Law and Gospel

As you read the New Testament there are times when it seems that the Law is viewed negatively and there are times when it seems to be viewed positively. 

We can use Paul’s letter to the Romans to make this point.  He sees the law as something under which the unbeliever is in bondage.  Those who come to faith in Christ are not under law but under grace (Romans 4:14, 7:6).  So in some sense the law is something from which we need to be delivered or set free.

However, Paul declares that the Law is holy, just and good (Romans 7:12, 16).  It is after all God’s law. 

Being from God the Law is indeed good.  The culprit in the problem of the law is not the law but sin.  Sin uses the law to its advantage.  

In Romans sin is presented as a kind of reigning monarch or at least a kingdom or dominion to which all who come from Adam are enslaved.  Sin’s representative within each of us is what Paul calls “the flesh.”   Sin is a larger reality than each one’s personal sinfulness.  Sin exerts it rule over human beings through death.  Death is a broad category that encompasses our spiritual deadness and separation from God, physical decay and bodily death and the death of eternal judgment.   Sin holds all its subjects under its tight and firm rule. 

When the holy, just and good law of God offers life to those who obey, sin will have none of it.  Its presence might lie almost dead like within the human breast but when the law is heard, sin springs into action and produces rebellious responses from within the heart of every unbeliever who hears the law.   Yet sin is so much a part of the soul and mind fabric of Adam’s descendants it is nevertheless the individual who rebels.  Adam’s descendants are slaves to sin and on one level want it that way. 

Yet in another way this was in part God’s design in giving first to the Jews the written law and from them passing it on to other people.   Sin is happy to remain undetected.  Many who are under its control do not see themselves as sinful, many others even deny that they are sinners.   Yet the Law also works on sin.  The law stirs sin up, agitates its activity and in this sense the law is a real mercy from God to expose sin’s ugly and death producing presence. 

Nevertheless, the law can also be a hard task master.  We need a little Bible history at this point, along with an understanding of the Bible’s teaching on a covenant.   Old Testament scholars give different definitions for the Bible’s teaching on how God uses covenants in the history of redemption.  For the most part what is clear is that even from the creation of humanity God has related to his image bearers in terms of a covenant. 

God establishes how he will relate to us based on a covenant.  It is an arrangement sovereignly administered by God that contains commands, promises and at times warnings.  There are basically two overarching covenants.  The first that God established with Adam was what some have called the covenant of works.  God created Adam and Eve, placed them in paradise under a kind of probation.  If they obeyed the Lord and were faithful to his commands, especially not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would continue in God’s presence forever.  Thus, it would be by their works that they would secure this relationship with God for themselves and for their posterity.  When Adam sinned death entered into human existence, yet with death came the reign of sin. 

From that time to this all human beings are born with original sin.  We are both guilty of sin and corrupted by our sinfulness.  We are mortal.  We do not have the capacity to love God.  We are totally unable to obey God.  We are under the curse, enslaved to sin and subject to death.  There is no way we can rectify this condition.  Sin will even blind us to this reality.  

God did not leave rebellious Adam and Eve in their sinful covenant bond to the devil. God then promised a new covenant.  It would be from the seed of the woman that a champion redeemer would come to destroy the devil and to remove the curse.   It would be by death that sin and death would be vanquished.   It was the Lord God that took life by shedding blood and hence clothed Adam and Eve of their nakedness before him.  This was God’s grace.

The covenant of Grace was further established with Abraham.  It was to be by faith in the promise of God’s deliverance that sinners would receive justification before God.  This covenant is what the Gospel is all about.  It promises life to all those who believe the promise.  This is underscored again by Paul.  He says in Romans and Galatians that Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.   So it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham – who come to participate in the covenant of grace.  For God had planned that it would be through the Gospel that he preached to Abraham that he would also justify the Gentiles (Galatians 3:6-8). 

The Law of Moses as a covenant was a reaffirmation of the covenant of works.  In this sense the Law promised life to those who would keep it perfectly.  The Law offers a kind of righteousness that is secured by those who obey it.  The problem is that sin makes the doing of the law as a covenant of works impossible and thus all one can secure by trying to keep the law is its curse.  “Cursed is everyone who does not who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law to do them” (Galatians 3:10; Deuteronomy 27:26).   

To see the Law as what you do to secure your own righteousness with God is to come under bondage to the law and to its curse and condemnation.  Many in Paul’s day and even today think that they can secure such a law based righteousness.   To have this mindset means that one is ignorant of the righteousness of God.  It is to pursue one’s own righteousness rather than submitting to the righteousness of God that Jesus Christ by his obedience to the law secured for us and we receive only by faith.  (Romans 10:1-13).  

In this sense the Law gives us commands without the power to obey them.  We are powerless due to our sin to keep the law.  Our bondage is only intensified if we foolishly think that we can even forge if not a perfect obedience, a well-intended and sincere effort at obedience.   If you try to keep the law to secure acceptance with God you remain estranged from God and under bondage to both sin, the commands of the law without any help from the law to keep it and the curse and condemnation of the law. 

As we remain connected with Adam and under the rule of sin we have no real motivation or power to keep the law for the glory of God.   We are under both the guilt and corruption of sin and the powerlessness of the law that only condemns us.  From both we need to be delivered.   Yet, the law is not the problem and in God’s designed mercy the law will wail upon us so as to awaken a sense of true conviction and set us on course to become open for our need of God’s mercy. 

The Gospel (or the covenant of grace) is what sets us free from the reign of sin and the condemnation and weakness of the law due to sin. 

Christ’s established the covenant of grace (ratified it securely into operative existence) by obeying perfectly the covenant of works.  He obeyed where Adam disobeyed and he obeyed all the Law of Moses perfectly securing a righteous record and then he bore the curse of the Law by suffering and dying upon the cross.  You become a participant in the New Covenant (the Covenant of Grace) by faith in Jesus Christ and his obedient life, penal death and glorious resurrection. 

So what Christ does away with regarding the Law is the law as a covenant of works.  He does away with this covenant of works by fulfilling it completely.   You are delivered by Christ once and for all from any need to keep the law sincerely or perfectly to secured saving righteousness before God.   Every effort you made to do what the law commanded apart from being joined to Jesus and his saving work, only brought greater judgment.  

Granted some people think that they are keeping the law, while others know they are not but are under the burden of believing they must to secure acceptance before God.   Both are under the rule and reign of sin.  Only, those who cease from doing the works of the law to secure acceptance with God and flee to Christ and find security in his law keeping and judgment bearing death will be set free from the treadmill of law keeping works-righteousness. 

The problem with law keeping to secure righteousness is that it is all about you and that is what sin loves to promote.  You are striving to trust in you, in what you can do to secure acceptance with God.  As long as you remain with this mindset you are under the bondage of sin and of the law.  

Even for believers who have been delivered from the realm of sin and the law covenant of works, an ally of sin’s rule remains operative in our hearts.  As mentioned above this ally is called the flesh.  As a believer you have been given the Holy Spirit and the Law of God remains in place not as a covenant of works but as the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it as a rule of life informing us of the will of God and our duty to obey Him who in Christ is now our loving heavenly Father within whose peace and favor we have come to stand. 

The Gospel has so changed you that even though the flesh remains as a foe against whom you must be on your guard and put to death, you in your inner man delight in God’s law.   Now, when you sin, in one sense it is not the real you who sins but it is the flesh that dwells in you.   The Gospel will use the law to expose the operation of indwelling sin (the flesh) but it is by faith in the Gospel that you will be given the power (however not without conflict and resistance from the flesh) to have the desire and power to obey God by keeping the law.  Yet you no longer will pursue law keeping as the basis of your acceptance with God but because you have been accepted in Christ.  It is from the standing of gracious acceptance in Christ (justification) and the presence of the Holy Spirit that you pursue obedience to the Lord.  

The Westminster Confession of Faith 19:6 gives this helpful assessment of the relationship that the believer in Christ now sustains with the Law.

Although true believers be not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned; yet is it of great use to them, as well as to others; in that, as a rule of life, informing them of the will of God and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly; discovering also the sinful pollutions of their nature, hearts, and lives; so as, examining themselves thereby, they may come to further conviction of, humiliation for, and hatred against sin; together with a clearer sight of the need they have of Christ, and the perfection of His obedience. It is likewise of use to the regenerate, to restrain their corruptions, in that it forbids sin; and the threatenings of it serve to show what even their sins deserve, and what afflictions in this life they may expect for them, although freed from the curse thereof threatened in the law. The promises of it, in like manner, show them God's approbation of obedience, and what blessings they may expect upon the performance thereof, although not as due to them by the law as a covenant of works: so as a man's doing good, and refraining from evil because the law encourageth to the one, and deterreth from the other, is no evidence of his being under the law, and not under grace.

Nothing, either great or small—
Nothing, sinner, no;
Jesus died and paid it all,
Long, long ago.

When He, from His lofty throne,
Stooped to do and die,
Ev’rything was fully done;
Hearken to His cry!

Weary, working, burdened one,
Wherefore toil you so?
Cease your doing; all was done
Long, long ago.

Till to Jesus’ work you cling
By a simple faith,
“Doing” is a deadly thing—
“Doing” ends in death.

Cast your deadly “doing” down—
Down at Jesus’ feet;
Stand in Him, in Him alone,
Gloriously complete.

“It is finished!” yes, indeed,
Finished, ev’ry jot;
Sinner, this is all you need,
Tell me, is it not?