No 31: So that We would Die to the Law and Bear Fruit for God

Tread carefully when you have a go following St Paul's deeper speculations!  And the material Piper is largely basing this chapter on is a good example.  A charming personal touch in one of St Peter's letters reassures us that it's OK to get confused:  "... just as our dear brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom that God gave him.  He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters.  His letters contain some things that are hard to understand ..." (2 Peter 3:15-16).

One of the great difficulties is the word 'law'.  St Paul jumps around several different meanings, sometimes in the same sentence.  Even the original Greek is of little help, because neither Greek nor English have the terms in Hebrew which shaped St Paul's thinking.  If you use the NIV, you may have noticed the word is sometimes capitalised 'Law'.  This is an attempt by the translators to clarify what St Paul means - remember there are no capital letters (or punctuation!) in the original manuscripts - but they don't always get it right.  In one place, St Paul himself looks for another phrase:  "He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us ..." (Colossians 2:14); or he amplifies it as "works of the law" (eg Romans 3:28).  To get a flavour of what I'm talking about, read the first 8 verses of Psalm 119, where you have all six distinct Hebrew words, for which the NIV team chose five English words - and some of those rarely used.

Of all these six words, the really important one to get a grasp of is 'torah'.  This is what the translators have in mind when they wrote 'Law', capital L.  One of the commonest criticisms of St Paul from teachers of Judaism is that he misunderstood what they mean by 'torah'.  Now I don't for a moment believe that is true - but they are reading him through the prism of Christian theologians' failure to get into his Jewish mind, ironically.

The best fit in English religious terms is the phrase 'the word of God'.  By that, we gather a wide range of meanings: how He guides us, what He has generally commanded, what He wanted preserved in writing, how He speaks to us personally.  It is pretty much the same with 'torah'.  Its root meaning is a word 'yarah', which variously means to aim (eg an arrow), to lay a foundation, to water, to point out (ie with the hand), to guide, and to teach.  Another derived word means 'parent'.  The same root begins the name 'Jerusalem'.  So is this the 'law' St Paul has in mind, with his strange talk of 'dying to the law' or 'no longer being under the law'?  Obviously not.  How should we ever benefit from straying out of the gracious path of God's guidance?  St Paul would have exactly echoed Jesus before his critics: "Do not think I have come to destroy the law and the prophets; I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17).

Neither Jesus nor St Paul ever taught anything which altered God's unchanging intentions regarding mankind and law - but their critics thought they were, and to this day, some theologians think they did.  Our relationship with God was never based upon a set of commandments; it has always been based upon His love and forgiveness - His free choice.  Before I think about what Jesus' death and resurrection really, and uniquely, achieved, I love to remember this story from Luke 18:9-14:

"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself ... but the tax collector stood at a distance.  He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner'.  I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God."

'No escape from the curse of the law' - in Piper's words?  Whoops - that tax collector just did!