How to Stop Making Gospel into Law
Read the full article at https://mbird.com/2021/04/how-to-stop-making-gospel-into-law/
1. God gave the law to creatures, but God is not the law.
The dream of finding Law [that inspires and gives life] imagines the theological project to be equating God and law, … to claim that God’s eternal, objective, righteous essence is none other than a graceful, nonthreatening, ordered, beautiful, eternal law as the thing that unites the complicated contradictory attributes of mercy and justice. […]
The law is taken to be the form of the will or mind of God … and so we mold our god into the shape of our happy life. […]
[Luther] knew that if one tried to describe God’s essence apart from forgiveness, what he got was God = law, which is God naked in majesty without any gospel, and that the end of that quest was death.
2. The law has two “uses,” but used by God. One use fosters and preserves life in the old world, and the other makes a person run from God’s threat/wrath to the mercy of Christ’s promise.
The law is not there to give ears [of faith], but to take them away. It does not give, but removes faith in God’s word. Worse, the law is there to kill sinners wherever it finds them.
3. The law always accuses, in both its uses, which is the essential or constant voice of the law.
The problem Paul had with the law is the same that you and I have: it kills us in whatever form it comes — ceremonial or moral — and we don’t want to die. It does not make us righteous; it condemns. … God gave the law for this one and only purpose: to threaten us with death, and carry out the death wherever there is sin.
4. Christ alone fulfills the law, and so is the point, the “thing” that law wants, needs, and demands — and which sinners cannot give.
Luther is very precise on this matter. Christ’s crucifixion and ministry do not abolish the law; he fulfills the law. But fulfilling is not the moment the law hands out its prize. Christ’s unexpected fulfillment of the law on the cross has a most dramatic effect on the law, evacuating or emptying it.
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Read the full article at https://mbird.com/2021/04/how-to-stop-making-gospel-into-law/