‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
53rd teaching
11.4.2013
“God’s Grace,
part II: Grace vs. the Law”
Review:
Last week, what was our topic? Grace, the final moral attribute
of God we had yet to cover. Why did I emphasize Grace as such a critical truth
to grasp? In our opening Scripture last week, Romans 5, what two men did Paul contrast? So through Adam’s
disobedience came what? And through Christ’s obedience came what? Now what is
Grace? Salvation, a free gift of grace, cannot be earned, because by definition
something of grace is something unearned. What is the Greek word for Grace?
Through whom or what do we have access to the Grace of God? According to
Scripture, what receptive state must you be in to receive Grace? Why is the
cross offensive? What were the names of the three men of church history who
were dramatically changed by Grace? Martin Luther, the German Reformer. John
Newton, writer of the hymn Amazing Grace. Chuck Smith, founder of Calvary
Chapel.
End
Review
In considering this great subject of God’s Grace, we would
be shortsighted if we failed to consider another subject that is very often
mentioned alongside Grace, that is, this subject of God’s Law. When you read
the New Testament, these two ideas seem inescapable and in the minds of some
people: irreconcilable. How do you reconcile the free and unearned Grace of God
with the obligatory commands and works of the Law?
Charles Spurgeon, “There is no point upon which men make
greater mistakes than upon the relation which exists between the law and the
gospel. Some men put the law instead of the gospel: others put the gospel
instead of the law; some modify the law and the gospel, and preach neither law
nor gospel: and others entirely abrogate the law, by bringing in the gospel.
Many there are who think that the law is the gospel, and who teach that men by
good works of benevolence, honesty, righteousness, and sobriety, may be saved.
Such men do err.”
Don’t you find it odd to realize that the greatest
confusions in the Christian church, and even among those outside looking in,
lie in the truths that are most central to the Bible? The greatest confusions
surround the most basic teachings of Christianity. Whether we’re talking about
the basics such as justification by faith or the deity of Christ or here, grace
and the Law, there’s tremendous confusion.
What ought to be the central and most basic fundamental
beliefs of Christianity are often reserved for the seminaries and Christian
colleges. Should that be so? As I’ve mentioned before, we live in a society
plagued by biblical illiteracy: Christians simply no longer know the Bible, and
that is ironically despite the multitude of teachings, of churches, of Sunday schools,
groups, radio programs and books out there. We the people of the Book no longer
know what the Book actually says, being content to rely on our own feelings, on
mystical interpretations of whether God told us something personally or not, or
upon the mere words and opinions of our favorite pastors and teachers. And thus we have this prevalent ignorant confusion.
Grace and the Law are no exception. I felt my own woeful inadequacy
to grasp all the richness and the scope of the text concerning these central
ideas. I thought to myself: “My goodness, I need to read the Bible more!”
So may God give us His grace to grow in our understanding
and knowledge of His Word and of Himself, especially tonight as we come to consider
the Law. Tonight’s study is entitled: “Grace vs. the Law”.
There is a kind of battle between the two. Are we saved by
faith or by works of the Law? How ought we to live, in grace or in law? Which
of these takes precedence? What does it mean to say that Christ fulfilled the
law?
Let me say from the get go that I will not demean the Law of God. I believe that the Law deserves
respect. Much is said in Scripture of the Law being good and holy and just. We
do not mean to say ever that the Law is some harsh and cruel and evil thing.
The Law is still the Law of God, and it has its purpose.
So last week we considered Grace, let us now consider the “opposition”
(in a sense). How are we to reconcile the two ideas: grace and law? Which comes
out the winner? How do we make sense of all this, of all these Scripture verses
and of all the teachings out there?
In order to answer that, we need to take a closer look at
the Law itself, just as we took a closer look at Grace last week. So then, we
have several points to hit tonight.
1.
What is the Law?
Turn to Exodus 19,
and we shall see the giving of the Law, when the Law came to Moses and the
children of Israel at Mount Sinai.
Exodus 19:1-25.
We have this incredibly solemn and frightening event, where
God Himself descends upon the mountain in thick clouds and lightning and fire.
The following chapter in Exodus details the Lord giving the Ten Commandments.
But notice that from the very outset, from its very beginning,
the Law was dramatically different than grace. Compare the giving of the Law to
the giving of the Son, through whom we have access to Grace (according to Romans 5). The coming of the Law was
terrifying. The coming of the Son was gentle. The coming of the Law resounded
with lightning and thunder. The coming of the Son was accompanied by angels
proclaiming peace on Earth.
What else can we notice about the Law?
The Law is known by several names.
A. Sometimes, it’s called the Law of Moses, or the Pentateuch.
Commonly, the Law of Moses can refer to the Five Books of Moses, that is, the
first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and
Deuteronomy. In Hebrew, the term is Torah, which means “teaching” or “instruction”.
B. While the term Law of Moses can
refer to the first five books of the Bible, the term Mosaic Law seems to be more specifically the regulations and
commandments contained in the 2nd through the 5th books.
C. Even more specific, the Law is sometimes
simply called the Ten Commandments,
or the Decalogue. These were inscribed by the finger of God upon two stone
tablets. Moses broke the first copy and had to go up the mountain to get a
second pair. Of the writings of the Law, it is the Ten Commandments that we’re
most familiar with. Even those who’ve never read the Bible know the words: “Thou
shalt not steal” or “Thou shalt not murder”. The Ten Commandments are viewed as
forming the basis of Jewish law. Others consider the Ten Commandments to be a
summarization of the God’s Law, as His holy moral standard.
What about some New Testament names for the Law:
D. Paul in II Corinthians 3 calls the Law the ministry of death and the ministry
of condemnation. That’s in opposition to the ministry of the Spirit and the
ministry of righteousness. The Law is the ministry of death and condemnation? Yes.
It lays out the standard, it identifies if you’ve broken that standard, and it
pronounces the judgment for breaking that standard. James 2:10 places an even greater emphasis by saying “For whoever
keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point is guilty of breaking all of
it.” And the punishment for breaking some of the laws was death. Therefore,
this ministry of death and condemnation points out that if you’ve lied, if you’ve
stolen, you may not have murdered, but you’re guilty of breaking the whole law,
and the punishment involves death.
E. Another New Testament title for
the law is a tutor or schoolmaster. This title emphasizes the
way the law points out our errors, much as our instructors did in school. More
on that later in the study.
F. And finally, the Law is
sometimes referred to as the Old
Covenant, or First Covenant.
This shows us that the Law was an agreement, a way to relate God with man, and
man with God. The Law formed a basis for which God revealed His expectations
for man and the basis for how man ought to live in the presence Holy God. So
the Law was a covenant. However, the Law was a conditional covenant, it was an
agreement with conditions, a contract if you will.
Unlike the New Covenant we’re now living in, which is based
solely upon the finished work and the shed blood of Jesus Christ upon the
cross, a covenant of grace, the Old Covenant in the Law was conditional. The
Law said “Do this and live”, or “Do not do this and die”. Deuteronomy 28, when the Law is being summarized, we find that the
text reads “Now it shall come to pass, if
you diligently obey the voice of the LORD your God, to observe carefully all
His commandments which I command you today, that the LORD your God will set you
high above all nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon
you and overtake you, because you obey the voice of the LORD your God…” and
the Scripture proceeds to pronounce the blessings given to those who would obey
the Law. But it also says “But it shall
come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the LORD your God, to observe
carefully all His commandments and His statues which I command you today, that
all these curses will come upon you and overtake you…” And it proceeds to
pronounce the curses earned by disobedience. So then, the Law involved a
conditional agreement, the conditions were obey and experience blessings, or
disobey and experience curses. Galatians
3:10 agrees: “For as many as are of
the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone
who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law,
to do them.’” How incredible then that just three verses later, Paul wrote “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the
law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who
hangs on a tree’)”. The penalty for disobeying the law was being cursed and
Jesus Christ became the cursed for us, since He took the punishment for our
disobedience. That even involved the cursings of the Law!
So now that we sort of have a better grip on what the Law
is: it was the Old Covenant, a conditional agreement between God and man that
man would obey God’s commands to be blessed. It was the ministry of
condemnation and death. It was the schoolmaster. It was the Law of Moses and
the Mosaic Law, summarized by the Ten Commandments.
That’s what the Law is.
To zoom in now, let’s ask the question:
2.
What is in the Law?
Now we know what the Law is, but what is the Law made up
of? What kind of regulations and commandments are we talking about? I think
answering this question may help to clear up some confusion about the Law of
Moses.
The Law involved three things:
Note, firstly,
that the Law of Moses involved moral laws. The moral laws are sometimes known generally
as the Commandments. Certainly that’s
clear from the Ten Commandments alone. They instruct how to love your neighbor by not coveting his stuff or stealing
from him or murdering him. The Law commanded people to be righteous, virtuous,
ethical, honest, moral and pure. But the Law wasn’t just about morals.
Secondly, the Law
involved a kind of social code and social laws. These are sometimes known as the Judgments. God gave certain divine
laws in order to give the nation of Israel their social structure, without it,
there would be a distinct lack of government. How do you get married? How do
you get divorced? How do you receive an inheritance? The social laws also
covered taxation and slavery and military service and sanitation and
quarantine. You’ll read of people becoming unclean and having to spend time
away from society. The social laws even regulated what was deemed “kosher”,
clean to eat.
Thirdly, and most
central, were the spiritual laws, known as the Ordinances. These were the sacrificial and ceremonial laws for the
priesthood, the tabernacle and temple, the holy days, the Levites and the
offerings. These prescribed how to atone for sins, through the covering of
blood by the sacrificial animals.
So we have these three categories: the moral Commandments,
the social Judgments and the spiritual Ordinances. We can benefit ethically and
morally from the moral laws as Christians, and as citizens of this country, we
can benefit from the social laws if we aim to make them the laws of our
government. But what about the spiritual laws, what about the Ordinances?
Of the three, the unique thing about the Ordinances is that
they can no longer be kept. Because the requirement for the sacrifices and the
priests was that they have a place to offer sacrifices in: the tabernacle and
later the temple, both of which no longer exist. So literally, there is no way
to directly keep the spiritual and sacrificial laws of the Law.
That’s because Jesus Christ was the final sacrifice, the
Lamb of God. There’s no further need for this aspect of the Law, the ceremony
of the priests and the detailed sacrifices.
I think that’s definitely one thing to consider if you
think that you must keep the Law of Moses in order to be saved, or in order to keep being saved… you simply can’t. Time
has prevented you. There is no way to keep the ceremonial laws, the Ordinances,
as detailed in the Law, because there is no more temple and there is no more
need for the sacrifices of animals. Hebrews
10:4, “For it is not possible that the
blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.” The thrust of the Law of
Moses, so far as what to do about your sins, has been done away with, because
Jesus Christ was the final sacrifice, whose blood takes away our sins.
We must make this point clear. Jesus Christ is the savior,
not moral living, not law-keeping, and not the Law of Moses. Somehow or other,
people got the idea that keeping the Law will earn you God’s favor and will get
you saved.
In a nutshell, that’s the belief of every major religion,
keeping some sort of law or doing some sort of good work in order to enter
paradise or heaven or nirvana or whatever their particular goal was. But in
reality, in Christianity, the Law cannot and does not save you.
If you come into any system of belief or any church which says
Christ alone plus works, faith in
Jesus plus knocking on doors, plus traveling to the middle east, plus this or that ceremony, plus anything or anyone other than
Christ, you know you’ve exited Christianity entirely. Doesn’t mean there’s no
room for good works in the Christian life. It means that the Law cannot save.
Hebrews 10:1, “For the law, having a shadow of the good
things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same
sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach
perfect.” The Law was just a shadow of the real substance to come, which
was salvation through Jesus Christ, the Lamb which God provided as the sacrifice.
Romans 3:20, “Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh
will be justified in His sight…” Nobody can be made right in the sight of
God by keeping the law.
Remember the words of the old hymn: “Could my tears forever
flow? Could my zeal no respite know? These for sin could not atone. Thou must
save and Thou alone. Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee.”
Point made, the Law cannot save you.
*So then, we know what the Law is, and what is in the Law, now let’s ask:
3. What is the Purpose
of the Law?
If we stop and think about it, this is the most important
question regarding the Law. After all, if the Law could not save you, if it
couldn’t do away with sins, then what was its purpose?
Why cover sins at all, if it merely resulted in an endless
cycle of sacrifices year after year after year after monotonous year? What’s
the purpose of the Law if it was unable to do what it seems to be designed to
do, if it could not save anyone or take away anyone’s sins? It simply could not
solve the great problem of history: how do you relate the perfectly Holy God
with fallen and sinful human beings?
The purpose of the Law was to expose sin. The Law point
outs sin. The Law, the ministry of condemnation, condemns the guilty by saying “what
you’ve done is wrong”.
There’s no way to claim ignorance. There’s no way to say
that you didn’t know when the Law has been here all along.
Romans 3:19-20,
again, says “Now we know that whatever
the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be
stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds
of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for be the law is the
knowledge of sin.” In other words, knowing what sin is is something which comes through the Law.
Later on in the same book, in Romans 7:7, we read: “What
shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! On the contrary, I would not
have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness
unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet’.”
Remember last week when we read the words “the law entered that the offense might
abound…”? That’s a frightening thought, that the coming of the law actually
increased sin and didn’t decrease it. The Law pointed out that the whole world
was guilty before God, thus paving the way for the gospel and its universal
application to all of humanity since all of humanity has sinned.
So the Law not only exposes sins, but it even further
allows “the offense to abound”. Check out Romans
7:7-13.
Is Paul really saying
that hearing the commandment led to him becoming even more sinful? Yes. Why?
How? And he’s already shown that the Law isn’t evil, it is not bad. So the Law
is not to blame.
In fact, we are. Spurgeon said: “So evil are we, that we
conceive at once the desire to commit an act, simply because it is forbidden.”
Something about the fallen human nature is that we are
rebels. We have a tendency to want to disobey just because we heard the words “thou
shalt not”. When your parents told you “Do not eat the cookies in the fridge
because you’ll spoil your dinner”, what did your tiny child mind want to do? You
wanted to go and eat the cookies in the fridge so that you could not only spoil
your dinner, but more importantly disobey your parents. Our sinful natures take
advantage of the law, take opportunity by the commandment to produce extra, or
abounding sin, in us. Makes it pretty clear why Paul said “the law came that
the offense might abound”, right?
Consider the words of Augustine from his book the Confessions. If you ever wondered
why his book is called the Confessions,
you’ll see why now. Speaking of his days as a wayward youth far from God,
Augustine writes:
“I became to myself a wasteland… There was a pear tree
close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting
either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night -- having prolonged our
games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was -- a group of young
scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a
huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after
barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more
because it was forbidden.”
Augustine realized, and we all will too if we’re honest,
that merely hearing the commandment makes our sinful selves want to break it.
He didn’t steal the pears because he had no pears. He had more and better pears
than he stole. He simply stole to simply
steal.
This is some weakness, a tremendous loophole with the
efficiency of the Law. Not only did the blood of animal sacrifices offered
under the Law fail to take away sins, but the very fact that the Law had
commandments and regulations stirred people up to sin all the more. The very
downfall of the Law was that it made you want to sin. You can’t keep it. And it
can’t save you.
And so the same thing which pointed out sin and condemned
your for sinning is the same thing which was remarkably incapable of doing
anything about it, for the Law actually made you want to sin all the more.
*Now I had mentioned that we would revisit the idea of the
Schoolmaster.
In Galatians 3:19-25
we find a great passage for understanding the Law. Paul equates the Law to a
guard that we were kept under, confined by, imprisoned by, even, until Jesus
Christ came and made righteousness available by faith in Himself. It’s very
interesting to think of the Law in terms of a prison guard.
He also says the Law was a tutor. The word here in Greek is
paidagogos In ancient Rome, there
were people who placed their children under the supervision of the paidagogos. These were trustworthy
slaves who were charged with the duty of raising the child (specifically boys)
in morality so that they could enter the upper class as adults. The paidagogos was that child’s moral
teacher and supervisor, possessing the legal guardianship over that child, from
age six to adulthood. And once the child grows up, the tutelage of the paidagogos is no longer needed and the
child is ready to receive their inheritance. So we needn’t just have this image
in our heads of the Law being a corrector and instructor, the paidagogos was more than just that, but
also a supervisor, a guardian as well as a trainer.
The analogy of our relationship with the Law and what this
reveals of its purpose is incredible. The Law as the paidagogos, the tutor, points out and teaches men that sin is wrong.
And now though, we are to put away the tutor and to become men and women in
Christ, adults that no longer need a tutor, ready to receive our inheritance.
We are to be mature Christians, no longer relating to God as they did in
ancient times under the supervision of the Law, no longer relating to God on
the basis of what we do for Him, but on the basis of faith in what He has done
for us.
Now that faith has come, we no longer need a tutor.
But I think many Christians are living as ridiculously as
it would be if that young Greek, now a young man, took back that old paidagogos to rule over him again. We
have Christ, now. We no longer need this old tutor. Let him retire.
The ministry of condemnation is replaced by the ministry of
righteousness by faith. “There is
therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Romans 8:1). The sacrifices of the
ceremonial law are replaced by the final sacrifice of the Son of God. “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
The shadows have faded away and we have the substance, the very thing the
shadows were pointing to: “So let no one
judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths,
which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is Christ” (Colossians 2:16-17).
What the Law could not do, God Himself has done. The
righteousness you can never attain by the Law, God Himself has offered to you
through His Son. Who comes out the winner in this battle between Grace vs. the
Law? It’s Grace. God through Grace gives you everything you could never have
through the Law.
Still, does your relationship with God seem to be one of
incredible highs and also of depressing lows? Do you feel really close to God
some days, maybe on Sundays or after Bible studies, or after doing something
you ought to do, and yet feel really distant from God if you’ve failed Him? Do
you feel as if you can’t approach God after you’ve sinned, do you feel like He
doesn’t love you, even though you know you’ve read that He is faithful and just
to forgive, and that He demonstrated His love on the cross?
These are tell-tale signs that you’re living in a
law-based, legalistic relationship with God and not one freed by His grace. You
can have such a Christianity that is stable, the relies solely upon the grace
of God and the finished work of the cross, not one in which you’re run ragged
by trying to work to please a Father that already loves you.
It is time for the Schoolmaster to retire, folks. He is
very, very old.
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