Not Faith
“But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.”
I have often heard people complain about Christianity as a downer of rule following. I used to respond with defensiveness and say something like: "The rules help us to live the way we were made." While that is true, I think they were on to something. I think they were seeing that something more than rule following is required to make life work.
This passage talks about that. The two terms are "law" and "faith." The law was a technical term to refer to all the rules of following God established in the covenant of the Old Testament. These were the behaviors required to be in a right relationship with God. God's people never quite obeyed these rules. In fact, Jesus' brother James said as much at the counsel of Jerusalem in the Book of Acts. While the law was meant to be an expression of our right relationship with God, it was quickly reduced to a plan for doing things right in God's eyes.
For this reason, Paul writes that the law is indeed not faith. It has become control or technology. The law is a formula that if we manage it, we will be able to control our own destiny and salvation and this is the case for all religious rule making. This wasn't the purpose of the law initially. The law was given out of covenant as a delineation between our neediness and God's righteousness. The law was always descriptive and kin esthetic. Through the living out of the law we learned through the living the character and nature of God, but after the epic fail in Israel, when the people were taken from the land, it became a tool so that exile would never happen again. Then when the heart of the law was realized (subconsciously) to be impossible, it went to surface behaviors. At the end of the day, it lost its initial purpose as a means to describe and put in stark contrast God's holiness and our need of Him. It became about control. Control is the opposite of faith. If we have the tools, technology and skills then we don't need God...it is not faith but a recipe for righteousness that cooks up to disappointment every time.
How do you live by faith? How will you live by faith today?
