Law or Love

In my reading this morning in the book of Daniel I suddenly saw the same pattern of progression that I saw not long ago in history, the movement from emphasis on the supremacy of kingship to the supremacy of law. In the Babylonian empire the top ruler was supreme. Whatever he decided to do was top priority even if it contradicted what he wanted to do previously. Consistency was not as important as satisfying the desires or whims of the king. Everything and everyone had to revolve around the personality of one person.

Obviously this is a very precarious way to run a government and lends itself quickly to blatant abuse of power. In fact this weakness was clearly demonstrated in the life of the last decadent ruler of Bablyon who was killed off by the succeeding empire during his drunken orgy feasting with his subordinates. The new government that took over, the Medes and Persians, brought in a new style of governing that at first looked like the perfect solution for the problem of power abuse by supreme rulers. They invested the highest supremacy in the rule of law itself instead of in a human being. In place of trusting in a single human as infallible they chose to trust in laws created by men and declared that the law itself was infallible. Now the very men who created the law along with everyone around them would be held accountable to the law instead of to a single, fickle person.

We still fall into the same faulty thinking today. The very immature crave absolute personal control over others like the kingship model that has been indulged in repeatedly over the centuries. The more mature believe in the safety of collective thinking and wisdom which is condensed into law and then imposed on everyone else. But the underlying fatal flaw still remains. That flaw is the root concept of force. Because humans have, deeply ingrained into their psyche, the lie that God operates His universe through force, they set up their various social systems on the economy of force.

Fear and force are the key ingredients of Satan's counterfeit kingdom propagated by ever-increasing lies and half-truths. God's system of family never employs Satan's methods to further its objectives. It is completely separate and foreign from Satan's methods. God system does not allow for any human to be supreme over another or use force to override another's freedom of conscience. Nor does He invest supremacy in the imposition of law, especially human laws. Most Christians mistakenly believe however, that God's government is base more on His law than on Himself. This is because they are still deeply influenced by the faulty thinking of Satan's subtle substitutes.

God's system of relating to all of His creatures is based on each one living in perfect freedom and in personal, direct connection with its Creator. When sin first began to emerge in the universe, the revelation that there was even such a thing as law came as a great shock to the angels. While it is true that God is revealed through the explanation of principles that explain His character, and those principles are as unchangeable as the God they refer to, those explanations usually referred to as laws to not take precedence over the Being from which they are derived. Love is a relationship far more than it is obedience to a list of descriptions. Love in relationship will always result in harmonization. But attempts to comply with a description of someone's character without living in a relationship with them does not constitute love and does not result in family bonds, which is what God's system is all about.