What God Intended His Law To Be
“Praise the Lord! I will give thanks to [Yahweh] with my whole heart, in the company of the upright, in the congregation. Great are the works of [Yahweh], studied by all who delight in them... He remembers His covenant forever. He has shown His people the power of His works, in giving them the inheritance of the nations. The works of His hands are faithful and just; all His precepts are trustworthy; they are established forever and ever, to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness. He sent redemption to His people; He has commanded His covenant forever. Holy and awesome is His name! The fear of [Yahweh] is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever!” (Psalm 111:1-2, 5b-10, ESV)
This psalm is not speaking about the Old Covenant Law worked by man, but the New Covenant works of God for the salvation of His people, His works that began in the beginning, when God did these works upon the spirits of Adam and Eve. He is speaking about what God intended His Law, all 613 “commandments” or authoritative teachings and exhortations of the Torah, to be in the Messiah, Jesus. The psalmist praises God for fulfilling the Law in us and through us, by His own works of directly teaching and training our spirits. The spirit of this psalmist was “moved” by God Himself, who is a Spirit, to express his awe for what we might now call the New Covenant Law in Christ.
But, rather than exegete Psalm 111 myself, I will let C.H. Spurgeon do some of that. I will quote a few excerpts from Spurgeon’s magnum opus, The Treasury of David. By letting another preacher exegete this passage, I hope to illustrate that my doctrines are not my own, not new nor novel. I strive to glean all my doctrines prayerfully from God’s Word, through God’s works in me, in the same way many other souls in the past received these same doctrines from God. Everything I teach has already been taught, in part or in whole, to and by other elect souls of the past. Now, before I continue, I should mention that Spurgeon claimed to be a covenant theologian and often spoke about the “covenant of grace.” But this was because his particular Baptist church required the external confession of those false doctrines. Nevertheless, only his mind of flesh seemed to intellectually accede to those false doctrines. However, all his writings from his heart reflected a belief in the more biblical and solid New Covenant theology. And you can see hints of his spirit’s belief in the more biblical New Covenant theology through many of his works, including his words about Psalm 111:
“The sweet singer [i.e., the man who wrote Psalm 111] dwells upon the one idea that God should be known by His people, and that this knowledge ... is man’s true wisdom, and the certain cause of lasting adoration.... It may be called The Psalm of God’s Works intended to excite us to the work of praise.... Even the little things of God are great. In some point of view or other each one of the productions of His power, or the deeds of His wisdom, will appear to be great to the wise in heart.... Those who love their Maker delight in His handiworks, they perceive that there is more in them than appears upon the surface, and therefore they bend their minds to study and understand them.... The hidden wisdom of God is the most marvellous part of His works, and hence those who do not look below the surface miss the best part of what He would teach us.... It is well for us that all things cannot be seen at a glance, for the search into their mysteries is as useful to us as the knowledge which we thereby attain....
“His one special work, the salvation of His people, is here mentioned as distinguished from His many other works.... Moreover, the righteousness of God in the whole plan can never now be suspected of failure, for all that it requires is already performed ... No promise of the Lord shall fall to the ground, nor will any part of the great compact of eternal love be revoked or allowed to sink into oblivion.... They have seen what He is able to do and what force He is prepared to put forth on their behalf.... Could we ever have known it so well if we had not been in pressing need of His help? ...
“All that He has appointed or decreed shall surely stand, and His precepts which He has proclaimed shall be found worthy of our obedience, for surely they are founded in justice and are meant for our lasting good. He is no fickle despot, commanding one thing one day and another another, but His commands remain absolutely unaltered, their necessity equally unquestionable, their excellence permanently proven, and their reward eternally secure.... The Lord is not swayed by transient motives, or moved by the circumstances of the hour; immutable principles rule in the courts of Jehovah [Spurgeon used the name Jehovah in the 19th century, a mistaken pronunciation of Yahweh, the name of God], and He pursues His eternal purposes without the shadow of a turning.... He is of one mind, and none can turn Him: He acts in eternity and for eternity, and hence what He works abides forever....
“Redemption by blood proves that the covenant cannot be altered, for it ratifies and establishes it beyond all recall.... To know God so as to walk aright before Him is the greatest of all applied sciences.... Men may know and be very orthodox, they may talk and be very eloquent, they may speculate and be very profound; but the best proof of their intelligence must be found in their actually doing the will of the Lord.... Lord, help us to study Thy works, and henceforth to breath out hallelujahs as long as we live.”
In the Old Covenant times, some Jewish elect, like the “sweet singer” who penned this Psalm, had awakened spirits. So these souls would spend much time praying and meditating upon God’s Word and works, letting God’s Holy Spirit write His true intentions and meanings of His words and works upon their hearts. Through this lifelong process, their spirits gradually grew a deeper and more abiding love and awe of God. For their spirits began to understand how God granted Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel and many other elect souls an inner ability to comprehend and embrace His timeless, eternal “redemption,” which had always been and always will be worked by God Himself, inside His elect children, through their Messiah. They began to clearly see what had been eternally promised through God’s covenant with Abraham, and how all God’s core works of that eternal promise had been revealed in the Old Covenant Law, once their spirits realized that the predestined fulfilling of the Abrahamic Covenant through the Messiah’s “redemption” was already being granted to all of God’s true elect who would ever live from the beginning to the end of time.
The above Psalm (111) is one of countless examples of writings from the Jewish elect who lived in times before the light of one physical day on earth more fully revealed the inner redeeming works of our Father’s New Covenant salvation through Christ’s blood, to fulfill the Abrahamic Covenant, to replace the Old Covenant with the promised completion of His works in us. After Jesus, the full Law was seen under the sun we enjoy, as we walk on this soil under this sky. Yet we recognize that this elect Jewish author, and many like him, truly knew this “redemption” of God, which can only come through the works on the cross by their future Messiah, though none had physically seen the deed that brought them this redemption. All the prophets and elect souls mentioned in the Bible, whether they lived before or after the Old Covenant Law was granted through Moses, knew this same “redemption” of God, the same one that the disciples of Jesus knew after the day of the Pentecost. It was even known by the elect who lived before God granted the Abrahamic Covenant, before the covenant granting the promises of the Messiah’s New Covenant. They knew salvation before Jesus fulfilled God’s certain and predestined ratification of the New Covenant through His body’s blood.
When God granted the temporary Old Covenant and its laws to the church of Israel, those were the precepts He created for the effective functioning of human life. And God created these principles, these truths about the most effective, just, loving ways of life, in the beginning, even before Adam and Eve saw life. So the Old Covenant Law proclaims the very same precepts implicit in the eternal covenant God made with Abraham (Gen. 17:5-8), not anything new to any awakened elect soul. In addition to this, we should realize that God’s people of Israel were already quite familiar with this type of covenant, with the Old Covenant kind of covenant of a King and God with His people. This was familiar to them long before the Exodus, long before God revealed that Law through Moses, and with His own voice booming from Mount Sinai. The temporary Old Covenant, which God made between Him and His church of Israel through Moses, was like the covenants they saw whenever a new human king took power in his land. Ancient rulers made covenants with their people in almost the same way that our governments make covenants with the people today—by stipulating laws for the people to obey and by making promises regarding all they will do for the people, so there will be order and well-being in the land. So we see how God was establishing a relationship with His people through a familiar covenant of law, so His people would understand that He alone was their King and Sovereign God. God made the temporary and highly conditional Old Covenant laws so they would not serve a human king or a demonic god, so they would be sanctified, set apart for Him and His purposes alone. But this Old Covenant was merely for this purpose, to tell them to turn away from human kings and demonic gods, to Him. It did not fulfill His Abrahamic Covenant promises.
When God made this Old Covenant, He created two tablets of stone, each of which held an identical copy of the Ten Commandments. And this stone indicated the permanence and immutability of His Law. For this was what some human kings did in those days, although their laws were imperfect, neither permanent nor immutable. On two identical tablets, often made of stone, a human king would write two identical copies of a short and carefully worded summary of his much larger body of laws. One copy was used as a reference for the king himself, while the other copy belonged to his people. This summary outlined all the major precepts found in the whole body of his laws, arranged in the order of descending importance or priority. We might compare it to a nation’s “Bill of Rights” or to its “Constitution,” which outlines the “fundamental principles according to which a nation, state, or body politic is constituted and governed” (Oxford), a list of legal protections a people can expect.
A human king might have a thousand laws or more, to govern all the various kinds of relationships in his land, those between him and his people and all the interactions the people might have between each other, personal and business relationships, or otherwise. The whole body of laws may have also be written on scrolls, but that whole body of many laws was summarized in the few archetypal laws carved on a stone tablet. Each law on a stone tablet represented a whole array of related laws. For example, the king might write literally hundreds of laws governing property, fair trade and lawful financial transactions, but would write only one law on each stone tablet to represent all of those kinds of laws, only an archetypal commandment like: “You shall not steal.” So I repeat, each stone tablet was similar to a simplified version of the constitution of a democratic nation today, a written record “of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is acknowledge to be governed” (Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Second Edition, 2004).
As mentioned, the first stone tablet was for the king himself, as his own reminder of the basic principles that would stand behind all the laws he would make for the people. Then the king would make an identical copy of that stone tablet for his people, so they could refer to it in determining the principles behind their interpretation and application of all the king’s laws. And the king would often also give an identical copy of this tablet, with a summary of his laws, to every subject king, prince, vassal, subordinate ruler, or other representatives of the people, to the higher authorities under his authority, to the “judges” of the people. But, in essence, any copies of those archetypal laws that were given to the highest authorities actually belonged to the king himself, since all those authorities ruled in the king’s name alone. Thus, only two copies of the archetypal laws was the norm, one for the king and one for the people. Likewise, God gave His own copy of the Ten Commandments on the first stone tablet to Moses, to be used by his brother’s Aaronic priesthood, who taught, trained, judged and did all their other works in God’s name alone. For both the stone tablet and all those priests were the property of God. For the sole purpose of the life of each priest was to do God’s will and works, where his only inheritance was God, not anything God gave to His people. Then the second stone tablet was for the people, who also had teacher/judges (elders) among them, men who needed God’s summary of His Law in order to correctly interpret and apply His whole body of laws.
Once these two summary tablets were created, the agreement or covenant between the king and his people was sealed, set in stone, to last as long as that stone lasted, or at least until the king died and another king established a new set of laws. A king’s whole body of law, represented by the summary on the tablets, actually defined his relationship with his people, telling his people the way in which he promised to behave towards them and how they were expected to behave towards him, as well as how each citizen was expected to behave towards all the other citizens in his kingdom. In every relationship, certain expectations are placed upon each party. And when those expectations are not met, it often results in tensions, disorder or the breaking of the relationship, possibly in destructive reprisals for any perceived injustices perpetrated by one upon the other. Much trouble may result. A fight or war may even arise through any departure from these expectations, from the breaking of the conditions, rules or laws of the covenant. If the king himself broke his own established and sealed covenant, he could expect rebellion from the people. On the other hand, if one of the king's subjects broke the laws and terms of the covenant, the king's law enforcers would correct or justly punish that lawbreaker, for the law breaker’s disturbance of congenial relationships might cause the people to take revenge themselves and result in chaos and destruction. Also, if the king unjustly allowed one citizen to break his covenant laws with impunity, the king himself would be seen as a breaker of his own covenant, and a rebellion could occur. So a king had to deny protection and other benefits to a law-breaker, or that king would be perceived as unjust and unfit to be the king ruling over the land.
Therefore, every king needed to be very wise about the laws he made, using extreme care in the determination of how each law would ultimately work in conjunction with all his other laws, and with the foresight and knowledge of how his laws would ultimately affect all the various personal and business relationships between him and his people, between his people and him, and between each citizen with each other citizen. A king also had to consider how his laws would affect the other kingdoms around him, since they too could cause trouble for him. And, to do all this wisely and effectively, a king had to become utterly selfless and commit his life entirely to serving his people. For even a hint of his own selfishness, injustice or foolishness could cascade down to all the people in a kingdom-destroying flood. One mistake or error in judgment could cause extensive harm to many souls or an untold number of deaths with an incalculable amount of irreparable damage.
Thus, all subordinate rulers and all the people of the kingdom were expected to show gratitude and loyalty to the king for making a wise covenant, since his law established peace and order in the kingdom, with clear parameters and guidelines for all kinds of personal, business and community relationships. Each knew what to expect from the king and from each other, since all were bound under the same laws of the same covenant. And all corporate bodies in the kingdom—all religious, political, business, military, judiciary, educational and other groups of people—possessed a means to maintain a civil relationship with each other, with an authority to justly judge and find solutions for all the inevitable conflicts they had with each other, so none would not cause harm to the kingdom or its people through their disputes. A good king kept all the people united, peaceful, free and without any fear of injustice or evil falling upon any of them. Of course, the king had the power to kill any people he conquered or subjugated too, if he chose to do so. And if the king only did this killing in a just way, in a way that eliminated killers and destroyers solely for the sake of his people, he would gain the trust and loyalty of the people. The wicked would fear that king, but the just would love that king and respect him with great admiration. Also, the sinners who had repented into the king’s ways of justice, and were forgiven, would love and appreciate the king more than the rest, for his grace and mercy in allowing them to live. All were expected to show gratitude by keeping the king's just laws, summarized on the tablet he gave them. For, if they rebelled, the king could sentence them to death, or banish them from his kingdom, even into a land that lacked all the benefits of his just laws.
When God made the temporary Old Covenant with His permanent church of Israel, He used this familiar concept to impress upon His people that He is their High King, the wisest, most righteous, most just, most powerful, most self-sacrificing and most loving of all kings, the only King that truly serves His people for their good at all times. From the first day this Old Covenant was made on Mount Sinai, it was to be known that “Yahweh your God is your King” (II Sam. 12:12). But God, who never forgets and never stops thinking about the welfare of His people, did not need a tablet of stone to remind Him of His obligations to His people. So God gave both tablets to His people, both summaries of His covenant outlining the expectations or conditions that allowed them to remain in His kingdom. For wherever God's copy of the tablet might be, there God would be also. Since both tablets were to be kept together at all times, in the Ark of the Covenant, God and His people were to be together at all times. Also, the royal priesthood of Aaron, which represented Him to the people and the people to Him, was to be in and among the people at all times. Both tablets were stored in the Ark of the Covenant together, because wherever God's people might be, God would be there too.
On each of the two tablets that God handed to Moses, God wrote a summary of His whole body of law, a list of foundational principles regarding all that He expected from His people in His covenant relationship with them. By doing this, God let His people know that He chose to be their King and they were His chosen people. They were His church or kuriakoi, the property of His kingdom, His priesthood representing Him to the rest of the world and representing the rest of the world to Him. Although God chose these wretched former slaves, the “fewest” or most insignificant of all people in those days, to be separate from the rest of the world, to be made into beloved citizens of His personal kingdom, saved from the destruction of their own ignorance, selfishness and sin. These little people were to be the agents whom He would use to save the world from self-destruction. God chose to join Israel to Himself, as a people among whom He would dwell. And the covenant's laws revealed the very character of their King and God Himself, the just and loving character which His own people should emulate. For God would never break His own laws. All His actions would be according to the very laws He gave to them. Therefore, they were to be like Him, like their High King, like their Judge of all judges, and obey all His laws as He did. Consequently, all judges in His kingdom were to interpret God’s laws in exactly the same way God Himself interpreted His own laws. If anyone interpreted God’s laws in his own personal way, it was rebellion against God, since any meaning that opposed His intended and true meaning of His law would break the relationship with God, the King.
God’s Old Covenant provided many rules and ordinances which were intended to develop a right, stable, pure relationship with Him and with other souls, if the people would spontaneously and correctly follow His laws and ways. And the Ten Commandments were a guide to interpreting all His many other laws correctly, in the way God intended them to be interpreted. Then god himself would help and comfort the spirit of one who strove to keep his law in the same way that god kept his Law. On the other hand, God was also obliged to judge an unrepentant law-breaker as being unworthy of His help. Yet God never judged anyone by mere outward appearances alone, never by mere outward physical criteria. God primarily judged each of His people by the intentions and motives of the heart, knowing that each one’s mind and body of flesh had certain limitations of understanding and ability. And this was made obvious in the Ten Commandments, especially in the first five, and in the tenth.
So, in Old Covenant times, God judged His people by His Law. But, even as God judged them by what it said in His Law, God judged them according to the motives and intentions of the spirit in the heart, not by their mere words and deeds of the flesh. Likewise, by His Law, His people were to judge each other in the same way. They were to look into the heart and recognize inner motives and intentions, to look for genuine repentance or a lack of it. For God Himself always acted precisely according to all that His Law stated, since His Law described His own attributes and character, all that pleased Him and all that displeased Him. And God is a Spirit. A Spirit created all physical reality, but existed outside that reality before He created it, and still exists apart from all physical reality. Thus, His Law actually describes the attributes and character of His Spirit. And the spirits of all His true and faithful children on earth and in heaven are to become like His Spirit. All their spirits are to emulate His spirit, and all their spirits are called and predestined by Him to become like His Spirit, since all elect spirits were created in His image. Even the greatest desires of all their spirits are to be shaped into the same greatest desires found in His Spirit. All are to love even as He loves.
All elect spirits are citizens of God's true kingdom, where each and every one of those spirits has been eternally joined to His homeland in heaven at the moment of creation in the womb, at the very instant God formed each spirit. And, through Abraham, God began to gather some of these chosen or elect souls into one body of people, to serve Him as a nation of priests, as His church of Israel. From the beginning, God made all of His truly elect to be citizens of His kingdom, although only some were to become priests in His church. Only in His kingdom in heaven will all elect human beings be priests of His church, and their centre of worship will be in the New Jerusalem within heaven. But, as the elect live on this earth in rebellious bodies of flesh—or through a relationship with God that was defined by the written Old Covenant Law that needed to be obeyed through the mind of flesh, where the minds of their spirits served their flesh—it was inevitable that all would disobey that Law and break their relationship with God, through their failure to meet all of the conditions of His Law.
When Israel broke God’s Law, the holy God was forced to abandon their flesh to death and cause the destruction of their earthly nation of priests, the physical or visible church. And it would not be until the New Covenant was established and made effective by Christ’s works directly upon elect spirits, by the power of His Holy Spirit, that the true visible church of Israel would return. For the church formed through man’s works, according to the Old Covenant Law, was never truly able to serve the utterly holy God through those human works. Yet God never abandoned the spirits of His elect in the church of Israel. The Spirit of Jesus never stopped teaching His ways to their spirits, never in all history. Rather, Jesus built up an invisible, eternal priesthood, maintained through His almighty power. Yes, the physical, visible church became invisible for a long time. But the members of His invisible church have always existed, and recognizable by the fruits of the teaching and training Jesus was working upon their hearts, as He wrote the principles of His just ways upon their spirits.
The mind of the human spirit was never meant to serve the mind of flesh, as the Old Covenant Law required. Rather, in every elect soul, God wanted the mind of flesh to serve the mind of the human spirit, as that human elect spirit served Him. And the entire Old Covenant Law made this desire of God very clear to His people in the church of Israel, by demanding right motives and intentions of the spirit in order to truly fulfill His Old Covenant Law, regarding repentance into the truths revealed in His Law. Since, in Old Covenant times, all God’s people were to be judged by the motives and intentions of the spirit—even while the written Law ruled their lives through an interpretation and application of its precepts by the mind of flesh, with man’s judgments primarily directed against the words or deeds of the flesh—God’s intent for that Old Covenant obviously was not to rescue or save His people from self-destruction through a physical obedience of that Law alone. Both the Ten Commandments and God’s whole Law clearly testify that God desired something much better and stronger for the salvation of His elect children. God required His own personal works in their spirits.
In human terms, the people living in the days of Moses were very familiar with the way kings essentially represented their whole body of laws in a short summary like the Ten Commandments. And they also knew how every human king expected his people to interpret and apply his laws in the same way that king interpreted and applied his own laws. But no human king could personally teach and train the very spirits of his citizens, until they spontaneously did his will through a personal love for that king, and for the good of all the people and things in his kingdom. Such a concept was so utterly impossible, the people of God could not even imagine that this is exactly what their King and God actually wanted to do for them. And, since God’s church of Israel did not know the true power or intended meaning of the words of their High King, Yahweh God, they did not yet see how He could do such a thing in the minds of their spirits. For most lived only according thoughts from the minds of their flesh, while the minds of their spirits remained dull and almost unconscious. Very few of them had spirits that were awakened, like the spirits of Abraham and the prophets. Thus, God took His time in preparing them for the fulfilling of the Abrahamic Covenant through the New Covenant.
While dwelling in the Old Covenant relationship with God, through minds of flesh, the priesthood of Israel caused nothing but trouble for themselves. But this is exactly what God’s Law was created to do, until Israel learned to worship God in their spirits and in truth. For, until they walked according to their spirits, they could never interpret nor apply God’s Law rightly. Now we all know that, if anyone decided to interpret a human king’s law in a way that king did not interpret it himself, that one’s hubris was usually rewarded with a judgment against him, with imprisonment or even death. For it was the way the king himself behaved, thought and felt that defined the correct interpretation of his own law. And all had a right to seek the king’s interpretation, if not directly, then through an intermediary. But no one in the entire kingdom was ever granted the right to invent his or her own personal, alternative interpretation. Yet the priests and subject kings being ruled by the High King of Israel, by Yahweh God, constantly invented their own, errant, personal interpretations of His laws, applied God’s laws in whatever ways they chose, to appease carnal pride, ambitions and lusts. So what could those people expect from God when they deliberately did such things? Both the Jewish and later Gentile branches of the church did such things. Thus, although God is slow to wrath and full of mercy, He had to justly grant them the fruits of their labours. He had to judge against them.
But the one true King of Israel always was and always will be a Spirit. Therefore, the way this King behaves, thinks and feels is always spiritual. And literally all His laws reveal spiritual principles that are to be applied by our spirits. All God’s laws are to be fulfilled through spontaneous expressions of our human spirits. Our spirits are to govern the behaviours of our flesh, so our spirits can express their just and pure kind of love for God, for His people and for all His property in His creation. And all God’s laws must be interpreted and applied according to the way this Spirit, who is our King, interprets those laws. This also means that none can seek the High King, or obtain His truly right interpretations of His laws, except through one’s own human spirit. For the mind of flesh can only communicate with the mind of its own spirit, within the interface of one’s own soul. But God, who is a Spirit, seldom communicates with the body and mind of flesh. And God limited our human spirits in flesh, which means that our spirits cannot directly and effectively communicate with other human spirits, only ineptly through words filtered through the minds and bodies of our flesh. Two human beings can relate to each other through the languages of the flesh. But God’s Spirit, and the demonic spirits God allows, can actually enter the chamber of the human soul and directly communicate with our human spirits, or even with our minds of flesh. Yet, even though God can speak directly to our minds of flesh, He almost always speaks to our spirits alone, even in a way that can convey very complex concepts to our spirits in a mere instant, in a “language” that is impossible for the mind of flesh to comprehend. So the mind of one’s spirit must then teach the mind of one’s flesh a figurative understanding of these spiritual words and concepts from God. But the flesh can only approximately understand these spiritual concepts, in a very figurative way t