Imagine a lawyer sitting down to write about the laws of the United States. She knows it is an impossibly broad task to sum up the vast expanse of federal law, but she wants to express to the reader that the laws of the United States are, in the main, right and just. Suppose also, that she chooses to address her writing to the “United States” personified, and she writes in the mode of a modern panegyric.
Even under these eccentric circumstances, can we imagine her writing something like, “Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments . . . With my
If she did, she would feel very alone if she had done much reading in her subject. Many legal treatises and law journal articles have passed dully over my eyes and none of them extol the law in this way. Even lawmakers, when they’re introducing a bill they’re sponsoring, do not speak of their proposed law in such terms. The most enthusiastic supporter of civil rights would not praise the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in this way. At their best, such laws are expedient, or practical, or groundbreaking, or necessary. They are never wondrous, wonderful, sure, true, or righteous.
The question then is, how can we meditate on the law as David does? What is it about God’s law that is worthy of such praise? Consider the contrast. Man’s law comes through human processes. In the case of the United States, some of it is common law (i.e., handed down through prior decisions of judges) and some of it is statutory. In either case, man-made processes produced it, so it never rises above man. David can speak in such rapturous terms because his meditation was on the very law of God. God’s law was not borne out of a committee vote. It was not handed down by previous judges over time. It was not ratified by a body of delegates. He wrote it on stone tablets at the top of a mountain, dictated it to Moses, and wrote it on our hearts. He has replaced our hearts of stone and given us hearts of flesh.
Meditation on God’s law seems to be a missing element in many of our churches and, indeed, in many of our hearts. That might be because meditating on God’s law means meditating on the books that most of us skim over because they seem too detailed to take in. Meditating on God’s law requires knowing God’s law. As much as the book of Leviticus is more glorious than the United States penal code, sometimes it seems just as complicated and uninteresting. Sometimes it seems irrelevant to our situations. Much of the law given in Leviticus is gloriously fulfilled in Jesus Christ and enacted in the sacraments of the church, such that we no longer have to bring offerings of animals to draw near to God, or follow the laws of ritual purity, or observe all of the annual feasts. Yet,
Rob Noland grew up attending Providence Church in Pensacola, Florida. He received his bachelor’s from New Saint Andrews College and his J.D. from the University of Mississippi School of Law. He and his wife, Amber, attend a PCA church in Atlanta, GA where he works as a lawyer.
