God Beyond Religion: The law is not the problem with legalism

Rom 7:12  So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.

Since I have begun a path of eclectic spirituality, I have gained a renewed respect for the law. While I am primarily a Jesus follower, the reason being, it was the belief system that I was born in and raised in, and consequently I developed a relationship with Jesus that is unique and special. However, early on in my life I was quite certain that Christianity as I was taught and understood it was not correct. It was a feeling and impossible to prove.

I was taught a legal constitutional reading of scripture. I was taught that the scripture was the Word of God, and it was to be the map and formula for living. Further, beyond this, it was infallible and inerrant and contained the absolute and complete truth. This led to the concept that it was necessary to fulfill and obey the law perfectly at all times. However, it was also taught that one could not fulfill and obey the law perfectly and that Jesus did that for us. So, if we believed that about Jesus, we would receive his righteousness as a gift, and the Holy Spirit would help us live the law and when we did not, we could confess our sin and God would forgive us for the sake of Jesus. The bottom line was that the law was necessary to please God and gain his love and acceptance. I was also taught that breaking God’s law was much more serious than breaking the law of the city, state, or country; it could mean that I would separate myself from God. This is one of the sources of toxicity and trauma that causes spiritual abuse.

This is why I am certain that the law is not the problem with legalism. If one views the law as the perfect guide for loving others, and not an instrument that can separate us from acceptance of God and God’s love, it does not have to be an instrument of guilt and shame. Now, when I refer to the law, I am speaking of the Ten Words, and not the entire Torah. I personally do not see value in many of the 613 of Judaism. They were geared toward an archaic culture. There is absolutely no value in instructions for selling one’s daughter as a sex slave as an example. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Jesus’s amplification of the law in the Sermon on the Mount, and it too has value as a guide for loving one another.

After all, the Ten Commandments and Jesus teachings are akin to the eightfold path of Buddhism. Right understanding, right intent, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration as they are explained and understood are beneficial as long as they do not become a dogma or doctrine that establishes one’s acceptability to Source or if not followed entirely always, a reason for punishment and separation from source.

It is the dogma and doctrine that is the culprit of legalism. The Buddha warned against making the eightfold path a dogma, and it is dogma and doctrine that causes the toxicity of legalism. The freedom from legalism resides in right understanding. It is understanding the teaching of Jesus to be saying that the Father-Mother, Source already accepts, forgives, and does not keep a record of wrongs. It is favor and acceptance that brings peace, and the presence of peace with the Source, produces love for the source and one another, and from this place of right understanding, laws become a guide for developing into a loving individual that emulates the characteristics of the divine as described by Paul in the First Letter to the Corinthians chapter 13. If the source is love, then it is a description of the characteristics of the divine.

One cannot have right understanding without the awareness of the indwelling divine nature in all. One can use the indwelling divine nature to discern that which is aligned with the definition of love and the fruit of the spirit, but even then, it must be a guide and not a mandate. When it becomes a mandate it becomes toxic legalism.