Honest Repentance: Law
Notes
Transcript
Mark Twain once saw a man shot in the street. It gave him bad dreams. He says that he dreamt over and over again that some idiot had put a large family Bible on the old man’s chest to help him, but it only made it harder for him as he labored to breathe. Twain then remarks, “In my nightmares, I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night.” (1 Harriet Elinor Smith ed., Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 158.)
As we enter a season of repentance, we need first to come to terms with what we think of the Bible, particularly of God’s law. If we think of a Bible as a book of arbitrary rules and boundaries that systematically restricts our humanity, crushing the life out of us like an anvil on our chest, then it’s going to be really hard to engage in anything like repentance. If we are honest with ourselves, we’d end up with resentment, more likely. Sure, we can try to act like good Christians and conform externally to the demands of God’s law, but if we are not convinced in our hearts that this way of life is what humans look like when we are thriving, then we run the risk of accumulating bitterness and resentment over time. At some point, we may even ask ourselves, “Was is worth it?”
But the creation account in Genesis 1 encourages us to think of God’s law not as a heavy burden, but as a set of boundaries that open up space for life to flourish. Take day two of creation, for example. God separates the waters from the waters. He installs the sky to keep the waters above away from the waters below. This space is where life flourishes. As the account continues, God fills the space with land, with plants, with fish and birds and land animals, and finally with Adam and Eve. If God had not established the boundary, then we would have nothing but watery chaos. Maybe the fish would be ok, but the rest of us wouldn’t have a chance.
Since we are created in the image of God, we imitate this boundary making activity in many aspects of our lives. We build houses, which are like little artificial skies that keep the waters away from us. We clean those houses, which is another way we try to impose order on our environments and keep chaos at bay so that we can have a space to live. And likewise, the rules we impose are, hopefully, designed to keep danger and chaos at a minimum. “Don’t play in the street.” That’s not an arbitrary exercise of capricious parental power. It’s meant to keep our children safe.
God’s laws are precisely this kind of boundary. The fifth commandment, for example, “You shall not murder,” sets a boundary on human behavior that prevents chaos in society. If you remove that rule from human consciences and societies, what would daily life be like? You would have to be suspicious of every stranger. You would have to be on your guard at all times, ready to fight or flee. You could have no pleasant interactions outside your immediate family. If you step out into the world, you step into a chaos that would exhaust and overwhelm you.
Or to return to the example of our houses, what would happen if we took the view that the structure of our houses is arbitrary and overly restrictive? I don’t like the fact that my kitchen window separates me from the outdoors, so I break it! I don’t like the fact that a wall in my house prevents me from going where I want to go, so I knock it down. That went pretty well, so I will take out another wall. Oops, that one was load bearing. Pretty soon the rain is pouring in, and I am sitting in a pile of rubble.
The ashes on Ash Wednesday are a sign that we as the human race have wrecked our homes. God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his face the breath of life. But when Adam and Eve broke God’s command, God pronounced the curse, “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” He reversed the original creation by taking back the breath of life and leaving Adam to revert to the earth from which he was taken. It’s a kind of poetic justice. “You don’t like the way I put you together? Then I will take you apart.” And that is the situation of every one of us. Our bodies are the houses that we destroy because of sin. The ashes remind us that we all labor under that curse that turns us into rubble.
There are some sins for which the rubble is obvious. An addict, for example, most likely knows that he is ruining his own life, even if he can’t find the strength to break free on his own. But more likely, sin is more subtle than this. We have to listen to the hints that life gives us, hints that something is not right.
From the outside, John looked like he had the perfect life. He was married with two kids. He had a good job and a spacious home. Everything was going his way. But none of these things filled the emptiness and vague sense of longing that he had. It was as if he had some sort of wound in the core of his being. He lived, in Thoreau’s words, a “life of quiet desperation.”
A sense of emptiness is a hint that all is not well. It is a hint that our decisions and our achievements have pulled us out of step with the way that God designed the universe, and us. Honest repentance is coming to terms with those things that pull us out of step with God. It means admitting that we have done this, that we are like this, and it means desiring to put that away and to live more and more in the space where life can flourish.
But this is a really big problem to grapple with, and we don’t have the resources to fill our own emptiness, much less to overcome death and condemnation. So, as we approach Easter, we also recall that our Savior talks about a house. Not just a house, a temple. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it” (Jn 2:19). The temple he was referring to was not the temple in Jerusalem, but the temple of his body. He took our place under the ancient curse and allowed his own body to return to dust. Well, not quite all the way to dust. On the third day he raised it and restored life and immortality to the human race.
As we wait for that day, it is this hope that makes honest repentance possible.