Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Friday, September 16, 2022
When we begin to understand the important relationship between the law of God and the gospel, we will guard against allowing any perversions of it in our presentation of the biblical teaching about justification and sanctification. We will carefully note the contexts in which these two means of revelation are contrasted in Scripture; and, we will recognize that while the law does not, in anyway whatsoever, play in to our justification before God (except insomuch as Christ kept it for us), we will seek to promote the important place that law plays in the Christian life. Believers, at one and the same time, recognize that they are neither justified nor condemned by the moral law of God and they are zealous to run the course of God’s commandments by faith working through love. 

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Joe Thorn, on the Doctrine and Devotion podcast, about the biblical relationship between law and gospel. This subejct is arguably the most significant for us to settle in our thinking, on account of the fact that the entirety of our salvation hangs on the right understanding of the relationship between these two aspects of the divine revelation about the will of God. Many errors have sprung up throughout church history by means of confusion about the relationship between law and gospel. Even Reformed theologians have struggled to come to a place of absolute uniformity in their understanding of the relationship between law and gospel. As Jonathan Edwards once rightly noted, “There is perhaps no part of divinity attended with so much intricacy, and wherein orthodox divines do so much differ, as stating the precise agreement and difference between the two dispensations of Moses and Christ.” To come to a settled understanding of the relationship between law and gospel, we have to first grasp the various theological categories by which the Reformed have sought to settle this questions.
The Scriptures can be divided into two, basic architectonic categories–the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace. In the Covenant of Works, Adam stood as the federal head of humanity. What he did in relation to the covenant stipulations, he did as the representative of all who would descend from him by ordinary generation. In the command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam had a summarization of the moral law of God. Though God did not tell Adam not to kill Eve, Adam would have known in his conscience (the moral law of God being written on it at creation) that it was evil to murder a fellow image bearer. If Adam had cut down the Tree, made a bat, and killed Eve with it, he would have violated the sixth commandment. For these reasons, we can say that the Covenant of Works was a legal covenant, and that the command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was Law.
By way of contrast, the gospel came to Adam and Eve in the Garden in the form of a Covenant of Grace immediately after their fall. God graciously gave the promise that He would send a Redeemer (i.e., the Seed of the woman) to crush the head of the serpent. God promised to send One who would be a new representative of His people and who would come to conquer the one who conquered man (Genesis 3:15). This promise was the first preaching of the gospel. It was built entirely on the free grace of God and was dependent exclusively on the gracious work of God. In contrast to the law, the gospel promised life and righteousness freely by grace. Christ is the mediator of the Covenant of Grace and came to freely provide in the gospel what God required in the law. In this sense, the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace represent the Law and the Gospel. Every man is either in Adam (as his or her federal head) or in Christ (as the representative of the new humanity).
In the course of redemptive history, another relationship between law and gospel appeared in the giving of the law at Sinai. When God entered into covenant with Israel in the old covenant, He did so by means of the covenant ratification at Sinai. Moses, as the old covenant typical redeemer, received the 613 commands from God on the mountain. In the giving of the law at Sinai there was a three-fold distinction. The 613 commandments can be categorized according to the tripartite division of moral, ceremonial, and civil law. The moral law is the essence of the morality God requires of His image bearers. It is summarized in the Ten Commandments. The ceremonial laws are those laws in the Mosaic Covenant that speak distinctly to the cultic practices of Israel. They include laws about sacrifice, priesthood, Tabernacle, and purity. The civil laws were those laws dealing with crime and punishment in the old covenant theocracy. In the New Testament, the word law (nomos) is used sometimes of the entire Mosaic economy, sometimes of the totality of the Mosaic law given at Sinai, sometimes of the ceremonial laws, sometimes of the civil law, and sometimes of the moral law. The context of each passage in which the word occurs will necessitate the way in which we are to understand its usage.
It is not uncommon to read in the Pauline epistles the contrast between the law and the gospel. In nearly every case, the contrast is set in the context of soteriological questions. A right understanding of the situations in which law and gospel are bring used is vital to a right understanding of the relationship between the two. Herman Bavinck has helpfully digested a number of places in the New Testament in which either law or gospel are used. He wrote,
“The law is the will of God (Rom. 2:18, 20); holy, wise, good, and spiritual (7:12, 14; 12:10); giving life to those who maintain it (2:13; 3:2); but because of sin it has been made powerless, it fails to justify, it only stimulates covetousness, increases sin, arouses wrath, kills, curses, and condemns (Rom. 3:20; 4:15; 5:20; 7:5, 8–9, 13; 2 Cor. 3:6ff.; Gal. 3:10, 13, 19).
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Protecting religious expression is vital, not just for Christians, but for everyone. Conscience rights are pre-political rights and provide the foundation on which every other liberty is built. 

In February, the U.S. Department of Education announced its intention to rescind the “Free Inquiry Rule,” established in 2020 by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. According to the rule, universities that receive federal funding cannot deny any right, benefit, or privilege to student organizations simply because they are religious in nature. The common-sense rule was designed to fix the increasingly common practice of campus authorities unjustly pressuring and discriminating against religious student groups. 
For example, during the 2014-15 academic year, the California State University system withdrew recognition from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship because it required its leaders to hold Christian beliefs. In fact, according to a Christian Legal Society fact sheet, similar incidents occurred at the University of Arizona, University of Northern Colorado, the University of Florida, University of Georgia, Boise State University, University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and others. One religious organization with multiple chapters was also forced to seek legal counsel regarding its presence at 16 different public colleges and universities in the last four years.  
In 2021, a Ratio Christi chapter at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was denied funding to invite a Christian philosopher for a lecture unless it included “another spokesperson with a different ideological perspective.” In a lawsuit filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Ratio Christi argued that the university failed to follow this policy with other groups, but instead spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars in student fees each year to pay for speakers … on topics like sexual orientation, gender identity, reproductive justice, social justice, police reform, and political activism.”  
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If I alone can determine what is right and wrong, true and false, just and unjust, I will always be bumping heads with all the others who also think and act this way. With no higher objective absolutes that transcend my and your judgments and assessments, we will always clash. Real human dignity and community can only come from recognising who God is and how we share in the image of God.

There are many ways to describe and discuss sin. Perhaps one definition of major significance is to speak in terms of autonomy. In its simplest form this means self-law or self-government. However, if there is a God who created us and seeks to govern us for our own best good, then autonomy is the height of folly – as well as sin. It is idolatry on steroids.
We perhaps see this especially played out in the radical trans movement. Here we have folks who have so deified autonomy that they believe they can – at will – redefine morality, redefine biology, redefine truth, and redefine reality. Talk about playing God! Talk about kicking God off his throne and elevating mere man in his place.
Last week I penned a piece featuring the important new book by Christopher Watkin: Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan, 2022). As I said there, this is such a wide-ranging and significant volume that a short review will hardly do it justice.
So instead I will feature aspects or chapters of the book in a number of articles. The first one focused on Ch. 23 and is found here.
What I want to highlight today is found in Ch. 5: “Sin and Autonomy.” The Australian Christian philosophy professor also stresses autonomy as the heart of sin, and shows why it is so very destructive. And let me preface this by citing a paragraph from the previous chapter, “Sin and Society”:
The absence of a sustained emphasis on sin and judgment in Christian cultural engagement is, at least, a little odd and, at most, a heinous omission that leaves Christian cultural theory limping and unbalanced. After all, sin is such a crucial figure in the biblical rhythm of creation, fall, and redemption, the rhythm that taps out the distinctively Christian approach to all things from identity and ethics and the environment to culture, the economy, and politics. 108
Exactly right. So it is vital that we speak about sin and identify it properly and accurately. Autonomy is key to all this. And it is the perfect descriptor of what happened in the garden with our first parents:
Adam and Eve choose to live by their own law, their own code of what is permitted and not permitted, rather than by God’s law, and they choose to do so in a world that God has created and sustains, as the creatures God has created and sustains. In the context of Genesis 3, autonomy manifests itself as deciding for oneself what is to be counted as good and evil. It is not, of course, deciding for oneself what is good and evil, because God has already settled that question, and any new legislation that Adam and Eve pass down from their DIY parliament does not annul God’s royal decrees. 133
All this should be sensible enough to understand, but sin of course twists everything, including our understanding. So it is like a toddler telling his parents that he knows what is best, that he can fend for himself, and that he is able to determine what is right and wrong. Or as Watkin expresses it:
It is hard to underestimate the extent to which many in our society today fail to consider what the Bible has to say about God on its own terms because that would require admitting that our own autonomous reason may not be the most reliable truth-discerning tool in the universe. One of the crucial pennies to drop in the minds of those who find their way to faith in their adult years is often the realization that, if there really is a God such as the Bible reveals him to be, then he is smarter than I am and his judgement is more reliable than mine: if he and I differ on a matter, and if he is really God and I am really a creature, then it is more than reasonable to assume that he is correct and I am mistaken. To reach any other conclusion would require a bizarre routine of epistemological gymnastics. Either God is God and I am not, in which case his judgement is to be trusted over mine, or else God is not God, in which case there is no reliable way of satisfactorily arbitrating at all between what is reasonable and what is not.
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