Cuteness in the Arts

How a society deals with this tension may explain whether cuteness appears in its art and literature.

 

Take medieval Europe as an example. Life there was anything but dull. On the contrary, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga writes: ‘Life was brimful of play: the joyous and unbuttoned play of the people, full of pagan elements that had lost their sacred significance and been transformed into jesting and buffoonery.’ Huizinga singles out ‘pagan elements’ because religion had transformed the social perception of play, if not people’s tendency to engage in it.

 

However, play remained pagan because Christians saw it as a frivolous distraction from God. Art was meant to express serious, religious themes, which might explain why cuteness appears far less in the art of medieval Europe than it did in Japan.

 

And yet Western artists did occasionally play around. Monks who spent many hours copying manuscripts sometimes doodled in the margins of the books they were working on. These marginalia include images of monsters and animals acting like humans, but they tend to look grotesque and strange. However, a few of them might be considered cute.

 

--- Joshua Paul Dale, Irresistible: 

How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World. 2023.

Man with Telos & Logos

Telos - every object in creation is directed toward an end. The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed. Facts and values aren’t separate things—values are embedded within facts.
 
What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.
 
So, according to both Plato and Aristotle, what makes us “virtuous” is doing our job: look at the world with our reason, discerning the final causes for which things exist. This is our purpose. Just as Adam is tasked with naming the animals in the Bible, so we are tasked with recognizing the telos of the world around us in Greek thought.
 
As philosopher Leo Strauss suggests, no society can be built on a multiplicity of end goals. In order to avoid arguing incessantly over end goals, therefore, the Greeks had to posit an objective, underlying logic to the universe: a Grand Designer, an Unmoved Mover. Were the universe a chaotic, arbitrary, and random place operating according to no design, it would have no telos. But if a grand plan stands behind all of creation, our job is merely to investigate that plan—to uncover the natural law that governs the universe.
 
Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) was the first known philosopher to use the term Logos to describe the system of unified reason behind the world we see and experience. Man could understand the universe because a force had created the universe; man’s mind mirrored that force to the extent that man could uncover its purposes. As historian Richard Tarnas writes, “As the means by which human intelligence could attain universal understanding, the Logos was a divine revelatory principle, simultaneously operative within the human mind and the natural world.” And philosophers were tasked with uncovering this Logos; by doing so, they would be fulfilling both their own telos and discovering the telos of mankind more broadly.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

Happiness is Moral Purpose

Pleasure can be gained from a variety of activities: golf, fishing, playing with your children, sex. Amoral activities can bring us pleasure—that temporary high, that feeling of forgetting our cares. However, that pleasure is never enough. Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.
 
This has been clear since the dawn of Western civilization. The very terminology for happiness is imbued with such meaning in both the Judeo-Christian and the Greek context. The Hebrew Bible calls happiness simcha; Aristotle called happiness eudaimonia.
 
What does the Bible mean by simcha? It means right action in accordance with God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments, “I said to myself: ‘Come now, I will mix [wine] with joy and experience pleasure,’ and behold, this too was vanity.”
 
The Bible doesn’t seem to care very much about what we want. Instead, God commands us to live in simcha. How can He command an emotion? He can’t—he can only command our enthusiastic pursuit of an ideal He sets forth for us. If we do not pursue that purpose, we pay a price: we serve foreign gods, which cannot provide us any sort of true fulfillment.

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

The Ingredients for Happiness

Happiness, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity. If we lack one of these elements, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible; if that pursuit is foreclosed, society crumbles.
Our society was built on recognition of these four elements. The fusion of Athens and Jerusalem, tempered by the wit and wisdom of our Founding Fathers, led to the creation of a civilization of unparalleled freedom and replete with virtuous men and women striving to better themselves and the society around them.
 
But we are losing that civilization. We are losing that civilization because we have spent generations undermining the two deepest sources of our own happiness—the sources that lie behind individual moral purpose, communal moral purpose, individual capacity, and communal capacity. Those two sources: Divine meaning and reason. There can be no individual or communal moral purpose without a foundation of Divine meaning; there can be no individual capacity or communal capacity without a constant, abiding belief in the nature of our reason.
 
The history of the West is built on the interplay between these two pillars: Divine meaning and reason. We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.
 
We must make our way back toward our roots. Those roots took hold at Sinai.

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

The Creation of Reason-based Government

The Greeks gave us the roots of democracy.
 
Based on the notion of virtue—use of reason to act in accordance with nature—Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics developed ethical systems. Those ethical systems didn’t merely recommend personal cultivation. They also encompassed the creation of new forms of government. Some of their ideas regarding government were good; others were bad. But they began the process of applying reason to governmental structures—a process that has continued down to our day.
 
The ancients believed that in order to cultivate virtue, the polis—the city-state—must be at the center of human life. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out, the Athenians universally believed that good citizenship was a prerequisite to being a good man. Plato’s ethical system tied together happiness and virtue: the truly virtuous man will be happy. Plato defined various virtues, too: justice, moderation, and the like. But these virtues aren’t individual virtues, in Plato’s view—they only exist in the context of a community. The virtue of justice, for example, exists when each person fulfills his or her function in relation to the polis. Our virtues exist in relations with others.
 
Because the polis is the context in which virtue is cultivated—and because cultivating virtue is the ultimate goal of man—the polis must be governed rigorously so that human beings are inculcated with virtue, according to Plato. That means that those who govern must be the best and wisest among us—that we must rigorously condition a class of philosophers to rule. Otherwise, chaos will ensue.

The Athenian system of thought establishes certain fundamental notions crucial to happiness: the notion of telos, discoverable by us; the importance of reason-led investigation, leading to the birth of science; the recognition that social ties bind us to one another.

 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

Roots of Civilization

Why should Americans bother to learn about ancient Greeks? Because the classical roots of Western civilization in Athens still have much to teach us. Athens teaches us what we are capable of doing as human beings. Athens teaches us that we have the ability to use our reason to reach beyond ourselves. Athens teaches us not only how liberty can flourish, but why it should. I’ve argued that without Jerusalem, there could be no West; without Athens, the same holds true.
 
Religious faith is empowering because it tells human beings that they are loved, and that they have the capacity to choose between good and evil. But religious faith also requires us to acknowledge the inherent limits on human capacity—it requires us to say that there are things we will never understand, that we are earthly creatures bounded by dust. But if the project of Sinai was about elevating man above the animals by associating him with a Godly mission and granting him a Godly soul, the project of Athens was about elevating man using man’s own faculties. Religion doesn’t discount the capacity of mankind, of course, but that capacity is always secondary to God’s will; Athens elevates man’s capacity and makes it primary.
 

The ancient Greeks gave us three foundational principles: first, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world; second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around us by utilizing our reason; and finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for cultivating that reason. In short, the Greeks gave us natural law, science, the basis of secularly constructed government. Jerusalem brought the heavens down to earth; Athens’s elevation of reason would launch mankind toward the stars. 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

A Price-weighted Index: Dow Jones

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is what’s known as a stock market index. An index is a group of stocks that are combined to figure out whether the stock market as a whole is going up or down. It is a way to track the performance of the stock market.
 
The business world has changed a lot since 1896, so the Dow Jones has adapted to keep up. In 1928, the Dow was expanded to include 30 companies instead of just 12. Every few years some of the declining businesses in the Dow Jones are removed and are replaced by businesses that are growing. This helps to ensure that the biggest and most successful companies of the day are always included in the Dow Jones. As of 2021, the Dow includes businesses like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Disney (NYSE:DIS), and Home Depot (NYSE:HD).
 
The Dow Jones has become one of the most well-known stock market indexes in the world. However, the Dow Jones also has critics that point out two big flaws.
 
First, the Dow Jones only tracks 30 companies. That’s only a tiny fraction of the 6,000 publicly traded companies that exist in the U.S. alone. Critics argue the Dow Jones does not accurately represent the entire stock market.
 
Second, the Dow Jones is calculated by using the dollar price of each stock. The Dow Jones ignores the size of each business. This means that a stock that is trading for $100 per share will have 10 times more influence over the Dow Jones than a stock trading at $10 per share.
 
That’s why the Dow is called a price-weighted index. The dollar price of each stock is what matters, not the size of each business.
 
To see why some investors think that this is a problem, let’s review the stock price from two Dow Jones stocks—McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)—in October 2020:

McDonald’s was $52 billion smaller than Intel, but its share price was about four times higher. This means that the price movement of McDonald’s stock had a four times greater influence over the performance of the Dow Jones than Intel’s stock, even though Intel was a larger company!

 

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

 

A Capitalization-weighted Index: NASDAQ Composite Index

Computers became a lot more advanced during the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, people who worked on Wall Street started to experiment with computers to see if they could be used to improve stock trading.
 
At the time, there wasn’t a good way to get stock price information—or stock “quotes”—to all investors at the same time. This made buying and selling stocks inefficient and expensive. The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), an agency that oversees the buying and selling of stocks, decided that computers could be used to solve this problem.
 
The NASD created a brand-new stock exchange in 1971. This new stock exchange would allow investors to buy and sell stocks on computers that were connected to each other. They called this new stock market the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, or NASDAQ.

The NASDAQ stock exchange offered many advantages over other stock exchanges. Since all of the buying and selling was done on computers there was no need to have a physical trading floor. Accurate prices could also be viewed by all investors at the same time.
 
The inventors of the NASDAQ stock exchange also created an index that tracked the price movements of all the companies that were listed on the exchange. They called this new index the NASDAQ Composite Index. Today, there are more than 3,200 businesses that make up the NASDAQ Composite Index.
 
Like the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite Index is a capitalization-weighted index. This means that larger companies have a bigger influence over the movement of the NASDAQ Composite Index than smaller companies.

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

A Capitalization-weighted Index: S&P 500

In 1923, the Standard Statistics Company created a new stock market index. Their goal was to compete with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was popular with investors. To stand out, Standard Statistics decided to use data on 233 companies instead of just 30 like the Dow Jones.
 
Years later, the Standard Statistics Company merged with Poor’s Publishing to create the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) company. In 1957, S&P made a few changes to its stock market index that would allow it to better compete with the Dow Jones.
 
First, S&P increased the number of companies that it tracked from 233 to 500.
Second, S&P let larger companies have more influence over the index’s movements than smaller companies. S&P judged the size of each business by using its market capitalization, which is the total dollar market value of a company’s equity. This is called a capitalization-weighted index.
 
On March 4, 1957, the S&P 500 was officially launched.
 
In 2021, large companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) had market values that exceeded $1 trillion. That causes them to have much more influence over the index than smaller companies like Hanesbrands (NYSE:HBI) and Under Armour (NYSE:UA) which are worth less than $10 billion. This is why many investors like that the S&P 500 is a capitalization-weighted index.
 

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

What is A Servant Leader

What is a servant leader? It is someone who, in Senske’s words, refuses to use people as means to an end—who always asks, “Am I building people up, or am I building myself up and merely using those around me?” 

A servant leader creates an atmosphere of “transparency” in which all relevant information is shared openly, so that everyone has an opportunity to make responsible decisions. Finally, a servant leader lets go of command-and-control methods, and creates a culture that allows everyone to grow into leaders, stretching their own God-given talents.

Dare to Confront

Every Christian needs to be equally convinced that biblical principles are true not only in some abstract sense but in the reality of our work, business, and personal lives. If we become aware that a ministry or business is violating biblical principles, we need to stop being enablers and start calling people to accountability—even if it means paying a price. An employee who takes a stand may not ultimately succeed in changing anything. In fact, he may run the risk of losing his job. The church’s task is to make sure that he does not bear that risk alone. As Lesslie Newbigin writes, fellow Christians should stand ready to support those who speak the truth to power and pay a price for it, even providing financial assistance to those whose moral courage costs them their livelihood.

We must never forget that going along with unbiblical practices is not only wrong, it is unloving. Acquiescing in an unjust situation typically stems not from love but from fear of possible negative repercussions. If we aspire to a godly, holy love for others, we must be willing to take the risk and practice loving confrontation.

- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004.

Leadership vs. Management: It’s All About Intent

The leadership vs. management question is answered when we look at the intent behind both terms. When we take the lead, we are:

• At the front, showing the way.
• Doing new things – going to places where nobody has gone before.
• Making change, instead of keeping things the same.

When we manage, we:

• Make sure everything is under control.
• Want to see stability and reduced risk.
• Look at metrics to monitor and measure success.

Leading is about putting ourselves out there and carving a path. Management is more transactional, about stability, smooth operations and cutting out risk.

excerpt from: https://www.thoughtfulleader.com/leadership-vs-management/

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

What did Baconianism mean when applied to biblical interpretation? For Bacon, standing at the dawn of the scientific revolution, the main enemy had been Aristotelian philosophy. Thus he taught that science must start by clearing the decks—by liberating the mind from all metaphysical speculation, all received notions of truth, all the accumulated superstition of the ages. “With minds washed clean from opinions” (in his words)......

The method suffered from several serious weaknesses, which we need to grasp in order to understand how it continues to shape the way we read the Bible today. First, the very notion that Christians needed a “scientific” exegesis of Scripture represented a degree of cultural accommodation to the age. By embracing the most widely held scientific theory of their day—and even applying it to theology—evangelicals came close to losing the critical distance that Christians are called to have in every age. Moreover, the empiricist insistence that theology was a collection of “facts” led easily to a one-dimensional, flat-footed interpretation of Scripture.

Metaphorical, mystical, and symbolic meanings were downplayed in favor of the “plain” meaning of the text. And by treating Bible verses as isolated, discrete “facts,” the method often produced little more than proof-texting—pulling out individual verses and aligning them under a topical label, with little regard for literary or historical context, or for the larger organizing themes in Scripture.

Perhaps most serious, however, was the Baconian hostility to history—its rejection of the creeds and confessions that had been hammered out by the church over the course of centuries…… It means the church loses the wisdom of the luminous intellects that have appeared throughout church history—Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin. By adopting the Baconian method, many American evangelicals lost the intellectual riches of two millennia of theological reflection…… the idea that a single generation can reject wholesale all of Christian history and start over again is doomed to theological shallowness.

Old Books for New Perspectives

The very language and concepts in currency today—like Trinity or justification—were defined and developed over centuries of controversy and heresy fighting, and unless we know something of that history we don’t really know the meaning of the terms we are using,

Moreover, in our own age, with its keener sense of the historical context of knowledge, we recognize that it is unrealistic to think people are capable of approaching Scripture with minds swept clean, like blank slates…… They lose the critical distance afforded by checking their ideas against those of Christian scholars across a wide range of different cultures and historical periods. Instead of seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, they are limited to what they are able to see from their own narrow perspective within a tiny slice of history.

That’s why C. S. Lewis urged Christians to read “old books,” not just contemporary ones. It is difficult not to be taken in by the prejudices of our own age, he wrote, unless we have access to another perspective—which is what old books provide. The great figures in church history are our brothers and sisters in the Lord, members of the Body of Christ extended across the ages, and we can learn much by honing our minds on the problems they wrestled with and the solutions they offered.

- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004

Keeping the Bible in the Real World

Every biblical text is organically connected to the era of its writing. Whether looking back to the past, recording the present, or projecting into the future, every Bible passage or book is linguistically, historically, and culturally a product of its day.
 
Here is a hard-and-fast rule of interpreting any part of the Bible:
 

Never project present ideas onto ancient texts! Also, avoid superimposing later biblical ideas on earlier ones.

 
Remember, the time and culture of King David was a far cry from that of Abraham’s day, and Daniel’s epoch was a world away from King David’s. Not to mention the historical and cultural distance between Daniel and the apostle Paul! And beware when you hear it said, “Take the Bible literally.” What does that mean anyway? Literal is a slippery concept. Most often it winds up being what somebody thinks a biblical passage “literally” says “to them.” This approach is dangerous when we seek to interpret the Bible accurately.
 
The proper way to understand the Bible is authentically. As far as possible, this means seeing it in its original historical context. An authentic interpretation is one that respects an author’s language, culture, and history without superimposing elements that are foreign or anachronistic to the time of writing. While we may not be able to know every detail of an author’s historical setting, getting as much accurate information as possible will always enhance our understanding of the text. This is where a discipline like archaeology proves invaluable.
 
The worlds of the biblical characters were real worlds. Sights, sounds, and smells. Blood, guts, and grime. Cities, towns, and villages. Houses, temples, and palaces. Swords, spears, and arrows. Jars, bowls, and lamps. A significant portion of the Bible deals with the accoutrements and objects of material culture. Such things are accessible only by the trowels and brushes of archaeological excavations. While ancient history is pieced together mostly from written texts and inscriptions, the finer details and nuances of societies and cultures are best illuminated from the physical remains buried in the eroding sediments of past civilizations. Indeed, archaeology has a lot to say on the subject of biblical interpretation!
 

Two Extreme Views on Archaeology

Unfortunately, there are two extreme views on the subject of the Bible and archaeology.
 
On the far left are scholars who want the Bible eliminated from ancient Near East archaeology altogether. Archaeology should not be done with a biblical “agenda,” they say. They want archaeology for archaeology’s sake, without a biblical bias attached to it. For these so-called biblical minimalists, the Bible gets little or no voice in the pursuit of archaeology.
 
On the far right are those who think the exact opposite. They disallow archaeology a place in studying the Bible. Put more accurately, they reject any archaeological data that casts doubt on their own interpretation of the Bible. In their minds, because archaeology seems to contradict many of their traditional interpretations of the Bible, they would just as soon steer clear of both archaeology and ancient Near East scholarship. For them, archaeology has no right to speak to biblical interpretation.
 
 

- Steven Collins & Joseph M. Holden, The Harvest Handbook of Bible Lands: 

A Panoramic Survey of the History, Geography and Culture of the Scriptures, 2020.

 

Five Principles for Rightly Handling Scripture

God’s word is our most important and indisputable authority. This is not to say it is the only authority. R. C. Sproul notes that the Reformation notion of sola Scriptura does not mean the Bible is the only authority for the Christian, but that it is the only infallible authority—for the simple reason that God himself is infallible.

1. Scripture should speak to all of life
We should not see the Bible as a manual for how to escape this world, but rather as a book of wisdom for, in part, applying God’s revealed truth to all of life now. Scripture should be both the foundation and impetus for all our knowledge pursuits.
 
2. Scripture should define your paradigm
All of us tend to like the parts of Scripture that support our paradigms while we ignore or downplay the parts that threaten our status quo. But bad things happen when we start shaping Scripture around us rather than ourselves around Scripture. We must always be on guard against force-fitting Scripture into boxes of our liking.
 
3. Scripture is valuable as a whole, not just the parts
Context is everything in Bible study. The truth of any given verse becomes clearer when we see it in the larger context. We get the most out of the Bible when we read it in big chunks and grasp its grand narrative. The Bible is a cohesive narrative.
 
4. Scripture should spark worship and obedience
We must “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22). Our lives should be beautifully transformed by the Bible because we obey what it says. Part of this is acknowledging that the Bible should engage not only our minds, but also our hearts, leading us to love the Lord and trust him more and more. We read the Bible to know its author, to behold the beauty and glory of Christ.
 
5. Scripture doesn’t have to make complete sense
This doesn’t mean we turn off our brains, throw up our hands, and tolerate theological fuzziness. Rather, the difficulties of Scripture should invite us to even more rigorous and precise examination, going deeper and wider in our study as lifelong learners, not because we have to know everything God knows, but because the more immersed we are in Scripture, the nearer we feel to his sweet presence.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

 

The Curse of the Law

Some people—including some Christians—might think that interpreting the law too carefully is legalistic. We have enough trouble keeping the easy commandments; so what is the point of looking at God’s law in exhaustive detail? Isn’t that legalistic?
 
On the contrary, it is when we have a limited understanding of the law that we are most tempted to legalism, because then we think that we can keep it. If all God commanded us to do was to avoid murdering someone, we might be able to obey him. But we need to interpret the sixth commandment in the context of the whole Bible, with everything it says about murderous intentions. Since the law is spiritual, it condemns unrighteous anger as well as murder. Since it is positive as well as negative, it requires the active preservation of life. And since it represents a whole category of sins, we are forbidden to harm people in any way or to allow others to do so.
 
Is this a legalistic way of thinking? Not at all. This kind of Biblical reasoning rescues us from legalism by preventing us from lowering God’s standard. God’s standard is only maintained when we recognize what his righteousness truly requires. And when we know what God requires, in all its fullness, we also see the full extent of our sin. It is only a full understanding of God’s law that reveals our full need for the gospel. In the words of J. Gresham Machen, “A low view of law always brings legalism in religion; a high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace.”
 
Here we need to recall how to use God’s law. As we have seen, the Ten Commandments are a multi-use item. One of their primary purposes is to show us our sin, so that we will see our need for a Savior. The law points us to Jesus Christ, whom the Scriptures identify as “the end of the law” (Rom. 10:4), meaning that he is the goal or true purpose of the law. The more clearly and thoroughly we understand what God’s law requires, the more clearly and thoroughly we understand the grace that God has provided for us in Jesus Christ.

Christ and the Moral Law

What does the moral law, summarized in the Ten Commandments and rightly interpreted, reveal about the person and work of Jesus Christ? It reveals the full extent of his perfect obedience. The Bible assures us that although Jesus was “born under law” (Gal. 4:4), he “fulfill[ed] all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15) and “committed no sin” (1 Pet. 2:22). This was no small accomplishment! The law of God searches to the very soul. It is utterly exhaustive in the righteousness it requires. We are not capable of keeping even a single commandment with perfect integrity. But Jesus kept them all, down to the last detail, and he did it on our behalf. If we are joined to him by faith, then God regards us as if we had kept his whole law perfectly. Christ was crucified “in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us” (Rom. 8:4a). Therefore, the law shows us what perfect righteousness we have in Christ. To put this in more technical terms, when we know what the law requires, we can understand the doctrine of justification.
 
The moral law also reveals the full extent of Christ’s atonement. The Bible teaches that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. If we have a narrow understanding of God’s law, we might imagine that we did not have very many sins to die for. But a full interpretation of the Ten Commandments reveals the full extent of our sin, and thus it reveals the full extent of the atonement. Christ died for all our sins. He died for our sins against God and our sins against humanity. He died for our idolatry, profanity, and adultery. He died for our lying, stealing, and murder. He died for our sins both inside and out. He died for all the sins we commit in every category of God’s command. He even died for all the sins we committed by sharing in the sins of others. Christ died for all our sins, suffering the full penalty that our guilt deserved. The more thoroughly we understand the implications of God’s law, the more truly grateful we are for the grace of God in the atoning death of Jesus Christ. When we know what the law requires, we can understand the cross.
 
Finally, for those who have put their faith in Jesus Christ, the moral law reveals the full duty of the Christian life. This is another use of God’s law. It shows God’s redeemed people how to live for God’s glory. When we give the law its full interpretation, we gain a better grasp of God’s righteous standard in all its perfection, and thus we have a better idea of how to please him. To put this in theological terms, when we know what the law requires, we can understand the doctrine of sanctification. This is why we study God’s law: to understand our great need for Christ and his gospel and to learn how many ways we can glorify God for his grace.