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Adding to the Law

When he was president, I was thinking about what I would have said to President Barack O’Bama. You know how you think when you think you’re smarter than everybody else. I would like to explain the danger of politics. One of the dangers is the contrast with faith. Faith seeks to be right with God, and He will give power to that faithful one. Politics is the attainment of power without any need to be right with God. When you’re poor and weak and God gives you power, you know you’re on the right track, not perfect, but on the right track. But with politics, how do you know you’re using power rightly? Do you need faith? Do you help the poor? Who are the poor? Is it those without means, or is it those who are pursued for their means? I mean, can you vote the largesse of those with means so that you can enjoy the product of their work? Does “Thou shalt not steal” not apply as long as a majority says it’s okay? Can you steal by using the ballot box?

So which is more important – political power or law? If law is man-made, can’t you just say, “We’ve changed it, and it’s now okay to take your stuff. You’re wealthy.” But if “Thou shalt not steal” is God’s law, then can we humans change it to fit our desires? If so, when can you do that? Speaking of law, did not the Pharisees of Jesus’ day get mixed up on it? They stood for what they understood was “the law,” but didn’t they try to get Rome to lend them power? Didn’t their understanding of politics and power get confused, so that Rome’s power, while hated, became to them the be-all-end-all instead of God. That’s the danger of political power as a mesmerizing idol for the powerless.

That’s a problem Jesus and John the Baptist had with the Pharisees. But the Pharisees and lawyers and priests thought that they were somehow buddies with Moses, the Moses who stood before God, then before Pharaoh and told him to let His people go, who threw down the tablets of the ten commandments and ground the golden calf to powder and added it to water and made the people drink it, who told the Levites to walk through the congregation with their swords killing anyone they met, who fasted 40 days and 40 nights on a mountain waiting for God to give him the ten commandments, whose face glowed in some way such that the people couldn’t look at it and he had to put a veil over his face, who lived about twelve hundred years before the Pharisees. Yes, they thought they were better than everybody because Moses was in their pedigree. If Moses had come back to life, they thought they could walk down the street with him, arm around his shoulders, telling him about their sufferings and troubles under the Romans. “Oh, but Moses we improved on your law. Right, we added some stuff, like remember how you said to keep the Sabbath holy, well, we’ve got that all wrapped up now. We don’t even let anyone walk more than so many feet from home on the Sabbath. Oh yeah, and no one can carry anything, not even a bed pad.

I heard a minister on the radio explain American Christians really well. They are very much into studying Jesus’ words but they rarely obey. It’s like your child, whom you tell to clean their room. Three weeks later, you ask her about her room. Have you cleaned it, and she says, “Well, no, but I’ve really studied what you told me; I’ve even started a bible study on it; I know what it is in the Greek.” But have you done it?