Much could be said under the heading I've given this post. Certainly one could launch into a disquisition on the 10 commandments, but I simply want to jot down a few perspectives I have "bumped into" during the last few days. In a 1991 book titled How My Mind Has Changed, various theologians gave their answer to the book's title. Elizabeth Achtmeier, then adjunct professor of Bible and homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, titled her response: "Renewed Appreciation for an Unchanging Story." After recapping the Biblical story, she wrote:
God's guidance in the new life is pure grace, given out of his love for us. Heaven knows our society is unable to instruct us about how to live the Christian life; society is still lost in the willfulness of its own sinful ways and knows nothing of God's way. Apart from God's continuing guidance, we do not know how to live. But God, in his incredible mercy, wants it "to go well with us," as Deuteronomy puts it. God wants us to have abundant life. God wants us to have joy. And so in love he gives us directions to point the way to wholeness, life, and joy. (p. 45)
A few days earlier, I had been browsing in a book I had read years ago, The Suicide of Christian Theology by John Warwick Montgomery. In this compilation of essays and articles on various themes, I had appreciated his reflections on "The Law's Third Use: Sanctification" and did so again. Montgomery quotes Horatius Bonar who wrote, God's Way of Holiness (emphases in the original):
But will they till us what is to regulate service, if not law? Love, they say. This is a pure fallacy. Love is not a rule, but a motive. Love does not tell me what to do; it tells me how to do it. Love constrains me to do the will of the beloved one; but to know what the will is, I must go elsewhere. The law of our God is the will of the beloved one, and were that expression of his will withdrawn, love would be utterly in the dark; it would not know what to do. It might say, I love my Master, and I love his service, and I want to do his bidding, but I must know the rules of his house, that I may know how to serve him. Love without law to guide its impulses would be the parent of will-worship and confusion. . . Love goes to the law to learn the divine will, and love delights in the law, as the exponent of that will; and he who says that a believing man has nothing more to do with law, save to shun it as an old enemy, might as well say that he has nothing to do with the will of God. For the divine law and the divine will are substantially one, the former the outward manifestation of the latter. And it is "the will of our Father which is in heaven" that we are to do (Matt 7:21); so proving by loving obedience what is that "good and acceptable, and perfect will of God" (Rom. 12:2). Yes, it is he that doeth "the will of God that abideth forever" (I John 2:17); it is to "the will of God" that we are to live (I Peter 4:2); "made perfect in every good work to do his will" (Heb. 13:21); and "fruitfulness in every good work," springs from being "filled with the knowledge of his will" (Col. 1:9,10). (pp. 426-27)
Me: I find food for thought here that counters our antinomian assumptions which we festoon with emotional "love" feelings. Montgomery and Bonar contend we don't really know how to love apart from God's revelation. I am reminded of the Apostle Paul's words in Philippians 1:9 - "And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment.."