New Covenant Law: No liability. No guilt. No condemnation.

Posted on December 10, 2012 by me

 

The Recap:

In Romans Chapter 3, Paul makes the following points:

  1. Both Jews and Gentiles are under sin.
  2. The Law only speaks to those under the Law (Jews).
  3. Since the Law only provides knowledge of sin, no one is justified by keeping the Law.
  4. Through Christ, righteousness is manifested apart from the Law.

Then in verse 22, he summarizes as follows:

  1.  Righteousness is given freely to all who believe.
  2. There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile.
  3. All have sinned.
  4. All are justified by grace as a gift through the work of Christ.
  5.  To show God’s righteousness.

Now, Paul ends Chapter 3 with a slightly different argument, making the same point:

  1. God is the God of the Jews (who had the Law).
  2. God is the God of Gentiles (who do not have the Law).
  3. Therefore, justification has to come from somewhere other than through works of the Law, or else God would only be the God of the Jews.

However, Chapter 3 ends with Paul emphatically saying that we still uphold the Law. So what gives?

The Tension Builds

Paul, who wrote this letter to be understood holistically rather than in chapters or verses, doesn’t really get back to this point until Chapter 7, when he reaffirms that the law is good, and is not what brings us death (but rather, it is sin which brings death).  He also makes the excellent point that the fact that we want to do good affirms that we believe the Law is good.

Paul makes a very important distinction here: The Law is good, but that doesn’t mean that keeping the Law can make us righteous.  It’s pretty clear by this point that keeping the Law is an impossibility.  From Chapter 4 to 7, Paul has continued to show us that our righteousness is totally unrelated to the Law. It’s good, but now irrelevant; or perhaps a better word is inapplicable. (I’ll go back to Chapter 4 in the next post.)

An Easily Overlooked Point

In Paul’s discussion of the goodness of the Law, he makes a very crucial point which is missed by many people, who are under the impression that they can, and should, discipline themselves in order to stop sinning.  The presumption is that with regard to sin, we are the problem, and many of us are plagued by feelings of guilt and shame as a result. However, in verse 20, Paul writes, “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Just think about this for a few minutes. If sin (the effect) is not caused by us but by sin (the cause), then there is absolutely no legitimate reason for Christians to suffer from guilt and shame.

The Law (which is good) tells us we should hate sin and its results; however, it does not judge us, who have died with respect to sin (Rom. 7:1-4), it judges sin itself.

The Plague of Sin

As I’ve said before, if you read through the Gospel of John, you see that Jesus consistently seems to treat sin as a disease, a plague on humanity. He never judges those afflicted by sin, but in pronouncing “Go and sin no more,” he sets people free from the bondage of sin. Who Jesus does condemn are those who by their legalism and condemnation perpetuates the plague.

Paul seems to be taking a similar position here; sin, like a virus, is waging war on our bodies (v. 21-23), and Paul himself does not appear to be free from this war going on within us. But, turn the page to Chapter 8, and my point above is affirmed: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

No liability. No guilt. No condemnation.

 

Posted in New Covenant Law | 1 Comment

I guess I need to write more…

Posted on November 28, 2012 by me

Or at least check the blog more often… I just deleted 2,428 spam comments. I think that’s a record, at least for me.

I will do more on the New Covenant Law series, and I’m planning more in the “This I Know” series. I’ve been thinking, just not writing.

Soon.

 

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This looks interesting…

Posted on October 18, 2012 by me

As if on cue, the Mockingbird blog is beginning a series called “Why Then the Law?”  It looks like it could be interesting.

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The Law of Romans: The Good, The Bad, and The Deadly

Posted on October 17, 2012 by me

Most of us, if not all, have had religious tradition handed down to us and have been taught false, religiously minded ideas about the law in teaching that actually encourages us to embrace the law as a useful guide to Christian living. What could be farther from the truth? ~ Mick Mooney, God’s Law Apart From Grace, p. 35

One of the weird things about law is that just the fact of adhering to a certain set of standards—whether you can actually keep them yourself or not—makes you more apt to feel superior to those who don’t acknowledge your particular code. Look around at our culture, and you can see that it’s true. The ultra-conservative Christians act as if they’re superior to the general less-moral population, and the liberals act as if they’re the ones higher on the evolutionary scale. Vegans believe they are superior to meat-eaters, and so on.  You don’t even have to be all that extreme; if you believe in a certain set of moral principles, however “normal” they may be, you will tend to believe that you’re superior, even if you fail to keep your own moral code.

The 1st Century Christians were no different. What Paul tries to point out in the first few chapters of Romans is that 1) God’s law is apparent to everyone; 2) You can’t become righteous by keeping the law anyway; and 3) everyone fails to keep God’s law, so we’re all toast regardless of whether we try to follow laws or not. What we have is a level playing field, Jews, Gentiles, whatever.  Righteousness is not a matter of keeping the law—any law—but comes as a gift of God’s grace.

So, whenever someone uses a law—any law—to judge someone else, they first must subordinate themselves to God’s law, for which they will fail, rendering themselves ineligible to judge anyone else. So, for example, using Romans 1 to judge gays doesn’t work. All you have to do is turn to Chapter 2, verse 1, and see that any attempt to judge anyone else means you’re actually engaging in self-condemnation.

Romans 2 is deadly. It’s clear we are all condemned. It doesn’t even help if we were to be circumcised as a Jew, or not; for the circumcision that matters is not physical but spiritual.

Now by the end of Chapter 2, the Jewish Christians must have been feeling pretty bad, for Paul seems to be telling them that their Jewishness is essentially worthless. Moving into Chapter 3, Paul says that being a Jew is important because it shows the faithfulness of God; however, that doesn’t make them any better off (v 9), because as I said, we’re all toast under the Law, whether it’s written or natural.

The Good Stuff

Now Paul gets to the good stuff when he gets down to verse 21:

    But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.
(Romans 3:21-25 ESV)

This is a pretty meaty section, and unfortunately, verse 23 is often taken out of context, actually separating the phrase “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” from “and are justified by his grace as a gift.”  To me, to separate these 2 phrases is unconscionable. But of course, it’s hard to get some “sinner” to feel really bad about his lot in life when he’s also told that his justification—in other words, his state of being declared righteous—has been given to him as a gift.

Why withhold the Good News? For one reason, it’s really hard to control someone once you tell them that their righteousness is solely resulting from the work of Jesus, not by their own work, or by obedience to any law or religious system.  And as Paul had written to the Galatians, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” This is scary stuff to someone who feels a need to control you. As Mick Jagger sang, “I’m free to do what I want, any old time.” (He of course was not entirely correct, as the so-called “freedom to sin” is not freedom at all.)

In case there’s any doubt, in verse 28 Paul lays it out clearly: “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”

But in the closing verses of Chapter 3, it starts to get a bit confusing as Paul also says that we don’t overthrow the law by faith, but uphold it.  Paul is not hinting that we can gain anything by keeping the law; to the contrary, justification by faith affirms the fact that we cannot obtain righteousness through keeping the Law.  For it is the Law that condemns us, that declares our unrighteousness and our need for grace. As Paul explains later, in Chapter 5, the Law was actually given so that our sin would increase! This only makes sense, as the more laws we have, the more we find that we are breaking. The Law is important, but only for the purposes for which it was given; and it wasn’t given to make us righteous.

For that, we need grace.

Posted in New Covenant Law | 2 Comments