The laws will always reflect the law-giver. If you want to know about the character of Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, or Donald Trump, you will learn something of it by studying the laws they have advocated. And if you want to know about the character of God, a great place to begin is with a study of the laws he instituted.

The greater our distance from another culture, the stranger that culture seems. This may be true geographically, but we observe it most commonly when the distance is chronological. The laws and customs of ancient civilizations often strike us as bizarre or unfair. There’s no doubt that sometimes they were. But if we assume that people then, just like people now, were rational beings, we can at least suppose that each law and each custom was arrived at deliberately and was meant to serve a distinct purpose. We learn a lot about these people and nations through the remnants of culture they left behind.

As Christians, we believe that every word of the Bible was breathed out by God. This includes the laws of the ancient nation of Israel that we find recorded in the Old Testament. While we do not adhere to this law, we do still study it to see what it reveals about our God. After all, the laws will always reflect the law-giver. If you want to know about the character of Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, or Donald Trump, you will learn something of it by studying the laws they have advocated. And if you want to know about the character of God, a great place to begin is with a study of the laws he instituted.

Yet there are many who read the Old Testament law and come away with the conviction that God is capricious or unfair or bigoted or misogynistic. If you read the “de-conversion” narratives of those who now deny the faith they once professed, you may well find they express their misgivings with those ancient laws and impugn the morality of any God who would enact such decrees. Some Christians feel the weight of these critiques and cringe with embarrassment. Some struggle to understand how these laws reflect divine love and noble character. But this should not be surprising since we live at such a vast distance from that culture. If we want to see how the laws are just and fair and good, we need to study not only the laws, but also the context in which they were given; we need to study not only the laws of that land, but also the laws of the other lands surrounding it, for the laws were not only just and fair and good, but more just and more fair and more good than anyone would otherwise hope to expect.

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