Law/Gospel Distinction

The Law and the Gospel as a Foundational Doctrinal Distinction

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

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. 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.

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.

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. We hope that this conversation is helpful and encouraging to you.

Stay tuned.

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Welcome to Theocast, Encouraging Weary Pilgrims to Rest in Christ, conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and myself, 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 Wednesday morning. John, I'm throwing it to you immediately, man. We've got some hot off the presses updates. Give the people what they want.

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Thanks for those, John. We are excited. I mean, I do feel a little bit of pressure. I don't know about you, Jimmy, to try to get these Ask Theocast things recorded.

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

Yeah, he is.

But then he kind of comes in and he'll try to relieve the pressure. But don't worry, guys. It's going to be fine. He tries to give us some peace and assurance and comfort. Yeah, in a strange way. So we're having another one of those foundational conversations today.

We did this a couple of weeks ago in talking about assurance. And our hope with some of these conversations is to turn these into primers for people to be able to read. And so 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. And it's essential for all kinds of things. It has a lot of implications for assurance and other stuff.

So, Jimmy, why don't you tell everybody what we plan to discuss today?

I would love to. Today we are going to talk about one of our favorite topics, which is law gospel distinction. And 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?

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? And 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.

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

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. 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.

And so 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.

Law and Gospel in The Marrow of Modern Divinity

Yeah, 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. And he says,. The law says, Thou art a sinner, and therefore thou shalt be damned.

He uses Romans 7 .2 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 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. And it is not a relative goodness. The law does not look for you to do your best. The law says, Must perform perfectly.

The gospel is the exact opposite. The gospel is good news and says, There's nothing to perform. There's nothing that's required. It's a gift given to you. It's good news being heralded that you are rescued.

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

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, I trust it's helpful. The law says, Do this and live.

The gospel says, Christ has done it, now live in him. Or another way, even if we want to be more succinct, the law equals do, the gospel equals done. I think those things are helpful for people as we try to distinguish categories.

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

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.

There are passages that anybody would be able to pick up and say, This is gospel. John 3 .16 is clearly a gospel passage. Praise be to God for such a wonderful passage. Then you go to Exodus and you go to the Ten Commandments.

Obviously, that's law. That is the pinnacle of the law. It's easy to see passages like that, where it's, Do this and live, the law of the Ten Commandments. Everyone would say that. Then John 3 .16, everyone would say is a gospel passage.

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 passages?

The Rich Young Ruler and the Sermon on the Mount as Law

That's a good question. I think probably one of the most significant examples is Mark 10, where we see the rich young ruler approach Jesus. He says, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus responds to him and says, Why do you call me good? In essence, if you're calling me good, no one is good but God alone. If you're going to call me good, you're going to call me God. Let's just get that out of the way.

What does Jesus respond to him? He says, Well, if you would inherit eternal life, if that's what you're looking for, which I think all of us would agree. The question, What must I do to inherit eternal life? Is not a bad question.

It's a sincere and I think honest and good question. How do I get eternal life? What do I need to do? Jesus responds to him and he says, You know the commandments. Jesus begins to list off various commands that we see.

How does the rich young ruler respond? He responds with a very interesting phrase. He says, Well, all of these I've kept from my youth. It's at this moment that we see Jesus begin to, in our view, turn up the heat of the law.

What Jesus does is he says, Well, if you would then be saved, go sell all that you have and give it to the poor. In that moment, when we do not properly distinguish the law and the gospel, here's what we can do with that passage.

We can say that Jesus is preaching the gospel to this young man. The gospel in that passage is radical giving or radical generosity or keeping the commands of God. In fact, what do we see later on in that narrative?

The disciples pull Jesus aside and they're like, Jesus, if that's the call, who can be saved? Jesus says, Well, with man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible. We see this in Luke. What does Jesus go and do later on?

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

It can be very confusing and damaging to people, specifically in the realm of their assurance. I know there's other passages that you guys want to bring up as well.

How many times have we heard that passage preached, Jimmy, where the gospel is surrender all to Christ and you'll be saved? You're spot on in pointing out the fact that Jesus is not giving that young man gospel.

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

This may be an entire show in and of itself to talk about the Sermon on the Mount. The biblical, redemptive, historical, theological stuff going on in the Sermon on the Mount is epic. In that Moses gave the law to God's people on a mountain and now the Lord himself is sitting on the side of a mountain giving a sermon on the law to his people.

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

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. 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. You've heard it said, do not murder. I'm telling you that if you are angry with your brother, then you have broken the law.

He gives a number of other exhortations and imperatives throughout that sermon, but it's very clear that in the mind of Christ, he has fulfilled the law in the place of his people. Now he is helping them see that they cannot keep the law and then thereby need to look to him and trust him.

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.

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. 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, I have fulfilled the law for you.

The original intentions of the law was never to save anyone. 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. What I mean by that is God has never called people to himself.

Abraham didn't look to the law. There was no law to be justified, and Abraham was the father of Israel who then passed it down. Every human being in the Old Testament has always been justified by faith.

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. 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 to make them justified before God. Jesus was saying, let me turn it up to the level it's supposed to be because no one is justified by the law. 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 I be saved? Jesus rarely gives gospel, very rarely. To those who are beat down by the law, Jesus says, come to me, all you who are heavy laden by the law, and I will give you rest. He literally says, my disciples are those who believe in me.

Then he'll say to people who think that, oh yeah, 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.

He's not giving gospel there. That's not gospel. Gospel is not forsake everything to follow me. No one can do that. It's impossible. It's not within our capacity. Jesus is turning up the volume in order for you to say, well, that's impossible, Jesus.

No one can do that.

The Law Exposes Sin and the Gospel Gives Rest

It's important to keep in mind that when we think of God's law, God's law doesn't just apply to our outward actions. This is what the Sermon on the Mount beautifully portrays. Beautifully and condemningly, the law of God not just talks about our outward actions, but it also talks about the inward posture of our hearts and minds.

That's why Jesus says such terrifying things like, well, you've heard it said that if you commit adultery, that's sin. Well, I say to you, if you even look at a woman with lustful intent, that you've committed adultery.

It's like, my goodness, what am I supposed to do? Please do not hear us say that we are only preachers of the gospel. Well, certainly there is room and we should preach the law in all of its force. 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. 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.

However, when we preach law and gospel, the gospel does what? The gospel lifts you and shows you, but the good news is that Christ has fulfilled these things on your behalf. Your posture now is to receive that and rest and believe.

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.

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

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. He says, This is how the kingdom of God is attained.

We look at that and rightly, we would conclude, I've never done either one of those things for five seconds of my life. How in the world could I ever have hope? To think about the language of Paul in Galatians 3, Romans 5, the law was given to increase the trespass.

It was given because of transgression. 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 Savior. It's exactly right that we understand that the law was never given that men would be saved by it.

It was given to wreck and undo us and to show us the only way of salvation, which is through Christ the Messiah. Here's the thing. When Jesus answers the questions, like the rich young ruler's question, what must 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. We have to be clear that if you break one commandment, you've broken the entire law.

This is, again, Galatians 3. It's James 2. It's Deuteronomy 27. You've got to keep all of these things all the time or you're done. 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.

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

Gospel in the Epistles and the Danger of Collapsing Imperatives

Yeah, I think to add to what you're saying, Justin, we go to the New Testament epistles, the writings of Paul and even 1 John. This is where you can also see a lot of glossable 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. What ends up happening is the good news is your performance.

The gospel becomes perform well and you can have assurance. 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.

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

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 God. Let's not get confused here. But that is not the gospel. The gospel must be in Scripture what Christ has done for you.

The only thing you are to do with that information is to trust it. That's it. The moment there is 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 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. Anytime there is an imperative or instruction that is related to your righteousness, that is not gospel.

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. That's all good news. 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.

That's what ends up removing our assurance.

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

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.

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

Insert your favorite command here. 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. 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.

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

Because 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. Certainly, we lay burdens on people that are almost unbearable.

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We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

Matthew 11, the Easy Yoke, and Gospel Implications

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

This is 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 Christ.

We are called to trust in him and then live in light of what he has done. Or you'll hear this language. You'll hear the language of demands of the gospel, what the gospel demands of us. I could talk about this for a long time, but I'm not going to do that.

If there is a demand of the gospel, it's one demand, and that's belief. Trust Christ. The other stuff that falls under the gospel by way of imperatives, as we've just stated, those things are not gospel.

They are implications of the gospel. They are outworkings of the gospel, and they are law. Law is not a bad term. I think we've got to get past that whole framework where the gospel is good and the law is bad.

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 constantly trying to keep it in order to know that you're good with God.

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, 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? If I'm not, the implication is I should be concerned. I am going to be one of those people that Christ looks at and says, Depart from me, 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 Christ and follow Him, who have no hope, no confidence that they will certainly be with Christ forever.

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

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.

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 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. 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 Jesus Lord of your life, you cannot be saved.

That is a demand that is given there. The word that's often used here is repent. Unless you repent, you cannot be saved. 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. That's all still law. Repentance, there's nothing good. There's no good news to repentance. That is a work. That is something you must do.

I would say it is an implication of being under the gospel. The moment that Christ comes in and transforms your heart and you believe, the first response of a new believer is to repent. 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, John 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. Do we hold to baptism or regeneration? Or do we believe that you have to be baptized in order to be a believer?

We have to look at all of the contexts of Scripture. 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.

Let's be clear about even our repentance here, that we are not turning it into the law. Collapsing these, even when it may feel like, no, it says very clearly, Jesus says that you have to forsake all, you have to repent.

That's exactly what Jesus says. You start hearing demands in the gospel. I would agree with Justin. The only demand that's ever there is to believe what you are hearing to be is good news. Even your belief, according to Ephesians chapter 2, is a gift given to you.

It's not even something you can meet. You can't even meet the requirement to believe.

Gospel Implications for Marriage, Parenting, and Daily Life

I think there's something I want to jump on what you said, John, where you talked about gospel implications. That is kind of a popular phrase these days, 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.

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

That is the gospel. Last night, my wife and I were having a conversation, and it was a little rugged, as we like to say. We do pause and we ask the question, well, how does the gospel help us get through this conversation?

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. 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.

Once again, we can easily make the formula this, that it is law, gospel law, that the law crushes you, the gospel saves you, and now you are back into the realm of law. We are like, well, no. What we are 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.

We never move back into the realm of trying to earn or merit something at all, ever. Period.

1 Corinthians 6, Galatians 5, and the Works of the Flesh

Justin Perdue. In thinking about this law and gospel distinction, I want to illustrate this with a couple of passages where I think there is just confusion demonstrated. In 1 Corinthians 6 and in Galatians 5, Paul uses very clear language about certain kinds of sins.

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

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.

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, what is the solution and what is the answer?

Because all of us have done this stuff. In 1 Corinthians 6 and in Galatians 5, Paul says, all these things that I am telling you, if you do this stuff, you will not 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 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 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11. In Galatians 5, it's very interesting too, because it's in the section on works of the flesh and fruit of the 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.

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, 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. 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.

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. This circles us back around to, one, I would just say that's not clearly what the text is saying, 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? Because if we're honest with ourselves, we are sexually immoral in all kinds of ways that we don't want to admit.