I’m not a huge rule breaker but sometimes laws are just a pain! Some days the speed limit is more of a hindrance than a help. Those double yellow lines in the middle of the road are often positioned at just the wrong places! Some laws however are there for good reasons and serve very helpful purposes! But what is the real reason for the law? No not the speed limits or the driving laws. Not the ones that say it’s illegal to steal from the local convenience store. But what’s the purpose of the laws we find in the bible? Why did God give them to us anyway?

This past Sunday we looked at Exodus 20 and several other bible verses. We looked at what it means to receive the law and why God gave it to us in the first place. And the purpose of the law wasn’t that we would follow the law! I know that sounds little counter intuitive but God didn’t give us the law so we would follow it and make him happy. As parents that’s often what we do. But God doesn’t operate like that. He doesn’t give us the law so that we can please him or earn some kind of favor in his eyes. He gives us the law so that we can see how much he loves us! Talk about not really making a lot of sense!

But the laws of the Bible aren’t meant for us to earn God’s love they are there to show us his love. Could you imagine a society without rules? I mean how terrible would that be! We would all just run amuck! As we unpack the bible and what it means for us today we spend a little bit of time valuing the laws because they have a purpose but we don’t get stuck in them. We look at them in the greater context of the bible. The laws were never the point! The point was always God’s love for us!

You see the purpose of the law was God’s love. God loved us so much that he gave us the law. It’s there to keep us safe. It’s there to help us love him back and to love one another well. The law has a purpose but it’s not to show us a way to be saved. It’s to show us how we already were saved. When we start looking at the laws of the Bible through the lens of God’s original plan, we start to see the Gospel promise come shining through! God’s law is intended to show us how he has come into our world and done what we can’t. It shows us that even when we couldn’t do it, he still loved us. God uses the law to show us our need for him and his willingness to come to our rescue even before we acknowledge we need him!

Check out this week’s message on loving God and loving one another as we obey the laws of God.