Gospel.com Blog

God’s law, revealed in the Ten Commandments and throughout the Bible, is often caricatured as a giant list of “thou shalt not’s”. Unfortunately, throughout church history, Christians have often contributed to this impression by focusing their energies too much what believers aren’t supposed to be doing.

But as this devotional by Chuck Swindoll points out, one amazing thing about God’s law as summarized by Jesus is how active and positive it is:

“Therefore, however you want people to treat you, so treat them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:2). That single sentence is perhaps the most famous statement Jesus ever made. It is the “Everest of Ethics,” as one man put it. In some ways it is the cornerstone of true Christianity, certainly the capstone of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

I appreciate the positive emphasis. Instead of saying, “Don’t do this,” He says, “Do this.”

You want to impact your family, your church, your community, your place of employment? You want to make a difference in the life of your mate, a family member, a friend (Christian or not), some person in the workplace? Demonstrate the characteristics of Christ.

There are certainly activities God doesn’t want His children to participate in. But a truly Christlike life isn’t obsessed with “thou shalt not’s”—it’s obsessed with actively living out Christian values in our life and relationships.

Earlier today, Chris highlighted a devotional about the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” That idea is closely related to one of Jesus’ two “great commandments”: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Nobody would disagree with these commands, right? Then why is this ideal so rarely on display in human history?

Gene Fant reflects on this contrast between ideal and reality in a post at Evangel about his visit to the Nazi work camp at Flossenburg. He compares the dismal horror of Flossenburg (where Dietrich Bonhoeffer and 30,000 others were murdered) to the fairy-tale Schloss Neuschwanstein, the gorgeous castle built by Ludwig II.

But the contrast Fant observes isn’t the one that might spring most immediately to mind. He compares the instinctive reaction that people experience upon visiting each site:

Visitors from around the world gasped with every turn of a corner on our tour [of Schloss Neuschwanstein], each of us having the same thought in our native languages: “What if I ruled this castle?”

Flossenburg, by contrast, sits on a dead-end road. It has no gift shop. It was not crowded. There were no thoughts of, “What if I were a prisoner in this camp?”

This, then, is the basic impulse of the human experience: we self-identify with kings and queens rather than the downtrodden and the oppressed. We amble through a concentration camp and imagine that those “poor people” were not quite as human as we are, even as we walk through a palace and imagine ourselves to be royalty. We forget that the prisoners were husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers like me, or wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers.

It’s hard to “love your neighbor as yourself” when you’ve mentally excluded certain people—people who might look, think, or behave differently than you—from the circle of those you consider “your neighbor.” When we can’t empathize with somebody as sharing our own basic humanity, it’s alarmingly easy to tell ourselves that Christ’s command simply doesn’t apply.

In the case of Nazi Germany, this impulse had unspeakably evil results. We rightly look back in horror at such atrocities. But in much less dramatic ways, we too fail to obey Jesus’ “great commandments.” Are there people you treat with less than perfect grace—perhaps nearly unconsciously—because on some level, you don’t consider them your “neighbor”?

It’s a sobering reflection, but worth reading.

[The image above shows a close-up view of Schloss Neuschwanstein.]

At the heart of the Golden Rule is reciprocity: when we do good, others will do good back to us. In a perfect world, we’d all be falling over ourselves trying to out-serve one another, but the reality is that many people are simply uninterested in doing good to each other. It’s enough to harden even the softest of hearts.

Have you ever tried to practice the Golden Rule on someone who isn’t interested in doing the same? They ignore or berate you for your friendly gestures and acts of service. It’s sometimes all you can do to not do anything negative, let alone something good.

Pastor Henning of Lutheran Hour Ministries writes in this devotional about the Golden Rule from God’s perspective. Even on our “good” days, we’re still sinful people deserving of punishment. Despite this, God offers us unending grace. While we might snap at someone for slightly inconveniencing us, God patiently endures even our worst sins. We should be thankful that he does:

When commenting on a number of the commandments, Martin Luther explains that we should treat others as we want to be treated, be it our brother or sister, father or mother, our co-worker, our neighbor, or our pastor. Now while this is a useful guide for how sinful human beings should reciprocate toward one another, it doesn’t quite capture the way a perfectly just God deals with us.

If God’s response to us was in keeping with our conduct toward Him — even on our best behavior — we wouldn’t stand a chance. His justice is beyond human comparison; it is perfect, absolute, and incapable of being satisfied by our efforts or best intentions. When we treat God with disrespect, or neglect Him and His Word, He is still patient with us. When we go out of our way to sin and scorn the very relationship we have with Him, He is still forgiving — ever ready and willing to draw us back into a genuine and healthy fellowship with Himself.

Rather than retribution, God offers grace — the unending and undeserved fount of love and forgiveness shown to mankind through the sacrificial offering of His Son, Jesus Christ, upon the cross. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who gave Himself as a ransom for all men …” (1 Timothy 2:5-6a).

Read the rest of the devotional at Lutheran Hour Ministries.

How do you enact the Golden Rule in your life? What does it mean to you to accept God’s gift of grace?