Experience Intimacy with GodSample

The Reason for the Law

People often think that God is mad at us because of our sins, and that He will punish us for them. They read the Old Testament and think:

"Wow, God is really wrathful."

But everything that God did in the Old Testament, He did out of love.

People lived completely in sin, for which they didn’t have to give an account. For there was no law, so the people didn’t know that what they did was against the will of God and that they lived in darkness.

But then God came with ‘Moses and the Law.’

Paul writes in Romans 7:13 about the law:

‘Has then what is good become death to me? Certainly not! But sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good [the law], so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful.’

As we can see, the law was given to set boundaries, so that people would become aware of their miserable state. And so that they would realize that they need a Savior. The law brought out sin in man because it made visible what kind of evil things that they did which fell outside of God's boundaries.

When He created man, God never had the intention to have us all be lost. God is love. That sometimes doesn’t seem to align with the God who dealt harshly with the Jewish people, but He had to make them see that what they did and how they lived was far below His standard. They had to be woken up.

Otherwise, there would never have been a virgin left to have the Savior be born from.

More than that, people would never have known that they even needed to be redeemed at all.

What God did in the Old Testament, God did out of love and out of grace. He is not an angry God. He doesn’t desire us to be perfect or demand that we first become good enough to be allowed in His presence.

No, God loves you and me so much that He does everything He can to clear the way to Him.