The Law Was Never A Ladder

Then God gave the people all these instructions: “I am the LORD your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery.”   Exodus 20:1-2

Moses returned to the place where God had spoken to him out of the burning bush, surrounded not by a flock of sheep, but by two million people. God had been faithful, and the seemingly impossible had happened. In one of the greatest miracles in the Old Testament, God parted the waters of the Red Sea. Now, a couple of months later, the people of God arrived at Mount Sinai, where they set up camp.

The God who came down to speak with Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was coming down to give his law to the people, but his law was never intended as a ladder for unsaved people to climb up to heaven. It was always a pattern of life for God’s people who had been saved from judgment by the blood of the lamb.

God was not saying, “I’m giving you these commands, and by keeping them you may become my people.” He was saying, “I’m giving you these commands because you are my people.” The law tells us how people who belong to God ought to live.

This is important, because some people have the idea that in the Old Testament God tried to save people by getting them to keep the law, but since they couldn’t, he came up with a better way of saving people—through his Son, Jesus Christ. If this were true, we would naturally conclude that the Old Testament is a book of law and the New Testament is a book of grace, so the Old Testament has nothing to do with us, because we’re not under law; we’re under grace.

That is a complete misunderstanding of the Bible. The whole Bible is a book of grace. God promised a Redeemer on the very day that sin entered the world. There is one God and one story. The law is given specifically to people who have experienced the grace of God and have become his people, and for this reason, it continues to speak to us today.

For further reading, see Exodus 20