Saturday, August 27, 2011

A Legal And Moral Question

And He said to them, "Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?" But they kept silent. (Mark 3:4)

A non-answer to God is provocative. Sometimes it's far better to be wrong in our response to Him than not to respond at all. When God asks a question, He expects an answer or at least an acknowledgement. Anything less is treating Him as though He is irrelevant to our life and whatever He says doesn't matter because He doesn't matter.
So they kept silent. But a disrespectful and dishonorable response is not all that is in view here. Their non-response, provocative to God and dangerous to them, was also a defensive response. They could not answer the question without destroying their position on Sabbath worship. And their position was not as much about worship on the Sabbath as worship of the Sabbath. Jesus taught that the purpose of the Sabbath was to benefit man as it glorified God. So their silence was grounded in their willing miscarriage of justice. Jesus wanted to know what mattered most to them...that a life was changed because of doing something good...or that a life withered away because of the hardness of the hearts of so-called holy men. The law, at least in their traditional interpretation, mattered more than the misery of the man. Simply because the man with the withered hand did not matter. But he mattered to God. And morally, God occupies the high ground. Do you ever get so focused on meaningless religious activity that the morality of helping someone who is suffering gets clouded out? Even to the point that we shut our mouths and refuse to answer the Lord's leading questions...that's why He asks those kinds of questions...He is leading us somewhere...out of bondage...into blessing.
Don't miss the Lord's lesson: Not everything deemed legal is truly moral.

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