My Thoughts on the Law and Christians...
This is an essay that I wrote when I was having difficulty understanding the part that Law (which Christ freed us from) plays in the life of Christian. I hope is makes sense...
As Christians, we deal with harmonizing contradictory concepts on a daily basis. God demands a payment, but pays it Himself. Give peace where violence would be a more normal response. The one who will be great is the one who least wants to be great in the eyes of others. Persecution for Christ is good. Build up others, and forget about yourself. He must increase, and I must decrease. Boast in weakness. But perhaps the most complex concept is the system of rules and regulations required of Christians, or rather not required… yet still imposed, but not fulfilled by Christians, but rather by the empowerment of the Holy Spirit… yet not entirely. This concept of the Law that God has imposed on the world is one of the most confusing aspects of our Christian struggle, second perhaps to the perfect balance that God strikes between justice and mercy, sovereignty and free-will, righteousness and grace, holiness and forgiveness, love and anger, almighty Lordship and tender Fatherhood. The idea that Christ defeated the Law, yet we still have to obey the Law, confuses the line between unmerited salvation and penance. The fact that the Law is our enemy and condemns us in our filth, yet it makes more earthly promises than any other tenant in the Bible confuses the line between friend and enemy. There are so many different views of the Law that are seemingly contradictory. Sin is perhaps the first thing that every Christian is confronted with and the 10 Commandments are many times held to be man’s only salvation. However, the Christian knows that the sacrifice that Christ made on the Cross was sufficient for all the sin of the entire world. Why then did He say “be therefore perfect, even as your Father is perfect?” Why did He give us the ultimatum that “if you love me, you will keep My commandments?” Do we still have a penance to pay in addition to the payment that Christ made? But Isaiah says “all our righteous works are as filthy rags.” No matter how many filthy rags you add to a brand new car, you’ll never increase the value of it, you will only ruin the value. So then is our keeping of His commandments a confirmation of our love for Him, or is it like throwing filthy rags onto the Cross of salvation? The Truth is much easier than that, but it is a little more complicated. The first step in solving this problem is to realize that there are two systems of Law at work in the world and they work together for the glory of God. The commands that God gives us are neither an ultimatum that we prove our love for God, nor are they some sort of personal payment for sin that adds to the work of Christ on the Cross. In the following paragraphs, I will try to explain the true nature of the two Laws at work in our lives as Christians.
The very first dilemma that any person is presented with, in the realm of spiritual matters, is that people do wrong things. Parents punish their children in order to discourage unwanted behavior. Society in general is built almost completely around sets of rules and regulations that are enforced by whatever level of government may be in place, because people generally don’t want to follow rules. In fact the mere presence of the rules is, for many people, the only encouragement needed to break them. Governments impose all manner of deterrents, including indirect deterrents like the exhibition of punished criminals and direct deterrents like threat of physical pain or other suffering upon violation of an ordinance. Oddly, as diverse as humanity is, we can distill several rules that are accepted in most societies. These rules are the result of the fact that God has placed an innate sense of the order of things in each human. It is natural for a parent to care for a child and for the child to obey and respect the parent. It is not natural for one human to take another’s life in cold blood. Ownership is a universal principal that should not be violated. Since we know that these are the way that things are supposed to work, we have begun to make rules that institute manufactured punishments for these violations and, in some cases, allow the government to enforce by consensus of the people the punishments set out in a religious text. Unfortunately, we all like sheep have gone astray, each unto his own path and thus not everyone turns to the Bible to find the rules and regulations that they want to codify in their own social government. Despite which government codifies which religious text, the Christian is undeniably confronted with a set of commandments that are listed in the Bible as being man’s only salvation. But at the same time it is quite obvious that the purpose of this Law is not to be kept so that we can earn the favor of God, but rather to prove to us the gravity of our situation and to prove to us that we are utterly helpless before a God Who demands justice. Now, the rest of the story is, of course, that Christ brings the justice for us so that we can have a relationship with God, but that is for later. In Romans 7:5 Paul shows us that we were aroused to sinful passion by the Law to the purpose of death, Romans 8:2 calls this Law “the Law of Sin and Death,” and later in 1 Corinthians 15:56 Paul tells us that the only sting of death is because of sin and that “the power of sin is in the Law.” So, already we are seeing a very bleak picture painted of the Law. The Law is our enemy and none of us can keep it. This enmity comes from our own propensity toward sin as stated in Isaiah 53:6 “All we like sheep have gone astray, each unto his own way…” and in Romans 7:19, even when we are Christian we still struggle with the “good I want, [and] do not do,” and the sin that we practice and “do not want.” In fact, not only do we have a propensity toward sin, but when we are without God any “good” that we do is without merit, “…whatever is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). By the breaking of the Law of Sin and Death, a debt has been accrued, one which must be paid (Romans 6:23a). This debt has already been paid, though. When Christ lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, and was raised again on the Third Day, He paid the price for all of the sin for all time. The fact that the whole world was paid for is evident in 1 John 2:2 when John says that Jesus was the atoning sacrifice for “not for [our sins] only, but also for those of the whole world.” The sacrifice was not only for the whole world, but it was also for all time as demonstrated in Acts 17:30 where He “overlooked (lit. “winked at”) the times of ignorance” when they did not know about the sacrifice of Christ. So then what is Hell? If Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient payment, why do people still go to Hell? Because Hell is not punishment, it is a consequence that we bring upon our own heads. It is as if God has bought the last bottle of water in the middle of a desert and he is offering it to us. If we refuse the water that does not “un-pay” it; the water is still paid for, but we are doomed by our own refusal to die of thirst in a place that was not meant for us. Never in the Bible does anyone say that Hell was created for sinners, but it was created for Satan, his minions, Death, and for Hades. Hell is not what God intended for us, but it is where we go if refuse the salvation that He offers to us. Fortunately Christ did buy that salvation for us. He lived a perfect life, and life without sin and He gave that life as atonement for the sins of the world. He made a human sacrifice for a human debt, Hebrews 2:17-18. He did not, however, live a life and make a sacrifice in the Law of Sin and Death. This is quite obvious because the priests of Sin and Death (Pharisees) were always at odds with Christ’s fulfillment of the Law of Sin and Death to the Law of the Spirit. Through Christ’s death and resurrection He finished the Law of Sin and Death into the Law of the Spirit (Romans 7:6). This is because the Law of Sin and Death is not to be kept, it is to condemn the world in it’s sin so that sin may exist for what it is and that the world may become accountable to God, because without the Law sin is ambiguous and not punishable (Romans 3:19, 5:13). The Law of Sin and Death is based on rules, regulations, infractions, punishments, and rational reasons. These are things with which humans are incredibly incompetent. We tend to pride ourselves with the perception that reason is what separates us from the animals, but we do not spring from the womb with reason. Reason must be cultivated and manufactured. No, reason is what we are condemned by! Human reason is what God uses in the 10 Commandments to chase us away from what we think we know and into the reason and rationale of the Spirit. Christ came into the world not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. When He kept the Law He did it with God’s reasoning, not the reasoning of man. The reasoning of man extrapolated the 10 Commandments and the sundry laws that He gave to Moses out to their logical conclusion. The logical conclusion was that if a Person picked a head of grain and rubbed it between His fingers and ate it, He was harvesting and winnowing on the Sabbath, which is obviously against the Law! Christ did not come to keep the Law of men, though. He came to keep the Law of the Spirit, for it was by this Law that He would save mankind.
Enter, Law of the Spirit! This is the salvation of mankind, because the Law of Sin and Death says that each must pay for his own, but the Law of the Spirit says that there is One Who can pay the price for all. In this way, and others, the Law of the Spirit has overcome the Law of Sin and Death. “For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned the Law in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:3-4). Where the Law of Sin and Death is based on keeping rules and regulations in spite of a sinful nature, the Law of the Spirit gives us a new nature that will love and follow God. By this fact, we are no longer under the Law of Sin and Death, because its requirement has been fulfilled in us by the only One Who can fulfill it. Now, this of course does not mean that we are free to sin as much as we like, now that we are free. This is addressed in Romans 6 but a more important relationship between the Law and the Christian is made by a commonly misunderstood verse. In John 14:15 Jesus says, “If you love Me, you will keep my commandments.” This verse is not an ultimatum. We do not have to prove our love for God by arbitrarily keeping a set of regulations that He has already kept for us; neither do we keep His commandments so that we can learn to love Him, for love is a fruit of the Spirit, not of the Law. The entire relationship is described by Jesus Himself in John when He answers a question posed to Him by some followers. They ask Him, “What shall we do so that we may work the works of God?” What they were asking is, “What deeds must we perform so that we can follow the occupation of God?” Jesus answers them in a plain and straightforward way, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” Many people take this to mean that the activity that God performs is to cause you to believe. This is not the case, because that would not be an answer to the men’s question. What Jesus says is, “The occupation that God has called you to is to live your life believing in Me.” What Jesus is emphasizing here is the difference between what the men were used to thinking about and what Christ had come to change. The men still thought that (as had been the case for thousands of years) there were rules and regulations to keep in order to fulfill God’s calling in your life. What Jesus did by fulfilling the Law of Sin and Death is make it so that “if you love Me, you will keep my commandments.” Not as an ultimatum, but as a tandem relationship. We no longer have to worry about keeping His regulations, because if we love Him, then all the commandments will fall into place. It is not possible to sin while you are loving God. Not that if you are loving God then whatever you do is suddenly okay, when it didn’t used to be. No, if you are loving God, then you are not going to lie or kill someone. He came to change the focus. The focus is no longer on the Law or on the sin, because if you’re looking at the Law then you’re not looking at God. Before Christ came, they didn’t have a way to look at God except through the Law, but now we are our own High Priests and we can come before Him and cry out “Abba! Father!” because it’s not about rules, anymore. It’s about love. The chief end of man used to be to fear God and keep His commandments because every deed will be brought to judgment, whether for good or for evil, but every deed has been brought to judgment and now we can rest in the love of God and the fact that “it is finished,” it is done. “Where there is forgiveness, there can be no more offering for sin.” Sin has been defeated! This is what that means, sin is no longer a contender. It has been dealt with and it has been thrown away as far as the East is from the West, it is no longer a matter to be taken into consideration because the veil has been rent, we no longer have to search for His providence in a Law, straining to sift through the humanity to see what God really meant, we now can look straight into the face of almighty God, because my sin (oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!) my sin, not in part but the whole, has been nailed to the Cross! and I bear it no more! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, oh my soul! I bear it no more, I don’t bear the price of it, I don’t bear the weight of it, I don’t bear the power of it, I don’t bear the scars of it, I don’t bear the memory of it. I bear the love of my Heavenly Father who will cause all things to work together for the good of those who love Him. So, let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: love God, for this is the chief end of man.
As Christians, we deal with harmonizing contradictory concepts on a daily basis. God demands a payment, but pays it Himself. Give peace where violence would be a more normal response. The one who will be great is the one who least wants to be great in the eyes of others. Persecution for Christ is good. Build up others, and forget about yourself. He must increase, and I must decrease. Boast in weakness. But perhaps the most complex concept is the system of rules and regulations required of Christians, or rather not required… yet still imposed, but not fulfilled by Christians, but rather by the empowerment of the Holy Spirit… yet not entirely. This concept of the Law that God has imposed on the world is one of the most confusing aspects of our Christian struggle, second perhaps to the perfect balance that God strikes between justice and mercy, sovereignty and free-will, righteousness and grace, holiness and forgiveness, love and anger, almighty Lordship and tender Fatherhood. The idea that Christ defeated the Law, yet we still have to obey the Law, confuses the line between unmerited salvation and penance. The fact that the Law is our enemy and condemns us in our filth, yet it makes more earthly promises than any other tenant in the Bible confuses the line between friend and enemy. There are so many different views of the Law that are seemingly contradictory. Sin is perhaps the first thing that every Christian is confronted with and the 10 Commandments are many times held to be man’s only salvation. However, the Christian knows that the sacrifice that Christ made on the Cross was sufficient for all the sin of the entire world. Why then did He say “be therefore perfect, even as your Father is perfect?” Why did He give us the ultimatum that “if you love me, you will keep My commandments?” Do we still have a penance to pay in addition to the payment that Christ made? But Isaiah says “all our righteous works are as filthy rags.” No matter how many filthy rags you add to a brand new car, you’ll never increase the value of it, you will only ruin the value. So then is our keeping of His commandments a confirmation of our love for Him, or is it like throwing filthy rags onto the Cross of salvation? The Truth is much easier than that, but it is a little more complicated. The first step in solving this problem is to realize that there are two systems of Law at work in the world and they work together for the glory of God. The commands that God gives us are neither an ultimatum that we prove our love for God, nor are they some sort of personal payment for sin that adds to the work of Christ on the Cross. In the following paragraphs, I will try to explain the true nature of the two Laws at work in our lives as Christians.
The very first dilemma that any person is presented with, in the realm of spiritual matters, is that people do wrong things. Parents punish their children in order to discourage unwanted behavior. Society in general is built almost completely around sets of rules and regulations that are enforced by whatever level of government may be in place, because people generally don’t want to follow rules. In fact the mere presence of the rules is, for many people, the only encouragement needed to break them. Governments impose all manner of deterrents, including indirect deterrents like the exhibition of punished criminals and direct deterrents like threat of physical pain or other suffering upon violation of an ordinance. Oddly, as diverse as humanity is, we can distill several rules that are accepted in most societies. These rules are the result of the fact that God has placed an innate sense of the order of things in each human. It is natural for a parent to care for a child and for the child to obey and respect the parent. It is not natural for one human to take another’s life in cold blood. Ownership is a universal principal that should not be violated. Since we know that these are the way that things are supposed to work, we have begun to make rules that institute manufactured punishments for these violations and, in some cases, allow the government to enforce by consensus of the people the punishments set out in a religious text. Unfortunately, we all like sheep have gone astray, each unto his own path and thus not everyone turns to the Bible to find the rules and regulations that they want to codify in their own social government. Despite which government codifies which religious text, the Christian is undeniably confronted with a set of commandments that are listed in the Bible as being man’s only salvation. But at the same time it is quite obvious that the purpose of this Law is not to be kept so that we can earn the favor of God, but rather to prove to us the gravity of our situation and to prove to us that we are utterly helpless before a God Who demands justice. Now, the rest of the story is, of course, that Christ brings the justice for us so that we can have a relationship with God, but that is for later. In Romans 7:5 Paul shows us that we were aroused to sinful passion by the Law to the purpose of death, Romans 8:2 calls this Law “the Law of Sin and Death,” and later in 1 Corinthians 15:56 Paul tells us that the only sting of death is because of sin and that “the power of sin is in the Law.” So, already we are seeing a very bleak picture painted of the Law. The Law is our enemy and none of us can keep it. This enmity comes from our own propensity toward sin as stated in Isaiah 53:6 “All we like sheep have gone astray, each unto his own way…” and in Romans 7:19, even when we are Christian we still struggle with the “good I want, [and] do not do,” and the sin that we practice and “do not want.” In fact, not only do we have a propensity toward sin, but when we are without God any “good” that we do is without merit, “…whatever is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). By the breaking of the Law of Sin and Death, a debt has been accrued, one which must be paid (Romans 6:23a). This debt has already been paid, though. When Christ lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, and was raised again on the Third Day, He paid the price for all of the sin for all time. The fact that the whole world was paid for is evident in 1 John 2:2 when John says that Jesus was the atoning sacrifice for “not for [our sins] only, but also for those of the whole world.” The sacrifice was not only for the whole world, but it was also for all time as demonstrated in Acts 17:30 where He “overlooked (lit. “winked at”) the times of ignorance” when they did not know about the sacrifice of Christ. So then what is Hell? If Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient payment, why do people still go to Hell? Because Hell is not punishment, it is a consequence that we bring upon our own heads. It is as if God has bought the last bottle of water in the middle of a desert and he is offering it to us. If we refuse the water that does not “un-pay” it; the water is still paid for, but we are doomed by our own refusal to die of thirst in a place that was not meant for us. Never in the Bible does anyone say that Hell was created for sinners, but it was created for Satan, his minions, Death, and for Hades. Hell is not what God intended for us, but it is where we go if refuse the salvation that He offers to us. Fortunately Christ did buy that salvation for us. He lived a perfect life, and life without sin and He gave that life as atonement for the sins of the world. He made a human sacrifice for a human debt, Hebrews 2:17-18. He did not, however, live a life and make a sacrifice in the Law of Sin and Death. This is quite obvious because the priests of Sin and Death (Pharisees) were always at odds with Christ’s fulfillment of the Law of Sin and Death to the Law of the Spirit. Through Christ’s death and resurrection He finished the Law of Sin and Death into the Law of the Spirit (Romans 7:6). This is because the Law of Sin and Death is not to be kept, it is to condemn the world in it’s sin so that sin may exist for what it is and that the world may become accountable to God, because without the Law sin is ambiguous and not punishable (Romans 3:19, 5:13). The Law of Sin and Death is based on rules, regulations, infractions, punishments, and rational reasons. These are things with which humans are incredibly incompetent. We tend to pride ourselves with the perception that reason is what separates us from the animals, but we do not spring from the womb with reason. Reason must be cultivated and manufactured. No, reason is what we are condemned by! Human reason is what God uses in the 10 Commandments to chase us away from what we think we know and into the reason and rationale of the Spirit. Christ came into the world not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. When He kept the Law He did it with God’s reasoning, not the reasoning of man. The reasoning of man extrapolated the 10 Commandments and the sundry laws that He gave to Moses out to their logical conclusion. The logical conclusion was that if a Person picked a head of grain and rubbed it between His fingers and ate it, He was harvesting and winnowing on the Sabbath, which is obviously against the Law! Christ did not come to keep the Law of men, though. He came to keep the Law of the Spirit, for it was by this Law that He would save mankind.
Enter, Law of the Spirit! This is the salvation of mankind, because the Law of Sin and Death says that each must pay for his own, but the Law of the Spirit says that there is One Who can pay the price for all. In this way, and others, the Law of the Spirit has overcome the Law of Sin and Death. “For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned the Law in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:3-4). Where the Law of Sin and Death is based on keeping rules and regulations in spite of a sinful nature, the Law of the Spirit gives us a new nature that will love and follow God. By this fact, we are no longer under the Law of Sin and Death, because its requirement has been fulfilled in us by the only One Who can fulfill it. Now, this of course does not mean that we are free to sin as much as we like, now that we are free. This is addressed in Romans 6 but a more important relationship between the Law and the Christian is made by a commonly misunderstood verse. In John 14:15 Jesus says, “If you love Me, you will keep my commandments.” This verse is not an ultimatum. We do not have to prove our love for God by arbitrarily keeping a set of regulations that He has already kept for us; neither do we keep His commandments so that we can learn to love Him, for love is a fruit of the Spirit, not of the Law. The entire relationship is described by Jesus Himself in John when He answers a question posed to Him by some followers. They ask Him, “What shall we do so that we may work the works of God?” What they were asking is, “What deeds must we perform so that we can follow the occupation of God?” Jesus answers them in a plain and straightforward way, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” Many people take this to mean that the activity that God performs is to cause you to believe. This is not the case, because that would not be an answer to the men’s question. What Jesus says is, “The occupation that God has called you to is to live your life believing in Me.” What Jesus is emphasizing here is the difference between what the men were used to thinking about and what Christ had come to change. The men still thought that (as had been the case for thousands of years) there were rules and regulations to keep in order to fulfill God’s calling in your life. What Jesus did by fulfilling the Law of Sin and Death is make it so that “if you love Me, you will keep my commandments.” Not as an ultimatum, but as a tandem relationship. We no longer have to worry about keeping His regulations, because if we love Him, then all the commandments will fall into place. It is not possible to sin while you are loving God. Not that if you are loving God then whatever you do is suddenly okay, when it didn’t used to be. No, if you are loving God, then you are not going to lie or kill someone. He came to change the focus. The focus is no longer on the Law or on the sin, because if you’re looking at the Law then you’re not looking at God. Before Christ came, they didn’t have a way to look at God except through the Law, but now we are our own High Priests and we can come before Him and cry out “Abba! Father!” because it’s not about rules, anymore. It’s about love. The chief end of man used to be to fear God and keep His commandments because every deed will be brought to judgment, whether for good or for evil, but every deed has been brought to judgment and now we can rest in the love of God and the fact that “it is finished,” it is done. “Where there is forgiveness, there can be no more offering for sin.” Sin has been defeated! This is what that means, sin is no longer a contender. It has been dealt with and it has been thrown away as far as the East is from the West, it is no longer a matter to be taken into consideration because the veil has been rent, we no longer have to search for His providence in a Law, straining to sift through the humanity to see what God really meant, we now can look straight into the face of almighty God, because my sin (oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!) my sin, not in part but the whole, has been nailed to the Cross! and I bear it no more! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, oh my soul! I bear it no more, I don’t bear the price of it, I don’t bear the weight of it, I don’t bear the power of it, I don’t bear the scars of it, I don’t bear the memory of it. I bear the love of my Heavenly Father who will cause all things to work together for the good of those who love Him. So, let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: love God, for this is the chief end of man.
posted by Matt at 01:22
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