The Threat of the By-pass

A lane near the town where I grew up is called ‘Dark Lane’.  For a while about twenty years ago, I used to drive up it on my way to work each morning; in the bright summer sunshine it was far from dark!  However, the field-edge on the sunny side still contains the stumps of tall oak and horse-chestnut trees that were removed in the ‘seventies.  While I can just remember those trees, the hedgerow on the opposite side of the road that completed the ‘darkness’ was even then long gone.

When I moved to Hertfordshire, and began driving around at weekends to explore my new surroundings, people would suggest places I should see, and might speak of ‘going down the by-pass’ to get to them.  I didn’t understand what they meant; to me it was all one main road; the fact that one particular stretch took the traffic around a village instead of through it was lost in the history of years before my arrival, but to those who had lived here all their lives that part of the road was still – and would forever be – ‘the by-pass’.

Roads change; life changes.  There are benefits: cultivation might be easier, villages safer, journeys quicker; but there are disadvantages, too: the passing trade for the village shop is decimated; driving from A to B is further, and the journey less interesting; road names are no longer meaningful and a way of life that for centuries lived out its own co-ordinated and successful existence vanishes.

God gave the Israelites Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21).  However, by Jesus’ time, the Pharisees had expanded these into over 600 rules of life, which together made life a minefield, and in many ways missed the point of the original ten.  People were striving to keep these rules, in the hope that they could please God by doing so. 

Jesus brought a new (and better) way.  Zacchaeus was a tax superintendent who’d made his fortune by overcharging people.  But when he heard of this new way, his whole life changed (Luke 19:1-10).   There were others, too, who were persuaded to follow Jesus’ teaching.  Paul wrote to some of them in Ephesus, encouraging them to lay aside their old lives and take up the new (Eph. 4:22-24).  Sadly, there were people who, having undergone that transformation, were inclined to backtrack and follow another ‘new idea’ that was, in effect, the very slavery to the Law that they had so recently rejected (Galatians 5:1-10).  Paul’s letter to them is in a much different vein!

In a world of constant change, we must see new ideas for what they are.  We need to recognise ways that are ‘new’, even if we never knew the ones they have replaced.  We should evaluate new patterns of behaviour before following them, and also be prepared to reject them, if they try to overturn tried and tested habits that were clearly God’s way of living.  Paul wrote about this to the Corinthians (I Cor. 3:11-15).   Bandwagons abound, and it’s all too easy to hop onto one that is going the wrong way!