OT Law part 2

Anyway, back to the point. Needless to say, Adam and Eve chose to eat the fruit, and that is the root cause of everything that is wrong with the world today. Breaking that first command placed a permanent schism between God and man. Everyone born from that point on had (and has) an anti-God nature. Everyone in the world is consumed by living for themselves and not for God. Mother Teresa was not a perfect person. Neither is Billy Graham. Ask them and they’ll tell you so themselves. Well, it’s a little late for Teresa, but you get the point.

God, being just, cannot allow blatant rebellion against him to go unpunished. But, being loving as well, he didn’t want to destroy everyone either. So he killed himself (an infinite being) to cover us (an infinite – well, not really infinite, but a huge – number of rebellious acts). He took the punishment we deserved upon himself. Then he came back to life, defeating death once and for all.

The Old Testament (including the law) was given to Israel, but they weren’t justified in God’s eyes simply because of that. In fact, the law was never intended to be a path to become righteous before God. The opposite is actually true: one of the purposes of the law was to prove that man cannot be good enough to warrant God’s good will. It’s impossible for humans to be completely perfect from birth until death.

So the point is this: when Jesus lived his life according to the Old Testament law, he fulfilled it. A new era was born at the point that he came back to life. We don’t live under the same rules that people did before Christ, although the Bible makes it clear that even back then people were accepted by God because of their faith, not because of anything they did.

I know a lot of so-called Christian leaders like to preach about fire and brimstone and damnation, and are quick to point scathing fingers at every transgression they see. But that’s not the point of Biblical Christianity. We’re not called on to point fingers at non-Christians and tell everyone how evil they are; we’re called on to reach out and help those who understand that they’re in over their heads and need an escape from the horrors that often fill their lives. Jesus is that answer.

almost forgot: OSU 46, SDS 9

Carolina 24, NE 23