The Law of God

God's truth is an anchor to our souls, our lives, keeping us from drifting without direction all over the place, crashing into levees like unchained barges, wrecking havoc and destruction on millions of people, destroying lives and flooding cities with chaos and confusion. 

Lest this image seem to be hyperbole, look at the effects of crime in New Orleans. Katrina's wreckage seems but a pale reflection of the destruction wrought on the city by violence and crime.  Drug lords, gang warfare, retaliation, brother against brother---and the innocent cry out to God for relief and peace.  There seems to be no way to stop those bent on destruction.

C.S.Lewis points out that God's law brings safety and security to those who hear and obey it.  God's law, according to Lewis, is "unassailable," rooted in the very nature of life and in the nature of God Himself:

Thy righteousness stands like the strong mountains; thy judgments are like the great deep (Ps. 36:6)

Lewis tells us that those who discover the law of God discover the delight of "having touched firmness--like the pedestrian's delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet after a false short cut has long entangled him in muddy fields."

Lewis looks at the temptation of the Jews to embrace the pagan practices of the cultures surrounding them, but "when a Jew...looked at those worships--when he thought of sacred prostitution, sacred sodomy, and the babies thrown into the fire ofr Moloch---his own law as he turned back to it must have shone with an extraordinary radiance" (Reflections on the Psalms).

Maybe, as Lewis points out, we cannot truly appreciate the beauty, sweetness, and reasonableness of God's law until we experience living in a violent and corrupt environment which makes us cry out for the pure air of safety and peace.  Maybe the destruction wrought by Katrina was our chance to begin again on solid ground.

David, like the victims of modern-day violence, had had enough of the schemes and plots of evil men and was not afraid to cry out to God:

If only you would destroy these violent godless men who are tying to kill me...O my God, blow them away like dust, like the chaff before the wind---as a forest fire that roars across a mountain.  Chase them with your fiery storms, tempests, and tornadoes.  Utterly disgrace them until they recognize your power and name, O Lord.  Make them failures in everything they do; let them be ashamed and terrified until they learn that you alone, O Yahweh, are the God above all gods in supreme charge of all the earth (Ps. 83: 13-18 TLB) 

To those evildoers and destroyers, David offers an "alternative lifestyle:

How happy are those who are strong in the Lord, who want above all else to follow your steps.  When they walk through the valley of weeping, it will become a place of springs where pools of blessing and refreshment collect after the rains (Ps. 84:5-6).

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the the temple of my God than to live in the palaces of the wicked.  For Yahweh God is our light and our protector.  He gives us grace and glory.  No good thing does He withhold from those who walk along His paths  (Ps. 84:10-11)