[image: Mystery Mountain, 2010, JA Van Devender]
Psalm 119:97 (NKJV)
97 Oh, how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day.
Sermon Passage:
And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. 2 Then He opened His mouth and taught them
(Mt 5:1–2).
Mountains are "big" when it comes to the "Law of God."
It was from a mountain that Moses descended and delivered the "Law" he had received from God on it. It was from a mountain that Jesus spoke and "filled out" this law and recalibrated the people's minds regarding it. It was on a mountain (Zion) that God established His city and directed the world to "come up" and learn His law in it. It was on a hill, on that mountain, that the righteous requirements of the law, its condemnation of all who violated its tenets, was satisfied for those who trembled at its sanctions.
The law was understood as the stronghold of God... the sphere of His protection... the steady Presence which furnished a landmark for them to guage their progress in their journey toward His Kingdom. All this and more was and is God's law.
God is God of Grace and God of law. Both are beautiful and both are the same. His grace is His law and His law is His grace. It is when men turn His law into something other than it is that it becomes a millstone about their neck and the abundant witness to their evil. It functions as a hedge against evil in the world about us and a tutor to Christ for those who seek Him and for those who have found Him, it is the sure path to their feet.
Jesus came not to abolish the law, rather to establish its fulness. He came to give us the law on His own authority not on the authority of someone or Someone other than He. He spoke and the truth of His words powerfully affected both those who loved Him and those who didn't. He called us to a New Understanding, not a different one. He called us to the power of witness, of holiness in terms of the law's heart not just its external conformity. He described the circumference and the center of the law, in mathematical terms he "integrated" the curve of it, and opened our eyes to the possibility of a New Humanity, bathed in the power of the Holy Spirit, and pointed toward that "true holiness apart from which no man shall see God."
These are words worth loving... and all God's children do and must love them... not as an obligation, though it is, but rather as a fruit.
Oh how I love Thy law... because You, Oh My God, are true and trustworthy and these describe the sphere of Thy blessing.
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