Jesus Love, not Moses Law!

Reflecting on Mark 10:1-12

"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law." (Mark 7:34)

Question, who wrote the Law?
I’ve always understood the Moses Law as written by God.
What that Law stated was God’s will from the beginning of creation.
Yet Jesus says that what Moses wrote does not reflect God’s creation will.
What Moses wrote was written for a specific reason: our hardened hearts.
Divorce is not God’s will from the beginning, yet God allows it in the Law.
Slavery is not God’s will from the beginning, yet God allows it in the Law.
Polygamy is not God’s will from the beginning, yet God allows it in the Law.
The Moses Law is not God’s eternal Law, but a situational law.
It was written for a specific people, in a specific culture and context.

So what is God’s eternal Law from the beginning?
It is self-giving, other-serving love – for God and for all people.
Love suffers and serves for the sake of others, also in marriage.
But in our broken, messed up world, who can live up to this?
We do not love perfectly, and marriages also suffer for it.
God in His grace makes allowance for human weakness.
God accommodates our weakness, and overlooks the many ways we fall short.
But again and again, He calls us to love.

This is the eternal Law of God embedded in the cultural, contextual Moses Law.
Divorce is a gracious allowance, it is not a legal loophole.
The religious leaders were more concerned about keeping the rules.
Instead they should have been more concerned about loving their spouses.
If we were honouring God’s creation laws, we wouldn’t want divorce.
Sometimes it is unavoidable, sometimes it is necessary, but it is never ‘very good’.

Moses had a hand in shaping the written Law of God.
Moses participated in shaping the rules for the situation of the people.
We should not literally follow the Moses Law; it fits in his culture and context.
But we should look for the gracious love embedded within those laws.
We should discern what love would look like in our culture and context.
How we ‘write the Law of God’ will be shaped by our culture and context.
We will recognize the hardened hearts of people today, like Moses did.
We will make gracious allowances for cultural applications.
But we will NOT compromise the Law of Love.
The Law of self-giving, other-serving, humble and gracious love.

Debates among christians today focus more on ‘obeying the bible’.
We find our verses, and apply them today, regardless of the situation.
We take verses written for another culture and context, and impose them today.
We do not consider the hardness of hearts, or the accommodation of love.
Its more about ‘obeying the words’ than it is about obeying the Law of Love.
Love applied today in our culture and context will look different.
But the essence of love is unchanging, rooted in the very creation.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

This is the Law of Love, as preached and practiced by Jesus.
This is what we should be pursuing, and not just ‘obeying the bible’.
Everything in the bible somehow hangs on the love commands (Matthew 22:34-40).
All the verses are shadows of Jesus, Who is Love incarnate.
We use them to get a sense of what love can look like.
Moses, David, Peter, John and Paul wrote about love for their times.
God inspired them to do this, to help us do the same in our time.

My job today is to interpret and apply the Law of Love in my context.
I need to be humble and gracious as I do it, knowing peoples’ hardened hearts.
I need to make allowances, and accommodations, for challenging situations.
But I should never compromise love, which is God’s Law from the beginning.

PRAYER
Lord Jesus, my own hardened heart keeps me from fully reflecting Your creation design. I fall far short from Your glorious goodness, in ways I do not even realize. Yet You make allowance for my weakness, and accommodate my cultural blind spots. You do this because You love me, and because You are showing me how I need to love others. 

Help me to learn from, but not follow Moses (or David, Peter, John or Paul). Help me to follow You as I work out what love looks like in my own daily situations.