Moses ascended the earthly mountain of God and came down with the law written on tablets of stone. But later, he expressed a longing that all the Lord’s people might have the Spirit (Num. 11:29). The law of Moses could command but it could not empower. By contrast, Jesus ascended the heavenly mountain of God and came down in the Spirit to write His law on our hearts.

At a PGA Tour tournament in October 2015, Ben Crane disqualified himself after completing his second round. He did so at considerable financial cost. No matter—Crane believed the personal cost of not doing it would be greater (encouraged by a devotional article he had read that morning by Davis Love III, the distinguished former Ryder Cup captain).
Crane realized he had broken one of the more recondite rules of golf. If I followed the story rightly, while in a hazard looking for his ball, he leaned his club on a stone. He abandoned the ball, took the requisite penalty for doing so, played on, and finished his round. He would have made the Friday night cut comfortably; a very successful weekend financially beckoned. Then Ben Crane thought: “Should I have included a penalty for grounding my club in a hazard?” Sure enough (Rule 13.4a). So he disqualified himself.
Crane has been widely praised for his action. No avalanche of spiteful or demeaning attacks on cyberspace or hate mail for being narrow-minded. All honor to him. Intriguingly, no one seems to have said or written, “Ben Crane is such a legalist.”
How odd it is to see so much praise for his detailed attention to the rules of golf, and yet the opposite when it comes to the rules of life, the (much more straightforward) law of God, even in the church.
There is a problem somewhere.
The Problem
Neither Jesus nor Paul had a problem with the law. Paul wrote that his gospel of grace upholds and establishes the law (Rom. 3:31)—even God’s laws in their negative form, since the “grace of God . . . teaches us to say ‘No’” (Titus 2:11–12, NIV). And remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:17–19? Our attitude to the law is a litmus test of our relationship to the kingdom of God.
So what is the problem? The real problem is that we do not understand grace. If we did, we would also realize why John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace,” could write, “Ignorance of the nature and design of the law is at the bottom of most religious mistakes.”
There is a deep issue here. In Scripture, the person who understands grace loves law. (Incidentally, mere polemics against antinomianism can never produce this.)
Think again of Ben Crane. Why keep the complex rules of golf? Because you love the game. Something similar, but greater, is true of the believer. Love the Lord, and we will love His law—because it is His. All is rooted in this beautiful biblical simplicity.
Think of it in terms of three men and the three “stages” or “epochs” they represent: Adam, Moses, and Jesus.
Adam
At creation, God gave commandments. They expressed His will. And since He is a good, wise, loving, and generous God, His commandments are always for our best. He wants to be a Father to us.
As soon as God created man and woman as His image (Gen. 1:26–28—a hugely significant statement), He gave them statutes to follow (v. 29). The context here makes clear the rationale: He is Lord; they are His image. He made them to reflect Him. He is the cosmic Overlord, and they are the earthly under-lords. His goal is their mutual enjoyment of one another and creation in a communion of life (1:26–2:3). So, He has given them a start—a garden in Eden (2:7). He wants them to extend that garden to the ends of the earth, and to enjoy it as miniature creators, images imitating the great original Creator (1:28–29).
God’s creation commands then had in view our reflecting His image and glory. His image-bearers are made to be like Him. In one form or another, all divine commands have this principle enshrined in them: “You are my image and likeness. Be like me!” This is reflected in His command: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2).
Implied here is that God’s image-bearers are created, hardwired as it were, to reflect Him. Yes, there are external laws given to them, but those laws simply provide specific applications of the “laws” inbuilt in the divine image, laws that are already on the conscience.
It was instinctive then for Adam and Eve to imitate God, to be like Him, because they were created as His image and likeness—just as little Seth would instinctively behave like his father, Adam, because he was “in his likeness, after his image” (Gen. 5:3). Like father, like son.
But then came the fall: sin, lack of conformity to God’s revealed law, and distortion of the image resulted in malfunctions of the inner human instincts. The mirror image turned away from the gaze and the life of God, and since then all people (except Christ) have shared in this condition. The Lord remains the same. His design for His image remains the same. But the image is marred. The under-lord who was created to turn the dust into a garden has become dust himself:
By the sweat of your faceyou shall eat bread,till you return to the ground,for out of it you were taken;for you are dust,and to dust you shall return. (Gen. 3:19)
We remain the image of God, and the laws that govern how we live best are unchanged. But now we are haggard and spent, twisted within, off center, distorted, carrying the aroma of death. Once chief operating officers, we are now vagrants who survive only by stealing from the Owner of the company (Yahweh and Son) who provided for us so generously. The law within functions still, but unreliably at best, not because the law is faulty but because we are.
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them. (Rom. 2:14–15; see also 7:7–25)
But God wants His portrait—His image—back.
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We confirm that God called and elected us by cultivating the virtues listed in 1:5–7. We must be continually growing in those virtues. We must persevere in faith and good works until the end. Consequently, God will richly welcome us into his eternal kingdom (1:11)—like how the King richly welcomes Christian into the Celestial City at the end of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Election is not an excuse for lawlessness or laziness. We must put off sin and put on virtues (see Col. 3:1–4:1). 

You Are at War
Election is terrifying for some people. “Am I chosen by God? How can I know for sure? And what about ______ [my spouse, my child, my parent, my neighbor, or my friend]?” Election may be alarming because it means that God the Creator is supremely sovereign and that we the creatures are not. We prefer to be in control. But what God has revealed about election should be encouraging, comforting, humbling, exhilarating, and motivating.
If you follow Christ and are struggling with whether you are elect, you are at war. You are fighting a scheme of the devil (Eph. 6:11–12). That is why Martin Luther asserts, “When man is assailed by thoughts regarding his election, he is being assailed by hell.”1 So how do we know if God has elected an individual? Cornelis Venema explains, “The warrant for the assurance of election is the same as the warrant for the assurance of salvation.”2
Calling and Justification Are Evidence of Election
“We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). Paul supports those comforting words with four proofs (Rom. 8:29–30):

God predestined (or elected) those whom he foreknew.
God called those whom he predestined.
God justified those whom he called.
God glorified those whom he justified.

This five-link chain of God’s actions is unbreakable: foreknowledge, predestination (or election), calling, justification, and glorification. Every human is either the object of all five of those actions or none of them. If God has called you, then he has enabled you to believe the gospel and thus has judicially declared you to be righteous. Faith is the means of justification, and faith is also an evidence of election. Jesus says, “All that the Father gives me will come to [i.e., believe in] me” (John 6:37).
If you are the object of God’s calling and justification, then you are also the object of God’s predestination. In other words, if God has effectively called you (which means that God has regenerated you and enabled you to repent and believe), then you are elect. If you are justified (which is a result of God-enabled faith), then you are elect. Your calling and justification are evidence of your election.
Following Jesus the Shepherd Is Evidence of Election
Jesus’s sheep are the elect. Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). Do you listen to Jesus and follow him? Then what Jesus says next is a precious assurance for you: “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (John 10:28–29; cf. 6:37–40).
A Transformed Life Is Evidence of Election
We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you [your election (KJV)], because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.
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The Christian is to keep no record of wrongs. Yet I find it every bit as important to keep no record of rights—of the right and good things we have done to others. And that’s because the accounting we are always tempted to keep is not merely of other people’s bad deeds but our own good deeds. When we become convinced there is a disparity between the two, we can become despondent and entitled—despondent that we are not being loved as well as we are loving and entitled to be loved more and better.

We’ve heard it at both weddings and funerals, as both aspiration for a life lived together and as commemoration of a life lived well. In these two contexts and so many others we’ve heard the “love passage,” the Bible’s beautiful description of love enacted in the life of the Christian: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.” And so on.
One of the descriptions can be rendered in a couple of different ways, but most translations understand it as a term related to accounting: “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” Here we have the image of a person opening an accounting book to carefully record every wrong that has been done against him. He writes a date, he writes a name, he writes a description of the hurt or harm, the insult or injury. And he does this not only to chronicle it all but to justify future retaliation.
To keep such a close accounting, a person must first be observant. He must look for every wrong that has been done to him, he must make a careful study of it, and he must write out a precise record. He has to be more than a casual observer of wrongs, but a scrupulous student of them.
In contrast to this, the Bible admonishes us toward something like a self-controlled modesty in which, just as we might avert our eyes from another person’s nakedness, we avert our eyes from another person’s sinfulness.
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