Training Wheels Pt V

If all of this is true, if Jesus then, is able to set aside portions of the Law, with the claim that 'love fulfills the Law, and love commands this or that action,' then we are faced with a rather important question, and a rather serious practical problem...

How do we know what is or isn't moral? Is the Law to be completely set aside? Or even if it is not, what do we do with other people's claims that we should set aside different portions of the Law, because 'love has led us to do so?'

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We read earlier the scriptural truth that 'love is the fulfillment of the Law,' let us think upon this...

We know what the Law is:

it is the commands God gave us to govern action; telling us to do certain things, or to avoid certain things, also telling us to value certain things, even to think and feel certain things. The Law also provides for the eventual breaking of the Law; punishments and sacrifices, what should happen when this or that aspect of the Law has been broken, how does the individual or community get back on the path after leaving it...

...but what is love?

Here we come to an interesting realization; love in our culture is not defined in terms that would line up with the Law. It would be a hard sell to say 'Love fulfills the Law' if we defined love in accordance with our culture! Our culture defines love primarily in terms of desire. We love people when we desire to be around them and with them. We love people when we free them to pursue their desires unhindered. This kind of love (and it is a form of love) would be hard pressed to encourage obedience to the Law in any way shape or form...

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Our love itself, then, is in need of shaping. It is not a pure thing, not a holy thing, and needs the Law itself to direct that passion, to form it into the kind of Love that will indeed fulfill the Law. This sort of love is less about desire, and more about a concerted effort of the will to effect good on behalf of another. This is what is meant by the word agape.

When Scripture talks of a 'love that fulfills the law,' then, it is speaking of a love that was tutored by that law, and grew up under it, and so whenever that love 'revises' that law, it does so in the spirit of the very law it is revising; a love that is defined by our concept of God (namely Jesus), not a God that is defined by our concept of love (namely desire)!