Under the law or under The Spirit?
I had a conversation with someone last week who wondered if I also took a shovel to the toilet:
As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.
Deuteronomy 23:13
His reasoning was as follows: if you think you no longer have to comply with that law, why do you still have to comply with the other laws? For Jesus said:
For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.
Romans 6:14
Then all those laws no longer apply, and I am free to do what I want.
Nice trick question X. Nice idea, but here it comes… Let’s take a look at the verses around Deuteronomy 23:13 (context!)
Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.
Deuteronomy 23:12-14
There is not one single law in the Bible where God forbids or mandates something “for fun”. Not a single one. There is a reason for all these laws. So in this case: why did you have to bring a shovel? 1: Because God wants to protect you. 2: God is always with you, so act holy and clean and don’t make a mess / shit pile in His camp.
Let’s face it, when God gave this law, everyone was living in a tent in a desert somewhere. If everyone just leaves their turds everywhere, it will become an unhygienic situation and people will get sick or die. God doesn’t want people to get sick or die, so he protects you from yourself with that law.
From yourself? Yes…. as long as people behave according to what God wants, by listening to His Spirit, God does not have to make laws. Only if people make a mess of it (again), then God must come up with a law to protect us against ourselves.
So, now back to X’s statement. That’s right, you no longer have to adhere to that literal text of the law, you must now adhere to the spirit of the law. God’s spirit of that law. And you will know what He wants and why, when you listen to His Holy Spirit. It’s up to you to listen or not….
That does not mean that you can do anything now, on the contrary. Now you live under God’s grace and you must listen to The Holy Spirit.
The Old Testament contains approximately 613 laws, often described in great detail. They are so tight, so on the letter of the law, so strict, that you can never follow them all in all detail. Humanly speaking, that’s impossible. And since the penalty for sin is death, that would mean that if we had to keep all those 316 laws at 100%, we’d all be dead and couldn’t go to heaven.
And now the good news, just what it says in Romans:
For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.
Romans 6:14
Christ has conquered that sin for you. So, you now (literally) fall, thank God, no longer under that law, but under His grace. And then the following applies:
So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.
Galatians 5:16,17
So, is not having to live under the law a blessing? Absolutely, because through it there is a path to heaven.
Can we just do what we want? No. God demands that we now listen to the Holy Spirit, and that means in practice many times more than just those 316 laws on paper. That is really living with Him, every day, even when you go to the toilet, 100%
And to round off the conversation with X, we finally gave him this text:
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.
Hebrews 10:26,27
And X understood very well what it was all about. He got the message. We pray that God will open his ears and open his heart and listen to His voice, instead of making excuses for a sinful life and/or having pointless arguments with himself and also with others. God never contradicts himself. Never.
