Lk 11:52    "Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering."

  

We seem to be finding some really negative verses at the moment! Yesterday it was the Lord speaking against Israel for their misdoings; now it is the Lord challenging those who should know better about their poverty of relationship with him.

 

Note he is challenging “experts in the law.” That means that these were men who had studied the Law of Moses that God had given them, and who knew all about every aspect of the Law. The only aspect of the Law they didn't seem to know about was the Lawgiver Himself! The Law was not merely for keeping; it should have revealed the One who gave it to Moses. If you read this Law as we find it in the Pentateuch, do you simply see a set of rules that you need to abide by, or do you catch something of the love and goodness of the One who gave these guidelines to Israel for their lives to be blessed?

If you examine these laws you realise that they were designed to create a community of God's people, where peace and harmony ruled. It also showed that when there were failures or transgressions, there were ways of dealing with them that enabled peace with God and with others to be restored. These ‘lawyers' missed the point and in the way they taught others, they didn't convey anything of the Lord, just of words, just of a set of impersonal rules. They missed the point! Do we read the words of the Bible and fail to be moved, fail to open our hearts to the loving Lawgiver, fail to be changed by His love, mercy and grace? Behind the Law is the love of God. May we not focus on words but fail to find the one who the apostle John described as love. "God IS love" (1 Jn 4:8,16)