Grace and the Law- What They are Not

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age~ Titus 2:11-12

I am not, nor have I ever been, much of a rule-maker. In fact the opposite is true. My husband and I had very few hard and fast rules for our children while they were growing up. None of them ever had a curfew. The few rules we did make for our kids all tended to center around safety, relationships, and how we treated one another.

 My aversion to an overabundance of rules has boiled over into other areas of my life as well. One of my favorite personal axioms is:

“Rules are for people who don’t know how to do things right”.

 My distaste for man-made rules has been born out of a deeply held conviction that laws are for law-breakers (1^st Timothy 1:9-11) and the belief that people would need no laws if they would simply use good judgment and do what God wanted them to do (Galatians 5:18). I have never been charged with being a legalist.

All that being said, if I have to listen to one more Christian who is skirting the edges of good sense or worse yet, openly sinning proclaim stridently one of the following phrases:  “I am under grace not law!” “You can’t judge me,” or “Just because something is wrong for you does not mean it’s wrong for everyone,” I will need to be medicated.

It is my conviction that these increasingly common assertions are born out of confusion over two concepts: God’s moral law and grace. Too many of us mistakenly suppose that God’s law and grace are things that they clearly are not.

God’s moral law is not…

Extinct- Matthew 5:17, Galatians 5:18-20, Colossians 3:5

There are three types of law in the Old Testament, ceremonial, civil and moral.  As the ultimate High Priest Jesus satisfied every aspect of the ceremonial law, it is now fulfilled and is therefore irrelevant for Christians. Civil law was intended for the nation of Israel, and is not generally pertinent today. But that does not mean that Christians are not bound by moral standards found in the law. If a command or directive from the Old Testament law is repeated in the New Testament, it still applies. 

A club to beat people with- Ephesians 4:2, Galatians 6:1-3

One reason there is so much confusion over this issue is because too many people have paid too much attention to the actions of others for too long. It is biblical for one Christian to warn another when their actions are crossing clearly defined Scriptural lines (1^st Corinthians 4:14, James 5:20). That being said, we have to remember that we are to judge our own behavior in light of God’s moral law, less so other people’s behavior. What others do or don’t do is really none of our concern once they’ve been lovingly warned (Ezekiel 3:21).  

  

An excuse to make more rules- 1^st John 5:3, Matthew 23:1-15

Too often well-intentioned Christians will put up fences around God-given commands and call those fences commands. A fence is a rule we put around a command to assist us in keeping the actual command. This is how we end up with man-made rules that look a bit like God-made rules. An example of this sort of thing would be sexual immorality. Christians are commanded to shun sexual immorality. Prohibitions against dating, hand-holding, movies, premarital kissing and dancing might help some people to avoid sexual sin but they are personal choices, not God-given commands and should not be treated as such.

Grace is a word that is nearly impossible to define. It is a mysterious and magnificent expression of God’s love for humanity.  At its core the word carries with it the notion of undeserved favor, but grace is so much more than just favor. Grace defines a God who, for no justifiable reason, chose to show love, kindness, and mercy towards undeserving and mostly ungrateful people.

The benefits of grace are incalculable. Grace pardons us from the penalty of sin (Ephesians 2:8-9). Grace allows frail, fallible men and women to do things and endure things they never dreamed possible. (2^nd Corinthians 12:9). Grace gives us peace beyond human understanding during times of stress or loss (Philippians 4:7). Grace enables humans to understand God on a deeper level (Ephesians 1:7-9). God’s grace empowers us to see people through God’s eyes and, if properly understood and applied, compels us to show mercy toward others. And according to Titus 2:11-12, grace brings with it the supernatural ability to live holy lives.

Because grace is freely given it can easily devolve into an excuse for self-indulgence and pleasure seeking (Jude 1:4), or an excuse to avoid the long, sometimes difficult process of becoming holy (1^st Peter 1:13-15).  When we allow these things to happen, our version of grace devolves into a cheap counterfeit of something truly beautiful.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you~ 1^st Thessalonians 5:28