Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): The dialectual nature of God's Law

The sermon on Numbers 9:1-14 (No. 11 in the series) by Dr. Rayburn gives us a great exposition on the Biblical Dialectic as it pertains to the regulations concerning the Passover celebration. For a more thorough treatment of the concept of the biblical dialectic see this series of sermons especially the first two. Here is an excellent section from this sermon on Numbers that shows the dialectual contrast between the strictness and leniency of God's Law:

Here in this chapter the emphasis falls on obedience to the regulations that governed the observance of the sacraments, in this case, the Passover. Things had to be done a certain way. This is clearly the burden of these 14 verses. These verses contain law and regulation. But two very different things are said about the law of the Passover and, in this way, we have two very different perspectives given on the Law of God in general. True enough, this law concerns the Passover, but this law is just like any other divine law in this respect. There is always this double aspect to the Law of God. And, once again, these are two perspectives that we often find difficult to maintain together; two perspectives that want to fly apart in our thinking and our living; two perspectives that we are very likely to choose between rather than hold at once.

In the first place we have God’s law as demand and requirement to be strictly obeyed.

This is clearly the emphasis of the opening verses of the chapter where Israel was told to observe the Passover at the appointed time and to celebrate it in accord with all its rules and regulations. We have that same necessity of strict obedience stressed again in vv. 11-14. Even those who observed the Passover a month later had to observe it precisely as instructed in the Law of God. They had to observe it on the right day, they had to eat the specified food, they couldn’t leave any of the food uneaten, they couldn’t break any of the lamb’s bones, and so on. What is more if they violated these stipulations they received not a slap on the wrist, not a “tsk, tsk” from the unIsrael activities committee, but they were to be kicked out of the community: that is, executed, or left to fend for themselves in the desert, or made subject to the judgment of the Lord.

Then, in the final verse, Israel was reminded that an alien could participate in the Passover but only according to the laws governing such things, including, as we read in Exodus 12:48, the demand that he first be circumcised.

Passover was a gift Yahweh gave to his people, a wonderful gift celebrating and remembering a still more wonderful gift. It was Christmas for the Israelite family and how much poorer our lives would be without Christmas! But no matter how happy the gift and the celebration, it still had to be done in the prescribed way! There is a strictness here that is undeniable.

Many larger churches nowadays offer a Saturday evening service to their parishioners to make it more convenient for them to attend church. If they have Sunday obligations a Saturday evening service makes it possible for them to attend church. What is wrong with that? Well, what is wrong with it is that God has appointed the Sabbath as the day of Christian assembly, the day for the worship of his house, the day of the remembrance of his great salvation. The day of Christ’s resurrection has become the new Sabbath and the new holy day. We aren’t free to alter those regulations. God has spoken and we are obliged to obey his law. So the answer to the man who has Sunday obligations is that unless they are of the sort that God allows to keep a man from worship – and there are very few such activities – they must be cancelled and he must be at worship no matter the inconvenience. It is never an inconvenience to be called into the presence of the Almighty!

Other large churches, especially evangelical mega-churches are virtually eliminating the sacraments from their Lord’s Day public worship. Heavily skewed to the unbeliever and to reaching him for the gospel as their Sunday service is, a Lord’s Supper at the end would be counter-productive. It would advertise the difference between the Christians and the non-Christians in the service, exactly what the church does not want to do. They want the unbelievers to feel welcome and comfortable; precisely what a strange ceremony that they could not participate in would not make them feel. So why don’t we do the same thing and take the Lord’s Supper out of our Sunday morning worship and observe it instead on Wednesday night or perhaps only in the Sunday evening service when unbelievers are less likely to attend? Well, the reason is that we are not free to alter the regulations laid down for our worship. The Lord’s Day worship of the Christian Church is supposed to be sacramental and the Lord’s Supper is supposed to be, as John Calvin once put it, the central act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day.

The point is: there are laws and regulations that we are obliged to observe; obliged because God has laid them down in his Law. We are not free to alter that law no matter the reason. Now fallen human beings do not like to take orders, still less to take orders from God. It is a fact of life that goes a long way toward explaining what we observe in the world every day. As one wise man has put it,

“Man’s self-centeredness, aware that it is being attacked and called in question by God’s claim to man’s [obedience], seeks feverishly to defend itself and to assert its inviolability.” [Cranfield, “Paul and the Law,” as printed in New Testament Issues, 151]

That is man. He has a passion to disobey God, no matter how harmful, how unreasonable that disobedience. But we are reminded in no uncertain terms in v. 13 that God will enforce his will and man cannot keep him from doing so no matter his arguments, his excuses, or his justifications. The Lord has published his law and because he is the Lord, the King, and the Judge, he demands that his law be obeyed. Failure to obey will bring his punishment. That is a brute fact of divine revelation that we encounter on virtually every page of Holy Scripture; it is also a brute fact of human reality, clear enough now, but to be made so much clearer at the end of the age. The way of the transgressor is and will be hard.

And lest anyone think that this strictness in demand and the threat of judgment for disobedience is peculiar to the OT, as if the Lord were harsher in the ancient epoch than he is today (an idea that continues to find supporters no matter how clearly it violates the teaching of the Bible), the same emphasis is found in the NT. There are a great many texts I could cite, but since we are talking about the sacraments let me remind you of 1 Cor. 11:27 and 30 where Paul tells the Corinthian church that some among them had already suffered the judgment of the Lord because they had profaned the sacrament. Some were sick and some were dead because they had not carefully observed the requirements the Lord had laid down for the proper observance of the sacrament – sickness and death just as in Numbers 9. They also had been cut off from the people.

But that is not the whole story. There is another pole on the continuum of the Bible’s teaching about the law. The Bible tells us something else about God’s law that is not easily reconciled with this emphasis on its strict and inflexible demand, the requirements that cannot be broken, and the forbidding of all deviations.

In the second place there is in God’s Law a wonderful accommodation and concern to meet the real-life situations of human beings. Requirements are tailored to help, not to hinder the life of God’s people.

This is the real interest of this passage; verses 1-5 really simply set the scene. The question concerns people who couldn’t observe the Passover because they found themselves ceremonially unclean at the very time they would have had to offer their sacrifice. Most of the chapter concerns instructions God gave to Moses in regard to such cases. And, while we might have supposed that the Lord would simply have said that the Passover, being a commemoration of an actual historical event had to be observed on its proper date, the Lord in fact bends to meet the need of his people to ensure they would not miss his blessing. He doesn’t want anyone left out. He wants everyone to have the blessing of the feast. Before this, of course, the Lord in effect had as much as said that if his people could not participate because they were providentially hindered, he would not hold it against them. There is a great deal of difference between the person who doesn’t go to church because he doesn’t want to and the person who can’t because he is sick or infirm, or a soldier in the field, or, like Robinson Crusoe, marooned on a desert island. The Lord knows the difference! Some, for no fault of their own would not be able to participate but the Lord would not for that reason accuse them of a fault.

But he goes still further. He makes an accommodation for those who couldn’t participate.
He allows this group of people – and all subsequent folk like them – to take the Passover a month later. That is a remarkable concession when you think about it; when you think about what Passover commemorated and about how strictly it was to be observed according to the regulations laid down, one of which stipulated the date on which it was to be observed. But the law is an expression of God’s goodness and his love and so it should not really surprise us that he makes even his law to accommodate the difficulties of his people’s lives. In fact there are other evidences of this in the material. In the regulations governing Passover given in Exodus 12 we are told that the people were to take the blood of the Passover sacrifice and smear it on the doorframes of their homes. No one had a home in the wilderness when the second Passover was eaten. The people were on pilgrimage; their lodgings were temporary. So presumably they smeared the blood on the flaps of their tents or the posts that held them up. The Lord didn’t intend for his laws to be impossible to keep. And he was happy to leave quite a bit up to his people to arrange according to their situation. He was happy with whatever they did so long as it honored the interest of his Law. He paid his people the compliment of giving them freedom to operate within the outline of his will.

In all these ways the Law bent to meet human beings where they were. The Lord was happy to accommodate real life situations. The Lord by his Law was after something in us and didn’t necessarily care how that thing was got if only it was got. There is a spirit to these laws, a basic interest, and it is this spirit that matters most.

C.S. Lewis gave expression to this principle that we find everywhere in the Law of God when he wrote:

“The order of the divine mind embodied in the divine law is beautiful. What should a man do but try to produce it, so far as possible, in his daily life?” [Reflections on the Psalms, 59]

This is the thought behind all of those expressions of delight in God’s law and desire to keep it wholly and sincerely that we find in the Bible. Think of life as a dance and the law as the steps of that dance, the rules of that dance. Think of one of those dances in one of the movies made recently from Jane Austen novels. Think of them dancing some minuet. The dancers – both men and women – want to get it “just so.” The beauty of the dance, the pleasure of it is only complete when the partners dance it correctly: they don’t step on one another’s toes, they don’t get turned in the wrong direction and clumsily have to find their way back, they don’t move too fast or too slowly for the music or the movement of others, and so on. Perhaps in this life we will never dance perfectly, but the law teaches us how to dance and the more closely we obey its rules the more beautifully we dance. God gave us his law not to make us miserable, not because he’s a spoilsport who doesn’t want us to enjoy life, but because he loves us and as our heavenly Father he knows what makes for a good and noble life. To live by his law is the right way to live, the best way, the happiest way.

The reason people break God’s commandments is because they don’t believe that. They do not trust the Lord’s goodness in giving us his commandments. It is that mistrust that lies at the root of man’s transgression of God’s law. They turn away from trusting God for their good and, depending upon themselves, they seek happiness in some other way, which is to say, they seek their happiness by doing what God forbids and not by doing what he commands.

This is exactly how we ought to think about so much of what is happening in our culture today. We are watching people attempting to find happiness in every possible way except that way the living God, the creator of all these people has published in his Law. And it is inevitable that they will fail. The law of God is proved by the misery that eventuates when it is disobeyed. But so determined has the culture become to find another way to happiness and fulfillment, or, better, to permit every man or woman to find his or her own way, that it is now adamant in refusing to allow anyone to press upon society enduring standards of human behavior, the sort of standards one finds in the Law of God. To admit such a law is to let a divine foot in the door and human beings recognize instinctively that once the foot is in the rest will come in behind. So, even at the cost of their own unhappiness, they refuse to bow to the law of God, refuse to permit God to regulate their lives, refuse to follow the steps God has ordered for the dance of life.

But, the fact is, there is a Law for human life. It is a law published by man’s creator and enforced by man’s judge. And, the fact is, every human being knows it. Every human being knows that right and wrong are realities; inflexible, undeniable moral standards woven into the very fabric of human life. But it is impossible to justify that knowledge without God; without both a giver and enforcer of that right and wrong. Those standards come from somewhere and mean something and that is true and can be true only if the law is God’s Law.