Where Do We Go From Here?

Romans 13:8-12
By Harold Dinsmore, M.Div.
© 2007 Harold Dinsmore

            Paul writes in verse this in the latter part of verse 9, “….and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule:  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love, he continues in verse 10, does no harm to its neighbor.  Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”  I find this most intriguing.  God, wrote all the law.  Moses recorded most of it for us.  But having written all that there is in the law, it all boils down to one thing.  Loving your neighbor as yourself. 

            I believe it was Jesus who said this in Matthew 5:17, “ Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”  Now the word here in this passage is plhrow which simply means to fill or better translated complete.  Jesus, in other words, was the embodiment of the law.  He came in fulfillment of why the Law was given.  Which was to demonstrate man’s complete inability to keep the law.  We are inept.  We are sinners.  We are wired by sin which is so imbedded in our being that we could not, under our own power, keep all the Law.  It is impossible for us to do that.  If you drop down in Matthew 5 to verse 19 we read, “Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven…..verse 20, For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”  Wow!  Remember Isaiah 64:6?  “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”