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God’s laws do not call us to mere external actions. Instead, they go deeper, commanding us to reorder our internal attitudes before the holy splendor of our God.
Indeed, God’s glory is the first thing we see in Exodus 20, which tells of the first giving of the famous Ten Commandments to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. God appears with thunder and flashes of lightning in His majesty.
When we think of law, we rarely think of it in such a way. But these laws reflect the nature and character of God Himself. As a result, they call us to a standard of holiness more beautiful and more impossible than we usually imagine.
This standard of holiness can be understood in terms of our vertical and our horizontal relationships.
The vertical axis refers to our relationship with God. This is the primary one, and out of this relationship flows our responses to other people.
The horizontal axis refers to our relationships with other people. We may at first treat this as a check-list: I haven’t murdered, haven’t committed adultery, so I must be a good person. But when we see this in the context of our vertical relationship with God in all of His awe-inspiring majesty, we realize that we fall far short of the perfection God requires.
Jesus picks up on this in the Sermon on the Mount. It is not enough merely to adhere to the external standard; our heart is also in view.
No person in all of history has ever fulfilled the law perfectly—except one. Our Lord and Savior fulfilled the commandments perfectly for us so that He could stand in our place. It is because of Him that we can stand before a holy God.
Watch part 81 of the 365 Key Chapters of the Bible series, based on Ken’s Handbook to Scripture.
These are the last recorded statements of Jesus Christ before His death on the cross. Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing. (Luke 23:34) When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified Him and the criminals, one on the right and
Mortality and the purpose of life are prominent themes in Thomas Cole’s paintings. Through his paintings, he vividly brings out the human dilemma of mortality, a dilemma we ourselves must wrestle with. Given the inevitability of death, what are we to do with our days? We can try to stave
In the article below, Dr. Boa synthesizes material from several teaching sessions from his series Biblical Principles for Marriage and from portions of his spiritual formation text Conformed to His Image (primarily from chapter 18, “Holistic Spirituality”). Dr. Boa focuses on agape love as one of the five forms of loves (based on the different Greek words). After reviewing all forms, he gives reasons for why agape is the greatest.
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