Grace and Law VI: The harmony between Moses and Jesus

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

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Law and the Gospel and in our last episode we didn't make it as far as we wanted to so we wanted to kind of stop there and we don't want to rush through our next portion in this book because Reisinger in his book on the

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Law and the Gospel speaks to what John Calvin had said and we really find that those quotes are worth looking at.

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But before we get any further in this I wanted to call attention to this little bottle of dirt. We're not sure exactly that it's dirt,

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Steve and I think it's freeze dried coffee. But it's sold for people who are ready to believe, you know, and this is the world, this is dirt from the

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World Series Game 6, Field Dirt Bottled and MLB Authenticated.

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Now this is for the Atlanta Braves, right? And the reason we have this here is because we have kind of an inter -team rivalry.

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Steve and I like the Yankees and it's easy to like them right now. Teddy loves the

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Braves and there's another guy, we hate to say it, but he likes Boston. A .C. is eaten up with covetousness and so that reminded us of this and A .C.

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hopes that Boston will once again not embarrass themselves this season. Alright, so now back to the important stuff.

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Looking at the law and the way the Scripture speaks, it often draws such a sharp contrast between the ministry of Moses and the

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Old Covenant and the ministry of Christ and the New Covenant. I mean, we can think of Hebrews where it says that the

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New Covenant is so glorious, so full in its richness, that what came before has no glory in comparison.

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We can think of a verse like that in the Gospel of John where John is speaking about the coming of the

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Son of God, the Word made flesh. And in verse 16 and 17 of his first chapter in his

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Gospel, he writes this, For of His Christ's, for of His fullness, we have all received every

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Christian and grace upon grace, wave after wave of grace.

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For, then he goes on to explain it, for the law was given through Moses, grace and truth were realized, were actually, you know, embraced and, you know, experienced, yes, embodied through Jesus Christ, who, he says in the next verse, is the only one who has seen the

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Father and he is the great image of the Father. He has living in his life and teaching, he explains, he manifests the

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Father. So when you read a passage like that, it's easy to see, if we don't slow down and think about the context, isn't

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John saying to us that law under Moses and grace under Christ are opposed?

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So, Steve, what do you say to that? Absolutely not, as you might expect.

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Yes, we have two covenants, the old and the new, and we have the Bible divided into two books in a sense that way, two halves, and yet it is one

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Bible, one God, one Father overall, the same triune

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God who, as we said last week, gave the law at Sinai through Moses and fulfilled that law through Christ at Calvary.

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And I do think, John, this is one of those really, really monumental issues that we need to wrestle with, and so I'm glad we can slow down and look at this.

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Reisinger says in the introduction here, the law, like Christ, has always been crucified between two thieves, antinomianism on the one hand and legalism on the other.

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And so we have embodied in this question, well, if the law was completely fulfilled in Christ, hasn't been done away with, and we jump to the antinomian side.

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Or the other, if the law hasn't been completely fulfilled or done away with, then legalism, aren't we stuck under the law?

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And yet what we have is, rightly understood, this wonderful reconciliation and the harmony between Moses and Christ.

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And John Calvin and all the Puritans, the great reformers throughout the ages understood that they work hand in glove.

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There is a wonderful harmony between the two. So we need to recognize that the law is what points us to, brings us to, sometimes has to push us to Christ.

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And then in Christ, what we find is not only that fulfillment, but also how the law has become our friend.

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Yes. So what we talked about last week at the end, that the triune

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God gave the law, the I am, I am the Lord, gave the law at Sinai, but the eternal

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Son is part of that triune God. And so the Son, as God, is lawgiver as much as Father and Spirit are.

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And the Son is also the one who accomplished what the Father planned and what the

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Spirit now presently applies for our redemption. So law and gospel, law and grace are somehow connected.

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And how we understand their connection really affects how we approach the Christian life and how we, you know, and how we appreciate the cross.

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Well, so one lie would be that, you know, almost as if Moses and Christ were the givers of the law.

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And therefore there's, you know, Moses gave the law, Christ gives grace. So there's a sharp disconnect. But we see that's not true.

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Another cousin to that lie is that with a kind of a strong dispensational approach to Scripture, that God does things differently in different eras.

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And there is just enough truth in that to kind of confuse. But the, you know, the error in strong dispensationalism is that God saves in different ways, in different eras.

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So God saved under Moses through law keeping, but, you know, God saves now through grace.

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And is that true? And if so, you know, has grace replaced law? And so law has no place in the

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Christian life. And I think, as you mentioned, that understanding the connection of the covenants and how they one leads into the next is really the way to answer that lie.

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We can think of it this way. There is an organic connection. It's not just the same

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God gave the law as gave the gospel, but it is these perfections of God's character represented in the law, which show us not only

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God's holiness, but the path that pleases God and shows us a need for a Redeemer, which, of course, in the

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Old Testament was clearly portrayed throughout the sacrificial system. So they were saved by faith, looking to the coming of a

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Lamb of God. We are saved by looking back at the Lamb of God. So same means of salvation through the finished work of Jesus Christ received by faith.

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And that is a gracious thing. But when we think of the two covenants, one covenant is like the root system, and the other covenant is the flower that grows off the stem.

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But there's a living connection. The life and the roots is the same life in the flower petal. So while there is a difference in the fullness and in the experience and the freedom that the believer has, it is not a difference that involves a moral difference in the sense that in the

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Old Testament, the root system was right and wrong. And in the New Testament, the bar is lowered now.

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And so if you just mean well, that's all it takes. We were talking before one of the podcasts about a debate that occurred in the 18th century.

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So this is during the Great Awakening over in the UK, which they called the

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Evangelical Revival. And if you're not familiar with that, in England, you had a pretty sharp division between the

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Wesleyan side and the Calvinistic side, which was represented under George Whitfield's leadership.

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In Scotland, it was pretty much completely Calvinistic, as also in Wales, and really also in the colonies.

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So Wesley was the odd guy out, especially in the early decades of that movement.

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Which, may I just interject, is ironic because today, looking back, at least in our country, mostly what you see is the

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Wesleyanism that has prevailed. So historically, he sort of won out. Yeah, yeah. I do think that the organizational genius of John Wesley and his indefatigable labors did prove beneficial to his people in ways that the

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Calvinistic side didn't have. In the midst of this, Wesley was looking at what he felt was a kind of an antinomian swing in his own people.

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That is, he felt that they were beginning to take obedience after conversion as an optional thing.

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You know, we're saved by grace. So John Wesley called his men together with his annual meeting of ministers, and they read from some

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Arminian books, which he felt cleared up the issue. And Wesley's statement was this.

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Our Wesleyan groups in the Revival are becoming too Calvinistic, and that's why they take holiness as optional.

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That was his view, of course, of Reformed theology. Now, John Wesley tried to cure it by separating justification into two events.

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Present justification was received solely upon the finished work of Christ, received by faith.

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Now, not his life, but his death. In John Wesley's system, if I understand it correctly,

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I don't mean to misrepresent him, although this would be an oversimplification, Christ's perfect life made him the spotless lamb, and therefore an appropriate sacrifice.

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But Christ's act of obedience is not imputed to a believer. Christ's death washes the sins, and there's a big difference there between that view and what all the churches in the

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Reformation held. So Wesley said, because of that, you can be justified right now by faith in Christ, but at the end, when you stand before the judge, you must add good works through your life to the finished work of Christ, and there's a second justification.

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Now, that's why Wesley believed you could lose your salvation. So the

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Calvinistic wing of the Revival, of course, you know, just went berserk and said, you know, this is going back to Romanism, you know, we're back to salvation by works, and Wesley disagreed.

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You know, these works that come afterward are the fruit of the Spirit, and therefore you can't say it's the same thing.

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What happened then, of course, was a lot of books back and forth. Four of those books were called

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Checks to Antinomianism, actually, I think there were five, written by Wesley's right -hand man, John Fletcher, who was a very godly man.

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Fletcher wrote and said that we must add good works, and you know, and he defended

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Wesley. Some of the Calvinistic wing wrote and said, how many good works do you have to add, because we need to know this, if we can lose our salvation, why doesn't

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God give us a very clear line in Scripture so we know? And Fletcher said, well, no, it's not like that.

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It is, these are things that flow out of a sincere heart. So sincere obedience became the term.

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A guy named Berridge, who was on the Calvinistic side, said to Fletcher, they were friends, he said, how sincere.

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So does sincerity make my work acceptable before God?

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And what the Calvinist pointed out was this, you have unlawfully used the law, which is leading to our next points.

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You have used obedience to the law as a payment in order to add to Jesus Christ, and that is an unlawful thing, and the reason it's so wrong is this.

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Our obedience is imperfect, even as Christians. Our sincere obedience is imperfect.

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So what you're saying is this, that after the cross, God was willing to accept as perfect righteousness that which is imperfect.

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So Jesus' perfect righteousness plus your imperfect righteousness equals a complete salvation.

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And so the Calvinistic side said, you have lowered the bar. And we were talking that really that is kind of the fundamental view that we have if we're not careful with the scripture, that the cross of Jesus lowered the bar of God's expectations and of the law, and that's why obedience is perhaps not as important for us.

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Kind of optional. Yeah. When what actually happened was the law was perfectly satisfied at its height by the life of Christ, and the punishment of the law was suffered in the death of Christ, and everyone united to Christ, that life being imputed to us, the law treats us as a people who have satisfied it because our mediator satisfied it.

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And therefore, what flows is not a lower standard, but the

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Father accepts, and we're going to though imperfect expressions of obedience.

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Why? Because it's not for justification. It's an expression of love.

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So given that lead -in, why don't we start with that quote from Calvin, and we can flesh it out a little bit more.

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Calvin said, no mortal will be found who can perform the law, just as you mentioned,

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John. But in the gospel, God receives with fatherly indulgence what is not absolutely perfect.

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Now, playing the other side for a moment, that sounds very much like, well, he's lowering the bar after Christ, and yet that's not the case, correct?

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Why not? Because what we have to do is keep in our minds clear the category that we're talking about.

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Are we talking about our response to salvation, which is obedience?

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Are we talking about that having a part in justification, or is it sanctification?

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And I think, you know, a real simple way to avoid about 90 % of our errors when we deal with the issue of the doctrines of salvation is keep the great categories that Scripture describes as being a part of redemption, keep all of them in order.

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So obviously, God's calling us and drawing us through the gospel precedes glorification.

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The order is not interchangeable. No question. Justification, being declared right with the law, precedes sanctification, that rightness working itself out.

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So we have an order. If you get them out of order, you get into big trouble. If you blend them, you get into big trouble.

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If sanctification becomes part of what makes me right with God, that what allows

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God to declare me right, justification, then sanctification becomes salvation by works.

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Which, by the way, the word justification does not, it is a legal term, does not describe a moral change.

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It describes a legal positional change. The opposite of justification is not unholiness.

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The opposite of justification is condemnation. If we come to a judge and a person is innocent and the judge declares them right with the law, he has justified them.

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He has not made them a good person. They don't walk out of the courtroom a morally better person.

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He has simply declared their relationship to the law based on the facts. If a person comes in and they're guilty and the judge declares them guilty, he condemns them from the law, they don't suddenly become a morally more bad person.

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He's just declared a position with the law. So our position with God is declared in justification based on someone's finished work.

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What flows out of that, the obedience to the law out of love, is a separate issue.

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One last thing about that, we keep them in the right order, we keep from blending them, but we also do not let them become disconnected.

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So if we want to talk about justification and election and predestination until we're blue in the face, but we don't love to talk about sanctification and perseverance, then we know that we're unbalanced because we have separated these great aspects of redemption which cannot be separated.

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And to underscore some of that, as we've talked about repeatedly throughout this series,

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God's law is unchanging, immutable, applicable at all times, in all circumstances, to all peoples.

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It will never be a standard that is lowered. He cannot. If he were to lower that standard, he would no longer be

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God. All of his attributes are sort of bound up in that requirement that the law, just as God is unchanging, so the law and its standards can never be lowered.

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So anytime you read Paul or Calvin or anybody else and think that's what they're saying, either you misread them or they are off base, right?

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I mean, it is simply one of those foundation truths. Okay, so give us another

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Calvin. Another quote from Calvin, and I mentioned that Calvin's helpful. I think one reason that John Calvin's helpful, it's not because we call

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Calvin, you know, Spurgeon said, I call no man master but Christ. So Spurgeon didn't go around, you know, parading

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Calvin, though he was not ashamed of the doctrines of the Reformation that Calvin really clarified.

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But I think one of the benefits of Calvin and the other early reformers is it was a life and death issue with them.

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And so, I mean, really, their friends were dying. We think of Hus and others, you know, before them.

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And then, you know, they were seeing men die for truth. And so that puts a keen edge on your theology.

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You know, there's no, you know, there's no fuzzy edge. You know, there's no kind of soft border.

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But also, I think that they were required, since they were going back to Scripture and rejecting church tradition, they were required to basically rethink everything they could biblically.

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And so, in a way that's more direct, perhaps, than the Puritans after them, and in a way that is, you know, really helpful,

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Calvin and the other magisterial reformers, you know, rethought a lot. So I find the quotes helpful.

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Here's another one. He says this, Paul, by the word law, frequently intends the rule of a righteous life in which

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God requires of us what we owe to Him, affording us no hope of life unless we fulfill every part of it, and on the contrary, annexing a curse if we are guilty of the smallest transgression.

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So that's, I think that's the kind of the general view of law, especially prior to Christ. But it's not just prior to Christ.

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It's today. The law without the law -fulfiller, Christ, today has the same impact that it had in Moses' day without the law -fulfiller.

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If we are using the law to be right with God, and we don't have a mediator that we belong to, who has kept the law, then the law is unsatisfied with us, and the law expects a perfect internal, external do's and don'ts, obedience, or else we are condemned, and therefore it's hopeless.

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Yeah, it's sort of like one of those bad horror movies where the monster is stalking you out there, and it's accusing, it's coming at you, and you're just hopeless if it ever reaches you because it is completely overwhelming, overpowering compared to your strength.

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And that's one of those wrong views of the law that the Jews embodied, right, and the

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Judaizers at Paul's day that leads Paul to speak out in such harsh terms against the law.

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Yeah, really you could say a Christless application of the law. That's great, yeah, Christless.

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Give us another one, Steve. All right. It is not unusual in Scripture to seek a description of a pious and holy life from the second table of the law.

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That's really, I think, putting in a nutshell what we, without maybe giving it much thought, would say today.

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Who is the pious man? Well, it is the one that fulfills those laws, the

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Ten Commandments, in the second table, right? The honoring father and mother, and not murdering, not committing adultery, and so forth.

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That's just sort of naturally, I would say, how we conceive of a righteous man.

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So you see in that kind of default, if you will, of how we would define the righteous, the pious man, a recognition of the justness and the righteousness of God's holy law, at least insofar as we're discussing just that second table.

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Yeah, so Calvin's argument, I guess, is that the moral law must still continue to have impact on the believer, because when

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Paul and those other men write to the churches and describe godly living, it is always in harmony with that.

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And it's not talking about, you know, the vertical, the first, the more Godward, directly

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Godward laws of the first half of the Ten Commandments. Not saying that those aren't important, but we notice, we can't see a man's love for God, but we can see it working itself out in the horizontal.

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Exactly. So the New Testament clearly goes back to that again and again, proving that Paul feels that the law has a place in the

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Christian life. Another quote, Calvin says, free affection is the foundation and beginning of duly obeying the law.

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So a free heart, a heart that freely loves God. For what is drawn forth by constraint or servile fear, you know, a fear of death, fear of punishment, this cannot please

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God. I love that, because I think, too, it embodies what we are doing, what the

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Pharisees did, by and large, what Christ condemned in the Pharisees. The servile, fearful attempt to keep the law outwardly without that inward, as Calvin put it, free affection.

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I would say, you know, love for God. It's really a denial of maybe the first table.

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You may not have a graven image, but you certainly don't honor God as being the holy, just, righteous one to whom you owe all obedience.

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There is a reservation of the heart in an outward, external attempt to keep the points of the law, as we would say in the previous one, the second table.

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So that will never be pleasing to God, and it clearly doesn't fulfill the call of God to righteousness.

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Yeah, and I think that that's obvious, especially in the New Testament, you know, the Sermon on the

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Mount, where Christ gets underneath the surface and talks about the heart issues. But it certainly is not only the

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New Testament. The Old Testament is very clear that God has never been only interested in external duty.

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I was thinking of Psalm 119 that I've been reading with a couple of guys in the church, and the second one, the second verse says that, you know, how blessed are the people that, you know, they walk this path.

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And then it says, who seek the Lord with all their hearts. So feet on a path of obedience, on a path of commandments, heart constantly yearning for God.

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And I think of David, speaking of Psalm 119, who is so often referred to as the man after God's own heart.

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It isn't the external compliance that makes the difference. It is the heart thing first, right?

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Another quote, the principal end and use of the law is to invite men to God.

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What a wonderful way to put it. It doesn't look like an invitation. It's not, it doesn't look like the invitation

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I get in the mail for someone's wedding. And yet, isn't that really a summation of its purpose?

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Its invitation works in a different way. It first has to crush us in a way by showing us the holiness of God and that unreachable standard that He has there.

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But it points us in subtle ways and sometimes not so subtle ways to Christ, the great law keeper, the one who really fulfilled it, and our desperate need for that Redeemer, that one who would keep the law.

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Yeah, if you think about the invitation of the law, you know, I kind of feel like the

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But think of it this way. The law rips away the self -delusion and the law shows us things about us that we would never have said.

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While we said we weren't perfect, we would never have said things like this. My soul is leprous, that in every area

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I see self staining my best religious works, my kindest things

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I do in the family, not to mention the things I would never say out loud. I'm leprous and I have this disease that I can't cure no matter how many doctors

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I go to. And then when the law shows you that, then it points you to the

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Savior who caused the leper to be cured. And before the law did that, you would have thought, well, that's good for lepers, but I'm not a leper.

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Think about lameness. The law shows me that no matter how hard I try, no matter how strong my resolution,

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I get up tomorrow morning and I'm determined to be a better man. And I just don't seem to have the legs to move forward.

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You know, and I go to walk and I can't make progress. You know, I just live my entire life in these resolutions that never move.

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And the law shows me that to be true of myself. And then it shows me

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Christ who says, you know, where we see him healing the lame, the blind, the sick, the stained.

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In every area, the law shows us the moral, that what we are morally is exactly what

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Christ heals. And so the law, in a sense, is essential for any man or woman or young person to take the invitations of Christ seriously.

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And what does that say about those that would preach only grace, as they say, in the pulpit today?

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Yeah, well, it's like throwing, it's what Jeremiah in chapter four, God says to break up their fallow ground and then you sow the seed.

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Anyone that would throw seed, you know, you plant a garden. If you just threw your seed on your yard, you would expect nothing really.

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Um, so there must be a, the plowing, not as part of a payment.

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You know, I feel so bad now I'm allowed to come. But as Ian Murray said in his book, Revival and Revivalism, which is a great book, he said, uh, nothing is required of a man before he go to Christ for salvation, but much is required of God to do in a man before he's willing to go to Christ for salvation.

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Yeah. Well, Steve, our producer, Teddy has told us that we've gone too long for this to be able to be one episode because we're not actually halfway through the quotes by the reformer,

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John Calvin, showing the reformation view of the law, the gospel and the Christian. And these are found in the book,

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The Law and the Gospel by Ernie Reisinger, and a link will be found in the show notes. So we're going to return to this and hit the second half of what