In the Beginning Was... The LAW!

 When conversing with folks who insist that God’s law is abolished, especially the parts like keeping the Sabbath or abstaining from pork, you’ll often hear something like this: “That was just for the Jews. Nobody else had to keep those old laws.”

In essence, they assert that God has different standards at different times for different people. That He invented special laws for the Israelites and never expected anyone else to follow them. They might also dismiss these as “Mosaic laws,” as if they were the product of Moses’ imagination and not Divine instruction!

But the truth is, we find these laws in the Bible long before Moses, long before Israel reached Mt. Sinai, and long before Israel even became a nation! When God gave Moses and the Israelites His laws at Mt. Sinai, they weren’t new laws. They were the same laws He established at Creation for all humanity! Israel, and most of the rest of mankind, had simply forgotten them.

Consider, for example, God’s prohibition against idolatry. Do you suppose that, prior to Mt. Sinai, Abraham, Noah, Enoch, or any of God’s other faithful servants worshiped idols? Of course not! Abraham’s father’s family “served other gods” (Josh. 24:2), so God called Abraham out from among them (v. 3). Centuries before God gave the ten commandments at Mt. Sinai, Jacob corrected his family and told them, “Put away the foreign gods that are among you” (Gen. 35:2).

Near the beginning of human history, when Cain got angry with and jealous of his brother Abel, God warned him, “Sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it” (Gen. 4:7). Now who defines what sin is? God. And what defines what sin is? God’s law. The apostle Paul explained, “I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet’” (Rom. 7:7). God wouldn’t have told Cain to rule over sin if he didn’t know what sin was, and he wouldn’t have known what sin was without God’s law. Therefore, it’s plain that God had already given His law at the beginning!

But Cain didn’t heed God’s warning, and subsequently murdered Abel, becoming the first murderer in human history. The apostle John wrote that Cain “was of the wicked one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his works were evil and his brother's righteous” (1 John 3:12). How is it possible to be either evil or righteous unless there’s a standard? Clearly there was a standard, and that standard is God’s law!

God held Cain responsible for breaking His law against murder, condemning him to wander the earth as a vagabond (Gen. 4:10-15). But this law is by no means the only one that goes all the way back to the beginning.

About 2,500 years before God instructed Israel to offer firstborn livestock (Deut. 15:19-23) and the fat of animals (Ex. 29:13), we read that Abel pleased God by offering the firstborn of his livestock and their fat (Gen. 4:4). How could Abel have known this would please God if he didn’t know God’s law? Was it just a lucky guess? Of course not! Clearly, God had already given His sacrificial laws. Abel obeyed, and Cain didn’t.

Centuries before Mt. Sinai, God’s servants knew His law against adultery. When Potiphar’s wife attempted to seduce him, Joseph responded, “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Gen. 39:9). The Philistine king Abimelech, too, knew that God hated adultery (Gen. 20:1-10).

But God’s law doesn’t just condemn adultery; it condemns even the lust that precedes it, as Jesus Christ reiterated in Mat. 5:27-28. Long before God told Israel “You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife,” Job knew that he shouldn’t even lust after a woman who wasn’t his wife. He said, “I have made a covenant with my eyes; why then should I look upon a young woman?” (Job 31:1). And a few verses later, he called for God’s vengeance upon himself, “If my heart has been enticed by a woman, or if I have lurked at my neighbor’s door” (v. 9).

In fact, we find much of God’s law in the Book of Job. Now, it must be noted that Job wasn’t an Israelite, nor is Israel ever mentioned in the book. He lived in the land of Uz (Job 1:1), which was part of Edom (Lam. 4:21). All his friends were likewise Edomites or other Arabians. We’re told that he “was the greatest of all the people of the East” (Job 1:3), and the Septuagint, at the end of Job 42, identifies him as Jobab, one of the earliest kings of Edom (Gen. 36:31-34).

But in Job’s own lifetime, God declared him the most righteous man on earth (Job 1:8; 2:3), and he knew God’s laws. He knew that God hated lying and cheating. Again, he called for God’s vengeance upon himself “If I have walked with falsehood, or if my foot has hastened to deceit” (Job 31:5). He likewise called for God’s vengeance if he had done any of the following:

• Oppressed his servants (Job 31:13)

• Oppressed his subjects (Job 31:38-39)

• Failed to help the poor, the widows, and the orphans (Job 31:16-22)

• Become a lover of money (Job 31:24-25)

• Worshiped the sun or moon (Job 31:26-28);

• Sought revenge on his enemies or rejoiced at their downfall (Job 31:29-30)

• Failed to help strangers and sojourners (Job 31:31-32).

All these sins which Job declared himself innocent of are likewise condemned by the laws of God we find in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Job knew God’s law, and, long after his death, God held him up alongside Noah and Daniel as one of the three premier examples of righteousness (Ezek. 14:14, 20).

We also find examples of honoring parents and honoring elders long before God told Israel, “Honor your father and your mother” (Ex. 20:12; Deut. 5:16) and, “You shall rise before the gray headed and honor the presence of an old man” (Lev. 19:32). Noah’s son Ham was cursed for dishonoring his father, but his other sons Shem and Japheth were blessed for honoring him (Gen. 9:18-27). Isaac honored his parents Abraham and Sarah, and likewise the other patriarchs. And in the Book of Job, Elihu waited to correct Job until all the older men had spoken, for he said, “Age should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom” (Job 32:7).

Why, it’s actually unthinkable that there ever would have been a time God’s law did not exist, for without law there can be no sin! As the apostle Paul said, “For apart from the law sin was dead” (Rom. 7:8) and, “Sin is not imputed when there is no law” (Rom. 5:13).

Yet sin is a concept we find throughout the Bible. And throughout the Bible, God punished nations, Israelites and Gentiles alike, for sinning and breaking His law. We read that Sodom and Gomorrah were “exceedingly wicked and sinful against the LORD” (Gen. 13:13). God destroyed these cities with fire and brimstone, not only for breaking His laws against sodomy, but also for these things: “Look, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughter had pride, fullness of food, and abundance of idleness; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy” (Ezek. 16:49).

We could go on and on for quite some time. There are many more examples of God’s law in the Books of Genesis and Job, long before God gave those same laws to Israel at Mt. Sinai. So God’s law has always existed. It’s part of who He is; it defines His character. He taught His laws to Adam and Eve and all their offspring.

There are still a few more examples we must include, though. They are the laws that so many people desperately wish to be abolished: the Sabbath, the Holy Days, and the dietary laws. These, too, existed from the very beginning. They, too, were not just for Israel, but for all mankind.

God established the seventh day Sabbath at Creation: “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made” (Gen. 2:2-3). At the dawn of man, God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. And when God revealed the Sabbath to the Israelites, He pointed back to this very event: “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it” (Ex. 20:11).

Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job — we can rest assured that all these men and their families kept the Sabbath, for they were faithful men who kept all God’s laws. God had blessed and sanctified the Sabbath when He made the world.

What about the Holy Days? When God created the sun, moon, and stars, He created them “for signs and seasons, and for days and years” (Gen. 1:14). In Hebrew, “seasons” is moedim (Strong’s # H4150), which means “appointed time, place, or meeting.” It is exactly what God calls His Holy Days in Leviticus 23 and Numbers 28! Psa. 104:19 repeats that God made the moon for moedim, or appointed times.

But that’s not all. As we’ve seen previously, God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood happened around the time of Pentecost, probably on that very day. And when God made a covenant with Abraham, He did so on Passover, for we read that when He brought Israel out of Egypt on Passover 430 years later (Gal. 3:17), it was “on that very same day” (Ex. 12:41).

As for the dietary laws, God described clean and unclean animals to the Israelites in Lev. 11 and Deut. 14. Yet centuries before that, as He prepared to send the Flood upon the earth, He told Noah, “You shall take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female; two each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female” (Gen. 7:2). Again, a few verses later, we read, “Of clean animals, of animals that are unclean, of birds, and of everything that creeps on the earth, two by two they went into the ark to Noah, male and female, as God had commanded Noah” (vv. 8-9). From the beginning, centuries before any Israelite existed, God determined which animals were clean and which were not, which animals were fit for human consumption and which were not!

Again, God told the Israelites not to eat blood: “You shall not eat the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood. Whoever eats it shall be cut off” (Lev. 17:14). But centuries earlier, He said the same to Noah: “You shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood” (Gen. 9:4).

Yes, the Sabbath, the Holy Days, and God’s dietary laws all go back to Creation. All of God’s faithful servants, who obeyed the rest of His law, would have obeyed these as well. God didn’t make these things up just for Israel, He simply restored to the Israelites the same laws which He gave their forefathers and which they themselves had forgotten while enslaved in Egypt.

John 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Jesus Christ is the living Word of God, and He was in the beginning. Again, when God revealed His laws to Israel, we read, “And God spoke all these words, saying…” (Ex. 20:1). And again, Jesus, quoting Deut. 8:3, said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Mat. 4:4).

Now, if Jesus Christ is the living Word of God, and if God’s laws are His words, then it follows that Jesus Christ is also the living Law of God! He is not only the Lawgiver, but He is also the very embodiment of God’s law. And of course He is, for He, and He alone, kept God’s law perfectly and never sinned! He is our example: “He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked” (1 John 2:6). The law defines His character, it tells us who He is, and it shows us what we need to become.

In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the law.