Every word in the Bible is the word of Christ. This includes the 613 Old Testament laws and the 1050 laws and commands found in the New Testament. But how are we as Christians to interpret them? It starts by understanding God’s four central purposes for the law: (1) To disclose His character and righteousness; (2) To reveal and convict us of sin; (3) To constrain evil in the personal and civil realm; and (4) To give us a rule of life. To this Scott Brown adds nine key questions to ask, including: Is it a moral, ceremonial, or civil law, and how is it fulfilled in Jesus Christ? 

Why did God give us so many laws? What is the purpose of the law of God? Well, the Apostle Paul addresses this in Romans chapter 7. When you get to Romans 7 verse 7, he nails one of the critical purposes of the law, and that is to expose sin. He says, is the law sin?

Certainly not. The law is not sin. The law exposes sin. Now, it's really critical that we understand that the Bible does not separate obedience from salvation. God gives us laws in order to obey.

And all of this, all of God's laws are pleasing to God. They are, they're all laws of love. They're all manifestations of his character. Now let me give some applications from this critical principle in Romans 7-7 that the law is given to reveal sin. First of all, the law of God exposes sin in the civil realm.

And you can just read the Old Testament and the New Testament and see how the civil government is addressed over and over again. Here's another application. The law of God is critical for use in witnessing because the most important thing for people to recognize is their hopelessness in their sins. When you're witnessing this somebody, they wanna talk about all kinds of side issues. Evolution, the sovereignty of God, what is God, what's God gonna do if the natives have never heard?

Well, in some ways, those things don't matter. What really matters is that a person understands their sinfulness and the law of God exposes sinfulness. Here's another application. Teach your children the law of God. Your children need to understand the law.

You are raising eternal souls, and they need to know what's right and wrong, what's holy, what's just, and what is good. They need to bring their thoughts into submission to the law of God, their emotions into submission to the law of God, their emotions into submission to the law of God, to the law of God. They need to know how to live and the law of God teaches them how to regulate their lives and when they're doing something that's really, really harmful. And so children need to understand the Ten Commandments. Okay, all of your child raising challenges are connected somewhere to the Ten Commandments.

And so the law of God is really, really critical in your child raising. Here's what I hope happens with all of us, that we would say what David did in Psalm 119 verse 97. Oh how I love your law. It's my meditation all the day." So the Apostle Paul makes it very clear that the law of God is holy, just, and good, and it's designed to reveal sin. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.

Us.