If you are ever in Ukraine and take a taxi the first thing you should do is put on your seatbelt. However, the moment you put it on the driver will tell you that you don’t need it. Sometimes he will tell you as you are leaving the city limits that it is safe to take it off. Before I continue with the spiritual side of this blog I must warn you. YOU DO NEED SEATBELTS IN UKRAINE!
Anyway, I once asked a driver, “Why don’t I need a seatbelt?” to which he replied, “They don’t check taxis,” or “They don’t check cars outside of the city limits.” This answer begged the logical question, “Did the engineers who designed these annoying straps do so for the Police to verify that people actually wear them? Or just maybe, just maybe they did so to stop us from flying through the windshield to our deaths during a collision?” This is funny but not. Drivers here don’t give it a second thought. They don’t wear them.
Now God’s commandments were not created just so He could catch us breaking them. They were actually created to keep us from danger. They were created out of love in the same way we put a gate in front of the stairwell to stop children from tumbling down. It is because of love.
Now some may argue that the Apostle Paul made seatbelts (God’s Commandments) obsolete by introducing grace. No, he simply showed us that God had removed the spiritual penalty but not the PRACTICAL RAMIFICATIONS of breaking God’s law.
Paul knew that the flesh would want to spring free from the law when grace was introduced so he instructed us that we were still bound to righteousness. A lengthy quote is appropriate here:
…and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 6:18-23
God’s laws are good and good for us. As Lt. Dan Taylor told Forrest Gump, “Don’t do anything stupid.” We should realize that God’s commandments also are there to stop us from doing anything stupid.
Recent dabbling into Politics:
The Lorax
The One Thing
