Grace and Law V: Is the Law Enemy or Friend?

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and with me again is Steve Crampton, and we are looking at the theme that's found in this book by Ernie Reisinger, and the book is called

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The Law and the Gospel. And this is not the only book we'll refer to, but it's kind of the book that we use as our guide.

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We want to continue to talk about this significant theme because there are so many aspects of the

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Christian life that are impacted negatively or positively depending on how balanced a biblical view we get of these things.

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So we live in a day where there's a lot of dispute over this issue, and we thought it might be helpful for Christians to kind of walk through some of just the big picture principles.

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Last week we looked at the existence of a moral law. God's moral law pre -existing the writing of the moral law at Mount Sinai, and that's a pretty important doctrinal point that we find

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Paul applying in Romans in multiple ways. So Steve, where do we see any evidence of a moral law prior to Sinai?

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Well, the main evidence I think we have for that is in the role of the conscience, where you can discern that where God didn't provide a written version of the law prior to Sinai, as far as we know, it was written in Adam's heart, too.

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You also see the evidences, you know, in the law we talk about sometimes there's a principle called res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.

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You don't have direct evidence, but given what you do see, there can be no other explanation for how it came to be.

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So here, what you see throughout the Old Testament is judgment being meted out prior to Sinai for violation of those principles in the

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Ten Commandments, and so we can plainly infer, the only explanation can be that that law was present in some form, and none of those folks as we went through a list of them in a prior broadcast, no one ever said, wait, we didn't have the law.

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How could I have transgressed the law? So the evidence is very clear that we had the law prior to that imminent occasion on Sinai, but it was simply presented in a different form.

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One quote, let me give you two, from one Puritan said, Adam had as much in the garden as Israel did at Sinai, only in fewer words and without the thunder.

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I mean, that's pretty good synopsis, I'd say. When we think of the giving of the moral law, particularly in its clarity at Sinai, not only in the summary statements, the

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Ten Commandments, but then in the specificity that follows all through those chapters,

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Exodus and Leviticus, moral law, civil law, ceremonial law are given in very precise ways.

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One thing that we're seeing is the perfection of God's moral character. When we think of the rightness, the straightness of God, how would people like us,

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I mean, how would we see that? How would we understand if God were to explain it to us?

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But what we have in the law, it's as if God has graciously stooped down to toddler level, and he has explained to us, these laws are reflections of my moral perfection.

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I am straight and right. And this is what that looks like in your human context.

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And so, while it of course does provide a path for our feet, primarily, before that, it provides some sight of our

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God's perfection. Yes, it's also been said, I think, rightly, that law is an expression of will.

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And when you think about God's perfect moral law as the expression of his perfect will, it sort of falls into place there.

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One other thing that we need to, I think, set forth as we embark on a review of the law at Sinai is the immutable foundation, right?

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As Reisinger opens chapter four on the giving of the law at Sinai, quote, the great creator and possessor of heaven and earth has an indisputable authority to make laws for governing his creatures and to require their obedience.

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He is the creator. We are the created. So there's that immediate sort of relationship there that says he has every right.

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But there's more, if I may jump ahead a little bit to the prologue of the giving of the law at Sinai.

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God identifies himself, I am the Lord your God. There's that personal side.

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He has selected us as his peculiar people. And in that vein as well, we owe him total obedience to his law.

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And then there's the third aspect that's set forth just in those first two verses of Exodus 20. He is also our redeemer who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

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So there's also that sense we've been bought with a price, as the New Testament makes clear.

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And as the redeemed people of the Lord, not only do we see the relationship and the need for obedience, but we also see foreshadowed there,

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John, that love and mercy in a redeeming God, right? What a beautiful foreshadowing of what we see fulfilled at the cross at Calvary.

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Yeah, that really is so significant for how we approach it. You know, a very different view without that prologue, you know, where we just have this kind of a death spot reigning over us and, you know, and us, like Adam, not trusting his word.

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Romans chapter 7 is one of the more significant passages on the role of the law.

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And in that role, Paul is going to say that the law is holy and that individual commandments are holy.

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They're good and just. They're fair. They're right in every way, but they are not adequate for some things.

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They're not designed for everything. And so Paul is going to write in Romans 7, in a sense, he's writing to the believers to help them to understand the role of the law, what the law did and what the law cannot do.

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And particularly in light, I think, of the fact that many of these young churches, they were made up of Jews, and the

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Jews needed to understand the place of the law. If they misapplied the law, or as Paul says to Timothy, if they use the law unlawfully, it's not good.

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So Paul has to really be very strict in how he draws lines of what the law can do and what it cannot do.

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So let me read just a portion of that chapter, Romans chapter 7, and I'll read verse 7 down through verse 12, and then just quickly point out some of the things that Paul says that the moral law does.

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What shall we say then? Is the law sin? And now to kind of pick up right there,

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Paul's been talking about what the law can't do. And what Christ does, and so is the law a sinful thing?

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His answer in verse 7 is, may it never be, God forbid. On the contrary,

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I would not have come to know sin except through the law. And so one way we can say he's arguing is, the law isn't sinful.

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The law exposes sin, and that's a good thing. Then he goes on. He says, for I would not have known about coveting if the law had not said, you shall not covet.

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But sin, taking opportunity, and the Greek phrase there means to take occasion, or literally it means to kind of set up a military camp.

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So sin turns the law into a base of operations, strangely, and then we see what it does.

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So sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind.

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For apart from the law, sin is dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died.

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And this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me.

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For sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.

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So then the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, and righteous, and good.

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So quickly, Paul says, basically the law does these things. It exposes evil. It shows you the existence of evil in places that you would never have known existed, particularly the heart level, which

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Paul applies there. So I keep all the law. He says that I do all the right things outwardly, but the law also searched my heart and exposed covetousness.

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So it shines in the places that are kind of the dark corners of our life and doesn't allow us to compare ourselves to other people and feel that we're doing fine.

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It exposes sin. It puts restraints where we naturally feel that we have the right to do what we want, and until we read the law, we don't realize

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God has actually forbidden that. So these restraints are suddenly there. Sin then uses the law as a base of operations to provoke our sinful hearts to greater rebellion.

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So we're kind of going along, and Steve, you have a lot of children, and we have four.

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I remember parents saying to us when, and these were often not

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Christian parents, and they meant well, but they would say, your children are being rebellious because you won't let them do what they want to do, but if you would like let them do what they want to do, they wouldn't be rebellious.

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And so in a way, that's true, because if you removed all law, there's no way to break a law, you know.

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So if you removed every speed limit sign on a road, in a sense, if you removed the speed limit, you can't break the speed limit.

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So like I thought, well, yeah, but that doesn't mean that the children are learning to obey the

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Lord. It just means you removed all restrictions. But when you put restraints on a child that thinks, that's grown up thinking that he has a right to do whatever he wants, that that's what life's all about, suddenly the restraints themselves provoke worse behavior.

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And then Paul says in the end that the law then kills us, condemning us.

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So there's a couple of questions I think that ought to come to our mind when we read this, and so I'm going to shoot one to you. Steve, how can

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Paul say, I was alive, and then I was dead, and what part does the law have in that?

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Yeah, it really is shocking language, isn't it, when you confront that without thinking it through and the context.

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And I guess my quick response would be, well, it is rightly said, ignorance is bliss.

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When we don't know the law, we feel alive and all is well, sort of like your example there without the speed limits.

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You know, we feel like we're doing fine when we don't tell the kids, no, they are all happy and satisfied.

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But the fact is, the moral law remains, and it is only when, as you put it earlier, the light is shown in our hearts and we see the law and recognize its purity and righteousness and the holiness of our

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God, to whom we are called in obedience, then we die and we see trouble, if you will.

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So, just because you're not aware doesn't mean you're not responsible, right?

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Let me read, this is from The Grace of Law by Ernest Kevin. He has a quote, law in the unregenerate has no other fruit but to enrage and increase sin in man.

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Quoting a Puritan, chains put not a fierceness into a beast, but yet it does outwardly draw forth that fury that was in its nature.

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So our rebellious nature is there, but we don't feel it until the law comes.

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So it is a wonderful recognition of one role of the law and perhaps a time for us to maybe stop and just ask, self -examination time, can you remember a time when you felt alive without the law?

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And then God, in his mercy, shows you the extent of your own sin and exposes yourself before the law, and it, quote, killed you.

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And you found instead at the end of that process, Christ to be all in all.

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I mean, I certainly remember in my own life that very process.

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Obviously, I couldn't have told you that that's what was going on. But you go from that blissful ignorance, though I would say that there's that gnawing of the conscience at a deep level that you've worked to suppress, as Romans 1 says, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.

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And then you come face -to -face with God's law and recognize,

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I am the sinner like Peter. You know, depart from me, for I am a sinful man, sort of moment before God again in his mercy sort of drew me in and showed me through his love that it wasn't meant to condemn and sort of banish me forever, but rather to awaken in me and bring me to that recognition that I must have a

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Savior, because I cannot satisfy that holy law in my own strength. So when

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Paul says he was alive, then he was killed by the law, he's not saying, he's not talking about the kind of life that he talks about in Ephesians 2 when he says we were dead, but then now in Christ we've been made alive.

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He was talking about in his perception, as you mentioned. So I felt pretty good about myself.

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I had a high view of myself. I thought I was really alive. Self -esteem was high. And the law murdered my high view of myself.

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I think an illustration that I've tried to use at times and in my own life, but also in teaching it, is to imagine a man who is in a room that is completely dark, except for maybe just there's enough light that there's differences in the darkness.

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So this is pitch black and this is just really dark gray, but he can't see anything really.

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He can just see some variation in black. And let's say that that's the man's soul prior to Christ awakening him.

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And he's a filthy man. This room that he's in, which has these heavy black curtains everywhere, on one side of the room there's a giant mirror that just stretches across the room.

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That's his conscience. But the man has never really seen clearly what he is when he looks at himself through his conscience because of the blinding effect of sin.

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So there's the man. And we'll say that scattered all around him in this room, in his soul, is the remnants of his favorite sin.

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So whether it's drugs or whether it's booze and he's covered in the refuse and the vomit and he thinks that he's not perfect, but he's pretty good, or whether it's some other embarrassing sin.

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So he gets up every morning and he kind of straightens his clothes and he thinks they're still pretty nice. He thinks his suit still fits and he thinks he's clean, but he can't see himself.

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In fact, he looks horrid. He goes over to the mirror. He looks in the mirror and he says, well,

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I'm not perfect, but nobody is and I'm pretty good. Now, what happens then is

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God rips the curtain back and the light of the law shines in and suddenly while the man is in front of the mirror, his conscience is enlightened by the law and he sees himself for what he is and he's horrified.

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And so, you know, he cries out, I knew I wasn't perfect, but I never knew it was like this.

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And, you know, when that comes and we turn to face the law giver, you know, in a sense in our heart saying,

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I could never have peace with that law giver, but I wish I could because he is clean.

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And then Christ, of course, answers that longing. So the law penetrating and showing us the truth about ourselves.

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Well, Steve, there are some other things, you know, that when we think about this relationship between the law and us and what it can and can't do, it might seem to say in Romans 7 that the law has, it's flawed.

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It doesn't do what we hoped and so Jesus replaces the law. But actually what

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Paul is pointing out is the law was never designed for certain things and therefore the

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Jews in the misapplication of the law, and of course us today, same thing, in trying to fix ourselves by rule keeping, we are misapplying rules and we're trying to get them to do what they cannot do.

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So the rules cannot justify me. They cannot form a kind of a ladder by which

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I'm climbing a little higher and closer to God. Instead, Paul says, no, the rules expose you and the rules just, they just, you know, they trample every hope you have of fixing yourself and then by doing that, they lead you to the one person that can.

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Yeah, amen. And the other side to that I want to point out is our temptation post -Calvary to sort of minimize the law, you know, kind of a, well,

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I'm under grace, not law sort of thing. And miss that critical relationship between the law and the gospel.

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Again, quoting Samuel Bolton, another Puritan, the law sends us to the gospel that we may be justified and the gospel sends us back again to the law to inquire what is our duty being justified?

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They work together. And the other thing that Reisinger points out, which is such a wonderful point, is it's the same triune

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God who gave that law at Sinai. God the Father and God the

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Son and God the Holy Spirit being present so that, as Reisinger puts it, the law of Moses is the law of Christ.

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They are one. And as you just mentioned, it is a difference in purpose of what the law is meant to do.

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So it goes from being our accuser and having us under the law to being our friend and pointing us back to Christ and to the path that the just must walk, right?

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It's a wonderful kind of combination and working together, a synergy, if you will, not any kind of antithesis or kind of hostility between Moses and Christ.

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It's a common but critical error that we must recognize and overcome to pit them as being in tension with one another, right?

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It is the same beautiful God that has given us that law and given us

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Christ fulfilling that law and bringing us to be a friend of the law rather than an enemy of the law.

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Well, Steve, I think we'll stop there and then we'll pick back up in our next podcast with looking more directly at what you just said about the antithesis that is a false antithesis between Moses and Christ, between the moral law and the gospel.

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And we're going to be looking at that a lot in the chapters to come, but we want to hit that now.

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And we want to also benefit from a number of quotes that Reisinger pulls out of the writings of John Calvin on this issue of law and grace and the interaction.