Reformed Law Keeping: While it’s true that many within the reformed and calvinistic schools are not consciously seeking to keep the law for justification, rightly confessing that salvation is by grace, that the righteousness of Christ alone is the ground of acceptance before God, &c., and though having seen the law’s condemnation removed, they somehow still feel compelled to re-erect it as a rule of life, not as a means to merit favor, but as a supposed expression of gratitude and duty. They fear that to walk without the law is to walk lawlessly, that to rest entirely in Christ is somehow to drift into carelessness. In their minds, obedience to the mosaic moral code becomes synonymous with honoring Christ and walking in obedience to the scriptures.
But the subtle tragedy is that by doing so, they unintentionally diminish both the law and gospel. The law, when transformed from a covenant of death into a guide for so-called sanctification, must first be brought down to their level, and its impossible demands somehow made manageable. It must be lowered from a perfect reflection of divine holiness to a moral chart of human behavior. And once thus reduced, it ceases to do what God designed it to do, to expose the sinner’s inability, to shut every mouth, and to magnify Christ as the end of the law for righteousness. Romans 10:4.
What begins as a sincere desire to obey scripture often ends as an unconscious diminishing of it. For the law, when rightly seen, admits of no partial keeping and allows for no human attainment. James 2:10. To bring it into the believer’s walk as a rule of life, one must first strip it of its curse and then pretend that its precepts can be kept apart from its penalty. But such a law is no longer the law God gave, it has been diminished, adjusted and domesticated. Galatians 3:10.
The law was not established to instruct man in the art of obtaining or maintaining life, but to declare that life is beyond him, not to teach man how to live, but to prove that he can’t live! Romans 8:3. It was given to condemn, to disable, and to slay; to make sin appear exceedingly sinful, and to convince man that he is both helpless and hopeless beneath its condemnation, that through the death it pronounces he might discover the life it points to in Christ. Romans 3:19-20.
The Scriptures could scarcely be plainer, yet those who boast of fidelity to every jot and tittle seem blind to it. The law was not given to direct the living, but to condemn the dead. How strange, then, that so many who profess to love grace insist on reviving that which was given only to expose their death. “The law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient.” I Timothy 1:9. What part of that is obscure? It must be a kind of reformed blindness. An unwillingness to bend to truth for fear of disturbing a system forged five centuries ago. Colossians 2:8.
And I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, how audacious to dissect the single, undivided law of God into three man-made fragments – moral, judicial, and ceremonial – merely to keep what suits us and discard the rest! The Lord never authorized such a surgery. What God has joined together, who are we to divide? Matthew 19:6. The law came as one through Moses; and so we are either under it in its entirety or not under it at all. John 1:17. To claim otherwise is to contradict the very nature of the law itself. Either we stand condemned beneath its entirety, or we stand redeemed outside of it in Christ!
Additionally, there is a great difference between law and right, though men often confound the two. One does not need a written code to know right from wrong. Right existed before law was ever given. The patriarchs, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, &c., walked before God without a written statute. They were taught of Christ inwardly. I Corinthians 10:4. The law they knew was not engraved in stone but in the heart, the same “law of faith” Paul declares in Romans 3:27, and the same inward testimony described in Romans 2:15. It was by this divine impression that they discerned good and evil, and by faith they obeyed, not by legal compulsion but by spiritual revelation. Faith, not law, has ever been the true spring of obedience. The same Spirit who wrought faith in Abraham now directs every believer’s gaze to Christ. It looks to Him who fulfilled all righteousness, satisfied every demand of the law, and stands as the living ground of our acceptance before God. Romans 8:3-4.
To most within the reformed camp, this is safe and familiar ground, it’s the teaching they were raised under or later persuaded into by the stream of calvinistic literature that has shaped their world. And indeed, it stands enshrined within every major confession, those venerable monuments of protestant thought and scholarship, written with the conviction that they captured the very essence of biblical truth, so revered for their accuracy that questioning them now feels almost like questioning scripture itself. Surely, they think if such ‘holy’ men of protestant renown believed it, we dare not differ. Such men could not have erred in matters so central. To question them seems almost blasphemous, as if truth itself were bound to their memory, and to examine their conclusions would be akin to challenging the very foundations of the ‘faith’ they supposedly reclaimed. But herein lies a subtle danger, the pattern of the Reformation can harden into a prison of tradition. Men cling to a system about Christ rather than to Christ Himself, mistaking inherited orthodoxy for living faith. Faith in Christ can become faith in a system about Christ, and the authority of Scripture is quietly subordinated to the authority of men who once upheld it. This is what they were taught, what they inherited, and what they sincerely believe honors God. And who can blame them? One can hardly fault them for defending what they believe to be a high regard for God’s law. After all, it seems safer to stand with those who exalt the law of God than with those who appear indifferent to it. But the safety they seek in the law can only be found in Christ, who both established and fulfilled it.
The peril of reformed law-keeping lies not in its intention, but in its trajectory, in seeking to uphold what Christ has already fulfilled. The gospel becomes rule, and grace becomes burden. But those who have died with Christ are freed from the law’s dominion, for death has cancelled every debt. “Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.” Romans 7:4-6. The law is neither abrogated nor altered, neither canceled nor compromised, but perfectly fulfilled; its every shadow finds substance, its every demand satisfaction, and its entire righteousness consummated in Christ, who is both its end and its glory. Matthew 5:17, Romans 8:3-4, Romans 10:4, Galatians 3:13, Hebrews 10:9-10. Thus, the law, having met its end in Christ, holds no further claim upon those who belong to him. Romans 7:6.
To be freed from the law, then, is not to despise it, but to see it fulfilled. The believer’s liberty does not rest upon its removal, but upon the perfection of its every demand in Christ. Freed from its dominion, he/she walks not by fear but by faith, not by law but by love. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” Romans 8:2. Christ is the believer’s law, life, and liberty, the Alpha and the Omega of all righteousness before God. To seek it anywhere else is spiritual suicide, and to attempt to supplement what Christ has perfected is high treason against the glory of God. Hebrews 10:14. MPJ