hello all
I am newbie in faith and on the forum
In the first minute of this clip
youtube.com/watch?v=wmL7Mw9oOKA from the film “Jesus of Nazareth”, Jesus tells these words:
…
I have found this saying of utterly importance and so close to my heart and mind, but then again i want to be sure if it is genuine (spoken by Jesus/found in bible) or something exactly similar OR… completely made up by the script writers of the film
Thank you
Wow. That was an amazing clip. I loved it.
Yes, the law IS written on our hearts; if we don’t realize it we just need our eyes opened. Jesus says He wants to write, but actually He already has, but is speaking in a way that those people could understand. They wouldn’t understand how come the laws could be written but just ignored, I suppose, without some sort of ruckus. So He talks as if His Father is going to install the laws in the future, but since God is not bound by time, to God it’s all the same. To communicate with humans, because they don’t understand causality going backward in time, He uses this reference frame.
Now for some Bible verses like you asked:
Ps 37:30-31
The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom; his tongue speaks what is right. God’s teaching is in his heart; his steps do not falter.
Rom 2:14-16
For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even defend them on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge people’s hidden works through Christ Jesus.
Note it says the “demands” of the law, rather than “law” itself. I just noticed it differs from a certain Protestant version in that way. I like “demands” because when people think “law” they think written words in a certain order with a list of rules. Well, your heart does not know these words because it is illiterate; it’s the speech processing centers of the brain that decode written laws.
Now the law on the hearts are pure, because they are based on the “essence” of the written law. That is, we were made in God’s image, and therefore our hearts already are oriented toward love, and really that’s all the heart needs to monitor is the love levels of various alternative behaviors you may choose at any time.
So for example, you can say, “I’m not going to kill him because God said, ‘thou shalt not kill’” and that way you use the obedient approach. Problem is, obedience requires understand AND consent. That is one limitation of trying to follow the written law; it was impossible to follow them all, and breaking one rule was tantamount to breaking the whole law. So if you don’t understand what is expected in any given situation, a spirit of obedience will actually give the go ahead for the wrong thing, and you will do something destructive. No you’re not culpable, but you still do the damage.
OTOH, if the law is “written” on the heart, it isn’t a human law, but it is part of the design of the human heart that it automatically behaves a certain way. In lower animals we might call this “instinct” but in humans we like other names because we don’t like to compare ourselves to lower animals.
Anyway this law is perfect, because it is pure and is not approximated by use of a human language. In this case, you can say, “I’m not going to kill him because it’s wrong. I just know it is,” without even reading a letter on a page.
That’s really about the only way we could keep the Living Word alive, as a refinement and upgrade to the stagnant word that St. Paul calls “the law of sin and death” between the time Jesus died, and the time the Good News was safely documented by the Church.
Christ, as Jesus, invites us to a place where we disconnect our notions that we actually know the law intellectually. That’s what He meant by “do not judge.” The second you judge, you override the love message from your heart. Jesus said they need to make a “right” judgment; that is, one from the heart. But before Jesus died and was resurrected, we didn’t understand our connections to the Holy Spirit because it didn’t all become official until the resurrection. This is probably THE simplest “negative” command Jesus ever gave, and yet one of the ones that our flesh refuses to allow, down to the very core of our beings – spirit component excepted.
But even here on CAF it is impossible to get even one thread worth of posters to all agree that when Jesus said, “do not judge,” that He didn’t mean there to be 80 gazillion exceptions and clever ways to deflect the whole issue by piously stating, “oh I’m not judging the sin, just the sinner,” but don’t these people hear themselves? They are saying there can be a sin without a sinner… HUH??? And yet judgment and behavior modification have been so drilled into us from the time we first heard the word, “NO!!” the blindness begins to set in so that it is a very rare man, indeed, who ever enjoys a taste of that particular “do not” from Jesus. Funny thing is, the people who say they are absolutists are among those doing the judging. They aren’t absolutist about this particular suggestion by Jesus. He wasn’t telling us not to judge because it offends Him per se, but because that’s the quickest way to renewal of our minds and hearts and entry into the kingdom.
Knowledge and judgment divide; love and mercy unite.
Alan
