“One of the aspects of the Christian faith that I find particularly perplexing is the freedom God gives his people to obey him in different or even opposite ways, so that one person’s obedience is another person’s disobedience. Even as two people take the same action, one might be obeying him and the other disobeying him.” - Challies
“Christ comes to magnify the law: how does he do it but by obedience? If I am to enter into life by the keeping of the commandments, as the Lord tells me in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew, and the seventeenth verse, how can I except by Christ having kept them?” - Pyromaniacs
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God continues to speak to Joshua, instructing him on how to handle what’s coming.
… being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go (Jos 1.7b).
In the New American Commentary, David M. Howard notes,
“It’s far more about what we do with them—where we go with our feet, what we do with our hands to help others, and what we say with our mouths to give meaning to the acts of our bodies.” - TGC
“…as Christians, we sometimes underestimate the change in status that took place when we were united to Christ and adopted into God’s family. We speak of ourselves as though nothing had changed in our relationship, and as if God still viewed our efforts to please him as offensive. But this is false, as we’ll see from Scripture.” - TGC
“the end of the matter, when all else has been heard, is that we are to simply fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the sacred duty of every man, the kind expectation of a loving God.” - Challies
“The word legalism is overused. Sometimes I tell my students at the seminary where I teach that they may use this word once a year and no more. All too often legalism is employed whenever we consider obedience inconvenient.” - Derek Thomas
In the historical drama about the American Revolutionary War, The Patriot, a slave named Occam is signed up for the militia in place of his enslaver, who is too cowardly to fight himself. Occam goes to war because he has been forced to. He is thrust into duty. But the sub-plot thickens.
