1.21 blog

A few weeks ago, I did a couple of posts about the classic Protestant distinction between law (everything God commands and requires of us) and gospel (everything God promises and does for us). The time has come to revisit that theme. God has created us for him to obey his will as expressed through the law. And despite our failure to obey the law, he has sent his Son, Jesus Christ to take our place, bear our penalty, and reconcile us to him. This is the gospel. However, once we’ve been reconciled to God by Jesus through faith, how are we to live? This is one of the questions I get most often as a pastor. It often comes in the form of, “What does it look like?” Given what I’ve said about law and gospel in the previous posts, the answer might be surprising, but here it is. It looks like the law.

Here’s what I mean. God didn’t just give us the law as an arbitrary standard. He gives it to us because it reflects his moral character. It reflects the sort of life he likes to see from humanity. Now because of sin, we can never keep the law well enough to have it be the basis of our standing with God. We will always need the gospel. But the gospel doesn’t change the fact that the sort of human life that is pleasing to God is described by the law. Now that we don’t have to keep the law in order to make ourselves acceptable to God, we are able to turn to the law in gratitude so that we can live lives that reflect what he wants for us. This is what Protestants have historically called the third use of the law.

Because God has perfectly pleased himself in Jesus, for our sakes, we are now free to imperfectly obey him. We are free because the law is no longer the basis of our relationship. But it’s still an accurate descriptor of what it looks like to live a life pleasing to God. Whenever we ask “what it looks like,” we’re asking for a law (this is the point of the law-gospel distinction, anything we do is law). And that’s okay, because we do indeed do things. We do indeed need a standard, a guide. The problem is that so often in looking for this law, we miss or ignore the one God has already given us..

The law is summed up in the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20), and from there even further in the command to love God wholeheartedly and love our neighbor as ourselves (see Matthew 22.34-40). Jesus’ point in that passage is that we should be loving to God and neighbor. And further, that rather than leaving it up to us to define what constitutes loving behavior, the 10 Commandments tell us what it looks like. They not only tell us what to avoid, but also what to pursue. For a classic account of the role of the 10 Commandments in the life of a Christian, see questions 92-115 in the Heidelberg Catechism. Boiling it down to these standards might seem a bit “shallow,” for those who want to go “deep.” But I assure you, there’s plenty to work on there. You won’t need anything deeper (at least not until you’re perfectly obeying these).

We should note, this doesn’t reduce our relationship with God to rules. The rules are never the basis of our relationship. That is founded on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (gospel). But the law does show us what a gospel centered life looks like. Through the gospel, the Holy Spirit enables us to obey the law with gratitude and joy, not trying to earn anything from God or pay him back or to prove we’re good, but just because we’re thankful and we love him. Our obedience to the law will never be perfect, and when we see that we are falling short (and we always will be), we allow the law to once more lead us back to Christ, where all our security, hope, and comfort are found.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger