God Simplifies

There is a spiritual principle that I have known and believed for years. It is that God simplifies and man complicates. This spiritual principle is one that has kept me from trying to make things too complex or complicated. It has also freed me up to simplify my life and help others do the same.

A great example of this is the law that God gave the people of Israel through Moses.

In Exodus 20:1-17 God gives Moses the Ten Commandments. Many people think that was the whole law. The truth is that the law given to Moses by God had over six hundred separate commandments. God summarized those six hundred commandments into ten. Of those ten, four deal with our relationship to God and six deal with our relationship to other humans.

During the years of exile of God’s people in Babylon, the group known in the New Testament as the Pharisees developed. They took the six hundred commandments and decided to interpret them. In interpreting them, they actually expanded them to over three thousand commandments.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to try to remember let alone obey over three thousand commandments is not going to happen. I can’t do that with six hundred commandments. Now, ten commandments are much more doable, but still a stretch.

The law became the focus of God’s people. They began to see the law as an end in itself and not as a means to lead them to the Giver of the law – God.

For decades the people were taught the way to reach God was through obeying the law. The problem was that no one could obey the law perfectly. The fact that there were over three thousand commandments complicated the matter.

The law was given for three reasons:

To reveal to us the character of God

To reveal to us the standards that we are to live by

To reveal to us that we cannot by human effort obey the law

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is allowing God to use the law in our lives for the purpose for which He gave it.

Jesus comes into the world and proclaims a gospel based in grace, not the law.

One way that Jesus does this is by simplifying the three thousand commands. He doesn’t simplify to six hundred or even ten, but to two.

Mark 12:30-31

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.

When Matthew records this saying of Jesus, he adds at the end, “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

If we love God with all that we are and we love our neighbor as ourselves, we have fulfilled all the law.

Now, I can remember two commands: love God and love other people.

I can remember them but I still have the problem of not being able to do that all the time in my own human effort.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is not depending on the law to deliver us and makes us right with God.

Paul expresses that same frustration in Romans 7 where he says that the things he wants to do he can’t and the things he does not want to do he finds himself doing.

In the last verse of Romans 7, verse 25, Paul says, “Thanks be to God, who delivered me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Jesus is who delivered Paul from the frustration of wanting to obey God but not having the ability to do it.

Jesus does this by dying for our sin on the cross and then sending His Sprit to indwell us with the resurrected life of Jesus.

Paul tells us in Galatians 2:20 that he had been crucified with Jesus and it was not him living but Jesus living in him and that the life he lived was lived by faith in Jesus.

The law inside is good and holy because it is from God.

The law was never intended to be what saves us and makes us righteous.

Grace through faith saves us and gives us the righteous of Jesus.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is depending on grace to save us and make us righteous.

Jesus simplifies the law in two commandments and then sends the Holy Spirit to empower us to obey those two commandments.

Nothing could be simpler. It is not easy, but it is simple.

Simply Through Jesus, Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

                                                     Joe