You Say You Want A Reformation? With Dr. R. Scott Clark (Session one: Law, Gospel and “Glawspel.” Becoming a Master Theologian)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. ...sites

and First Great Awakening stuff and George Whitefield, and that was fun, and then we went to the

Basketball Hall of Fame, and we played a little one -on -one, and I was Sidney Moncrief to, who are you,

Artis Gilmore? And so we played a little basketball together, and that worked out great, but before we pray, the conference is,

I call it just kind of a simple conference unplugged, so we're not gonna have a bunch of music, we're not going to have a bunch of accoutrement, we're just gonna have a prayer.

Dr. Clark is gonna teach us for an hour, we'll take a break, there'll be a Q &A after that, and then we'll be done tonight, so good to see you.

I know people who will come and go as you please, if you need to get up and have a coffee during the lecture or whatever, feel free.

Is this technically a lecture, you think, is that what you're gonna do, lecture, okay, a talk, a chat.

For those of you who don't know Dr. Clark, he and I both went to the same university, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, he went to Westminster and then graduated from St.

Ann's College, Oxford, Oxford Mass, sorry, Oxford College in London.

Some of the things that Dr. Clark is gonna talk about tonight and tomorrow have been helpful for me as I've tried to process thinking about things rightly, and so I handpicked the topics because I knew they were good for me and I wanted them to be good for your soul as well.

We'll pray, and then Dr. Clark, you have till 8 o 'clock for session one, how's that? Bow with me, please.

Father in heaven, we thank you that we are called your children by sovereign grace, by a grace that has found us out by your spirit's power as he would show us the beauties of Christ and how he would grant us a saving faith.

Tonight I pray that you'd help Dr. Clark and help us understand categories that are so basic and so necessary that so muddle things like law and gospel, and we are very, very thankful that although we couldn't do, your son did, and we just rest in his doing for us in his life and his death, confirmed by the resurrection.

Thank you, in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, thank you so much for coming out tonight.

It's nice to see you. Thank you for having me, and when he says we played a little one -on -one, it was very little.

So he does have long arms, though, I did discover that. Well, the title of the conference is

An Attempt to be Clever, so you say you want a reformation, right? So those of you who are of baby boomer age will get the

Beatles reference, and as it turns out, reformation is harder than it looks.

And here we are at the beginning of the 21st century, when the

Reformation seems like a long, distant memory, and to be honest, it is mostly unknown.

So if you're coming out of a Roman Catholic background, what you think you know about the

Reformation, unless you've studied it at an academic level, is probably wrong.

If you're coming out of broader evangelicalism, you probably have no consciousness of the

Reformation. So just to sort of set the table, get a lay of the land, there are about 120 million

Christians in North America, roughly. That's very rough numbers.

As of 10 years ago, scholars counted 60 million American evangelicals, without really defining that adjective, that category, very closely.

We used to know what an evangelical was. It meant one thing in the 16th century, 17th century, came to mean something slightly different in the 18th century, and something even more different in the 19th century, and in the 20th century and 21st.

That's a pretty slippery word, evangelical. But used to be, as George Marston said, an evangelical is somebody who loves

Jesus and likes Billy Graham. My students don't know who Billy Graham was, so that's difficult.

But evangelicals, people who love Jesus, believe the Bible, are Protestant, believe in salvation by faith, we won't be too precise about that, grace, we won't be too precise about that.

So 60 million of those, wherever they may be found, and then 60 million Roman Catholics.

But among those 120 million, and particularly among the 60 million evangelicals, the

Reformation is mostly an undiscovered country. There are, in the world that I live in most of the time, is the confessional reform world.

These are Dutch reformed and other kinds of reformed, and Presbyterian. These are theologically conservative, typically culturally conservative, and I would like to call them confessionally reformed people.

People whose congregations, at least, believe things like documents like the Heidelberg Catechism, the

Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort, the so -called three forms of unity. The Canons of Dort are, of course, where we get the five points, so -called five points of Calvinism, and then the

Westminster Standards, the Confession, the Larger Catechism, and the Shorter Catechism.

And all together, I call them the six forms of unity, because they confess essentially the same theology, piety, and practice.

But if you add up all the people who actually say that they believe those things, and attend congregations that profess those documents, you're talking about 500 ,000 people at the most out of the 60 million.

And if you're looking for other public adherence, conscious adherence to the Reformation, you're looking at 3 million

LCMS, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, about 500 ,000, no, about 300 ,000

Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, slightly more conservative Lutherans, and then a few other sort of parallel Lutheran bodies.

So out of all of American Protestants, you're talking about a very small percentage of people.

And so, in a sense, and I tell my students this, we who embrace the Reformation, we're like missionaries to a culture that, in some ways, thinks it's related to the

Reformation but really has no concept of it. And even in my own circles,

I spend most of my time reminding my own people what the Reformation is and why it's so important.

And the thing we want to start with tonight is a distinction with which you may or may not be familiar, is a distinction with which

I was not very familiar, that I had to learn. I learned it partly when

I was in school, but not well and not deeply. And then I learned it a little bit more doing my doctoral research.

I researched a German Reformed theologian who wrote an important book on covenant theology called, the author's name, the writer's name, is

Caspar Olivianus. He's a contributor to, editor of the Heidelberg Catechism. And I know some of you know, the pastor knows, and I think has quoted and referred to the

Heidelberg Catechism, published in 1563, a wonderful summary of the Christian faith. And it's one of the things that we confess in our churches that I've actually signed my name at an ecclesiastical meeting on a piece of paper underneath those documents saying, this is my faith, and these are the things to which you can hold me accountable if I stray from this.

It's the word of God as summarized in these documents. And so reading him, I was struck by how often he, this

German Reformed theologian in the 1560s, 70s, and into the 1580s, was talking about the law and the gospel.

And in his commentary on Romans, he says in one place, the whole book of Romans is about fundamentally the distinction between law and gospel.

So I knew it was important, and I had a conceptual idea of what it was. But when

I was a full -time preacher for six years, a minister of a congregation in Kansas City, Missouri, for six years, and then

I preached various places as I was pursuing my doctoral research, and then

I was teaching at Wheaton College, and teaching and preaching. And in those 10 years after my ordination, until I, over 11 years till I got to Westminster Seminary, there was a,

I knew there was a serious problem with my preaching, but I didn't know what it was. And I would preach the gospel,

I remember preaching through the Exodus, the whole book of Exodus, chapter by chapter, passage by passage, and preaching the gospel.

And then at the end of some of those sermons, I thought, well, I need to apply these sermons to God's people, so I would say to them, and if you meet this condition, and it wasn't always faith, or trusting in Jesus, sometimes it was some other condition,

God will accept you. And I functionally contradicted everything that I had just said in the previous 35 or 40 minutes.

And I knew there was a problem with my preaching, and I didn't know what it was. I'm sure my wife knew there was a problem with my preaching.

She didn't know what it was. And I went to a conference, so I got, I was called to Westminster Seminary, I'm teaching church history, and we had a conference on preaching, we had all these famous preachers and teachers of preaching come and give short talks,

Tim Keller, we had Jay Adams, we had my professor Dirk Bergman, Bob Godfrey, I'm sure

I'm leaving people out, and Mike Horton got up and gave a little 20 -minute talk on distinguishing law and gospel in preaching.

And it totally revolutionized my preaching and my reading of the Bible, 20 minutes.

It was like scales fell from my eyes. And in that 20 -minute talk, I became a groupie, you know, a bunch of people went off to lunch with Mike and I went tagging along because I wanted to hear more, but I knew fundamentally he had explained the problem with my preaching for the previous 10 years.

I had not consciously distinguished between the law and the gospel, and having preached the gospel,

I was putting people back under the law, unintentionally. I didn't mean to do it, but I was doing it, and I did it because I didn't know how to distinguish law and gospel.

And the tragedy of that is, there's no reason for it, and had I been better read in our own tradition,

I would have known better than to do that, because our own writers explicitly exhorted me not to do what

I had done. And it exhorted me to make this distinction between law and gospel. And why did they do this?

Because there were five things that Luther did as he, in a sense, set the

Reformation in motion between 1513 and 1521. And this is one of those five things.

I'll sketch the others very, very quickly. I can't go into them because I just don't have time. But the first thing that he did was to discover the doctrine of sovereign grace.

When Luther began teaching in the university, he didn't understand the doctrine of sovereign grace.

He didn't understand what we now call the doctrine of total depravity. And it was as he was lecturing through the

Psalms in 1512, 1513, 1514, the first time, he was reading

Augustine on the Psalms. And as he was lecturing through the Psalms and reading Augustine, he realized that he had been taught a kind of theology called

Pelagianism, which denies original sin, which thinks that we have abilities that we don't have, which doesn't understand that grace is completely unconditional, free, and sovereign, and that we are brought to new life sovereignly by God's grace.

We call that regeneration now after the Synod of Dort, and that we are by nature dead in sins and trespasses.

This is a huge breakthrough. This is the first great breakthrough of the Reformation. Second great breakthrough came in his next set of lectures as he was lecturing through the

Book of Romans, 1515, 1516. And as he's doing this, he discovers that the

Apostle Paul has a doctrine of imputation. Now, he knew already a doctrine of imputation, but the doctrine he knew was that God was going to impute to Luther perfection for Luther's best efforts.

And the way you know this theology, it's the Ben Franklin theology. I hope you don't believe it. Ben Franklin said,

God helps those who help themselves. And that is what Luther had been taught. He'd learned it from a

Franciscan theologian who was commenting on an earlier theologian, and there's a long

Latin phrase that he had learned, that he... And as he's reading

Psalms, he's coming to reject this. And as he's reading Romans, he comes to see that, no, it's not...

God doesn't impute perfection to my best efforts. He doesn't meet my best efforts with grace.

He imputes Jesus' actual, inherent, perfect righteousness to me.

That was a huge breakthrough. That's a second great breakthrough. A third great breakthrough, he says, came in 1519.

In 1545, as he was writing the preface, near the end of his life, he died in 1546. Near the end of his life, writing the preface to his

Latin works, he explained when he discovered this doctrine of sola fide that we'll be talking about tomorrow, or we're going to be talking about tonight a little bit, but we're going to be talking about it specifically tomorrow.

And he said it was in 1519, and it was after he had lectured through Galatians the first time,

Hebrews first time, Psalms again the second time. And through the course of those lectures, he learned this doctrine, particularly,

I think it was probably Galatians and Hebrews that really did it for him, this doctrine that faith is not a virtue, a strength, a power within us.

It's an empty hand that looks away from ourselves and looks to Jesus and apprehends

Jesus. What makes faith powerful is not the quality of faith, nor the quality of the believer, but the object of faith.

And the object of true faith is Jesus, and that's what makes faith powerful. That's a third great breakthrough.

Fourth great breakthrough was about the same time, well, a little later, 1521, about March of 1521, he writes a letter where he essentially begins to articulate what we know as the doctrine of sola scriptura, that the

Bible is the final, sole, unique authority for the Christian faith and the

Christian life. It is the final court of appeal, and it's sufficiently clear so that we can know what we must know for salvation and for the

Christian life. And that's a great breakthrough. Now, these are all biblical doctrines. These are doctrines to one degree or other that were taught in the early church, and these were doctrines to one degree or other that even had been echoed throughout the medieval church in different ways, but nobody had pulled it all together this way with this clarity as Luther.

So these are really massive breakthroughs. And you have to understand, he's doing this by himself.

And nobody had put it this way, right, with this clarity, and pulled all these pieces together quite this way for a very long time, and nobody around him was doing this.

You ever been on a trip where, you know, maybe a motorcycle ride where you're riding with a bunch of other people, just imagine this if you haven't done it, and everybody else says, no, we've got to go this way, and you absolutely know you have to go that way, and you go despite the fact that everybody else is going that way, and you're going to go this way.

That's scary, because what if everybody else is right, and what if you're wrong? Well, that's what

Luther did. Now, we look back and we say, well, of course, sola gratia, right, by grace alone, of course through faith alone, of course according to Scripture alone.

What else would you do? Well, when you're the first guy doing it for a thousand years, that's no small thing on the basis of the imputation of Christ.

And the last thing that he discovered, and I can't give you a concrete date,

I just haven't figured it out. I can see him thinking about it. I can see it beginning to poke in and out of his consciousness already as early as 1513.

But by 1525, I know for sure, and I think probably a little earlier, he articulates this distinction between law and gospel, and this is the distinction that Luther says that without it, you're not a theologian.

Without it, right, if you don't get the distinction between the law and gospel, you are no different, he says, than a

Muslim or a Jew, and he doesn't mean a Jewish Christian, he means a Jewish non -Christian or a pagan, right?

You fundamentally do not understand Scripture. And by the way, all of the Orthodox Reformed writers that followed

Luther, all the Orthodox Lutheran writers, of course, agreed with him on this, but so did all of the Orthodox Reformed writers.

And one of the things I'm trying to, of which I'm trying to convince my own people is, the Dutch have an expression, onze volk, our people, trying to convince onze volk that this is our inheritance, and it's not exclusively the province of the

Lutherans. And the evidence for that is overwhelming. But anyway, we'll come to that if we have time.

So what am I talking about, this distinction between law, it's so important, tell me what it is. Well, Luther says in his 1531 commentary on Galatians, this is on Galatians 2 .14,

therefore, whoever knows well how to distinguish the gospel from the law should give thanks to God and know that he is a real theologian.

The way to distinguish the one from the other is to locate the gospel in heaven and the law on earth.

That's so classically Luther, what does he mean by that? He means that the gospel is only known from Scripture, but that everybody knows the law.

You knew the law from the moment you were born. Everybody you know knows the law. There isn't anybody that's ever existed in all of human history that doesn't know the law, and we know that from Scripture.

The apostle Paul says that, that everybody knows the law in their conscience by nature.

And Paul says that both in Romans 1 and in Romans 2, particularly Romans 2 of 14 and following.

In 1518, in one of my favorite places in Luther, in the

Heidelberg Disputation, he says, the theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil, but the theologian of the cross says what a thing is.

Now, this might seem sort of cryptic, and it is a little cryptic, but this is actually an indicator that he's getting to grips with the distinction,

I think, between law and gospel. He's making here, this would be a whole other conference, the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory, or the theologian of the cross or the theologian of glory.

The theologian of glory is a rationalist. He thinks that what his mind is the measure of all things, ultimately.

He's a moralist. He thinks that he's going to do things that will enable him to present himself to God, and he's a triumphalist.

He thinks he's getting better every way and every day, and a theologian of the cross knows that he knows the opposite of all those things.

But anyway, there's a hint in that. If you want to look this up and meditate on this, this is

Thesis 21 from the Heidelberg Disputation. I've spent a lot of years just thinking about Thesis 19, 20, and 21.

I've done whole conferences on just those three theses. In a 1532 commentary or sermon on Galatians, and I don't know where,

I don't know the passage, he says the difference between the law and the gospel is the height of knowledge in Christendom.

If this ability is lacking, one, as I was saying earlier, cannot tell a Christian from a heathen or a

Jew. All right, so as I say, if it's so important, what is it? Well, let's start in the beginning, Genesis 2,

Genesis 2, 16 and 17. What Luther's doing, and I'll come to tell you in a bit how this came about and how we lost this distinction, what

Luther's doing is he's recognizing that there are two kinds of words in Scripture, and by words

I don't mean just individual units, I mean two ways of speaking. And the one way of speaking is law, and the other way of speaking is gospel.

There are two words, two kinds of words in Scripture, two, right? They're all God's words, right?

It's all God's word, but within God's word there are two subspecies, right? Two subspecies or two species of words, and the first species is law and the second species is gospel.

And the first, and essentially he's saying, well, what is law? Well, anything that says, do this and live, whether it uses those words or not, if that's the message, that's law.

And if it says, Christ shall do, or the seed of the woman shall do, or Christ has done, that's gospel.

Does that make sense? I'm not saying do you agree with it, I'm just asking if conceptually it makes sense.

I hope you'll agree with it at least somewhat by the time I'm done, but I just want to make sure it's conceptually clear. Anything that says, do this and live, whether it uses those words or not, if that's the substance of what's being said, that's law.

And anything that says, God shall do, Christ shall do, or Christ has done, that's gospel.

Okay? All right, so Genesis 2 .16, and Yahweh Elohim commanded the man saying, you shall surely eat from every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day you eat thereof, you shall surely die.

Is that law, or is that gospel? Well, that's a law, right? You know,

I mean, you know instinctively what a law is, right? When the posted speed limit is 35, that's the law.

And you look in your rearview mirror and you see, I saw a lot of blue lights, are they all blue here? Are they red lights when they're in your mirror?

Right? In California, there are red lights in your mirror, red and blue, right? You see those red and blue lights, you're, whoop, whoop, whoop, right?

Pull over right away, he's lit you up because he wants you to pull over now, not in six blocks, and he, she, right, has pulled you over because he, the officer has probable cause.

And what was that probable cause? You were doing 42 in a 35. You broke the law, and the officer observed you breaking the law.

So a law is a rule that requires perfect and personal and perpetual obedience.

And the law says do this and live. In other words, if you drive 34 point, given the conditions are good, right?

It's possible that driving 35 is still against the law if conditions, if it's a blizzard and you're driving 35, that could possibly be against the law.

But if all conditions are good and you're driving 34 .5, you're okay. You're driving 35 .5,

you've, you've transgressed the law, and the law says do this and live. The law requires that you do it, that you perform it.

And if you fail to perform it, you will suffer the consequences. And the officer pulls you over, says,

I clocked you doing 42 in a 35. Here's your ticket. You are done.

And you just have to say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. I transgressed the law. I am guilty.

You signed the ticket. You pay the fee. Don't be a jerk, right? You broke the law.

The law caught you. The law convicted you. The law said do this and live. You failed to do this and live. You transgressed.

God said to Adam, who was created in righteousness and true holiness, there's nothing wrong with Adam. He wasn't broken.

He wasn't defective. He didn't have concupiscence running around in his soul prior to the fall.

And God said to him, you can eat from any of the trees in the garden, including presumably the tree of life.

But you may not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die.

And so the negative is eat this and die. The positive is do this and live.

Obey me and live. And what was he really saying? He was saying, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor, as it happens,

Eve, as yourself. And mysteriously, of course, you know how this went.

Adam, as the head of all humanity, failed, refused, and failed. And you know the consequences.

All right. So this thread runs throughout Scripture. The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die.

Oh, Leviticus 18, right? Leviticus 18, 1 through 5 is a classic passage that we've always often gone to.

Then the Lord spoke, right? Yahweh spoke to Moses saying, speak to the sons of Israel and say to them,

I am Yahweh, your Elohim, your God. You shall not do what is done in the land of Egypt, where you live, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan, where I'm bringing you.

You are my redeemed people. You're not pagans. You shall not walk in their statutes.

You are to perform my judgments and keep my statutes, to live in accord with them.

This is serious business right now. Whenever Yahweh says,

I am Yahweh, your God, this is like an oath. You people are, right?

I had a friend that used to say when things went badly, he was an old Air Force pilot, and he said,

I'm in deep kimchi. If you fail to do this right, when

Yahweh says, when he says, I am Yahweh, I'm your covenant God, I'm the God who delivered you out of Egypt. I'm the sovereign

Adonai, right? El Shaddai, I'm the boss.

Do this or else. You are to perform my statutes and keep my statutes.

I am Yahweh, your God. Verse 5 is the key verse. So you shall keep my statutes and my judgments, by which a man may live if he does them.

I am Yahweh. Do this and live is a principle that runs all through the scripture.

This is a kind of word. This is God's word, but it's a specific kind of God's word.

And the Reformation, through Luther, came to recognize that this is a specific kind of word from God.

This is a law word, not a bad word. The law is holy, good, righteous, and just, and it reflects

God's nature. And it is that moral law is as immutable as God is.

God doesn't change. God is what he is. You and I, we all change. We're body and soul, and we're finite.

We're creatures and we're sinners. And as a consequence of all that, we change. We won't be in three minutes what we were three minutes ago.

We are, and for most of us, right, it's decay is what's happening, right?

That's what's happening to most of us is decay. You kids, you just wait and see.

You're enjoying it while you can. You crest at a certain point, and it's all downhill after that.

A person who does this shall live. For example, in Matthew 19, the story of the rich young man, right, 16 through 23, right, and I have to summarize or work through this quickly because I also want to go to Luke 10, 25 through 29.

It's a parallel passage. And behold, a man came up to him and said, teacher, what good deed must

I do to have eternal life? That's such an interesting question. He understands that there is this do principle, that the law has to be performed, and he thinks that he can do it.

That's very important. He understands that there's this principle that the law must be done, the law must be performed, and he thinks that he can do it.

What must I do to have eternal life? And he said to him, why do you ask me about what is good?

Why do you call me good? There's only one who is good. Now, look at what Jesus says. If you would enter eternal life, right, or if you would enter life, keep the commandments.

Jesus doesn't let him off the hook. Since he came to him on the basis of his own personal doing,

Jesus says, you want to enter into life on the basis of your doing? Then keep the commandments.

And what does he say? Which ones? First thing he tries to do, right, he tries to narrow down the scope.

Well, there's a lot of laws. Now, as the rabbis counted the laws, there were 613 mitzvot, 613 commandments, the judicial laws, the religious laws, ceremonial laws, and the

Ten Commandments, the moral law. And Jesus says, what does Jesus say?

You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery. He begins to recite parts of the Ten Commandments.

You shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, honor your father. He takes them out of order, which is interesting. He surely knew them.

And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Quick summary of the...

In other words, he invokes the moral law, the law given at Sinai, the do this and live.

And the young man... And look what the young man says, all these I've kept. All right?

Wrong answer. He should have been crushed. He should have said, teacher,

I've never really kept these. In my whole life, I've never really kept these.

I've never really loved the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and my neighbor as myself. Certainly not sufficiently to present myself to God on the basis of my performance.

And Jesus knows that he doesn't get it yet. And so the young man says, well, where am

I falling short? And Jesus says, if you would be perfect, go sell what you possess and give it to the poor, and then you will have treasure in heaven.

Come and follow me. And some people have represented this as to say, you know, had he done this, this is the call to all

Christians for discipleship. And this is what Jesus expects of you as a condition of entering into heaven.

No, Jesus, this is what... You say, so what's the big deal about distinguishing law and gospel?

Right here. Is Jesus preaching the law? Is he making a promise to the young man that if he meets this condition, that he'll enter into a state of blessedness on the basis of his personal performance, or is he doing something else?

If you think this is gospel, that's one reading of the passage. It's a significant and a serious misreading of this passage.

He's preaching the law. He's saying, you think you've done everything? Let me give you a law that even you will see that you can't keep, and look how it goes.

When the young man heard this, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. That was the law that he could not keep, and would not keep, and did not keep.

Jesus preaches the law to him and then just leaves him, remarkably, as the story goes.

Who knows whatever transpired? But as we have it here in Matthew, we don't hear anymore.

He just places him under the law. Why? Because Jesus knew, if I can put it this way, what

Luther later rediscovered, that there is a difference between law and gospel, and the first use of the law is that it teaches us the greatness of our sin and misery.

We call that the pedagogical use. Paul teaches us that in Galatians 3. The law, or Galatians 4, the law was a pedagogue.

Now, Pastor and I are old, and when we were boys in Omaha, in the Omaha public schools, teachers were allowed to beat us, and they did.

Mrs. Corcoran whacked me with a switch at Dundee Elementary. I don't have clear memories, but I do remember the dread, because I had a desk outside her office.

I had my own desk. Every day, I went up for an hour to give Mrs. Connor a break, my second grade teacher.

So I know what Paul, when Paul says the law is a pedagogos, he's invoking that old -fashioned notion of a teacher.

Anybody here went to Catholic school with nuns? OK, old -school Catholic nuns.

What happened if you couldn't recite your Latin paradigm? Well, that's more than I expected.

OK, they took you in the cloakroom. I was just figuring that you'd get a, that's what

I get for asking questions. A lawyer will tell you, never ask a question to which you do not already know the answer, not in court, right?

The nuns will whack you across the knuckles if you didn't learn your paradigm. That's what Paul's saying.

The law, the first use of the law is to whack us across the knuckles, and that's what Jesus does. He preaches the law to this guy who thinks that he has done all these things, because he doesn't yet know the greatness of his sin and misery.

That's what Martin Luther had to learn when he was working through the Psalms the first time. Look at Luke 10, 25 through 29.

And behold, a lawyer stood up and put him to the test saying, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

And he, Jesus, said, what is written in the law? How do you read it? By the way, that's such a question you ask to a lawyer, right?

You, it's almost Jesus now is a lawyer asking another lawyer, or a judge asking a lawyer, well, how do you read the statute?

How do you interpret that statute? Because that's what they do. And the lawyer says, you shall love the

Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus said to him, you've answered correctly.

Do this, and you shall live. And what's the next thing the lawyer does?

Who's my neighbor? He wants to minimize. He wants to, that's too much.

What we want to notice here is what does Jesus do? He puts him under the law so that he'll know, so that he, the lawyer, will come to know the greatness of his sin and misery.

The apostle Paul says in Romans 2, 13, it's not the hearers of the law, it's the doers of the law.

And again, this is a crucial place where it's essential to distinguish law and gospel.

Romans 2, 13, how is Romans structured? How is

Romans structured? Well, Romans is in three parts. The first part of Romans, there's a prologue.

And then from 118 to 320, that's the first part of Romans. And do you know what that first part of Romans is?

Is it law or is it gospel, given the definitions that I've given you?

It's law. The first part of the book of Romans, Paul preaches the law from 118 to 320.

That's all law. Where is 213? It's in the section between 118 and 320.

So you know that anything between 118 and 320, that whole section is law. Look at what

Paul says in 213. We even go back to 212.

For all who have sinned without, meaning outside the law, that is even Gentiles who didn't have the law of Moses, the 613 commandments, will also perish outside the law, right, because they're under the law, the moral law, the law of nature.

And all who have sinned under the law, the Mosaic law, the Mosaic system, will be judged by the

Mosaic system. Why? Verse 13. For it is not the hearers of the law, right, it's one thing to come to synagogue and stand up in synagogue and say,

Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad. They wouldn't have said Yahweh, but I do because it's in the

Bible. They would have used another word for the name of God.

But that's his covenant name, his name by which he relates to his people. Shema Yisrael, hear, O Israel.

The Lord our God, the Lord is one. That's a fundamental confession. And James says any schmuck can stand up in the synagogue and say the

Shema. The question is, do you believe it? And that's a whole other, we'll get there, that's another discussion.

Verse 13. For it's not the hearers of the Torah who are righteous with God.

Who's righteous with God? It's the doers of the law. Whether Gentiles under the law of nature or Jews under the law of Moses, they're all under this obligation to do this and live.

So this do this and live principle is all through Scripture. And that do this and live principle is law.

It's not gospel. Is that getting clearer?

It's crucial that you get this, right? You don't want to be a Muslim. Luther says if you don't get this, you're no different than a

Muslim or a Jew, an unbelieving Jew, or a pagan. It's essential to be a

Christian to get this distinction. So I've been using this language from Westminster Confession 19 -1.

The law requires personal. I love these. It's so carefully done.

Westminster Confession 19 -1. The law requires personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience.

And you know where they learned that? They learned it from Deuteronomy 27 -26, which says cursed, as Paul has it in Galatians 3 -10.

Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything which is written in the book of the law.

Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything which is written in the book of the law.

That's what the law says, do this and live. So that's law. What's gospel?

Gospel is good news for sinners. Gospel is good news for sinners.

And the gospel comes very early on. In Genesis 3 -15, the seed of the woman shall crush his head and the serpent shall strike his heel.

The gospel is a promise that somebody else will do on our behalf.

And it starts right at the very beginning of the story. The law is at the beginning of the story and the gospel is at the beginning of the story.

Just as soon as we sin, here comes God the Son in the garden. What have you done?

Who was walking with Adam in the, as we translate it, the cool of the day?

Probably not entirely correct translation. I'm confident Moses is not making meteorological observations about the weather.

It's probably an elliptical expression that has something to do with the day of judgment. In the day, in the voice of the day, the sound of the day, here comes

God the Son before he was incarnate. And he comes to his image bearer,

Adam, who was made in righteousness and true holiness. He says, what have you done? As if he didn't know.

It was a rhetorical question. He didn't need information. He knew what had transpired. But he also promises that the seed of the woman, who's going to be the seed of the woman?

God the Son is going to become incarnate and to be in the womb of the virgin.

She's blessed among all women. She's not a mediatrix. She's not a co -redemptrix, certainly.

But Rome is wrong when it says in the catechism, I forget exactly where now, that she's a mediatrix.

She's not a mediatrix. But she is blessed among all women because in her womb was

God the Son incarnate fulfilling this promise. That's the gospel.

Isaiah, we could just go all the way through Scripture. Obviously, we don't have time. Go all the way through Scripture.

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news of blessedness and salvation.

This is a different kind of word. So for sinners, the law is bad news because after the fall, the law continues to say, do this and live.

Now here we are in sin and death, conceived in sin, dead in sins and trespasses,

David says in Psalm 51, and Paul says in Ephesians 2, 1 through 4. But the law doesn't relent.

It's like now we're talking about driving. It's now like being blind or having lost your sight, having lost your senses, and you're still operating a vehicle, which is a really bad scenario, and the law still requires that you meet the standard.

Well, you can't even see the speed limit. How are you going to meet the standard? You can't see the road. You're toast.

But the law never stops being the law. God's not your grandfather, and he doesn't say, oh, faith, well, you tried the best you could.

You gave a good effort there, boy. Boy, oh, not bad. No, the law says do this and live.

The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die. And what have you done? You've transgressed, right, constantly in every way.

Even your best efforts are fouled and stained with sin and corruption.

The moment you think, you know, I was not too bad today, right?

That very thought is a corrupting thought because you were not that good today. That thought was a lie.

So all through Scripture, the gospel keeps coming again and again until finally, Jesus says in John 19 .30,

right, to Telestai. It's finished. What is the gospel?

It's the announcement by his one act of obedience. Christ, the last

Adam, has fulfilled what you know, what you and I know, as the covenant of works.

He did, right? God said to Adam, do this and live. Christ, the last

Adam, did. And on the basis of his doing, he lived.

Why was he raised from the dead? Why was his resurrection a vindication? His resurrection was a vindication of his actual inherent righteousness that every moment of his life, he obeyed the law.

He kept the law. He did the law. He performed the law. He did this and lived.

That's why he was raised from the dead. Do you understand that? God did not raise Jesus from the dead because, well, he did the best he could, and it was a good try, and it's the best that anybody's done so far.

God the Spirit raised Jesus, God the Son incarnate, true God and true man, from the dead, from the tomb, because Jesus was actually inherently righteous and had met the terms of the law perfectly.

When he was in the wilderness and the evil one came to him and said, let me show you all the kings of the earth, he said, in effect, get behind me,

Satan. When Peter tried to lead him away from the cross, oh, no, not you.

Jesus said, literally, get thee behind me, Satan. I have a job to do.

I have a mission to accomplish. I have a salvation to procure for all those whom the

Father gave me, for whom I came to lay down my life to actually accomplish their redemption, and I will not be dissuaded, even if it meant sweating great drops of blood in the garden before and submitting to all the terrible abuse to which he voluntarily and freely submitted for our sakes, for my sake and for yours.

See, that's gospel. The gospel says that everlasting righteousness and salvation are freely given by God merely of grace only for the sake of Christ's merits.

That's Heidelberg Catechism 21. Freely given only for the sake of Christ's merits.

And as Heidelberg 60 says, it is as if, if you're a believer, it is as if I had done personally accomplished all that Jesus did for me.

That's gospel. All right, well, there's a whole lot more

I could say and should say. Very briefly, if you're wondering, well, okay, what happened?

Where did it go? Why did we lose that? That's a whole other lecture that I thought

I could squeeze in, but I couldn't. The very short version of that lecture is something like this.

In the very early church, we faced a terrible crisis, two -fold crisis.

One were the Gnostics, and the other were the Marcionites. And the Gnostics and the Marcionites both, they disagreed on a variety of things, but they agreed that the

Old Testament was one thing and the New Testament was fundamentally, radically something else.

And so they were radical dualists relative to the Old Testament and the New Testament, and they both regarded the

Old Testament God, Yahweh, as a semi -god, a demi -urge, they called Him. He's a creator.

He's mean, judgmental, angry, and the New Testament God is friendly, warm, and forgiving.

And they set up this dichotomy between the Old and the New Testament. In order to react to that, the early

Orthodox Christians, our people, began talking about the whole Bible as if it were one thing.

It's all law. And they said there was old law and new law, but it's all law.

And they did that in order to keep the unity of Scripture. But by talking that way, we set the stage for losing this distinction between the law as one kind of word and the gospel as another kind of word.

So we came to speak of the law and the gospel not in theological ways, but mainly and almost exclusively for 1 ,500 years in historical ways.

So when we said law, we meant the old law. When we said gospel, we meant the new law. So that when

Martin Luther was in the process of becoming a Protestant, one of the things he was wrestling with was, well, you put us under the

Ten Commandments, and then Jesus comes at the Sermon on the Mount, and He makes it worse. This is terrible. How am

I ever going to be saved? And it was only when he figured out that the law is one kind of word and the gospel is another kind of word did he realize that the gospel is not, here's some additional grace to enable you to keep the law unto eventual final justification and final salvation, because he had been taught as a

Roman Catholic that he was initially justified in his baptism, but then he had sinned and lost that. And so he hoped for a final justification, partly on the basis of what

Jesus did, but really Jesus becomes a great facilitator. It's really finally ultimately going to be up to how sanctified he was able to be in this life.

By the way, if you ever hear people talking, I don't care how famous they are, how well -regarded they are, how popular they are, how pious they may be, that there's a first stage and a second stage,

I got an answer for you. This is what you say to that. Whenever you read that, whenever you hear it, get thee behind me,

Satan. There's no such thing as a first stage and a second stage. There's no first stage of salvation.

There's no first stage of justification. There's no, right, and there's certainly no second stage.

Jesus didn't die to make it possible for us to do our part. He died to accomplish our salvation and our justification of which, right, salvation is just our justification, our sanctification, and our glorification, and Jesus accomplished it all.

He bought it all. He finished it all, and it's all freely given to you, and if you have Jesus now by grace alone, through faith alone, you are acquitted, you are justified, having therefore been justified, period.

We have peace with God. There is therefore now no condemnation. Not there is therefore now no condemnation now, but there could be later if you don't do well enough.

The final judgment, let me put it plainly, the final judgment is not like a test. Well, I'm good now, but I still have to face the final judgment, and it's going to be a pretty scary test, and they're going to play the video back of my life, so I better be good because they're going to play that video back, and that's going to be humiliating.

Well, if they did play that video, it would be humiliating. It would be worse than that. It's going to send you right to hell, and that's worse than humiliation.

Trust me. Hell is much worse. You get over humiliation. You don't ever get over hell. One day you're in hell.

The next day you're in hell. The next day you're in hell. It just never ends. Ask the rich man.

Can I have some water, please? No. You're in hell.

You don't get any water. It's hell. That's why they call it hell. It's the relentless judgment of God.

When Jesus said it was finished, he didn't say I did my part. He said it's finished. It's done.

I did it. And when you trust him, you get all of that. You get all of the benefits, and it is done now.

And so at the judgment, you know what's going to happen? God's going to announce, all you people, all you people who believe, by grace alone through faith alone, by my sovereign grace, you believed in my son

Jesus, you're all my people. And all you other folks, here's the film.

You've got to watch the film. There's no film for us. Right? It's all done.

Do you understand that? That's the difference between law and gospel. So it's not theory. You go to bed tonight.

If you're in Christ, you're under the gospel for your standing with God, for your sanctification, and for your glorification.

We lost that because we started talking about old law and new law, and it was only finally, ultimately, when

Luther realized that there were these two kinds of words that we realized. As my grandpa used to say, holy mackerel, that the good news is really good news.

It's not slightly better news, right? For a lot of the history of the church, the good news was just slightly better news.

Or not, depending on how you read it. As Luther really contemplated what

Jesus was saying, he said, it's not slightly better news, it's actually worse news. No, the good news is really good news, that he accomplished it.

He did it. And through the whole history of the church, to some degree or other, we've been struggling.

We recovered it in the Reformation, and particularly in the modern period, people have been chipping away, chipping away, chipping away.

Richard Baxter, Jacobus Arminius, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, the

General Assembly of the Scottish Church in the 18th century when they were going after the merriment. In my own world, the ecclesiastical world

I live in, Norman Shepard went at this. The Federal Visions go at this.

The New Perspective goes at this. Daniel Fuller is attacking this. John Piper is whacking away at this.

People who say that you have to meet certain conditions besides trusting in Jesus in order to be saved, that's law.

People are constantly chipping away. So you need to be firmly convinced of this conviction, of this distinction.

It needs to become a core conviction of yours so that you'll be able to distinguish law and gospel. You need to listen to him.

You need to listen to him. It's their job. They're commissioned by God.

Let me leave you with this quote. I know we're out of time, but this is a longish quote, but I want you to hear this because maybe you've never heard this.

This is Luther recounting as an old man. He doesn't have much more time to live.

He's going to die in 1546. He doesn't know that, but he's been thinking he's going to die for a number of years.

He did not feel very well. He had kidney stones and all kinds of stuff. He had a bad diet. If you've ever had kidney stones, you're ready to go.

Take me now, Lord. I've got kidney stones. I'm not kidding. It's time to go. 1545,

Luther says, Meanwhile, in that same year, 1519, I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again. I felt confident that I was now more experienced than I had since I had dealt in university courses with St.

Paul's letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the letter to the Hebrews. That's what I told you. I had conceived a burning desire to understand what

Paul meant in his letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word, which is in chapter one, the justice of God is revealed in it.

I hated that word, the justice of God, by which use and custom of my teachers

I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it.

That is, the justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust. In other words, he said he was taught that we're justified because we're sanctified.

That's what he's saying. And he realized that was bad news because he was never sufficiently sanctified. Just as soon as he confessed all his sins to Father Staupitz, he'd be going back to his cell to beat himself, to lay on the floor, to say more prayers, and to do more good works.

He'd see some monk who was napping instead of scrubbing the floor, and he'd think some evil thought about that lazy monk.

And he'd turn around and do a 180 and go back to the confessional because he had to get rid of his sins because he didn't want to be under the judgment of God.

Which, if you really believe that God is a consuming fire, you'd do exactly what Martin did. And finally,

Staupitz, who didn't really quite believe all this stuff, I mean, he believed it, but he didn't, he finally told

Martin, go away and come back when you've got something to confess. But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience.

I couldn't be sure whether God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners.

In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry with God. I said, isn't it enough that we miserable sinners lost for all eternity because of original sin, oppressed by every kind of calamity through the

Ten Commandments? Why does God heave sorrow upon sorrow through the gospel? This is how he used to think before he figured out the distinction between law and gospel.

The gospel just heaps trouble on him, right? Through the gospel, and threatened us with his justice and wrath.

This is how I was raging with a wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context.

The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written, the just lives by faith.

And I began to understand that in this verse, the justice of God, that by which the just person lives, is the gift of God, that is, by faith.

I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the gospel, but it is a passive justice.

That is, by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, the just person lives by faith.

All at once, I felt I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. And immediately, I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light.

I ran through the Scriptures from memory and saw that other terms had analogous meanings. The work of God, that is what

God works in us, the power of God, by which he makes us powerful, the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

I exalted in this sweetest word of mine the justice of God with as much love as before. I had hated it with hate.

This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise. Afterward, I read Augustine, and he goes on to say that he found the same stuff in De Spiritu et

Litera. What's the breakthrough? Well, the breakthrough here, he's thinking about his soul of fide, but part of the breakthrough is the distinction between law and gospel because he realized that the law is one kind of word and the gospel is another.

All right, well, we have to stop. We'll take a break, and I've already burned some of our time, but we'll take a break.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right en route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.