The Sun Is Blotted from the Sky
“Give me Adam’s complaining and Jacob’s obstinacy and Samson’s lust.” The angels of heaven seem to shout, “Stop! Surely he has reached his limit!” But again he speaks to say, “Burden me more! Add to me the weight of all the sins of the next two thousand years, add to me all the sins of all the ages that will follow. Load on the guilt of the blasphemer, the perjurer, the murderer, the adulterer, then the shame of the thief, the gossip, the hater, the idler.”
When of great physical strength have sometimes carried outrageously heavy burdens—six hundred pounds, seven hundred pounds, eight hundred. And even then they have said, “I still have not been fully tested. Put on some more weight! Load me up!” With confidence they have gripped the bar and with great straining and groaning they have lifted it clear of the ground. Yet in every case, they have eventually reached a point where they have had to cry out, “Stop! I have hit my limit. I cannot carry any more weight.”
I wonder if you have ever considered that the burden Christ carried for us was without limit. Have you considered the tremendous weight he bore on Calvary?
There was his own burden of hunger and thirst and bereavement, and the burden of the thousand insults and outrages that had been heaped upon him. On top of that was the burden of seeing the sorrows of his mother and friends as they watched him suffer and struggle for breath. On top of even that was the burden of witnessing the crimes of the soldiers who were putting him to death and the mocking of the criminals who hung beside him.
Even as we consider this our hearts begin to cry, “Stop! Surely he cannot bear anymore.”
Yet Christ says, “Add more. Add to me the sins of the people of Israel as they turned and rebelled and chased after false gods.”
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A Not So Secret Ingredient for Marriage
Pride has been called the origin of all sins. If that is so, humility is the answer for all sins. It begins with humility before God and leads to humility before others in our relationships. And the surprising fruit is the grace He gives as He blesses a marriage.
Anniversary While in Quarantine
Jennifer and I are three days away from finishing our 14-day quarantine in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We have returned to the field amidst the COVID-19 epidemic. Today marks our 25th wedding anniversary, so we celebrate stuck in a hotel under heavy restrictions. Don’t worry—we often celebrate at a later time when circumstances crunch The Day. But being stuck has allowed time for musing, reflecting on what grace has brought us through twenty-five years, still so grateful to be sharing life together.
I have been married to Jennifer for more than half of my life now, two years more to be exact. It is hard to imagine life without her. If the Lord were to take her home before me, it would be extremely difficult. We have learned so much about helping each other in daily joys and trials that our lives are now interconnected in a thousand ways.
But no marriage is perfect. That is impossible because each of us are sinners. Being in Christ and having God’s Word, His Spirit, and His Church should make a tremendous difference in our lives and marriages. But even if both husband and wife are godly believers growing and changing, there will still be conflict and difficulties at times. We may be saved sinners being sanctified, but we are sinners still.
Why the Conflict?
Why is it that some Christian homes with both husband and wife genuinely born-again believers still have poor marriages? Why does conflict and strife still dominate many Christian homes? How could it possibly be that Christians could defy God’s will for marriage and get divorced?
If we were to try to explain the difference between a godly Christian marriage and a failing or failed Christian marriage, what would that difference be? If we tried to “boil it down” to the most basic difference between them, what would that basic difference be?
What Saith the Scriptures?
The Scriptures don’t give us a statement that says, “The golden key to success in marriage is this one word or principle”. We do have lots of statements about marriage to draw on, however:Believers are to leave their parents and cleave to one another as the most important person in life, to become “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).
We are to view our marriage commitment as a covenant made in the eyes of God, one that He takes very seriously. God hates divorce (Mal. 2:13-16)!Read More
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On Properly Distinguishing Law and Gospel
Law and gospel go together in Paul’s thought, and having been shown the truth of the gospel and having trusted God in light of it, we are then to show the sincerity of our faith and to realize the law’s temporal purpose and the rest of God’s predestined will for us (Eph. 2:10) by obeying the law as a way of love for redeemed persons (Rom. 13:8-10; Col. 3:1-14; 1 Jn. 2:3-5). Law convicts, gospel reconciles, and law informs and sanctifies the redeemed life.
In a recent article I criticized an anonymous group of Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) agency heads for using the phrase “gospel imperative that ‘love does no wrong to a neighbor (Romans 13:10)’” that had also appeared in a 2016 denominational resolution. Central to my objection was that the phrase spoke of the gospel while quoting a section of Romans that deals with the law – the rest of v. 10 states “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (emphasis mine) – and thus conflated what ought to have been distinguished. In a subsequent response a professor and PCA member, Chris Bryans, expressed uncertainty as to my meaning, saying:
I am not sure where Mr. Hervey is going in his brief comment about Romans 13:10. In attempting to separate law and gospel he believes that Paul is not discussing the gospel but the Law. The author is correct but only in a limited sense. And, as I am sure Mr. Hervey will recognize, although Paul lays out the gospel in Romans chapters 1-11, the applications of the gospel present themselves in the beginning of chapter 12 and continue to the end of the book.
And elsewhere:
What Mr. Hervey also means by the “separation of law and gospel” is as unclear to me as some of the issues of the Statement seem to be to him. How the separation of law and gospel relates to the issue at hand is also a puzzle to me. The same statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is part of law AND gospel. This needs further elaboration and I look forward to it.
In answer to the professor’s objections, and also because of correspondence which informs me that ministers doing important denominational work regard the law/gospel distinction as peculiarly Lutheran, I offer this response.
In the first case, I did perhaps speak poorly in saying that a “separation” should be maintained between law and gospel, which might suggest they are utterly antithetical. It is noteworthy, however, that I had earlier said (in my “brief comment about Romans 13:10”) that “as a rule the law and the gospel should be carefully distinguished, and each appealed to in its proper place”; i.e., the separation in view is really a clear distinction that puts each in its proper sphere and in the right relation to the other. I will concede that I could have been clearer, but I do not wish for Professor Bryans or anyone else to believe that a believer can so fully separate law and gospel that he can deal with only one rather than both, or that they ought to be regarded as exclusive of each other.
What is the law? In its widest sense it means God’s revealed will for human behavior. In this sense it includes the moral law which is impressed upon human conscience through God’s common grace operating in society (Rom. 2:14-15).[1] In a narrower sense it refers to the special revelation of this will in the Old and New Testaments, hence it sometimes refers to the whole Old Testament (Jn. 10:34), while in other cases it refers specifically to the Mosaic Law (Matt. 7:12), and in yet others it refers to the way of love as taught and exemplified by Christ and his apostles (Jn. 15:9-17; Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 6:2; 1 Jn. 4:21-5:3).[2]
What is the gospel? It is the good news of the kingdom of God which has appeared with the incarnation of Christ (Matt. 4:23; 9:35), and which has been raised against the oppressive kingdom of sin, death, and devil that afflicts people with misery and separates them from God (Lk. 11:14-22; Jn. 12:31). God’s kingdom is built upon the redeeming work of its king, who has atoned for the sins of his people and broken the power of death and the devil by dying in their place and rising from the dead (Rom. 4:25; 1 Cor. 15:20-22; Heb. 2:14-16). This redemption is received by faith (Mk. 1:15; Rom. 1:16-17; 3:21-26), and so the gospel is then the message of God’s kingdom and of how to enter it by a faith that receives and rests on the king who has accomplished redemption by his work.
The distinction between law and gospel is not per se a distinction between the Old and New Testaments, between grace and judgment, or between commands and promises. Both law (Matt. 5:17-19) and gospel (Gen. 3:15; 15:6; Ps. 32:1-2; comp. Rom. 4:3, 6-8) are present in both testaments, albeit with different degrees of clarity.[3] Both are of grace, as God could have left us to wallow in the darkness of our own sin. Both have to do with judgment (Rom. 2:12, 16). Both relate to sin and have a part in the lives of both believers and unbelievers, being to the former a blessing and to the latter a source of condemnation (2 Cor. 2:15-17). Both contain commands – “do” and “do not” in the case of the law and “repent and believe” in the case of the gospel (Mk. 1:15; 6:12; Acts 2:38; 3:19; 17:30; Rom. 16:25) – as well as promised rewards for obedience (Deut. 28:1-15; Acts 16:31; Rom. 10:9-13) and warnings and punishments for disobedience (Deut. 28:15-68; Heb. 6:4-6; 2 Pet. 2:20-22).
Law and gospel are antithetical only on one point, and even there only insofar as there is human misunderstanding about the matter. It just so happens that this is the most important matter in any person’s life. In the question of salvation the law and gospel are opposed if a person believes that salvation comes from obeying the law, the misunderstanding of Judaism and of various groups throughout church history. If one is inclined to think along such lines, the answer is that the law is a failed, impossible way of gaining eternal life and serves only to condemn, whereas the gospel of God’s free grace in the person and work of Christ, received by faith, is the only means of obtaining the desired salvation. As regards salvation the law is death (Rom. 7:5, 10) and the gospel is life (5:10-21); the law increases sin (5:20) and the gospel compels to righteousness (5:21-6:14); the law is of works (Gal. 3:10-12) and the gospel of faith (Rom. 3:28; Gal. 2:16; 3:13-14); the law is condemnation (Rom. 3:19-20) and the gospel is grace and justification (3:21-26); the law is selfish (Gal. 5:2-4) and the gospel is Christ-centered (2:20-21).
Properly understood, law and gospel are distinct but complementary. The law convicts of sin and shows the insufficiency of all human efforts to earn eternal life, whereas the gospel shows God’s remedy for human depravity and guilt. For the redeemed the law shows the need for the gospel (Rom. 3:19-20), while the gospel provides the material knowledge which faith believes and which moves one to trust God for salvation (3:21-30). The gospel then sets one in the right relation to the law by making it a joyful guide for how to love God and Man (13:8-10), not a hopeless way to try to earn salvation (3:20), nor a condemning testimony to one’s own conscience (2:15) and at the Day of Judgment (2:16). For the reprobate both law and gospel serve to increase the guilt of those who have encountered and rejected them, while those that have not known them will be judged apart from them (Lk. 10:13-16; 12:47-48; Rom. 2:12; 2 Pet. 2:21.)
What makes all of this liable to confusion is that Paul uses the phrase “the law” in different ways, using it to refer especially to the Mosaic Law in the earlier chapters of Romans, and then in the later chapters meaning by it what he elsewhere calls “the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2), i.e. a way of living characterized by love for neighbor. Nonetheless, in its varied forms the law is one thing, the gospel another. Both go together to provide an accurate knowledge of Man’s sin, of his need for forgiveness, of how to obtain eternal life, and of how to live a life pleasing to God. But they are distinct and must be carefully recognized as such. To attempt to have law without gospel is to attempt to earn salvation – and to fail miserably. To attempt to have gospel without law is to become an antinomian and to open the door to hypocritically pleading Christ while living wickedly. To conflate the two is to convert the gospel into a new law, the error sometimes known as neonomianism, which changes the gospel from being about what God has done in Christ, the reconciliation which is received by faith, and makes it instead into a different set of directions for what men must do to please God.
Those that speak of a ‘“gospel imperative that ‘love does no wrong to a neighbor’” while appealing to Romans 13 make the error of mistaking gospel for law. Romans 13 is about law, not gospel: loving neighbor is therefore a legal imperative, not a gospel one. But Romans 13 is about law as a guide for proper conduct because Romans 1 through 11 are about gospel and about the law as a testimony to our own sin, our inability to save ourselves, and our need for God to redeem us.[4]
Law and gospel go together in Paul’s thought, and having been shown the truth of the gospel and having trusted God in light of it, we are then to show the sincerity of our faith and to realize the law’s temporal purpose and the rest of God’s predestined will for us (Eph. 2:10) by obeying the law as a way of love for redeemed persons (Rom. 13:8-10; Col. 3:1-14; 1 Jn. 2:3-5). Law convicts, gospel reconciles, and law informs and sanctifies the redeemed life.[5] That is the proper relation and order of law and gospel as revealed in Paul’s writings.
Those that fail to distinguish the two and regard as gospel what is really law open the door to further error, not least the errors of the so-called social gospel, which turns the Church’s message from the gospel of reconciliation to God by faith into an appeal for merely temporal philanthropy. That the phrase to which I objected occurred originally and subsequently in statements about social affairs should therefore move you to concern, dear reader. And while I do not think this indicates that the mistaken authors in view are heretics, nonetheless it betrays a sloppiness in scriptural exegesis and ethical and theological thought that ill becomes our denomination and its foremost men, a sloppiness that merits criticism (and amendment) lest it inspire further failures to rightly handle the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15) that will lead us father away from the Church’s proper mission of making disciples by the means of grace and on into the abyss of socio-political activism in which so many other Presbyterians have foundered and died by abandoning the Great Commission for things that are more properly the province of other institutions.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Simpsonville, S.C.[1] H. Bavinck, Reformed Ethics Vol. I, 218-226
[2] Of course what is recorded in the New Testament was, previous to its authorship, transmitted via other means (2 Thess. 2:15).
[3] This lack of clarity is especially as regards the gospel in the Old Testament. One of the purposes of the law was to show the depravity of sin and with it the need for a gracious redeemer to save man from sin’s dominion: thus the law was added to help clarify the gospel (Rom. 7:7-13; Gal. 3:21-26).
[4] On this point Professor Bryans and I agree, though implications is arguably a preferable term to his own “applications,” as it better communicates the fact that being in the right relation to the law is a consequence of embracing the gospel of salvation by faith in Christ.
[5] Hence we have historically distinguished between the three uses of the law, two of which are in view here. Its use in conviction is regarded as the second use of the law; its use in teaching love is its third use.
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4 Ways to Show Your Love for the Lord
My prayer is that as Christians we would grow in that love as we go about our daily lives learning to be satisfied in the situations that God has placed us in, reading and trusting in God’s Word and promises, obeying His commands as a sign of our faith and always thanking Him for the gifts that he gives His children every day.
What characterises the life of a Christian? Your answer will largely depend on your experience. You may say that a Christian is characterised by following certain traditions, by obeying certain norms within Christian-culture. You may jump to actions and think about Bible reading, church attendance, prayer and other kinds of Christian disciplines. But at the very core being a Christian means following Jesus and becoming more like Him, it also means being characterised the love that we have been shown by God.
Love is one of the many things that should characterise the life of a Christian. I often speak about four the key ‘loves’ that should be seen in the life of every Christian and that should, we pray, be growing in our lives as individuals and as local churches. The four loves are; love the Lord, love His Word, love His people and love the lost.
But what does it practically look like to love the Lord and how can we grow in that love? We don’t have the space to unpack everything that loving the Lord means, but here are four key things I’d like to mention:
1. Being satisfied in Him
One of the passages that many Christians run to for encouragement and strength to face their day to day struggles is in Philippians 4:11-13, where Paul famously says “I can do all things through him who gives me strength”. That statement of faith and confidence in God is the reason Paul has contentment, the reason he is satisfied, because he knows Jesus and all the wonderful gifts God had given him. Paul in his time of need and troubles, of which there were many, reminded himself of the gospel and the grace of God that called him, saved him and sent him to share Jesus with others. We can be satisfied in God because He has given us the solution to our biggest need – our sin and separation from Him, God knows everything we need and His good plan for us will be fulfilled. Growing in our knowledge of who God is will mean that our satisfaction in Him grows.
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