Law, Reality, Gospel

I think it clarifies various aspects of Christian ethics to see the commands of God operating on three different levels.  This is more obvious in some cases than others, and may not hold true in every case at all, but the pattern of my thinking has been this.

At the first and most obvious level, a command of God is Law.  The Law says 'you must', or 'you must not'.  At the level of Law, the key consideration is the rightful authority of the One giving the command.  Because it is God the King who says 'you must' and 'you must not', the proper response of all who belong to God (and we all belong to God) is implicit obedience.

This is not the only way God's commands work on us, though.  At another level, the commands of God simply represent Reality.  That is to say, because God is the ultimate Reality, and all created reality depends upon him and is shaped by him, the command also says 'you can' or 'you cannot'.  There is a sense in which Christian ethics simply aims to describe the way things really are, and then to bring our lives into conformity with that reality.  (Note, by the way, that this must be a view of reality properly informed by God's own revelation; we as sinners are very bad at discerning what reality really is).

And then third, God's commands take the form of Gospel, good news.  Because he is our good and kind Father, the commands of God show the best way.  As well as 'you must' and 'you can', they tell us 'you may'; as well as 'you must not' and 'you cannot', they tell us 'you need not'.  The life of faith, the life that is founded on trust in God, brings us to green pastures and leads us beside still waters.  The commands relieve us of burdens - the burdens brought on by living wrongly in God's world, but also the great burden of having to define good and evil out of our own limited resources.

A worked example: the first commandment.  God says 'you shall have no other gods before me'.  At the level of Law, this commandment tells me that I must not worship other gods; this is a matter of loyalty to the God who has created and redeemed me.  At the level of Reality, the commandment tells me that there are no other gods to worship; not only am I told I must not worship other gods, I am also told that I cannot, since in reality there are none.  And finally, at the level of Gospel I am told that I need not worship other gods.  The one true God is all-powerful, and provides for all my needs, so that I need not placate or pursue other deities.  It is a liberation from the burden of polytheism.

Our culture tends only to think of the commands of God at the level of Law, and because it sinfully rejects God's right authority it hates his commands.  People imagine that doing away with the Law of God will bring liberty - no great authority telling us what we can and cannot do.  But here's the thing: in pushing away the Law of God it is increasingly clear that we have also lost touch with Reality.  If the point of escaping the Law is to allow me to be whatever I want to be, that of course must also involve pushing away from the way things are.  Reality, no less than Law, constrains my self-expression.  Therefore it must be rejected.  Just look at the treatment of gender for an acute example.

But what really strikes me is how we therefore lose commands as Gospel.  If you can really construct yourself, make your own meaning, rule the direction of your own life, decide your own values - well then, you must do those things.  Otherwise your life is without meaning, you  have no values (or value), and perhaps you do not even meaningfully have a self.  But this is to be as god - in terms of responsibilities, at least.  Can we fulfill those responsibilities, with our human resources?  Must we ourselves not become gods?

There is good evidence that young people today are increasingly unhappy.  Might not part of the reason be that they are carrying the intolerable burden of creating and sustaining themselves - and indeed the whole world, for what is a world but the projection of my internal consciousness out into the meaningless void?  Might it not be good to hear God say not only 'you must not be your own god', but also 'you cannot be your own god', and supremely 'you need not be your own god, for I will be your Father and will keep you to the very end'?