Our culture and many in our churches believe the law takes away our freedom. Increasingly the law is being replaced by what seems right and feels right according to our perceptions of the facts in the moment without the patience or the wisdom to consider what the facts actually are. The law is interpreted to reflect the common perceptions rather than the common good. We must wrestle with this unpopular subject for clarity in our minds if we are going to convince ourselves let alone others that the Law is good because the Law is holy, and holiness results in the highest beauty, joy, and wholeness as well as being admitted to heaven.
To begin, there is one scholar/pastor from whom we have not yet heard, A. W. Tozer [The Knowledge of the Holy]. He adds a dimension of holiness rarely discussed: Gods immutability. He writes, “God cannot change for the better. Since He is perfectly holy, He has never been less holy than He is now and can never be holier than He is and has always been. Neither can God change for the worse. Any deterioration within the unspeakably holy nature of God is impossible.” In the relativistic and evolutionary world of the 21st century everyone and everything changes. It is natural for us to apply this change to God as well, whether we do so consciously or unconsciously. We read in scripture that God changed his mind about wiping out the Israelites for their idol worship at the base of Mt. Sinai and starting over with Moses. Many today believe the God of the Old Testament [OT] is not the same God of Jesus because the OT god was warlike and wrathful. Many in the church have concluded that God does change and evolve like we do and therefore much of the OT and even the New Testament [NT] does not apply to us. We reason that God has evolved beyond those quaint restrictions of centuries past and has become enlightened, like us. Amazingly, the only parts that do apply are those that agree with our way of thinking!
Does God change? He changes his mind and actions due to a change of circumstances. He did not wipe out the Israelites and start over with Moses because he (Moses) prayed. He did not destroy Nineveh because the people repented when Jonah warned them of their impending doom. The change in circumstances due to prayer and repentance cause God in his holiness to apply grace and mercy instead of justice and judgment. There is a kind of change that never occurs with God. Tozer warns us that to think along the lines of God’s changing for the better or for the worse relegates God to nothing more than “an object” which is “something else and someone less than He.” He writes that this god is not the God of the Bible but that “the one of whom we are thinking may be a great and awesome creature, but because he is a creature he cannot be the self-existent Creator.” If we apply our relativism and evolutionary thinking to God, we are no longer relating to the God of the universe, but to some sort of created being. We have made God in our image. We must remember that the difference between us and God is that we change as we mature. The danger is that if we project our human capacity for growth and change on God, the result will be a god of our own making who can and does modify his requirements of us to agree with what we want. We are then free to be our own “free” moral agents (more about this in future blogs), but God says, “Be holy because I am holy!”
How are we to understand the role of the Law in the 21st century? 
We will begin with a few key passages of scripture: Psalms 15 and 24, and Ephesians 1:4.
Question: What is your gut reaction to this blog?
Tell the Next Generation 