Law's Primal Origin
By John Gavazzoni

Go to Part One, Part Two or Part Three

In John's Gospel, we're made to understand that "the law came BY Moses....", but John did not, in that writing, deal with from WHENCE came the law.. It came BY Moses, but where did it come FROM? To simply answer that it came from God, is to miss an important complexity. A law consciousness existed in the minds of men well before law, as such, was codified into its God-defined edition as the Law of Moses.

It existed even in the form of "and every man did that which was right in his own eyes," during what some call the dispensation of human conscience. For every man to do so required some sense of what is right, and what is wrong, hence law, for "death reigned from Adam to Moses." as the consequence of sin, as induced by law, even before its via-Moses codification.

Now let's be clear that there is law, and there is law. There is first, and definitely foremost, law, as in the inexorable expression of incorruptible Being in action, behavior and relationship. Pure incorruptible Being will Be what it IS actually, behaviourally, and relationally. But then there is law, as in an externally imposed standard of behavior toward God and our fellow man, under the threat of punishment for disobedience to its statutes.

By externally imposed, I include the sense of law that does not operate from the inside out, that is, it does not operate out from the Being of God, nor out from that which is birthed by God, but, from the natural mind which was deliberately made vulnerable by God to the influence of this world's value-system, a system created by eternal value being distorted by its translation into time, by the Infinite having to suffer the distorting limitation of the space-time continuum.

That form of law has nothing to do with true righteousness, it only, to the degree that one manages to outwardly conform to it, makes one what the psychologist would call "a well-adjusted individual," well-adjusted, that is, to a system that imposes some checks and balances on the Adamic ego

This essay is about the latter form of law. How did it come to be so integrated into human experience? I suggest that it came from God Himself making our creaturehood vulnerable to translating His promise, and/or His self-fulfilling edict into a deception-induced lust to be capable of knowing good and evil as God does, that is, without the intimate, experiential knowledge of God, without a God-birthed participation in the nature of God.

It came about by the satanic spin put upon the truth of man being created in the likeness of God. That spin posited, that since God acts sovereignly, man, made in His likeness, ought to be able to exercise a certain sovereignty of his own. He, man, would actualize his God-likeness, by acting autonomously. Really clever, eh? Yeah, the serpent indeed was more subtle than all the beasts of the field that the Lord God had made.

That spin distorts Primal, reproducing Rightness into a challenge to do one's best to be like God. That law is about TRYING, whereas God's law, the law of His nature, is about BEING. Consider: Since sin means to miss the mark, it is implied that to sin, one must have been trying to hit the mark. If one were aiming at other than the mark, it wouldn't constitute missing the mark. Duh!

God knew that in creating Adam vulnerable to deception, through the woman taken from his side, the words of God "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; " would not be heard by Eve as promise, as self-fulfilling Divine edict, but would be heard, that is, she would translate it into a prohibition, concluding that God was cleverly inducing them to act on their own, as He, God, does.

The serpent was indeed subtle, as he proclaimed with bold insistence, that not only would they not die by eating of the fruit, but they would be acting as God, with sovereign independence. This would surely be a determining act of the will, as in the Divine fashion She concluded that the only way to sovereign God-likeness was through God manipulating them into disobedience, otherwise, the act would not involve independent, sovereign choice. Mankind's innate, intuitive sense that becoming like God was our destiny, was used against us.

Go to Part One, Part Two or Part Three