A New Law (Part 1)
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and we’re talking about the law.
The psalmist wrote, “Oh, how I love your law,” and I think that’s pretty much going to be the heart of our conversation today. The law of the Lord is good and it’s a blessing to have it. We don’t get a new law with the coming of Messiah. We get the same law because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Is that accurate?
Of course, people are automatically thinking, “Sacrifices! Circumcision! Kosher laws!” Ok, yeah. We need to make some distinctions obviously, because otherwise this would be like a 5-minute podcast and what’s the fun in that.
But as you said, as the prophets looked forward and as the writer of Hebrews looks backward, they tell us that the new covenant is going to be, well, new. It’s going to be better – better hope, better promises, better sacrifice, a better country, a better more enduring substance, the writer of Hebrews says.
There’s just one for all. There’s a priest. He’s better than all the other priests put together. There are still promises, but they are better promises. But when the writer of Hebrews comes to discuss the place of God’s moral law, he does not say that there’s a new and better law. He says the law will be written in a better place.
Assuming for the moment hypothetically that the writer of Hebrews and Paul are not the same person, Paul tells us of the writing of the new covenant in the fleshly tables of the heart, and that’s what the writer of Hebrews says, quoting Jeremiah, that under the new covenant God will write his law on the hearts of his people, which is to say he will transform human nature in terms of his standards so that we will no longer be left to our own, nor will his standards simply be something outside of us, condemning us, but they will become a new principle of life and thought for us. We could just leave it at that and call it a day, but let’s qualify a few things here.
First of all, we do acknowledge, and the New Testament acknowledges very clearly, shadows, ceremonies, rites and rituals that were by their very nature temporary. The thing is that anybody who was thoughtful and actually listened knew they were temporary. From the time that Adam and Eve sacrificed the first lamb, they could stand there and say, “Wow, we’re right with God.”
“You think that animals, though, are ever really going to do it? I mean we have to keep on doing this thing forever and forever and forever. We would need something/someone/somehow who could do this once for all.”
Yes, who could really be a penal substitutionary atonement for sin, and so with the other shadows of laws. As God’s people look at them, they would realize there’s a weakness, there’s a deficiency, there’s a problem. Sometimes the prophets came right out and said it. For instance, you come to the tabernacle and you can look at that and say, “Hmm, this is cloth – linen, wool, ram skins, wood. It’s in the middle of a desert.”
No, it’s not terribly enduring and there are no instructions for repairing or replacing anything either, so this thing is short term. Even when Solomon’s temple came along, Solomon was quick to point out that God does not dwell in temples made with hands, and of course eventually that temple was destroyed. They could look at the priests. The priests have one really bad habit – well, two. The second was they sinned. The first was they died. They just couldn’t get over this habit of dying.
Man, that’s the worst. We need a death patch to help wean the priesthood off of dying, like a nicotine patch.
This is something Paul addresses. This is Romans. My memory is so bad right now, but that Abraham was justified before receiving circumcision. That’s Romans?
Originally it’s Genesis 15, but Paul discusses it in Romans 4, and God himself spoke of the circumcising of the heart, that the circumcision of flesh was never enough. Jeremiah spoke of the day when people will no longer talk about the ark of the covenant. They won’t do that anymore, he says.
The latter prophets, Isaiah for instance, spoke of God taking Levites and priests from among the Gentiles. Malachi speaks of every place being consecrated, for instance, in tribute offerings, and we could go on with this.
The writers of the Old Testament were in some measure conscious of the fact that the Old Testament, the old covenant, was deficient and that it pointed ahead, and that many of these outward forms were either temporary or were not the main point in and of themselves. And if they discovered later that they would be temporary, it shouldn’t be a huge shock, although any time we make changes in the way we think about God or worship God, of course there’s always, “Wait, is this right? This seems strange. We’ve always done it this way,” but the message was there that the old covenant is, in fact, insufficient.
Paul in Colossians will speak of the shadows. The writer of Hebrews says the same thing – “Which stood only in meats and drinks and various forms of baptism imposed upon them until the time of reformation.” So the Bible itself from the beginning gives ample witness that there were things about the older covenants – not just Moses’ covenant, but all the way back to the garden covenant with Adam as they were being expelled, and the sacrifice of lambs – that these things were pointers on how to approach God, how to walk with God, how to draw near to God, how to be right with God, how to be holy, or rather how God would manage all of these things.
And yet in the midst of all these things there’s never a suggestion, for instance, that “And one day it will be okay to go kill your neighbor if he ticks you off. One day it will be okay for you to chase your neighbor’s wife, and no one will be offended.”
We say that like the old law, if you will, like the ten commandments aren’t ways to love your neighbor. It’s drawing this sharp wedge between what God has revealed to be loving, and a squishy feeling of goodwill.
There are a couple things I think that are going on here. One is just a simple lack of thought. We’ve been programmed that when we hear the word law we think tyranny. We think Old Testament. We think a rejection of grace, a bondage of some sort.
We don’t stop to think, “Wait, which of these ten do you want to get rid of? Do you want to be able to commit adultery? Do you want to be able to lie about your neighbor? Do you want to be able to kill your baby or your aging parents because they’re annoying?”
The response you’re going to get from any Christian, even a nominal Christian one would think, is “No, no, no. That’s not it.”
I think the next step – and certainly this was inherent in dispensationalism originally – was, “It’s just that it’s not law. Law comes to you and says, ‘Thou shalt not’ or ‘Thou shalt.’ It’s bossing you around. We don’t need that anymore.” There’s sort of a yes and no there. If you mean that the bossing around was never sufficient, yes, that was our fault because we were sinners and we didn’t want to be bossed around. Even if it was something that we wanted, we didn’t want to be bossed around by it. It’s the old “Wet paint. Don’t touch.”
There’s a Far Side comic which I haven’t thought of in years. I’ll try to remember it. There’s a sign on a wall that says, “No juggling chainsaws,” and a man who cannot see it has just walked by and says to his wife, “I have never felt such an intense desire to juggle chainsaws. I wonder why.”
The other one that I think of is I think from the late Sir Terry Pratchett. He says, “If you found a cave in the most unreachable portion of the world under an ocean floor, and you put up a sign saying, ‘End of the world button. Do not push ever,’ you wouldn’t have to wait for the paint to dry.”
And that’s it. Of course, our nature is so rebellious that even if someone comes and tells us to do something we normally would want to do, we just don’t like the fact we’re being told to do it, so we dig in our heels and say, “No. Death first,” which is an interesting trick sometimes in working with teenagers.
I have heard a variation on this idea of, not now in the new covenant, but in heaven there will be no law because we’ll be done with these rebellious natures so we won’t need someone bossing us.
That’s where we come back, I guess, and talk about God. The someone bossing us would be God.
Yeah, what is this law thing we speak of? There are a number of ways of getting at it. The simplest one, I suppose for our purposes at the moment, is it tells us how to love each other and how to love him. The commandments – and I’m speaking here primary of the ten, because those are one of the summaries that God gives us; there are others, love God and love your neighbors is another one – but just to look at the ten, they’re all rooted in who God is.
God has revealed himself in Christ, who is his very image. Why would we want to make physical images?
God reveals himself wholly in Jesus. God’s name is in him, so why would we mess around with God’s name or try to usurp God’s authority, his power of attorney?
Jesus is our rest. He’s the faithful Son of the Father. He is life. He is the true and faithful one. He’s the desire of all nations and he is our Savior.
Notice the possession there that’s at the bottom of “Thou shalt not steal.” There is this thing of, “You can’t take my God away from me, nor can you take me away from the God who owns me.”
These are basic ideas about who God is. They’re truth about reality, the reality of our divine and loving Heavenly Father, so what is it here that you don’t like, and what is it here that somehow would be helpful to remove?
Trying to put what you just said in the best possible light, you’re saying, “It’s so internalized you won’t have to give it a second thought.” Well, we’re not in heaven yet and we’re not told exactly how this is going to work. I don’t know about second thoughts. I am pretty convinced that Christian growth continues for eternity, that since God is infinite and we’re finite we will always be learning more of God.
This is not to say that our sanctification in terms of our commitment to Christ will be incomplete when we rise from the dead and see him face-to-face, but knowing him and understanding him better would seem to be something that goes on eternally. If that’s so, we can expect if there’s not more revelation, at least the revelation will become clearer to us.
I’m not going to push too hard here, and evidences of a contrary kind are hard to come by. We all have to deal with the same finite 66 books, which don’t speak a whole lot about eternity beyond knowing him face-to-face, so if what you’re saying is God will not have to tell us basic stuff anymore, alright. It is true we will know not to steal and not to kill and not to lie and that these things will be written in our hearts, which is kind of where we’re going tonight.
Does that mean that God can’t send us a message and say, “We need the back 40 plowed by a week from Saturday. Can you get on that, please?”
I don’t know what God will do. I don’t know what directions he’s going to give. I don’t know what kind of new revelation there may be. “God has decreed that today we’re all going to be Englishmen and we’re all going to drive on the left side of the road.”
The image of knowing God face-to-face is in contrast to knowing him from afar, right? It’s kind of like when David and I were dating, we were on opposite sides of the country so that was a very different experience from getting married and living face-to-face with one another. Now being married five years, we deal with a lot more mundane things than we did before. This is the whole really living life together part.
And heaven – or the world to come, the new creation, whatever we should call it – is not a world of inactivity. The parables speak of having rule over many cities or reigning with Christ. There seems to be the assumption that there’s going to be work to do, even if it’s just, “Alright, today everybody drive on the right because we’ve got stuff coming up on the left. Get out of the way, please.”
I remember a young man in college who said basically that in heaven nobody has to give orders. I said, “Who decides what side of the road we drive on?” Even if it’s just new technology, new technology produces new possibilities for screwing things up. My friend was saying, “But we won’t want to do wrong!” This is not right or wrong. This is how do we get this job done efficiently without getting in one another’s way.
The real topic now I remember was whether or not heaven is a democracy. He was kind of leaning toward, “Well, no one’s going to be telling anybody what to do.” Yeah, someone’s ruling the ten cities, and some people are following instructions.
To use Lewis’s image, the rules may fluctuate like those of a dance, where sometimes one person leads and sometimes another, but there are going to be times when we will need to know what we do next. Are we still going to be touchy and say, “You can’t tell me what to do. You are not the boss of me.”?
God is king. King and democracy don’t go together. They just don’t. There’s a hierarchy or chain of command or whatever you want to call it, but ultimately, no, God does not leave it up to us. That would be dumb.
And indeed it need not be that we’re such evil people, but there are other reasons for leadership than sin. In an unfallen world there would still be a need for leaders, which means that there would be followers.
Like a dance. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I’m going to go for it. The swing dance community is a very urban thing so it tends to be a very liberal thing, so there’s a big push to stop saying ladies and gentlemen but to say leads and follows when you’re teaching a dance class. But you can’t do without the idea of a lead and a follow. You can empower the follows to dance with their own voice, and that’s a great thing to do, but there’s still that function. You can even switch who’s doing it in the middle of a dance. That’s fun, dancing switch, but somebody’s still leading.
Yes. So we’ve gone down several tangents, which is fine because we’re kind of just clearing ground here and asking what is it about the idea of law that so upsets the average moral Christian? Most Christians are sober, hard-working, and faithful to their spouses. They don’t lie and cheat too much on their income tax, or steal, and yet you say law in America and the American church and people bristle.
I’m going to suggest again that the first part is we just don’t talk about it, so we have learned these automatic gut reactions of “law, that means bondage.” We have to stop and say, no, what it means is a path of love and service and productivity. If we go around killing people, we’re not going to get much done, and if we go around killing people we’re not being governed by love.
“Don’t try to blame this on me, but I’m being led by the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit doesn’t go around killing people for no reason. We need to start thinking biblically, and sometimes that simply means we need to start reading the Bible again. Psalm 119 would be a good place to begin in this context, but so is the Sermon on the Mount.
When Schofield was trying to introduce dispensationalism to America, he actually said the Sermon on the Mount is law and does not belong to the new covenant, because it’s telling you what to do and conditioning blessing upon it. It’s not conditioning blessing upon it, besides reading it, but Jesus is kind of telling us what to do. And this goes not simply for the Sermon on the Mount, which was early in his ministry, it goes all the way to the end when he turns to his disciples on that last night and says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
So this is what we’ve got here. We have God, who does not abort his commandments. He does not transform them. He does not come up with a better set. He does not leave us to our own devices. He does not silence the voice of scripture and insert his Spirit in our hearts so that we’re all led internally by some immediate revelation, although there are sects within the American Christian community who seem to think that.
Rather, he takes the moral law that God’s people have always had, summarized in the ten commandments and the laws to love God and love our neighbor, and he begins writing them in the very center of our being, by the power of the Spirit, based upon the finished work of Jesus Christ. This is the natural (or supernatural) outflow of the gospel, that Jesus came not only to forgive sinners, but to transform us and make us productive in God’s service.
It's not all about what we want right now. It’s about what God wants, and the funny thing is that when we learn to do what God wants, we are happier. We are healthier. We have a better society. We get more stuff done and it’s good stuff.
This requires an internalization of law, but it is still the law that God has revealed, that is consistent with his nature, and that is eternal in his own character, and therefore in the very heavens. It’s the law that Jesus obeyed. It’s the law that the Holy Spirit writes in our hearts.
Now, the moment we step back and say, “And I can get more brownie points with God if I keep it,” no.
So I think we need to address Galatians, because there’s a reading of Galatians out of context that says the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, and schoolmaster in the Greek is the slave who would take the child to school and make sure he did his homework and that sort of thing, the person who’s on him to make sure he gets the stuff done.
It’s the word we get pedagogue from. The King James says schoolmaster, but it’s not that. It’s not a teacher.
Right, it’s not the teacher, it’s the person cracking the proverbial whip, the piano teacher who says, “This is what you are practicing this week.”
It’s actually more like mom getting you up in the morning, throwing cold water on you if necessary, and standing over you with a stick. The piano teacher becomes the good guy. It’s the mom that’s scary. I wish I had been more like that when my girls were little. Actually, the lessons were given to us and we did not do with them all that we should have, because of sin in all of us.
So you want to talk about that. Let me read just a little bit from there. We are told in Galatians 3:13 –
Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree, that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
The background for all of that is how do you get blessing, and Paul talks about two types of blessing that are interrelated, and that’s kind of his point. They’re interrelated. One is being righteous before God (justification by faith) and the other is having the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower you to live a godly life. These are not two separate things, Paul argues.
The Galatian heretics, the Judaizers, were trying to make them two phases in the Christian life. You come to Christ by faith and you’re justified, and if you die you’d go to heaven, but if you really want power for living, for being really spiritual, higher life, deeper life, more victorious life, then you need to do something, and in their case the specific thing was circumcision, and then the other elements of the ceremonial law.
Paul is arguing, no, Jesus died for us and that opens up both justification and sanctification, forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit, “…that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”
He goes on and says even in a human covenant, once you’ve made a covenant or contract you can’t change the terms, at least unilaterally. You could both agree to go back and change them, but one person can’t go back and say, “Oh by the way, I inserted retroactively this new stipulation.”
You cannot do that, and God of course does not do that. He doesn’t go back on his word. And since the promise was made to Abraham and to his seed, which seed is Christ.
And this I say, that the covenant that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise, but God gave it to Abraham by promise.
The law given by Moses, with all the things that wrapped around it – the Levitical priesthood, the tabernacle, the feasts and the fasts and everything else – all of that came 430 years after the promise to Abraham. Whatever its intention, it could not be something that God ever intended to alter the basic condition of righteousness by faith alone, and of the Spirit by faith alone, because those were the blessings to Abraham. The question then is then why in the world do we need the law?
Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made…
Paul does not say this is the only reason, but it’s the one that’s adapted to what he’s facing. He’s facing people who are saying, “Well, it was added so that you could get more blessings. Sure, God brought you into covenant, but if you really want to be blessed in that covenant then here’s the list of things you get to do to earn your Super Brownie points with God.”
Paul is saying, “Look, whatever it was, it was not that.” In fact, exactly the opposite, because when we look into the law of God and see ourselves in it, we see we’re sinners. There’s no blessing that way. There’s nothing to add to. We don’t have anything we can add to what Jesus has done, so what does the law do? It was added because of transgressions. He goes on –
Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid, for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.
If it were that easy, God would have said, “Here’s a list of commandments. Keep them and I’ll let you into heaven.” It can’t do that. It cannot earn God’s favor in any degree, in any fashion, to any end – not for justification, not for sanctification.
But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.
But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
The first part then is fairly easy, and notice the ‘we.’ He’s talking about the covenant people. He’s talking about Israel, because the externals of the whole Mosaic law did not apply to the world. There were some things that specifically did not apply to Gentiles, like the dietary law, but what was the purpose of all of that? If it wasn’t to earn God’s blessing, what was it to do?
One thing it was to do, and in Paul’s mind the most important thing at this point in the discussion, is that it was to shut them up to the faith that was to be revealed. In other words, it held them together under conviction and pointed them down the road of their historical development toward Messiah, toward what he would do.
God needed his people kept together, centered in the promise, centered around the divine revelation, centered on the worship of God, and they had to stay with that until Messiah would come, at which point they would understand more fully exactly what God was about and what this gospel was. Although he had said it, he would say it much more clearly once it was accomplished – “to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.” And now the lines you were talking about –
But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
The externals, insofar as they were there to drive us to Christ, no longer have that function with us, so those things wherein that was the primary or maybe the only function, those things are gone. We don’t need sacrifices. We don’t need priests. We don’t need a tabernacle. We don’t need a temple. We don’t need circumcision and those things.
On another level, once we’ve come to Christ we don’t need the threats of the law. Yes, the law says “Do this and live. Oh, you didn’t? Well, you’re going to die now. The soul that sinneth must die.” We don’t need that because we’ve come to Christ and we’ve found our salvation, our life in him. So in all of those ways we are free from the law. We’re free from its ceremonies. We’re free from its curse and its threats. We’re free from trying to grab onto it and use it as a tool to justify or sanctify ourselves.
There are ways in which it was indeed like that slave who would take the recalcitrant child across town at 6 in the morning to see his teacher and stand there and make sure he paid attention to his lessons, but you know there comes a time when the kid grows up and the lessons are internalized. That slave might often become a friend and advisor of the child in his later years.
It becomes a joyful friendship. In our piano analogy, you stop having to have mom crack the whip, and you start to actually enjoy playing piano. You don’t stop playing piano, but it’s become a joy to you and it’s something that you do because you want to, but it’s the same thing that you’ve learned.
Yes. It doesn’t mean that mom or your teacher may not say, “Hey, why don’t you try this,” and now that you’ve begun to master things you say, “Oh, you mean like this?” and not, “Death first! Don’t tell me what to do.”
That’s not a completely thorough exegesis of the passage, but I think that’s enough to set us on our way and say that yes, there are things that the New Testament warns us about with regard to the law, like some things are gone. We already admitted that and talked about the shadows and ceremonies that had no purpose beyond that. They’re gone.
The fear that we’re going to go to hell because the law keeps telling us that that’s what happens to people who break it – that’s gone. The desire, temptation, or fear that we have to keep the law to earn God’s blessing, whether it be the blessing of justification or the gift of the Spirit and sanctification – that’s gone.
We are also free from the taboos of men who would say, “Well, you’re that kind of Christian. Do you really do that? Do you really drink that? You really wear that? You really have one of those? You really read that stuff? You really watch that? Oh, you’re that kind of Christian.” We’re free from that because we have in scripture a clear revelation of God’s will that is constantly being internalized for us. So rather than being the voice outside that says, “Here is the way. Walk you in it,” it’s the voice in the heart which is put there by the Spirit through the written word of God preached, taught, and read.
Nothing contrary to it, that says, “This is indeed the way. I recognize it. It has my Savior’s footprints all over it.”
When we think of the law given in the Old Testament, we’re thinking of God’s own character put forward to Israel. Even in the New Testament where many of the ceremonial laws are fulfilled in Christ, we still have in the law God’s character portrayed to us just as it was to Israel as a nation, and the law still has a clear benefit for us. We don’t get to escape God’s moral requirements.
People who butt up against the idea of law in the Christian life say, “It’s just going to be so internalized.” It’s still there. It’s still in your spirit. It’s still being enforced in some sense by what the Holy Spirit has done in your life through sanctification. You’re still growing.
The substance of it hasn’t changed, exactly. You’re still growing in the love of God and the love of neighbor. Even when we get to heaven, to the eschaton, we’re going to have that impulse perfected. It’s still going to be the same substance because we’re not going to do any of the things that the law prohibits, and we’re going to do that perfectly. In fact, we’re not going to be able to breach the law because we’re being brought to the status that Christ has.
So yes, the law is good. The Psalms talk about the law so much, and it’s never in the sense of, “Oh, this is so burdensome.” Only trying to keep the law for your salvation is burdensome.
The Heidelberg as a thing that is built out, the structure of it, the third section is gratitude and that’s where the law comes in for the Christian. We live out the law now in our lives as a reflection of God’s character, as a reflection of being further built into Christ’s image, and as true moral character and living.
I think I’m ping-ponging across multiple different sides of a dodecahedron here, but essentially what I’m getting at is that just because you don’t know the law by hearing it from scripture doesn’t mean that it’s not incumbent on you to follow it.
A concept I’ve leaned a bit more heavily into in my own personal theology, I guess, is if God made the world, it’s going to reflect him. That means that living the way God wants you to live is going to be, generally speaking, the best way for you to live in the world. It’s going to be maybe not more personally advantageous to you in a rough Machiavellian kind of sense, but it’s going to be living honestly, dealing honestly with your fellow men, not murdering everyone you meet, and respecting bonds of marriage and not sleeping around. Those are all going to have very practical benefits for you.
Now and in the long run and in eternity. Occasionally it’s “Don’t bow down,” or “Here’s a fiery furnace,” but generally the advantages appear very soon and, when they don’t, they do appear. It is better to serve God and to love God than not in God’s world, strangely enough.
When you look at people who are not believers, who have never heard of the gospel, and they still have recognized some of these practicalities, that is a result of them living in God’s world and observing how things work, without suppressing it. It doesn’t happen all the way. You don’t get to the fullness of this kind of beauty of God’s law without hearing it from God, but you can see it. You can see glimpses of it around the world because they’re looking at the world God made.
It kind of comes back to honesty, which is something that God would, perhaps unknowingly to them, give them, but if they’re honest about what they see in the world they align with this.
In one of the epistles, it might even be in Galatians, it says when those who are not under the law do the things that the law requires, it is good.
Funny you should mention that because that’s kind of where we were going with all this, and we’re almost out of time, so rather than try to cram it into five minutes we’re going to come back next time and talk about this very thing that Bryan’s been talking about.
When you live in God’s world and you are God’s creature, some familiarity with God’s law is necessary. It’s required. It’s going to happen. The question is how clear is it going to be? How clear is it? How much do we receive it, even though it may be clear. How does sin get in the way of that? And then why do we need the new covenant?
Bryan said before we started, “It goes with the new year.” Yes, so we’ll start the new year with why do we need this new covenant thing anyway? Don’t we have the revelation of God all around us and within us? Don’t we have a pretty fair idea? Aren’t we mostly honest about what God had said? Stay tuned for next time.
Before we go, let’s make some recommendations of stuff that we’ve read or watched or enjoyed.
My wife and I started watching a TV show that I had seen when it was first coming out, and she has watched a couple times through before, but I hadn’t seen any of it in years. The show is Psych.
I did, but we finished the series today like two hours before we started recording.
It doesn’t matter, I’m going to do it again. That’s how good the show is. Specifically I’m going to highlight something that’s not unique to Psych, but it’s a storytelling aspect that I am generally just fascinated by, even if stories that are dominated by sinful secular thought, especially regarding sex and sexual mores. Most stories recognize that marriage is the end goal. Marriage is a natural conclusion to a person’s growth and development as a character, at least in terms of story.
Obviously, I’m married. I’ve been married just over a year. You guys have been married longer than me, and you guys are still growing as people in marriage. In fact, that’s one of the best ways to grow in sanctification, and there’s something very beautiful about that fact.
Spoilers for the show that ended eight years ago. At the end, Shawn moves to San Francisco, where his girlfriend has moved to, and in the last three minutes of the show he proposes to her. It’s very wonderful and super emotional if you’ve been watching it straight, like we have been.
I keep thinking about this concept, that when that romantic arc is consummated it’s an echo of what history is going towards. It’s the consummation. It’s the wedding feast of the Lamb. We’re going to have a big wedding party between the Church and Christ at the end of history, so stories, as a reflection of the story of salvation, can’t get away from that. Even if they think they’re being clever or just leaning into a trope, they recognize this is a natural end point for a particular kind of story.
And the fans would be disappointed if that last three-minute thing weren’t in there, because it would feel incomplete.
It would feel empty and open-ended and hollow. So yes, I’m recommending Psych a second time, but more specifically I’m also just geeking out over the fact that that appears across so many stories, regardless of the writers’ or the producers’ faith status. They still can’t get away from it.
I think I will make a recommendation next, and that is actually the perfect segue. Our recommendations dovetail here. The book that I would like to recommend is called The Nine Brides and Granny Hite by Neill C. Wilson. It’s a collection of short stories and it’s extremely – what’s the word – the thing where it’s just like itself and there’s nothing else quite like it.
Secret knowledge. It’s not secret knowledge. It’s extremely enjoyable. This is the book that we read some of the stories from for my birthday party earlier this year. We read a few stories and then our mutual friend, David Farschman, was like, “I need to buy this book,” so he went on Amazon right then and there and bought the book. Then a few months later he said, “Emily, I know what I want to do for my birthday. I want us to read this book,” so we got together for his birthday and read some more of the book.
The premise is there’s this town called Cat Track Holler in Appalachia, sometime between WW1 and WW2, very remote, mountaintop people, trapping, a little bit of farming, but really rural, shall we say.
The overarching story is that there’s a quilting bee for all the brides who are waiting for the circuit-riding preacher to come and marry them, so as they’re making each quilt for each of these nine brides they each have to tell the story of how they got engaged. It’s wonderful and very down-to-earth, as you would expect from the setting, and it’s just delightful stories. You get that sense again and again of the beauty of marriage, even among very sinful people.
There’s no perfect engagement story. Everybody’s got their thing of, “Oh, I was such an idiot,” because we’re all sinners, and when we get married on this earth it’s two sinners getting married. Then when we look at the cosmic love story it’s, “Wow, we were really sinful and Jesus still loves us. Wow!” It’s really great to just reflect on that and enjoy all of the sub-created reflections of it, so I’m going to recommend that.
That’s going to go for Greg’s recommendation as well, as he insisted that I recommend it today, which works because he actually had to run off and see to some things, so we will leave it there. Greg and I will share that recommendation with you and we will say good night.
Thank you so much, Bryan, for being here. Thanks to Greg also, and thanks to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.
Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling, and thank you very much for my new microphone. It helps the editing a lot.
If you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at [email protected]. We’ll see you next week.