Have you noticed the language Moses always uses regarding
the commandments? He says that God used
a specific kind of language when He gave them, ““Hear, O Israel, the statutes
and the rules that I speak in your hearing today…” The rabbis teach that God isn’t repeating
Himself by speaking of “statutes and rules”, that these mean different
things. Rules can be rationally deduced
while the basis of statutes is incomprehensible to the human mind. You would think the progression would be from
rational to incomprehensible but it is always the opposite and they reason that
this is so that we not depend on reason, that we understand that these rules
and their rationality, show them to be first the will of God and then rational.
The reason and logic that make these rational, then, are to be seen and valued
as gifts from God. There are certain
things that everyone would agree on that would be beneficial for good society
like not murdering, no adultery, no stealing, but the first commandments about
one God, no carved images, a Sabbath, etc., you can’t deduce, you must be told. We would say that reason is a gift from God
but it, like everything else, participated in the fall and needs redemption and
transformation. We would also agree that
reasoning flows from the truths God speaks that we can’t know apart from His
graciously giving us these truths.
The Pharisees don’t like Jesus’ form of reasoning because it
indicts them, challenges their own reasoning.
It is an easy thing to be a lover of money when we believe that health
and wealth are signs of God’s blessing. You
can easily slip past Jesus’ words here and say you’re not a lover of money you
just want His blessing. I know, I am an
expert at it. The way Jesus says it
though makes me feel like He is talking about those first commandments, that
money is an idol, a substitute God, and they don’t see it. We would like it best if idols were easy to
spot, a totem of some sort rather than something less obvious like money, we
would be less prone perhaps to idolatry.
Jesus’ argument is that everything goes back to that first commandment,
you have to accept that He is your redeemer and your God and allow everything else
to find its rightful place behind that.
Why does He transition from that discussion to adultery? It’s actually incredibly logical, if you
forsake your God to chase something else, wouldn’t that tend to apply to human
relationships, especially your covenant relationship?
Would reason ever lead you to foresee the cross as God’s
means of redemption? A man dying on a
cross cannot be the savior of the world, cannot be the final statement on
death. That man did not rise again to
life three days later, did not ascend to the throne in heaven and will not come
again in judgment on sin. Not a single
bit of that is reasonable. We don’t even
think it reasonable any longer that God created the world, how could we believe
those other things? Paul says plainly, “the
god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from
seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” These things are unbelievable to those who
have not received the Holy Spirit and they should think us mad for believing
them. For us, the cross and the resurrection become the keys for renewing the
mind. All reason and logic is
subservient to these things, we know our reason and logic to be fallen when we
believe these non self-evident truths.
What other truths, then, are there that I have denied and are unknown to
me in my fallenness? Evangelism should
always begin with prayer for God to give the Holy Spirit, the gift of sight and
true reason.
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