Free of the Penalty

April 14

How much of the law of God do you know? How many of the Ten Commandments can you recite? Do you know them in order? Well, welcome to the club. Most of us don’t. Even those who profess faith in the One, True, Living God, even we who have received Jesus as our Savior and Lord, are among those who don’t actually know the law—even its most familiar aspects.

This state of ignorance on our part is at total variance with what the Bible says in the matter. Joshua 1:8 admonishes, “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from you; meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do everything in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” It’s quite a word of counsel—and it promises quite a blessing!

But we have largely ignored it. We employ some of its tenets in our day-to-day lives. We don’t kill or steal, but we are rather ‘foot-loose’ with some other of its warnings. Have we committed adultery? Have we coveted our neighbor’s success? And the big one—have we taken the Lord’s holy name in vain? Have we used the name of Jesus blasphemously? Have we uttered prayers in His name without investing our heart in them? The list of self-probing questions could go on to include all the infractions of God’s holy and immutable law that we have all committed.

We know we stand guilty before Him. We know we have returned to our sin “as a dog to its vomit…” Proverbs 26:11, so we know our failure isn’t merely in not knowing the law, but in not living the law we know! This brings us to conclude that our need is for a Savior who fulfills the law for us. We have that Savior in Jesus. The Giver of the law is the Fulfiller of the law in our behalf. He lived the law and He died to pay our penalty for breaking the law. Because of Jesus, we are made righteous. Because of Jesus, we are made free of the penalty of the law we’ve broken.