If you have small children in your home, try this: Bake fresh, moist chocolate chip cookies, preferably using the legendary Neiman-Marcus recipe. After they cool ceremoniously place them in a cookie jar on the kitchen counter. Then take the children who are probably by now hovering nearby drooling and explain to them that the cookies are not for them, not at any rate, until dinner time. Forbid them to touch the cookie jar, and place them under whatever sanctions seem appropriate to them and you. Place a video camera trained on the cookie jar and wait to see what will happen. I absolutely guarantee that the children will try everything and attempt every ruse to get their hands in that jar. If you had made the cookies when the children were not present and then put them in the cookie jar and not told them about the cookies, and certainly had not forbidden them to touch the jar, they would not likely have sought to get their hands in it. Driven by the prohibition, they are quite certain that what is in the jar is very desirable for them.

There is nothing wrong either with the prohibition nor the sanction in themselves. The greedy human heart goes wrong, because we have not the power to obey the law's prohibitions, but instead, righteous and holy though they are, they inflame our desire by the prohibition itself. "Don't touch that cookie jar!" The law then points out our sin, spiritual weakness, lack of a good will, and downright wickedness, that the thing which ought to direct our steps becomes the very cause of wickednesses. The law is good. We are not. What a mess we make of things, that God's own instrument for righteousness becomes the incitement to sin. What grief this should cause us! What a huge offense it is! What anguish we should experience because we have so perverted, in our abuse, this good gift and blessing of the law. When we sin against the law we are offending against it as a gift of God and against its author. Oh, let us repent for our ongoing offense. Let us cry to our Father that He would open His arms and embrace even us, who have so mistreated His law!

The enormity of the offense gives some small measurement of the generous opulence of the remedy. God has superseded the law, by putting it to death in Christ, though it is His own creation. See how He loves us! He takes His own creature and sacrifices it through the death of His own precious Son, to our desperate need. Though the law is good and holy, it is killing us. Rather than see the death of a sinner, God has seen to it that the law is done to death in Christ. How gracious He is toward poor sinners. How easily God could have stood on His rights as the holy lawgiver: "Why would I kill the law? It is mine. It is good and right. Let the humans deal with it; it is after all their problem." And He would have been right. But God is not interested in being right, but rather He is interested in counting us right for the sake of Christ, His beloved Son, who was crucified for us.