I will never forget Your precepts, for by them You have given me life. I am Yours, save me; for I have sought Your precepts (Psalm 119:93, 94 NKJV, emphasis mine).

Have you ever considered that we receive life by God’s law? I love this psalm because it describes reality, for it explains that only in harmony with design law do we find life and health.

You cannot maintain health while violating the laws of health; conversely, you can’t avoid the healing that comes when you harmonize with them. This is what the psalmist is describing, and the only type of law that brings life is design law, the laws the Creator has built into the operations of reality.

The psalmist here cannot be talking about laws like humans make—legal rules that require judicial enforcement. Why? Because you cannot legislate a rule that gives health. See what happens when you smoke two packs of cigarettes per day for 20 years and then get your congressman to pass a law that states you have healthy lungs, or that cigarettes promote health.

God’s laws are design laws, protocols built into the operations of reality that, when we harmonize with them, give us freedom. As James wrote, God’s law is “the perfect law that gives freedom” (James 1:25).

Why is it that only design law gives freedom and imposed laws do not?

Because of how reality works. Imposed laws always function by restriction of freedom—do not do this; it is illegal to do that; if you break the law, punishment is required.

But design law—the laws of health, the laws of life—when it is applied, gives vitality, ability, development, expansion, growth, and, thus, ever-increasing freedom.

It is in the breaking of design law that one causes one’s own enslavement and loss of freedom, which can never be restored through imposed legal systems and enforcement.

For instance, break the laws of health by eating junk food every day and never exercising, and you will become obese, deconditioned, and lose freedom. You will not be as free, by your own condition, to climb stairs, run and play with your children, and engage in so many of life’s activities. Conversely, the more you harmonize with the laws of health, the greater freedom you retain.

It is the same in the spiritual world.

The Design Laws of Spiritual Health

If you break the law of love by lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, or manipulating, you deviate from reality as God designed it to operate, and you encode degradation, fear, guilt, and shame into your own neurobiology.

These distortions and corruptions become part of your brain’s predictive model, a filter you encoded into yourself that now colors how you experience reality, how you interpret life: kindness is viewed as weakness; a gift is received with suspicion; a person who speaks truth is experienced as threatening and accused of being hostile.

As you continue to encode error, survival-of-the-fittest, and distortion, you practice methods ever out of harmony with reality as God created it to function, and you will not have peace but will experience the pain and suffering that naturally occurs when one is deviated from reality. Anxiety and fear, guilt and shame, relationship and psychological problems that, if not remedied by actually getting healthy (harmonizing with truth and love), cause the suffering soul to seek all kinds of comfort measures to reduce the intensity of the natural distress that comes when out of harmony with God.

Such measures, however, serve only to further encode error, and you will become a prisoner of your own making—the alcoholic who imprisons themselves in denial and distortion, the sinner who imprisons themselves in a false legal theology that keeps the spirit of fear alive behind the self-made legal distortions designed to hide self from God.

There are two types of laws: God’s laws upon which life and reality are built; and imposed laws, the types of laws creatures make up and which always require enforcement through punishment.

It is true that sometimes, a loving and benevolent person will impose made-up and artificial rules to protect the immature, ignorant, childlike, and even the rebellious through the infliction of artificial consequences (discipline). Such added “rules/laws” are given in love, to protect the immature from the self-harm that comes when they break a design law they do not yet understand—like parents who impose rules about what foods are allowed and not allowed, teeth brushing, not playing in the street, and many more. Such rules are not reality; they are artificial interventions to protect from injury and harm that comes when one breaks the laws of reality.

This is the reason God gave added laws, including the Ten Commandments and the ceremonial laws; the people were unruly, unrighteous, immature, selfish, and needed parental oversight and protection, not because God’s kingdom runs on made-up rules, but because God’s kingdom runs on love and truth, and God loves too much to let people destroy themselves without trying to save them.

Those who grow up in Christ, the mature (Hebrews 5:14), realize that the written law was added (Galatians 3), like a parent’s rule to brush teeth, because of our immaturity, not because God’s government is a legal one. His government is reality, how things are created to function—always in harmony with Him!

But those who remain sin-sick, who refuse to surrender heart and mind to God for rebirth with His Spirit of love and trust based on truth, instead continue to live in fear and selfishness. They continue to encode error, falsehood, in thought and function.

However, no fiction, no fantasy, no personal belief, even if one calls it “my truth” (or even perhaps “biblical truth” or “God’s truth”), regardless of what it is called, changes reality. Therefore, people who encode error will always be confronted by reality—meaning, their errors will be exposed by a failure to thrive, by pain, by suffering, by distress, by problems, because life only exists and advances in harmony with God’s design laws, as the psalm states.

So what happens to those who are encoding error? Things start to fall apart; their fantasy doesn’t work. The rich young ruler’s fantasy that he was right with God because he was rich didn’t work; he did not experience peace; he knew something was wrong. Therefore, he came to Jesus asking what he was missing.

That is truth/reality confronting the distortion, which gives opportunity for change, for repentance, for encoding truth and healing. But if people do not repent, then as things fall apart because they are out of harmony with reality, they experience more fear, more anxiety, more distress, and want order, want stability, want safety and security, and therefore, they always resort to rules and rule-enforcement as a means of trying to exert control both over themselves and others.

The alcoholic who sets rules for no drinking before noon; the abusive spouse who sets rules for no physical hitting but continues to engage in emotional and verbal assaults; the Christian who sets rules for Sabbath observance can’t do this and that. But their system is false, and their means of pursuing righteousness through law and law enforcement is false; it is not how reality works and leads only to further distrust, fear, rebellion, loss of autonomy, individuality, and conflict and division.

Such systems fail because they cannot change the heart, or rewrite the networks of the brain—why? Because cut off from God, the infinite source of truth, by their own fear and selfishness, they encode only error; they do not possess truth to replace the distortions, and they do not possess love to replace fear and distrust. So, they devolve into ever more desperate and frantic systems of “survival” and escape.

That is the exact history of reality, of what happens when law and law-enforcement are used as a means of trying to provide security and stability; it cannot correct encoded error; in fact, it expands it and prevents actual salvation and healing.

The Church and Imposed Law

Look at the history of Christianity. Wherever it is practiced as Jesus taught—truth presented in love, leaving people free, never with law and law-enforcement, but sowing and reaping, design law—then transformation, unity, love, growth, and healing occur.

But wherever the church has embraced imposed law and begun teaching that God’s law functions like human law, the system becomes abusive, divisive, and fragmented, and souls are destroyed.

This is why the final message of mercy to the world, as recorded in Revelation 14, is a call for people to return to worshiping God as Creator who made the heavens, earth, sea, and fountain of water—and that requires us to realize that all His laws are design laws.

It requires us to come out of the system represented as Babylon, a system known for its legal code, a system embodied by Nebuchadnezzar, who, after acknowledging the God of heaven, passed a law to kill anyone who spoke ill of Him. It is a system of religious beliefs that frames the God of heaven as a dictator who makes up laws and enforces those laws through inflicted punishments.

And that system, the Bible says, is fallen, fallen, the natural, unavoidable result of all false systems, all encoding errors, all deviations from reality, which always result in disintegration and collapse. It falls upon the weight of its own corruption, passing more law and more law-enforcement in seeking to punish those who live free, who promote truth, who advance our Creator God and His eternal gospel.

When we return to reality, to worshiping God as Creator, to understanding His laws are the laws life is built to operate upon, then we realize that sin is deviation from life; it is not a legal problem; it is, in reality, a lethal problem. Because of Adam, we are dead in trespass and sin, born terminal, born with a condition that, without remedy, results in perpetuating the encoding errors to the point of disintegration and death. Those who sow to their fallen nature from that nature reap destruction (Galatians 6:8). It is how reality works.

Salvation does not do anything to God or His law, for they are perfect and flawless. Salvation does something to sinners who are terminal and sick; it is God’s plan and process through Jesus Christ to write His code, His design law, upon our hearts and minds and restore us into His righteousness (Hebrews 8:10; 2 Corinthians 5:21).

As the psalm says, it is God restoring in us His precepts, His living law, His code of truth and love that restores us to life, and this is possible only when we are won to trust and reborn by His Holy Spirit and receive what Christ has freely provided for us. When that happens, because of what Jesus has done, we receive a new heart and right spirit and are literally refashioned, recoded, rewritten, in the inner person, as we remain humbly submitted to God and say yes. This is reality.

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul (Psalm 19:7 NIV84).

This is describing the reality of design law. Consider tying a plastic bag over your head and breaking the law of respiration—what happens? Various symptoms ultimately result in death—why? Transgression of God’s design law takes one out of harmony with life. There is nothing legal going on, no investigation, no judicial finding, no inflicted punishment. But death is encroaching, and if a loved one saw you and reaches you before you die, and simply removes the bag and puts you in harmony with the law, what happens? You revive! The law of the Lord is perfect and reviving, bringing life to the soul. That is reality, that is God’s design law, that is what God is trying to achieve inside of you right now—but the imposed-law lies obstruct that. The imposed-law lies are the human psychological defense mechanism that the unconverted heart of fear invents to hide and protect self from God, but the very theologies that people invent and encode into their own brains give them a false sense of security and, in reality, cut them off from seeing God. They don’t see our loving Savior, they see the imposter, the sinister legalist who is the source of death.

So I invite you to return to worshiping God as Creator, embrace the truth that God’s laws are the laws of life, and reject all the penal/legal fictions that misrepresent God and keep hearts hiding in fear. For when you embrace the truth and open your heart to God, He will write His law inside of you, and you will have life, new, abundant, and free—just as the psalm says.