This was presented by Doug Phillips of Vision Forum. Psalm 119 is a good summary of this presentation, "Open my eyes that I may see the wonders of your law."
Doug recounted a story from his college years where he was invited to a session which became a 3-hour attack on him and the Bible by his college professors. He did not have answers to all of the questions, but this challenged him to never be without answers like this again. It planted a love for God's law in him.
Today, we are the most Biblically illiterate generation in 500 years, we have substituted everything else for the study of God's Word. (my question: Rather than going to Christian books, etc... why don't we go directly to the Bible?) We are in a battle between Biblical and secular thinking, there are two elements to this battle: 1) Orthodoxy (belief and doctrine) and 2) Orthopraxy (practical outworking of thee beliefs).
It has turned into a battle over the practical application and working of the family; man and woman, parent and child, abortion, divorce, etc... We need to reform the church and the family. The church is the problem, we have backed down or gone soft on God's law. (going back to a previous post, culture = religion externalized) The church has bent to the culture's influence, 'if it is not listed explicitly in the concordance, we are free to do as we please'. This is backwards and eliminates much of what can be plainly deducted from the message in the Bible. We often do not really believe that the Bible has the answer to all of life.
All people worship the Creator (God) or the creature/created things. We either depend on God for all we need, and know, or we depend on our self or others (Humanism).
We have written off the Bible in terms of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughter. We look to our own standards of the culture, rather than looking to the Bible for the standard.
Doug used a pyramid diagram to demonstrate God's laws. At the top are "The Greatest Commandments" (love the Lord your God, love your neighbor as yourself). The next level is the "Ten Commandments", which can all be categorized into one of the two greatest commandments. Then at the lowest level, there is a plethora of "Case Law" all over the Bible of specific, practical application of the other laws. These case laws help us better understand the higher laws better through specific situations.
In all this we should hold the Bible as our standard and be able to say, "Lord, I love your law".
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