suspected. If you appreciate living
in a country ruled by law and not
by the whims of a human king,
then thank the Jewish people and
God Himself who gave us the
expressions of God’s character
and purposes for mankind stand
the test of time
Viewing the Hebrew Bible in its
context safeguards civil society.
Do not reduce it to commands, or to cute poems—inner
spirituality, me and Jesus, me and God—but actually think
about the kind of people God was creating and the way He
wanted them to see reality. It is a difficult task, but it begins
how it might speak to our context today. I do not think
there is a single thing we are facing today—from
transhumanism, to smart phones, to sexuality, to end-of-life
Testaments, do not speak to powerfully.
The teachings of Jesus in the New Testament are
consistent with the Torah, the Writings, and Prophets, and
even magnify them. The four categories that are mentioned
above illustrate not only how we are to relate to one
another, but also how we are to relate to God. To say that
the greatest commandments are related to love, as Jesus
did, is to make the Torah, the entire Old Testament, Jesus,
the entire New Testament, and God, personal.
Through the Bible, God reaches into this world of His own
design and shows us how to love each other and love Him.
And through this love, the rest of the world will be drawn to
God. And the greatest evidence of God’s love for us is the
under God’s instruction, the
same instruction given to every
sits under God’s instruction
because He is the kind of God
who does not hide in the
heavens but dwells with His
people and teaches them. That
creates the conditions for what
we now call the rule of law.
When you look at the Torah,
most of it is not law. The Torah is story, poetry,
and legal codes. When we hear the word
law to the table. We see it as a list of rules—
you either keep them or you break them. But
this statutory approach to law is fairly new.
For example, I have four teenagers, and if
you had written down everything I said to
them in a day when they were younger, it
would give you a very distorted perspective
of my view of fatherhood. You would think I
see it as a bunch of “dos” and “do nots.”
That is the statutory view. But the truth is I
was trying to keep them from killing
themselves, or each other, or burning down
our house. It was out of a deep and
profound love that I was willing to patiently
guide them over the years.
That is the rule of law in the Hebrew
Bible. God was trying to keep Israel from
burning the house down. The roots of
western civilization are probably less
traceable to the Greco-Roman culture and
more traceable to the Hebrew Bible than we
6 The Chosen People | SPECIAL EDITION 2019