely fulfilled by Jesus Christ, as we get into that setting, we want to be able to understand how those things apply to us. So today, as we think about the law, think about the moral, ritual, and judicial, but not as hard and fast categories. Think about how there is a lot of overlap, a lot of integration there. And keep in mind that our job is to find the principles that we see in the text and apply them to our lives today. So God bless you. I'll see you again tomorrow.