It is amazing to me the way in which people with a Calvinist background can interpret everything based on the assumption they are right. We were in a Bible study, and the verse we were looking at was,
Matthew 23:23 (KJV) Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.The discussion had been dwelling on the tithe, and the pastor was commenting on how we were not under the law anymore, and tithing is a principal of the law. I could’ve made a lot of issues on that, but I refrained.
In the midst of this one of my godly contemporaries had to express some plain Calvinism about the law. He said something about how we were given this law which, from the very beginning, it was impossible for us to keep. His emphasis was that we cannot earn our salvation by keeping the law.
His basic point about how we cannot earn our salvation I would agree with. What drives me crazy is this continued insistence by people of the reform tradition that we cannot keep the law, that it is impossible. That is nonsense. There is nothing in the law that you cannot keep. When you whittle down the so-called 613 laws that are often listed to the actual real number it becomes even easier. The point is, the laws were never given with the intent of earning your salvation. There was never an assumption you would keep them perfectly. When the Old Testament talks about atonement, it’s in relation to sacrificing an animal showing that blood is shed, and that death is the payment for our sin. The animal simply substitutes for our death. It is not giving the tithes, or eating the right foods, or observing the Sabbath that saves us. As Hebrew says in the NT there is no forgiveness of sin without the shedding of blood. In the Old Testament times it was the animal that shed the blood as a type looking forward to the death of Jesus on the cross. We were not saved by tithing, not mixing fabrics in our clothing, or not planting trees in the courtyard of the temple. In the OT as well as the NT salvation comes from God and our trust in Him.
Is this a deliberate distortion of what the law was for? I have to believe that if you go back to Calvin or some of the early reformers there was definitely distortion going on.
But then I have my own extreme positions.
homo unius libri
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