Last week I pointed out that the starting point of experiencing God (as taught in the book Experiencing God) is obedience. It’s like Jesus’s story of the fellows given ten pounds of silver, and the servant who earned the greater profit was given greater responsibility. (Lk 19.12-27) If we do something with God’s standing instructions, He produces fruit with it—and begins, rather quickly, to give us specific instructions.
Okay, but which instructions ought we follow? After all, the bible is full of commands and principles and proverbs and examples. It seems every book in it has some form of “Do this, not that.” That’s a lot to incorporate into our lifestyles… and weren’t some of those commands nullified when Jesus died for our sins? Which of them must we do, and which of them can we skip?
Follow Jesus.
Well, we’re Christians, so our starting point should always be Jesus. Start with Him. Read the gospels. Read His teachings. Anything He said that strikes you as kinda command-like, do. That’s why I’m writing all the Red Letters posts: If we’re gonna follow Jesus, we need to know what He taught.
Learn the Law.
Technically, Jesus’s teachings are His commentary on the Law. The Law would basically be the commands that God (and, of course, Jesus is God) handed down to the Hebrews while they were traveling to Canaan. So it would behoove you to become at least familiar with those commands. They are the context of pretty much the rest of the bible: They’re what the prophets were trying to get the Israelis to return to; they’re what Jesus had in mind when He taught about the Kingdom; they’re what the other folks in the New Testament had in mind when they taught about Jesus.
The biggest error in Jesus’s day—the one He tried time and again to correct the Pharisees about, and the one His apostles tried time and again to correct their fellow Christians about—is that the Jews believed they were saved by following the Law. (Dispensationalists* actually teach the Jews were saved by the Law; at least until Jesus died for our sins and changed the dispensation on ’em.) Paul in particular tried to point out that the Law never did save; God did, and always has. Out of the fear of making this mistake again—depending on our good deeds rather than God’s grace to be saved—many Christians, particularly Dispensationalists, teach we should avoid the Law. But Jesus taught that we should teach it, and again I say stick with Him.
Still: Certain parts of the Law—namely the rituals—are no longer necessary because the rituals were meant to represent things that Jesus achieved by His death. Ritual sacrifices are an obvious example: Christians no longer kill animals or burn grain as sin offerings or thanksgiving offerings or as part of ritual cleanliness. Jesus’s death took care of these things once and for all. Any sacrifice would just be redundant.
Ritual cleanliness, likewise: Christians don’t bother with the food laws, the clothing laws, the mildew laws, the leprosy laws, or any of the ritual cleanliness laws. (Although, for hygiene’s sake, we really ought to.) The point behind ritual cleanliness was to make ourselves holy so that we could go to the temple and stand in God’s presence. But again, Jesus’s death took care of these things once and for all. We don’t need to make ourselves holy for worship; God has made us holy and, collectively, into His temple, so that He no longer needs a physical one, but lives in us.
The rest, by and large, are still valid. But the principle that they need to be understood under is grace. Just because we violate some command in the Law that usually merits the death penalty does not mean we should enact the death penalty; “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,” (Dt 19.21) might be totally fair, but Jesus calls us to be unfair in favor of grace. Just as God forgives us when we violate the Law, we need to forgive others when they do so too. (And at the same time, since we love God, we need to work on not violating the Law as much as we do.)
Prophecies and proverbs point back to the Law.
One common mistake Christians make is that we assume every declarative statement in the bible is a command from God. It is not.
For example, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” (Ec 9.10 NIV) That one gets quoted a lot, usually for the sake of slackers. It’s taught as if it’s a command from the bible; that those who disregard it will call disaster down upon themselves. But it’s not a command. It’s advice from Ecclesiastes. Good advice—but, like all advice, true in most cases. There are exceptions. Picking your nose, for example.
Proverbs are generally true. It is generally true that God doesn’t let the godly go hungry. (Pr 10.3) But there are exceptions. Godly people have died in famines, or of malnutrition or starvation. Sometimes deliberately.
When proverbs are phrased as commands, remember that they are good advice, and can be followed most of the time profitably; but we need to be wise, and not apply them to circumstances where they just don’t fit. They are always to be superseded by Jesus’s teachings and commands.
Prophecies likewise. Prophecies have a context: They are from the prophets to the people of their day; they are commands to those particular people. Not necessarily us. We will certainly find parallels between their circumstances and ours—like how people in Jeremiah’s day acted exactly like Sunday-morning Christians who act like pagans the rest of the week. (Jr 7.8-11) But that doesn’t necessarily mean God is going to destroy the United States like He had the Babylonians destroy Israel. (Doesn’t necessarily mean He won’t, either.) Don’t take those statements out of context. Study the context. Fall back on the Law.
The apostles point back to Jesus.
In the case of all the declarative statements in the letters of the New Testament, the apostles were after all trying to instruct the first-century churches on how to follow Jesus better. Since there are a lot of similarities between the early Christians and today’s Christians, we often just take their advice to those Christians as if it’s advice to us—what was true for the Galatians and Romans is true for the Americans and Chinese and Russians and Indians and, well, everyone.
But just like the prophets, the apostles’ teachings have a context: They’re from the apostles to the people of their day. We need to look at whether those teachings do actually apply to us, or whether they’re limited, in some way, to the specific folks the apostles wrote to. Obviously, when Paul told Timothy to bring his coat and books and papers to him, (1Ti 4.13) of course this isn’t something we can apply. Not that some Christians haven’t tried: “Well, we should be willing to bring people their stuff when they ask….” Of course we should, but that wasn’t Paul’s point.
Paul’s point was to help the churches understand how to behave towards one another, how to encourage one another, and how to facilitate following Jesus. That is the point of the church, after all. The other apostles as well; they wrote what they did in order to remind their readers about Jesus, and to create an environment where we’d obey Him better. Sad to say, Christians tend to focus on these environments more so than on the Lord, and lose sight of the point. The point is our relationship with Jesus: Loving Him, following Him, and interacting with Him.
So don’t disregard what the apostles taught, but like the prophets: Fall back on Jesus.
Any shortcuts?
Jesus famously said that the Law and Prophets can be summed up in two commands:
So let love be your starting point. From there, look at what Jesus teaches and try to follow it. Put most of your focus on Jesus’s commands, obeyed in love, and the rest will begin to fall into place—the Law, the teachings of the apostles and prophets, the principles in the bible’s wisdom literature…
And the experience of God interacting with His obedient children.