Law/Gospel Distinction

Theocast

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are going to talk about one of the most important doctrinal issues that we ever consider on this show.

00:09

It's something that we talk about quite often, and that is the distinction between the law and the gospel.

00:15

The Bible contains passages that are law and passages that are gospel, and sadly we've observed that those two categories are often collapsed in the evangelical world.

00:25

So in this conversation today, we're going to define the terms law and gospel, what we mean by those, and think about the distinction between the two.

00:32

We're going to consider some passages from the Bible that are often confused where law and gospel are collapsed, and then we're going to think about the fallout that is produced by this confusion of law and gospel and what it means for our assurance.

00:43

In the members' podcast, that's particularly where we go. We talk about the implications of law -gospel distinction for our assurance, our peace, and our rest in Christ.

00:52

We hope that this conversation is helpful and encouraging to you. Stay tuned. A simple way for you to help support

00:58

Theocast and join their information is by shopping at Amazon. That's right. Everything that you purchase there, they will take a percentage of it and donate it to our ministry.

01:08

All you have to do is go to smile .amazon .com and then search for Theocast, Inc.,

01:14

and choose us as the supporting donation. To learn more about this and other ways of supporting us, you can go to theocast .org

01:33

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

01:40

Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Jimmy Buhler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and myself,

01:53

Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Guys, it's good to get behind the mic with you again on this

02:01

Wednesday morning. John, I'm throwing it to you immediately, man. We've got some hot off the presses updates.

02:06

Give the people what they want. Absolutely. Well, we've been receiving some generous donations recently, and we're trying to put those quickly to work.

02:15

One of the things we've been able to do is transcribe our podcast. Believe it or not, there's over 35 million hearing impaired just in the

02:22

United States, so our podcast really is not useful to them. We've been asked a lot to be able to share our materials with people who don't listen to podcasts.

02:32

Now people can read them as they would read an article, and they can share them for those who can't listen to podcasts.

02:39

Those are now available. You can go to theocast .org and begin to read the podcast there.

02:46

Then we have something we're pretty excited about, starting another podcast. It's a shorter podcast.

02:52

It's going to be about three to five minutes long called Ask Theocast. We know that when you listen to these podcasts, you send in all kinds of great questions and response.

03:01

This is a great way for us to respond to those questions. You can go to asktheocast .com, and there is the phone number to leave as a voicemail and also the form to fill that out.

03:11

By now, this podcast should already be out and running. You can go to your favorite podcast app, follow it, and give us a review after you've listened.

03:20

That'll help more people be able to find questions about theology and the Christian life.

03:26

I'm pretty excited. This is a little bit different for us. We're trying to reach more people with a shorter amount of material.

03:34

Thank you for your donations. Thank you for the members who continue to support us. Hopefully, we'll be able to keep producing more material for you in the future.

03:44

There you go. Big announcement. Thanks for those, John. We are excited. I do feel a little bit of pressure.

03:50

I don't know about you, Jimmy, to try to get these Ask Theocast things recorded. But we do.

03:56

John is like the slave taskmaster, always pushing the law on us to get it done. Yeah, he is.

04:03

Then he kind of comes in, and he'll try to relieve the pressure. Don't worry, guys.

04:09

He's going to be fine. He tries to give us some peace and assurance and comfort in a strange way.

04:18

We're having another one of those foundational conversations today. We did this a couple of weeks ago in talking about assurance.

04:24

Our hope with some of these conversations is to turn these into primers for people to be able to read.

04:31

Today, we plan to have a very foundational conversation. It's about a topic that we discuss regularly on Theocast that we think is absolutely essential for our understanding of Scripture.

04:46

It's essential for all kinds of things. It has a lot of implications for assurance and other stuff.

04:51

Jimmy, why don't you tell everybody what we plan to discuss today? I would love to.

04:57

Today, we are going to talk about one of our favorite topics, which is law -gospel distinction.

05:04

Specifically, when we read Scripture, how do we make sense of the verses that seem to speak in such a way that can perhaps generate fear and anxiety and maybe give us pause for question and a lot of doubt and insecurity?

05:22

How do we reconcile those with the passages that we also see in Scripture that are meant to bring us comfort and hope and assurance and things like that?

05:31

We believe that the proper way to understand these things and to reconcile and marry them is to have a proper understanding of the law and the gospel and specifically how we distinguish those things.

05:45

What I want to do really quick is just offer a couple of brief sentences and then we are going to spend the next few moments just kind of defining these terms collectively.

05:54

When we say law and gospel and specifically how we distinguish them, we think of it like this.

06:02

The law are the commands of Scripture that tell us what to do. In other words, the law are the imperatives of Scripture, do this and live.

06:13

The gospel are the indicatives of Scripture. In other words, the gospel declares to us what has been done by God in and through Christ.

06:24

That is a very simple definition, but now we want to flesh that out for you to help you understand it a little bit more.

06:33

I think a helpful quote from a book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity by Edward Fisher, he is giving a distinction here between the law and the gospel.

06:43

He says, the law says, thou art a sinner and therefore thou shalt be damned. He uses Romans 7 .2

06:49

as an example or 2 Thessalonians 2 .12. But the gospel says, no, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners and therefore believe on Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, 1

07:01

Timothy 1 .5 or Acts 16 .31. So you have the law, any passage that says, do this and if you don't do it, you are damned.

07:10

It is not a relative goodness. The law does not look for you to do your best. The law says, must perform perfectly.

07:19

The gospel is the exact opposite. The gospel is good news and says, there's nothing to perform.

07:24

There's nothing that's required. It's a gift given to you. It's good news being heralded that you are rescued.

07:31

So you have demand versus rescue. Hope versus dread is the way that we have to define those two separately.

07:41

To put a few paradigms out there in trying to sum this up relatively succinctly, and I'll be repeating a little bit of what the guys have said, but nonetheless,

07:51

I trust it's helpful. The law says, do this and live. The gospel says, Christ has done it.

07:57

Now live in him. Or another way to, even if we want to be more succinct, the law equals do, the gospel equals done.

08:07

And I think those things are helpful for people as we try to distinguish categories. And the last thing I would say about this, perhaps this is helpful to me in thinking about a law economy, men earn favor with God through what we do.

08:23

In a gospel economy, we receive favor with God by believing, not by working.

08:31

And so we're believing upon the Lord Jesus and what he has accomplished. We are not striving after something that we would earn through our own works and merit.

08:40

So there are passages that anybody would be able to pick up and say, this is gospel.

08:47

John 3, 16, clearly a gospel passage. A praise be to God for such a wonderful passage.

08:55

And then you go to Exodus and you go to the 10 Commandments, obviously that's law. I mean, that is the pinnacle of the law.

09:03

So it's easy to see passages like that, where it's do this and live, the law of 10

09:08

Commandments, everyone would say that. And then John 3, 16, everyone would say is a gospel passage.

09:15

But what would you guys say is passages that maybe aren't as clear and we can tend to mix them, where we make the law or the gospel now have requirements and we get glossable, as Patti Ebendroth has coined it, where I'm assuming he's coined it, where we get glossable passages.

09:35

Yeah, that's a good question. I think probably one of the most significant examples is

09:41

Mark 10, where we see the rich young ruler approach Jesus and he says, good teacher, what must

09:49

I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus responds to him and says, why do you call me good?

09:56

In essence, if you're calling me good, no one is good but God alone. So if you're going to call me good, you're going to call me

10:02

God. So let's just get that out of the way. And what does Jesus respond to him?

10:08

He says, well, if you would inherit eternal life, which I think all of us would agree, the question, what must

10:17

I do to inherit eternal life, is not a bad question, it's a sincere and I think honest and good question.

10:23

How do I get eternal life? What do I need to do? And Jesus responds to him and he says, you know the commandments, and Jesus begins to list off various commands that we see, and how does the rich young ruler respond?

10:36

He responds with a very interesting phrase. He says, well, all of these

10:42

I've kept from my youth. And it's at this moment that we see Jesus begin to, in our view, turn up the heat of the law, and what

10:52

Jesus does is he says, well, if you would then be saved, go sell all that you have and give it to the poor.

11:00

And so in that moment, when we do not properly distinguish the law and the gospel, here's what we can do with that passage, is we can say that Jesus is preaching the gospel to this young man.

11:13

And the gospel in that passage is radical giving or radical generosity or keeping the commands of God.

11:22

And in fact, what do we see later on in that narrative? The disciples pull

11:27

Jesus aside and they're like, Jesus, if that's the call, who can be saved?

11:34

And Jesus says, well, with man it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.

11:40

And we see this in, I believe it's Luke, where Jesus, what does Jesus go and do later on?

11:46

Well, he meets a very rich man named Zacchaeus, and what does he do? Well, he saves him. And so when we do not properly distinguish between law and gospel, specifically in Mark chapter 10, the rich young ruler, we can say the gospel is radical living.

12:02

And it can be very confusing and damaging to people specifically in the realm of their assurance.

12:08

But I know there's other passages that you guys want to bring up as well. How many times have we heard that passage preached,

12:14

Jimmy, where the gospel is surrender all to Christ and you'll be saved? And you're spot on in pointing out the fact that Jesus is not giving that young man gospel.

12:25

He's actually turning the temperature of the law up on that young man. He's dumping the full weight of the law on his conscience.

12:32

Another passage that comes to mind is the greatest sermon on the law that's ever been preached, the

12:38

Sermon on the Mount. And this may be an entire show in and of itself to talk about the

12:43

Sermon on the Mount. The man, like the biblical, like redemptive, historical, theological stuff going on, the

12:50

Sermon on the Mount is epic. I mean, in that Moses gave the law to God's people on a mountain, and now the

12:58

Lord himself is sitting on the side of a mountain, giving a sermon on the law to his people.

13:04

And he's unpacking the law and all of its implications and aiming it and applying it to the hearts of men.

13:10

And so if we don't have the distinction between the law and the gospel in our minds, we'll do all kinds of bad things with the

13:16

Sermon on the Mount. Jesus begins that sermon towards the very beginning of it in verses 17 through 20 by explaining to people that he has not shown up to abolish the law and the prophets, but he has come to fulfill them.

13:29

And then he begins to unpack the law and demonstrate to people that nobody actually has kept the law, though he's speaking to people who think that they're doing a decent job of it.

13:40

And this is where he begins by talking about lust and anger and these kinds of things. You've heard it said that you should not commit adultery, but I say to you that if you have lust in your heart after somebody, then you've broken the law.

13:53

Or you've heard it said, do not murder. Well, I'm telling you that if you are angry with your brother, then you have broken the law, and he gives a number of other exhortations and imperatives throughout that sermon.

14:04

But it's very clear that in the mind of Christ, he has fulfilled the law in the place of his people, and now he is helping them see that they cannot keep the law and then thereby need to look to him and trust him.

14:20

And if we're not preaching the Sermon on the Mount that way, we end up saying all kinds of things like, well, you need to battle lust vehemently, and you need to battle and fight against anger in this particular way, and you need to live this way and live this way in order to be right with God, in order to be pleasing in God's sight.

14:42

And that's not the message that Christ is giving at all. He is exhorting these people to all kinds of things, but underneath the banner of,

14:51

I have fulfilled the law for you. That's right. Well, the original intentions of the law was never to save anyone.

14:59

If you go back to Moses, and when the law was given to Moses to give to the people, it was not do this and live.

15:08

What I mean by that is God has never called people to himself. Abraham didn't look to the law.

15:13

There was no law to be justified, and Abraham was the father of Israel who then passed it down.

15:19

Every human being in the Old Testament has always been justified by faith.

15:25

The law was designed so that they could have fellowship and protection from God, and God also used it as a schoolmaster to teach them, don't trust your own righteousness.

15:36

It's to prove to you how, and what were they doing when Jesus showed up? They were trusting their own righteousness in the law.

15:44

To make them justified before God, and Jesus was saying, oh, let me turn it up to the level it's supposed to be because no one is justified by the law, and this is why it is so dangerous to go back to the rich young ruler or really to any question that Jesus receives, how must

16:00

I be saved, Jesus rarely gives gospel. Very rarely. To those who are beat down by the law,

16:08

Jesus says, come to me, all you who are heavy laden by the law, and I will give you rest.

16:14

He literally says, my disciples are those who believe in me, and then he'll say to people who think that, oh yeah,

16:22

I'll follow Jesus because they're just adding to the righteousness. He goes, oh no, unless you forsake everything, mother, father, everyone, and follow me, you can't be my disciple.

16:31

He's not giving gospel there. That's not gospel. Gospel is not forsake everything to follow me.

16:37

No one can do that. It's impossible. It's not within our capacity, and so Jesus is turning up the volume in order for you to say, well, that's impossible,

16:47

Jesus. No one can do that. Yeah, and it's important to keep in mind that when we think of God's law,

16:55

God's law doesn't just apply to our outward actions, and this is what the Sermon on the

17:00

Mount beautifully portrays, beautifully and condemningly, that the law of God not just talks about our outward actions, but it also talks about the inward posture of our hearts and minds, and that's why

17:14

Jesus says such terrifying things like, well, you've heard it said that if you commit adultery, that's sin.

17:21

Well, I say to you, if you even look at a woman with lustful intent that you've committed adultery, and it's like, my goodness, what am

17:30

I supposed to do? Please do not hear us say that we are only preachers of the gospel.

17:37

Well, certainly there is room, and we should preach the law in all of its force.

17:45

And I think what we would argue for around these microphones is that when we preach the law, we are preaching the law as Jesus preached it, that it is dialed to 11, and that what the law does is it removes any hope in and of yourselves to have any self -righteousness, because when you preach the law properly, what it does to you is it reveals how sin -sick and miserable you are.

18:09

However, when we preach law and gospel, the gospel does what?

18:14

The gospel lifts you and shows you, but the good news is that Christ has fulfilled these things on your behalf, and your posture now is to receive that and rest and believe.

18:27

Jesus, in his context, is speaking to an audience who either understands that in and of themselves that they are righteous, and they're trusting in that, or they assume that they can achieve righteousness.

18:43

And so he explodes those notions over and over and over again. To John's point a moment ago,

18:49

I would say that 90 plus percent of the time that Jesus responds to a question about eternal life, he gives law and not gospel.

18:57

And that's true. We've talked about the Sermon on the Mount. We've talked about the rich young ruler. Another significant passage is when he's asked about the great commandment, and he says, love the

19:08

Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. There's a second that's like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself. And this is how the kingdom of God is attained.

19:17

And we look at that, and rightly, we would conclude, I've never done either one of those things for five seconds of my life.

19:25

How in the world could I ever have hope? And that's, to think about the language of Paul in Galatians 3,

19:32

Romans 5, the law was given to increase the trespass. It was given because of transgression.

19:39

It is the schoolmaster. It is this instrument that God has given us to show us who and what we are and to drive us outside of ourselves to the

19:47

Savior. And so it's exactly right that we understand that the law was never given that men would be saved by it.

19:55

But it was given to wreck and undo us and to show us the only way of salvation, which is through Christ the

20:03

Messiah. But here's the thing. When Jesus answers the questions, like the rich young ruler's question, what must

20:10

I do to inherit eternal life? He says, keep the commandments. That's exactly right. No one will ever live with God forever who has not kept all of the commandments perfectly.

20:20

And we have to be clear that if you break one commandment, you've broken the entire law. This is, again,

20:26

Galatians 3, it's James 2, it's Deuteronomy 27, that you've got to keep all of these things all the time or you're done.

20:35

Well, the reality for us in the gospel is that Jesus has kept the law perfectly and that by faith in him, his obedience is counted to us.

20:45

And so it's as though we have done what he did. And so we will be saved by works, but we are saved by the works of Jesus in our place, applied to us by faith.

21:00

I think to add to what you're saying, Justin, we go to the New Testament epistles, the writings of Paul and even 1

21:08

John, and this is where you can also see a lot of gospel happening, where you are given commands, even things like to examine yourself, we've seen that passage used, where unless your life looks like a certain way, then you are not a believer.

21:27

So what ends up happening is the good news is your performance. The gospel becomes perform well and you can have assurance.

21:35

And that is not gospel. You have to remember gospel has nothing to do with you. The only thing you contribute to the gospel is your sin, which makes it necessary.

21:47

So as you hear any kind of instructions, if you are to perform in any such a way to either save or maintain yourself, that is not good news.

21:58

That's what we call law. That does not mean we do live, we do uphold the law and it's necessary for believers.

22:05

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, it's very obvious that you are to pursue holiness and to love your neighbor and to love

22:12

God. Let's not get confused here. But that is not the gospel. The gospel is always, must be in scripture, what

22:22

Christ has done for you. And the only thing you are to do with that information is to trust it.

22:28

That's it. The moment there's an action coming to you, whether it is love of neighbor, whether it's having to do with morality, any of the instructions in the

22:38

New Testament. This is where I think the most important law gospel distinction has to happen next to the gospels with Jesus is in the epistles.

22:46

Anytime there is an imperative or instruction that is related to your righteousness, that is not gospel.

22:53

That is law. Anytime that Paul talks about Christ, our righteousness, our union with Christ, Christ being imputed to us, our eternal hope with Christ, that's all gospel.

23:03

That's all good news. So making sure that if someone connects your obedience, your sincerity, your emotions, your feelings, what you do or don't do, and they connect that to the gospel, that's mixing law and gospel, and that's what ends up removing our assurance.

23:24

We do see a lot of imperative commands throughout the New Testament. Particularly one that is very popular is to flee from sexual immorality, and all of us would say that is a wise and good command to flee from sexual immorality.

23:43

But one of the things that we can do is when we collapse the law and the gospel and we begin to say something nonsensical like, your final salvation depends on how well you can flee from sexual immorality in this life.

24:04

I think a phrase like that is certainly an overcorrection to what we are saying, that certainly we all would say we need to flee from sexual immorality.

24:16

We need to flee from drunkenness. We need to flee from whatever it is, insert your favorite command here.

24:25

But what we are saying is that in light of all these things, what a proper law and gospel distinction does is, yes, it gives us the things that we should do.

24:35

But what the gospel does is it provides us a safety net and it provides the wind in our sails by which we do these things.

24:42

Ultimately, as we strive and we struggle in this life and we fail, we look to Christ and his finished work on our behalf.

24:50

What else puts wind in our sails and breath in our lungs than the safety net of Christ who lifts us from our sin, forgives it, and sets us on our feet?

25:03

Merely barking at somebody like, hey, you're going to die if you don't do this, and if you don't do this, and you don't do this, and you need to do this.

25:11

I mean, certainly we lay burdens on people that are almost unbearable.

25:20

We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called Faith vs.

25:26

Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ.

25:37

And how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance. And you can get this at theocast .org

25:45

slash Primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

25:51

You can do that by joining our Total Access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

26:03

And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

26:10

Whenever you talk about burdens that are unbearable, I immediately go back to Matthew 11. I know this was mentioned a minute ago.

26:17

When Jesus says that his yoke is easy and his burden is light, he's referring to the law. Those are images of the law, the yoke and the burden.

26:25

And he's telling his people, if you're weary, come to me. I've done these things in your place and trust me, and I'll give you rest.

26:33

I want to illustrate briefly, I know we're talking about implications of these things and some of the fallout of the confusion of law and gospel, but just a couple of illustrations briefly about how this is often done.

26:44

You hear a lot of language in the church these days about the church needing to live the gospel or the church needing to do the gospel.

26:53

And this is like exhibit A of the problem. When we're telling people that they need to do the gospel or live the gospel, we clearly have misunderstood the fact that there is one person who did the gospel and lived it, and his name is

27:06

Christ, and we are called to trust in him and then live in light of what he has done.

27:12

Or you'll hear this language. You'll hear the language of demands of the gospel, what the gospel demands of us.

27:20

Now, I could talk about this for a long time. I'm not going to do that. If there is a demand of the gospel, it's one demand, and that's belief.

27:31

Trust Christ. The other stuff that falls under the gospel by way of imperatives, as we've just stated, those things are not gospel.

27:41

They are implications of the gospel. They are outworkings of the gospel, and they are law, and law is not a bad term.

27:48

I think we've got to get past that whole framework where the gospel is good and the law is bad.

27:54

That is not true. The law is good, and it is wonderful when it's used lawfully. The problem is the law is often not used lawfully, and we wield it around like this tool that you're trying to keep it in order to know that you're good with God.

28:12

I think everybody understands that that is a damning reality. When you start to talk about living and doing the gospel or the demands of the gospel, people immediately start to assess their lives, and they realize,

28:26

I'm not doing enough. How could I ever know that I am appropriately meeting the demands of the gospel or that I am living the gospel sincerely enough, and if I'm not, the implication is

28:40

I should be concerned. I am going to be one of those people that Christ looks at and says, depart from me.

28:46

I never knew you. We have people in the church who are sincere, and I'm using that word on purpose, who are sincere in meaning to trust

28:55

Christ and follow him, who have no hope, no confidence that they will certainly be with Christ forever.

29:06

How could I ever know that when you constantly are asking me to stack myself up against these demands of living the gospel?

29:16

Their gospel has splinters of law, and those splinters are what keeps them out. We have argued so far that in Scripture, we see that there is the definition of gospel and the definition of the law, and they have two separate intentions.

29:34

One is to save, one is to condemn. The law never saves. The gospel always saves. The reason we say this is that that actually becomes an interpretive model or a hermeneutic, a way in which we understand

29:47

Scripture to present itself. If you do not allow Scripture to present itself this way to you, you then will start getting theologies that we've alluded to.

30:01

So, I wanted to add to Justin's thought here on the demands of the gospel. You hear this in language, in other words, when someone says, unless you make

30:11

Jesus Lord of your life, you cannot be saved. So, that is a demand that is given there.

30:19

The word that's often used here is repent. Unless you repent, you cannot be saved.

30:25

Well, I would completely agree with you on that. If you don't repent, you can't be saved. But also, if you don't do a lot of things, you can't be saved.

30:35

That's all still law. Repentance, there's nothing good. There's no good news to repentance.

30:40

That is a work. That is something you must do. I would say it is an implication of being under the gospel.

30:49

The moment that Christ comes in and transforms your heart and you believe, the first response of a new believer is to repent.

30:57

So, to say repent and believe when it says that together, it is not to contradict it, but people will point to passages and say, well,

31:04

John, see, it says right there, Peter says, repent and believe and you shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. Well, I say it also says, repent and be baptized and you will inherit the kingdom of heaven.

31:13

So, do we hold to baptism or regeneration or do we believe that you have to be baptized in order to be a believer?

31:20

So, we have to look at all of the contexts of scripture and he is saying, repent, really of turning away, not from moral sins, he's saying, turn away from the law, turn away from your own self -righteousness and turn towards Christ and trusting in Christ.

31:38

So, let's be clear about even our repentance here, that we are not turning it into the law, so collapsing these, even when it may feel like, no, it says very clearly,

31:47

Jesus says that you have to forsake all, you have to repent. That's exactly what Jesus says and you start hearing demands in the gospel.

31:56

And I would agree with Justin, the only demand that's ever there is to believe what you are hearing to be is good news.

32:02

And even your belief, according to Ephesians chapter two, is a gift given to you. It's not even something you can meet.

32:07

You can't even meet the requirement to believe. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's something I want to jump on what you said,

32:14

John, where you talked about gospel implications and that is kind of a popular phrase these days.

32:21

And certainly I have no qualms with it, but I think it's also important to remember that the implications of the gospel are not the gospel.

32:29

Does the gospel have implications for my marriage and the way I parent and the way that I think about my life and work and ministry?

32:36

Absolutely. But those things are not the gospel themselves. That in short, the gospel is that Christ saves sinners.

32:45

And so that is the gospel. Now, last night my wife and I were having a conversation and it was a little rugged, as we like to say.

32:56

And we do pause and we ask the question, well, how does the gospel help us get through this conversation?

33:01

Well, we look to the forgiveness that we have in Christ and so we are able with fervor and vigor and joy to press through where we are not in alignment here in our marriage.

33:13

Now, us doing that is not the gospel itself, but rather we are looking to the finished work of Christ on our behalf in order to continue to press forward in our marriage.

33:26

And so, once again, we can easily make the formula this, that it's law, gospel law, that it's the law crushes you, the gospel saves you, and now you're back into the realm of law.

33:42

And we're just like, well, no. What we're trying to say is that the gospel actually rescues us from the law and its condemnation and we always rely on the finished work of Christ on our behalf.

33:57

We never move back into the realm of trying to earn or merit something at all, ever, period. In thinking about this law and gospel distinction,

34:05

I want to illustrate this with a couple of passages where I think there's just confusion demonstrated.

34:11

So 1 Corinthians 6 and in Galatians 5, Paul uses very clear language about certain kinds of sins.

34:18

And he tells the Corinthians and the Galatian Christians, people who do these things.

34:24

He talks about sexual immorality and envy and drunkenness and all these things. People who do these things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

34:35

If we maintain appropriate distinctions between law and gospel, we do not need to do all kinds of gymnastics with those passages to make any sense of them.

34:46

We can preach them straightforwardly as they are stated. People who do this stuff will not inherit the kingdom of God, which then immediately causes us to ask the question, well, what's the solution?

34:56

And what's the answer? Because all of us have done this stuff. Well, in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul says, all these things that I'm telling you, if you do this stuff, you won't inherit the kingdom of God, and such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the

35:13

Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. That's a great, great exercise in illustration of the distinction between law and gospel in 1

35:21

Corinthians 6, 9 through 11. And in Galatians 5, it's very interesting too, because it's in the section on works of the flesh and fruit of the

35:28

Spirit, where Paul talks about the works of the flesh being obvious, and people who do these things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

35:35

And I remember preaching this. I preached Galatians a couple of years ago in our church. I remember preaching that text and just stating that, that we don't need to qualify this.

35:43

Because typically, how do we hear that preached, guys? We hear that preached as, well, what Paul is talking about here is a trajectory of your life.

35:50

If your life is characterized by sexual immorality or envy or drunkenness or slander or perversity, then you will not inherit the kingdom of God.

36:01

But if the trajectory of your life is one of improvement and sanctification and transformation, then you can have assurance that you will inherit heaven.

36:13

And this sort of circles us back around to, I mean, one, I would just say that's not clearly what the text is saying.

36:19

But then secondly, this circles back around to the question of assurance. How could a person who is self -aware at all ever have any confidence and assurance that he or she will make it to heaven?

36:30

Because if we're honest with ourselves, we are sexually immoral in all kinds of ways that we don't want to admit.

36:38

We are envious in all kinds of ways that we don't want to talk about. We slander others, at least in our minds and hearts, if not with our mouths.

36:46

I mean, we could go on and on and on. And we are all grieved by the amount of sin that we see in our lives.

36:54

So then how much transformation is enough? What kind of trajectory do

37:00

I need to be looking for? Help me explain that to me, Pastor, if you're telling me that this is what Paul is saying, and nobody can answer those questions because that's not what the text means.

37:09

The text means if you do this at all, you're damned. And now you need a perfect righteousness that can only be found outside of you in the

37:18

Lord Jesus Christ, who did the law perfectly. So look to him and be saved. Believe and receive.

37:25

Amen. Well, I would even turn to Romans chapter six, where Paul tells the believer, but thanks be to God that you were once slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you are committed, and have been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

37:43

What he means by that is that we had zero control of, in other words, the more you sin, the more condemnation you brought upon yourself.

37:54

Now being in Christ, 1 John says, when you sin, not if you sin, when you sin, repent, and you will be cleansed.

38:04

You will be cleansed of all of your unrighteousness. To compare those two together, Paul is saying you are now set free and you have repentance as the means by which you can be free from the condemnation of this sin.

38:21

And here's the thing, in 1 John, it does not tell you what your, you got a cap limit on this, okay?

38:26

You can repent of the same sin three times and then that's it. You've been set free from it, is what

38:33

Paul is saying. We often interpret that to mean, oh, that should mean I should never struggle with sin again.

38:38

Well, may I remind you that Romans 6 is right before Romans 7, and what does

38:43

Romans 7 teach us? Oh dear, Paul repented of the same sin quite often, it seemed, according to his own words.

38:51

So we cannot turn those passages into law saying, well, if you get tripped up and sin, well, then you're not a believer.

38:59

That is law, that is not gospel. The gospel must always be, I am saved by the righteousness of Christ through faith alone, by grace alone, period, sola fide.

39:09

If you add in performance, you are no longer set free. You are back underneath the condemnation that we've been set free in Romans 5 when it says, therefore, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

39:21

Yeah, I want to give an illustration. I think you guys are going to roll your eyes at me, maybe. We don't want to preach

39:27

Jesus like the stock market, and what I mean by that is if you put a thousand dollars into the stock market, it can go up, it can go down, you can lose money, you can go into the red, and often,

39:42

I think the way we like to preach Jesus, specifically the way we like to preach sanctification, is like it's the stock market.

39:47

That Jesus has given you his forgiveness, his thousand dollars of forgiveness, and now it is kind of up to you in your stock market wit to make that positive, or you can lose it and go into the negative.

40:04

We believe and we think that a proper distinction between law and the gospel actually tells us that Jesus has given us an inheritance in heaven, saved for us, given to us freely by grace through faith on account of Christ, is what 1

40:22

Peter 1 talks about. As we struggle and fall and stumble in this life, we rest, not even in our failures, we rest not even looking to our worst days of sin.

40:35

We don't look to our worst days of sin, but we also don't look to our best days of obedience, but rather we always trust the meritorious work of Jesus Christ on our behalf.

40:45

That's it. That is the simplicity and beauty of the Christian life. We've said this how many times?

40:52

Well, how many times can a Christian sin and still be a Christian? Well, in theory, ad infinitum, forever, on and on.

40:59

Because one, sin is more than just a collection of misdeeds.

41:05

I mean, it's a power that reigns and rules in you. It's not like we're just writing things on a chalkboard.

41:10

You can't repent of your nature. That's right. Absolutely. And that is why God gives us a new heart.

41:17

So even when we repent, that is just evidence of God's gracious work in our hearts.

41:25

That's absolutely right. Chad Byrd talks about that great in his book, Night Driving. And so it's just important to remember that, that it's like God has not given us a thousand dollars in stock, and now it's kind of up to us to use our sanctification wit to make that either green or red.

41:40

No, he's given us a final inheritance in Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the seal of that promise. One of the more damaging confusions of law and gospel that's out there today, it's a conversation that's going on even now in evangelical circles and even amongst

41:58

Calvinists in particular, is this conversation around future justification.

42:04

I don't need to lay this out in a ton of detail, but just to summarize it simply, the idea in a future justification view is that we are justified by faith in Christ alone, but we will finally be saved by faith and good works.

42:23

Or to frame it another way, we have the right to eternal life completely by faith in Christ, but we will acquire possession of eternal life by faith in Christ plus good works done in the

42:36

Spirit. And the problem with that, there's a bunch of them, it's a separation and a bifurcation of justification and final salvation in a way that the scripture just frankly does not do and does not allow.

42:49

Because biblically speaking, to be justified in Christ is to be finally saved, to be in Christ Jesus and united to him by faith is the same thing.

42:59

Your final salvation is certain, not because of anything that you will ever do or anything that God foresees you doing, but it is completely because of what

43:09

Christ has done for you, received by faith, and you are safe. I see, and guys,

43:16

I'm going to say something strong and hyperbolic and you can rebuke me if you, and I shouldn't say hyperbolic because it's true.

43:22

So you can rebuke me if you want to. The Council of Trent, session six, canon 24, they talk about justification and good works and they state, paraphrase, that anybody who says that good works are simply the fruit and the evidence of justice obtained by faith and they are not working, good works are not working to preserve and increase the justice received, let that person be accursed.

43:54

So here's the deal. Justin, just clarify real quick, what is the Council of Trent for someone who may not know what that is?

44:00

Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, we've talked about it before and I shouldn't assume that knowledge. The Council of Trent took place in the 1540s to the 1560s.

44:08

It was an ecumenical council of what would be called the Church of Rome in response to the

44:14

Protestant Reformation. So they were defining their teaching and the official doctrine of the

44:19

Church of Rome over and against what the Protestant reformers were teaching and articulating. And so in this particular session, session six, this took place like 1546, 1547, they were dealing with the issue of justification, how a person is declared righteous before God, how a person is right before the

44:37

Lord. And so they were saying that the Protestant understanding of good works, that it was simply evidence and fruit of justification already obtained is wrong and that good works preserve and increase our justification.

44:49

Well, I don't know that many evangelicals would ever say that our good works increase our justification, but there are a ton of evangelicals who, and there are a number of pastors who preach and teach in such a way that you would understand that you are keeping your justification intact through your obedience and good works.

45:06

And I would say, one, that is absolutely damaging and wrecks any possibility of assurance that we could ever have.

45:14

And two, if we talk that way, we have departed from the Protestant faith and we have become

45:19

Roman Catholic. And so we need to be very careful in how we talk about good works and obedience and even examining our lives.

45:27

It can never be the ground of our confidence. And we can't talk about it, Jimmy, like you just said, the illustration of the stock market is bright, dude.

45:34

You can't talk about it like that, that you've got to keep yourself in the black. You know, like Jesus has done this for you, but keep yourself in the black and you'll be good.

45:44

That is not a Protestant, and we would argue a biblical understanding of salvation and justification.

45:53

That's great, JP. I think something to maybe entice the listener to think about membership is

45:59

I would love for us to discuss law and gospel, specifically how it relates to our assurance in Christ.

46:08

And so maybe that's something that we can throw that ball over the fence into the members' realm.

46:14

And chase that thing around. Yeah, I would. I would love it because, I mean, I just, for those of you that have listened to my kind of introductory interview into Theocast, assurance for me was just something that I feel like was just robbed for so much of my life.

46:33

And to be frank and honest, you know, I still have these PTSD assurance moments where I just really struggle to believe in the good, gracious nature of God and Christ toward me.

46:45

But having a proper law and gospel distinction, if you struggle with assurance, man, this is balm to your soul.

46:51

So I think that's what we should talk about in the membership. Jimmy, you're not alone in that, man. I still struggle.

46:57

I had mighty struggles with assurance too in my younger years, and I still find that rearing its head with me where I wrestle with, am

47:06

I legit? Will I really finally see Christ and be with Him forever?

47:12

Because we're aware of the sin in our lives, and we're aware of God's righteous standard, and we have heard so many things about examining ourselves and assessing our hearts and our minds and our performance.

47:26

And I have a tender conscience when it comes to this stuff, as I know you do, bro, where it's that Martin Luther crisis of the soul, like there is nothing that could ever be enough, and I'm undone here before the

47:38

Holy God of the universe. Where is my hope and confidence? And yeah, so let's talk about that in the members area.

47:44

So friends, that's where we are headed to the members podcast, and you might be listening and you don't even know what the members podcast is.

47:51

Well, it's an additional podcast that we offer to our membership every week. The members are those who have partnered with us financially to help support the work of Theocast.

48:00

You can go to our website, theocast .org, and learn more information. Not only about our ministry in general, but in particular, about our total access membership.

48:08

We offer a 14 day free trial on that thing. So you can kick the tires and get a feel for what the additional content is.

48:15

So the three of us are headed to the members podcast now to talk about assurance and how that relates to the distinction between law and gospel.

48:23

We hope you've been encouraged by the conversation thus far, and we hope you're encouraged by the other things that we have to say, we'll see you there.