If we were to treat the Ten Commandments like our children, we’d likely pat them on the head and pinch their cheeks and send them off to play, not unlike our Aunt Martha used to do on our birthdays. But God’s Law isn’t cute or trite or optional. It’s real, and so is His wrath when we fail to keep it.
This month in The Lutheran Witness, we walk through the commandments — one at a time — to better understand what each one means. In doing so, we are reminded that those commands were not simply meant for the children of Israel but that they are demanded of us today as well.
We also debunk the prevailing idea that the Law is bad and the Gospel is good. After all, as the Rev. Michael Kearney reminds readers, “The Law is good; it shows us the unchangeable will of God. And His will is that sinners repent of their sins, trust in Christ and follow their Lord into all good works.”
Finally, we offer ways you can share the goodness of God’s Law — speaking the truth in love — with those who do not believe.
From swearing to coveting, we repent, we pray and we remind one another, as the Rev. Adam DeGroot explains, that Jesus alone “came to fulfill the perfect Law of God by His perfect obedience, by His innocent suffering and death.”
Posted February 1, 2017
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