God's Rules

If you live in the human world, you know there are rules...and then there are the real rules, which may or may not actually be written. 

If you have siblings, you probably know this all too well. 

If you had a label in school - whether that was as gifted and talented or as a troublemaker - you also know it. 

If you watch the news, you definitely know it. 

This world is full of rules, of rights and wrongs, of things that we think ought to be non-negotiable, and yet, we see those rules broken and bent every day. We see folks getting away with the unthinkable. 

It makes it really hard to know who to trust. It makes it really hard to know what to do. It makes it really hard to know what risks to take and which ones to avoid. It can make it really hard to be consistent because when you feel like the world isn't consistent, then you feel like what's expected of you can change from day to day...or from attitude to attitude...or for no reason at all, at least not one you can figure out. 

If your parent, spouse, brother, sister, coworker, boss, company, local law enforcement, doctor, whoever changes the rules however they see fit whenever they see fit, it's hard to know how to live. 

But that's never the case with faith. 

Because God doesn't follow unwritten rules (Mark 7:5). 

This was a point of tension between Jesus and the Pharisees. See, for thousands of years, the people of God had the rules. They had the instructions that God had wanted to give them, and they had passed those down through generations. But also through those generations, the religious elite had spent their energies expanding the rules, clarifying them, making a bunch of sub-rules and expecting others to follow them. 

It's how there ended up being literally hundreds of very detailed guidelines about how to keep the Sabbath. 

So then Jesus comes in, and He simply follows God's rules, not all the little unwritten rules that men had added to it, and the Pharisees get upset. "Why don't your disciples do the 612 things we've prescribed them to do?" 

I can almost see Jesus rolling His eyes. 

This kind of honesty, this kind of straightforwardness, this transparency that we have from God - that He has rules, He's told us the rules, and He follows exactly those rules - is exactly what we need if we are ever to be able to trust Him. He's not like the world that we live in; He's steadfast. The rules are the rules, and they are right there for everyone to see and to know and to live by and to trust. There's nothing unwritten, no place where those rules bend except under the weight of the Cross. That's it. 

And that's one of the things that makes Him a God worth worshiping.