June 4, 2017 PM Service: The Laws Misused by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Law Is Good When Used Lawfully

To 1 Timothy. This will continue to be our text for the next several Sunday afternoons, Lord willing. 1 Timothy in chapter 1. Our text this morning is verses 8 -11. So the words of the Lord to us from the Apostle Paul.

We know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully. Understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

You know my father had a special talent as a teacher, as an educator. He was a district curriculum consultant and supervisor and director here in Sunnyvale, before that in San Jose. He was a very good educator.

He had a special skill for that. He had a knack for making learning fun and finding ways to apply things. He would just see things and apply it to a lesson he was trying to learn. He also had a talent for pressing tools into services for which the tool was never meant.

He was a bit of an impatient man, sort of the absent-minded professor sort of man. He was just profoundly impatient, I can say that looking back. He didn't have time to go looking through the garage for a screwdriver when he needed screwdrivers.

And if he had to hand a pair of pliers to turn a screw, then rather than get up, go to the garage, get the screwdriver, he would try to grab the head of the screw with pliers. And they'd usually just twist around, sometimes twist the head off, which caused more and more trouble.

And all he'd have to do is, one out of thousands of times, get a screw to come out with a pair of pliers, and that was it. Pliers were the tool. But he had this way of forcing things into service that they were never meant to do.

Now he passed that skill on to my sister. And be patient, we will get to the text of God in a moment. But he passed that skill on to my sister. She one time needed a squeegee to get ice off her windshield.

Now of course, you know, living in San Jose, we don't see a lot of ice on windshields, so it's a bit of a mystery for most of us. But it was just a thin patina of ice, maybe a squirt of the hose, it would have been all gone.

But she needed a straight edge. And the first thing she found that seemed to be straight, think of my father taking screws off with a pair of pliers, the first thing she found that was straight was a brick.

And she proceeded to wipe the patina of ice off of her windshield with a brick. And when she had it all off, was surprised that it was less visible now through the windshield than it was before she remedied the situation with the first squeegee she found, which was a brick.

I think she grew out of that by the time she became an endodontist. I think she did. I hope she did. I believe she did because she had a very successful practice. But it's true. And if you ask my wife, if you think, well he's just making up the story to go give me a good example for the sermon, not true.

It is a true story. You can ask my wife, she will attest that my sister, having learned from my dad, did that. What's the point here? The point is the misuse of a thing does not render that thing useless.

Because someone misuses it, even if they're once in a while successful by misusing the tool and accomplishing what they're doing that the tool wasn't meant for, even if they're every now and then successful in general, their misuse of the thing does not render the thing itself useless.

The fact that a brick makes a poor squeegee does not make it a poor brick. Nor is a pipe wrench at fault because it's unable to get hold of small nuts. Bricks were not intended to clean windows. Pipe wrenches were designed not for turning little things, but for turning big pipes.

Nor is the law of God intended to be the ruling principle in the life of the church. This is the basis of the Apostle Paul's point here. The false teachers, the same which Timothy was given the duty of silencing, were misusing the law.

They set it forth to the church as the rule of life for the church. So Timothy is sent this charge to silence the false teachers. This appears to be what the false teachers were doing. They were presenting the law as the means of justification, sanctification, those sorts of things.

So Timothy is sent into this combat, if you will. He's not sent into the fray unarmed. Paul has equipped him, not with pliers to be used for turning screws or bricks for squeegees. The tool that he needed to refute the false teachers is just what we need to refute anything that comes our way, to test the truth of it.

What is always needed to protect the church and ourselves from error, and that's the truth of God, the Word of God. This he received in the form of apostolic instruction from his spiritual father, which was of course the Apostle Paul.

So Timothy is sent in or back to, or told to stay at Ephesus in order to refute these false teachers, to silence them. I'm not sure if he was sent in there to debate with them, and to get into an apologetics with them, and to win the debate, or win the apologetic contest, or anything like that.

He was simply told to silence them. He doesn't want, Paul doesn't want them to go on with this teaching in the church. In our passage before us, he assured the young protege first that the law is in and of itself good.

That's verse 8 that I read. We'll speak more about that later. The second thing in Paul's quiver, or in Timothy's quiver, if you will, in verses 9 and 10, he is told how or to whom the law does not apply, and then to whom it does.

So you have the negative, it doesn't apply, and the positive, who it does apply to. And third and finally for this afternoon, verse 11, the sum and total that everything the church is and represents, that one rubric through which all else must pass, is the gospel of the glory of the blessed God.

The Law as Good Gift and the Need to Repeatedly Remind the Church

The value of God's gifts to the church, what we call the means of grace, depend on the use we make of them. God's word is to be used rightly. The means of grace he gives the church, baptism, the Lord's table, the communion of the saints, how we edify and encourage one another, these sorts of things, they must be wielded properly.

The tools that God gives us, we must use them for the intended purpose. So the first thing Timothy must be reminded is that the law is good. The law is good. As obvious as such a state must have sounded, it bears repeating in the church that the Word of God carries an intrinsic quality that emanates from its author, from its giver.

We're learning in Sunday school about the simplicity of God. God is simply God, and everything God says, everything God does, is consistent with his nature. He is simple in that way. We've said before, and I need to caution us, not simplistic.

He is simple because he only is what he is, and he always is only what he is in everything he does and says and thinks. So the law, because it comes from God, reflects God. It's good. It's a good law because it came from a good God.

Now here when we think of God's Word and what God has said and done, it's the spoken and the written Word. With the psalmist we can say, your testimonies are wonderful, therefore my soul keeps them. Or we could say that the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. With Paul we can say that all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

So when Paul tells Timothy, we know that the law is good, he's reminding him something he already does know. We know we've established this. You and I, Timothy, in our Bible studies, in our prayers, in our missionary journeys, in the testimonies I've given you, the testimonies you've given me, we together can say that we know that the law is good because we know God by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

We know God's Word by application in our lives and things we've seen. We know together, have established and can attest that the law of God is good. But we can right away look at this passage and tell ourselves, remind ourselves that the fact that we know something ought not prevent us from just this, from reminding each other of what we know.

We know that the law is good. Does that mean we should never say it? No, we should repeat it often. Therefore, 2 Peter 1 .12 says, Here's the Apostle Peter doing much the same thing. He says, I know that you know this.

You want to know what I'm going to tell you? I'm going to tell you something you already know. Remind you of these speaking of God's way of sanctifying his people. You don't need to be clever. You don't need to have ferreted out some heretofore undiscovered application.

You need only, we need only, to remind each other that the Word of the Lord is good. We can remind each other of some of the most basic truths, some of the most fundamental things. Some of you have been Christians for a very long time.

I got saved in 1992, so I was a bit further along in life than many of you at that time. But you can remember back to truths that you learned in third or fourth grade Sunday school. You children are now under Mr. Tompkins being taught the gospel.

You will learn things at this basic level, second, third, fourth grade, however old you are, and you can remind yourself. You remind others of those by the time you're my well-advanced age. It will be good for you to remind others of these basic things, that God is good, that Jesus Christ came to save sinners, of whom I am the chief.

What you're learning this morning about the spiritual armor of God, and it's constant necessity that you need it all the time. I don't know if you've all noticed, but I slip into your class and I hear what you're being taught, and these are good basic things.

And just because they're not complicated, because they're not highly intellectual like that, doesn't mean they're not worth repeating, because they are. They're very much worth repeating. They're very much hiding in your heart that you might not sin against God.

They're very good for you to remind others of as you go through life. Remind people of what they already know. Remind the Christians what they already know. Nothing wrong with that. Matter of fact, we're commanded to do that.

So Paul says, we know, you and I, we know together that the law is good, and it remains good even when it is misused. The best screwdrivers in the world are made by a mechanic's garage, so I think they're the best.

He wouldn't do it otherwise. But the best screwdriver ever made is going to do a poor job as a hammer. And so with the law, it can be misused. It can be set to purposes for which it was never intended.

The Pharisees in Jesus' day used it to justify all kinds of things. Abandonment of elderly parents, divorce for anything, any reason whatsoever, self-aggrandizing pride, and on and on in his constant conflicts with these men, the list goes on.

They were misusing it. They were taking something good, the law, and using it for something that was never intended, to abandon parents, to pump up myself and make me look good. So where do we lay the fault for that?

Well, certainly not with the law. Where did Jesus lay the fault? With the one who misused it. And misuses are rife, not just with the law, but the entire Word of God is vulnerable to man's scheming and manipulation.

There's a reason that the Church's history of interpretation is important to us. There's a tradition which we stand on to a large extent. We don't follow the Roman Church where tradition of the Church is held to be as authoritative as Scripture itself.

We do not do that. And yet, while denying that Scripture and tradition are of equal levels, we can hold tradition in the Church, thousands of years of Biblical interpretation and application, we can hold it in high regard without going overboard on it.

We Reformed folk, believeth the Holy Spirit, dwells among and speaks to the Church. We have a high regard held for the positions of men from ages past. They're not infallible. Only God lays claim to that.

But their work is still nonetheless valuable. And when we swerve from it, from these long, centuries-long established truths, we do swerve from the Church at times has done so, but we do so circumspectly.

We do so guardedly, cautiously. Why is that? It's so that false teachers coming with something new and exciting gain no easy foothold here. Let them work it out at the academies. Let them stand before godly and prove their case.

While we hold to the traditions that have held for centuries, and we hold to those things that we can look upon, holding them far below Scripture, and like the Bereans, comparing them to Scripture, and saying, yes, they appear in this case to have gotten it right.

God blessed fallible, sinful men, and they came with the truth of God's Word, and we will hold to it. I've said before, why do we sing mainly from the Trinity Hymnal? Does anybody in this church, from your pastor down, believe that the Blue Trinity Hymnal is the canon of all right and godly and holy music for the Church?

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But when I hear those songs, when you sing those songs, and we read and ponder on the truths that are embedded in those lyrics that we sing, we know our spirits attest to us that we're singing things that are true about God.

And so we hold to them. We don't toss them away easily. So we say to the innovator, the one who comes with the new and the jazzy novelty, we say plainly, you're not welcome here. We don't mean here to sit in the pews and worship with us.

We mean here to stand at the pulpit and teach God's people. We're a church. We're not a lecture hall. We need no new exciting way. We have the gospel. We don't need our emotions stirred by some worldly manipulation.

We have the Holy Spirit who tempers and sanctifies our passions. He doesn't take them away. He moderates them so they're sanctified and useful for ourselves and others. And so we don't need people to come in here and show us some truth that got uncovered after all these centuries and get us all excited about something.

We don't need glitter and we don't need the big show because we have the gospel and we don't let go of the traditions by which we hold it easily. As Paul tells Timothy, something he already knows, we know that the law is good.

You can almost hear Timothy saying, or couldn't you almost hear someone saying, well I know that. Come on, let's get on to bigger and better things. No, let's stay here. We know that the law is good. Let's remind ourselves and each other of the good things of the Lord.

The Law Is for the Lawless and Points Sinners to Christ

Well so for whom is law? For whom was law meant? I mean to carry on my analogy, what task are we trying to accomplish with the law? And given that task, what is the proper tool? Paul answers in two ways.

He says, for the law is not laid down for the just. That's the negative. The law is not for the just. And then the positive, but for the lawless and disobedient. So we're going to eliminate the law from the one group and then we're going to see how it applies to the other.

The law was not meant for the just. Now that's easy enough to understand, isn't it? Now all we have to do is identify what the just means. Who are the just? The word is from the same root as righteous.

It's the same word Paul uses in Romans 5 .1, therefore having been justified by faith. And he then goes to great lengths to show that by faith, by that faith the law has been for them fulfilled by Jesus Christ, which is what it means to have been justified by faith.

Justified before the bar of the law that is the subject of these verses in 1st Timothy. Been justified by faith. Same word here. He says where the law is not for the just. If you're justified, if you're declared by God to be righteous because of your faith in Jesus, then the law used properly is not for you.

Now this is a common error today. Many even more, maybe even more so now than then. The false teachers, these purveyors of this different gospel, this different teaching that Paul cautions Timothy against, they're trying to apply the law to those who have died to the law, which is how Paul describes them in Romans 6.

I mean bringing the law to the church as a guide for Christians is to miss the purpose of the law. Its design was, its design is to expose sin and to make the need for faith and repentance undeniable.

The law is the revelation of God's righteous requirements for man, should lead men to look to the cross of Jesus Christ and look there in wonder as they see, looking back and forth, law, cross, sin exposed by the law, the cross, failure to obey God's law, the cross, back and forth, law, cross, law, cross.

This is what it was meant for. Their failure and their need to repent is what has to be exposed there. The law makes us despair of coming to God on our own. It forces us to the cross. There are violations against God's law receive their due reward in Jesus.

In his own body he bore the wrath due for our sins. The same exposed by the law. There is a place for the law. There is a place for the law. We're not antinomians. We're not throwing it out, the baby with the bath water as they say.

I'm not going to preach on it this morning. I'm not going to tell you where the law actually stands with us this morning because that's not Paul's subject in the verses before us. The place of the law though, we can say it is not as the accuser of the Christian, nor is it the binding requirement of the Christian.

The Spirit of God assures us that no one shall lay a charge against God's elect. He tells us that all that the law could ever demand has been fulfilled in us because it was fulfilled for us and by faith the one who fulfilled it for us did it as we were in him.

And that's why Paul can say in Romans 6 that we've died to sin, that we have died to the law. All that the law could ever demand is satisfied by Jesus Christ. So the law is not for the just. The law is not for those who have been justified.

So who then is it for? For what purpose? Look again at verse 9 please. The law is intended for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

The law for them is the correct tool. Now this list I just read you in verse 9 actually parallels the Ten Commandments. Let me go through that again for you very quickly. Lawless and disobedient equals you shall have no other gods before me.

Ungodly and sinners equals you shall not make for yourself a carved image. The unholy and profane, you shall not take the name of the Lord in vain. Those who strike fathers and mothers, you shall honor your mother and father.

Murderers, pretty clearly you shall not commit murder. Sexually immoral, homosexuals, you shall not commit adultery. Enslavers, you shall not steal, where man-stealers were among the worst sort of thieves back in that day.

Liars and perjurers, you shall not bear false witness. And then he goes on with that all-encompassing statement, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, an allusion to the easily concealed violations of the Tenth Commandment, you shall not covet.

The law is for the lawless. Lawless people, the least free of all people. They are slaves to their sins. They're held captive to their passions. Only by constant strain are they able to suppress the truth.

Romans 1 .18 actually says exactly that, that men suppress the truth. This constant effort of holding it at bay, they suppress the truth in their unrighteousness. They slide from there to the profound and determined depravity that is well known to us all.

Nor is the end of that awful ride the one that they hoped for. Romans 1 .26 says, for this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. That sort of letting go of God and allowing them to go their own direction and receiving themselves the recompense of their deeds.

You see the law was once the tool well fitted to our needs. Titus 3 .3 says, for we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.

And then Romans 6 .7 says, for one who has died has been set free from sin. Having died in Christ, set free from sin, we do still sin. It's the dread ultimate eternal consequence of sin that we're free of.

And also it's condemnation. Romans 7 .4 says, likewise my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit to God.

All those and more speak of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. When he remakes us, he sets us on a new course, an entirely new existence, so profoundly different that the old man is spoken of always in the past tense.

And all this by the gospel, by the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes. The gospel which makes the law the inappropriate tool for the improvement of the Christian. Now as I said, the application, the current application of the law in the life of the church today is a huge subject which we're not going to touch on, except I'll give you one verse, just one verse.

And this will tell us something about the law its proper usage, its proper place. So then, Galatians 3 .24, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. For by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.

It's the Ephesus, that church there that Timothy was in charge of, it was filled with Christians who needed to grow, who needed to grow in the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. To drive us to Christ is the end of the law's purpose.

To show us our sin, make us despair of our self-efforts, to make ourselves right with God, is what the law is to do. And once in Christ, the law in him, by him, fulfilled for us. Ephesus was filled with Christians who needed to grow by the gospel.

They needed to grow by the gospel. They had been justified by faith, not by the law. For if the promise came by works of the law, then faith is null and void. The law itself, holy and righteous and good, had done its work.

It had driven them to repentance, to the cross of Christ. It's no different here. It's no different here at Providence, some 21 centuries later. The right tool for the job came and did its work. The snap-on screwdriver, as it were, came upon us, fitted itself to the slot, and extracted us from the depths which had held us fast.

Its work, a holy and righteous and good work, is complete. Praise God for his law and the sin that exposed, and then praise God for Jesus who died for every one of them. The third and last portion of this is the rubric through which all in the church must pass.

The Gospel of the Blessed God as the Final Rubric for Church Life

All this that Paul says, silencing these false teachers, and the teaching of the law, and the correct doctrine he would have, and what he would have the church grow by, he says, is in accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

I think this is really the completion of his thought begun all the way up in verse 8. Think of it this way, he says, now he said there, now we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, which then makes verses 9 through 10 about the ones for whom the law is intended, the ungodly and so on, that makes 9 to 10 sort of an excursus in his thought.

And so I'll read it to you, I'm going to put the thought together this way by taking verses 8 and 11 and putting them together. And I just give all that explanation so you know where we're going. Look at verse 8, and when I say the word lawfully, drop down to verse 11.

You'll see where I'm doing, or what I'm doing here. Verse 8, now we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully in accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

Now this amplifies the importance of the law and its proper use. It's a matter of the gospel, it's a matter of how we view the glorious gospel of the blessed God. No wonder Paul's charge of Timothy to oppose the false teachers was so intense.

The gospel hangs in the balance. Well not the gospel itself, I mean it's the power of God. We can't change that, but our understanding of it, our life in it, is what's in play here. The proper use of the law is to apply to sinners that they might despair of their souls and be bereft of any hope to effect any change, but it can't stop there.

Any more than a house is painted only when the owner sees the need for the new paint. When sin is noted and self-reliance is stripped away, then the law has done all it can and all it was intended for, and now the glorious gospel of our blessed God must finish the work, a work of hope.

It says it is Christ who died. It's a work of transformation, but you are washed, you are sanctified, you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Spirit of our God. So we'll close this afternoon where our author does, the blessed God.

This is an unusual title for God, but isn't it a good one? The blessed God. The blessed God who is infinitely happy and whole and complete in himself. The blessed God, he's God our Father who would have his children come close and share in his blessed presence.

It's the blessed God in accordance with the glorious gospel of our blessed God, called elsewhere the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ in Ephesians 1 -3, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

The law is good and righteous and holy. The law of the God is good. Every word of God, we know this, don't we? That every word that emanates from God's mouth is good and meant for our good. And the law had a purpose to show us who and what we are before God, to show us our failings before God's just and righteous law, to make us despair of ever bringing ourselves to God, of ever saving ourselves.

It does a good work in us when it tears us apart like that, doesn't it? But after that, it's done its job. It's done its work. It's done what God in his holiness and righteousness and goodness intended it for.

It's the Holy Spirit, who by the gospel of the blessed God, the gospel of his son Jesus Christ, the forgiveness that he wrought for us on the cross, the very cross we remember every afternoon, the broken bread which is his body, the fruit of the vine which is his blood, his life poured out for us.

That is the gospel. And once the law has driven us to that, then it is by the gospel and by the spirit that we grow. And the law, thank God for his law. Thank God for exposing our sins. Thank God for his word which tore us apart like that, has done a good and holy and righteous work in us.

But once it's driven us to Jesus Christ as a tool, it has done all that God intended for it. Amen.