If we don’t understand the purpose of someting, it’s likely we’re going to misuse it. I could, for example, purpose to use my laptop as a cricket bat. It would probably hit a few balls, but I can’t be that surprised when the laptop breaks and fails to be as effective as a proper cricket bat. It simply isn’t built for being used that way. In the same way, if we don’t understand why God gave us the law, we are likely to badly misuse and misapply it.
In Galatians 3, Paul insists the law was not really given to us to keep us holy. Indeed, he says much the same in Romans 5. The law was given to show us our inability to please God. More than that, it was given to point us to our fundamental need of Jesus.
Martin Luther was about right in his view that the law exists to point us to Christ. The law exposes our sin and shows our inherent inability to please God in ourselves. Once it has done the work of showing us our inability, it drives us to Jesus in whom we receive life and live by faith.
What this means is that it is a fundamental misapplication of the law to berate people with it and push them to live by it. Not only will it accomplish nothing because they are unable to do it, it’s specifically not why God gave the law. If we try to live by law, we will just be crushed under the weight of its impossible burden. But if we live by faith in Christ, we’ll want to do what is good and holy without being crushed by the perfect demands of the law.
The fundamental problem with any sort of legalism is that it expects people to do what the law was never given to do. It expects people to keep what God designed to be unkeepable. Expecting people to live by the law is to misapply the law itself.
There is, however, a right way to utilise the law. Paul is clear that believers are not under the law, it has no jurisdiction and it isn’t demanded of us in Christ. That means the law is not a stick with which to beat believers. However, the law does exist for those who think they can be right with God by their own efforts. The law exists to show such people that, in and of themselves, they have no hope of pleasing God. It won’t take long before they realise they can’t do it.
This means the law is effectively an evangelistic tool. It has no authority over believers – we are freed from the law and now live by faith in Christ – but if you will insist on making yourself right with God apart from Jesus, here’s what he requires of you! It won’t take long before you realise you simply cannot do it perfectly.
The law, then, is for those who haven’t woken up to the reality of their sin. It is for those who haven’t fully grasped the seriousness with which God treats their sin. It is for those who do not realise the distance the law puts between them and God. It is for those who haven’t realised that the only way to please God is by faith in Christ alone.
Those who belong to Christ don’t relate to God through the law. We relate to him by faith. We don’t need the law to expose our sin because we have reckoned our sin to be serious, understood our inability to do anything to save ourselves and turn in faith to Christ. We have been freed to live by faith.
The law is just an evangelistic tool for those who think they can earn salvation, who can make themselves right with God and who believe they can please him in their own strength. Those who know they can’t don’t need the law and those who think they can very much need the law to expose their sin so that they can see they are wrong – what they really need is Jesus!
Seeking to live by law is a misapplication of the law itself. We live by faith in Christ. The law is for those who have yet to realise the reality of their sin and their inability to please God. Berating believers with a law from which we have been freed, which we know exposes our sin and which we have long accepted we cannot keep is mindless. The law exists to drive us to Christ; Jesus does not then drive us back to the law.
I hope I am not missing the boat on this. I agree wholeheartedly with your description of the law for the unregenerate man. However, standing on 2 Corinthians 4:6, and God’s love for the elect in that he “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” and in regeneration, the justified believer is set free from the dark power of sin and drawn ineluctably to the beauty and loveliness of Christ. No?
You write the law “has no authority over believers – we are freed from the law and now live by faith in Christ.” Yes! But in that new reality, in our union with Christ, the moral law’s relation to the believer is changed. It reveals to his blood-bought children what is good and what is pleasing to God. The law, which once for us was only the groundwork of condemnation, is now the spiritual lodestone drawing the believer in his pursuit of holiness.
When Jesus says in Matthew 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them,” this “fulfillment” should not be understood as a “finishing” or a “doing away with,” but as an embodiment and a revelation of the beauty of Christ and that to which is the goal of all our sanctifying struggles.
Thanks for your comment here.
If I read you right, your first paragraph would agree entirely with what I have written here. We are made regenerate and then drawn to Christ. I don’t see anything requiring the law here.
Your second paragraph (if I hear you rightly) relies on the tripartite understanding of the law. But this simply isn’t how Paul talks about the law. He says repeatedly we are freed from the law; not just the civil and ceremonial aspects of it. Nor can the law easily be broken down this way as most of it has multiple aspects to it (laws on gleaning, for example, clearly have a moral dimension despite typically being cast as civil; laws surrounding the temple often have both ceremonial and moral dimensions). The fact is, the Old Covenant and the entirety of the Mosaic Law no longer have authority over believers. This functions for us prophetically.
Indeed, in your third paragraph, you cite Jesus himself insisting he has come to fulfil the law. I think it is impossible to read Galatians or Hebrews and not conclude that this meant the Old Covenant in its fullness – including the Mosaic Law in its entirety – reaching its telos; namely, Jesus himself! We are now under the New Covenant with its operative law of love (or, law of Christ) the fullness of which cannot be codified, especially as it is for those drawn from every tribe, tongue and nation in every time and place as opposed to the Mosaic Law intended for one nation at one particular time and place. Whilst I accept God’s moral standards are unchanging, I determine God’s moral standards by what is consistently applied across all the covenants.
I like your closing observation: “Whilst I accept God’s moral standards are unchanging, I determine God’s moral standards by what is consistently applied across all the covenants.” Perhaps that is, in fact, the law of love you refer to, with specific reference to those whose names were written in the Book of Life since before the foundation of the world.
Thinking of the apostle Paul brought an article to mind. The author seeks to answer the question “How do we hold together Paul’s thundering denunciation of law-keeping with his sweet affirmation of the precise fulfillment of the law’s demands in the loving Christian heart?” I have pondered that much myself, and that’s why I appreciate your article and your website in general – See here: https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2002/08/pointing-the-way/