A Standard to Admire – The Kingdom Curriculum III (2)

A Standard to Admire

“Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” Deuteronomy 4:6

There is a certain beauty and attractiveness to the Law of God which, when it is fleshed out in the lives of His people, captures the attention of the world and appeals to the nations as a way of wisdom. The Lord Jesus is the best example of this. He embodied, in exhaustive detail, the life, liberty, and love which flow from obedience to God’s Law. Throughout the course of His ministry Jesus was followed by throngs and masses eager to benefit from the grace of God evident in Him. And many did, although not all of them unto salvation. Often the Lord was content to heal the sick, cast out a demon, or provide for the needy, knowing full well that these acts of common grace would be the only grace many people would ever know.

We should thus expect that, as the redeemed people of the Lord, the members of the Body of Christ, take up study of and obedience to the Law of God, they also would stand out in the eyes of their unsaved contemporaries with a moral and ethical distinctiveness unlike anything else. Such was God’s promise to the people of Israel from the beginning. Through Moses, God told the people of Israel that their obedience to His commandments would make them a people which the surrounding nations would admire. The commandments, statutes, ordinances, and rules of God, encoded in His Law, which Israel was to obey in the land of promise, would enable them to demonstrate justice, mercy, goodness, fairness, and love such as the world had never seen. The nations, observing the ways of the people of God, would regard them as wise and understanding, able to solve difficult problems and live together in peace and prosperity without the need of political power or violence.

The nations all had their own laws back then, but none of those legal codes rose to the heights of beauty, goodness, and truth that we see revealed in the Law of God, as embodied in our Lord Jesus Christ. It makes sense that the nations, seeing the fruit of Israel’s obedience, would want to emulate at least some of that obedience, so that they also might hope to prosper and be at peace. From the beginning God intended Israel to be a witness to the world as to how obedience to God could bring blessing to a nation (cf. Ps. 33:10-12). From the early days of King Solomon’s reign we find that what God promised to Israel came to pass almost exactly as He had foretold (cf. 1 Kgs. 10). This clearly indicates Gods’ intention that even the unbelieving world should gain some of the benefit – albeit not unto salvation, but as a witness thereunto – that comes from obedience to His Law.

Indeed, in our own day we see the truth of this. Many of the most taken-for-granted laws in our own country have their foundation, not in human reason, scientific research, or common sense, but in the Law of God: You shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness. And while the nation has found it convenient to back away from certain of God’s commandments, it yet clings tenaciously to statutes and civil codes which derive from the Law of God as in its own best interest to do so. And the reason for this is that the powers-that-be recognize the wisdom of those statutes and desire to gain for the nation the benefits that come from continuing to enforce them.

Order your copy of The Law of God today. Go to www.MyParuchia.com, click Publications, Waxed Tablet, to place your order and take up the Kingdom curriculum of our Lord.

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“In the Gates” is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001,2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.