Page 38 - Laying Down the Law

that you will marvel.”

How is it that the Father disclosed what He was doing to the Son? It was through
the Spirit.

I Corinthians 2:11-13
For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man
which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit
of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is
from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which
things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those
taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

I want to share with you here one of the most tragic consequences of looking to
the Law as a guide for righteous living. Because the Law contains only a shadow of the
will of the Father, and not the full substance of His will, those who are guided by the
Law will fail to discover and walk in all that the Father has appointed for their lives.
Those areas of the Father’s will they are most likely to fail to enter into are one’s in
which the saint would experience suffering and persecution.
Let us look to Christ once more as a pattern. It was the Spirit that directed
Yahshua to heal on the Sabbath day. Although the Law did not strictly forbid healing
on the Sabbath, neither did it say that one must heal on the Sabbath if an opportunity
presented itself. Yahshua understood that if He healed on the Sabbath, the Jewish
religious leaders would condemn Him and eventually seek to take His life. If He were
guided by the Law He might have reasoned, “I can wait until the Sabbath is over to
heal the people. They will still be healed, and I will avoid condemnation and
persecution.”
This however, is not how Christ formed His decisions. He was careful to do
whatever He saw the Father doing, and He saw the Father healing certain people on
the Sabbath day. If Yahshua was to accomplish all the Father’s will, He had to be
submitted to do all that the Spirit revealed to Him. Observe how this topic of
persecution ties into the passage we read previously.

John 5:16-19
For this reason the Jews were persecuting Yahshua, because He was doing
these things on the Sabbath. But He answered them, "My Father is working
until now, and I Myself am working." For this reason therefore the Jews were
seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the
Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with
God. Therefore Yahshua answered and was saying to them, "Truly, truly, I say
to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the
Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in
like manner.”