What Jesus did from his birth was take upon himself the task of obeying every jot and tittle. It is never legalism to obey the commandments of God. There's a word that I hear misused and abused to a very serious degree and that is the word

legalism. I hear legalism constantly being defined as if it meant

obedience to the law. That if I obey the law of God, that makes me a legalist. Is that

what legalism is? God forbid. Legalism has many different manifestations.

One is the legalism of the Pharisees who obey the outward demands of the law, the letter of the law, while violating

and compromising the spirit all over the place.

And they were legalists in the sense that they were Philadelphia lawyers

studying the fine points of the law in order to secure

a knowledge of loopholes by which they could escape the mandates of the law.

For example, the rabbinic law forbade them to travel more than a certain amount of time

on the Sabbath day which was called a Sabbath day's journey and the Sabbath day's

journey was measured by so many furlongs from your house. So how did they get around

that?

On business trips during the week, they would have some of the men on caravan teams take along a toothpaste or a toothbrush or other articles that a man possessed and every so many furlongs put these

toothbrushes under a rock thereby legally establishing residents.

Every so many people.

So if the Pharise he wanted to travel more than a Sabbath day's journey on the

Sabbath, he could just conveniently go from rock to rock from residents to resident,

so he could get as far as he wanted to go on the Sabbath.

That's legalism.

Say I'm a bang the law, technically.

But finding loopholes to break it.

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