King Alfred ‘The Great’. c. 1815. Samuel Woodforde

We are horrible at arguing these days.  No one does it, or even tries to do it well and so no one is forced to do it, or compete to become better at it.  Most of what we deal with today are fallacies, which are basically cheap tricks to disguise the fact that we don’t know what we are talking about. Instead of responding to another person’s claims you can call them names, or attack a group they are associated with, or attack someone close to them, or make a joke, or you can just threaten them like the Muhammedans do.  Another strategy is to make appeals to emotion rather than actual arguments, this is all to common. “Give us money, it’s for the children.”  Or you can make a straw man which is creating something that looks like your opponent, but you design it in such a way that it is easy to destroy.  Obama is always doing this “some folks think the earth is flat.”  A form of this is just creating a whole army of straw men, or even a bunch of armies all fighting each other.  Then you can just throw up your hands at all the confusion as if the issues is now impossible because all these made up people are fighting in the first place.

Now argument is not all there is in the world.  There is a place for emotion and jokes and all of the rest.  But when it comes to people working out tough issues in communities, this is no way to behave. It is also no way to behave in understanding and proclaiming the word of God.  Now I don’t think the study and practice of God’s word is an argument, it is a story.  But when we make arguments about his word, in forming theology and preaching it to others, we should not use these cleverly devised tricks.

Satan loves the confusion trick.  Every time God does something, Satan comes along and creates a twisted copy or a bunch of copies.  He bends it just enough to cause confusion. God creates the church based on a martyr, Jesus Christ and so Satan creates a million false churches with a million false martyrs.  God creates his Word and Satan creates a bunch of false words.  God gives us commands for how to worship him and a million people create false worship. Satan even uses the truth in the mouths of the crazy to confuse the issue as in Acts 16:16-24.  Now this does not mean we abandon the Church or the Word or religion.  It just means we need to be more careful in distinguishing between the real and the false.  This is not a new concept or something due to sin, this is what we were made for, to make judgements, to choose between right and wrong.  Of course in the garden we grasped for more than we could chew, we wanted the knowledge to decide instantly instead of being given it on God’s schedule.  But the fact remains we were made to judge, we are like God and unlike the rest of creation, because we can chose.

Moses with the Ten Commandments. Philippe de Champaigne. c.1648

This applies to the Mosaic Law in two ways.  First a muddle surrounding the way in which we follow or don’t follow the law is no excuse for not sorting out the issues.  Just because some people worship the law and others misinterpret it in one way or another, does not mean the pursuit is pointless.  Far from it, good judgement is always praised in scripture, it is the virtue of leadership, it is the ultimate praise (Luke 7:43), it is our hope,  For one day God will judge every deed of every man and set everything in it’s place. But for now judgement is our task, which is the second reason for study of the law.  The Law is about helping us to make judgements.  It was a gracious gift from God.  We entered a world of sin a world in which we were not prepared to make the judgements that were required, so he gave us this help.  Without it we are just wandering in the wilderness with little hope, we are savages.

Christians have alway recognized various realms in which these judgements take place.  The first layer is individually. Then the corporate layers of the home, the Church and the civil government.  It is a patriarchal system because we worship a Heavenly Father.  The father makes judgements in the home, the elders make judgements in the Church and the civil magistrates make judgements for the state.  These elements were all combined in various ways in the Old Testament.  It is our duty to sort them out and apply them today. “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases” I Corinthians 6:2

God not only gave us the rules of the law, but he gave us stories of the law in action.  This is true of our lives individually and corporately, because this is the reality of our world.  We are given God’s commands in theory but then we actually have to make judgements and apply them to specific events in our lives.  This is how a case law system works.  This is the nature of the Mosaic Law and the basis of our British Common Law Tradition.  

King Alfred (849-99) submitting his laws to the Witan. John Bridges.

King Alfred, know as Alfred the Great was the founder of the law tradition which we in America follow to this day.  In the 880’s he basically applied the Mosaic civil law to his people the Anglo-Saxons.  And it carried down as a blessing to all the English speaking peoples of the world to this day.  A case law system is one in which there is a standard of law in place and a judge makes a decision about each particular person accused of a crime, based on that law.  In addition he can look back on past judgements for help in determining how best to judge in the current instance.  This is a very wise way to arrange a legal system.  Humans are imperfect and they often make mistakes, they can be corrupted and full of evil.  Comparing cases can spread the power around, divided between past and present judges.  It can add a layer of objectivity as you look back on cases of people you know nothing about, you can be more objective.  But that does not excuse this system from being corrupt.  And that is the case with our legal system and the legal system of Jesus day.  But that is a case for another day.

The Daughters of Zelophehad. Illustration from The Bible and Its Story Taught by 1000 Pictures. c. 1908

I was struck recently by this case law system in action in Numbers 36.  The Law of Moses was designed to keep land in the family.  Land was livelihood, without it one tribe could be wiped out by another.  God told Moses to distribute the land to the 12 tribes by lot before they conquered it.  This is mentioned in Joshua and Numbers. Land was passed down to the male heirs, and the firstborn got a double share.  So those were the rules.  Then in Numbers 27 the daughters of Zelophehad brought their case to Moses and said “wait a minute, our father had no sons so does that mean our family doesn’t get any land?”  Moses took it to God and God told him that the daughters get the land.  Ok, fine.  But later in Numbers 36, the heads of households of this family brought another case to Moses.  Now that the daughters had the land, if they married someone from another tribe, then the land would would be passed down to that tribe.  Moses said according to the word of the Lord, apparently he went to God again, that these men were right.  From then on the daughters of Zelophehad and all daughters with land, were not allowed to marry men from other tribes.  You can see how these cases brought to light the reality of following God’s rules.  Essentially the Law was changed or clarified in practical ways and it was binding for the future.  Now, God knew this would happen, he could have just piled up these laws in the beginning, but he chose to let men be part of the process, because his goal is not a perfect system of rules.  His goal is to teach us to judge rightly.  And he repeated the same thing in the New Testament.  Jesus spoke and gave us the proper way of interpreting the Old Testament, and then he gave us some new commands.  Then in the whole book of Acts we see the Disciples applying those rules to new situations.  One of the prime examples of this is the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15.  This council would set the pattern for determining orthodox doctrine by further councils.

So, we are called to think through all of scripture and apply it to our specific cases:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. -St. Paul to Timothy

And we don’t have to do the work alone. Women have husbands, families have the Church elders and even the world has the civil magistrates.  They are all in positions to judge.  They are all called to sort out the law standard and apply it to their particular situations.  They can judge by the standard of scripture or some other man-made standard.  But all judge.  It is unfortunate when even teaching elders of the Church, throw up their hands and lament the mess rather than using all the tools God has given us in the Old Testament. If we don’t judge rightly who will?  Satan of course!  He his happy to come in and fill the void with his standard.  He has been doing it since the beginning.  Shall we let him continue?  I don’t think so.  So, get to work!

Further Reading:  The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky