In religion, people preach about Christ and talk about Him, but Christ Himself is not there. What is it about religion that inclines our natural man so strongly toward it? What makes it so captivating?
First, religion seems to give the natural man an easy way to please God apart from Christ. We may call this the law. Within every Jesus-lover’s natural man, there is a strong inclination toward the law. The natural man says, “I love the Lord. I know what I shall do. I shall memorize 1,000 verses every year.” Is there anything wrong with this? Only if we put ourselves under bondage, taking it as a law. Yet even so, our attempt to keep this law will expose our actual situation. When the Israelites at Mount Sinai told Moses, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exo. 19:8), they ended up dancing around the golden calf before Moses ever came back down from the mountain (32:1–6). This exposing feature is one of the positive functions of the law.
Adapted from Ruth: Growth Unto Maturity, page 80.
Tomorrow: “Under Bondage to the Law”