Re-Contextualizing Love

Exodus tells the story of Yahweh's liberation of his people. He brings them out of slavery in Egypt and gives them a list of laws they are to follow, which radically changed the way people in the ancient world interacted with each other and their god/s.

Heston's 10 Commandments were written in Epigraphic Hebrew.

By giving his people concrete instructions about how to live and what they needed to do to ensure right standing with him, Yahweh showed he had an accessibility unmatched in the ancient pantheon. He was concerned about even the most intricate and even mundane, details of their lives.

Deuteronomy, literally the "second law," re-contextualizes the laws given to the first generation who escaped from Egpyt. The first generation had spent 40 years wandering in the desert and with the next generation about to enter their new homeland, the laws needed to be updated.

The Laws are changed as the people are about to re-enter civilization.

Take, for example, Deuteronomy 15.12-18, which insists that the same laws should apply to both male and female slaves and also details the extra care to be taken when a slave is set free. Contrast this to Ex 21.2-11.

Ways of cooking the passover lamb even changed. Ex 12.8-9 says, "they shall eat it roasted over the fire" and "do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water." While in Deut 16.7, the Hebrew states, "You shall boil it."

I prefer roasted.

Chronicles, written after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, records King Josiah's Passover celebration (2 Chron 35.13),  and adds a brilliant twist: "They boiled the passover lamb with fire according to the ordinance" - combining the instructions from Exodus and Deuteronomy.

These texts illustrate the incredible providence of God as he shows concern for every detail of our lives. He is interested in caring for all our needs (cf. Mt 7.11). This is the unchanging principle.

What does change is the application of the principle. If the laws had to be rethought after only 40 years, how much more are we, who live thousands of years after the Bible was penned, to rethink them for ourselves? 

This of course has happened. Christians have decided that most of the laws found in the Hebrew Bible are no longer to be strictly applied. But what about ways of running the church? Or male and female relationships? Or women's roles in ministry? 

God's love is to touch every area of our lives and because of this, we are charged by God, by the very nature of how the Bible teaches us to relate to him, to re-contextualize that love so that it is most powerfully experienced in our times.