Devotional 99: The Law Cannot Justify: Its Purpose Is Not Salvation

The Confession Read

The moral law doth forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof; and that, not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it. Neither doth Christ, in the gospel, any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 19, Section 5

Introduction

There is a strange and persistent impulse in the human heart, even the regenerate heart, to imagine that grace makes commandments optional. The reasoning runs something like this: if I am justified freely by faith apart from works of the law, then the law itself must be a spent force, a covenant I have graduated beyond, a stern schoolmaster whose classroom I have left for good. Gratitude will now motivate what commandment once compelled. The Spirit will lead where the Decalogue once directed. And so the moral law, having done its diagnostic work of revealing sin and driving me to Christ, may quietly recede into the background of the Christian life. This is not a new impulse. It troubled the apostolic church, as Paul's urgent questions in Romans make plain. It erupted with force in the early Reformation, when certain radicals charged Luther and Calvin with preaching a gospel that left men free to sin. And it confronted the Westminster Assembly directly in the 1640s, when antinomian teachers in England argued that the moral law had no binding authority over believers at all. The Divines' response was characteristically precise, and it is this response that we hold in our hands this morning in Section 5 of Chapter 19, a mere fifty-seven words that defend a truth with real pastoral and practical weight. The assertion could hardly be plainer. The moral law is not a temporary arrangement, not a covenant of works that has been replaced by a covenant of grace that dispenses with commandments altogether. It is the perpetual expression of the Creator's righteous will for all his image-bearers, and it binds every human being, the justified no less than the unjustified, to obedience. Christ, far from dissolving this obligation, strengthens it. The gospel does not lower God's standard; it raises our capacity to meet it and deepens our love for it. Consider what is at stake in this question. If the moral law no longer binds the believer, then the Christian life has no objective shape. Holiness becomes whatever the individual or the community feels it to be. The Ten Commandments become ten suggestions, and the rich particularity of God's revealed will dissolves into vague talk of "love" and "following the Spirit," phrases that, detached from the commandments that define what love requires and what the Spirit produces, can be made to mean almost anything. A church that loses the moral law as its rule of life will not become more spiritual; it will become more worldly, for it will have no fixed standard by which to distinguish the Spirit's leading from the impulses of the flesh. The Divines understood this pastoral danger with prophetic clarity, and their fifty-seven words are an anchor dropped into the storm.

Scripture Foundation

Our Lord himself addresses the question with unmistakable clarity in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:17-19 records words that should be engraved on the conscience of every believer: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The word katalysai, "destroy," carries the sense of loosening down, dismantling, abolishing. Christ anticipates the very misinterpretation that would plague the church for centuries and blocks it preemptively. His coming is not the demolition of the law but its plērōsai, its filling full. He came not to lower the moral demands of God but to live them out in perfect human obedience, to reveal their full depth in his teaching, and to bear their penalty in his death. Notice the temporal marker Christ provides: "till heaven and earth pass." That is a long time. The moral law outlasts the ceremonial law precisely because it is not a shadow cast backward from Calvary; it is the transcript of God's own holy character, and it will abide as long as God abides. When Christ speaks of the "jot and tittle," the yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the keraia, the tiny decorative hook distinguishing certain letters, he is guarding the substance of the law and its full precision. Every commandment; every prohibition; every precept. Nothing is discarded. Nothing is downgraded to mere suggestion. Romans 3:31 takes up the same theme from a different angle. Having spent three chapters demolishing any hope of justification by law-works, Paul anticipates the objection that must have been forming in his readers' minds: if faith alone justifies, does faith not render the law irrelevant? His answer is emphatic: "Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law." The verb katargoumen, "make void," "nullify," "render inoperative," is the very thing Paul denies with the strongest negative at his disposal, mē genoito, "may it never be." Faith does not dismantle the law; faith establishes it. The Greek histanomen conveys the idea of setting something firmly in place, causing it to stand. How does faith accomplish this? By embracing Christ, who perfectly kept the law on our behalf, and by uniting us to Christ by the Spirit, who writes the law on our hearts and enables our delighted obedience. The law is not abolished; it is relocated: from stone tablets to fleshen hearts, from external demand to internal delight. Romans 7:12 adds yet another dimension. "Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good." Paul has just wrestled with the law's role in exposing and even provoking sin, and he pauses to guard against the very misunderstanding that antinomianism would seize upon. The problem is not the law but sin. The law is hagia, holy, set apart, bearing the character of the God who gave it. It is dikaia, righteous, perfectly conformed to justice. It is agathē, good, beneficial, life-giving in its design. A holy God could give nothing less. And if the law is holy, just, and good, then to set it aside is to set aside something that reflects the very nature of God himself. 1 John 5:3 brings the matter into the realm of affection. "For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous." John makes the keeping of commandments the very definition of love for God: not the meritorious ground of love, but its authentic expression. And he adds a pastoral word that dismantles every complaint that God's law is burdensome: his commandments are not bareiai, not heavy, not crushing. This is not because the law's demands are trivial; they are, as we have seen in earlier sections, "personal, entire, exact, and perpetual." They are not heavy because the same God who commands is the God who empowers, and the same Christ who fulfilled the law's precepts now fulfills them in us by his Spirit. The yoke is easy and the burden light, not because the standard is low, but because the Helper is strong. James 2:10-12 reinforces the comprehensive nature of this obligation. "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law. So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty." The law is not a buffet from which we may select the commandments that suit our temperament while ignoring the rest. Every precept bears the authority of the same Lawgiver, and to violate one is to defy him. James calls it the "law of liberty," a striking phrase that refutes the notion that law and freedom are opposites. The true bondage is not submission to God's commandments but enslavement to sin. The law of liberty frees us to be what we were made to be.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly convened in the 1640s, the antinomian controversy was not a theoretical exercise. It was a live pastoral crisis tearing at the fabric of English Puritanism. Teachers such as John Eaton and Tobias Crisp had argued, with varying degrees of extremity, that since Christ had fulfilled the law for believers, believers were entirely freed from it as a rule of life. The moral law, in this view, belonged to the old covenant and had no more claim on the Christian conscience than the dietary laws of Moses. Some went so far as to claim that believers need not confess sin because all sin, past, present, and future, had been forgiven at the cross, and God no longer saw any transgression in his children at all. The Divines saw that this teaching, however sincerely held, was a pastoral disaster in the making. It severed the nerve of sanctification. It dismissed the Ten Commandments as a relic of a superseded covenant when the Reformed tradition had always treated them as the abiding rule of grateful obedience. It confused justification with sanctification, the ground of acceptance with the pattern of gratitude. And it contradicted the plain teaching of Scripture in passage after passage. Section 5 is the Assembly's careful, compressed rebuttal. Every phrase is chosen with precision and is doing theological work that repays close attention. "The moral law doth forever bind all." The word "forever" is doing heavy lifting. The ceremonial laws, as Section 3 explained, "are now abrogated, under the new testament." The judicial laws, as Section 4 explained, "expired together with the State of that people." But the moral law, the Ten Commandments as summarily comprehending the permanent will of God for human conduct, binds perpetually. It was given to Adam before the fall (Section 1), republished at Sinai (Section 2), and remains in force until the consummation of all things. No dispensation, no covenant administration, no advance in redemptive history sets it aside. It is the unchanging expression of the unchanging character of the unchanging God. "As well justified persons as others." This is the clause that cuts directly against the antinomian error. The Divines insist that justification does not diminish obligation. The believer who has been declared righteous through faith in Christ is not less bound to obey the moral law than the unbeliever who stands condemned under it. The ground of obligation differs: the unbeliever is bound as a creature under the covenant of works, the believer as a redeemed child under the covenant of grace, but the obligation itself remains. Grace does not make obedience optional; it makes obedience possible and pleasant. "Not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it." Here the Divines address two distinct grounds of obligation. The first is the intrinsic goodness and righteousness of the law's content, "the matter contained in it." Commands against murder, theft, adultery, and false witness are not arbitrary rules that God could have made otherwise. They reflect the moral order of the universe as it proceeds from the character of its Maker. To violate them is to act against reality itself, like a man who insists that gravity does not apply to him. But the second ground is even more fundamental: "the authority of God the Creator, who gave it." Even if a particular commandment's purpose were not immediately apparent to human reason, the bare fact that the Creator commands it establishes the obligation. The law is not merely wise advice from a benevolent counselor; it is the decree of the One who made us and to whom we owe our existence. This is why the preface to the Ten Commandments is not "Here are ten suggestions for a flourishing life" but "I am the LORD thy God… Thou shalt…" The imperative rests on the indicative of divine identity, and that indicative has not changed because we have been justified. God remains our Creator and Lord even after he has become our Redeemer and Father. "Neither doth Christ, in the gospel, any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation." The word "dissolve" translates the Latin solvere, to loosen or release. The Divines are echoing Christ's own ouk ēlthon katalysai, "I am not come to destroy." The gospel does not release us from the law's claims; it deepens them. Christ strengthens the law's obligation in at least three ways. First, by his teaching: in the Sermon on the Mount, he extends the law's reach from external act to internal motive, from murder to anger, from adultery to lust, from honest oath to simple truthfulness. Second, by his example: he kept the law perfectly, and those united to him are called to walk as he walked. Third, by his Spirit: the new covenant promise is not that the law will be withdrawn but that it will be written on the heart, so that obedience flows from inward transformation rather than external compulsion. A.A. Hodge, commenting on this section, crystallizes the theological logic: "The law is the revelation of the divine nature." If God does not change, the law that expresses his holy will cannot change. The gospel changes our relation to the law, from condemnation to grateful obedience, but it does not change the law itself. That would require a change in God, and with him there is "no variableness, neither shadow of turning."

Theological Depth

Calvin's treatment of the law's third use, the tertius usus legis, which he considered the principal use, provides the deepest theological foundation for what the Divines are asserting here. In the Institutes, Calvin argues that the law serves as a rule of life for believers, "to teach them what is the will of God, and to exhort them to obedience." Without the law, the believer would be like a traveler without a map, uncertain which path leads to the destination of holiness. The law does not merely expose sin (the first use) or restrain evil in society (the second use); it positively instructs the regenerate in righteousness. "The law is to the flesh," Calvin writes, "as a whip to an idle and balky ass, to arouse it to work." The image is earthy and memorable: even the believer, in whom the Spirit dwells, remains burdened with a sluggish flesh that needs the law's prodding to press forward in holiness. This was the point at which Calvin parted company with Luther, who tended to emphasize the law's accusatory function and to see the Christian life primarily as spontaneous, Spirit-led love that needed no written code. Calvin, by contrast, insisted that the Spirit works through the law, not around it. The law written on the heart does not render the law written on tablets obsolete; it confirms and internalizes it. To dispense with the external word of the law under the pretense of having the internal Spirit is to open the door to every subjective delusion. The Spirit and the law are not rivals but allies; the Spirit's work is precisely to cause us to "walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology was the standard systematic theology text for generations of Reformed students, addresses the perpetuity of the moral law with characteristic thoroughness. He poses the question directly: "Is the moral law abrogated under the New Testament?" His answer is a careful distinction. The law is abrogated with respect to its covenant function: it is no longer the instrument of a covenant of works by which we must earn life. The law is abrogated with respect to its condemning power: there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The law is abrogated with respect to its constraining terror: we no longer obey from slavish fear of punishment. But the law is not abrogated with respect to its directing function: it remains the rule of righteousness. Turretin's threefold abrogation coupled with a single retention is precisely the logic the Divines compress into a single sentence. Watson, writing on the Ten Commandments, brings the pastoral warmth that theological precision needs. He acknowledges the objection directly: "But does not the apostle say, 'Ye are not under the law, but under grace'?" And then he answers: "The apostle doth not here speak of the law as a rule, but as a covenant." To be under the law as a covenant is to stand or fall by one's own obedience, to seek life by doing; from this bondage every believer is gloriously freed. But to be under the law as a rule is to receive it as the Father's instruction, the pathway of grateful love, the pattern of the family likeness. "He who is freed from the law as a covenant," Watson writes, "doth still regard it as a rule. He looks upon the law as his counselor and directory." The distinction between covenant and rule runs through this whole section like a golden thread. Warfield, reflecting on the relationship between law and gospel, observes that the antinomian impulse always arises from a truncated view of what Christ accomplished. If Christ came only to pay the penalty of sin, then the law's precepts might indeed be set aside once the penalty was discharged. But Christ came also to fulfill all righteousness, to obey where Adam disobeyed, to live the human life that God's law demands. His active obedience, his lifelong conformity to the moral law, is as essential to our salvation as his passive obedience in death. And because we are united to Christ, his law-keeping becomes the pattern for ours, not as the ground of our acceptance but as the fruit of our union. To set aside the law is to set aside the very righteousness that Christ came to establish and that the Spirit now produces in his people. Robert Shaw, whose Exposition of the Confession of Faith has guided generations of Scottish Presbyterians, puts the matter in terms that every believer can grasp. The moral law is binding, he writes, because it is "founded on the nature of God, and on the relation which man bears to him." These two things never change. God never ceases to be holy, just, and good, and man never ceases to be a creature owing allegiance to his Creator. Justification changes our legal standing before God; it does not change our creaturely status. The redeemed soul in glory will still be a creature, and the law that reflects the Creator's character will still be the atmosphere of his existence, no longer as an external command but as the very nature of perfected holiness. What ties all these voices together is the conviction that the moral law is not an intrusion upon human freedom but the shape of true humanity. The law describes what a human being fully alive to God looks like. Adam was created with the law written on his heart, and the redeemed are being renewed in knowledge after the image of their Creator, which means they are being conformed to the law from the inside out. The antinomian, for all his talk of freedom, is actually arguing for a truncated humanity, a human being who relates to God without reference to God's revealed will, which is no true relationship at all but a projection of the self.

Puritan Application

First, test your attitude toward God's law. Every professing Christian should examine himself honestly on this point. When you read the Ten Commandments, not as a historical artifact but as the living will of God for your life, what rises in your heart? Is it resentment, a quiet sense that these demands are excessive, a wish that certain commandments could be softened or set aside? Or is it the response of the psalmist: "O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day"? The justified soul loves the law, not as a ladder to climb to heaven but as the Father's house rules, the family likeness, the path of grateful love. If the law irritates you, something is wrong, not with the law, but with your heart. You may need to return to the gospel afresh and relearn that the same God who gave the law gave his Son to fulfill it for you. Gratitude, not grit, is the engine of evangelical obedience. Second, never separate the law from the Lawgiver. The Divines were careful to ground the law's obligation "in respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it." This means that every act of obedience is an act of worship, and every act of disobedience is an act of rebellion, not against an abstract moral code but against a personal God. When you resist a commandment, you are not merely violating a rule; you are defying the One who made you. When you keep a commandment, you are not merely following instructions; you are honoring your Creator. This transforms ethics from duty into devotion. The question is not "What does the rule say?" but "What does my Lord require?" And the answer comes back: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" The practical reach of this truth is wide. It means that no sin is small, because no sin is committed against a small authority. A "little" lie, a "minor" theft, a "harmless" lust: each of these is an affront not to an abstract scale of wrongdoing but to the living God whose word it violates. David understood this when he cried out after his sin with Bathsheba, "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight." He had wronged Uriah, wronged Bathsheba, wronged the nation, but the ultimate referent of every sin is the God whose law it breaks. Conversely, this also dignifies every act of obedience. When you tell the truth in a difficult situation, when you honor your parents though they are imperfect, when you rest on the Lord's Day though the world calls you back to work, you are not merely keeping rules. You are bending the knee to your Creator, and he sees it. Third, look to Christ for both the pattern and the power of obedience. This section's final clause, "Neither doth Christ, in the gospel, any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation," points us to the One who kept the law perfectly and who now, by his Spirit, enables our imperfect but real obedience. Do not attempt obedience in your own strength, as if the gospel gave you a clean slate and then left you to fill it by sheer determination. That is the old covenant dressed in new covenant language. Instead, abide in Christ as a branch in the vine. His law-keeping is credited to you for righteousness, and his Spirit works in you to produce the fruit of obedience. The law sends you to Christ for pardon when you fail, and Christ sends you back to the law for guidance as you walk. The circuit is unbreakable. Fourth, resist the temptation to make exceptions. James warned that whoever keeps the whole law but stumbles at one point is guilty of all. The human heart is endlessly creative in carving out exemptions: "I know the seventh commandment forbids adultery, but my circumstances are unique." "I know the ninth commandment forbids false witness, but this little deception serves a greater good." "I know the first commandment demands exclusive allegiance to God, but my career, my family, my comfort: surely these are legitimate secondary loyalties." The law admits no such negotiation. Every commandment comes from the same throne, and to refuse one is to refuse the authority of the King. This is humbling, devastatingly so, and that is precisely the point. The law is designed to shatter self-righteousness and drive us to Christ, even as it guides us in grateful living. Fifth, teach the law to those under your care. Parents, you are not raising children who need merely to be nice; you are raising image-bearers who need to know what their Creator requires. Do not reduce Christian ethics to vague principles of kindness and generosity while neglecting the specific commands of the Decalogue. Teach the commandments positively: what each one requires as well as what it forbids. Teach them evangelically, always pointing to Christ as the one who kept them and the one who forgives their breach. But teach them. A generation that does not know the law will not know the gospel either, for the gospel is meaningless without the law's diagnosis of sin. "By the law is the knowledge of sin," Paul wrote, and without that knowledge, the cross becomes a solution to a problem no one knows they have.

Prayer

O Lord our God, great and holy Creator, whose law is the transcript of thy perfect character, we bow before thee in wonder that thou hast not left us to guess at thy will but hast spoken plainly in thy commandments. We confess that our hearts have too often resented thy law. We have treated it as a burden when thou didst give it as a gift. We have sought exceptions where thou hast spoken absolutely. We have imagined that grace means the setting aside of righteousness, when in truth grace establishes righteousness upon a firmer foundation than our own obedience could ever provide. We bless thee for thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it, who kept every precept in our place, bore every penalty on our behalf, and now intercedes for us at thy right hand. We thank thee that his righteousness is counted as ours through faith, and that his Spirit is at work within us, writing thy law upon our hearts and causing us to walk in thy statutes. Grant us, we pray, a deepening love for thy commandments. Let us never imagine that justification lessens obligation. Let us never presume upon grace as a license for sin. Instead, let the sweet constraints of thy redeeming love bind us more tightly to thy will than fear ever could. Make thy law our meditation by day and our song in the night. Cause us to say with the psalmist, "I delight to do thy will, O my God." For thy church in this generation, we ask a recovery of holy obedience, not the grim duty of the self-righteous nor the careless liberty of the antinomian, but the joyful, Spirit-enabled conformity to thy will that is the birthright of every child of God. Raise up teachers who will proclaim the whole counsel of thy Word. Strengthen parents to instruct their children in thy statutes. And hasten the day when the knowledge of thy glory shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, and every knee shall bow to the King whose law is liberty and whose service is perfect freedom. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who loved us and gave himself for us. Amen.