Bad News and Good News

In the fourth place, the Word of God is not rightly divided when the Law is preached to those who are already in terror on account of their sins, or the Gospel to those who live securely in their sins. – Walther, The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, Thesis VIII

For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. -- Romans 2:13

God reveals Himself to man in many ways, beginning with consciousness of truth and beauty.  Divine providence in the lives of the patriarchs is another stream of revelation, as is the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage.  Then there is the Law in which God explicitly identifies Himself as the One and Only God and manifests His Nature by codifying the ethical and moral relationships of those who would be His people.  The revelation of the law is amplified and expanded in the history of Israel and in the prophets.  Ultimately, there is the Incarnation. 

Jesus said expressly that He came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and He did, perfectly and completely, all the way to His redeeming death in submission and obedience.    Paul spends a lot of time on the law in his Epistle to the Galatians, but also in Romans chapter 7.  After saying that we have died to the law through the body of Christ, he gives us a little insight into the true purpose it served and still serves:   

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, You shall not covet.  But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law, sin lies dead.   I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.  The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. … Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.  (Romans 7:7-13)

In other words, the law is a standard that reveals how far from God we are.  We are examined by the law and our inadequacy and unrighteous is unmistakably marked like a big red F on a test paper.  Not all of us need that as a specific and explicit experience, such as hearing someone preach “hell fire and brimstone”.  We may, like the 12-Steppers, have, instead, a rock-bottom experience, physically, mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually.  Perhaps we will, like the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, succeed and achieve only to be flattened by the utter emptiness of all our celebrated accomplishments and repulsed by our pleasures. 

No one who is “secure”, as Walther says, in his sin is ever going to be born from above.  We may not all use the same words, it may not happen in a single moment, but all who are in Christ know exactly how Paul felt when he cried out, “Wretched man that I am!”    

When Jesus gave us the Sermon on the Mount, He was targeting those “good” people among us who think that God is concerned only with external obedience.  They could have, as Paul did in the passage quoted above, extrapolated from the Tenth Commandment and concluded that simply not stealing and not actually committing adultery were insufficient when it came to obedience. 

Some people have speculated – and that’s all it is – that the rich young man (Mark 10, Luke 18) who asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life might have been Saul of Tarsus.  While that may not have been the case, he had the same problem.  The only commandments Jesus named to the young man were those that dealt with the horizontal and external:  You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’  The man thought he had it made, until the Lord called him to abandon himself completely to God by divesting himself of the possessions in which he had placed his trust in this life. 

Coveting kills.  That’s the bad news.  Saul dies in the end.  The message of the evangelist, the good (news) angel, is, there is resurrection.  Paul is alive and well.