Carved in Granite, Buried at Calvary

There is a movement in this country that wants the law of Yahuah written into the law of the land. Commandments back in the schoolroom. Cut into stone outside the courthouse. Judges who rule by them and legislators who legislate by them.

The same movement is taught, week after week, that the law of Yahuah was nailed to the cross.

Both claims come from the same pulpits. Often from the same man in the same hour.

Set them side by side and look at what is being asked. A law too dead for a believer to keep is somehow alive enough to govern a nation that does not believe. A yoke nobody could bear is the right burden for the unbeliever down the street. The command that binds no Christian on Sunday morning should bind a judge on Monday.

That is not a hard doctrine. That is two doctrines that cannot stand in the same room.

Watch which commandments make the trip. Murder, theft, adultery, false witness — all demanded in the civil code. The fourth never goes. Nobody carries the Sabbath to the courthouse steps. It is the one commandment on that stone that would cost the man carrying it something on his own calendar. The second stays home as well.

The commandments that regulate the neighbor are treated as law. The commandments that regulate the worshipper are treated as history. A man who sorts them that way is not submitting to the law. He is using it.

The verse behind the whole claim is Colossians 2:14, the handwriting of ordinances nailed to the tree. The word for that handwriting is cheirographon. It does not mean law. It means a debt note written in a man’s own hand — the charge sheet, not the statute. Burning a man’s hospital bill does not cure him.

“Sin is the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4).

If the law is dead, sin has no definition. A movement campaigning against sin in a nation has cancelled the only document that names it.

The order runs backward as well.

“Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations” (Deuteronomy 4:6).

The nations were meant to look at a people who kept it. The witness was a walk, not a bill. Israel was never told to legislate the law onto Egypt.

This cuts more than one direction. A man can keep the feasts, keep the Sabbath, keep the diet, and still sort his commandments by cost. The ones that cost him nothing get preached. The one that would cost him a paycheck gets studied instead of kept.

The question underneath is not which commandments a nation should enforce. It is which book a man opens when he wants to know what is right.

One of those books was written by men, and it can be amended.

The other cannot.