No 7: To Cancel the Legal Demands of the Law against Us

This morning's reflections are about two trees and two sons.

The start of the start of the Bible - edited into eighty verses and three chapters by unknown lovers of God - is revelation which is so wondrous that it continues to reshape my personal spiritual landscape, and I expect it will go on doing so until I die.  Perhaps that's because it carries the same young, wild, fecundity with which God created all things - so brilliantly imagined in C S Lewis' book 'The Magician's Nephew'.

The whole system which St Paul refers to in the verse quoted by Piper - debts and credits, good and bad deeds, and the laws we make to manage them - had its origin in our first parents' decision to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in preference to the the tree of life; and, to compound things, to decide disobediently.  They had no real clue about the consequences, but this much they knew: it was not what God wanted for them.  (I wonder what it previously felt like for them both as they ate from the tree of life?  I'm doing so now, but in a fallen world.  Oh Holy Spirit, take me back in the Spirit to those times in Eden!)  Nevertheless, into their hearts crept a seed of distrust, and they thought they knew better than God and they could get something to their advantage.  The result must have been a terrible shock: "They realised that they were naked" (Genesis 3:7).  Mankind has been traumatised ever since, as St Paul saw: "Many died by the trespass of one man" (Romans 5:15).

I don't doubt that God intended that the first family would eventually eat from both trees, when they were ready to do so.  He withholds no good thing; all He created is good, including the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  But at that point, Adam and Eve were not ready.  Stripped of their trustful and loving relationship with God, they were indeed naked.  They began to need clothes - laws - instead.

In Jesus' story about the two sons (Luke 15:11-32), we see two very different young men who are each in their own way trapped in this "law of sin and death" - the prodigal one as much as his brother.  The former suffers some tough lessons in the university of life and realises how futile his life has become - great.  But what are his thoughts? "I have sinned against heaven and against you.  I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men" (Luke 15:19).  He can only see himself in terms of his good or evil deeds: that's his value and identity in his eyes, and he has decided the matter for himself.  The other son is of course just the same.

We all know that in the story, the father is our Father.  He simply doesn't care about all those good-and-bad calculations; he cuts his son's pious spiel short.  There seems nothing even to forgive - he is all only compassion and love.  He makes no demands of either son, legal or otherwise.  Now remember when this story was told: this is what God has always been like.  He didn't become like that after Jesus died.

So how has Jesus changed things?  Thinking about the story again: the extravagant party may have convinced the younger son of his Dad's love and forgiveness - but would it have altered his feeling of unworthiness?  And would the father's patient words to his other son have soothed his sense of grievance?  I don't think so.  The difficulty lay not in God's readiness to be reconciled, but in their inability. 

It is we who clutch at the comfort of rules about worthiness, and it is we who cannot tear our hearts from the law of sin's deceptive embrace; for very deep down, we are not sure we would be safe with God if we lived nakedly without it.  The only thing which will heal my trauma is to see God Himself come and take my place and be judged by the same rules - and come through triumphant.  Mysteriously, that works.  Now I am sure, and safe.