Grace and Law XII: 20 Errors of Antinomianism

The Law and the Gospel: Introductory Difficulties and the Problem of Antinomianism

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and with me again is Steve, and we're looking at the theme of the law and the gospel. And last week's podcast, we looked at some of the difficulties, it was really part two of the difficulties, that come up when we start to look in the Scripture.

There are some legitimate difficulties, and one of the difficulties that you mentioned a few weeks back was the way that the Bible uses the phrase, law, in different ways. And so, if we read kind of in a surface, careless manner, we can come up with a wrong idea.

And then last week, we talked about the difficulties that were connected with this whole issue of antinomianism. How do we lift up the law and put it, you know, in a place of honor that it belongs in the life of a believer, without damaging or going against what the Scripture teaches about Christian freedom and liberty?

And how do we emphasize grace and freedom and liberty without going against what the Scripture says about the absolutes, the right and wrong choices that are laid out in the moral law? So, this week, we're going to look at 20, and we'll have to pick and choose for the sake of time, 20 errors that grow on the root of antinomianism, and then we'll finish with three forms of antinomianism that we are likely to see in our own day.

So, Steve, why don't you just kick us off?

Justification by Faith Alone Does Not Make Good Works Unnecessary

Okay. The first one, and these, by the way, are taken in Reisinger's book from the Encyclopedia of Christianity. First one, I think, is worthy of discussion. The law is made void by grace. Justification by faith alone renders good works unnecessary.

Void? The law is made void? I mean, to me, that's just what you're talking about in the intro. How do we not go so far as to say the law is made void? And we've discussed this, I think, over several podcasts, but the extreme of taking that position is really to embrace libertinism, right?

And you just don't see that. We've discussed and discussed, I mean, I'm thinking in particular Hebrews 10, we are to strive for holiness without which no man shall see God, right? How can you even discuss holiness if the law is made void?

It's a disconnect that, to me, is insurmountable in a proper understanding of grace and who we are in Christ.

This, by the way, was the reason that John Wesley felt so strongly that the Bible taught a two-part justification. You're justified presently by faith, but in the end, at the judgment, it has to be faith plus a life of good works.

And if the life of good works isn't added, then you have fallen away from the state of grace that you were in initially by faith. Which, of course, is a view that kind of meshed with some Anglican views of Roman Catholic views.

So Wesley believed that we are presently at peace with God through faith in Christ, but then we need to work for life, not just from life, which Whitefield and the more Reformed men would have said, well, we do do good works.

We do good works because He made us alive.

From life.

Yes, from life. And Wesley said, no, we do good works in order to get life for life. So two very different approaches. And I think that an answer to that, it's not so difficult. There are just so many good ways to answer that.

One is, having been saved by Christ, John says we love Him because He first loved us. That's essential to a Christian, the new nature, the new life, the experience of complete forgiveness. We love Him that did this.

Jesus said, if you love me, you keep my commandments. So we could say this, if you don't even think about justification as part of the argument, if you are freely forgiven, what do you want to do as a Christian?

And the answer is, I want to obey what my King said.

And I would add to that too, John, we love God as believers. That's, again, absolutely elementary, Christ and God the Father. And the moral law is the perfect, or maybe not quite perfect, but reflection of the perfect God in His perfect holiness.

How can you not love the law and want to obey it if you say you love God? They're all of a piece.

Yes, yeah. Another argument could be that if you are a Christian, you're brought into a family. And in this family, we have a perfect Father who perfectly disciplines when we disobey. And so how can we give a picture of Christianity that says, obedience is no longer of any account since Christ has obeyed for you?

Well, then why does the book of Hebrews in chapter 12 warn us that disobedience does bring a loving discipline? So if I can live a lawless, disobedient life, and disobedience could only be defined by breaking the moral commands, then really I'm not in His family, I'm one of the street children that He doesn't discipline because of that familial relationship is missing.

We could also think of Christ's great purpose. He came to destroy the works of the devil, and that is sin. And sin is described as lawlessness, as rejecting law, as twisting it. Or we could say what Paul says in Titus, that He died.

And he talks about it's all of grace, but He died to purchase a people who would be zealous for good works. So how can we say my version of Christianity does away with the need for any good works? Because justification is so complete.

Okay, so you have a version of Christianity that goes completely counter to Christ's great purpose in saving people. So there are just many wonderful arguments to say, if you think of justification, if that's all you wanted from God, and now you got justification, so you're not interested in obedience, you probably have not understood Christianity at all.

Exactly. And we've talked at length, I think, about the old man loving self and hating God, really, and the new man loving God. And the corollary to that is kind of hating self. If you're only about justification, all about you, well, that's the same old you that loved you before you ever claimed justification.

You really haven't been justified, I would argue.

Yeah, and when we think of the life after the Christian has come to the cross, you know, Paul says that Christian, really, the Christian life is faith working by love. And so, you know, faith and good works are not against each other in the life of a believer.

So it's not good works which have earned me God's glance of friendship and gotten Him to notice me and pity me. Where the other guy over there who doesn't even try at all, well, he gets passed over. Well, that's a completely false idea, one that's natural to us, but it's false.

But having believed and been united to Christ and having been, you know, made alive in Christ, good works are the constant expression of that faith, working by love. Love works these things out. And that's why James can say, you talk a lot about faith and you profess faith, but you can't justify your claim to faith without works.

That's the only way we know that we believe what we say we believe.

Yeah, it seems basic, doesn't it?

Yes.

The Justified Still Sin and Need Fatherly Discipline

Well, another one here that is good is number three, God sees no sin in the justified, who are no longer bound by the law and is not displeased with them if they sin. So a couple of things are kind of floating around here.

First, if justification is the forgiveness of all your sins, past, present, and future, and not just the washing away, but Christ's perfect righteousness being placed on your account, then God looks at us and sees, treats us in the category of a person who has done all he required.

That's true. And we could also say there's another thing here that if the law has been put away by Christ in the way that an antinomian would say it has, which we would disagree. Without a law, sin is impossible.

You can only sin by going against God's law. So therefore, some antinomians would say you actually cannot sin because there is no, there's no signs on the road that say what not to do.

The law has disappeared completely.

Right.

One of the answers to that is that justification is as wonderful as we've just said. It completely washes and provides a complete positive obedience. And that is our position before God.

Position.

That is our relation. That is, I am his child because of that. So I'm in the family. But the day to day interactions with our God are affected by our behavior. It doesn't lose or gain my entrance or, you know, it doesn't get me out of the family or get me back into the family.

Yes.

But we know even on a human level, if we could use that as an illustration, that between a son and his dad, if the son disobeys the father, he knows he's still the father's son and the father still sees him as son.

He's not next door neighbor. But he's disobedient son. And there's an interruption in the friendship there.

A distance.

Yeah.

And so if we think that justification means he cannot even see our sinful activities, though he does not see us in the category of sinner condemned, if we say that means he can't even see me doing wrong things or maybe I can't even do a wrong thing, then we have to go against so many passages in the New Testament, like the letters to the churches where Christ says, I have this against you.

But aren't we forgiven? You are forgiven.

But?

But there is something between us. There is this continued embrace of disobedience. And if you will repent, I will come back in, sit at the table with you. You know, friendship is restored.

Yes.

Yes, he wants that closeness, that intimacy. But is there any doubt, any believer who has lived for however short a time in the light of Christ and sinned and experienced that distance would attest, and I know I'm appealing there to a rather subjective side, but you have the commands, do not quench the spirit, for instance, or John in his letters, right?

If we sin and we confess, he's faithful and just to forgive us and so forth. Well, what does that mean if we can't sin as believers? I mean, it's just nonsensical. So another one here is number six. We're going to skip a few because they're sort of encompassed in what we've already talked about.

Faith and Repentance Are Commanded and Necessary Responses

But number six, since no duties or obligations are admitted in the gospel, faith and repentance are not commanded. Faith and repentance are not commanded. So apparently you're left with you simply believe, I don't know, I guess apart from faith, and obviously you have nothing to repent of that's really necessary because the law is erased from the New Testament and the world of grace.

And to me, this is completely contradicting. For instance, the Roman road, as we call it. Again and again and again, we are commanded to believe and to turn from our sins. So what is the role of faith if it is not required in the path to salvation?

I think there's a lot that this misconception here that you just read. There's a lot that we can learn from it. One is just a real simple one I think of is that when our theology, no matter how careful we've been in piecing it together, so we come to a new truth, we love the new truth, but being like we really never grow up.

We're like little kids that get the new toy and the new truth is all we see. We see it everywhere in Scripture. So election maybe that we saw neglected growing up in church and now we see it everywhere in Scripture and you think, how did I even not see that?

So we can get one truth and just kind of go to seed on it. And you know that you're wrong when your conclusion, like what you just read, when your conclusion doesn't match the clear pattern in Scripture that faith and repentance are commanded.

I remember a really a very godly, earnest, older gentleman who had been brought up in kind of a Reformed Baptist tradition, but maybe in some ways not as balanced or maybe it's just he got unbalanced.

I don't want to blame anyone else, but as an older man, he would hear me preach and he appreciated it, but he would say to me, but you do have one thing wrong. You don't preach repentance to the lost because they can't repent.

Repentance is only a word for the Christian. Now that was a little different than what we've been saying, but I would say, well, but the Scripture preaches repentance. No, he said, it just says believe for the lost.

And I said, but the lost can't believe on their own either, do they? And so why do you draw that distinction? It's just an example of where you take one part of the gospel and you kind of run with it.

You don't notice that you have detached from other truths of the gospel, the big picture, and you've kind of become isolated and you look up. It's like you go underwater for a long time. You pop up and you think, whew, I'm a lot further than I thought I was, and now I'm starting to say things that go directly against Scripture.

Also, when we talk about the duties and obligations, so there are no duties or obligations in the gospel for us to fulfill in order to merit or complete what Christ has started.

As a condition.

Right.

And I even would just, I would qualify the word condition. There are no meritorious conditions. I would say there are essential conditions, and some people do get bothered by the word condition at all, but here's what I mean.

And I get this from Ernest Kevin's book on the law and the gospel, and he talks about a marriage. Now, let's say that the prince marries the street urchin, the girl that's homeless, very unattractive, nothing about her matches the prince.

The prince, though, sets his affection upon her, cleans her up, makes her beautiful, brings her to himself, proposes marriage. There they are at the ceremony. Do you take him to be your husband? She must say, I do, legally, or she's not married.

But nobody who hears her say, I do, says, wow, she earned his love. It is an essential response, not for merit, but because of the nature of the relationship. So let's go back to grace and faith. I mean, faith and repentance.

Faith and repentance are the ways that we receive the free gift. But if we will not reach out and acquire or appropriate or respond to the gospel, if we will not believe and repent, then we do not receive.

It's not because believing and repenting is part of completing what Christ did nine-tenths of the way.

No earning.

It's not meriting. It's not saying, I deserve the gospel because I'm willing to repent and believe. It is based in the nature of the relationship. If someone has done everything and is giving everything in the purest form of grace, the purest form of undeserved love, the only thing the recipient can do is to believingly receive.

So faith is the essential response. Repentance as well. If you are dominated by the worship of self and filled up with the lies that orbit that, and you come to a king who is all and infinite and deserves all of you, there is no way for that relationship to be legitimate unless, by the grace of God, you drop the trash and grab hold of him.

So I think that we have conditions in our response to the gospel, as long as we understand they are not meritorious. And even these conditions, we have a hymn in our hymn book that we really love, where it talks about, don't let any sight of your unfitness cause you to delay.

And it says, even faith and repentance, which is all he requires, that you turn and believe, that you embrace. Even these he gives you. So the scripture speaks of both faith and repentance as being gifts, but that does not mean that we don't exercise them or that they are not elements in our response.

However, if conditions is a word that bothers people, you can find a different word.

I'm thinking Richard Owen Roberts points out, he has the whole book on repentance, that repent is the first word of the gospel, right? John the Baptist and then Jesus takes up that very same repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.

How can you write that out as this proposition from the antinomians would require?

Yeah, again, so it's a really simple test. If, at the end of all your thinking, you have a thing that you've built that looks different than the thing that God has built, then you think, okay, somewhere down below the surface, I stepped wrong, just a little, and when it finally played itself out to its full conclusion, I see that something's wrong.

And it's a good opportunity for us to just say, I don't know how I got here because I thought I was careful, but I need to humble myself and say to the Lord, I seem to have come up with a different conclusion than you did, and I want you to show me, under the surface, where did I misapply these things?

Yeah, retrace our steps.

Right.

Take it back. All right, how about number 10 here? Justifying faith is the assurance that one is already justified. It's a kind of circularity to that, isn't there? And I would say an entire omission of Christ and His work and His perfect sacrifice.

Very dangerous ground.

Yeah, so take that with number 11 as well. They kind of go together. The elect are actually justified before they believe, even from all eternity. So I think what we have here, again, is one aspect of redemption, God's electing love, which we get a grip of, and it's so wonderful that sometimes perhaps that pendulum swings a little.

So we're reacting against the kind of the cultural Christianity that says, well, when I decide to kind of pull myself up by my bootstraps and love God, then He'll love me back. So I'm the initiator of everything.

All right, so we react against that, and we say, but actually the Scripture speaks of this great, prevenient grace, this work that started before Earth was created, and God set His affections on the people, and God chose a champion to not only carry their guilt, but accomplish their righteousness, etc.

And He is the reason we can be justified. Well, that's all true, but it's becoming so impressed with the kind of the primary instrument there that we forget that there are secondary things that God also chose for Christ to come, for Christ to die, for Christ to be raised, for Christ to ascend and rule, for Christ to send the Spirit, for the Gospel to go forth, for us to believe and repent, for us to live daily in dependence upon Him and to persevere all the way to the end, and for Him to glorify us.

Now, if all that matters is the choice in the past to elect, because God is sovereign, we think, well, what more would it take? Well, God Himself has also sovereignly chosen all the means. So I think that if we can keep that in balance, then we avoid a lot of the errors that we can get into by admiring one aspect of the covenant of grace and forgetting the other things that go hand in glove.

Let me tag on with that. Number 12, which we didn't read, it says,. Therefore, they were never children of wrath or under condemnation. Well, that's directly contradicted by Paul, isn't it?

Yeah, I was looking at Ephesians 2 right here. So in Ephesians 2, he describes Christians prior to faith and repentance and says,. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prints of the power of the air, of the Spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh. Now, up to that point, you could say, Well, we were really, you know, we were like children of God set apart. We were among those people and we lived wrong.

That's right, but we were already, you know, justified. And then he goes on to say, So we also, we formerly lived among them, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind and were by nature, not by our behavior, by nature, children of wrath, even as the rest.

So no distinction between the elect and the unelect prior, you know, in that sense, prior to the embrace of the gospel. So, you know, there are many paradoxes here. You know, Christ can say, I must, I have other sheep who are not of this fold that I have to go get.

I have to go call their names. They'll hear my voice, they'll follow me. So they've not yet been gathered into the fold, and yet he sees them as his. And yet, Paul says, though they have been given to Christ from eternity past, they are children of wrath until he goes and brings them in.

I mean, a great mystery, but there's the doctrine of adoption as well, right? There is a point in time when we are adopted, even though we're chosen from before the foundations of the world. Right. Remarkable.

Assurance, Sanctification, and the Three-Legged Stool

The 14th one that he gives, he says, Sanctification is no evidence of justification, for assurance is the fruit of an immediate revelation that one is an elect person. So again, faith is not embracing Christ as the Savior as much as we just talked in number 10 and 11.

It's more of just you need to come to the point where you accept that you're one of the elect who have already been justified. Faith is not what unites you to Christ, and therefore the benefits of Christ's redemptive labors are applied to you at that moment in time.

And so you begin to enjoy, experience what was planned and purchased long before you were born. So faith is just, I just accept that I'm one of the elect, and therefore I'm one who has already been redeemed and justified, and so I kind of have everything I need already.

Therefore, why would sanctification, why does obedience or the transformation of the life have anything to do with my assurance? And I think that that, you know, to be fair, that probably is, it is a reaction to, you know, the pendulum bouncing back and forth.

So we talked a little bit about this. We grew up in a day, Steve and I, where we, you would have gone to a church and like, so VBS, do you want to go to hell or do you want to go to heaven? Do you want to be on God's team or devil's team?

You know, and then all the kids go up, I want to be on God's team. And like, you certainly don't want to be the only kid that said, actually, I'm still on the devil's team. So you go up too. Okay, I want you to repeat this prayer and mean it, and then we'll talk to your parents.

You'll get baptized next week. And so we look at this easy believism, this kind of, you know, ritualistic replacement for the real work of grace. And we say, this is terrible. This is producing people who have been deceived.

And, you know, this is not Christianity. Okay. So then we're tempted to swing so far from that, that we say the only way that you can know you're a Christian is that you have all the evidences that, for instance, that John mentions, a new love for God, a new love for God's people, a new belief system, a new loyalty, a new obedience.

And you have that almost perfectly and forever and all the way to the end. And like, you know, so if you have all these evidences in sanctification that you really belong to Christ, then you can be at peace.

But of course, if you go too far with that, well, who could ever have peace then? I'm still hoping to see, do I make it all the way to the end? You know, then the reaction to that seems to me to be what we just read.

And that is, well, actually, sanctification has nothing to do with it because it's just the work of Christ. So you just have to accept that you're in Christ and then none of that would ever apply. And the answer to those is the biblical medium, you know.

So we could say that assurance ought to really be like a stool that has three legs. If you're on a stool with two legs, you know how your kids do. They sit at the bar in the kitchen and they push back on the stool and parents say, ah, all the legs on the floor.

Now, if your stool only had two legs, you could sit there, but you'd have to constantly, you'd be unbalanced, always unbalanced, but it could work. If it only had one leg, you could hold on to the counter and you could, but three legs is the minimum for being able to let go of the counter and be stable.

So think about three legs for assurance in Scripture. We have the promises of God, and that is the essential, the fundamental, that is the foundation. Everything else is built on that. Does God keep His word?

Okay, He says He died for these kind of people and that they will come in this way. He will, for His amazing purposes, He will bring glory to Himself by being kind to them. So I trust Him. All right, so that's the basic layer.

But then there's another leg, because the question kind of comes, how do I know that I really do trust Him, or am I just spitting out religious phrases? Well, there's the leg of what John gives, evidences of the new birth.

There are some changes that God will be working in His people, and every one of His people sees those, but they are imperfect.

But it sounds like sanctification.

Yes, that's sanctification.

The process has begun.

So it's begun, it's imperfect, but it's there. And there's a lot we could say about that. We've talked about that in podcasts in the past. We don't have time to go on. But we're looking at kind of the wide-angle lens of our life, the panoramic lens, not a snapshot.

This morning I woke up and I had a great quiet time, so I am a Christian. Or this morning I woke up and yelled at everybody in my house, so I'm not a Christian. So we're looking from the moment I feel that I embraced Christ, and He was merciful to me here till today.

Is that a year? For me it's 33 years. So I look at 33 years and say, can I see a general pattern of God changing me in the way that John says God changes His children? And I say, yes. It's so imperfect I feel more ashamed than elated, but it's there.

And then the third leg is that wonderful work of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Romans 8. There is an immediacy where, you know, as we go to call God Father and the conscience would naturally rise up and say, what right do you have?

Are you insane? The Spirit enables the believer by a direct action to know and to believe, I have a right to call Him my Father. Now, if you take any one of those away from the other two, you've got an unbalanced, you've got a wobbly assurance.

And I think we also should say that assurance is not essential to salvation. Your assurance can go way down and way up.

Yeah, to this proposition, if I don't have that assurance by an immediate revelation, where am I?

Yeah, did God tell you you were elect? Well, not yet. Well, then you're not elect. Well, what should I do? Well, wait, because you can't do anything. Yeah, so that would be a very fatalistic kind of a hyper-Calvinist approach.

And, you know, if you read church history, you find that there were quite a few people who struggled with assurance, Jonathan Edwards, Richard Baxter, J .C. Ryle, others. There were struggles where they look back on their own experiences and they say, well, I didn't have exactly the same experience as Joe here.

And, you know, so that bothered me in the early days, especially as a young believer, I think we're susceptible to that.

I agree, yeah.

So three legs of a stool, I think, good illustration for having a more biblically balanced approach to assurance. And that frees you from that overreaction that we just read where, hey, you just have to accept that you're elect and sanctification has no part in it.

Yeah.

The Gospel, the Law, and the Call to Repentance

All right, how about number 16? Repentance, now we're going to acknowledge repentance, by the way, from the antinomian perspective, is produced not by the law, but by the gospel only. And it seems to me, we were talking before we came on the air right here, that this is a unscripturally narrow definition of gospel, if you're using it that way.

And what it sounds like they're saying is grace alone. The only good news is God loves you. When I think properly understood, the gospel must entail that conviction, frankly, that the law brings, which is a recognition I am not a good and lovable person until God opens my eyes to the great love and absolutely undeserved mercy that he brings to me.

There's not much good news in what I see when I'm confronting the reality of who I am in myself. And so you had used the phrase that we must have a little of the recognition, maybe a lot, and these aren't your terms exactly, but the bad news, if you will, of who we really are and how far we are away from God and holiness, and the good news that we can get there through the blood of Christ.

And what a beautiful thing the Spirit has for us in Christ in order for the gospel to be effective.

And there's truth in this. It's just that, as with many of these, what makes them so appealing at times, and we were talking even before the podcast that these are probably oversimplifications. I don't think antinomians would state it so succinctly.

They would say, hey, you've misrepresented me. And because it wouldn't be a tempting error if it didn't sound a little more convincing than the quick 20. So we have to give that to those that would agree with that, who would teach some of these things, but not say them in the same way.

But regardless, the Bible says it is the goodness of God that leads us to repentance. But as you said, how do we see that he has been good? How do we measure the goodness? How do we get a right understanding?

How do you even notice he's being good to you? Until the law is like that MRI that shows you how it's a mirror. It's an accurate mirror that shows you how undeserving of goodness you are. You're deserving of the exact opposite.

Why is he showing me goodness when the law has exposed me as the ugliest of creatures, and yet he is loving me? That doesn't make sense. And then for the first time you understand the gospel. So the love of God does lead to repentance, but the love of God as expressed in the gospel makes no sense without the law.

Or another way of saying it is when Christ was there teaching in the crowds, he said, I did not come to heal the well, those that are healthy, but I came to heal the sick. Well, he's surrounded by people.

Which ones aren't sick spiritually? Well, every one of them is sick. And yet many of them feel I'm just fine. So they have no use for the gospel. Those that look at Christ and say, I don't know why anybody would ever offer me love, those by the law exposed are, like Paul says, taken by the hand and brought to Christ.

So in one way you could say this, the law itself, by itself, the rules, you broke the rules. That doesn't lead to repentance. Or God just loves you so much. That doesn't lead to repentance. Calvin said that for us to really be brought to respond to God, we must believe both the threat and the promise.

If it's just threat, we hide from God. If it's just this kind of a sugary statement of how wonderful we are in God's eyes, without the law we say, well, I agree. I feel that that's a perfectly honest assessment of how wonderful I am.

And we just stay in that self-deceit.

The cry of the real repenter is, God, be merciful to me, a sinner. We have to recognize that we are sinners before we can really accept the gospel, right?

Secret Counsel, Election, and Practical Antinomianism

Number 17, the secret counsel of God is the rule of man's conduct. And if you take that with—he kind of lumps these together with similar—. 18 says, God is the author and approver of sin, for sin is the accomplishment of His will.

So because God has allowed it, well, then God is the author of it. 19 says, unless the Spirit works holiness in the soul, there's no obligation to be holy or to strive toward that end. And 20 says, all externals are useless.

You know, there's nothing for you to do. Or they are—at least they're indifferent. They really won't accomplish anything. Since the Spirit alone gives life. So all of these kind of are a hyper-Calvinism.

So with number 17, the secret counsels of God. So what God has chosen in eternity past. What He's chosen to allow. Who He's chosen to save. Those kind of big questions that we see hinted at in Scripture.

These things. There are these things. There is election. There is predestination. And yet, we are tempted then to go beyond what the Scripture says. And we say, well, I am not going to even try to believe.

I'm not going to respond to God. Try to respond. Because I can't. And I don't even know if I'm elect. So the best thing for me to do is just kind of drift along in neutral. And then if God wants to save me, He'll save me.