The notion that something can be so awful that it can’t be made to go away, is a concept that is hard to wrap your head around. At least for lawyers. The idea that we can get rid of a bad act with the help of the law isn’t all that new. In fact, it’s been around for many years.
In the 17th century, a lot of lawyers got a lot more serious. This was the era of Jeremy Bentham, who was famously known as the “father of the law of remission,” because the legal system could only remove certain acts of cruelty from a person, like a murderer or a rapist.
Bentham’s principle was that the law should not hold people to account for things they couldnt change. But as Bentham himself said, “If you can’t make the law take away a bad act, then keep it.” You can see where this is going.
In the mid-19th century a new, more liberal, law came into play. The law held people to account for their actions, but the law had to be flexible, which meant it could be more forgiving. These laws were known as “remedial” laws, because they allowed people to be punished for acts that would only be grounds for a criminal conviction if the law had been changed (which is why they were sometimes called “remedial”.
The word law is still used in English and it’s even used in the New Testament. However, in the New Testament, the word legal is also found in the Old Testament.
This is one of those examples where I could go into a whole lengthy review of Old Testament law, and I’m still not sure what is intended to be the point of this post. I think all we need to say is that when speaking of law, Jesus clearly meant the Old Testament law, and it is still in force today. After all, in Old Testament days, there were also many different kinds of law.
That being said, the New Testament has a different idea about what “legal” means. Jesus tells us that we need to obey the Sabbath, the Lord’s day. And even then, the New Testament actually speaks of the law of the Sabbath as being, well, the actual Sabbath.
That’s a good thing. We can’t really get into the details of the Old Testament laws because they were kept in the Old Testament, but Jesus clearly intended the New Testament law to be the same. For example, the New Testament describes the Sabbath as “a day that must be kept” and that it is “holy.
We all know what the Sabbath is. But is the Sabbath in the New Testament, or is that not the Sabbath? Well, the New Testament was written over a thousand years after the Old Testament. And while there are differences between the two in practice, the two do describe the same thing. The New Testament Sabbath was a day that needed to be kept, that must be holy, and that was the day that Jesus came and died on the cross.
