Grace and Law IV: The Law for All Times

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is Steve Crampton and we're looking at the themes of law and grace and how they are interwoven throughout the Christian experience, how they affect our understanding of the work of Christ, how they affect our understanding of the Christian life, you know, when we've been saved by grace and brought into the realm of grace, how we understand the enormity of our need, how we understand, you know, the magnificence of the gospel.

There are just so many things that are critical in the Christian life which are united to our understanding of how God's law and how God's grace interact, especially for the believer in the New Covenant.

So we're going to be looking at that. Last week we started to look at this question and we'll continue it this week and the question is this, what about law, moral law, a fundamental right and wrong prior to the Ten Commandments?

Did it exist? Do we have any evidence it existed? And if it did exist prior to writing it down, where did it exist? And if it does exist and we can see that it exists in humanity prior to the Ten Commandments, what implications are there going to be as we move forward with our studying this topic?

What implications flow from that reality? Last week we looked at chapter 2 of Romans, verse 14 and 15 in particular. Let me read those again. For when Gentiles who do not have the law, the written law, the Bible, do instinctively the things of the law, they do right or wrong, these not having the law are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them.

So that was our topic last week. The existence of the moral law seen not on written on paper or in the stone tablets, but in a universal existence. It is in every reasonable creature, every human, has a sense of right or wrong and no matter how twisted that is, now that sin has defaced it, it cannot be obliterated.

It exists because we are made in the image of God and warped as we are, we cannot escape a fundamental sense that some things in life are right and some things are wrong. And as we mentioned last week, Lewis, C .S. Lewis, makes a great argument there that the category in the human mind of something is right and something is wrong is a real, that's a real stumbling stone for those who want to say that there is no moral being who is behind our creation.

Yeah, you're just kind of stuck with it. Well, this week we're going to look at another couple of verses. One is found in Romans 4 and then the other is found in Romans 5 and we're going to really see some specific evidence from these verses going back into the Old Testament.

We're going to ask the question, is the fundamental content of the Ten Commandments represented in the conscience prior to the giving of the Ten Commandments? So not just a sense of right and wrong, but does God actually love and hate the things he says he loves and hates in the Ten Commandments prior to the Ten Commandments?

And does he expose those things as sinful when they break the conscience, and does he punish those? So Romans 4 and verse 15 says this, "...for the law brings about wrath," and this is in the midst of an argument about Abraham and life and justification by faith and not by works, "...for the law brings about wrath, but where there is no law there also is no violation.".

And that is just a fundamental principle. It's not even one that's limited to Scripture. If a law isn't given, it is impossible to break it. Then he says again in chapter 5 in verse 13, he adds, "...for until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.".

So men sinned prior to the Ten Commandments, but how can you say that men are guilty before a law is given? How can you break a law that hasn't been given? Or was there a law given? Yeah, I.

Think that that is a really excellent question that just has to be answered. And as we read through Scripture, by the way, I don't know if some of y 'all have experienced this, but many is the year that I've read through those Old Testament passages and failed to stop and ask, wait a minute, how can that be wrong when we haven't had the law laid down there?

And one of the first things that we want to point out here is that our obligation as creatures of a holy Creator, is our obligation to Him never changes. From Adam to the time of Genesis 4 through the giving of the law in Exodus 20 to today, the time of Christ, at any time, the obligation remains the same.

Why? Because God, the holy uncreated Creator, is immutable. He is perfect, His law is perfect, was always perfect. He is unchanging, and consequently that obligation is unchanging. What we lost at the fall was our ability to keep the law, which one would hope, and I think is intended through all of history, to point us to that desperate need for grace and mercy and bring us back to the cross of Christ where those obligations were dealt with once and for all.

And so I think there are a host of theological heresies of just misunderstandings of, frankly, the fallen human heart that wants to be free of law, that wants to believe that those commandments no longer apply to us, and that selfish desire to always do what we want to do rather than what we are called to do and ought to do, are still there, and we wrestle with those.

But I think we have to lay that sort of foundation in order to rightly approach the law and the gospel.

Certainly. So if the obligation hasn't altered, then we are, you know, we are rightly condemned for not obeying our Creator. I think that, you know, as you mentioned, there are quite a few heresies and misconceptions that are cleared up immediately if we base the existence of morality and the content of morality not upon our abilities but upon God's unalterable perfection, His moral perfection.

He is straight or righteous, and He is always straight, and His straightness cannot be altered, and therefore what pleases Him can't change and what displeases Him can't change. He can be bent. We can't bend God's nature to fit our nature, and neither can we bend His moral expectations.

But may I—doesn't that raise the question? Well, wait a minute. If we all concede and God recognizes we're incapable of keeping that law, how is it fair to impose that law on a people that is incapable of keeping it?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question, and I think that, like you said, it's not just the big thinkers that wrestle with this, or it's not just the moral philosophers. It's the average guy that, maybe unknown to himself, is using a false logic.

So let me give you this illustration. If you are in a school setting, and you're, you know, everybody takes a test in your class, and everybody fails, and you fail, how comforting it is to go home and say to the parent, everybody failed, even Susie, and Susie always gets an A.

No, everybody failed. No one passed, and we feel that the universal failure of our class, therefore, alters the nature of failure. My failure wasn't bad. My failure wasn't even a failure. Actually, it's wrong to expect me to pass a test that everyone fails.

So apply that morally. If all humanity is imperfect, we have become very adept at saying things like this. Well, we're all sinners. I mean, a Christian's not perfect. He's just forgiven. And we might as well say it this way.

God, everybody fails, so failure can't be a big deal. Think of it this other way. You go to school, and you take your test, and everybody in the classroom makes an A, except you. Suddenly, how ashamed you feel.

Everyone's passing papers around. What'd you make? What'd you make? What'd you make? Oh, man, great. What did you make? And you realize, slowly but surely, as you hear people murmuring around you, everyone has gotten an A, except you.

And you realize, I had the same opportunities to study. I had the same teacher. I had the same notes. I had the same textbook. What is wrong with me? And you're humiliated, and you just hope that no one turns and says, and what about you?

How strange that we think failure is a big deal if we're isolated. But if everybody fails, failure's a little deal. So, you know, just an illustration of how warped our thinking can be when it comes to right and wrong.

Doing wrong is of immense consequence, whether everybody does wrong or just you. And so we can't use that as some kind of excuse that God has lowered the bar of expectation since humanity is now marred.

And by the way, when we say that our ability has altered, the old writers talked about like a physical and moral ability. And that seems strange just because they're not really talking about physical, but think of it this way.

The faculties of the soul, the mind, the heart, the will are still there. They've not been, we've not lost them. But they are now under the dominance of a new appetite, of a new worldview, of a new view of myself.

We do not obey because we don't like to live for someone else. We cannot keep the commandments because deep within us there is, I will not surrender to another. And it is so deeply ingrained that it is not just a will not, it's a cannot.

But it is our appetite, it is our bent of soul, not losing some key faculty. I mean, I can still read the Bible. I can still say, I can still reason through things and say, I see no reason to doubt this God.

I can still say, I see that this morality is right. I can still see the provision of Christ. But something in me rises up in hatred of every one of his expectations of me, because I love being a little God.

Well, in looking at the law written on Adam's heart prior to sin, and then looking, as we're going to look in a minute at the evidences that the law is on the heart of the people after sin enters, a couple of things Reisinger says we see rising from this, some implications.

First, it is the same fundamental rule of right and wrong, he says, on Adam's heart that was later in his children and grandchildren's hearts as sinners. That same law was codified and specified through Moses at Sinai.

We're going to see some evidence of that in a minute. Second, it is the same law of right and wrong on Adam's heart and on his offspring's heart as sinners that eventually is summed up by the Lord Jesus Christ and the two commands to love your God and love your neighbor.

And the third implication is, it's the same moral law that is now rewritten on the new heart of the born again child of God, but now with a love to the King, gratitude to the King, that distinguishes us as a people who desire to obey the law.

Amen.

So, question, what happened to the law between the exile from Eden and Mount Sinai and the giving of the law? Well, Reisinger on page 19, again we're in the law and the gospel book, sets down a list of Old Testament figures violating each of the Ten Commandments.

So, for instance, Pharaoh in Exodus 20, they had false gods, they had false worship, they blasphemed the one true God. So, you got the first commandment, the second commandment, the third commandment, just laid out right there.

Again, go to Jacob, he failed to put away the foreign gods in Genesis 35. And one of the things that strikes me in these passages, John, is there's never a complaint, wait, you can't charge me with failing to put away foreign gods, false gods, you never told me.

There's never that argument made. By the way, by contrast, the story is told of Caligula, the horrific Roman Emperor, who would write tax laws in the tiniest font and post them high up on the columns, and then come and charge, especially the rich, with violating those laws, which they never saw and couldn't study.

That's not God's way here, that's not what happened in these Old Testament passages. Even the fourth commandment, right? Israelites were charged with breaking the Sabbath when they went out seeking manna on the seventh day, and the Lord chastised them.

Says, look, he gives you the sixth day, bread for two days, you know, the Sabbath is for rest, you have violated the Sabbath. Fifth commandment, Noah, after the flood, here is Ham breaking that commandment to honor one's parents, and his brothers carefully came and made amends.

Ishmael also dishonored his father Abraham, mocking him, he was punished by being cast out, Genesis 21. Sixth commandment, infamously of course, here's Cain slaying, murdering his own brother. Again, he doesn't turn and say, you never told me that.

No attempt at excusing it there. In 2nd Peter 2 5, by the way, we're told Noah was a preacher of righteousness. Well, how can you be a preacher of righteousness if you don't have the standard of righteousness before you?

It is implicit there that the entire Ten Commandments, the perfect moral law, is laid out for him, he understood it, and he shared it to no avail. The seventh commandment, adultery, again, the Sodomites famously, infamously broke that, egregiously.

Jude 7 comments, Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Again, in the account in Genesis 34, when Jacob and his sons come to Shechem, Hamor and his son Shechem were slain for their violation of Dinah, Jacob's daughter. No argument, again, that this was somehow not just.

Eighth commandment, against stealing, Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit. Genesis 31, Rachel stealing her father's idols. Ninth commandment, Cain again broke the ninth commandment when he lied about what he had done with Abel.

Am I my brother's keeper? I don't know what happened to him. Genesis 4, 9. And finally, in the tenth commandment, we have Abimelech coveting Abraham's wife, Sarah, breaking that tenth commandment, threatened with death unless he returned her to Abraham.

It's really extraordinary to me, in retrospect, if you will, when we slow down and consider that law of God was so clear to all those people before Mount Sinai. No excuses, no misunderstandings. They knew exactly what they were doing, but they failed to keep it and they suffered egregious punishment for it.

So, a couple.

Of the big implications there. One is that what Reisinger says is true, that humanity does have a law on the heart. It pre-exists the Mosaic economy, the Ten Commandments, and therefore, since it doesn't begin with the Ten Commandments or the Old Covenant of God with the Hebrew people, it doesn't end with the Old Covenant and the movement into a new covenant.

And we're going to be talking about this a lot in the coming chapters, the relationship of the moral law to the believer and grace and the finished work of Christ, but I think we need to say here at the beginning that neither the entrance of sin into humanity, debilitating us morally, nor the completion of redemption by Christ at the cross, perfect life, you know, sacrificial death, neither of these events in the scriptures is presented to us as altering what is fundamentally pleasing to God and displeasing to God.

And it seems to me that that's a.

Critical point in that timeline. Maybe it's just my simple mind going here, but if the law did not begin at Sinai, then it is illogical, at least, to conclude that it ended at Calvary. The law, God's perfection, is eternal just as God is eternal, and I think it is a difficult thing for the modern believer, and maybe this is a sign of the modern church sort of missing the boat a bit, to latch on to that fact and to willingly, joyfully submit to that call to follow God's perfect law as our happy path of obedience.

One thing that we also see.

Here is that we have the, in a sense, we have the clearing of God's honor as a judge who is punishing, sometimes with death, the sins that are seen in the ones that you read. Men and women are held guilty before an eternal God for breaking laws that have not yet been written on stone.

If they have no copy of that law within the heart, then they are a people who are in complete confusion. I'm going along, I killed my brother, what's wrong with killing a brother? You know, I wanted to do it, and nobody said I shouldn't do it.

Cain doesn't, as you mentioned, Cain never raises that argument. He doesn't justify himself. He only pleads that if God allows him to be dealt with as he deserves, it's just overwhelmingly terrible. You know, the consequences are too terrible to think of.

So, we find that God is a just judge. He is not punishing people for a law they are unaware of. They know they are crossing a line. They may not know it as clear as we do. They may not fully understand the implications of crossing the line, but the line is there.

They see it, and they.

Step across it. And it was there clearly to them. Again, there wasn't a, oh, I misunderstood. You know, like lawyers today, we might argue over one little clause or an and versus an or. None of that. No attempt to quibble with the justness of the sentence or the clarity of the law itself as it was laid down.

Yeah. Also, I think we want to avoid the misconception that the finished work of Christ in freeing us, which is a wonderful truth, has actually freed us from the law, from right and wrong. Instead, having satisfied the law's demands of his people, when we are united to Christ, when we are positionally represented by Christ, the law has a different relationship to us, but it does not change its content.

There is no planet. There is no covenant. There is no, you know, millennia where a person can look to Jehovah, to Yahweh, and say, triune God, now you love adultery. Now you love cruelty. Now you love deception.

So, for the believer, the finished work of Christ has freed me from the law as a means of trying to perfect myself and trying to earn God's love. It is not a means of righteousness. We are saved by good works, just not ours.

By his good works, which we have hoped in. But the law is still the same. It still has the, it hasn't changed its course. It's a river that hasn't, you know, altered, and it still shows the same rights and wrongs, and we need to understand that neither the fall in Eden nor the finished work of Christ at Calvary have freed us from the obligation to express love to our Creator by obeying what He says He wants.

Us to do. Yeah, and when we just, again, slow down and sort of think about it, right is right. Today, tomorrow, in Adam's day, and until eternity ends, you know, until humanity ends, and you would never say, well, no, right has changed.

We don't do that. And yet, we want to alter it, as you say, to maybe make it more palatable for us, even as believers. That's that, I think, old nature still working on trying to, in effect, remold the law, in this case, to fit us, just as we often will want to make a different God, a different Christ, to sort of fit our desires.

Can I jump to one of Reisinger's quotes here? Reisinger gives us why the moral law is indispensable for all people on page 23. Let me just read the highlights here. First, the moral law reveals the holy nature and will of the Creator, and John 17 3, Christ prays that we may have eternal life, and what is eternal life, but to know God, to know His moral law isn't that part and parcel with knowing God here.

Second, the moral law of God convinces creatures of their inability to obey this perfect standard of morality, thus revealing to them not only the sinfulness of their lives, but the sinfulness of their hearts and nature.

Third, when the Spirit brings home to the heart the spirituality of the law, it humbles sinners. Don't we all need humbling again and again, giving them a true sense of their sin and misery apart from Christ.

Fourth, and finally, all of this is to lead us, he says them, I'm gonna say us, to the only remedy for our lost and helpless condition, brings us back to the perfect work of Christ that you mentioned.

It is His works that we look to, not ours, and it is God's law that Christ looked to and delighted in, and that we as followers of Christ and believers in God must submit to and delight in as well,.

Right? Yeah, the old writers used to, you know, using John chapter 1 verse 16, in particular verse 17, they used to say the law has altered its view of you in a sense, because you're in Christ, and Christ has satisfied all the law requires.

So it comes to us from the hands of Christ, not from the hand of Moses, and from the hand of Christ it becomes a friend to lead us on the path of the happiest life, a path where how I can show love to my heavenly Father is so clearly laid out, and I'm not left to kind of meander and, you know, guessing that, I wonder if He would like this, would He like this?

So the law has become the friend, and so its relationship to us has altered in that sense. Its role alters. It's no longer condemning us because we are in Christ, but its content, what it requires, what it shows us of God's delight and displeasure cannot be altered, and so that's where it becomes so significant, not only to lead us to Christ, as you mentioned, but to guide us after we come to Christ.

Well, a couple of conclusions that Reisinger wants us to walk away from the chapter with are these. The moral law is for all times. So it's in Eden, perfect humanity. It's post-Eden, fallen humanity, but not yet written, the law written out in the time of Moses, and it's for the believer with the law written on the heart.

So the moral law, right and wrong, is for all generations of humanity, and it is for all people, Jew or Gentile, religious or irreligious, whether we have a Bible with all the wonderful clarity that God has given us, or whether we are atheistic and we worship Mother Nature, but within the heart we have a sense of right and wrong, our mind, our conscience is accusing or defending our behavior constantly.

We have the existence of a moral law, and we will be held accountable for what we did with that. So in the coming chapters we're going to be looking at the Ten Commandments, we're going to be looking at the relationship between the law and the Savior's work, the law and the Christian, the law and grace, so we hope that you'll be able to join us as we look at those things.