Faith Tidbit #36

The second function of the Ten Commandments, God's law, is to be a mirror, showing us ourselves as we are. We touched on this briefly several days ago. "Through the law comes the knowledge of sin," the Bible says. When we come to terms with God's commands for things like absolute loyalty to Him, honor for our parents, respecting the lives, properties, and reputations of others, sexuality expressed only in marriage between a man and a woman, and so on, we see our distance from God and from the life only God can give. We see that we are sinners and sinners can have no place in eternity. This realization will either drive us to despair or it will lead us to seek forgiveness and reconciliation through Jesus Christ. Knowing that we can't trust ourselves, we're called to take the leap of faith and entrust ourselves to Christ. The Bible explains it this way:

God treats everyone alike. He accepts people only because they have faith in Jesus Christ. All of us have sinned and fallen short of God's glory. But God treats us much better than we deserve, and because of Christ Jesus, he freely accepts us and sets us free from our sins. (Romans 3:21-24, Contemporary English Version)

Faith Tidbit #34

So, if, as we said yesterday, we can't keep the commands we must keep to avoid losing the life only God can give, why does God bother giving us the Ten Commandments? The answer is that God gives us His law as a mirror, a means by which we can see ourselves as we really are, not as we pretend to be. "Through the law," the Bible says, "comes the knowledge of sin." When we honestly look at the law and how far we are from keeping it, we see how far we are from God and how filled with futility our lives are going to be, now and in eternity. Wrestling honestly with God's law is like the bracing first step of all Twelve Step programs: We are incapable of loving God completely or of loving others as we love ourselves. If the Ten Commandments were the only thing God revealed about Himself to the human race, life would be pointless.

Faith Tidbit #33

Although the Ten Commandments reflect God's will for all humanity for all time, two points should be made. First: "'No human being will be justified in [God's] sight' by deeds prescribed by [God's] law..." In other words, even if we were capable of mustering enough love to obey the Commandments perfectly, they wouldn't spare us the consequences of our past lovelessness, the condition of sin into which all humanity was born. Sin shuts us off from God, the One Who gives life. And so, the grim consequence of sin, which none of us can avoid is death. The Bible says, "The wages of sin is death..." The second point will be here tomorrow.