This is the first part of a series about The Beauty of the Law.
About two years ago God began revealing Psalm 119 to me. This longest of all Psalms with its almost 200 verses is often feared for its length and especially its seemingly bizarre praise of “The Law”. This refers to the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible) and in a stricter sense to the commandments of the Torah.
I was always among those with whom this chapter never rang. But what I then started realizing is that there is so much personal closeness to God pulsing throughout this Psalm. The writer is not just talking about the Law in a general, abstract sense but instead he is constantly addressing God. This Psalm is a place of encounter with the God of the Law. And the writer desires to know Him more and endlessly reflects upon the goodness of the whole of Scripture:
The sum of Your Word is truth, and every one of Your righteous rules endures forever!
We have come to know that truth is not mere facts — truth is Someone, a person we can know; you might even say He is The Person. Just like the apostle John writes in the prologue of his gospel: Jesus is the Word In Person. So when reading Scripture — any part of the Bible, even the Torah and its commandments — you are bound to encounter Him everywhere, all over the place!
Out of this marvelling I suddenly realized that I effectively had no idea what the Law is, even after having read through the whole Bible multiple times in my life. So I started reading the Torah, exploring it and falling in love with it. Let me share some beautiful findings from my journey so far:
God Reveals His Character In The Law
Leviticus in the Old Testament and the gospel of John in the New Testament are the books of the Bible where the phrase “I am” appears most often (about 50 times in each book). In John, these are mostly the famous “I am” sentences by Jesus like “I am the Bread of Life,” “I am the Good Shepherd,” or “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” In Leviticus, the most common phrase is “(For) I am the Lord (your God).” Although in John the speaker of each “I am” phrase is not always Jesus, we can get a feeling that the identity of God and His people is front and center in both of these books.
The chapter with the highest density of “I am” in Leviticus is chapter 19. This has become one of my favorite chapters in the Bible: We read all kinds of commandments there, and almost every second or third sentence is “(For) I am YHWH (your God)”. It’s almost as if these were not mere commands but that they instead reveal something about the very character of God. Everything in this chapter (and by extension, the whole of the Torah) therefore becomes not just a statement about what we should do but also about who He is.
Examples From Leviticus 19
Let’s try a few excerpts from this chapter:
Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father, and you shall keep my Sabbaths: I am the Lord your God.
Not only are we told to honor our parents and lay down our working on the Sabbath, but we also learn that this has something to do with God’s nature: Focussing only on the Sabbath for now, we read in the Ten Commandments that “in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and He rested on the seventh day.” God wants us to share this resting in Himself, He wants us to rest in that same Peace.
He gives us commandments not because He is a tyrant who changes His plans at whim but because He is infinitely good and wants us to share in His character and actions. He made us in His likeness, and Jesus is the one who came to open up God’s Kingdom to us so we can truly “be children of your Father in the Heavens.”
Here is another “law” from chapter 19:
You shall not strip your vineyard bare, you shall leave the fallen grapes for the poor: I am the Lord your God.
God loves the poor and cares for them. He will look after them and provision for them, even when people around them ignore them. Of course we are to act just like Him! He adopted us in Jesus and we are His sons and daughters, and children learn naturally by imitating their parents.
This way of imitating is something Jesus frequently talks about in the Gospel of John:
The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing.
For wathever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
Other verses in Leviticus 19 and the Torah in general are harder to discern for me currently. However, the more you start to explore the Law in search for Him, the more you will find Him. I don’t assume I get everything of the following completely right, but let’s take a look at the commandment in verses 6 through 8 about eating the sacrifice meat only during the 3 days after the act of sacrificing: At first this sounds illogical and the consequence of exclusion from the sacred community very harsh.
However, God never meant for us to eat food from sacrificial acts alone. He always wanted those who sacrificed an animal for Him to celebrate together in His presence. By keeping some of this prepared, holy meat and eating it later — at any time of our own liking — we would treat something that was meant for communion and closeness with God and others as something we can exploit selfishly on our own.
That is not the way He has meant for us to live — neither in the context of sacrifices nor in basically any other part of life. He wants to make us into beings that can and will naturally live in loving harmony and interaction with Him every moment of each day.
Jesus Is The Fulfillment Of The Law
The initial followers of Jesus in the first century were Jews. They knew the Law well, from learning to read and write in the Torah schools and from the synagogue. It was probably in some sense easier for them than for us today to understand what Jesus meant when He said in Matthew 5:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets;
I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Does that only mean that Jesus simply obeyed all the commandments in the Torah to the letter? Is that all there is to Jesus in particular and, more generally, to the life we can lead through Him?
The letter to the Hebrews helps to complete the picture: It is directed to just such people that came from the Jewish tradition and had gotten to know God the Father through His Son Jesus. And it draws from the rich imagery of the whole Old Testament to make an important point: Jesus is the fulfillment of every part of the Old Covenant:
He is higher than the angels, better than Moses, the 100 % perfect High Priest in the actual, original Sanctuary in the Heavens. He has offered up Himself as the one ultimate and completely spotless sacrifice. The Gospel of Matthew, as a complement, makes it clear that Jesus is not only the fulfillment of everything displayed in the Law but also the fulfillment of everything announced in the Prophets.
So Jesus did not just comply with the Law, He is also The Original that preceded it. Everything we see in the Old Covenant is ultimately an image, a reduced snapshot of the One True Savior. It is not the real thing itself, it simply points towards The One To Come and projects a pre-image of Him.
The beautiful thing we see in Hebrews is this: Just because the Old Covenant was a reduced image and an imperfect projection of The Real Thing, we don’t have to throw away our Old Testaments because “we now have Jesus”. Jesus also said (see above) that He was not going to abolish them, but fulfill them. Rejecting the Old Testament because it was incomplete would be outright wrong, just as would be rejecting sex in marriage because it is an incomplete image of the union of Christ and His Bride. Everything on this planet will be an incomplete image of God’s glory until He returns.
How Do We Now Live In This Fulfillment?
Romans and Galatians show clearly: If you try to justify yourself by fulfilling the laws, you have to fulfill them all. No person has ever managed to do that apart from Jesus. And He knew perfectly well that our hearts cannot be deeply transformed by merely “checking all the boxes”.
Discussing which of the Torah commandments are still relevant today and which are not would completely miss the point: Living in the Kingdom of Jesus is just the opposite of justifying our lives on our own terms and through our own doing. Instead, Jesus Himself has become our righteousness and the justification for our existence.
He is inviting us to whole different kind of life: Not eating from the Tree of Knowing Good and Evil but from Him, the Tree of Life. By throwing away the ways of our own carefully engineered righteousness and placing our trust in Him, our hearts will be healed and we will no longer need a list of rules to comply with so we can make ourselves good. Instead, we will live from Him, with Him, in Him. This is what Jesus describes when He says this:
Now this is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ, whom You have sent!
With this in mind, we can turn towards the Old Testament and especially the Torah and discover Jesus in there and contemplate the beauty of the Law — because it displays His character. This makes me say with the words of Psalm 119:
Open my eyes and reveal to me the wonders in Your Law!
This is the first part of a series about The Beauty of the Law. Here is Part 2.