13. Christ and the Law (Remastered)

Christ and the Law

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is Galatians 5:13-23 and our subject; ‘Christ and the Law.’ Galatians 5:13-23

“For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” 

At Easter time we celebrate the great facts of our Lord’s victory; His victory over sin and death, the victory of the Cross and of the Resurrection. The fact that He died in atonement for our sins and that He rose again from the dead is accepted by all who believe in the Scriptures. The point of difficulty, however, over which so many go astray, is the meaning of those events in relationship to the law. 

Very commonly it is stated that in Christ we are dead to the law, and one of the passages most commonly used is the one which we have just read. Galatians, the whole book, and in particular this passage from the fifth chapter. Also commonly used is Romans 7:4-6 where again it is stated that we are, “dead to the Law.” However, this passage is immediately followed by Romans 8:4 which states that now, in Christ, being risen from the death of sin, we are alive in Him that the righteousness of the Law might be fulfilled in us. 

How can we understand these various passages, the passages that deal with the ostensible death of the law are many? Another such passage is Ephesians 2:1-10, in which St. Paul speaks of us as being, “dead in tresspasses and sins.” But we are made alive by God through Jesus Christ and His cross. The remedy for man, St. Paul tells us, is not the Law. Man has broken the Law, he is dead in sin and cannot keep the Law. Our salvation, St. Paul tells us, in wholly the work of God. The faith which we have, which brings us to believe in Christ, is itself, he declares in Ephesians 2:8, the gift of God. At this point, all Scripture is emphatic; God is man’s only redeemer and savior, the law is not given as a way of salvation, but as God’s way of righteousness for His chosen people. 

St. Paul concludes this passage by saying that we are, “God’s workmanship in Jesus Christ created beforehand unto good works,” that is, recreated from the foundation of the world in Jesus Christ to be born again in Him unto good works, unto obedience, unto the Law. But there are some who then say, “But the law is called ‘carnal’ in the Scripture, for example in Hebrews 7:16.” At this point it is well to note what scholars, for example, as far back as Calvin, have said:

“It was called carnal, because it refers to things corporeal, that is, to external rites.” ⁱ

In other words, the usage of ‘carnal’ is to anything that is external, corporeal, or bodily. So that when St. Paul, for example in this passage, speaks of the requirements of temperance, he is speaking of something that is ‘carnal.’ The calling of believers, we are told in Galatians, is unto liberty. 

“For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. ¹⁴ For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” ⁱⁱ

Thus, here we have an identification of three things; liberty, the Law, and love. We are then further told in the passage that follows, that this is the way of the Spirit. In other words, the man who is filled with the Spirit walks in the way of the Law, which is the way of love, which is our calling unto the liberty, the freedom, unto God. “But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law,” ⁱⁱⁱwe are then told. Again, there seems to be a contradiction. Suddenly the Law and the spirit, the Law and the gospel, seem to be opposed one to another. Then we have a table which gives us ‘the works of the flesh,’ that is, the works of the fallen human nature. And this catalog, beginning in verse nineteen, starts off with adultery and fornication and so on. Then we have in verse twenty-two the catalog of the fruits of the Spirit; love, joy, peace, concluding with temperance. And we told, “against such there is no law.” When the plain implications, as scholars say, is that there is law then against adultery, fornication, uncleanness, and so on, but no law against love, joy, peace, long-suffering, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, and so on. So again, the Law reappears. Against one catalog, there is no law, these are the works of the Spirit. Against the other, clearly, the implication is there is a law. 

Now, how are we going to understand these things? It is at this point that it is imperative for us to analyse very carefully what the Scripture speaks of when it speaks of the “law being dead,” and what it speaks of when it speaks of the Law as still being important to us. In what sense is the Law dead? 

First of all, the law as the death sentence against all sinners is finished when the guilty party dies or is executed. In Romans 7:1-6 this is emphatically stated. The law is null and void when it executes its sentence and the party is dead. Thus, we are dead to the Law in Christ, the death sentence against sinners. Christ as our substitute, having died for us, that death sentence is no longer binding upon us, we are the new man now, alive in Christ our Lord. 

Second, this means very clearly that our salvation is by God’s grace. In both testaments this is the only doctrine of salvation set forth. Justification is, from the beginning to the end of Scripture, by God’s grace. This is the meaning of the typical lamb and of the sacrifices of the Old Testament, and of course, the whole book of Hebrews tells us simply this fact; that the way of salvation in both testaments is the same. It was typical in the old set forth by the blood of animals, it was now set forth in all finality by the blood of Christ.

Now, at this point some would say, “Yes, this is true. The sacrificial system is ended and the ceremonial law, and the Old Testament priesthood. But,” they add, “only the moral law remains; the civil law, the law of theocracy is also ended.” And at this point we must object. Now, how can you speak of the civil law of the Old Testament being ended, and the moral law remaining? How are we going to separate the two? “Thou shalt not kill.” Now, that’s a civil law, is that ended for us? Are we now free to kill? Or, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” In virtually every society from the beginning of time, this has been a civil law as well as a moral law; only nowadays, even though it’s still on the books as a civil law, it is no longer enforced. But, how are we going to separate the two? Throughout history they have been one! “Thou shalt not steal.” It’s a civil law as well as a moral one. “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” Again, it is a civil law as well as a moral law; you cannot separate the two. And so those who say the civil law is also ended, first of all have no warrant in Scripture for that, they cannot find a single fact in all of the New Testament or any passage in the Old Testament that tells us the civil law will ever end.  And so, very clearly, there is no warrant for it. 

Nor can we say that the theocracy belongs to the Old Testament and is no longer with us. After all, isn’t this what Christ preached? The kingdom of God, the theocracy? And did not the whole of the New Testament proclaim the kingship of Christ? And is not the whole book of Revelation about his kingship? Thus, the Law is ended as a death sentence against us, the Law is ended as far as the laws of sacrifice and the priesthood and the ceremonies of the Tabernacle and the Temple are concerned, but the rest of the law still stands. 

Then, third, we must say that the Law is condemned by the whole of the New Testament as a means of justification; it was never intended to be that. The Law never, in any of the Bible, was a way of salvation or of justification, it was always a means of sanctification. Pharisaism had perverted the meaning of the Law and our Lord said, they had made the Law of none effect in Matthew 15:1-9. What the Pharisees called “the law,” our Lord in the same passage called, “the commandments of men.” Both Christ and St. Paul attacked the Law in this sense, in the pharisaic sense. They repudiated the Law as pharisaism interpreted it. The Law, in this sense, never had any legitimate standing in the Old or New Testament, it was always condemned. But the Law in the New Testament stands; not as a way of salvation, but as the way of sanctification. We are justified by God through faith, but we are sanctified by our keeping of the Law. How else can a man be holy except by obedience to the law of God? 

On the one hand, then, we face, in this day and age as in our Lord’s day, pharisaism and legalism which wants to make the Law or works the way of salvation. Now, if this be true, if Law can save men, the answer, then, is that society must work to institute a total law-order; to govern men totally by law to save men totally.

If law is man’s savior, then all we need is total law to govern man absolutely from cradle to grave. And of course, whenever you have pharisaism, and the social gospel is a modern version of ancient pharisaism, you have the gospel of socialism, the gospel of total law, of salvation by law. Law, then, is needed to remake man and society. The social gospel calls for a saving society, it is an expression of the faith in man’s law as man’s savior. And of course, whenever you have pharisaism, then you have hostility to God’s Law immediately. Because God’s Law is not total law, God’s Law is a ministry of justice, it doesn’t pretend to be man’s savior, it never says that man is going to be saved by works of the Law, and so, it is limited law, it is not total law or totalitarian law. Therefore, whenever you have pharisaism or legalism or the social gospel, it must work to undo, to repudiate, to repeal, to abolish God’s Law. It is an enemy to all limited law, because it wants to replace it with total law, and so it works to set aside God’s Law for man’s law, for a saving law. Pharisaic law is never modest, it is total, it is never satisfied with the modesty of God’s Law. 

To take a very simple and obvious example from the Scripture; the Old Testament law did not say much about fasting. In fact, there was only one fast the entire year on the Day of Atonement, and we would hardly call it a fast, because it was only a fast until sundown, and at sundown there was a huge banquet as celebration for the fact that God was man’s savior, and by the blood of the typical animal the sins of God’s people were removed. And so, the Day of Atonement ended with a tremendous banquet, the biggest celebration of the year. In fact, it was a great time, a very popular time in the Old Testament era, we know from the various Hebraic records, for announcing engagements because it was the most glorious banquet of the year. This was the only fast in the Old Testament that was required and this was done away with, of course, when the Day of Atonement ended with our Savior’s work on the Cross. The only other days to fast were when people in time of national tragedy or mourning had a day of fasting and prayer, and this was voluntary. 

But the Pharisees, we are told, fasted twice in a week, they were going to be holier than God, their law was going to be a higher and more thorough law than anything God had ever imagined. And this, of course, is the way of pharisaism. Now, the work of pharisaism or legalism is clearly not scriptural, it makes law man’s savior, the means of justification. But Scripture says law does not save man, it is the way of sanctification, the way whereby man grows in grace and his obedience to the Law-Word of God. The antinomians, therefore, who abolish law, lead us instead to anarchism. The logic of the antinomian position is anarchism. If we say we are dead to the Law, then why do we need law in any area? Why have it in the family, in the school, in the church, in state, in business, in any area? If Christ has abolished the Law, why should Christian society maintain it? So the logic of the antinomian is clearly anarchism.

As a result today, we must say that the churches, by and large, have created our social dilemma by their failure to understand the meaning of the Cross of Christ in relationship to the Law. And on the one hand they have gone out into pharisaism and the social gospel, on the other hand antinomianism, which creates a situation conducive to anarchism. 

There is one other alternative; many have simply gone nowhere but into indifference, but the Pentecostals at least have been logical. Their answer is not scriptural, but they have said that man needs sanctification. And so, if man is not going to be sanctified by the Law, he’s going to be sanctified by the Spirit without the Law. True, in Pentecostalism a great many sins abound, but the enthusiastic manifestations, which they wrongly call ‘Spirit-filled’ activities, are their substitute for the Law as the way of sanctification; at least they are not indifferent to the problem of sanctification. Man needs to grow in the grace of God. How shall he do it? The God-given is his Law, The Ten Commandments and all the subordinate laws. And to separate the Law from the gospel is to separate ourselves from both the Law and the gospel and from Christ.

We cannot say that man is “dead to the law” in every sense of the word and still say that man should not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, or covet. If those things are binding upon a men to avoid them, then, they are law to man and so the Law still prevails. Martin Luther once observed, and his words are especially telling:

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proven, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.” ^iv

And today the church is flinching at this point. Its answer, what is the way of sanctification? God’s answer is the Law. Adam fell, he broke God’s Law. God in due time set Jesus Christ to restore God’s kingdom, to destroy the power of sin and death, and to keep the Law perfectly and to reestablish man in obedience. It is by obedience, therefore, the way of sanctification, that man is called to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth.

Let us pray.

* * *

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that in Jesus Christ thou hast saved us from sin and death and reestablished us by thy grace in thy Law as our way of sanctification. Make us strong, our Father, in grace and by thy Spirit, that in the keeping of thy law they may subdue the earth, exercise dominion, and bring again all things into captivity to Jesus Christ our Lord. In Jesus' name. Amen. 

* * *

Are there any questions now first of all with respect to our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] What was the founding fathers’ attitude towards God’s Law, Dr. Rushdoony? ^v

[Rushdoony] It would be better to say that the background of the founding fathers was one of understanding to the meaning of the law because from the foundation of this country until the Civil War, there was still an understanding of the relationship of the Law and the gospel. So that you had the entirety of the Biblical Law enacted as our civil law, and a proper understanding of their relationship.

Now, it was beginning to fade about the time that the founding fathers met, but it still persisted very much as the dominant kind of thinking until the late 1850’s. So that they operated on the basis of the background of this understanding; it was beginning to be fuzzy at that time. 

[Audience member] It seems that the Pharisees and the Antinomians find much common cause against the Law of God. ^vi

[Rushdoony] Yes. The reason for that is, of course, that, while they represent different attitudes, on the one hand pharisaism and on the other antinomianism, they are alike in their hostility to the Law of God, and in that respect they are both antinomian, anti-God’s Law; they have another way. And so, in this respect they do represent a natural alliance. And we see this natural alliance in the political world too. The Marxist and the anarchist are supposedly at opposite ends, and yet they work together continually against us because their basic hostility is against God’s Law. This is the heart of their opposition, so they can unite on that basic hostility. Later, of course, they fall out when they triumph, when they quarrel over the fruits of their victory. 

[Audience member] Did the revolution advance through anarchy? ^vii

[Rushdoony] First, there had to be chaos rather than anarchy, deliberate chaos, a revolution against the old order. The dictatorship was totalitarian, and then the state of anarchy when man with no more need of state than the beehive needs to have a tax collector or a government. Man will go back to the beehive, anthill society, everyone will naturally and automatically refer to this pre-alienated condition when they will be unconscious like the animals, and will function automatically. Then man will be beyond history and beyond good and evil; like the animals he will lack self-consciousness. Religion introduces self-consciousness and the idea of good and evil, and therefore man lost this automatic characteristic that the animals have in the beehive in the anthill. So the goal, of course, is to revert to a pre-evolutionary condition.

Yes?

[Audience member] No ‘good works’ can be done without the knowledge that scripture supplies as to what is good and what is not in the Ten Commandments and their subordinate case laws, etc. ^viii

[Rushdoony] Right. Very well put. In the statement of Scripture that faith without works is dead, the ‘works’ there means works of the Law. There are no good works apart from or in defiance of the Law. By good works, Scripture means the works of the Law, those works which God requires. And this is where so many people, because they’ve been brought up on this antinomianism, feel that to do good works, you’ve got to do something special, something extra, like spending long hours at the church or with some guild rather than doing your duty as a housewife, a mother, in your day by day responsibilities, in your vocation, in your calling; that’s what constitutes the good works that Scripture speaks of. But of course, in the Middle Ages, the idea was that you had to go off into a cell and pray long hours, and in the modern era that you had to go to the church and do some kind of extra work, and then, and then only, have you done any good works. This is not Biblical.

I like the passage, I’ve referred to it before, where Luther, in striking at this notion of some kind of special activity, holy religious activity constituting good works, he spoke of the Virgin Mary after the angels and the announcement and he said: “What did she do then? Did she resort to some special good work by going to a convent and spending the entire day on her knees in prayer? No, she went back to work in her parents’ home and met her day by day responsibilities in the kitchen and out in the gardens, slopping the hogs and the rest.”

Now, in other words, what Luther said very vividly was that her holiness was revealed by her discharge of her godly responsibilities under the law.

Yes? 

[Audience member] God’s Laws are very simple and understandable by all. The laws of the state today are complex and voluminous and virtually impossible to know, and yet you are responsible to know and punishable if you violate them whether you know them or not. ^ix

[Rushdoony] Yes. A very, very good point. If you didn’t hear, what Mr. Maxwell had to say was that God’s Laws are very simple and understandable by all. The laws of the state today are complex and voluminous and virtually impossible to know and yet, you are responsible to know and punishable if you violate them whether you know them or not. And what is my comment on this? Well, first of all, God’s Law is the law of being therefore every man knows the law, no matter how much he denies it. And St. Paul declares in the first chapter of Romans that all the things of God, including His infinite majesty and greatness as well as His law, are known to all men, but they suppress it. “They hold the truth...” it reads in the English, but in the Greek more literally, they “hold down the truth,” they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. So, all men know the Ten Commandments and the details thereof, but they deny them and they suppress them. But because it is still written in their being, however much suppressed, it is a law that is readily understood by all. 

The whole presupposition of the jury supposition is Biblical Law, God’s Law, which every man knows. And this is why the jury system arose as Christian Law arose, because you could go to a jury of your peers, and the case could be presented and they could judge in terms of the fundamental moral law of God. 

Now, statist law has nothing like that to appeal to. There is nothing in the heart of man in the nature of being that responds the statist law, it’s something that lawyers invent, and they put in the most difficult language possible so it leads to endless wrangling year-in and year-out, generation after generation, on the part of jurists and so it requires specialists. And so the jury system becomes progressively obsolete. And so, too, average citizen, in fact almost every citizen becomes more and more helpless in the face of this law because there’s nothing there he can grab ahold of, it doesn’t respond to being, it isn’t a part of the nature of things, it is an endless series of regulations which has been manufactured out of man’s imagination. Therefore man becomes progressively helpless in the face of statist law. And that is why we have to go back to the other, or we perish. It means the destruction of a culture and of a civilization, because the law is beyond the reach of men, they cannot follow a law that they cannot know.

Yes?

[Audience member] Is there much in the way of extenuating circumstances that is mentioned in Scripture that would lessen the punishment for the offence? ^x

[Rushdoony] No. Today they raise the question of ‘extenuating circumstances’ where God’s Law is concerned with regard to murder, for example. But supposing you violated some rule of the bureaucracy, there are no extenuating circumstances for you; then they will punish you to the full extent of the law. In other words, extenuating circumstances are raised only to weaken the force of God’s Law; murder, for example. 

This whole business of ‘extenuating circumstances’ is a product of the attempt to weaken the law, and it arose at about the same time that this matter of insanity and the plea by insanity arose. Today for example, if you were drunk when you committed murder, that is an extenuating circumstance, and this is increasingly a plea that is made. And in the Sirhan trial, of course, the attempt has been made to show him as under the influence of alcohol at the time he committed the murder. 

One last question?

Yes?

[Audience member] Is the great commission to evangelize and such a law for us? ^xi

[Rushdoony] Yes. It isn’t a commandment, it’s a commission; there is a difference, the great commission, and it is to the church, so that it is not to every man who is a believer as a believer, it is to the organization, the institution of the church. In other words, it doesn’t come to you as a member of a family, or as a member of a business, or a school, it comes to you as a member of the church. The church has the commission so that you have a responsibility as a church to proclaim the gospel and to carry it unto every creature. Your responsibility as an individual in the family is different. 

Does that help explain it?

[Audience member] I have heard it said that we are all called to be missionaries. Is that true do you think Dr. Rushdoony? ^xii

[Rushdoony] That is wrong, we are not all called upon to be missionaries. The church has an obligation, and particular individuals may be called as ministers or missionaries to go forth, but this does not apply to all of us. The church has an obligation to keep tithing, and as part of its tithing, and it is not the sole recipient of the tithe, but of that portion of the tithe which the church gets to use a portion for its mission. But I do feel that while missions are an important aspect of the church, we need to rethink responsibility of missions, and we need to recognize that the Lord says, “If they will not hear you, shake the dust off your feet and go on to the next place.” We have spent too much money in missions where there have been no returns.

Our time is just about up and I wanted to share a couple of things with you. A couple of items in the paper this last week which I think are quite revealing. The very thoroughly reprehensible play Hair may rack up, we are told this week, $2 million by the Fourth of July, so that we see how successful dirt is today, it appeals to this generation. 

Then, a very interesting review this Friday in the paper of a new film, entitled “All the Loving Couples” which represents the kind of truth we’re getting today. It’s about wife swapping, and guess who the leader in this is? In the film it is presented as being a John Birch leader. And ostensibly, I believe according to this, it’s a San Fernando Valley chapter which is a chapter I haven’t heard about yet. 

Then, this item by a well-known British writer, Malcolm Muggeridge, who is not a conservative, concerning the assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, Sweden this last year:

“At Uppsala as one clearly saw, they were able to agree about almost everything because they believed almost nothing. They reminded me of a pub turnout in my youth, with ten or a dozen drunk holding on to one another, swaying to and fro but managing to remain upright. Alone they would infallibly have fallen to the gutter. It was all tremendously reminiscent of the United Nations, that tragically absurd assembly. Stony faces between earphones, papers circulating in prodigious quantities, the Swedish government allot ten tons which got used up the first two days of the World Council meeting. 

Oratory to match; interminable discussions about the precise wording of statements of beliefs and purpose which few would read and none heed. A well-equipped but little used press room. Documents of no conceivable importance or interest to anyone urgently rushed out to choke the pigeon holes of absent journalists. If ever in human history there was a non-event, this was it.

I cannot see how apart from the desultory use of the cross as assemble and the garb of some of the delegates, anyone could possibly have known that the occasion had anything to do with the Christian religion. Institutional Christianity is quietly but inexorably extinguishing itself.”

I think that coming from a liberal is a very interesting and discerning comment. 

And with that, we are adjourned. 

i. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle to the Hebrews, John Owen translation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), p. 169.

ii. The Holy Bible: King James Version, Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), Ga 5:13–14.

iii. The Holy Bible: King James Version, Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), Ga 5:18.

iv. Cited by Marshall Shelley, review of Bring Forth Justice by Waldron Scott, Christianity Today 25, no. 11 (June 12, 1981):62.

v.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

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