Law and Grace

Does the law serve any purpose in this dispensation, and in what way does the “new commandment’’ fulfill the law?

The Ten Commandments, with all Old Testament Scriptures, are as Paul says, “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” The Ten Commandments are an expression of God’s will for His ancient people, Paul’s Epistles express His will concerning the walk and worship of the Church. The great distinction is that in grace the believer is raised to the highest possible relationship and position, and then exhorted to ‘‘walk worthy” of such a place; while law is a testing of man in respect of obedience of God. “The man that doeth these things shall live by them.”

Again, under law, obedience was the condition of life; under grace, obedience is the outcome of life. Under law, fear was the motive power of the life — under grace, love. A converted Jew, carefully instructed in all of the Jewish religion, remarked the other day that “‘a Jew knew nothing whatever of the love of God; that he obeyed through fear; that only as he came to know Christ crucified could he comprehend at all the love of God.”

The “new commandment” of love (John 13:34) points the way to the fulfillment of the moral law — written on the heart rather than on tables of stone, (Heb. 10:16). He who loves God will never dream of having any other God before Him; he who loves his neighbor will not kill him, nor bear false witness against him, nor covet anything that is his.

Note the higher ground to which the rule of life, as laid down in the New Testament, lifts the believer over and above the law:

Exodus 20:4, 5, cf. Acts 17:22-29; 1 John 5:21.

Exodus 20:7, cf. James 5:12; 1 Timothy 2:8; James 5:15, 16; Ephesians 6:18, ete.

Exodus 20:8, cf. Mark 2:28-28; Acts 20:7; Romans 14:5-18, 19, 22; Colossians 2:16, 17.

Exodus 20:12, cf. Ephesians 6:1; Colossians 3:20.

Exodus 20:18, cf. 1 John 3:15.

Exodus 20:14, cf. Matthew 5:28; Galatians 5:19; 1 Corinthians 10:6, 8.

Exodus 20:15, cf. Romans 12:17; Ephesians 4:28, etc.

Exodus 20:16, cf. Ephesians 4:25; James 4:11.

Exodus 20:17, cf. Ephesians 5:5; Colossians 3:5, etc.

Is the whole race under grace, or only the Church?

1. Only the saved are under grace as a rule of life. This being the age of grace, “whosoever will may come.” The unsaved are still living under the measure of light they have: under condemnation of the law, if Jews (Rom. 3:19); under the accusing of conscience, if Gentiles who know neither law nor gospel (Rom. 2:12); under wrath if rejecting Christ (John 3:36).

2. The heathen who have not heard the gospel are responsible, not to the law, but to conscience and creation testimony, according to Romans 1.

What would be a brief analysis of Romans 6 to 8
for a sermon?

The theme of Romans 6:1 to 8:2 is stated in 6:1 — “‘Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” “Sin,” in the question, and in Paul’s answer, refers not to sins, or actual transgressions, but to the Adamic nature. The whole answer may be thus divided:

1. God reckons the believer to have died in Christ’s death and to have been raised in His resurrection to ‘‘newness of life’ (verses 1-10).

2. The believer must by faith “reckon” this to be true.. “Sin” (the Adamic nature) is not dead, but the believer is to take account of himself as dead unto it (verse 11).

3. The third step in the believer’s deliverance from “sin” is to yield “himself to God,’ and his “members instruments unto righteousness.” It is the voluntary abdication of self-sovereignty, and the enthronement of God over the whole nature and life (verses 12, 18).

4. The fourth step is to cease to live under law, that is, to cease to endeavor to produce a holy character by effort under the precepts of the law, and to trust it all to the gracious power of God. This is the theme of what remains of this great passage, as will be seen by the following analysis: (a) The apostle answers the instinctive fear that the cessation of effort to keep the law will issue in a life of sin by returning to the question of yieldedness. The believer has chosen his Master; he has become by free choice in yielding himself to God a servant of righteousness (verses 16-22). (b) Moreover, the believer is reminded that he has become dead to the law by his co-crucifixion with Christ, so that it is no longer a question of going back to it. And not only so, to go back to law is infidelity to the new husband, Christ (7:1-4). (c) And then, to show the futility of a renewed man going back to law, the apostle gives his own experience while seeking, as a renewed man, to produce a holy character by legal obedience. That experience demonstrates that in the believer dwells still the old Adamic nature — ‘sin.” It is “a law in the members” of the believer, though the new nature is also there (7:5-25). (d) And now the apostle points to the real Deliverer, the Holy Spirit. “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin” (8:2, 18; Gal. 5:16, 17). He is not delivered from ‘“‘sin,” but is delivered from the “law of sin,’ the lordship or rulership of sin.

The Bible does not teach the entire eradication of the Adamic nature, but does point out a way of deliverance from its dominion.

How would you distinguish the three classes mentioned in Hebrews 12:22-24?

This passage enumerates incidentally (for the purpose of the passage is a contrast between law and grace) the classes composing the heavenly citizenship. These are three: (1) “an innumerable company of angels”; (2) ‘‘the general assembly and church of the first-born’; and (3) “the spirits of just (or justified) men made perfect.” The first includes the supra-mundane intelligences who have not sinned; the second, the saved of this dispensation between the first and second advents of Christ; the third, all other redeemed ones in preceding dispensations from Adam to Christ, and all future redeemed ones in the great tribulation and the millennium.

Is there any qualification of Paul’s statement (Rom. 6:14) that the believer is not under the law?

The answer is that the apostle immediately adds a tremendously important qualification. The believer is ‘not under the law, but under grace.’ God’s grace secures the doing of the will of God in and by the believer, through the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:2-4). “Not under the law,’ standing alone is antinomianism. ‘‘Not under the law, but under grace,’ is the gospel liberty, and ensures loving obedience — something the law never did, nor ever can do. The remedy for lawlessness is not preaching the law, but preaching grace. The expression, “Not under the law as a means of life, but under the law as a rule of life,” is an utterly unbiblical invention. It is the rule of life which is directly before the mind of the Spirit in Romans 6-8.

What is meant by the term, “Ye are not under the law, but under grace”’?

The whole difference between law and grace is understood only as we come to really comprehend the new ground upon which grace lifts us, and to realize that life in this new realm is the spontaneous outcome of a new nature, imparted through the new birth, the dominant characteristic of which is love. This “new man” is not under the law, but under grace (Rom. 6:14). The Holy Spirit becomes the enabling and the only enabling for a life of love, and of a righteousness that includes all that the law demanded, and “the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” (Rom. 8:4.) The word “commandments” is used in the writings of John (1) in a general sense of the divine will, however revealed, “his word’ (1 John 2:5), and (2), especially of the “law of Christ’ (Gal. 6:2; 2 John 5; John 15:10-12).

“If ye love me, keep my commandments,” said the Master, and He sums it all up in one word: ‘This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). Again, through Paul, he tells us that “he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law’’; and then, specifying some of the commandments, he goes on to say that they are all briefly comprehended in this saying, ““Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Take what commandment you will (aside from the ceremonial law, of course, which was for the Jew only), and apply to it this new principle of love, and it is evident that, because love worketh no ill to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

In those who keep this new commandment of Christ, John tells us, is the love of God perfected (1 John 4:12). So long as a life is expressing the love of Christ, consciously or unconsciously, in that life is the law fulfilled in all its righteousness. Paul states the whole principle in the terms of experience in Galatians 2:20. Christ Himself, by His own life, imparted in the new birth, is living in us and through us this new love life. No effort on our part can accomplish this, as Romans 7:7-24 demonstrates, but a continual reckoning that the ‘old man” has been crucified with Christ, therefore we are dead to it; that we now have within us His own resurrection life, as a reality, not a mere doctrine; that that life is actualized by the Holy Spirit who dwells in our bodies; and that as we “walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4), not only do we “not fulfill the lust of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16), but “‘the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us’ (Rom. 8:4).

This is what Paul means in Romans 3:31: “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid! Yea, we establish the law.”

When a sinner confesses his guilt under the law, and his desert of death, he “establishes” the law as a ministry of condemnation (Rom. 3:19; Gal. 3:10). When he believes on Christ, the law is “established” as a “schoolmaster unto Christ.” And then, having received the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) and the eternal life of Christ (John 3:14-16), and the Holy Spirit as indwelling (John 4:14, 1 Cor. 6:19), and walking in yieldedness to the Spirit, the “righteousness of the law,” viz., a life dominated by love, is “‘established’’ within.

What saved a sinning Israelite when breaking an
inexorable law?

It should be remembered that when the law of duty, in the Ten Commandments, was given, God also gave a law of mercy in priesthood and sacrifices. An Israelite who broke the law of duty could resort to the law of mercy. But on the divine side, the Israelite was forgiven because his offering pointed to Christ. In this way God “passed over the sins done aforetime” (Rom. 3:24-26; Heb. 9:1-14).

Reply to a legalist who contended that since Christ kept the law, we His followers were in duty bound to follow His example and teaching.

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1. Christ was “born of a woman” “made under the
law.”

2. He kept the law.

3. He freed the law from traditionalism and drew it from the scabbard of rabbinical interpretation.

4. He was a “minister of the circumcision” (Rom. 15:8) not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. His ministry, therefore, was not to the Church. Church truth, position, walk and reward were among the “things” (John 16:12) that even His disciples were not able to bear before Pentecost.

5. Since Christ was a minister of the law, made under the law, and living under the law, to adopt as a rule of life His rule, is to go back and live under law.

6. Such a position is precisely identical with that of the schismatics in Corinth who said — ‘‘and I of Christ.” That is, they justified legality not by an appeal to Mosaism, but to the example of Christ, ignoring (or not knowing) that to “fulfill” the law He must not only bear its curse on the tree, but live under it.

7. The legality of the synoptic Gospels is expressly declared to be “kingdom” truth, and we are members of the body and bride of the King, not subjects of the kingdom.

8. If the epistles are inspired, they are authoritative, not advisory, or suggestive, as to the principles of the

Christian’s walk. It is not open to an obedient member of Christ’s body to justify a return to the legality under which the Son of God graciously humbled Himself to live.

9. There is no unselfishness, disinterestedness, compassion or self-sacrifice painfully wrought out under obedience to law that is not spontaneously and joyfully produced under grace.

10. The defective conception of Christian obligation current among unbelieving, self-indulgent church members, is not to be cured by legality.

11. For such a position, the Acts, Epistles and Revelation might as well be non-existent.

The serious aspects of such a position are:

1. We are cutting off the only divinely-given means of holiness. Under the law-system, painful righteousness is possible, but not liberty, joyousness, and victory.

2. Converts are kept in a modified Galatianism.

3. It is an experiment which has invariably resulted disastrously to gospel liberty. The book, “In His Steps,” is along that line — “What would Jesus do?” Now in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is just one’s guess as to what Christ would do. If, on the other hand, we “walk in the Spirit,” are “led by the Spirit,’ — checked by such precepts as are given to instruct the believer of this dispensation, you are in a path where every step is demonstrable and sure.

There is, we are told, an almost irresistible tendency among missionaries to grow legal. Hudson Taylor speaks of this. They see how crude a sense of even common decency the converts are likely to have, and they see, too, that they are pretty sure to use liberty for an occasion to the flesh. The natural resource is authority. But in 1 Corinthians, where both these tendencies (to anarchy, self-sufficiency and immorality) had ripened into a shameful condition, the apostle refrains utterly from the smallest tinge of legality. He well knew there was no other remedy but grace.