The Law is holy, righteous, and good?

I learned something fascinating about the Law a day or two ago. Galatians 3:23-29 talks about people under the Law being like children and only coming to maturity in Christ, and verse 24 says, “So the law was put in charge of us until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.” In Greek the bit about the law being put in charge of us actually says, “The law was our paidagogos.” A Greek or Roman paidagogos was a slave assigned to take care of his master’s son. He made sure the child behaved and was his bodyguard and guide in proper behavior, and the term eventually came to mean teacher—pedagogue. To be a paidagogos was to care for and teach someone by leading, guiding, and disciplining him until he was old enough to do it for himself.

Christians have this tendency to misconstrue the Old Testament Law in several ways. We can see it as a harsh, cruel taskmaster to be servilely obeyed in everything in an attempt to get God’s good will, an attitude that raises the Law from its proper place as God’s tool for guidance and maturation to a god in itself that keeps people as immature children instead of grown and mature adults, able to guide themselves in right living. Or we can see it as this evil thing that enslaved the poor Israelites until Jesus came to show them how they really ought to live in freedom like we do, rather than, as before, that useful servant God gave for our maturation which eventually serves its excellent purpose and is no longer needed because we know how to live as He desires. It would be slavery to try to go back to the Law’s domination as adults because that is not its Proper Job, so to speak. The Law was good. It taught right from wrong and guided people along good paths. But as it would be absurd for adults to stay under the absolute rule of their parents or preschool teachers or nannies, it would be absurd to stay under the Law when we have the maturity of Christ and the life of the Spirit.

If all people lived exactly as God desires, solely to honor Him and love one another, I doubt there’d be any need for human rules and laws at all because people would live in such a way as to make them null and void. Laws are specific instances that illustrate finite points about a proper way to live for people who aren’t mature or godly enough to understand the deeper meaning behind them. For instance, The Commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the American laws prohibiting specific methods of killing are not necessary to me because I comprehend God’s love for humanity and the value He has placed on human life. It would be absurd for someone to come to my house and harshly demand that I not kill anyone or preach hellfire and brimstone down on me if I break that commandment or put guilt trips on me for not thinking about it all the time and worrying that I might accidentally break it. I don’t have to go around in mortal fear of the punishment promised by the Commandment. My whole philosophy in life precludes it. I live it naturally, as part of who I am. I have become mature in that respect. And that is the difference between life under the rule of the Law and life under the rule of the Spirit.