Skip to main content

End of the Law

In the mornings, I like to come downstairs to make coffee for April and me.  As I'm waiting for the water to heat up and the coffee to brew, I like to sit quietly for a few moments in my thoughts or to pray.  Usually, its nice and quiet, but some mornings it's hard to concentrate because our son's room is adjacent to the living room, and he likes to go to sleep watching shows on his TV.  Sometimes that TV is *loud*, and I have to find ways to drown out the voices.  I'll put a fan on, or I'll turn on the living room TV and crank some white noise.  Still, the voices bleed through.

There's another voice that we like to drown out, too, but it is even more relentless in how it cuts through our attempts to drown it out.  It's not an audible voice, but it is no less real.  This voice haunts us with reminders of how we fall short of our humanity.  We try to cover it up with bravado.  We try to turn it into a motivational voice for self-improvement.  We go to therapists to help us cope with it.  We try to dull it with booze, drugs, money, and relationships.  Many of us just silently despair with it.  But in the end, that voice always does one thing: it accuses us.

It accuses to death, quiet literally.  The wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23).  That voice of accusation will not rest until to goes all the way.  And this is why Jesus came.  Though innocent, He came into our world as one of us to die as the accused one.  The law went all the way onto Him, it exhausted itself upon Him to the point of death.

Or do you not know, brothers...that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? (Romans 7:1)

Through faith, His death is our death, and the claim of the Law no longer hangs upon us.  And His resurrection is our resurrection, to a new creation, to a new life that extends into eternity.  We are free.  They say dead men tell no tales, but in Him, we are dead men who are truly alive.

Sometimes, I just have to stop and try to fathom this.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Tale of Two Stories

 Martin Luther, the 16th century German reformer, is one of my heroes.  Among many things, Luther taught that there are two fundamental stories in this life:  the glory story and the story of the cross.  The glory story is the natural story of all of us, fueled by our desire to secure some kind of identity and security and significance for ourselves in the face of what we know is there: our finite limitations and, ultimately, our death.  The story of the cross, on the other hand, teaches us that the glory story is essentially a lie.  There is no path to self-glory, to self-security.  It's a myth, a closed circle that ends in death.  In fact, my addiction to my glory story is my real problem.  It chains me to myself, curves me inward selfishly.  But what the cross story offers us, in our union with Christ, is freedom through death to the glory story and resurrection to the new creation where we now belong to Someone and something bigger than ourselves, being rescued from the final,
Post a Comment
Read more

CRAS TIBI

I remember kneeling down closer to make out the Latin inscription on the grave stone, as we all walked about the Charter St. Cemetery in Salem. This particular stone belonged to Christian Hunter (died March 18, 1676), the first wife of Captain Richard More, the only one of the Mayflower Pilgrims to take up residence in and be buried in Salem, MA. The words etched just below the primitively macabre winged-skull read, "HODIE MIHI, CRAS TIBI". My Latin is a little rusty, so thanks to Google I was able to translate into the sobering English phrase: "Today me, tomorrow you." It's one of those things that stops you in your tracks and cuts through all the layers of "stuff" that constantly occupies our minds and hearts. It makes me think of what the writer of Ecclesiastes said (Ecc 7:2): It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. As on
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cross and Our Hurts

In the suffering and death of Christ on the cross, we have three loud voices spoken to our hurts.  First, we have a voice that understands what it is to suffer.  He was rejected unfairly.  He was the object of ridicule and whispers behind the back.  He was betrayed.  He suffered an agonizing death.  He identifies with our hurt, and, as those who belong to Him, we identify with His.  Some only want to stop at this, however, and therefore don't find what it takes to heal.  They want to be affirmed, validated (which, depending on the wound, can be understandable) but not to move on and change.   Second, there is a loud voice that proclaims from the cross, "This was required for YOU."  The cross of Christ is the public indictment of our sinfulness.  We see that we also *cause* hurts, even out of the hurts we've received.  We see that we also transgress against God and neighbor.  We need forgiveness, too.  In this way, the cross exposes our blindness, for a person who is f
Post a Comment
Read more