One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (7 page)

The apostle Paul notes that the giving of the Law to Israel did not lead to a newfound obedience but began a history of rebellion that he can even see in himself (Rom. 7:7–9; 9:30–32). Jesus’s severe indictment of the Jewish leaders in the New Testament does not lead to a heartfelt repentance, but to his own crucifixion. Jesus’s command to his disciples that they must take up their crosses and follow him fails to get their martyr juices flowing. Instead, they all abandon him. Paul’s stinging criticism of the Corinthians leads directly to his own tearful letter in 2 Corinthians 10–13. In each instance, the arrival of the Law does not lead to life but to disobedience and death. And I haven’t even mentioned the most obvious example of all, the very first one, in the Garden of Eden. The command not to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil prompts Adam and Eve to disobey rather than follow it. If the Law has a purpose, it may just be this paradoxical outcome.

THE FRUIT OF THE LAW: RESENTMENT, REBELLION, AND EXHAUSTION

In 2012,
The Guardian
published an excoriating email sent by retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews to his son and two daughters.
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It quickly became a viral sensation. The letter lists, in remarkably colorful language, all the misery that the three grown children had put their father and mother through, from failed marriages and careers to poor finances to fears about their grandchildren’s well-being. The final paragraph is particularly vicious:

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don’t want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes—it’s not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace—far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won’t do it by simply whingeing and saying you don’t like it. You’ll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn’t possible, or you simply can’t be bothered, then I rest my case.

I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

Dad

Wow! Any parent can relate to Mr. Crews’s frustration. And many of us can probably relate to his children and the disapproval they must have felt. It does not sound like Mr. Crews is making things up. He and his wife apparently have every reason to be so bitterly disappointed and angry. Like the Law itself, the content of his missive may be well-founded, and their standards for their children may be perfectly reasonable (and righteous). But expectations, as they say, are planned resentments; law and bitterness are frequent bedfellows. We expect people not to be self-centered sinners, and when they turn out to be just that, we get angry and blame them!

Do you think that the letter had the effect Mr. Crews intended? Absolutely not! I don’t care who you are, no one responds to a letter like that by saying, “By golly, Dad, thanks for pointing these things out. Now that I know how much pain we’ve caused and how irresponsible we’ve been, starting tomorrow, that’s all over.” Of course, the law may work … for a little while. Guilt and fear can be powerful motivators in the short run. What they cannot do is change a heart from self-seeking to self-sacrificing. The letter may have succeeded in scaring the kids straight for a spell, but fear of further berating would be the driving factor, not the genuine desire to fly right. What’s much more likely is that the children would be so hurt and offended that they struck back at their father by releasing his letter to an international media outlet, so that he might be castigated and humiliated by the public. Which is precisely what happened. His email backfired. Instead of bringing his children closer, it pushed them further away. This is an echo of what the apostle Paul meant when he wrote that “the law was brought in so that the trespass might increase” (Rom. 5:20
NIV
).

It makes me sad that some pastors invoke Mr. Crews’s tactics from the pulpit. Frustrated with their congregation’s failure to come to church enough, get involved enough, give enough money, pray enough, read their Bibles enough, invite their friends enough, so many pastors use their position to send verbal letters. “How can you afford your fancy SUV but not give more to the church? How can you take your kid to their soccer game every Sunday but never bring them to youth group?” Pastors who resent their congregations are just like husbands who resent their wives—the resulting guilt may produce some modified behavior for a while, but estrangement and rebellion are inevitable. The only difference is that a congregation has every right to expect that their pastor will preach a little Good News every Sunday. Make no mistake: over time, preachers who major on law and behavior rather than grace and faith will empty their pews and create refugees. Human DNA simply cannot bear the weight of the law indefinitely.

Pulpits today are full of preachers telling one-legged people to jump higher and run faster. Musician Rich Mullins once wrote, “I have attended church regularly since I was less than a week old. I’ve listened to sermons about virtue, sermons against vice. I have heard about money, time management, tithing, abstinence, and generosity. I’ve listened to thousands of sermons. But I could count on one hand the number [of sermons] that were a simple proclamation of the Gospel of Christ.”
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It’s not just Rich. I received the following letter recently from someone I’ve never met. He wrote:

Over the last couple of years, we have really been struggling with the preaching in our church as it has been very law laden and moralistic. After listening, I feel condemned with no power to overcome my lack of ability to obey. Over the last several months, I have found myself very spiritually depressed, to the point where I had no desire to even attend church. Pastors are so concerned about somehow preaching “too much grace” (as if that is possible), because they wrongly believe that type of preaching leads to antinomianism or licentiousness. But, I can testify that the opposite is actually true. I believe preaching only the law and giving little to no gospel actually leads to lawless living. When mainly law is preached, it leads to the realization that I can’t follow it, so I might as well quit trying. At least, that’s what has happened to me.

So sad. And frustrating. The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn’t make people work harder, it makes them give up. Moralism doesn’t produce morality; rather, it produces immorality.
The Onion
brilliantly parodied this dynamic with its article, “Where Are All These ‘Loose Women’ My Pastor Keeps Warning Me About?,” in which a fictional seventeen-year-old kid laments that he never seems to run into any of the promiscuous ladies that he hears about at church so often.
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The humor is based in reality. It is no coincidence, for example, that the straight-laced
Leave It to Beaver
generation preceded the free-love movement of the 1960s. We live in a country where the state most known for its wholesomeness and frugality, Utah, also leads the country in rates of pornography consumption and antidepressant prescriptions.
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We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone
stirs up
more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. This isn’t to say the Spirit doesn’t use both God’s Law and God’s Gospel in our lives and for our good. But the Law and the Gospel do very different things. The Law reveals sin but is powerless to remove it. It points to righteousness but can’t produce it. It shows us what godliness is, but it cannot make us godly. As Martin Luther wrote, “Sin is not canceled by lawful living, for no person is able to live up to the Law. Nothing can take away sin except the grace of God.”
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The Law apart from the Gospel can only crush; it cannot cure.

WHY THEN THE LAW?

If you are at all like me, at this point you must be asking, “What is the purpose of the Law if it doesn’t seem to be able to produce what it calls for? If the fruit of the Law is self-righteousness, rebellion, resentment, and ultimately death, why bother with it at all? Are you saying that the Law is indeed bad?” No! The answer comes in Jesus’s words to his disciples after the rich young ruler walked away sorrowful:

And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.” (Mark 10:23–27)

Can you see what Jesus was up to? Before that young man could look outside himself for help, he needed to be disillusioned about who he was. The Law, to paraphrase Martin Luther, is a divine Hercules sent to attack and kill the monster of self-righteousness—a monster that continues to harass the redeemed. We need the Law to freshly reveal to us that we are worse off than we think we are. We need to be reminded that there is something to be pardoned even in our best works and proudest achievements.
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But then, once we are recrushed by Law, we need to be reminded that “there is a fountain fill’d with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains” (W. Cowper). We need to be told that the sins we cannot forget, God cannot remember, or as the old hymn puts it, that “though th’ accuser roar, of ills that I have done, I know them all and thousands more; Jehovah findeth none.” We need to be told over and over that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, that nothing can separate us from God’s love, and that Christians live their lives under a banner that reads, “It is finished.”

The Gospel declares that Jesus came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. Jesus met all of God’s holy conditions so that our relationship with God could be wholly unconditional. The demand maker became a demand keeper and died for me—a demand breaker.

Until we realize that self-salvation is
impossible
, we will not be interested in the One with whom all things are
possible
. In its mirrorlike fashion, the Law reveals our helplessness before the devastation and comprehensiveness of divine expectation, and that helplessness creates the space for God’s amazing grace and the freedom it produces. It shows us who we really are, stripping away every shred of our self-justifying and delusional facades. In doing so, it leaves us no other option than to cling to the One who has fulfilled the Law in our place. I wish I could say I do everything for God’s glory. I can’t. Neither can you. What I can say is Jesus’ blood covers all my efforts to glorify myself. I wish I could say Jesus fully satisfies me. I can’t. Neither can you. What I can say is Jesus fully satisfied God for me.

This happy exchange lies at the very heart of what the Bible teaches about Christ. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves, not just acting in a righteous way, but
being
righteousness himself—so that we might become the righteousness of God. This is why the Gospel is such good news to those who have failed in significant ways. It offers more than a second chance to get things right, it offers a substitute. God, in fact, is not the God of second chances. He is the God of one chance and a second Adam. Perhaps my favorite illustration of our relationship to the Law in Christ is the following:

[We are] a little like the duck hunter who was hunting with his friend in a wide-open barren of land in southeastern Georgia. Far away on the horizon he noticed a cloud of smoke. Soon, he could hear the sound of crackling. A wind came up and he realized the terrible truth: a brush fire was advancing his way. It was moving so fast that he and his friend could not outrun it. The hunter began to rifle through his pockets. Then he emptied all the contents of his knapsack. He soon found what he was looking for—a book of matches. To his friend’s amazement, he pulled out a match and struck it. He lit a small fire around the two of them. Soon they were standing in a circle of blackened earth, waiting for the brush fire to come. They did not have to wait long. They covered their mouths with their handkerchiefs and braced themselves. The fire came near—and swept over them. But they were completely unhurt. They weren’t even touched. Fire would not burn the place where fire had already burned.
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The point here is that the Law is like a brush fire that takes no prisoners. It cannot be escaped or extinguished or circumvented. But if we stand in the burned-over place, where Law has already done its worst, we will not get hurt. Its power has not been nullified, nor has its necessity and authority been denied. Yet because of where we are standing, not a hair on our heads will be singed. The death of Christ is the burned-over place. There we huddle, hardly believing yet relieved. Christ’s death has disarmed the Law, and where there was once guilt, now all that remains is gratitude.

Again, just think about your own life for a moment. As much as we might wish the world—and we ourselves—didn’t operate according to debits and credits, there is always a cost to what we do. We are conditional beings living in a conditional universe. “I called you last time, now it’s your turn to call me.” “If you lie to me, there must be an apology before we’re good again.” The condition must be met, the cost must be paid—“either I swallow my pride, you say you’re sorry, or we never talk to each other again.” But the debt has to go somewhere. Christianity alone affirms that the God who makes the demands also met those demands for us in the person of Jesus. That God would deign to reach us in a way that both acknowledges and resolves these fundamental realities is not juvenile or overly abstract/economic—it is both gracious and miraculous. We are both fully known and fully loved.