Sermon 27 - God's Law is Good--for Us

Sermon 27 - God's Law is Good--for Us

Leviticus 22:31

Keep my commandments, and do them. I am the Lord.

2 Corinthians 6:14

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

Exodus 20:3

You shall have no other gods before me.

Leviticus 25:4,5

But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. 5 Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest.

Philippians 4:8

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Generally put, God's law is good for us.  That's a point of faith.  I think we agree that it's a good idea, and that we should follow God's laws.  But we tend to think of it as following God's law is something that *we* do for God.  It's part of the covenant, part of our agreement with God.  We do what God says, and God takes care of us.  It's really a matter of God is the boss.  And so, what He says goes.  Even if we agree that it's a good idea to do what He says, it's still an attitude of *we* are doing something *for* God.

I don't think that that's a good attitude, and it's certainly creating an attitude.  And as far as I can tell from actually *reading* the law, it's not correct, either.  We can see lots of seemingly arbitrary things in God's law.  How you kill certain animals, which parts you sacrifice on the altar and which parts you burn up elsewhere.  And we tend to think of following God's laws and rules and commandments in that way.  God said we do it, so we do it.  But it doesn't do *us* any good.  Again, I'm pretty sure that's wrong.  There's an awful lot in God's law that is for our benefit, not for Gods.

It makes sense.  After all, God is the one with the owner's manual for the universe.

Let's start with something simple.  Let's look at the dietary laws.

Especially pigs.  I mean, pigs have been a staple since before man started domesticating them, in a preference for hunting and protein.  But when domesticated, I mean, they're great!  You can feed them *anything,* and produce a lot of meat.  And a lot of fat.  Now, in these modern times, we don't consider fat to be a really great idea.  But fat, for an awful lot of human history, was an important source of energy.  It's still very important for infants to have a fairly high fat diet.  So feeding them formula based on skim milk powder can be a really bad idea.  Anyways, pigs produce an awful lot of what we need, and do it quite efficiently.  And it's not difficult to raise them.  They also don't take up an awful lot of space.  You can keep them in pens, and feed them scraps, and you don't have to give them huge fields to graze around in.

Pigs are a pretty good source of nutrition.  So, why is it that God told the Jews not to eat them?

Well, it turns out, and we've only discovered this fairly recently, that pigs, in terms of body tissue, are really similar to us.  (No, I'm not going to get all weird here about the similarities to cannibalism.)  The thing is, that since their tissue is so similar to ours, they get the same diseases that we do.  And we get the same diseases that *they* do.  There's an awful lot of infections that will infect pigs, and will also infect us.  And there's an awful lot of infections that we can transmit to pigs.  So, having a large population of pigs, well, it's a really good breeding ground for new diseases.  And that makes for epidemics.

But then there's the fact that the Israelites, at the time, are wandering through a desert.  And were going to a place that's got a fairly warm climate.  Once again, once we kill pigs, and turn them into meat, there are an awful lot of organisms that will grow on that meat, that will infect us when we eat it.  So it's a really good idea, if living in that kind of climate, not to have too much to do with pigs.  Even if they are very efficient nutrition machines.

There's some other interesting points as well.  There's my experience of going out to dinner with a bunch of other instructors, all of whom happened to be Jewish.  Now, they were probably Jewish in the same sense that most of France is Catholic: nominally, at best.  They were fairly secular Jews.  They knew that you weren't supposed to eat bacon, but probably weren't really familiar with the niceties of Jewish dietary laws.  One of their number had had a heart attack, recently, and, as is often the case with that type of thing, it made him a little bit more serious about his own religion.  So, he was wearing a yarmulke, and had probably been studying Jewish law a bit more extensively than most.  So, when we went to a sushi restaurant, he took his yarmulke off.  And the others asked why.  He said that he didn't want to mislead anybody: a sushi restaurant isn't exactly kosher.  Anyways, we sat down to an appetizer that the restaurant had provided, which was a delicious dish of octopus in a sweet vinaigrette sauce.  He didn't eat it.  The other guys were chowing down on it with great gusto, and urging him to try it.  Hey it's good.  You should try it.  No no, he said, it's not kosher.  Why not? they said.  I, without thinking about it, stated, It hasn't got fins and scales.  I kept on eating until I realised that the entire table had gone dead silent.  I looked up to see all of them looking at me, with, pretty much visibly, the same question on all their faces.  Why does this goy know more about Jewish dietary laws than we do?

Yes, that's there in the Bible.  It's not just pigs that you can't eat.  You can't eat octopus.  You can't eat clams.  You can't eat oysters.  There's an awful lot of stuff out of the ocean that you can't eat.

You can eat what's got fins and scales.  I don't imagine that octopus was extensively on the menu in the Middle East.  But they did seem to eat a lot of fish.  And there were probably shellfish available.  Now, fish does not keep too terribly well, in a hot climate, but shellfish can be absolutely deadly.  So, if you're making up laws for a people in that situation, it's probably a good idea to tell them you can eat fish, but nothing else that comes out of the water.

Again, the law says not to eat blood.  Blood is very nutritious stuff.  You can't eat much of it directly, but, prepared, it can be an extremely good source of lots of nutrients.  However, it's also really nutritious for bacteria.  So, in a hot climate, it's a really good idea not to eat it, since it might be growing all kinds of stuff that isn't good for you.

Exodus 20:3

You shall have no other gods before me.

For another example, there are the Ten Commandments.  Let's start with them.  And right off the top, the first one, God is the one that we are to follow.  You shall have no other gods before me.

Now, I think that a lot of people see this simply as God establishing his precedence.  He's the most important.  What He says goes.  We shouldn't try to wiggle out of some of the things that he says by appealing to some other god.  (Even though we do do that.  An awful lot.  But we'll come to that in a bit.)

But just think about it for a moment.  What if we go all Unitarian on this matter.  What if we accept that there are other gods and that maybe they have some good ideas and so what does it matter?  If we follow other gods, if we worship other gods, I mean, we can still give God precedence.  God's got first claim, and we're not necessarily gonna use other gods to deny Him His due or His rights.  So that's all okay, right?

Well, no. And we've got a pretty good illustration of this.

We aren't too big on formal religion in our society.  (Outside of those of us here in this church, of course.)  We want to be easy-going about it, and not stress too much, and not be too cruel to other people.  But, you know, it doesn't matter if we just go for spirituality in general.  Whatever the heck spirituality means.  We can just use that as a term for anything that's not really illegal or outstandingly immoral, and that doesn't relate to business or technology.  And just everything on that line is sort of religion or spirituality, because religion has too many rules, and spirituality doesn't.

A few years ago, this was called New Age, or the New Age movement.  You expected that religions were sort of different paths to the same ... well, I won't say "truth," because truth assumes that *some* things are *not* true, and that isn't exactly fair.  So we'll just say they're all different paths to spirituality, and spirituality, even though we don't know what it is, is a *good* thing.

New Age tended to be written with a capital N and a capital A, and as two words.  I tended not to capitalise anything, and to run the two words together, so that it became newage, which rhymed with sewage.  Which I thought was highly appropriate.

The thing is, if you go with this sort of new age mentality, you just accept everything.  And, as has been stated, if you keep your mind sufficiently open people will throw a lot of garbage into it.  And that seemed to happen with the New Age movement.  Everything was okay.  We just accepted everything.  Nothing was terribly bad.  There weren't any particular standards.  More like, maybe, guidelines.  Even "guidelines" might be a little too strong.  So maybe just suggestions.  Which you can sort of take or leave.

If we just accept anything, it doesn't really matter.  Well, If it doesn't really matter, then why bother about it?

You have to choose. 

We have chosen God.  We need to stick with that choice.  We need, ourselves, to follow God's will.  If we think we're following God's will, and God's will is one will, we can't have a number of different possible gods, and still come to any conclusions about what we should actually be doing. 

And remember that when I say "we," I really mean "I," and you should be hearing it as "I" for yourselves.  This is not about saying what *other* people should do, but what *we* should do.  Giving ourselves clarity.  Giving ourselves the best chance to actually determine what it is that God wants us to do.

I mean, it's not just logical, but inherently necessary. 

God is the creator of all, of everything.  If there are, somewhere, not only this universe, but in the entirety of reality as God created it, other powerful entities that we might be tempted to call gods, because they superior to, or more powerful than, us, well, they still were created by God.  The one *true* God.  If they are more powerful than we are, but *didn't* create everything, then that's not God.  So calling them gods, well, it says more about us than it does about them.

And if there are a bunch of "gods," that are more powerful than we are, but none of them actually created *everything*, well, what rights does that give them?  What precedence does that give them?  They are more powerful than we are, but that just makes them bullies.  In terms of worshipping them, if they aren't the true creator God, they aren't worth worshipping.

2 Corinthians 6:14

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

Okay, let's try another, well, maybe not commandment, but instruction or directive.  This is from the New Testament, and it's maybe a little bit iffy.  In second Corinthians, when it says that we should not be unequally yoked with unbelievers, most people seem to think that's saying you can't marry non-Christians.  Others disagree.  Elsewhere, of course, this idea of being married to non-believers is examined more explicitly.  But it also says, if you are married to a non-believer, and the non-believer doesn't want to get divorced, then you should stay married.  But, if you weren't married, you shouldn't marry a non-believer.

I think there's an awful lot of validity in that directive.  Marriage is hard work.  Marriage is great: don't get me wrong.  I'm a grieving widower.  I am grieving because my wife died; because my wife is no longer here; because I am alone.  It is not good for man to be alone.  Marriage is wonderful.  The best piece of non-advice that my father ever gave me was to say that marriage was the best thing that ever happened to him.  Marriage is definitely the best thing that's ever happened to me.  I am definitely in favour of marriage.

By and large, I don't believe in the concept of "the one and only."  And I think there's an awful lot to be said for arranged marriages sometimes.  And that if you choose to be married, and if you choose to love someone, that that can form the basis of a very strong marriage  Even so, I would still say that you should have some choice in the matter.

So in regard to the admonition against marrying non-believers, well, like I say, marriage is a lot of work.  Marriage is hard.  Marriage is a lot of hard work.  Marriage is difficult enough without having a basic and fundamental disagreement over the nature of reality.  I mean, you either believe in God or you don't.  You believe that God has first claim on our lives, and that following God's commands and will is the best thing for us, or you don't.  And if you disagree on that, you disagree, very fundamentally, about the nature of reality.  And that disagreement affect all kinds of other very fundamental axioms for life.  For example, the existence and validity of standards of morality.  What we should be doing with our lives.  Whether we, and our desires, are the sum total determiner of what we should be doing, or if there is something else that has a prior claim on what we do.  And how we think, and how we live.  If we do not agree on that fundamental basis, it's going to be an awful lot harder, making a marriage.  There is not going to be much of a meeting of minds if there is not that agreement between you. 

Now, there's another aspect of the law, and directives in general, that turns on this idea of the law being good for us.  But it's also interesting in terms of the prohibition against worshipping idols.

There's an awful lot of really great business advice in the Bible.  We seem to think that we have invented business management in the last couple of hundred years, or even in the last seventy years, by some reckoning.  But it's interesting to note that every twenty years, a really important business principle gets rediscovered.  That is, pay attention to people.  Now, God's been telling that for millennia, in fact.  But, every twenty years, somebody brings out a book that basically says the same thing, and it becomes a huge business hit, that people think has been discovered for the first time.  In the 1960s, there was "Theory X and Theory Y," which basically said, pay attention to your people.  Around 1980 there was the book "In Search of Excellence," which basically said, pay attention to your people.  Around the year 2000, Jules Pfeffer wrote "The Human Equation," which basically said, pay attention to people.  Are we beginning to see the pattern here?

God has been telling us that for millennia.  It's not new.  It shouldn't be news.  We should have been paying attention to it all the time.  But that's only one of the really great pieces of business advice that there is in the Bible.

And some of the business advice really goes against what we, very firmly, believe.  I ran a Men's Retreat where we took the theme of work, and used that.  We had different people talk about their professions and jobs, and what it was like being a Christian in that profession.  We had a keynote speaker who did a really bang up job of researching the Bible's attitudes to business and to work.  He did an exemplary job, and gave us a tremendous grounding on a Biblical basis and Biblical attitude to work, business, commerce, and so forth.  It was absolutely amazing.

The guys in the retreat hated it.  Because, you see, an awful lot of the Biblical statements and attitudes towards commerce are contrary to one of our big, unrecognised idols of the modern age.  And that is capitalism.

Capitalism has been very successful.  It has made us very productive.  It has made us richer.

But it's a false idol.  

It isn't Biblical.  It's really difficult to say that it's even neutral.  To prove that point, I give you the sabbatical year.  Oh, yes.  We are not only to keep the Sabbath day, but every seven years, we are to leave the ground fallow.  We are not to plough.  We are not to plant.  We are not to be efficient about this.  (And efficiency is another area to consider.)

No, we are to leave the fields alone.  We are to have faith.  We are to trust that God has given us enough, in the six years that we are allowed ploughing and planting, that we'll make it through a full year, and a little bit, more until we can again.  Once again, this is something that is probably good for us.  Leaving the ground fallow for a year, after six years of planting, lets it regenerate the soil.  Rebalance itself, without interference from us.  We tend to think that we're really good at managing productive resources, such as agricultural land.  But there's an awful lot of times that it becomes apparent that we just aren't as good as we think we are.  So, the sabbatical year is not only a command from God, it's a really good idea.  And we should do it.

But the sabbatical year isn't the *only* year that the land should lie fallow. There's the Year of Jubilee.  And the year of Jubilee goes a *lot* further.  The Year of Jubilee says that we are to forgive debt.  That we are to give back land that we have bought or obtained from other people.  That we can't actually buy somebody else's land.  We can just lease it.  It needs to go back to them every fifty years.

This is a huge no-no, in terms of capitalism.  It's ridiculous to expect people to give back property that they have legitimately bought and paid for.  I mean, how can you build up your savings?  Build up your stock?  Become richer?  If every fifty years we've gotta give an awful lot of it back?

Yeah, but that's the point.  Why do we need to pursue *that* much wealth?  If you had something, some productive field, some house, some business premises, to live in, to work in, to make money for you, for forty-nine year, well, why do you need to still keep it?  You've made money, you've gotten richer.  You've got a lot of money.  Why do you need to give it back, simply because that's what God says to do?

And once again, it's something that modern research indicates is actually a very good idea.  Not just in religious terms.  But in business terms, in terms of the entire economy  And, in terms of society, possibly even in terms of preventing war.

Recently, it has been rather firmly established that the one thing that capitalism is better at than making people productive, is concentrating wealth.  Unrestrained capitalism inherently, and almost inevitably, ensures that those who have get more, and those who don't have get poorer.  The rich get richer and the poor get children, as the song says.  And research has proven that it's not just a song lyric.  Capitalism creates inequity.  Inequity creates social instability.  And the Year of Jubilee would go a long way to fixing that: to rebalance society, every fifty years.

Philippians 4:8

In conclusion, brothers, focus your thoughts on what is true, noble, righteous, pure, lovable or admirable, on some virtue or on something praiseworthy.

There are other areas that maybe aren't commands, but are still very good advice.  There is Philippians 4:8.  That tells you, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, whatever is really good stuff, think on these things.  Now, it's probably fairly easy to see that this is good advice.  If we concentrate on the good; if we avoid thinking and dwelling on the bad; well, the power of positive thinking probably kicks in, and, whatever you think about Norman Vincent Peale, that's probably good advice.

Even if your life is not particularly good, and *my* life is not particularly good right now, being grateful for those things that *are* good; my garden, one particular friend who I converse with regularly every week, the fact that I have the second best view in Port Alberni; being grateful for these things is helpful in not sinking more deeply into depression.  It doesn't necessarily *fix* any of the problems, or mitigate my depression, but at least it doesn't make more problems.  And, of course, when I'm thinking about positive things; thinking about good things; I'm not dwelling on my problems and difficulties and suffering.  And so, at least it keeps the depression from getting any worse.  These days this is known as cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, or at least a part of it.  (Another one is the facial expression hypothesis, which is that simply *smiling*, whether you feel good or not, might make you feel better, or, at least, not feel worse.  It certainly makes *other* people feel better  :-)  You are distracting yourself from dwelling on the bad things by considering the good things.  Cognitive behavioural therapy is a big deal in psychology and counselling these days.

You probably don't need to be depressed to benefit from thinking about whatever is pure and whatever is lovely.  If you're thinking about those things, in any interactions that you have with other people, those tend to be the freshest, most current thoughts in your mind.  And therefore, those thoughts tend to be what comes to mind in whatever conversations happen when you encounter someone.  You'll be speaking of, and spreading, and reinforcing, pure things, admirable things, good things, noble things.  If you're constantly thinking of problems and troubles, that's what's probably going to come out in your conversation.  Which probably doesn't end up doing an awful lot of good for you, and for anyone around you.

I'm going to come back to the Philippians passage, but I have to make a wee bit of a digression before I finish up, here.  I didn't think of it when I first got the idea for this sermon, but, as I've collected these examples, I've noticed that all of the research supporting these examples is fairly recent.  Histology, the study of types of tissue, is a new field.  Nobody had ever dreamed of it in New Testament times, let alone two thousand years before when the law was given.  CBT is new.  Detailed concepts of business and economics is a new field.  So, for those who would claim that the Bible is just a religious text, and might have a few decent philosophical ideas, but doesn't actually have God behind it, because there *is* no God, I have a question.  How is it that this religious text had so many of these great ideas, supported by research that is mostly not more than a hundred years old, two and four thousand years ago?

OK, end of digression.  Let's get back to Philippians.

This passage in Philippians can be a little problematic in specific situations.  After Gloria died, basically, my life was over.  I wasn't so much rebuilding my life, as building an entirely new life.  I came up with lots of ideas and started pursuing different projects in different directions.  But I had *so* many possible projects, and so many ideas, that there was the question of which were the ones to concentrate on.  When I raised this issue with a friend, she immediately went to Philippians 4:8.

The thing is, that a number of the ideas that I had, and possible projects that I could have worked on, involved my professional career in information security.  Information security, of course, doesn't always involve security: an awful lot of the time it involves theft, and lying, and fraud, and all kinds of things that can, by no stretch of *anybody's* imagination, be considered pure, or noble, or lovely, or admirable.  That seemed to indicate that I should concentrate on other areas, and move away from what had been my professional life.  Especially since it was probably time for me to retire anyway.

Mind you, you don't just drop your professional life at the drop of a hat (and, when you're a consultant, this idea of "retirement" is a bit difficult, anyway).  You don't immediately dump years of researching and learning in this area, and a lot of my contacts, reading materials, and areas of interest were in security.  And so, while not concentrating on it, I was still noting items that related to areas that I had been researching, and that might have been possible projects for the future.

One of the ideas that I was working on, that I figured had a good chance of being noble, admirable, and pure, was this possibly rather silly project of writing sermons.  And there was one which, very shortly after I moved to Port Alberni, I felt very strongly moved to write.  I kept feeling that this was important, and that I was possibly being prompted.  And so I wrote it up.

But it didn't feel finished.  I wasn't happy with it.  I couldn't think of anything specifically wrong with it, but it just seemed to need more.  More what, I wasn't sure.  And then, one day, prompted by a throwaway comment at the end of somebody else's sermon, the extra material, and where are the sermon had to go, came to me, almost in an instant.

The thing was, it wasn't any particular Bible study.  And it wasn't anything profound that this other minister had said.  As I say, it was a throwaway comment, at the end of the sermon, a bit of a joke.  But it prompted a remembrance of a couple of the security projects which addressed areas that were definitely *not* pure.  They were areas of danger for society, and even for the church, as well as for individual Christians.  But they were concepts that came because of my work in the depths and darker places of information security.  And those two areas of research, which didn't have to do with anything pure, gave me the completion of the sermon that I was unhappy about.

It's very odd.  And it kind of works against my thesis for this sermon.  Maybe we can just say that it's evidence that God can use anything, even mistakes of ours, for our good.

And that all things, even what seem to us to be arbitrary and oddball religious laws, work together for good to those who love the Lord.

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