God and The Law ...

Laws are a consequence of evil. Laws are designed in an attempt to contain evil, and limit the damage that can be inflicted on others when naked self-interest runs amuck. Laws are an attempt to restore fairness and equality between people who believe their own interests are paramount. In heaven, before there was evil, when everyone including God, had a serve-others-first way of life – there was no need for laws to constrict behavior. There is no need to set a limit on how much you can love someone else, or how much you can care about them, or do good works for them. In efforts to make someone else’s life better, the sky is the limit. But when your first thought in life is what you get out of it, suddenly and irrevocably the need for laws becomes critical.

Satan’s tried and true methods remain the same; one of the more effective ones it to place upon God the characteristics of himself. Satan called God a dictator, with a rigid set of controlling laws, that if disobeyed would result in death at the hands of God. Satan pointed out that despite their collective ignorance that laws could exist, everyone in heaven was in perfect obedience to a set of implied laws, and the consequences of breaking them would bring about their deaths. Since the initial accusation, Satan has done everything he can to attempt to portray God as an obedience driven, generally angry being, who delights in punishing the wicked for their nefarious deeds. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

Laws are a consequence of evil. It is truly ironic that freedom can only be achieved in a self-less society, not in a self-motivated one. Where ambition and avarice rule the day, laws are required to attempt to limit the damage one would impose on others to achieve their personal goals. But where it comes to doing good for others, we would wish no limits in this regard. When Christ walked the earth, He did not stop to heal just one person. In fact, ALL who sought Him for healing were healed. He turned away no-one. Some did not even know who He was before He encountered them. But He knew every name, every soul, every child He had ultimately created. And He met every need He came across, most importantly the hunger for truth and redemption from evil. The impact of His life was so great, in part because He lived it without a thought for what He would get out of it, only what we would.

Those who see God’s laws as constricting their freedom are looking through the prism of evil. It is our natural desire to live for ourselves that sees God’s laws as interfering with our goals and desires. Were we to be freed from our addiction to evil, we would see only the beginning of wisdom in the laws of God. For it is not sacrifice to obey, it is the only plausible way of maintaining a state of joy. The irony of self-service is its inherent link to pain and death. Serving self seems to never bring satisfaction. No matter how rich a person becomes, there seems to be no limits as to how rich they desire to be. The operative word in self-services is always – more. But with the achievement of “more”, there is no relief, no rest, and no relative appreciation – only the desire for even “more”.

Evil, or serving self, has long been portrayed as a “good” thing. Satan’s marketing campaign is well versed in selling us this concept. After all, if you do not look out for number one, who will; the obvious answer, God. But no-one thinks this through very often. Evil itself is actually a simple deviation away from God. And when you deviate away from the source of love, life, and happiness – you are bound only to find pain, death, and misery. This is the true nature of evil. Evil is nothing more than pain and death, sometimes delayed, but always inevitable. It is acts of evil that punish the evil doer over his life, not acts of love and charity. It is thinking incessantly about self-gratification that warps the mind, and keeps one from appreciating beauty and truth. It is the nature of evil to become addictive, to the point of knowingly engaging in life-threatening behavior and being “unable” to stop. Logic is no answer. Will power is helpless against the desires in the mind. Behavior might be managed, but inwardly, evil is a cancer the envelopes the life and degrades the quality of our existence. Evil is the punishment. It is Evil we need to be saved from, not saved to wallow in.

Death is the natural result of evil unrestrained. From homicide to suicide, evil leads nowhere other than the grave for those who embrace it with abandon. This is not a dictate from God, it is instead the nature of evil itself. This is the reason why God contains no evil, He knows what it would do, to Himself, to His creations, to existence period. God is not a balance of good and evil; He is only all that is good. As such our God embodies the ideas of love to others ahead of love to Himself. As John wrote … “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son” Imagine that the only thing of highest value in the universe is the life of God Himself, and He was willing to lay that down, in order to redeem man from evil and the consequences of evil. There was nothing more He could have given. There was no higher a sacrifice to make. His every effort designed to reveal to us what love is, and why it is so much better than the evil we became bound to.

So how does a human become in sync with the divine? How do we transcend our evil natures and begin to live lives of perfect obedience when now we sit chained to our self-service? It is not possible for a leopard to change his spots, nor for a human to break his own chains to self. But what man cannot do, God can easily do. It was always and only His plan to do the work of redemption FOR us. As we submit the will to Christ He breaks our bonds and changes how we think, what we want, and ultimately what we do. Not only does Christ alter our behavior, He alters the thinking behind it. In so doing He perfects us. We do nothing more than allow Him to do so. We submit. He heals. We submit. He transforms us. We submit. He brings us wisdom and truth. We submit. He saves us. This is the only method of escaping the fate of self-destructive evil.

Man requires a savior to be saved. We need help from outside of ourselves if we are to achieve perfection. It is not a question of presenting Christ as the only way to salvation as some sort of threat. It is a question of presenting Christ as the only one who is able to deliver salvation. Many promise, but the results are real with only one. This is why Christ said … “no man comes to the Father, but by Me.” This is not a prideful boast. It is a statement of fact. Only God could redeem us, only love that is so great it would literally die to accomplish our redemption. No other god or man offers us similar salvation, and especially when we were not even looking for it. He did all of this while we were yet counting ourselves as His enemies.

It is our God who wishes us to live truly free, unbound by laws that constrict evil, as evil is to have no place in our hearts, minds, or lives. When we allow Christ to restore our lives to the state of holiness He intends, we become humble servants of others. Our service frees us from the bounds of laws designed to contain evil, and we are free to love unrestricted. We are free to do good to enrich the lives of others. In this alone can we begin to emulate the character of our God. When we live this way, we mimic the lifestyle waiting for us in heaven itself. When we find joy in the giving, we unlock the secret to fulfillment that none can take away. This alone is a life worth living.

The tortured lives of those who reject freedom, reject truth, and reject the love God offers, are lives of purest pain and misery. Death will be the last of act of mercy a loving God can bestow on those whose entire existence is nothing but pain upon pain. Eventually the torture victim begs for death. If allowed, evil would self-destruct. But if unchecked, evil would take out as much as it could with it, along the road to death. This is why God must intervene and save the world from its own demise. It is why throughout history, God had to intervene to protect his people from the extinction that evil would love to impose. And it is why at the end of all time, God will extinguish evil in flames, and will see it slip into non-existence forever more. The second death will be the passing of evil from the universe, and all those who cling to it, refusing to be saved.

It is not God’s intent that we live under the laws designed to constrict sin. It is God’s intent that we live in the perfection of freedom to serve others, love others, and do good for others. In this is true freedom, unbound by any laws. One day, we will return to heaven, where this thinking is the only way of living. One day, our hearts, minds, and bodies will be in perfect sync with the divine. Through our daily submission to Christ, we can begin this journey here and now. And we can begin to see the benefits from it, even in a world filled with pain and agony. For by submitting to Christ, we eliminate the greatest source of our pain – ourselves. It makes no sense to delay this activity for some time in our future lives. It makes more sense to embrace submission immediately and begin to see its value right here and right now. In that event, heaven will be a continuation of what we have learned to do here. And Christ will truly have been allowed to save us from the pain that evil surely brings.