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Two Words From One God
Law and Gospel
The law tells you what God requires. The gospel tells you what God has done. Confuse them and you will lose both.
The law is holy, and it is not the problem. We are. God’s law puts his own character into commandments, and it does three kinds of work.
- The law restrains. Even among people who hate God, the law written on the conscience and echoed in a nation’s laws holds back some of the evil that would otherwise swallow us.
- It shows you what you are. Held up to the commandments, you stop guessing about yourself. The law was never given as a ladder. It is a mirror, and it drives the honest sinner to Christ.
- For the believer, it guides. Already justified and safe, he takes the law as the rule of a grateful life. This is the third use, and Reformed Christians have always insisted on it.
Two errors wait on either side of this teaching, and both are deadly.
Legalism takes the law and makes it the ground of acceptance. It says God will love you if you clean yourself up. It turns obedience into a payment and Christ into an assistant. The legalist is either crushed or proud, and often both in the same week.
Antinomianism takes grace and uses it as permission. It says that since works do not justify, obedience does not matter. Paul had already heard that argument and he did not treat it gently.
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?
Romans 6:1-2 (KJV)
The Confession says in WCF 19.6 and 19.7 that the believer is free from the law as a covenant of works and is still bound to it as a rule of life, and that these uses of the law are not contrary to the grace of the gospel but sweetly comply with it. The commandments no longer threaten a justified man with the curse. They show him what love looks like in the concrete.
You keep the law because you are loved, never to become loved.