One of the issues we have with the law is that it can be seen as a structure that allows us to be righteous, and we deceive ourselves. The risk is that we will think that if we pray the liturgy or do this work it will account for salvation,

Which was the law of Moses. If you do this — all of this — you will live. James reduces it to things relating to three things that are antithetical: sexual immorality, the minimal dietary rules, and avoiding idols. Paul advised people to buy their meat from the market and ask not how it was killed, since much sold was a byproduct of pagan sacrifice.

But the point of this is that our salvation does not rely on anything we do, but on the work of Christ on the cross, completed in resurrection. What we do now matters: for it is a witness.

And all the assembly fell silent, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles. After they finished speaking, James replied, “Brothers, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name. And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written,

	“‘After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins,  and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old.’
	
	Therefore my judgement is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood. For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues.”

(Acts 15:12-21 ESV)

The law leads to a false sense of righteousness and to a sense of justification. It also, when combined with sentimentality, leads to grievous and great errors.

Ben Kingsley plays a very bad rabbi: who justifies what he is doing within his legalism (and he gets more than his just deserts at the end of the movie, for unlike Philip Pullman the writers of Lucky Number Seven understand plot). Well, fiction can give us examples. To quote John C Wright [1]:

What worries me is that the pagans have rediscovered the law and are trying to make it work in some kind of justification of their lives. Yes, they use projection: they look for small flaws in our lives and then scream loudly and long that Something must be done. As if this is novel. It is how the NSDAP got euthanasia approved: firstly, they got soft-hearted atheists to write sentimental books where the life not worth living was nobly crushed by the hero, then they got the women of Germany to write to the Führer asking for a merciful death for little Johann, then the Führer started gassing the disabled in the asylums [2].

It is not merely Moses and the legal glosses of the Talmudic scholars — for Judaism is the religion of the Pharisees, who (as Christ said) sit on the seat of Moses — that we need to worry about. Rabbi Stern in the movie is fictional. And the Law of Moses is righteous.

If we could keep it: we cannot.

It is the laws of the neopagans, which make the laws of Moses look liberal, and where the exaltation of spirituality and ritual allow for the most evil of acts to be covered, searing the conscience, denying the work of the Holy Spirit, in the hope that this will damn the deluded congregation who has been led into this falsehood by those who use the power of religion while denying its very existence.

Such as Pullman: his book may be irreligious, but is saturated with the decaying resonances of liberal Anglicanism: the culture of Cathedral Choir and evensong. As Wright says, he cannot even write a good blasphemy: turn instead to Fritz Leiber or John Milton.

And not let your spiritual disciplines and the good you do, even the obedience of the law and what is right and proper deceive you. All these things are good. But they do not expunge our sins.

That work was done on the cross.

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1. The quote from Wright is a screenshot of my kindle version of transhuman and subhuman. Well worth it.

2. Some Catholic and Protestant psychiatrists refused to do this. They were threatened with everything from a loss of job to joining their patients in the death truck. They continued to stand against this. When Euthanasia rules exist, then the church must not obey them, and you need to choose to get help from church organisations that will not sacrifice your loved ones to Moloch or the Volk.