God of Grace

God's got too many rules. 

It's an objection you'll hear from many seekers...and an affirmation from many of the faithful. So often, when we talk about what it means to be a Christian, we're talking about the do's and don'ts, the things God wants from us and the rules He's laid out. 

We go back to the Ten Commandments, to Leviticus, to all the weird rules about not mixing two different types of fabric in our clothing. As much as we want to look back at the way that the Jewish leaders really overdid themselves in making hundreds of fine points and adding tones of tiny print to the laws of God, here we are overdoing like we've never overdone before - God hates this sin, but this other one is forgivable, but don't ever do this thing...or that one. 

The truth is that the only way any of us navigates all the "rules" that we think have been placed on our faithfulness is by claiming that we understand them in all of their nuances, by pretending that our understanding of what God really wants is the same thing we think about it. 

How convenient!

The Bible does say, after all, that "this is what the Lord requires of you," but if you're about to answer that question by saying, "live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly," then you should know that the very same phrase is used in Deuteronomy, and it doesn't end quite like that. 

And yet, for all the talking that we do about the law, about the rules, about what God "requires" of us, we're missing the point of the Christian faith - the Christian faith that centers not exclusively on the God that we come to know through the pages of Scripture, but on the Christ who actually came and walked with us in the flesh. 

John introduces the difference well: 

Moses gave you the law, but Jesus came with grace and truth (1:17). 

And all of a sudden, it's no longer about what God requires of us (which is not to say that He does not still have standards nor expectations); rather, it is about what God has come to give us. 

God has come to give us that thing that our sin led us to seek from the very beginning - truth. When Eve broke the fig off the tree in the Garden, that's what she was looking for, the serpent having convinced her that God was holding out on her. Now, here is Christ, coming to give us the very fruit we thought we already ate and reveal to us the truth. 

Not just that, but He also gives us the grace to handle it. Because once we take this fruit, once we know the real truth, it really puts into perspective how much that tree - and that serpent - really lied to us, and we wonder, how will we ever live with ourselves? Not just with ourselves, but how will we live with God? 

So at the very same moment that God brings us the truth, He comes living with us so that we understand it's not about us figuring out how to live with Him; He's already here, living with us, and this...is grace. It's the grace to forgive ourselves as Christ has forgiven us and to get out of the mindset that there are rules to follow, rules we've already broken, rules we are still breaking right now...

...because Christ isn't about the rules. He's about truth and grace. 

And that is how we should live. 

That is what God requires of us.