Rebekah Hawk is sharing our devotional thoughts this week. If you don’t know her, stop by the contributors page to learn more about her.
Laws usually remind me of restrictions. I must not drive too fast, I may not keep all the hard-earned money I earn, I am not permitted to sell products without proper licensing, and I am not allowed to bring my dog to every public beach. Quite frankly, I don’t naturally associate laws with blessing. So when I read James 1:25, I don’t immediately see how any law blesses my life.
Perhaps the Jews who received James’s letter struggled with this concept, too. Their entire culture was built upon centuries of being held to a standard—a strict code of moral laws given to them by Almighty God. With all the restrictions of the Mosaic Law, the Jews undoubtedly struggled to equate blessing with the crushing guilt of continually failing to live up to the laws imposed upon them.
It is shocking, then, that a Man Who makes crippled people dance and blind beggars see should refer to Himself as The Law, and not only that, but the fulfillment of the law! How could Someone Who is setting people free from the bonds of physical ailments and even death be associated with restriction—with laws?
James tells us to “look into” the perfect Law. Looking into means to inspect curiously. When we curiously inspect Jesus Christ, we find that His perfect (finished!) work on the cross provides us with “freedom from the dominion of corrupt desires, so that we do by the free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.” (Strongs)
The Perfect Law provides us with freedom to do what we were always created to do: bring delight to our Creator by freely choosing to do what He says. Christ takes us all the way back to the Garden where Adam and Eve fell and gives us their choice again: we may freely eat of all the trees in the garden and choose to reject the fruit of the one tree He has told us not to eat. Only this time, He put a bit of Himself in us, to give us the power over our corrupt desire to long after what is restricted.
The Perfect Law came down to restore our relationship with our God. The Perfect Law obeyed the Word of His Father to bring us to salvation. That is blessing indeed! But James carefully reminds us that it is not enough to curiously inspect what the Perfect Law did for us, we must also persevere. Strongs defines the Greek word paramenō as “to remain beside, continue always near, to survive, remain alive.”
Blessing comes when we remain beside and alive in the Perfect Law. We continue always near to Him, reveling in His Word and getting our hearts and minds surgically purged from sinful desires every day. Our actions will ultimately reveal whether the invisible surgery is taking place: one of the restrictions of this Law of Liberty is that we cannot abide with the Perfect Law and remain the same.
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