God is Lawless

When we read the Old Testament, we read a lot of rules. Laws, they tell us. Everything about what to eat, what kind of fabrics to wear, how to deal with mildew in the house, what to do about your neighbor's donkey. And on and on the list goes. And our interpretations over the many years have told us this is "God's law." 

But it's not. 

It's not God's law because 1) God doesn't have a law. God doesn't need a law. These are not the rules that we follow because these are the rules God follows. God doesn't need rules about fabrics or mildews or biological human realities. 

And it's not God's law because 2) God doesn't need the law to save us. There's not some magical amount of following all of these rules that suddenly makes us acceptable to God. 

Paul says, in his letter to the Romans, that through Christ, God's righteousness has been made known to men apart from the law (3:21). Which means the law might have taught us something about God once upon a time, but the Son of God taught us more. 

It means that even if we had never had the law, Christ still would have shown us what we were missing. Which, by the way, we were still missing even with the law. 

It means that God's righteousness is enough to reveal Him to us. Without a bunch of rules. Without a bunch of regulations. Without us tiptoeing around a bunch of do's and don'ts. 

In fact, there is no tiptoeing with Christ. There is lining the streets and shouting out amidst the crowds and cutting holes in strangers' roofs and bursting into dinner parties uninvited with jars of nard and pushing unclean through the crowds for a chance just to touch Him. 

All of those things (and more), by the way, that would completely not be allowed by the law. 

But again, the law was never the thing. 

Love was. 

So if you're stuck in a faith that's trying to do things "by the book," there's nothing wrong with starting there. But flip a few pages forward and find the greater revelation. 

Because God's righteousness is even more revealing than His rulebook. And that's the kind of thing you can truly build a life on.