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Commentary on "A Love Response"
Day 2: Sunday, June 3, 2012 - Motivated by Love
Perhaps some of this is my own reaction to years of listening to the SDA message, but the underlying theme of today's lesson seems to be "If you really love God you will do these things." The emphasis remains on the need for obedience as the result of love. If you love your spouse more than anything on this earth do you need a command, and the subsequent obedience to that command, in order to not have an affair with someone else? Or does the love make the command irrelevant? The one who needs the command to be faithful to their spouse is the one who doesn't have that committed love. This is actually a Scriptural concept of the law.
I Tim 1:8-10 But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching
So when we read that love fulfills the Law, we don't need to argue about which Law is fulfilled or whether fulfilled has some different meaning in the Greek. We can simply understand that the law, and really all of the commands including evangelism, is not written telling the ones who truly love what they need to do. They will already naturally being doing that. The law and commands are needed for those who don't truly love as a witness to their continued self-centeredness and rebellion.
There is a "hidden heresy" in this lesson. I believe these are among the most dangerous of teachings. The teaching is presented in a variety of ways, in a number of different places. People hear it and see it so many times that they begin to think that it must certainly be true because it sounds so common. People can even start believing that these often repeated phrases and concepts come directly from Scripture when they do not. The specific heresy inserted into this lesson is the one of "revealed will". Like many heresies that are hidden in plain sight, it sounds innocent enough. But the concept attached to "obeying His revealed will" is the idea of "living up to the light that one has". This results in God grading on a curve. His righteousness is no longer the standard for measuring our righteousness, instead our understanding is the standard. This not only lowers the bar on God's standards, but turns salvation into a combination of knowledge and works rather than faith alone.
Copyright 2012 BibleStudiesForAdventists.com. All rights reserved. Revised June 1, 2012. This website is published by Life Assurance Ministries, Camp Verde, Arizona, USA, the publisher of Proclamation! Magazine. Contact email: BibleStudiesForAdventists@gmail.com.
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