The Mirror or the Looking glass?
I want to take you way back to when you were 13 years old. You were likely squirming in your chair trying to maintain your concentration on something very important Pastor was trying to communicate. You may have been battling against the thoughts and distractions like when you were going to get your homework down or that cute girl or boy at school.
Pastor was telling you about the 3 uses of the Law. An important set of ideas that if are not given the proper attention and balance have led to many pathologies in the church. To Curb the individuals behavior and give order to the world, To Mirror or show us our sin and futility rightly pointing us to the Cross and Christ’s work, and to Guide that shows Christians how to lead a God pleasing life. Now, I do not intend on going too deep into any one of these, but one. Because, I am sure, you remember most of this from your hormone driven and confused days as an adolescent, but I do want to remind you of the damage that is done when humans use the law as a hatchet or machete to chop off at the knees anyone who is not living up to their own personal standards.
Instead, I would like to talk to you about the third use and my own understanding and conception of it. The Guide to a Christian life. My imagination began stirring on this concept while reading the Pslams of Moses, that has been echoed many times throughout scripture. but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night(Psalm 1:2). Now my thoughts on the are heavily informed by David’s use of the statement on occasion someone we all now to be a broken man and far from a legalistic Pharisee.
The Ten Commandments as a looking glass. I know when we think of the Ten Commandments it is easy to see them as a concrete set of ideas, 2 dimensional and inscribed on stone. Today, in my conception of the law I see a natural transition from this mirror to guide principal when meditation on the law, just as my imagination takes me deep into the mirror or looking glass. This is the place where the theologists will hop out of their seats steaming, puffed up, arguing the weakness of my upcoming analogy. With all the patience I have I will so kindly say please sit back down, and if you will please move your chair to the corner. My expression is only a practical understanding of the uses that allows for me to love people more.
Without sounding to Post Modern I would like to suggest my looking glass is much like a lens that refracts and reflects light. With much a dew mi punta de vista. When I say the looking glass is like a lens for my imaginations, what I mean is this. Take those commandments for example that say not to steal or kill. You have to do some real intellectual back flips to suggest stealing or killing from someone is an expression of love. There are many antinomians out there, and new age Christians, whose modalistic interpretation of God is love, a true statement by the way, lends to some form of moral relativism. For me however, without a guiding set of principals, in spite of all the love I claim to have for my brothers and sisters, have found myself on occasion in situations of conflict hurt and hurting both physically and emotionally apart from any consideration of the law, with a very carnal understanding that what has happened was wrong. If I lust after a woman, am I really showing love and respect for her husband or even her brothers, father and mother? This type of dismissal of consideration for them is dehumanizing, by my own definition the dismissal at its core a form of hate. If I covet my neighbors things, greedily defining their gains as somehow unjustly attained, instead of celebrating their achievements and even self-sacrificing to protect him and his house, how can I say that I love or know a God who is Love.
Now I could spend all day and all night articulating the spectrum by which violating or failing to follow the guidelines set down by the infinite refractions of the Ten Commandments is a failure to love God and Man. However, I think you get the point. Back to David and his meditations. When you lift the Ten Commandments up off the table and bring them much closer. When they become transparent and you begin to see the world through them I think we begin to see at least one way how David was a man after God’s own heart. Furthermore, when we reflect and confess our failings we can have a new perspective and motivation on how we have failed and be refreshed by the power of Love how it is we intent to correct our behaviors.
Thank you, Lord for freeing me from the bondage and burden of sin and providing me through your perfect expression of Law and Gospel a way by which I can love you and my neighbor better. Thank you for writing the law on my heart and giving me a Looking Glass by which I can comprehend your righteousness. Thank you for the free gift of bestowing that righteousness on me, in spite of my failings.
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