Psalm 119:126 – Time to Act

It’s time to act, LORD.
They’ve set your law aside.

I’ve talked about waiting and patience a few times, so let’s look at the second part of this verse.

How can one set God’s law, or any law, aside?

We usually think of simply breaking the law, a sort of binary choice. I’m either doing it or not. And of course, that is one sort of lawlessness. I know what the law is. I have the power to do the right thing, and I choose to do the wrong thing instead. That certainly happens!

But there are a few other ways to set the law aside, or make it void.

We can trim around the edges of the law. A common way of doing this is to discuss what limit the state troopers are actually enforcing. Can you get by with 5 miles over the speed limit? 10 miles? You’ll see occasional arguments online about this. Inevitably, there will be an officer in the discussion who says he doesn’t actually have any margin for grace. If you’re speeding, you’re speeding!

I observed this driving through Ohio way back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was in graduate school. Someone had told me that the Ohio cops didn’t have any margin on enforcement, so I stuck straight to the speed limit. A few miles into the state another car crawled past me. He couldn’t have been doing more than a couple miles over, but in a couple minutes there came the flashing lights as the trooper sped past me and soon I saw the slight speeder at the side of the road.

I congratulated myself on my great intelligence and waited until the next state to speed up.

But there are other ways we can make the law void. Another way is to load people down with laws and regulations until it’s pretty certain that no matter how hard they try, they’ll be violating the law at some point. Once you get there, people realize they can’t be completely in the clear no matter what, and they become careless about keeping even more important laws.

You can also have the attitude of self-righteousness in which you’re convinced that you must keep the law, and that you’re a good person, so you’re doing it. How does this work? You reduce the actual laws to a level that you can. You grade yourself on an imaginary curve.

All of these tend to result in a certain amount of lawlessness, and when carried far enough can be destructive of a family, a community, or a nation. Laws are important, but they are very much subject to misuse and abuse, often by the people who ought to be upholding them.

With the psalmist, we can call on God. It’s time to act! People are setting your instructions aside and substituting their own.

How can you live constructively in relation to the laws that you know?