The Law of Love (Part 1)

“Brush your teeth . . . clean up your room . . . go to bed . . . eat your veggies . . . don’t play with matches . . . be nice to your sister . . . don’t play in the street . . . do your homework . . . respect your elders . . . use your manners . . . be home by midnight . . . you better not sass your mother!”  Do you remember all those rules and regulations your parents seemed to constantly lay on you?  And the older we got the more we seemed to resent them.  I remember wanting to say, “Why can’t you just back off and let me live my own life? Who needs all those dumb rules anyway?”

Strangely enough, though, when I became a parent I found myself saying the same things to my kids.  That’s when I began to understand why mom and dad used to give me all those directives – because they loved me and cared about the kind of adult I would become.  Setting parameters for my children is one of the primary ways in which I demonstrate my love and commitment to their wellbeing.  Let’s face it - if we don’t really care about our children we certainly wouldn’t be willing to fight the constant battle of trying to teach them the basic things of life.  We’d just leave them to themselves without much concern regarding their quality of life.

Ultimately, parents try to protect their kids from themselves and from the dangers of life.  Young children are incapable of understanding the difference between right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, appropriate behavior and inappropriate behavior.  They need to be taught how to take care of themselves, how to relate to other people in appropriate ways, how to make sound decisions, that real love has to be tough sometimes, etc., etc.  When they become adults they’ve hopefully learned how to function as responsible members of society.

If all of this is true of the human family, it only makes sense that it’s even truer of God’s family.  At one point in history God chose a specific group of people through whom he would specifically reveal himself to all of mankind – the Jews.  When he first introduced himself to the descendants of Jacob (also called Israel), he was in the process of leading them out of slavery in Egypt.  It is estimated that there were between three and six million of them at that time.  Except for a few stories handed down by their parents and grandparents, most of them didn’t know very much about God.  So to help them understand him he gave them 613 laws and regulations.  Moses told the people several time, “If you are careful to keep all these laws God will bless you.  But if you do not keep them he will curse you.”  Most folks have heard of the first 10 laws – the Ten Commandments.  That left 603 instructions that included personal hygiene, diet, marriage and family, animal husbandry, hospitality, financial management, and lots of other topics.

But why in the world would God give his people all those rules?  Is he just a cosmic control freak who wanted to produce endless frustration for the very people that he’d rescued out of total bondage?  And was he so naïve way back then as to really think mankind would actually obey all those rules?  Of course not.  It was all because of love.  Isn’t that what we tell our kids today?  “The only reason I’m saying or doing this is because I love you.”

So what do all God’s laws have to do with us today?  Are we still blessed or cursed on the basis of whether or not we obey the 613 rules?  You’ll find out in Part 2. ( Coming soon...)

Derryck McLuhan

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