161
Q.
Who gets to decide which laws in the Bible are irrefutable?
question, but it’s all I’ve got. And if someone has an answer, the Nobel Peace
Prize is sooooo theirs.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Who is...
?
Nadia Bolz-Weber
I have nerve damage in my face. If you touch part of
my left cheek, it tickles the inside of my eyelid.A.
Actually, these two guys from Cleveland and I are in charge. But
one of them is retiring soon so we have an opening if anyone is
interested.
Seriously, there is the Law and there are rules written in the Bible. The
Law is anything the convicts the conscience. Lutherans believe that God’s
Law is written in our hearts and illuminated by God’s Word. But there are two
uses of the Law. The fi rst is simply to curb sin and, I would add, to protect my
neighbor from me. Don’t kill, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, and so on.
The second use of the Law is to convict our consciences so that we know with
certainty that we are unable to fulfi ll God’s Law by our own efforts.
Remember that whole “let he who is without sin cast the fi rst stone”
thing? That would be the Law. The Law shows us that we are sinners in need
of God’s grace. It drives us to the foot of the cross where we hear that because
of the work of Christ, we are forgiven.
We love to take the law into our own hands. I’m forever trying to wrestle
my salvation out of God’s hands and into my own by attempting to just get
everything right—to just follow all the rules. To do this is to effectively leave
Jesus idling in his van on the corner as though to say to him, “If we know
what to do to be saved, we’ll just do that rather than rely on you.”
There are only two options when we think the Bible is a rulebook to fol-
low so we can make sure that we are saved: pride or despair.