God's wonderful law

When I browse skeptical websites, I get the idea that the law of God as expounded in the Old Testament (at greatest length in Deuteronomy), is mostly about the eating or non-eating of prawns, and killing people. So much for the fruits of free thinking and rational inquiry.

When I have the pleasure of reading God's wonderful law, I find a book so rich and practical for the problems of everyday life. As a book of case law it is not comprehensive in the sense of describing every possible scenario (which is what legalists want). Rather, it is varied and full in demonstrating how righteousness, love and wisdom combined to deal with the realities of daily living in God's glorious but now fallen world.

There we find the rich and the poor, the worker and the idle, the prospering and the down-and-out. There is the aggressor and the aggrieved; the judge who is tempted to twist justice; the man surprised by circumstances and the man deliberately plotting evil. There are the young children, the soon-to-be-adults, the newly-married, the long-married, the widowed, the single, the old and the dying. And so on.

It is said that "everything old is new again". Many situations in life surprise us with their complexity. There's always a new twist on an old conundrum. And yet, the more I read, the more I found that God knew it all already, and gave us the guidance we needed - we just didn't know it. How many issues have we had to wrestle through the out-workings of; how many temptations have sought to lead us astray; how many times have we suspected that we've done wrong by someone else... and it was all there, all the time, in God's law, explaining to us how to relate to our neighbour/wife/son/employee/etc., in a loving, generous, righteous and merciful way.

Sorry, skeptics - I'll take God's liberating law any time over the man-made tyranny of a new law being passed every 3 hours (or 2,700 new laws every year) into which our rejection of God's wisdom has been plunging us in recent times. The law of God can be read in a single sitting. There's not enough hours in the average day to read the laws that were passed during it - and what of those passed before you started the exercise? If I and the secularist each get to enjoy a good prawn curry after reading the laws of our preferred Lord, then the secularist will die of starvation. I shall be tucking into the second course and thanking God for it before he's got past the pre-amble.