Sometimes Christians think they are or act as if they are still under the law, so they believe their obedience will make God love them more. Or they think their disobedience makes God love them less. They are then terribly frustrated by their failures and try harder to obey God only to fail and feel worse. Or they deceive themselves and think they’ve succeeded in obedience and thus becoming proud. They think they are still under the law and they act like it.
“Through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God” (Gal. 2:19 NASB). “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law” (Gal. 5:18 NASB). In Reformed theology, these words are taken to mean that the believer is not under the law as a covenant of works, demanding obedience upon the pain of curse and death. Because of what Jesus has done, we’re not under the law for justification nor are we under its curse for our sin. Like Thomas Boston said, Christians are neither under the law’s commanding power nor its condemning power. Boston also noted that since the Christian is not completely sanctified, sometimes the Christian sadly believes he or she is still under the law’s demands:
“In the best of the children of God here, there are such remains of the legal disposition and inclination of heart to the way of the covenant of works, that as they are never quite free of it in their best duties, so at sometimes their services smell so rank of it, as if they were alive to the law, and still dead to Christ.”
That’s true. Sometimes Christians think they are or act as if they are still under the law, so they believe their obedience will make God love them more. Or they think their disobedience makes God love them less. They are then terribly frustrated by their failures and try harder to obey God only to fail and feel worse. Or they deceive themselves and think they’ve succeeded in obedience and thus becoming proud. They think they are still under the law and they act like it. Boston:
“And sometimes the Lord for their correction, trial, and exercise of faith, suffers the ghost of the dead husband, the law, as a covenant of works, to come in upon their souls and make demands on them, command, threaten, and affrighten them, as if they were alive to it, and it to them. And it is one of the hardest pieces of practical religion, to be dead to the law in such cases. This death to it admits of degrees, is not alike in all believers, and is perfect in none till the death of the body.”
In God’s fatherly discipline, sometimes he allows the Christian to think he or she is under the law. It’s tough, but he does this to show them not to trust in themselves or their works but in Jesus. Boston is right: Christians are dead to the law, but we don’t always live that truth consistently because we still struggle with sin. It has to do with sanctification. The more God grows us in grace, the less we view ourselves under a covenant of works. As we are gradually sanctified, the legalist in us gradually dies. Remember what Boston and others have noted: the remedy for a legal spirit is not antinomianism, but the gospel of grace. God loves you in Christ with a steadfast, unchangeable love. Rest in that truth!
The above quote is found on page 176 of the Marrow of Modern Divinity by Edward Fisher.
Rev. Shane Lems is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Hammond, Wis. This article appeared on his blog and is used with permission.