AJ Jacobs is an agnostic Jewish author who decided to live for one year following the laws of the old testament as an experiment for his new book, "The year of living biblically." He followed not only the Ten Commandments, but such laws as do not wear clothes of mixed fibers and do not shave your beard. He found the experience to be liberating and enlightening for him. Although I find his experience fascinating, because we come to the bible from a different set of beliefs, I find that I disagree with his accessment of the concept of following the law.

Jacobs writes, "Your behavior shapes your beliefs. If you act like a good person, you eventually become a better person. I wasn't allowed to gossip, so eventually I started to have fewer petty thoughts to gossip about. I had to help the less fortunate, so I started to become less self-absorbed. I am not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but I made some progress." (It's hilarious that he uses Jolie as an example of ultimate moral comparison, but that's another story.)

The whole point of the Law is to show that we can't follow the law. Paul writes in Romans 7, "But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful." But for Jacobs, he gained inspiration from being able to follow many of the laws, even using "techniques" like thinking about women he might lust after as his mother and feeling successful at upholding the law, instead of realizing that the whole point of the law was to show that he even needed a technique.

I guess the reason this hit a cord with me is that one of my pet peeves in our society is our utter determination to not be sinful. We usually do that by just denying the law or justifying it. But when one man decided that the "law was good" and tried to follow it, in his quest to be less self-absorbed, he proved that he like all people even approach sin from a self-absorbed point of view. Feeling good about yourself for following the law wasn't exactly the point of the law.

The need for forgiveness and grace has no place in a worldview where the law is created to just give us a good life. It's true that God gave us the law to provide for and protect us, but recognizing that we in ourselves cannot fulfill the law is where true life comes as we yield our sin and our lives for God's power to transform us instead of trying harder to be perfect or lowing our standards to strive to be just a little bit like Angelina Jolie.

So my conclusing, Romans 8: "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering."