Law vs. Gospel

I have come to believe that, sadly, most churches today have been assuming the gospel. Even the best Bible believing and teaching churches have allowed the gospel to play second fiddle to various other things. Many of these things are good things, for example my own church background proclaims that we are to keep, "The main thing, the main thing" referring to teaching straight through the Bible. However, in many cases teaching "line upon line" has caused us to treat Bible teaching as something that can (and/or should) be leveraged over and above the gospel. This is so grieving because it means that we have reduced the gospel to something that get's us in, but doesn't keep us and grow us. I have come to agree with Tim Keller when he says, "The gospel is not the ABC's of Christianity, it is the A-Z's."

In this post I want to propose a way of viewing Scripture as a twofold breakdown of Law and Gospel. Martin Luther, Theodore Beza and many of the Puritans used this distinction and it is very helpful. I want to say that this is not the only way to breakdown Scripture, but it is a useful tool.

Viewing the Bible as Law and Gospel means we must recognize that the Bible can be broken into two parts. Law would be anything that is a command or a requirement. For example Adam was given law when he was told to not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and when he was told to subdue and expand the borders of the Garden. Gospel is anytime that God promises, for example, after the Fall God promised that one day Eve's seed would crush the head of the serpent. There is nothing required of Eve to achieve this, it is merely a promise that God is going to bring about.

This pattern is repeated throughout the Scriptures as God commands men to obey (law) and also promises that one day He will act and deliver them (gospel). Anytime we read of men trying and succeeding or failing it might be classified as law, but when we read of God saving and rescuing we could classify that as gospel.

Many of the Reformers and Puritans used this distinction to define how the Bible should be taught. Tullian Tchividjian captures this approach when he wrote, "God uses his law to crush hard hearts and his gospel to cure broken hearts" and, "The law illuminates sin but is powerless to eliminate sin. The law points to righteousness but only the gospel can produce righteousness." Paul used a similar distinction in Galatians 3 when he said that the Law was our schoolmaster, leading us to Christ.

A practical way to understand this is to say that men will never come to the Savior until they recognize that they are lost and broken. The Law must do its work of showing us that we are unworthy before the Gospel can be understood and believed.

With this in mind we must see that the gospel must be preached from every page of Scripture because the Law can never save us, it can only condemn us. To teach "line upon line" but then not show how those lines prove our brokenness and our need for a Savior (let alone to then show that Savior has already come and died for our sins!) is to teach only the bad news. As we have seen, this bad news MUST be taught for people to come to see their need for the Savior, but it also MUST be followed up with the Good News of the gospel. So we see that Law and Gospel are inseparably linked together and one must not be taught without the other.

However, while Law and Gospel are linked they are also distinct, and must be kept that way. Gerhard Ebeling said, “The failure to distinguish the law and the gospel always means the abandonment of the gospel."
This failure is quite prominent in many churches today because people love to be told what to do. If the sermon is lacking in "practical application" then it is considered a bad sermon. But this trend has led most sermons today to be nothing more than a chat about the passage and a short list of things for us to do. Notice, that falls squarely into the "Law" category of things that we are supposed to do, and completely ignores the "Gospel" category of what God did for us. By not keeping them distinct the gospel is lost and the law is all that is left.

Theologian Michael Horton addresses this issue well when he says, "I think if Paul wrote a letter to churches today ... he would not begin, "Now, I realize that you know the truth, so I'm going to fast-forward to the exhortation." I think he would begin the letter, as he did all of his letters, with the assumption that if people understand the gospel better ... it would make a difference in their lives, their relationships, their witness, and their loving service to their neighbor." (emphasis added)

Just as Paul argued, we begin in the Spirit and are saved by the preaching of the gospel, so too are we grown and matured by the Spirit through a deeper appreciation and understanding of the gospel. There is no graduating from the gospel into the deeper things of the Word, the gospel is the bottomless well that won't run dry. It is the Good News of what God has done for us and it constantly reminds us that, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." May we never get so caught up in our lists and our doing that it overshadows all that He has done, because it is only the gospel that saves us. As the great hymn says, "Twas grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home."