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V. THE LAW IN OUR HEARTS

So, we are obeying the law in action, but our hearts were far from God. What was God's proposed solution? We get an answer through the Prophet Jeremiah:

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

God's solution was to write the law into our hearts, so that nobody would need to ask or teach the law, it would simply be understood. We wouldn't need interpretation, and we wouldn't want to disobey, because it would be in our very nature. God's desire was for all of us to look at the law as the Psalmist did:

O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. (Psalms 119:97)

Christ says that he's not come to destroy the law, or prophets, but to fulfill (Matthew 5:17). This obviously contains the message that he's come to fulfill the promises that were contained within Scripture about his coming. But, in this is also the promise to bring the law itself to its fullness, by freeing us from the written law to the spiritual law, as Paul would say, or by writing the law in our hearts, as Jeremiah would say.

Once we've become followers of Christ, and he's sent us the Spirit (John 14:16), we ought to be able to say that we've got the law written in our hearts. The law, meaning the spiritual law, which is to love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. So, you may be saying to yourself, "that's an impossible standard." Well, be cautious with the notion that you can claim to be filled to the brim with the all-powerful divine love, and still state that obedience to the spiritual law is impossible. In fact, Jesus addresses this directly, when he's questioned about the high standards he's given:

And they that heard it said, Who then can be saved? And he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God. (Luke 18:26-27)

There is obviously forgiveness of sin under Christ, but there's also a call to change who we are. If you want to claim to be a follower of Christ, you need to seek to imitate Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), you need to obey his Commandments (John 14:15), and you need to walk in his footsteps (1 John 2:6, 1 Peter 2:21). Fortunately for us, all of these are stating the same thing, because Christ demanded that his followers obey his Commandments, and he lived his Commandments out in everything he did, so to obey his Commandments was to imitate him. The Bible is simultaneously extraordinarily complex, being one of the (if not the) most self-referential things ever written, and childishly simple.

There are 613 Commandments that are observed by Jews within the Torah, these are said to all stem from the original 10 Commandments. Christ tells us that these 10 are summarized in just 2 fundamental laws. Then Paul and James come and summarize those 2 into 1. They both summarize the law as "love your neighbor as yourself," but why is this? Have they excluded the other great Commandment, to love the Lord your God with everything you have because they don't regard God? God forbid; no, the idea is that you absolutely cannot love your neighbor as yourself without also loving God. This brings us back to the beginning of the Bible and this book: humans are created in the image of God. Thus, a pre-requisite to loving humans as they're meant to be loved is to love them as representations of God. Every human you look at ought to point you to their origin, which is with God. This is why we can summarize everything as "love your neighbor as yourself." This is why James calls it "The Royal Law," and we can see in his word the need to recognize people's status as images of God in his words:

If ye fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well: But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors. (James 2:8-9)

James calls on us to avoid having "respect to persons," and what he means by this is to value some people more than others. He makes this clear by giving us an example of offering a well-dressed man a good chair, but offering a poor man a footstool (James 2:2-3). We're not to take notice of people's status, but we're to treat everyone as fundamentally human, that is, as representations of God.

If we're going to discuss loving others as much as ourselves, it's worthwhile to try and understand how it is we're supposed to regard ourselves. Christ tells us that a man is defiled by what comes out of his mouth (Mark 7:20), but this is in a context of telling us that we will be accountable for the things that come out of us. He tells us that what is outside our body is not what's important, but the status of the heart. So, as far as how we're to regard ourselves, it's with a very close watch on where our hearts lie.