BIB501-2 Wk 6 DQ#6 What are the good things about the Law (read Psalm 19)? What is the dark side?

It seems to me that Psalm 19 concerns three major points, for example:

1. God is all in all, 1, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

2. God’s Law is right, 7, “The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul.”

3. The keeping the law is good, 11, “By them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward.”

King David ends the Psalm with 14, “May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

The law provides a standard for life, a goal. The big however is that I certainly could not always adhere to the law and I can be a real back-slider. What a relief to know we are saved by grace through faith. The gospel of Jesus is so simple, He did it all and said, “It is finished.” Good works should follows salvation but good works don’t save.

It wasn’t long after Jesus’ crucifixion and Resurrection before the Judaizers surfaced and promoted that circumcision and the observance of the Mosaic Law were necessary for salvation and insisted that this was necessary for the Gentile converts.
To quote Dr. Missler, “The Church thrived on the great truths of God’s grace until grace began to erode into forms of legalism, plunging the world into the Dark Ages from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries.“ Here the legalism is the Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther gets much of the credit for The Reformation; however, people such as the Protestant Huguenots deserve much of the credit. Thousands died professing the Truth of Scripture rather than converting to Catholicism.

Even today the Catholic Church is wrapped, in my opinion, in legalism. Non-Catholic Christians celebrate the Lord’s Table as symbolic and done in remembrance….Catholic believe that the wine and bread actually become the very blood and body of Christ. This would imply that Jesus lied when He said “it is finished.” Then there is purgatory, the temporary home of those who have passed on. The loved one residing in purgatory can get an early release if enough masses are said, drawing from accounts of saints and more.

Other religions such as Islam and Mormonism adhere to legalism. Not only are these religions works oriented, they deny the divinity of the Jesus I know and love. There has to be a special level in hell for the religious leaders who promote fault faiths to millions to their eternal condemnation.