The Love Infusion of the Law

I have thought a lot recently about this concept — God's law and the very nature of the law being love infused. Makes sense right? I mean after all God is Love. And so would not his laws by their very nature be in fact love-infused? And yet, people hate the law, reject the law and feel the law is not only hurtful, but yes, in fact hateful. The Bible says we all have knowledge of God, yet we deny this knowledge and hate Him and have a natural love of sin. I am not sure it is so black and white as that sounds, but I do think it is still a true statement. Most humans might agree on many laws and the inherent goodness in them, like not to murder for example. Then again 6 million Jewish people were killed in concentration camps, so maybe things are more straightforward than we would like to believe. Seems a love of power and pride in that case was far more seductive than what would seem to be the most basic moral virtue.

Christ teaches us so much about the law. One is that he goes out to people in love, mercy and compassion. He goes to the absolute worst transgressors perhaps of the law, not with scorn and condemnation but rather perfect Love. So maybe part of man's difficulty in seeing the good and right in the law, is that these laws can only be fully received and understood through Christ (love and mercy). 

I heard a great section from a Joel Osteen story where he is talking about hanging out with a bunch of youngsters at a certain time with whom he used to play basketball. As he explains it, "they were a rough bunch" — cursing, maybe some of them drugging, who knows exactly — but probably the same types Jesus would have engaged too. He said, "I did not try to tell them, don't do this, don't do that, most people already know what they should not do".  Wow so true, don't we already know on some level what we shouldn't do? Don't we spend enough mental energy beating ourselves up for all the things we should not do? The end of the story is that he just kept showing up, spending time, sowing love and mercy, and bringing his own joy to the games. At some point some of these young people started saying to him, "I want what you have" and so the conversations started. 

Another aspect of the law that Christ illuminates so beautifully for us is the spirit of the law opposed to the letter of the law. The old law said not to heal on the Sabbath, and yet Christ does so, once again in a spirit of mercy and compassion. So we can see how a cold hearted approach to the law with no room for context is limited, and hardened, not in line with the heart of flesh promised by Christ. However, Christ does also say, "I have come to fulfill the law, not to abolish the law" (Matt. 5:17). He is the fulfillment because he is perfect in goodness, without sin. Yet, even he still abides by the law and accepts the will of his Father. 

In my opinion the law, and anything that is considered sin, or an abomination, or perhaps the gentler words of anything that misses the mark of perfection and gets labeled as such, has first and foremost very practical repercussions. Usually with only a small amount of thought it is pretty easy to see or imagine what these could or might be. A priest I know said, "sin is anything that separates you from God or your neighbor".  That also is pretty easy to imagine. So perhaps the law is written very much for this very earthly realm and how it operates under the laws of the fabric of reality, and the fabric of our own beings. Like gravity, whether I believe it is real or not, really becomes irrelevant. When I jump off a cliff all the while denying gravity, I will still plummet to my death. When in this earthly realm we experience difficulties, these difficulties affect us, our minds, our spirits. I believe anything that preoccupies our consciousness to some degree, separates us from God (“Be still and know that I am God” — Psalm 46:10). If we are busy being the judge of our own sin, that can be pretty all-consuming. Maybe this is our call to repentance and our call to Christ: if he can love us and fully accept us in mercy even in the depth of our sin, then why is it so hard for us to love ourselves and others? Maybe God actually understood this about our natures. Being our Creator, it does make sense. Maybe with his laws he is basically saying, "don't go there. Yes, yes, I know you will anyway, come back to me and I will forgive you, but I am telling you, you can't handle it, trust me on this one!"

God sent his son out of Love for us that we might turn to Him. Somewhere in all this, I believe is the key to finding the love infusion of the law. Is it not that our Father knows what is best for us even better than we do? He is calling us to those things for our own well being. He is encouraging a true love relationship with Him. He does so out of love and mercy for our own being, for his creation; and then our genuine need and maybe deepest of fundamental desires, can be satisfied — to be in relationship with Him. To be in loving relationship with that which is greater and more perfect than we, we willingly give up a temporary satisfaction for an enduring peace.

I do think we all do have an understanding in our minds and beings of what perfection is, and to varying degrees we desire that. Perhaps we see God's perfection in the beauty of nature. Maybe the reason we have great admiration for people that achieve very high levels in any given field is because we see something of God in what they are capable of? If we only have love and mercy we will to some extent encourage chaos, destruction and ultimately pain. One only need be a parent to see this play out. We may want to protect our darling from the pain of being told no they can not play in the street, but obviously that would be absurd. If we only approach the world with cold hearted, black and white laws, we have lost our humanity, and any life giving properties that exist in the life force itself. It seems there must be a harmonious marriage of the underlying truth principles of the law, operating through the life-affirming substances of love, mercy and compassion. Maybe this explains the difference in our call to be like children, and yet not actually be children.