God’s Life-Giving Law & God’s Passionate Pathways

Please read slowly and carefully. It will be worth your time. I promise!

“There are religious men who have become so familiar with the concept of God’s will that their familiarity has bred an apparent contempt. It has made them forget that God’s will is more than a concept. It is a terrible and transcendent reality, a secret power which is given to us, from moment to moment, to be the life of our life and the soul of our own soul’s life. It is the living flame of God’s own Spirit, in Whom our own soul’s flame can play, if it wills, like a mysterious angel. God’s will is not an abstraction, not a machine, not an esoteric system. It is a living concrete reality in the lives of men, and our souls are created to burn as flames within His flame. The will of the Lord is not a static center drawing our souls blindly toward itself. It is a creative power, working everywhere, giving life and being and direction to all things, and above all forming and creating, in the midst of an old creation, a whole new world which is called the Kingdom of God. What we call the “will of God” is the movement of His love and wisdom, ordering and governing all free and necessary agents, moving movers and causing causes, driving drivers and ruling those who rule, so that even those who resist Him carry out His will without realizing that they are doing so. In all His acts God orders all things, whether good or evil, for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose. All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory!”

—Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983) Kindle Edition, 53-54.

Now please take a moment to re-read that paragraph.

There is a way to get so familiarized with God’s will—that is, his Law—that we abstract it from the Person from whom it originates. The prophet Micah gives a grand eschatological vision for the goal of all Creation in chapter 4 of his prophecy.

Many nations shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
—Micah 4.2—

Of all the things that come out of Zion, why would Micah celebrate God’s Law going into all the world? Because he knows that God’s Person is inextricably tied to God’s Law. We don’t denigrate a letter from a lover or from a king, do we? We sconce it in a picture frame. Put it on our wall. Fold it and put it in our pocket. Why? Because through those words communicated we are connected to the one our allegiance and our heart is wedded to.

One of the beautiful truths that often gets lost in preaching God’s Law is the utter dependence it has upon the heart of God. Have you considered that God, the Creator of the Universe and every plankton in it, has communicated to you?

Imagine a world where people did not know what God required of them. What is more, why does God require it? Because we lost the magnitude of what it means to be made in the image of God. God made us in his image to redound to his glory. He made us so that we might emulate his way of being. We were to tend and care for soil and sojourner. But from our first brother, Cain, we set our eyes on our own prestige and greed. We can’t stand being thought less of…or at least being exalted over our brother.

All the other gods of the Ancient Near East—and all those who have followed in their train—never gave their faithful a clear ethic to follow. You had to go to a shaman or a priest, who would toss some entrails out and tell you what you ought to do. Toss a little harder and you might do penance for two years longer. Toss a little weaker and you might think that you are in the gods’ favor.

Have you considered that God is steady and sure and reliable? So rock solid that he is willing to have his words committed to writing until the end of time. There have been assaults on the veracity of Scripture since before it was written down. Look at any of the prophets of Israel. Were they not maligned and assaulted and thrown in prison and jeered at for their cries (and there were tears!) of judgment?

The Minor Prophets all bear witness to God’s reliability. Unlike popular conceptions of God, he is not maniacal or fickle. These conceptions truly are figments of our imagination. That is, we see a reflection of ourselves in such contrivances of God. We get angry at any kind of sleight someone may deal us. We are one minute strong and confident. The next we are doubting and frail.

God, on the other hand, makes it clear for decades that he is patient and abounding in steadfast love…even to wicked Assyrians and Babylonians. Even to hard-hearted self-dubbed “children of Abraham”—who presume upon and despise such mercy.

As you consider God’s Law, do you relish the fact that he has revealed to you that the plans belong to you, but he establishes your footsteps (Proverbs 16.9)? Do you savor the fact that if you take your neighbor’s eye, he can only take your eye and not your ear as well (Leviticus 24.17-20)? Are you satisfied in the beauty of order as the sun rises each morning (Psalm 19)? Does your jaw drop as you reflect on the fact that a king does not have a right to take your vineyard because he has the power to do it through craftiness (1Kings 21)?

God has graciously made it clear how he acts and wants his image bearers to act in his world.

This, then, informs how we understand Jesus’ perfect obedience to that Law. He was able to obey perfectly not as some external, coercive force to which he had to conform. Rather, being very God of very God, he gladly and joyfully and whole-heartedly obeyed God’s Law. In turn, we are able to obey because he has poured out the same Spirit into our hearts. So, Christian, you obey not to get or appease. Rather, you obey as a new reality in line with who you are as redeemed from futile thinking and futile ways.

What is more, when we understand God’ s Law as an outflow from our hearts, we don’t see it as constricting. Rather, it is delightful to not murder or bear false witness or covet. It is at those points that we see the immense freedom from our lives in the bright countenance of only One who really matters. As we act in accord with his Law, we are liberated from self-rule and human subservience. We hear his beckoning to a whole new world. We see our lives as part of the Divine Drama that will culminate in the effulgence of his incomparable beauty.