Did we receive a new law, a new set of rules from God when we followed Jesus? Or do we continue to look back to the Ten Commandments, to the laws that God has given us and follow those? Should we follow all of the Jewish laws? Or maybe, instead, none of them? This is a little confusing…
Paul explains to Timothy that there will be people who will come and teach others to abandon the freedom that we have been given in Christ. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus opened the door for us to live for him, to live freely without being burdened by the written law, yet there will be those who will come to tell us and teach that we have received rules and laws that we must follow:
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
1 Timothy 4:1-5
But wait, do we not have to follow the rules that God has made for his people? Or, maybe instead, did Jesus give us a new law that we have to follow?
What are the rules???!!!???
To answer this, let’s spend a moment to think about what Jesus has done for us. Through his death and resurrection, he opened the way for us to be reconciled back to God. He is the perfect sacrifice for our sins and he is the life in which we can place our faith so that we also may live, live forever with him, an eternal life.
But as we stand before God, the way that we are identified by God as having been reconciled back to him is that we have been given the Holy Spirit. As we believe and place our faith in Christ’s death and resurrection, saving us from God’s wrath and punishment, he gives us his Holy Spirit and we become the “temple”, the dwelling place for the Spirit of God. As God looks at each of us, he either sees his Spirit within us, or he does not. He either sees that we have been sealed in him by the Spirit for eternal life, or he does not.
It is this life by the Holy Spirit that makes all of the difference. As the Spirit comes within me, he changes me. Both in that singular moment of salvation where my fundamental priorities are changed as well as over the rest of my life where I learn to live out that change that God has made in me. The Spirit changes me so that I can learn to live this new life that God has given to me.
Jeremiah described this work that God has done within us as he talked about a new covenant that God would make with his people. He specifically refers to the people of Israel in this passage, but this can also be understood to describe God’s relationship with the rest of us Gentiles – non-Jews – as well:
“The days are coming,” declares the LORD,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the LORD.“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
Jeremiah 31:31-33
after that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
The people of Israel had broken the Lord’s covenant. The covenant that God had made with his people was that if they, his people, would obey his commandments, God would be their God and they would be his people.
But that didn’t happen. The Israelites did not keep God’s covenant. They didn’t obey God’s commandments.
So God makes a new declaration. He declares that the Israelites had broken his covenant and that covenant is no longer in force. Instead, God will make a new covenant with his people. It will be a type of “new” Israel. Not in the ethnic sense, nor in the national sense of the Israel. But in a spiritual sense.
This new covenant won’t be a covenant based on the laws that God will have written down and given to his people. No, instead, it will be a covenant based on the laws that God will write onto their minds and their hearts.
No, not on pen on paper. Not words etched into stone tablets. This law willl be placed in their minds and on their hearts.
How is that possible?
This is the nature of the work that God does within us by his Spirit. The Spirit of God makes us come spiritually alive before God and God identifies us as his own. By his Spirit, we are identified as God’s people. Not by his laws and keeping the laws that have been written down, but instead by keeping the “laws” of the Spirit that have been written on our hearts and minds.
This seems nearly impossible to understand. If God hasn’t written down his laws for me to follow, how can I know what to do? This is where we need to understand the difference that it makes that we produce the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
What do we mean when we talk about the fruit of the Holy Spirit? Since we have the Spirit of God within us, we should be guided and act throughout our lives, living by the Spirit. So therefore, these characteristics should be consistently evident in our lives:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23
If I claim to be a believer in Christ, and I believe I should, therefore, have the Holy Spirit living within me, I should be regularly asking myself: Am I showing love in this situation, with this person, right now? Do have an attitude of joy? Or peace? Am I demonstrating self-control? These are questions that I can easily ask myself to understand whether or not I am listening to, and living by, the Holy Spirit living within me.
But let’s also notice that last sentence: Against such things there is no law.
If we are living by the work of the Holy Spirit within our lives, we are, for example, loving other people. If I am loving other people, what does that look like?
I’m not jealous of them or trying to take advantage of them.
I’m not stealing from them.
I’m not lying to them.
I’m not trying to hurt or kill them.
Those are all basic commandments from the law. Just by truly loving another person, I am therefore, naturally, fulfilling the law. I don’t need the law because I am already doing what the law says to do. And that is just in talking about the fruit of love. We haven’t even yet started to talk yet about how our lives would change if we were to demonstrate joy, peace, patience, kindness, or any of the other fruits of the Spirit.
Let’s return, then, back to Paul’s original statement to Timothy, urging him to understand, and subsequently tells him to keep teaching, that people should remain within the freedom that they were given in Christ. By remaining in Christ, they remain free. The law no longer rules over them because they have, in Christ, died to it. They are no longer subject to the law. They have a new life, under the new covenant, with the law written on their minds and their hearts, the “law” of the Spirit that produces the fruit of the Spirit, thus needing no law.
Paul says, though, that those that will come and teach about the things that they shouldn’t eat, or shouldn’t touch, or shouldn’t do, are demonic. Wow! Why such a strong statement?
Paul is so direct and so strong about this because these teachings attempt to neuter or nullify the work of God through Christ on the cross. Jesus gave the ultimate sacrifice, the most precious gift imaginable. He is himself God and yet he gave his life, taking the sins of all men upon himself. He is life and yet, without deserving death, died in our place.
And so now, therefore, Paul is now declaring that it is demonic to deny the power of Christ’s death and resurrection by teaching and claiming that the way to be redeemed back to God is by following some rules. That is what it means that we must obey the law: We must follow the rules so that God will be pleased with us and let us into heaven.
Paul is urging Timothy to continue to encourage each person to remain in their faith in Christ and not fall back into these old patterns of being subject, in fact of being slaves, to the rules. He is urging Timothy to encourage the church to continue to follow Christ, having been set free from the law, having been set free from sin and death, and most importantly, having been given the Holy Spirit through which they would produce the fruit of the Spirit, thus not only fulfilling the requirements of the law as they go forward, but so much more.