4 Keys to Understanding God's Law

The law of God, plainly spelled out throughout His Word, is intended to teach us about what God wants us to do and who He wants us to be. God frequently admonishes us to delight in His law and to meditate on it. I encourage everyone, firstly, to read God's Words - all of them. Furthermore, when you have read what God has said, you must do your best to seek understanding of it through God's Spirit living in you.

As you read and consider God's law, there are many things that seem antiquated in our time. Don't be deceived: God has written these laws for our understanding and spiritual growth! None of it is truly "done away" or "abolished" - it is simply fulfilled in a different way. The following are 4 keys that have helped me personally in unlocking the deep spiritual significance of some of God's laws, and it is my sincere hope that they will also guide you in your personal study.

#1 Marriage between men and women typifies the coming marriage of Christ to His Church.
Just like God designed the physical Temple to mirror the Temple that He has in heaven (Revelation 8:3-5), God also designed human marriage to mirror the relationship that we are going to have with Him. The laws concerning the rights of husbands in a human marriage depict the rights of God in our marriage to Him. Likewise, the responsibilities and duties of wives in a marriage are symbolic of our responsibilities to God. God did not create human marriage in order to oppress women; on the contrary, we must ALL submit to God in the way that a wife is supposed to submit to her husband. By extension, this fact indicates that husbands should strive to be like God by not oppressing their wives. Think about how God deals with you individually: that is how a husband should treat his wife! Check out this article for an example of how to apply this principle to illuminate the meaning of a seemingly useless Old Covenant marriage law.

#2 Redemption in the Old Covenant is symbolic of the fact that Christ redeems us from sin.
This one is sort of a no-brainer - Christ is even called our Redeemer many times throughout the Prophets (Isaiah 63)! But when you are reading through the law, it is often presented in very physical circumstances that make it easy to overlook the spiritual significance. First, we must learn the physical meaning of redemption so that we can then have a fuller spiritual understanding of redemption. God declared these laws in order to teach us two important lessons: firstly, that we must be redeemed from sin and, secondly, that Christ is the one who redeems us by His perfect sacrifice. An exposition of how this parallel can help us understand the redeeming of the firstborn of animals can be found here.


#3 Sacrifices are not all referring to Christ! While Christ is symbolized in all of the sacrifices, it's also a fact that all believers are called to give sacrificial offerings in our lives.
Many people assume that the sacrificial system has no value other than to teach us that we needed Christ to be a sacrifice for our sins - WRONG! Indeed, it does teach us that. If you study the sacrifices, every single one does teach you something about the character of Christ, although most people won't even study enough to gain that benefit. In actuality, if you read through the sacrifices in the first few chapters of Leviticus, less than half of the offerings described there are for forgiveness of sin! Furthermore, there are a number of New Testament passages that urge us to offer sacrifices through our actions and how we live our lives (Hebrews 13:16, Romans 12:1). To see how this can open your understanding, here is an article where I applied this reasoning to the grain offering (Leviticus 2) to gain a better perspective of its meaning for our lives today.

#4 The concept of ceremonial cleanliness is intended to show us the imperfection and corruption of our existence as human beings.
Under the Old Covenant, God actually lived among the people of Israel in the tabernacle and, later on, in the temple. Ceremonial cleanliness was required in order to approach God's presence, or else the person approaching would die. People could become ceremonially unclean by their direct actions, such as touching a dead body. Other ways of becoming unclean were completely unavoidable, such as women's periods and certain diseases, which a person had no control over. The New Testament teaches us that our bodies are "sown in corruption," that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God," and that God will give us new bodies that are capable of inheriting eternal life (1 Corinthians 15:42-52). Just as there were ways that a person could make himself unclean by choice as well as ways that a person could become unclean by circumstances beyond their control, so also there are ways that we can consciously disqualify ourselves from God's presence as well as ways that we are inherently alienated from God because of the nature of our physical existence. I am in the process of writing a more detailed article about the significance of ceremonial cleanness, but, in the mean time, here's an article that touches on the related topic of holiness.

Hopefully these tools will help you in your own study. Also, please feel free to share any additional insights that you might have for understanding God's law!

Concerning Unfaithful Wives

If an Israelite man suspected his wife of adultery, then he had the right to have her "tested" by the priests. Numbers 5:11-31 describes this process – yet another ritualistic law that causes most readers to shrug their shoulders in confusion and skip on to the next section.

The NKJV refers to this section of scripture as “Concerning Unfaithful Wives.” A man could bring his wife before the priest any time that he thought she might have been unfaithful to their marriage. This could be done as often as the husband chose, and there was no analogous procedure for women to test their husbands. The priest would take some water and add to it a pinch of dust from the floor of the tabernacle. He would also etch an oath into a clay tablet and then scrape the words off into the water. The woman would swear the oath, which said that she had not committed adultery and that she would be cursed if she had, and then she would drink the “bitter water the brings a curse.” Afterwards, if she had been lying, she would become ill: it says that her stomach would swell and her thigh would rot. While the punishment may seem a bit vague, it was probably some condition associated with barrenness, since, if she were telling the truth, it says that she would be free and allowed to have children.

To understand the purpose of this law, we should consider the symbolism of the biblical institution of marriage. God ordained marriage to be between a man and a woman, and for the woman to be subservient to the man “as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22). In numerous places throughout the bible, the future relationship of God’s people with Christ is pictured as a marriage, with Christ being the groom and the Church being the bride (Revelation 19:7-9, for example). Human marriage is a “shadow of the things to come” (Hebrews 10:1) - it was created in order to teach us about the relationship that we are supposed to have with God. Likewise, the focus of this particular law was not to help Israelite men catch their adulterous wives – it was pointing to our relationship with (and eventual marriage to) God!

Once we understand this key, the interpretation is simple: God, our future Husband, reserves the right to test us. We have to drink the bitter water of His Word, which comes with a choice between life and death – blessing and cursing. If we have committed spiritual adultery through any form of idolatry, then we will be cursed and cut off from Him. On the other hand, if we are faithful to Him, then we will be blessed and found suitable for marriage. Furthermore, just as in the physical law, our Husband may test us as often as He chooses, and we have no right to test Him in return: He is faithful in all things.