Numbers 19:1-2 — “The LORD said to Moses and Aaron: ”This is a requirement of the law that the LORD has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect or blemish and that has never been under a yoke.”
Did I say this already? We need to keep the law!We’re driving into work this morning, and Myra is getting people driving up to our back bumper … speeding past us, cutting in front of us … What’s going on??
It all goes back to something that happened a year or two back. We were driving back from Gainesville, and a Police Cruiser came up behind us, flashing lights. An eye in the sky has spotted that, though we were only moving with the flow, we were a few miles over the speed limit! Myra took the lesson very much to heart, and committed to do her best to observe all traffic rules and regulations in future.
Well, a lot of you probably think that speed limits, and perhaps some of the other rules of the road, are a bit pointless. In fact you might even feel that slavishly observing them while all around you are ignoring them is being a bit of a nuisance.
I beg to differ!
What’s the standard for deciding whether laws should be obeyed or not?
Numbers 19:1-2 begins the telling of the rules for ritual purification with the ashes of a red heifer. It’s quite mysterious because although the ashes of the red heifer can cleanse all those who have become unclean, for those who are pure contact with the ashes has the opposite effect… it makes them unclean!
The commandment of the red heifer might be the best example of a “chok” — ordinances that belong to the category of chok — a law that the Lord has decided that cannot be understood with human logic. Instead, they are laws that we must obey just because we love and fear Him.
Obedience to the law doesn’t depend on our understanding of the law, or our opinion of its worth. In his first letter Peter says:
Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men.
It is God’s will that Christians obey the law. Let go of that basic principle and all laws become optional. I have to say I think we see plenty of evidence around us that says that’s exactly what is happening in our world today. In fact there’s a philosophical basis for exactly that.
Postmodernism is the foundation of many people’s worldview today. It might loosely be summarized as claiming that there is no absolute truth — all “knowledge” is effectively the sum of the beliefs of the most powerful culture in a society. Or, as some people might express it “that might be true for you, but it isn’t true for me.”
George Saalman writes about postmodern legal theorists in an article for the Xenos Christian Fellowship:
Principles of law could never reflect universal truths, they argue, only allocations of power among social groups. According to these scholars, it is senseless to talk about whether a law is right or wrong or moral or amoral. Law is whatever the most powerful cultural group in society makes it. (http://www.xenos.org/ministries/crossroads/dotlaw.htm)
It is this kind of thinking that leads to the undermining of laws that ten or twenty years ago would have been regarded as sacrosanct. And sadly, Christians who start to regard some laws as optional are part of the postmodern drift.
We need to keep the law. Did I say that already?