Grace and Law XI: Rejecting the Lies of Antinomianism

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is Steve Crampton and we're looking at the theme of the

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Law and the Gospel and how we understand the interplay between those in the

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New Covenant and the Christian life. And we've been using a book by Ernie Reisinger and it's a good book, very simple really.

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He writes for the common man and so it's a good book for us to use, just to kind of guide some of our thoughts.

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But it has been a while since we have had our podcast on the Law, so if you've been following the podcast, we had a couple of gaps there where we ran some of the things.

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So Steve, it would probably help if you just give us a running, you know, head start to get back up to where we're at.

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Sure, yeah. We're looking at the Law and the Gospel, as the title suggests, but we took the

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Law from the very first chapters of Genesis, looked at what was the

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Law, where was the moral law back before Mount Sinai, how it manifested itself and was clear that even the patriarchs were abiding by and bound under the

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Law. We looked at the Ten Commandments at Sinai, we've brought it up through looking at several of those commandments, the interplay with the

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Gospel, and we have begun now looking at the difficulties in the Law, and we spent a good deal of time talking about even the different uses of the term

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Law, and throughout Scripture it is used in such a wide variety of ways.

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You've got the Law of Moses, you've got the Law of Christ, you've got the Mosaic Law, you've got the

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Ceremonial Law, you've got the Judicial Code, and all of these terms that are

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Law in a broad sense, and that's where we came down, is we're using the definition that Reisinger gives us, which basically very broadly is, any doctrine, instruction, ordinance, statute, etc.,

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that teaches or directs or commands men with respect to a duty we owe to God.

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So that's where we are with Law, and John, where are we going to take it now?

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So we're looking at chapter 7 in his book, and it deals with the difficulties of the Law, and this is difficulties part 2.

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Part 1 was what you just mentioned, where the different uses of the Law require that we kind of carefully read the text and understand what it's talking about.

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It's not rocket science, you don't have to know Hebrew and Greek, it's just a matter of kind of reading carefully.

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And we're going to look at Law and Liberty and the issue of antinomianism today and again next week in our podcast.

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Before we jump to that, I want to say that we talk a lot about how important it is that we get a right view of these things, because even with genuine believers, there is a constant, you know, we do have an enemy that lies to us and that manipulates the truths of Scripture, and we do love the truths of Scripture.

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We love the things that are attached to obeying God, because we're Christians.

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So when someone comes and says to us, well the Law is the expression of obedience to God, and we agree, but if we're not careful, perhaps we could apply that in a way that would lead to legalism.

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And then another man comes and says, Christ is all and in all for the believer, and we love

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Christ, and we love the gospel, and the way that he is freely given a cleansing for our soul and a positive righteousness applied to our account, because we love those things.

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And someone comes along and says, you know, it's grace that we need to be talking about, not law. We're tempted perhaps maybe to swing like a pendulum the other way.

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And with other topics throughout Christian history, we find that that pendulum is a good illustration. It's often easy to think that the safest place when you see an error, so let's say legalism, the safest place for a

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Christian when he sees the error of legalism is to go as far from legalism as you can get.

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Well, then you end up in an opposite error. And so, you know, what we want to do is instead of swinging here legalism and then going into antinomianism, and you know, this takes a number of years in our life to kind of realize,

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I shouldn't have gone so far. I think I overstressed that. And so then we try to react against that, and you know, culturally the church is doing this.

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So we want to follow the scripture through the midst of all the overreactions.

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Sometimes I think that, you know, views that we had of the law before we were believers, it tends to kind of be a hangover afterwards.

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We had these old views. So I used to think of the law as something that perhaps

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God was requiring me to do to kind of help him out. So like, you know, mutually beneficial interaction here.

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So God obviously is offering me much more than I can offer him, but still

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I have to help. Something. Yeah, so you know, I'm coming to you, and I'm going to offer you this forgiveness, but I have a long list of duties

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I want you to do because you're going to help me spread my kingdom. And so, you know, if you have that view, you misunderstand grace.

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You think, so actually this is not an unmerited free gift where all the reasons are drawn from within God's own, you know, amazing character that he chose to love us.

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Rather, he looks at us and says, this person looks like they would be useful. And so if you follow my rules, you will be more useful.

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And then, you know, you look at the gospel and there's just no room for that. And so you think, well, then there's no room for the law now that I'm a

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Christian because God, you know, God doesn't need me to do that. And I had a wrong view of law or that was my view of law.

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So it doesn't translate into the New Testament life. I also think of, you know, punishment, you know, you can kind of think of the law as God kind of cruelly laying on humanity rules that are right, just, holy, and pure.

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But it's kind of like it's, there's no purpose to them. You know, it's just,

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I just have to do it because God makes me do it. And it reminded me of a Greek myth. And so I had

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Teddy look this up. So I'll give you a Greek myth today. Sisyphus, all right, Sisyphus. And Steve was around when

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Sisyphus was around. So, all right, Sisyphus was the king of Corinth.

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It wasn't called Corinth when he was king. And according to the Greek myth, Zeus was angry with Sisyphus because he cheated death twice.

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So he's supposed to die, he doesn't die. He kind of sneaks past, you know, the rules, gets, you know, cuts the corners, cheats death, and Zeus punishes him by making him roll this enormous boulder up a hill.

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And every time he gets close to the top of the hill, it just rolls down. And he has to do that for eternity.

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So the reason I mentioned that Greek myth is because it's kind of how I viewed the law.

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Except, you know, I thought, well, the law is good, it's right, it's pure. But really, my view was that it was like rolling a boulder up a hill that would never get there.

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And God was just going to make us do that forever. Now, if that is your view, and then you come to the gospel, and you see the cross in its correct light, then there's no room for that kind of a view of a law.

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And you think, well, so there's no room for law in the Christian life. But then I was thinking this morning, so what is the law?

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The law is this perfectly laid path by God. It shows the life that is the happiest, fullest life.

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It is the furthest from self -destructive behavior. It is the life that walks in harmony with our

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Creator. It is the life that Christ lived in front of us. You know, he blazed a trail. There's his footsteps, you know, his footprints right there.

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And when the cross comes, that doesn't make that path useless.

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When I think of that path in the right way, and then I see it in light of the gospel,

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I think, well, the path belongs here, because now the gospel has made it so that we, forgiven for our rebellion, can come to our

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King and say, having forgiven me of all, may

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I walk this path? You know? And will you grant me, moment by moment, all

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I need to walk this path with you? I mean, we want to walk the path, and we want to know, could

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I come back to the path that I mocked and rejected? And the answer is yes. And so, in that light,

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I think it's just so clear that the moral law lays a path of obedience that is in perfect harmony with the work of Christ in our rescue.

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Well, he says in this chapter that the object of the chapter is to fold.

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Number one, to uphold the law so that it does not threaten Christian liberty. And second, to establish grace so that the law is not made void, and the believers are not exempted from their duty.

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So, how to view the law, how to hold it before our eyes in a way that does not go against Christian liberty that's taught in the

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New Testament, and how to see grace and Christian liberty in a way that does not go against what the

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New Testament says about the law. So that leads us, John, to Reisinger's point.

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Well, if Christ has liberated us, granted us freedom, freedom from what, right?

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Is it freedom from, as you laid out there, from the law in its entirety? No, obviously, based on what you just said.

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So Reisinger gives us three broad topics, three areas in which

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Christ has brought us liberty. First, we are freed from the law, and this

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I think really is critical, as a system of salvation. It is not, as I think you've used the illustration in the past, the ladder by which we climb up to God and earn salvation.

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I mean, that is obviously critical to our whole understanding of what it means to be free in Christ and to be given by grace that life in Christ.

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We're to be not perfect law keepers, but really we're walking by faith and by being forgiven in Christ.

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That's the path to salvation. So Christ has freed us from what some would call the covenant of works.

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We've, I think, Christ has freed us from sin's dominion, and Scripture is very clear that we really are slaves,

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Romans 6 in particular, to sin. Christ has broken that power of sin over us, and so we are supernaturally regenerated, we are united with Christ, and it's in that context, as you talked about a moment ago,

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John, how we now want to walk that path of righteousness, the path that the moral law lays out for us.

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We have a new love for God and His law, and as Paul puts it in Romans 7, we now serve in the newness of the

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Spirit, not in the oldness of the letter. I think that's a beautiful way of drawing that distinction, but I would underscore, as you said in that intro, we are serving in that newness of the

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Spirit, we are walking that path. And the third area that Reisinger highlights here, and we were talking before the show, it doesn't seem to rank really with the first two, but we'll include it here and just mention it anyway.

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He says that we have been freed from superstitions, and there what he uses is the example of those, and this is one of the the heresies of old, that saw the entire material world as inherently evil, intrinsically so, and so as spiritual, reborn believers, we are to basically run from and have as little to do with the physical world and physical pleasures as we can.

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And of course, that's just not what Scripture teaches. We are men, created with feet of clay in bodies, and God has given us this created order as a beautiful gift to be enjoyed in proper relation, as some commentators would put it, with God, not apart from God.

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And I think that's a critical distinction. So there's where Reisinger is talking about the superstitions, but that's the big three.

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He also points out that when the Apostles give moral direction to the churches, and so we have in the churches quite a mixture.

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You have the Jews who've been converted and embraced Christ, and they're wondering what to do with the entire old system, the old covenant, as it becomes a thing of, you know what

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Paul says to the Corinthians, really a thing of no glory in contrast or comparison with the new covenant.

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So what is laid aside, and what's brought into the new covenant? I mean, good, legitimate questions, yeah.

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And as they're wrestling with those, then you also have Gentiles who are wondering, how Jewish do I need to become to follow the

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Jewish Messiah? You know, Jewish at all? If I'm not required to be

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Jewish, which Paul is so very clear about, I'm not required to be circumcised or to offer these animals sacrifices.

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Well, what about the moral law? What part does that play? Obviously, we find in the New Testament a stress on following Christ, and that the law is summed up in the word love.

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And so some perhaps have said, well, that means, that leads you to think that the Apostles downplay the law.

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Maybe they even dismantle the law as a guide for Christian living. But I think that Reisinger does a good job.

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He just mentions a couple of passages. We'll give you two, Galatians 5, and then later in Romans, where the

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Apostle is going to talk about liberty and love, and he uses specific statements from the

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Old Testament moral law as the guide for what these look like. So in Galatians 5, verse 13, we read, for you, brethren, have been called to liberty.

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Now that's a wonderful statement. Christian, you're called to a life of freedom. Only, he goes on, do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another.

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Now that could be taken as kind of somewhat vague. He keeps going. For all the laws fulfilled in one word, even in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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But if you bite and devour one another, beware, lest you be consumed by one another.

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And this is what Reisinger says. If the liberty possessed by the Galatians consisted in freedom from the obligation to obey the moral law, it would be strange that these very precepts should be urged as an authority against their using liberty as an occasion to the flesh.

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So in other words, Paul says, you're free, but don't use the freedom in the wrong way. Well, what do you mean,

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Paul? Can you give us some guidance? Yes, it's clear. It's the moral law. Love your neighbor as the moral law directs you.

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So you are now free. Free from what? Free from the penalty of the law, but not the precepts of the law.

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So from the penalty, but not the path. He then mentions Romans 13, and I'm going to read a larger section.

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This is verse 8 through 14, and you remember that the first 11 chapters of Romans, it's just this great sweeping theology lesson from the desperate need of humanity to the provision in Christ, to the means of embracing that provision, faith, which unites us to the

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Savior, and then the results in Romans 6, 7, 8, where, you know, union with Christ not only produces justification, but a justification that frees us to be sanctified, to live for Him.

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9, 10, and 11 explaining if this is such a great salvation, why do so many of the

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Jews reject it? And we look at what Paul says there. Chapter 12, the great application, you know, therefore, and this picture of presenting myself as a living, daily, moment -by -moment sacrifice to God out of love, but what does that sacrifice look like?

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Well, it's guided by the moral law. In chapter 13, he says this, O no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.

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For the commandments, now he's taking us back to the specific commands, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet, and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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Love does no harm to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. And do this knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep, for now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed.

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So he's speaking to believers. The night is far spent, the day is at hand, therefore let us cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light, let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in licentiousness and lewdness, not in strife and envying, but put on the

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Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts.

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May I play the other side for a moment? Okay, you just said, I mean Paul just put it, all of that Old Testament law is summed up in the

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New Testament command, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So why do we have the

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Old Testament moral law in its decalogue sort of form instead of just love your neighbor?

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Yeah, I think that's a great question, because I think that coming to a passage and reading that quickly, you do get the impression like, oh, so Paul's just saying

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Old Testament laws have all been laid aside, we don't need them anymore because in Christ we have grace to love and love's all we do.

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And I think the answer to that could be that in saying that they're summarized, they're summed up in the word love, and in loving we are obeying them.

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Paul is not dismantling them, Paul is explaining the nature of them. So like a

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Pharisee, we could be tempted to keep the specific rules, but there's no love. So I didn't do that to my neighbor,

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I could have, but I didn't because I'm a good church -going Christian and I keep the rules.

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But you care nothing for your neighbor, so have you really obeyed the law? You know, it's easy to maybe check off our list of the

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Ten Commandments and not love and think that God is impressed, and Paul has to turn and say to us, you haven't understood the law at all.

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As Paul himself experienced when his eyes were opened, as it were. And the other thing about that for me,

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John, we've again talked in past podcasts, there's kind of hidden, as it were, at least it's kind of mentioned but not highlighted.

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In those Old Testament passages teaching the law, they say expressly that we are to love our neighbor, and then it lays out how you do that.

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So it's not that the love wasn't there before, we just didn't get the whole picture, right?

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Still in the types and shadows sort of thing, it seems to me. Well yeah, and you know, and these commands that he mentioned, some of them are, you know, you love your neighbor, and I mean, that is a direct quote from the

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Old Testament. So yeah, so the specific laws other than love your neighbor are laying it out in, you know, with a clarity.

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Well this is how it would look in your life setting, it would look this way. So it guards us against kind of that vague good intentions, you know, where, you know, sometimes people will say,

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I'm often shocked where someone will say, you know, I feel like you didn't even care about me, or you didn't love me.

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And I think, but I really cared about that person. Then I realized, but did I do anything? You know, was it just all, did it get stuck inside John, you know, feelings of genuine concern and compassion and care and appreciation?

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And I never followed the specific steps that Scripture gave, you know, I thought that, well,

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I loved him, you know, but did, did we, you know? He gives also some people throughout history who've been falsely labeled antinomians, which reminds me of a statement by Martin Lloyd -Jones.

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When Lloyd -Jones said that you know you are preaching the gospel correctly if you offend a group of people in the church and they call you an antinomian.

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And he, and he gave his evidence by pointing to, particularly to the

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Apostle Paul. People called Paul an antinomian because he preached the gospel so fully.

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And Paul of course has to explain how he is not an antinomian. But let me give you the, the few examples that Reisinger gives.

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First he gives Christ. You remember in Luke chapter 7, that the crowds look at the life of Jesus. And it looks different than the austere life of John the

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Baptist. So Jesus, they say, look, a glutton and a winebibber.

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So this guy's always eating with people and he sits down at the table and he drinks wine by them. He's a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

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So the Pharisees look at Jesus and say, he's enjoying himself. He's with these lost people and he's, you know, he's befriending them.

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So he can't be serious about holiness. And so he's an antinomian, so to speak.

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He's a, he's a man who disregards the law, dishonors it. So clearly they're blind to the true nature of the law, what it called for, and what

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Jesus was doing. Later we find the same attitude toward the Apostle Paul. In Romans 3, verse 8, we read where Paul says this.

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And why not say, let us do evil that good may come, as we are slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say.

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So Paul's statements to the Jewish ear seem to disregard the old covenant so completely.

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And grace seems to be painted in such large pictures that they say, well, if you follow

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Paul, you might as well send more so that you can get more grace. And of course, Paul argues how that not only is not what he's saying, but in Romans 6, he gives a clear, you know, theological explanation how, of how that is actually impossible.

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A Christian cannot live that kind of life. He gives another example, one from history.

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Charles Spurgeon in 1856, March 16th. This is when he is about 24 years old, and he's at the

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Park Street Chapel. The only reason I mentioned that is, this is fairly early in his ministry. Before he, before that building no longer serves them, and they move into the building they built to hold thousands, the

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Metropolitan Chapel. I am fond, Spurgeon says, of being called an antinomian.

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For this reason, that the term is generally applied to those who hold truth very firmly and will not let it go.

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But I should not be fond of being an antinomian. We are not against the law of God.

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We believe it is no longer binding on us as the covenant of salvation, but we have nothing to say against the law of God.

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The law is holy. We are carnal and sold under sin, he quotes Paul. None shall charge us truthfully with being antinomians.

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We do quarrel with antinomians, but as for some poor souls who are so inconsistent as to say that the law is not binding, and yet try to keep it with all their might, we do not quarrel with them.

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So he's saying there are some baby Christians who get confused. They say, you know, they say antinomian things, but in their heart they're not antinomian.

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They just are not really clear on how to explain it. Which was true of some of the Puritans that we've looked at.

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Yeah, yeah, and we'll talk about that in our next episode as we talk about that kind of that theoretical antinomianism.

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So Spurgeon says, he kind of, he goes easy on these guys because they, he says, we think they might learn to distinguish between the law as a covenant of life and a direction after we have obtained life.

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So he is hard on antinomians who live as antinomians, but he said, you know, he's a little more patient with those who speak like antinomians, but really their heart isn't.

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So Reisinger does actually give us an example, John, of one who actually was an antinomian. Indeed, the dispute between Martin Luther and Johannes Agricola was the genesis of the term antinomian, as best we understand in history.

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It was Luther that applied that term to his colleague and at one time friend, fellow teacher there at Wittenberg, who took the extreme,

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I think we can actually safely say here, position. What Agricola did is, he says that we are as believers completely free of the law, and here are some of the premises that he would teach.

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Men are not to be prepared for the gospel or conversion by the preaching of the law.

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You don't need it at all. Or repentance is not to be taught out of the Decalogue or any law of Moses, but only from the violation of the

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Son of God in the gospel. Again, you don't really even need the Old Testament. Another one, and this just has that great rhetorical ring, but it's,

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I think, very dangerous. When thou art in the midst of sin, only believe, and thou art in the midst of salvation.

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Another, the law is not worthy to be called the Word of God. Shocking, really.

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Again, a believer is above all law and all obedience. We'll touch on that again in the next podcast,

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I think. Again, good works profit nothing to salvation. Ill works tend not to damnation.

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Kind of half -truth in there, right? Finally, our faith and New Testament religion were unknown to Moses.

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What? I mean, remarkable. Well, Luther took him to task, as I say, termed that antinomianism, and came back and taught the proper uses of the law.

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We won't go into those now in the interest of time, but roundly condemned Agricola's position there.

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Historically, Agricola sort of recanted some of those beliefs, or at least he tried to say that.

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Luther never quite accepted that, and I guess we can leave it at that. We were talking earlier that it is interesting that throughout, you know, the examples he gives in Scripture, and then even with Spurgeon, it is often the more conservative element in a religious gathering that would be offended at the freedom and the dimensions of the hope, the grace, the completeness of justification, that when that's preached in a way that is so clear, they feel that maybe the preacher has become antinomian, you know?

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So, like Lloyd -Jones said, and we want to be careful that we, with long exposure to church, aren't slipping back into an abuse of the law, using the law as a thing that we think makes us better, superior, you know, people, us and those people.

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And, you know, and we begin to forget that the law is a wonderful gift from God, but all our hope is in Christ, you know, and it's a privilege to walk alongside

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Him. One of the marks of a Pharisee is always, whether ancient or modern, is that you officially put your feet on the right path, so to speak, but you're always bitter because the people over there aren't doing it, you know.

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You're not paying the high cost. I'm paying a cost, and yet you call yourself a Christian, and you seem happy in the

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Lord, and this is not fair, you know. It's like the child that keeps the rules for the wrong reasons and constantly complains that everybody else is getting off the hook, you know.

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And when that's our attitude, we know that we have gotten a wrong approach to the law again.

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Well, next podcast, we're going to actually look at 20 different errors connected to the root of antinomianism, and some of these, we'll go through them, but we'll spend some time on some of them because some of them are more prevalent in our day.