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Apologetics & Outreach

Instructor: Professor Jerram Barrs

Audio Transcription for Lesson 7: Postmodernism & Truth

Let us begin with prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank You so much for Your love to us. You have committed Yourself to us again and again. You care for us in Your provision day by day through the practical details of our lives as You watch over Your whole creation with compassion. You have cared for us in sending Your Son to give Himself for us, and You care for us by working through Your Spirit in our hearts every day. Father, we praise You for Your love, and we pray that we may be those who commit ourselves to You and to Your service in return. Teach us in our time together we ask, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

In our last session we were talking about the breakdown of relationships, and we discussed personal loneliness and the difficulty people have in making relationships. And I want to say a little bit finally here about the issue of the loss of community in American culture, in suburbia, but everywhere else as well. We are living in a context where most people who have been raised in the last 20 to 30 years in American society have very little experience of community as it was traditionally experienced in this society, whether you were living in a rural area or in a city. But the practical reality for most of us is that we have no experience of community at all. And this is very challenging for the church; it is challenging for us as Christians. Basically, the only places where we still see any vestiges of community in our culture are in small rural areas where people still know their neighbors well and care for one another practically. And there are some sections of our inner cities where there are still some vestiges of community, although there is such a growth of fear that we see community breaking down. Let me give you an illustration of that before I turn to the suburbs where the most serious problem is. Three or four years ago there was a period during the heart of the summer where we had some heat waves here in St. Louis, and also as far north as Chicago. And particularly in Chicago, quite a number of elderly people died during those heat waves. And I was listening to a program on public radio about it in which they interviewed the theologian Martin Marty, who was raised in the inner city of Chicago 40 or 50 years ago. He was describing what had happened at that point 40 or 50 years ago when there were very hot summers, and of course far less people had air conditioning than today. And he said at that time, when there was very hot weather, you would see everybody sitting out on their porches or decks in the evening in the summer, chatting with their neighbors, but being outside where it was cooler. And when it got really hot, basically the whole community from the center of Chicago would go sleep on the beach. And of course today, nobody does this because everyone is afraid of everyone else. And many of the elderly people died because they were afraid to even open their windows, much less sit on their decks and porches. And so some of the houses got as hot as 125 or 130 degrees inside if they did not have air conditioning. So a lot of people died just from heat exhaustion, because they were frightened of their neighbors and the places where they lived. Now that tells us something about the breakdown of community in the society in which we live. And in the cities there is far more community still than there is in the suburbs.

What has happened in suburbs in America and in other places, and if you live in suburbs you will know, is that it is not at all easy to get to know your neighbors. But if you think about the problem in the suburbs, the challenge that all of us face is this: we all live in half a dozen different communities. Historically, in a traditional American city, suburban area, or rural area, people basically had one community. They lived in a neighborhood; they worked in the same neighborhood; their children went to school in that neighborhood; they went to church in that neighborhood; and they had their entertainment in that neighborhood, their sports or little league and everything else. The reality in which most of us live now is very different. We live in an area; I will not call it a neighborhood, because most of them are not neighborhoods at all, in the sense of any meaning of "neighbors." We live in an area, but we commute to somewhere else, so we have one "community" where we live. We have a second "community" where we work, often miles away from the place we live. We have a third "community" where our children go to school, again often miles away. Our youngest son, for example, went to the local high school in our district, and it was basically 25 minutes away by car, and that was our local high school. We go to church in a different "community." We have our entertainment in another "community." All of us have hundreds of superficial relationships in which we do not know anybody well. This is one of the practical challenges that face us. Now, this is not a consequence of some set of ideas related to postmodernism; this is a practical, social reality that has come about for all sorts of reasons. One of the primary ones is the fact that in America we all drive cars very long distances to go anywhere we want, but there are all sorts of other practical reasons for it as well. But this practical reality is one of the fundamental reasons for the breakdown of community, where people feel so lonely that they do not know how to make relationships. When they are in need, especially if they have had to move away from their family for the sake of work, they have nobody to turn to. It is the reason why people need dating services to get to know people of the opposite sex to get married, because they simply do not know anybody well.

Now this is not just a problem out in the world. This is a problem in the church as well. I hear students on this campus saying that they expected there to be more reality of community as they live here, or they expected there to be some reality of community living in a neighborhood where there are many seminary families. But they experience very little of it. This is not a problem simply out there; this is a problem in the church as well. And I want to come back to it later. Now there are some ideas, as well as some sociological realities, that are at the heart of this. And the fundamental idea at the heart of the problem here is the pursuit of happiness for the individual. That is the fundamentally destructive element that breaks down community in our culture: the sense of a lack of responsibility to other people. We could talk about this with the issue of hospitality and how this undermines the commitment to care for other people and welcome them into our homes.

Next, I want to say just a little bit about practical idolatry. I do not want to go into this at length, because we are going to do an extended section on idolatry later in these lessons. I just want to make some summary points here. We are living in a culture that has no story, no narrative. I used that term meta-narrative earlier. It has no meta-narrative, no story that gives ultimate meaning to our lives. You can read Robert Jenson's article, "How the World Lost its Story," which addresses this issue. It is an excellent article which you all should read. People around us have no account of human existence, where we have come from, who we are, what we are here for, or where we are going. They have no story that gives ultimate meaning, hope, and vision for their lives. The consequence is that they develop idols of the mind. That is, people will believe anything -- no matter how irrational it is -- as long as it gives some sense of meaning to their existence. It is why people believe the most bizarre ideas, like the Heaven's Gate cult, for example. These are people, seemingly rational people, believing ideas that are completely irrational and have no evidential foundation at all. People do not ask the questions, "Does this make sense? Is it reasonable?" They simply ask, "Will it help me, will it make me feel more hopeful?" So people have idols of the mind.

Also, they have no commandments to direct their lives. We live in a society without moral direction. People need to live with some sense of what they are living for and with some sense of purpose and direction. But people have no sense of direction. There are no commandments from above to tell them who they are to be and how they are to live, and consequently they develop idols of the will. People live for something that is going to provide goals for their life. Now for many, that goal, or idol, is going to be work. For many of our contemporaries, work is the primary thing that gives them a sense of purpose in their daily lives, and it becomes an idol. One of our faculty wives has a brother-in-law who ended up losing his wife, children, and many other things because he was so devoted to his work. He said this about himself: "I am no longer a human being; I am a human doing." Work is one of the primary idols, especially of men in American culture, but increasingly of women too. Work, ambition, success, and making money are common idols of the will. So an idol of the will is something around which to direct the devotion of my will.

If people have no passion in their hearts to love God, to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever, then they are going to live for something else. They are going to develop some idol of the heart that will give them pleasure and fulfillment. They will develop some passion for their heart to devote itself to, and that may be possessions, the pursuit of personal pleasure or sexual fulfillment, or the admiration of their own body. So, there are idols of the heart. You remember I quoted Robert Bellah in a previous session. He is a sociologist who has written lots of really excellent books, one called Habits of the Heart and several others as well. He is one of the most perceptive commentators on the culture in which we live, and he says that Americans have two overriding goals in life: personal success and vivid personal feelings. We can call these idols of the will and idols of the heart. So we live in a culture that is saturated with idolatry. And of course one of the greatest idols, which is the fundamental contributing factor to the breakdown of relationships, is simply the idol of my own personal freedom and happiness, which dominates the American culture. And I would just simply say to us that it is impossible to address any of the moral issues, which we as Christians wrestle with in our society and long to see changed, in terms of the laws of this nation, whether it is sexuality or abortion or anything else. It is impossible to challenge people in any of these areas unless we challenge this fundamental idol. That is the idol that "I have the right to decide for myself how to live my life and pursue my own happiness." Until that idol is challenged, it is not possible to change the laws about anything in the area of personal morality. It is not possible. We can work as hard as we want to, and we should work hard at trying to change laws to protect innocent human life and to protect family and marriage as an institution. But all of our efforts in those areas are absolutely in vain unless our nation, as a nation, is weaned from the idol of "my own personal fulfillment." That is the primary idol in this culture: that I am free to do what I want to do. And the overwhelming majority of Christians will define their life that way as well. That is why it is so hard to practice something like church discipline in this culture. This is an enormous problem; something like 98% of Americans will say that they believe that they have the right to have control over their own lives. That includes the overwhelming majority of believers, of Christian believers. If we have any belief in God at all, or sense of submission to Him, we cannot say that. God is the one who is in control of my life. Not just in the sense that He is the sovereign Lord over history and over me as an individual, but also in the sense that He is the lawgiver and the judge to whom I am accountable and to whose will I am to live in obedience. Then there is no way that I could possibly say that I am in charge of my life or that I have the right to have complete control over it or the freedom to do what I want to do. For the Christian, that is a nonsense statement. And yet 98% of our contemporaries consistently make that statement about their own lives. So we have an enormous problem of idolatry here.

Another way to express this would be to say this: if there is nothing in heaven to worship, we will worship something on the earth. And Paul of course says this, and later on we will look very carefully at Romans 1 and what it says about idolatry. Paul says in Romans 1:25 that when we refuse to have God in our knowledge, we worship and serve created things rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Now that is a description of the culture in which we live. If we refuse to have God in our knowledge, we worship and serve created things rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. So if we do not have someone in heaven to worship, we are going to worship someone or something on earth.

That brings us to our next point, which is the return to paganism. And later on we are going to talk in some detail about the New Age movement, but we live in a context where people are fascinated by all sorts of new religions. It is one of the fastest growing realities in the culture in which we live. Something like 30% to 35% of the population in American society is identified in some way or other with New Age thinking. And that is a very, very rapid growth, because back in the 1960s there would have just been a handful of people, maybe less than 1% of the population, who would have identified themselves in any way as being adherents of what we call today New Age religion. So it has been an extraordinary, rapid growth in this area. It is one of the fascinating things about our culture. We will try to analyze exactly what has happened, because for the last 300 years Western culture has been moving in the direction of rationalism and secularism. Secularism means literally that what goes on in this age, in this life, between birth and death, is all there is and there is nobody up there in heaven. We get rid of that altogether. And there is nothing down there in hell. So secularism says that life is just completely contained in this experience we have between birth and death, and that is it. And it would have seemed impossible 30 years ago to many people in our culture that suddenly a huge proportion of our population is becoming involved in all sorts of pagan religions. If anybody had predicted this, people would have said that the idea is absurd. It could not possibly happen, because we are living in a society that has grown up and grown beyond religion. We no longer need God, and we can do without God in every form, but suddenly we have a culture where people are believing in any kind of god, and there is an extraordinary revival of interest in every kind of pagan religion. People believe in spirits of all sorts, again, in quite irrational sorts of ways. Lesslie Newbigin puts it this way. He says, "We have learned that what has come into being is not a secular society but a pagan society." That is the culture in which we live. And he says elsewhere that one of the striking things about this new paganism is that this post-Christian paganism is far more resistant to the Gospel than pre-Christian paganism. Many of the people in many New Age groups are people who think they have tried Christianity. This is one of the reasons why post-Christian paganism is resistant. When a couple of guys I knew two or three years ago got involved in a local New Age group, they said that everybody else in the group had basically been a member of a church at some point. And of course those people were involved either in nominal churches where there was no real spiritual vitality, so they thought they had tried Christianity and that it was just spiritually empty, which of course it was in their context. Or they had been to liberal Churches, which had completely lost the Gospel a generation ago and no longer preached any kind of biblical message at all. So again, they thought they had tried Christianity and found it wanting because it had nothing to say to them. Or they had gone to some evangelical, very legalistic church where they were turned off completely by the substitute for Christianity that they discovered there.

The way we might describe the last topic we have been looking at is with this kind of subtitle: what is my neighbor thinking? That is really what we have been talking about. In this next section on the consequences of postmodernism, we might want to subtitle it with this: what is my neighbor thinking about me? What impact does this have on us as Christians in terms of the particular challenges that face us? How do people think about us as Christians, how does this impact us, and what challenges does this create for us? As we go through this section, I really want to look at three questions as we go back over some of these points from our last section. What particular difficulties does this postmodern reality create for Christians in terms of how people think about us? Second, are we being faithful as we seek to serve God facing these pressures; how are we being squeezed by postmodern culture? And third, what particular challenges does this create for us as we seek to reach out with the Gospel? So I want to think about those three questions as we go back over each of these areas, not necessarily in the same order that we went over them the first time, but we will begin with the area of truth.

What is the loss of truth in a postmodern culture going to mean for us? What are our neighbors thinking about us? The first point here is that truth claims are offensive to our contemporaries. As long as we tell somebody this is my truth, this is my faith, this is where I go to church, and this is what I believe, nobody minds. But as soon as we claim that what we believe is the truth, then we are considered arrogant, because once you say to somebody, "This is not just my personal conviction; this is the truth," then of course what you are saying is that Christ's claims are exclusive. What we are going to say is that He is the only way to God, as Jesus Himself says, "No man comes to the Father but by me." Or as the apostles say, "There is no other name given unto heaven by which people may be saved." Now that claim -- that Christianity is the truth and that the message of Christ is exclusive -- is considered intolerant and unloving. It is even considered immoral. Now I want you to think about that. To say this is the truth is considered an immoral claim by our contemporaries. Now, of the Greeks and the Romans at the time of the apostles in the first century, someone said this, and you will come across this quotation when you read Michael Green's book, Evangelism in the Early Church, that "it was not that men became so depraved that they abandoned the gods, but that the gods were so depraved that men abandoned them." Christians have always assumed that we are on high moral ground, but in Western culture we are considered to be in the lowest moral place. Now I want you to think about that; it may be a hard idea for you. One of the primary reasons why people have problems with Christianity is because they think it is immoral in making truth claims. Now that is a new problem. That is a new problem, that people think it is immoral that we make truth claims. So this is our dilemma. The primary scandal of the cross in our generation is the claim that Christianity is true. That is the primary scandal. It is the thing that people most do not want to hear. There is enormous pressure, consequently, on the evangelical church to abandon this commitment to truth claims.

And so this brings us to our next point. Given this challenge, are we going to hold on to the truth? Are we going to hold on to the conviction that Christianity is the truth, the only truth, the absolute truth, that Christ's claims are exclusive, that people can indeed only be saved through faith in Jesus Christ? And we talked a little bit about this earlier, but I want to express it this way now. You already see a number of very influential books among evangelicals that are backing off from this claim, suggesting that sincere Muslims, sincere Hindus, and sincere everybody else are going to be saved, and that everybody who does not hear about Christ in this life is going to have another opportunity after death. Now that is not what the Bible teaches at all. But there is a huge pressure; you are all going to experience this pressure. You are going to experience this pressure from the culture to back off from this truth claim, this exclusive truth claim of the Gospel, and you are going to experience this pressure from within the church as well. So do we hold on to truth claims? I probably mentioned these statistics before, but let me repeat them here. You remember I said that for our American contemporaries somewhere between 66% and 70%, over two-thirds of our contemporaries, deny that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and over 80% of Generation X. But for us in the church, the worrying figures are these. If you ask the same questions of people who profess to be evangelical Christian believers, who believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior, about 55% of people who claim to believe in Christ as their Savior will say they do not believe in absolute truth. Over half of the people in our churches right across the United States who say they personally have faith in Jesus Christ will also say that they think Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and everybody else will find their own way to God without the knowledge of Christ. So this is not just a problem in a few books. The Church as a whole is being squeezed in this direction by the culture. So this is a tremendous challenge to us. Are we holding on to the truth? Or, let us put it personally, do you love the truth giver, the one who claims Himself to be the truth? "I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life." Do you love Christ who is the truth giver? Without truth there is no Gospel, there is no Christianity. Hebrews 11:6 says, "The one who comes to God must believe that he exists." God is not just some vague notion in my head that I can turn into any shape I want. God exists as the infinite personal God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Trinity. This is who He is, the holy, righteous, sovereign, loving, and merciful God. That is who He is, and He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He does not change like a shifting shadow. The one who comes to Him must believe that He exists. And John says in the first few verses of 1 John 4 that we must believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God who came in the flesh. Do we believe in the truth of the incarnation, that Christ is the second person of the Trinity who became man, who was born as a human child in a stable, the son of God and the son of man? Do we believe that? If we do not believe that, then there is no Gospel, there is no Christian faith at all. And Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 15, if we believe that Christ rose from the dead actually, literally, factually, and historically, so that television cameras would have observed an empty tomb and could have recorded His meeting the women in the garden and His meeting disciples on the Emmaus Road and in the upper room, and in Galilee before His ascension. Do we believe that this is the truth? And Paul says if we do not, then our faith is in vain; we are still in our sins, the people who have died are dead, and that is it. And he says, of all men most to be pitied, why on earth would I do the things that I do and be prepared to endure the persecution I receive, if this is not the truth? And Paul says this, "If this is not true, then let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Without truth the Gospel is meaningless, and you have absolutely nothing to say to people out there if this is not the truth. So is this truth in the sense that this is who God is, and is this truth in the sense that this is what historically happened? Christ was born of a virgin, died on the cross for our sins, rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is coming again. If that is not true, well I would not be here teaching you. I would not be a Christian at all. I would have committed suicide long ago, that is exactly what the apostle Paul says. So are you holding on to truth, because if you do not, you have nothing whatsoever to say to the generation in which we live. We must hold on to the truth.

Finally, are we communicating truth to unbelievers? No matter how difficult it is and how offensive it is, we must communicate truth. We are living in a culture that is dying because it has lost the truth. That is the reality of the society in which we live. There is a statement in Amos 8 toward the end of the prophecy in which he says that the time is coming when there will be a famine for the Word of God, when people will stagger from east to west and from north to south, looking for the Word of God, and they will not find it because there is a famine. Well that is the time in which we live. When I spoke at a recent L'Abri conference, there were people there from as far away as Alaska and from places all over the nation, who said that there are no churches in their community that are proclaiming and believing Christian truth. They are completely alone. There are some churches that claim to be evangelical, but they are either so bogged down in legalism that they have absolutely nothing to say to people, or they are off somewhere in some kind of vague spirituality, which is not rooted in truth in any way at all. There were people at the conference who just wept and said, "We never hear teaching like this, where we are encouraged to know that this is the truth that is going to transform our lives." There are a lot of people out there who are experiencing famine, the famine for God's Word, and that is going to get worse. So are we holding on to the truth, and are we communicating truth to unbelievers? If we are not careful, people just hear us making religious noises. That is what people hear unless we very carefully say, "I am talking about truth; I am not talking about my personal religious faith simply, though of course I believe this personally. I am talking about truth." No matter how difficult it is, no matter how offensive it is, we must talk about truth.

But it is imperative when we talk about truth that we speak it with love. The apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:15 says, "Speaking the truth in love, we will grow up into Christ." If we do not speak the truth with love, we are first being disobedient to God and to the very nature of the Gospel itself, which is about the love of God in Jesus Christ. But we are also going to cut off the possibility of communication to this generation if we do not speak the truth in love; people will not listen. They have a problem with truth anyway, but if you do not speak it with love, people will not hear you. A passage in Scripture, which is going to be fundamental to everything I say in this class, is 1 Peter 3:15 where Peter says, "Always be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in you; but do it with gentleness and with respect." I just got a letter on my e-mail yesterday, and it gave me the title of my lecture for a conference where I will be speaking later this year. I was appalled by it, because the title of the lecture I am giving is "Why Atheism is Absurd." What atheist is going to come and hear such a lecture? I certainly would not. I used to be an atheist, and I would never have gone to a lecture with that title. We are awful at doing this kind of thing, and I am going to write back to the conference organizers. I asked one of our secretaries to call right away. I am not speaking on that title. I am not coming if you give me that title. I do not care whose conference this is or where it is taking place. I absolutely am not going to speak on such a subject. I might speak on the subject "why I am no longer an atheist," but I am never going to speak with that kind of title anywhere. If we do not speak the truth with love, we are dishonoring Christ, and we will have nothing to say to the people around us. We must hold on to the truth, but we must communicate it in a way that commends the Gospel to people.

That brings us to our next main point, which is the loss of moral direction. It is not only truth that is offensive in our culture; we are living in a culture where absolute moral commandments are an offense to the people around us. As long as I say to people that this is my lifestyle, these are my values, this is the way I personally choose to live, then we are acceptable. It changes as soon as we say to people that this is for you too -- God has commanded this for all men and women. As soon as we say that, we are considered disrespectful, intolerant, judgmental, and unloving. We are considered immoral. I am serious. We are considered immoral when we make absolute moral statements. The judgment of God is equally an offense to our contemporaries because, as I said earlier, personal freedom is the greatest idol of our culture. To tell people that God is going to hold them to account and judge them for their lifestyle is outrageous to them. God is declared immoral because we say that He is the judge and measure of human behavior, and we are considered immoral for making such a claim. That really is the moment in which we live. That is how we are considered; that is how your neighbors think about you if they realize that that is what you are saying. So, this is a challenge to us again. Are we holding on to God's commandments? Are we committed to obedience to the law of God? Or are we so shaped by the culture and bowing to the idol of personal freedom, that we too resist God as our lawgiver and judge? Again, let me put it very personally. Do I love God as my lawgiver and my judge? Do we love God in His holiness? That is certainly what the Scripture calls us to.

Again, let me give you some figures. Somewhere between 35% and 40% of people in the United States say that they personally believe in Jesus Christ and are born again. That is more than one third, between 35% and 40%. But when Gallup did a very, very careful survey of how people live, only 10%, one in ten, acknowledge that their life is affected in any way by their beliefs. Those are the figures. While 35% to 40%, let us say four out of ten, Americans today say they have put their faith in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, and they have been born again; only about one in ten acknowledge that this is having any impact on their lives at all. But the New Testament teaches us that faith without works is dead. Now I am not saying that only 10% of Americans are truly Christian believers. God is the only one who could tell us. But those figures reveal to us just how deeply impacted the church is by the loss of God's law and by the idol of personal freedom. Again, just think of the problem in our churches of practicing church discipline. Many people would be horrified by the notion that we should discipline somebody for committing adultery, for malicious gossip, or for treating their workers badly and dishonestly. The Scripture commands us to practice church discipline in such areas, but most people would be appalled. They would just leave and go to another church, one that certainly would not discipline them, because most churches do not ever practice church discipline. Most evangelical churches do not ever practice church discipline. It is extraordinarily challenging to do it in this culture. I know, because I have been a pastor myself for many years, and we practiced church discipline for people who were dishonest at work, greedy in the way they treated their employees, involved in homosexual practice, committing adultery, and malicious gossipers. We disciplined people in all those areas, and it was very challenging.

So what about us? Are we holding on to the commandments of God ourselves? Do we love the Lawgiver rather than our own personal freedom? The great temptation for us is to do what Paul speaks of in Galatians 5:13 when he says, "For freedom Christ has set you free, but do not let your freedom become a license for your sinful nature." Now, living in this culture, that is one of the biggest challenges that you and I are ever going to face, that our freedom will become a license to our own sinful nature. In the class in which I graduated back in 1971, the seminary was much smaller then and there were about 15 of us. My estimation is that three or four of my classmates wrecked their ministry through committing adultery. So where is your heart in terms of your love for God, your acknowledgment of Him as your lawgiver and judge, and your love for His commandments? Can you say like David, "How I love your law, it is my meditation all the day"? You ought to be able to say that you love the law of God and you are committed to walking in God's ways. I am not talking about legalism. The Bible does not encourage us to develop all our own sets of rules about what books we should read, music we should listen to, and all kinds of other ridiculous things that we come up with for ourselves, our children, and young people in our churches. It has got nothing whatsoever to do with what the New Testament teaches. We are talking about the law of God, the commandments that God has given us. He forbids us to add to His law, and the apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 2 that all these regulations "have an appearance of wisdom [...] but they lack any value in restraining the sinful nature." But I am always under law to Jesus Christ. One of the greatest weaknesses of evangelical churches in general right now, right across the denominations, is the failure to teach the moral commandments of God. If we do not teach God's commandments, either we are just going to simply copy the culture in which we live, bowing to the idol of personal freedom and our own sinful passions, or we are going to develop our own rules, masses of legalism. And that is what you get, actually. We need to teach God's law because God's law is beautiful. It describes the way God walks. The Bible says this is the way God walks, and we are called to walk like Him. He has created us to be His image, to be like Him. His character stands behind all His moral commandments, and that is the way He calls us to be. We need to love His commandments and recognize, as Paul says, that the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good, and the law is spiritual. It sets out the way of life the Spirit desires me to live: to love God's law. We need to stop with this point.

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