You have no doubt heard all your life about how Grace and Law are
polar opposites, how you cannot be saved by Grace if you are committed
to obeying the Law. This is directly contrary to the overall witness of
Scripture. I will show you Grace and Law are not only not incompatible,
but are absolutely necessary to each other.
Let's start in Ezekiel 16:6:
And
when I passed by you and saw you squirming in your blood, I said to you
in your blood, Live! Yes, I said to you in your blood, Live!
Albert Barnes wrote,
In thy blood
- may be connected either with “I said” or with “Live.” In the latter
case, the state of blood and defilement is made the very cause of
life...
So that the last phrase in the verse could be
rendered, "Yes, I said to you, 'Live through your blood.'" In other
words, the blood brings life. But why does God say it twice?
In "
Circumcision: The Individual's Covenant with God"
Rabbi Yohanasan Gefen wrote that each iteration of this statement
refers to a different shedding of blood. The first statement refers to
the circumcision of Abraham, while the second refers to the Passover
Lamb.
Circumcision represents our decision to commit ourselves to
God, while the Passover Lamb represents God's decision to commit himself
to us. Faith gets you inside the house as the angel of death passes over, but you can't eat the Passover Lamb unless you are circumcised. Without both commitments, we are lost and we have to accept both
of them, hence we are commanded to eat of the Lamb by both Moses and
Yeshua.
Circumcision was a physical manifestation of Abraham's
faith in God's promises. He circumcised his flesh and the flesh of all
of the males in his house, including Ishmael, as an outward sign of his
complete trust in God's faithfulness. However, circumcision in itself
was not the means of Abraham's salvation. It didn't replace his faith,
and the act of cutting himself did not cause God to keep his promise of
an heir and a great inheritance.
Consider Ishmael. He was
circumcised also, but he did not inherit the covenant. Many years before
the circumcision, God promised Abraham a son. When he began to doubt,
he tried to force God's promise through his own power. Ishmael was
conceived through his father's
mistrust of God and a reliance
on works to earn God's favors. Obedience alone will never be enough to
warrant inclusion in the covenant with Abraham; one must also have
faith.
But faith in what? In the Messiah Yeshua, our Passover Lamb
whose blood covers us and takes away our sins. This is the ultimate
inheritance of the children of Abraham, and the ultimate reason we must
keep God's Law.
We do not (cannot!) obey to earn God's favor or to
bribe or force him to keep his promises. God is faithful whether we are
or not. No, we obey because we believe. If we believe in God's
faithfulness to provide an atonement for us and to forgive us our sins,
then we will obey him. Obedience follows true faith, and there are only
two reasons why a a person would not keep God's Law:
- Ignorance
of his requirements, such as is the case with those many Christians who
have been deceived their entire lives to believe that God didn't mean
what he said.
- Lack of faith. As James said, "Show me your faith
without works, and I will show you my faith by my works." There is no
such thing as faith without works. A lack of works always indicates a
lack of faith.
As I have said over and over, this does not mean that anyone is saved by their works. Abraham did not circumcise himself
before his faith, but
because
of it. We do not keep God's Law to earn salvation, but because we are
saved. Likewise, a person can be perfectly obedient to every point of
the Law and still be eternally lost because they put their hope for
salvation in obedience instead of in God's faithfulness.
I can't
tell you how many sermons I heard growing up in the Assemblies of God
about how the Law was replaced by Grace. Even at the time it all seemed a
little hypocritical. If the Law was done away (or "fulfilled" away) why
did Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, and others spend so much time talking
about it? Why do we put the Ten Commandments up on the Sunday School
walls?
The Bible was very little help. James clearly wrote that
the Law was still in effect, and Peter wrote that you had to have a good
foundation in the scriptures (the Law and the Prophets) in order to
understand Paul's letters. But why should an understanding of the Law be
important to understand someone who used so much ink telling us to
forget the Law?
"Don't take James so literally," I was told. "He's talking about a new
spiritual law that has replaced the old written law."
OK, but what about Peter? He couldn't have been writing about
spiritual
scriptures. Scriptures means "writings". If they only exist on a
spiritual plane, how can they be written? And how could one study
writings that aren't written?
As I have demonstrated through numerous arguments elsewhere,
that was all so much hot air and wishful thinking. The fact is that the Bible is only no help if you have assumed a priori that the Law is irrelevant to the Christian.
Grace and Law were
never in opposition, but were always complementary. You cannot be saved
by Grace unless you are first convicted by the Law, and you cannot be
saved by God's Grace unless you are also committed to obeying God's Law.
How can a person claim to believe in someone else if they refuse to
believe what the other person has said?
Law and Grace are not
opposed to one another, but are merely two sides of the same coin. If
you are not committed to obeying God's commandments, then you cannot be
heir to his promises. And if you are not under God's Grace, then all the
obedience in the world will earn you nothing but damnation.
