What God Wants: The Law
God has never wanted less than all of us. He gives us two great commandments in His Word: to love Him with all our heart, soul, and mind and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Every other commandment boils down to these two.
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What God wants from us: whether we find it to be a curb to bad behavior, a mirror to show us what’s wrong with us, or a guide to point out how to live, that is His Law. It doesn’t change, and it always accuses us since we’re sinners. Its best summary in the Bible is the Ten Commandments.​
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The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments are a summary of what God wants from us. He wants us to love Him and to love our neighbors just like we already love ourselves. Each commandment helps us to properly order our love for God and others in specific ways.
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We sometimes divide the Commandments into two different "tables" or "tablets" because God originally gave Moses two tablets of stone on which He Himself wrote these Commandments. The First Table is composed of the first three Commandments that focus on the love of God, and the Second Table is made up of the last seven Commandments that focus on the love of our neighbors.​
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Each Commandment has a "positive" side ("Do these things") and a "negative" side ("Avoid these things"), and gifts God seeks to protect for us in giving these Commandments. A fuller explanation can be found here, but below is a brief summary of each Commandment:
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The First Commandment – Worship only the true God. Do not worship any false god of any kind. (Gift of faith in the one true God)
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The Second Commandment – Use God’s Name the right way. Do not use it as a swear word, to cover your own lying, or to find out something you shouldn’t know. (Gift of refuge in God's saving Name)
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The Third Commandment – Set aside time and attention for God’s Word, especially on Sundays. Don’t use the time God has given you for anything less than His truth. (Gift of God's Word and Sacraments)
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The Fourth Commandment – Honor your parents and the other authorities God has given you in your life. Don’t destroy the family through what you do, what you say, or how you live. (Gift of parents, other authorities, and good order)
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The Fifth Commandment – Protect innocent life. Do not take the life of any innocent person through what you do or what you fail to do to care for him. (Gift of life)
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The Sixth Commandment – Protect marriage. Do not do, think, or say anything that destroys your marriage or anyone else’s, your chastity or anyone else’s. (Gifts of marriage and chastity)
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The Seventh Commandment – Protect property. Do not take something that truly belongs to someone else, whether the way you got it looked right or wrong to anyone. (Gifts of possessions and property)
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The Eighth Commandment – Protect other people’s good name. Do not say things, even if true, that are useless gossip when you stop and think about it. (Gift of a good reputation)
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The Ninth Commandment – Protect other people’s possessions, especially their real estate. Do not let your heart be ruled by obsessing over things that belong to someone else. (Gift of contentment, especially with your own possessions)
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The Tenth Commandment – Protect other people’s family, job, and their whole life, everything that makes their lives worthwhile, upbuilding, and good. Do not allow the desires of your heart to overwhelm the need to love your neighbor. (Gift of contentment, especially with the people God has placed in your life)​​
Sin and Death
All the evils we see in the world can be boiled down to either sin or death. Sin is every thought, word, and deed against God’s righteous Law, His holy will for us. And death is the obvious result of sin in this world.
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Scripture teaches that the first sin of our parents Adam and Eve has passed on to us a disease called “original sin.” This spiritual genetic disease infects every single human being and always brings us to death. And we commit many sins along our way to death. Those sins, called “actual sins” or “sins of omission and commission,” are all acts of rebellion against our Creator and symptoms of the underlying disease that’s leading us to death.
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So death is not natural except for sinners. If sin could be taken away from us, then we could be saved from death. If death could be taken away from us, life would look completely different; we would live knowing that we had already died and that we would not have to face the enemy of death anymore.
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The Gospel is the good news that in the death of Christ, our death has been defeated. That by the blood of Jesus, sin’s stain has been washed away. And that through baptism into Christ you can die with Him now so that you might live with Him forever.
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Three Uses of the Law
God’s Law works in three ways when we hear it or read it:
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Curb: It sets a boundary or curbs sin so that when we hear that we will get in trouble for doing something, we don’t do it. In the same way that the curb keeps your car from running over someone on the sidewalk without consequence, the law curbs sin so that it doesn’t destroy everything.
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Mirror: It shows us our sin. This works as a mirror to make us aware of blemishes and stains we could not otherwise see. Sometimes we do not know our sin, not even its existence let alone its consequences, until God’s law is made known to us.
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Guide: It shows us a better way to live. We then know what we should do or not do so that we do not invent “good deeds” for ourselves but instead do those things God would have us do.
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Orders of Creation
Life is not random. The Creator of all life is not Himself random and disorderly. He is a “God of order” so the life that He has made also has an order. Birds cannot become pine trees. Oceans do not turn into azaleas. Boys do not turn into girls. Women do not become men.
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These realities are called the orders of creation. We can deny them and fight against them. We can say that they are old-fashioned or silly. We can make war on anyone who says that they are real or do exist. That won’t change anything. No amount of screaming will turn the bird into a pine tree. No amount of denial will change the Atlantic into an azalea. No social media post or politician’s speech will make boys into girls or women into men.
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Created life, including each one of us, can either conform to its created design or push against it. When we conform our thoughts and words and deeds to God’s orders, we live a better life than when we push – vainly – against them. When we expect to get pine cones from a pine tree and to see a boy grow into a man, we find wisdom. When we expect otherwise, our foolishness leads to all kinds of destruction.
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Table of Duties
One of the best places to learn about the orders of creation is the collection of Bible passages found in the Small Catechism – also known as the Table of Duties. This puts together how churches, families, workplaces, and governments all should function and why they should.
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If you read the Table of Duties, you’ll find that the Bible is especially clear about how each of the different parts of life – the home, the local church, the workplace, the courts, and so on – is accountable to the one true God. Even if someone is doing evil and getting away with it now, he won’t forever. Even if someone is being lazy or foolish or wicked now, he will one day answer to God for all those things. Life is a serious thing because we live it in God’s presence, whether we acknowledge that fact or not, and one day we will all surely know that we must answer to Him, however much we now deny that.
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Marriage
Marriage has three purposes: the procreation of children, faithfulness to one’s spouse, and the symbolizing of Christ’s marriage to His bride the Church. Marriage can therefore only be between one man and one woman since God Himself has only one Bride, the holy Christian Church, and when He instituted earthly marriage in the first times of the world, He brought together just one man, Adam, and one woman, Eve so that they should be “fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.”
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Marriage cannot be between two people of the same sex or multiple people at the same time because God did not establish marriage to be that way. What He established is what we acknowledge and honor, not what our hearts might want in their worst moments. We support and protect marriage so that God’s will might be honored and the children He has given us might be protected.
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Learn more about our church’s teaching on marriage here.
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Abortion
No one has the right to take an innocent life. The Bible recognizes that guilty men could be punished for certain crimes with death, but no child may be punished for existing. We cannot support, vote for, much less practice abortion because we cannot support, vote for, much less practice murder. Murder is the taking of innocent life, and abortion is the taking of an innocent life that is so pointedly and cruelly without the ability to defend itself.
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Learn more about our church’s teaching on abortion here.
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Sex and Gender
We are not free to be whatever we would like. We were made to be some things and not others, to be male or female, neither both at the same time nor the opposite at some time nor something else altogether. If we were free to be whatever we would like, we would be greater and more powerful than God Himself, and since we plainly are not gods, do not have such control, cannot even keep ourselves alive without His help every moment, we can scarcely become something we were not made to be. We might playact, but we cannot become other than He has made us to be.
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This video is helpful to understand better what’s happening and how to think about it.
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Christian Freedom
"A Christian is the freest lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is the most dutiful servant of all, subject to all." - Martin Luther
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Christians are free from the regulations and traditions of men. We do not regulate one another in things that the Bible has left free – ceremonies, times of year, the drinking or not drinking of alcohol. Christian freedom must be maintained because it means that God’s Word is supreme in all things so that wherever and whenever God’s Word is silent, we are silent. Wherever and whenever God’s Word speaks – about the evil of being drunk, not the “evil” of drinking alcohol – we must speak.
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You can hear Martin Luther’s teaching on Christian freedom here.
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