The Way the World Works

Why does Paul refer to legalistic systems and rituals, pagan or Mosaic, as rudiments or elements of the world?

The elements or rudiments of the world are the principles of operation of the physical world around us, or rather, the way the world works.

It is a realm of cause and effect, where physical consequences naturally follow our actions. It is concrete, unforgiving, without pity or mercy, and not subject to appeals or faith or the imaginations of the mind. Every child begins to learn the way the world works: if you fall out of a tree, you will cause harm to yourself. We learn by the school of hard knocks the way the world works.

Our sin against God revealed the physical consequence of death, which now operates naturally and is the way the world works.

To cope with all this, we learn to manipulate the things of this world, to learn how it works and manage our existence within it.

We learn that God is displeased by certain acts and so we attempt to conform our conduct to avoid the consequences. This is the basis for all legalistic systems of behavior, rooted in the way the world works.

So the sinner's interaction with God is always according to the rudiments of the world, the manipulation of physical acts and things, because that is all we can do, and that's what the physical world demands we do.

By establishing the Mosaic system, God demonstrated that the rudiments of the world could never make righteousness, because man could never fully comply with the law.

The law teaches us that by physical means, we can never please God. But Christ came to redeem us from the rudiments of the world, and establish Righteousness by faith in Him!