A Mighty Mirror
Deuteronomy 14:1-2
“You are the sons of the LORD your God. You shall not cut yourselves or make any baldness on your foreheads for the dead. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”
There are many elements of the Mosaic Law that are clearly temporary in nature that I don’t believe God intended to translate over from generation to generation. Laws like, “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk” (Deuteronomy 14:21b), and, “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother … then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones” (Deut. 21:18a & 21a), and, “If brothers dwell together and one of them dies and has a son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother … shall take her as a wife” (Deut. 25:5), along with this law given here in Deuteronomy 14:1.
Nevertheless, though the above rule may not carry a literal application for Christ’s church anymore, it certainly carries a spiritual one. Everything we do, from our eating to our driving to our working to our conversing is a reflection of our Father’s character. We are a people holy to the LORD! There isn’t a thought we entertain in our heads nor a word we speak to our children nor a gesture we direct to the guy who cuts us off on the highway that isn’t intrinsically connected back to who we are in Him. But that thought shouldn’t fill us with depression at our inability to imitate Him perfectly; rather, it should fill us with a sense of delight that He treasures us even in spite of our weakness! To understand that He continually and patiently sanctifies us into His likeness should infuse us with courage to keep trying and keep striving and keep pressing on, knowing that Christ upholds all our steps and all our falls in the palm of His faithful hand.
Friend, God didn’t give us the mirror of the law just to expose our failure. He gave it essentially to express through our failures His unfailing love and mercy.