I was on a drive with my son discussing despair. How those who do not have a wife and kids or family — some couples don’t have kids, but they do have family — end up being bitter. The men drink or become vagrants. The women have cats, travel, and support causes, that may not help them. Both die younger than they ought.
In general, life has consequences, and if you don’t do things at about the right age something is wrong. We all expect our children to walk at around one and speak at around two. we know that child development occurs in a certain order.
This natural law is good, for it means creation is predictable. It means we can understand enough of the weather patterns to predict it will not rain on this day with a degree of accuracy. It means we have science and the applied sciences.
And if you deny the law, it does not matter: the falling tree falls unwitnessed. It is a sign of the perversion of this generation that we consider that we can deny the law at all.
1Do you not know, brothers and sisters — for I am speaking to those who know the law — that the law is binding on a person only during that person’s lifetime? 2Thus a married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives; but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning the husband. 3Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress.
4In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.
7What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. 9I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived 10and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. 11For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. 12So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.
What is the use of preaching the law? It will not save us. It will not help our self esteem. It will not make us comfortable. For it is akin to a plumb line indicating what is straight, but we are crooked. It is a level, but our lives are like the mountains.
We cannot meet the standard of the law of God, even in its more broken form as the law of nature.
And when we deny this, we become stupid.
What the law does is bring us to shame. Shame leads us either to despair or repentance. And repentance brings us to Christ.
Without our fall and failure, Christ did not need to die. But from Adam until now, we have all chosen to follow our instincts in a fallen time, and then put the blame on others. We have not lived for those around us. We promote evil, and we would corrupt the law so it does not bear witness against us.
But the law of God stands regardless. Ignore it at your peril. Rather confess that you have sinned, confess your sins to God and those you have offended, and turn again to Christ.