he who has eyes...

“Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” [Romans 3:20]

Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) is a rare disorder where the sufferer cannot feel pain. And while at first this sounds totally awesome — who wouldn’t want to be Claire from Heroes? (oh wait, MOST people wouldn’t want to be that whiny) — once a slight bit of thought is put into it, one realizes pretty quick why this would suck. You see, if you can’t feel pain, then you can’t tell if your hand is burning when you accidentally put it on a stove. And so you don’t remove it until you smell burning flesh. And by this time, it’s a bit too late — you’re now not only suffering from CIP, but also third degree burns.

You see, pain has a purpose. It tells your body when something is wrong. When you have a headache, it isn’t just that your body is mad at you for missing your morning coffee and is therefore waging a war on the area behind your eyes. Your body has become conditioned to surviving with a certain amount of caffeine in your system, re-establishing your chemical equilibrium so that your body compensates and offsets your receptors and other-sciency-sounding-things. And so the headache is your bodies first attempts at telling you, “If you don’t caffeinate me real soon, I’m going to get pretty messed up with all the extra stuff I’ve been creating for you.” (Of course, your body doesn’t shut down by not having caffeine or anything, because it quickly realizes that this caffeine addiction was all a cruel trick designed by Starbucks to develop dependencies and increase profit margins, and that your body doesn’t really need caffeine to survive.)

Or something like that.

Without pain, we wouldn’t know it when something was wrong with our bodies. We’d continue living in any harmful ways we could find until the consequences were far too dire for us to make a recovery. We’d have third degree burns and lose fingers and toes and fail to realize when enough money hadn’t been tithed to the great St. Arbucks.

As has become a typical trend on this website, I think this all links to a favorite topic of mine: sin.

To me, pain is used in a way very similar to how God uses the Law. Just as pain is a way for us to determine when something is wrong before serious damage is done (In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis calls pain God’s megaphone — “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”), God gives us rules and regulations and the Law to instruct us how to and not to live. It’s not as if God is waging a war on us or our souls (or on the area behind our eyes), it’s that God is telling us that we’re going to hurt ourselves if we continue on in this way.

God knows the truth about sin, and He wants to protect us from it. He doesn’t establish rules for rules’ sake, He does it because these rules keep us from sin by making us aware of sin (”through the law we become conscious of sin”) [Romans 3:20] — not from “fun” as is typically thought, but from harmful, damaging sin.

Tapped into God’s vast knowledge on the subject, Paul tells us that “the wages of sin is death” [Romans 6:23], meaning that when we are living in a lifestyle of sin and are thus slaves to it, what we get paid is death. The end result of sin is death, every time. This is the truth that God sees about sin.

You see, in the beginning with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, sin (and thus death) did not exist. Once they went against God’s best judgment, they introduced sin (and thus death) into the world. And from then on, things died. We died. That’s what happens with a world fallen into sin.

And so God set out to tell us what it was that continued our lives’ degradation. He gave the Law. He outlined what sin was. And the Jews got the privilege to relate to God through the Law as they attempted to live sinless lives and thus draw closer to God.

And I do mean privilege. The Jews were incredibly fortunate to be God’s chosen people. They got the inside scoop on how to best live. Sure they would be judged because with knowledge of the Law, they were accountable to it (”all who sin under the law will be judged by the law”), but it’s not like those without the Law were better off — they still suffered the consequences (that is, death) of living in a world of sin (”all who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law”) [Romans 2:12].

The Jews got the idea of sin spelled out to them. It was as if the very Creator of life wrote down the instructions manual for how to live (seems like a good source for an instructions manual, right?). And the rest of us? Well, we had to go on our God-given intuition to guide us on what to and not to do. Our consciences were our law (see Romans 2:14-15).

That is, until Jesus came. Because, with his death and resurrection, he tore down the barriers between God and man. He made a way for the privilege of being God’s chosen people to be opened up beyond the world of the Jews and the Law; He allowed all of us to know God and to know His instructions manual by sending the Holy Spirit — He who writes the law onto our hearts.

All of this culminates in another letter from Paul (not to the Romans, but to the Galatians). In chapters 3 and 4, we see Paul set out his case for the purpose of the Law. And rather than paraphrase for you, let’s just read it together.

Brothers, let me take an example from everyday life. Just as no one can set aside or add to a human covenant that has been duly established, so it is in this case. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ. What I mean is this: The law, introduced 430 years later, does not set aside the covenant previously established by God and thus do away with the promise. For if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on a promise; but God in his grace gave it to Abraham through a promise. What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come. The law was put into effect through angels by a mediator. A mediator, however, does not represent just one party; but God is one.

Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not! For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law. But the Scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe.

Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. He is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir. [Galatians 3:15-4:7]

Paul takes us from promised covenant people under God’s care (at Abraham’s time) to chosen people under Law (at Israel’s time) to fulfilled covenant people under faith in God (at Jesus’ time) to heirs of God along with Christ. Quite a story arch.

And so, the Law as it is written down in the Exodus and Leviticus and so forth and the Law as it is written on our hearts and consciences by the Holy Spirit point the way towards Christ (the sinless one) insofar as it points out what sin is and how to avoid it.

The Law is like pain. It tells us what is wrong before this thing has been given free reign to damage us irrevocably.

So please, don’t act as if God is obsessed with rules and regulations and control. Don’t think that God is an angry God who longs for us to be obedient and cause us to suffer when we aren’t following Him. God longs for us to live rightly, in the way we were designed to live. And He introduces rules not for control, but for love.

And in this way, pain really is God’s megaphone allowing Him to shout to the world what it is to truly live.