Galations 3 and 4 Exposition on Law vs. Faith

See the note below on how this picture applies to this blog.

  I am not sure why I never really considered the truths of Galatians 3 and 4 and prized them as much as I have recently. It is a valuable tool in understanding that we should not place our souls into the mish-mash of trying to determine our eternity based on how well we keep the commandments. Where did the Christian community go so wrong in sprinkling in a few commandments here and a few there to make faith more complete? WHY is faith not enough. Is it bland like an unsalted bean, so we feel we need to spice it up? Or are we just not sure that faith is just that simple? Can we not accept the gift of God? Do we reject that a loving Lord would just provide us everything we need to have a fulfilled spiritual life?

Is it too easy?  It was very hard for him.  It took Him several hundred years to set up so we had volumes of documents and lifetimes to show us we couldn't achieve a spiritual peace on our own, or that we would ultimately fail under the law. It took him sending his beloved Son to die on a cross to make it possible, indelible. He went to great lengths. To make sure that it was all written down. 

Galatians says in no uncertain terms that God clearly dealt with His Old Testament believers without the law for 430 years before he gave them the Law.  Why did He give the Law anyway? and set up a whole priesthood to help the people keep the commandments?  Well, there seem to be two basic reasons. One is to make it clear that we are incapable of keeping them. To help us see that the standards of God are pretty high. WE need God to help us live to any level of the the standard. But the second one is that some of those things in the law are all about preserving us. God's form of Eco preservation. If He hadn't helped to preserve the nation of Israel, Jesus would have not been a Jew. LOL It was about showing us that there are certain things in life that if not taken seriously, will lead us to extinction. How we eat, if we rest, how we treat one another, if we kill one another irresponsibly, how much we respect the possesions of others as belonging to them.  Ecologists act as though these concepts are something new they thought up. The reason being, we have lost our way. Do the laws of God have relativity in the modern world. More so than ever, because we humans are on a collision course with our undiscipled lifestyles.  Are we more unlawful in God's eyes than any of our predecessors? NO We totally are no different than any before us. There are just so many  more of us that the consequences are catching up with us. Will we ever be able to turn it around. No. It's fruitless...to beleive that Utopia will come to earth. But not fruitless, to try to live healthier, treat others well as much as we are able, and not make what we do be detrimental to others, and our environment, or to that of future inhabitants of this creation. But ultimately, it is like any other thing in the universe. Someday, in someway, God must intervene. There must be renewal or a remake. So the Lord gave us some direction. Do we therefore get busy keeping the law with more determination?  AHHH the delimna.  Back again to working harder at keeping the law.  Jesus summed it up. He said the law was all rolled up in Loving God more than anything, and loving others in the same manner we love ourselves.  The implication being that we should also find a place to love ourselves. Scripture also gives direction to chose life....so oddly, we start with asking ourselves do we, or can we, at least try to love ourselves, enough to desire a realtionship with our creator, and then give that same opportunity to all others?  Taking care of the earth, ourselves and other people becomes a matter of respecting what belongs to God. Some will make that their life's journey, Some will stop there, thinking that if they just do their part on this earth that God will be pleased enough somehow to take them into his eternal blessing. Some will work harder and harder to make a difference, and proudly so, but fall short.

Use the gage.
If we use all the oil deposits, will all our environmental efforts bring it back. NO
If we change the chemical makeup of our air, can we change it back to oxygen? NO
If we cut so many trees...replant enough trees...etc., etc....
So if it is so impossible, why are we so responsible?  WE are not. God made us stewards of HIS work. But His Creation is HIS Creation. The point being, that at some point we must incorporate the God of Creation back into the resolution. So it is with our salvation. Why not sooner than later?  So then the question is do we couple the law with our salvation?  Only to the extent that by knowing it, we can try to work with respect to God's laws. God set up plans for renewal, replenishment, return. Almost anything in His creation works on a cycle.  It is beyond our ablility to see how the whole of our universe recycles itself. But on smaller scales, we see that other things in our universe circle around until the time they have extinguished their purpose, and they disentegrate.
It isn't news to God that things expire. The life death cycle of humans demonstrates that things should be expected to expire. The renewal is in the fact that we reproduce. The laws of God, and not just those written on behavoir in Old Testament Scripture, are about how this will continue when our earth expires from the universe.
People talk about the end of the world, thinking that it will be over when something catastrophic comes. But the other more wonderful element of God's law of "re" is that He made a way that supernaturally, we are renewed to a place in a realm we cannot fathom. The world in which God resides. We think of it as being out there somewhere. A heaven beyond the horizons of our solar system?  I don't think so. I believe that it is a realm into which only our souls may go because it is of something totally beyond our understanding.  I don't believe in re-incarnation, because I beleive in the principle of expiration and recreation as much as I believe in the law of renewal. There will be a time of extinction for this physical world. What if that dreaded catastrophe comes while people still inhabit the earth? Did God just forget that? No He made way that we could be a part of His spiritual realm.  Who knows.  Maybe there will be yet another realm beyond Heaven. But I know that it will be as impossible for me to get there on my own as Heaven is a place to which I have absolutely no power to transport myself there.  At some point, the God of the Universe must intervene. I am in the end, totally at His mercy. No amount of anything I can do to work within His laws endows me with power to do the Godly, impossible tasks of keeping things going. Yet I am not only a part of the laws of God, and ruled by the laws of God, I am in existance due to the laws of God.
Simply, the laws of God are not something I do or keep, but are something that exists to keep me. So what do I do with the laws of God. I live within them to the best of my ablility to make those choices, simply because God gave me the right to make choices. Why did He do that? So I would need to get to know more about Him. Giving me the choice to live outside of His laws, can in fact help me understand that it doesn't work, and may give me a reason to seek the companionship of God to know how I might have life and that more abundantly. Everything God did in creating man, as about allowing us to make a choice to be His friend, to get to know Him, fall in love with Him, to desire His presense, and involvement in my life. 
A keyboard is useless if you don't type. Electric lines are powerless without a source of energy. Life doesn't go on without water. Tools are of no value without a purpose and a person or machine to use them for that purpose. These are all kind of "laws".  Mathmatics is a set of laws. Because they are laws, there is an element of dependability about them. The items are useful because the laws reguarding their use are dependable. I can say certain things are true, and can build upon that truth.  That is the requard God would have us give to His laws.  Use them as tools to build upon. But don't count on them to give eternal life. They can describe the paths to eternal life. I can build hope upon them. I can have understanding about Justification, value, and Redemption which are all legal terms. But they are the description of how it works, not the essence of how it works.  Grace by faith is HOW it works.  It is when God intervenes to bring life to the law.
Precious Lord, how do I praise you enough for the laws of life and eternity. How do I place you in the box in my mind that tries to understand the magnificance of a God who is that big? Thank you that all you really want is me, a loving relationship with me.  That a place a value on that leaves me humble     and desirous to be ever aware of your indwelling companionship.  YOU came into me... and you wanted to be there enough to go beyond your own laws to make it happen.  Much Love Jesus. And praise! Thank you. AMEN

The picture at the top of the blog is of a fractal. Fractals are the visible result of placing points on a grid of numeric values derived from a type of function or mathmatical equation.  The resulting answer to this kind of equation is dimensional because there are an infinite number of answers to the problem. The resulting image is both infinite and repetitious. It is also artistic and generally intricately beautiful. A flat image can not present the full depth of these graphics. A 3 dimensional rendition is however impossible because the image is infinite.  Therefore we must use our imagination and possibly a little virtual zoom to see the repeated pattern being reworked an infinite number of times.  I love these images because to me, they are as close as I can come to getting a visual of the law of God of renewal.  I also love that it takes a mental exercise to imagine the concept of this pattern being set and going on for ever into infinity directionally, and expansionallly, for ever near,forever far, forever large, forever small, and larger than is possible to construct even virtually.  They are an artistic picture of the laws of God in practice. The law is in place. The math has been revealed to us. The tools have been made to make the picture visible. It is up to man to plug in the numbers to the formula.  Since that is also beyond our ability to do without the help of the computer, we don't even have to plug in the numbers. but rather slide a button along a line and determine the place in the numerical values of the color spectrum and hit enter. Et Viola ~ That's how it is with God's law and how we are to live within its perameters. Just plug in the numbers, so to speak.  Use God's laws to make our lives beautiful. Recognize their capacity, enormity, boundaries, and see them as reasonable patterns for a good life that God intended to go on and on. But when we break the pattern, life does not go on and on. There fore God must intervene to renew the pattern.  I love the deep things of God. and I love fractals for being a visual on the laws of God.  As a child I saw this in the simple exercise of setting a mirror to reflect something in another mirror. You've done it. the reflection goes on and on... Same principle but more linear than the fractal. Jesus said he was the light of the world. Light is intricate in concept.  The thing Jesus was telling us was that the act of salvation is just that intricate. The laws of God are just that magnanamous and beautiful. In order to bring out that beauty, we need only plug in the numbers. Use the laws to bring infinite beauty into our lives.