Then the LORD spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared to you his covenant, the Ten Commandments, which he commanded you to follow and then wrote them on two stone tablets. And the LORD directed me at that time to teach you the decrees and laws you are to follow in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess. (Deuteronomy 4:12-14)
The implication of God writing his law in stone is one of immutability and finality. These, He seemed to say, are not rules open to human tinkering. God’s words, as they so often do, also spawned a very useful analogy that man usually employs in the inverse, to connote a little wiggle room: “well, it’s not written in stone or anything,” or “ok, pencil me in for Tuesday, but I’ll have to get back to you.” We know that our little wiggle room disappears as soon as the stone is written upon, yet it is our nature to treat the Ten Commandments a bit like God had just penciled them in on the back of a manna wrapper and handed them to Moses for future reference. “Here Moses, I’ve just jotted down some of my thoughts. No, no don’t look at it now, I just wanted you to have something nosh on over, say, the next 40 years while you’re wandering around. Call me.”
Our reason for doing this is simple. God’s Law crosses Our Will—especially the way Jesus interpreted it. He said that a man who lusts in his heart for a women has already committed adultery (Matthew 5:28). Wow, that seems so, well, excessive. I mean, who cares what’s going on in my heart as long as I don’t act on it? Apparently God does, because He told us that the evil of our hearts fills His heart with pain. (Genesis 6:5-6). My junky heart hurt’s God’s pure heart? Well, I don’t want that. Maybe we can work something out, a compromise of sorts. Luckily for me, my tribe already has one. It’s called the Covenant of Goodliness (the “COG”). It’s not written in stone or anything, but it’s got a lot of good stuff in it that more or less tracks God’s Law. For example, where God says that to be angry with my brother is tantamount to murder, the COG says “revenge is a dish best served cold.” Or where God says you shall not commit adultery, the COG says “you can look at the menu but you can’t order anything.” The COG also has a couple of extra rules that God apparently didn’t even think about, like: thou must recycle, and thou must treat pets really well and thou must not be tacky. The best part of the COG is that, unlike God’s law, it is written in pencil so it has a lot of wiggle room. So, as long as I drag my recycle bin out to the curb on Tuesday, I’m pretty much good, even though it’s empty half the time because, frankly, I can’t be bothered trying to keep up with what goes in there.
Of course there’s a couple of catches. The COG is narrowly tailored to be applicable to my tribe only. Following it won’t do me much good with God. In truth, it is only designed to keep me from being tossed out of my supper club. Here’s another problem—it goes no farther than my tribe, lovely people that we are. I suspect that pimps have their own COG, and that a Righteous Pimp follows his COG as closely as I follow mine. The Goodly Covenant of the Righteous Pimp might shock the goodly people of the Tribe of the Supper Club, but that’s only because we were raised in different surroundings. When we Supper Clubbers try to back the Righteous Pimps into moral corners using our COG, they call us hypocrites, as well they should. For what we call the “law” is only convenience, and what we cast today as “sin” is just as likely to be virtue anon because our goodly rules of tackiness change as fast as the acceptable hem of a women’s skirt.
And that, I contend, is why the Lord wrote His Law in stone, and why He sent His Son as a fulfillment of His Law (Matthew 5:17)—so that we goodly pimps and supper clubbers could huddle together at the foot of His Cross and fully and finally know His Love, the greatest of that which will remain.
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