Devotional 101: The Law and All Men: Even Gentiles Are Under Its Obligation

The Confession Read

Neither are the forementioned uses of the law contrary to the grace of the gospel, but do sweetly comply with it; the Spirit of Christ subduing and enabling the will of man to do that freely, and cheerfully, which the will of God, revealed in the law, requireth to be done.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 19, Section 7

Introduction

There are truths in theology that a man may hold for years as articles of his creed before he ever tastes their sweetness. That the law and the gospel are friends, not enemies, is one of them. Many a sincere believer has spent a decade or more in the Christian life before he could say with the psalmist, "O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day," and mean it without a wince. The reason is not far to seek. We come to Christ, most of us, with the law's accusations ringing in our ears. We were brought to conviction by the law's demands and terrified by the law's threatenings, and when grace finally broke through and we discovered that Christ had satisfied what we could never satisfy, our first instinct was to put as much distance between ourselves and the law as possible. The law was the accuser; grace was the deliverer. Who would wish to keep the accuser in the house after the deliverer has arrived? Yet the Westminster Divines, having spent five sections establishing the law's continuing authority over the believer and one section unfolding its multiple uses for the regenerate life, arrive at a conclusion that many Christians never reach: these uses of the law are not merely compatible with the grace of the gospel; they "sweetly comply with it." The word "sweetly" is carefully chosen. It is not enough to say that law and grace can coexist without mutual destruction. The Divines want us to understand that they belong together, that they complement and complete one another, that the believer who has both the law's direction and the gospel's peace is not a house divided against itself but a soul in harmony with heaven. The final section of this chapter on the law is therefore not a grudging concession but a crescendo, a vision of the Spirit-empowered believer doing freely and cheerfully what the law requires.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle Paul, more than any other New Testament writer, has been charged with teaching a gospel that sets aside the law. The antinomians of the seventeenth century claimed him as their champion, and the charge has been repeated in every generation since. Yet when Paul speaks most directly of the Spirit's work in the believer, he does not describe a life liberated from the law's moral content but a life liberated into it. Nowhere is this clearer than in 2 Corinthians 3:6, 17, where he draws the famous contrast between the letter and the Spirit: "Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." And then: "Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." The Greek terms that structure this passage repay careful attention. The word translated "letter" is gramma, which in Paul's usage does not mean the moral law per se but the law considered as an external code, a written demand that commands without enabling. The gramma kills because it pronounces a sentence the sinner cannot alter by his own resources. The pneuma, the Spirit, gives life because he writes the law on the heart and supplies the power that was lacking. When Paul declares that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," the word eleutheria does not mean liberty from obligation to God's will. It means liberty from the condemning power of the gramma, liberty from the inability to obey, liberty from the servile terror that characterized the sinner's relationship to the law under the old covenant. The Spirit does not abolish the law's content; he changes the hearer's relationship to it. The same commandments that once stood over him as a death sentence now stand before him as a path of life, and he walks it not because he must but because he may. This inward transformation was promised long before Paul wrote. The prophet Ezekiel, speaking to a people whose history had been one long rebellion against the law, announced a day when God would deal with the root of the problem. Ezekiel 36:26-27 records the promise: "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." Every element of what the Confession describes is present in these two verses. There is the divine initiative: "I will give," "I will put," "I will cause." There is the radical inward change: the heart of stone replaced by a heart of flesh, the lifeless resistance of the sinner exchanged for the responsive sensitivity of the regenerate. There is the Spirit's enabling presence, indwelling the believer not as a visitor but as a permanent inhabitant. And there is the result: walking in God's statutes, keeping his judgments, doing them. Ezekiel does not imagine a new covenant in which the law is set aside. He imagines a new covenant in which the law is at last obeyed, not by the external pressure of command but by the internal propulsion of a renewed nature animated by the Spirit of God. The same promise finds its voice in Jeremiah's prophecy of the new covenant, quoted in full in Hebrews 8:10: "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people." The kainē diathēkē, the new covenant, does not introduce a new moral standard. The laws that God writes on the heart are his laws, the same laws that were inscribed on tablets of stone at Sinai. What is new is the location of the inscription and the manner of its reception. The law written externally can be ignored, resisted, or forgotten. The law written internally becomes part of the believer's constitution, as natural to his renewed mind as breathing is to his lungs. He does not need to consult an external code every time a moral decision presents itself, because the code has been transcribed into his affections. He loves what God loves and hates what God hates, not by a continuous act of willpower but by the new instinct of the regenerate heart. Paul's most extended description of life in the Spirit, in Galatians 5:16-18, 22-23, brings all these threads together. "This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." And then, after listing the works of the flesh, he adds the decisive line: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." This last phrase, "against such there is no law," is one of the most liberating statements in all of Scripture. Paul does not say that the Spirit produces in believers a life that violates the law. He does not say that grace makes the law irrelevant. He says that the fruit the Spirit produces is of such a character that the law has nothing to say against it. Love is the fulfilling of the law. Joy and peace and patience do not transgress any commandment. The law was never given to condemn gentleness or to prohibit self-control. When the Spirit produces his fruit in the believer's life, the law and the life converge. The believer is not straining to meet an external standard; the standard is being met from within, by a power that is not his own. He is not under the law as a covenant because the law's righteous requirement is being fulfilled in him through the Spirit. The contrast Paul draws is not between law-keeping and Spirit-walking as two different moral paths. It is between law-keeping by human effort under the threat of condemnation and law-keeping by the Spirit's enablement in the freedom of sonship. Both involve the same commandments. The difference lies entirely in how they are kept and by whose power.

What the Divines Meant

The seventeenth-century context in which the Confession was framed explains why the Divines devoted an entire section to this single, harmonizing sentence. The antinomian controversy had forced the question: if believers are not under the law as a covenant of works, if the law's threatenings no longer hang over their heads, if they obey not to earn but to express gratitude, then in what sense does the law retain any function at all? And if the law does retain functions, diagnostic, restraining, directive, do not those functions reintroduce the very legal principle the gospel abolished? The antinomians argued that any continuing use of the law was, by definition, contrary to grace. The law and the gospel were not merely distinct; they were opposed. To preach the law's demands upon believers was to betray the liberty Christ purchased. The Divines answered this charge with a single sentence, but that sentence is dense with theological precision. Every word carries weight. "Neither are the forementioned uses of the law contrary to the grace of the gospel." The negative formulation is significant. The Divines do not merely assert that law and gospel are compatible; they deny the antinomian claim that they are incompatible. The "forementioned uses" are the law's work as a rule of life, its diagnostic exposure of sin, its restraint of corruption, its threatenings that reveal sin's desert, and its promises that encourage obedience. None of these, the Divines insist, contradicts or subverts the free grace of the gospel. But they go further than bare negation. The uses of the law "do sweetly comply with it." The adverb "sweetly" is one of those rare moments when the normally sober language of the Confession rises to poetry. The Latin root of "comply" is complere, to fill up or complete, and the suggestion is not that law and grace merely tolerate one another but that each supplies what the other, in the economy of redemption, is appointed to lack. Grace without law would be formless, a gift without direction, a pardon without a path. Law without grace would be crushing, a demand without enablement, a mirror that shows every stain but provides no water to wash. Together, they form a complete ministration for the believer's soul: the law directing, the gospel forgiving; the law exposing, the gospel healing; the law commanding, the Spirit empowering. The second half of the section explains how this sweet compliance actually works in the believer's experience: "the Spirit of Christ subduing and enabling the will of man to do that freely, and cheerfully, which the will of God, revealed in the law, requireth to be done." The sequence is important. The Spirit first subdues the will, breaking its native resistance and overcoming its entrenched hostility to God's authority, and then enables it, supplying the moral energy that was lacking. The result is not a reluctant compliance, a grudging external conformity that masks inward rebellion. It is a willing, glad obedience that springs from the heart. "Freely" and "cheerfully" are the adverbs the Divines chose, and they describe a kind of obedience that the natural man finds almost incomprehensible: doing what God commands not because one must but because one may, not under compulsion but with delight. This is the true resolution of the supposed conflict between law and grace. The conflict exists only in the unrenewed will, which experiences every command as a threat and every prohibition as a prison. Once the Spirit has subdued and enabled that will, the law is no longer a threat but a guide, no longer a prison but a path. The believer who has experienced this inward transformation does not chafe against the commandments; he cherishes them. They are not the demands of a tyrant but the directions of a Father, and the Spirit who indwells him makes those directions not merely tolerable but sweet.

Theological Depth

The Dutch theologian Herman Witsius, whose work on the covenants remains one of the most careful treatments the Reformed tradition has produced, devotes sustained attention to the relationship between the law's continuing use and the Spirit's indwelling work. In his discussion of the new covenant, Witsius observes that the principal promise of that covenant is not the abrogation of the law but the communication of the Spirit, who writes the law on the heart and causes the believer to walk in it. The law, under the old covenant, was presented externally, on tablets of stone, and the people's obedience was secured, insofar as it was secured at all, by fear of penalty. Under the new covenant, the same law is presented internally, on tablets of flesh, and obedience is secured by the Spirit's inward operation. The content of the obligation has not changed, but the manner of its fulfillment has been entirely transformed. What was once a burden becomes, by the Spirit's grace, a delight. Witsius presses the point further by asking how it is that the Spirit's work can be described as producing both liberty and law-keeping simultaneously. If the Spirit causes the believer to walk in God's statutes, is the believer truly free? Is not "caused" obedience simply compulsion by a gentler name? Witsius answers by distinguishing between the liberty of indifference and the liberty of delight. The liberty of indifference is the capacity to choose between alternatives without any settled disposition toward either: the liberty of a man standing at a crossroads with no preference for one path over another. The liberty of delight is the capacity to act according to one's deepest desires without hindrance: the liberty of a man who loves music sitting down at a piano. The Spirit does not grant the believer the liberty of indifference with respect to God's law; he grants something far better. He implants a love for the law so that obedience becomes the believer's deepest desire, and then he removes the obstacles that prevent that desire from expressing itself. The believer who obeys freely is not floating in moral neutrality; he is acting from a heart so thoroughly renewed that God's will has become his own. This, Witsius argues, is the highest liberty a creature can possess, not independence from God's authority but glad conformity to it. Thomas Boston, the Scottish theologian whose writings bear the imprint of his own struggles with legalism and grace, approaches the same truth from the angle of pastoral experience. In his notes on the Marrow of Modern Divinity, Boston reflects on the believer who, having been taught that he is free from the law as a covenant, finds himself perplexed by the continuing role of the commandments in his daily walk. Such a believer, Boston observes, is like a man who has been released from prison and given the freedom of a city, yet keeps glancing over his shoulder, half-expecting the jailer to reappear. The solution is not to tell him that the city has no laws (it does, and they are for his good) but to teach him that the laws of the city are administered by the King who released him, not by the jailer who imprisoned him. The commandments come to the believer in Christ's hand, not in Moses's. They are the house rules of the Father's family, not the terms of the judge's sentence. The believer who grasps this distinction can take up the law without fear, because he knows that every command is backed not by the threat of condemnation but by the promise of the Spirit's help and the Father's smile. Boston is particularly helpful on the word "cheerfully" in the Confession's language. Why, he asks, do believers so rarely experience cheerfulness in obedience? The answer, he suggests, is that we have not sufficiently reckoned with the Spirit's role. We attempt obedience in our own strength, and we find it hard. The commandments chafe, and our resolutions crumble, and we conclude that cheerful obedience is a fantasy reserved for the perfected saints in glory. But the Confession does not present cheerful obedience as the product of heroic self-discipline. It presents it as the fruit of the Spirit's work: "the Spirit of Christ subduing and enabling the will of man to do that freely, and cheerfully." The cheerfulness is not something the believer generates; it is something the Spirit produces. The believer's part is to depend, to pray, to acknowledge his native inability, and to look to the Spirit for the enablement he has promised. When obedience is attempted in dependence on the Spirit, it ceases to be a grind and begins to be the natural outflow of a heart that has been made new. John Murray, writing in the twentieth century but in full continuity with the Reformed tradition represented by the Confession, elaborates the relationship between the indicative and the imperative in Pauline ethics, a relationship that lies at the heart of what the Divines were teaching in this section. The indicative declares what God has done: "ye are not under the law, but under grace." The imperative declares what the believer must therefore do: "let not sin reign in your mortal body." The indicative always precedes the imperative and grounds it. The believer is not told to obey to become something; he is told to obey because he is something already, a new creation in Christ, indwelt by the Spirit, set free from the dominion of sin. The imperative draws its force from the indicative and its power from the same Spirit who effected the indicative in the first place. Murray insists that this pattern is not a compromise between law and grace but the very structure of grace itself. Grace does not say, "You are free, therefore do as you please." Grace says, "You are free, therefore walk as free men, not using your liberty as a cloak for vice but as servants of God." The law, in this construction, is not the antithesis of grace but the shape grace takes when it is working out its purposes in a human life. Geerhardus Vos, whose biblical theology traced the unfolding of redemption through the covenants, adds a dimension that the earlier theologians, for all their precision, sometimes left implicit: the eschatological character of the Spirit's work. When Ezekiel promised that God would put his Spirit within his people and cause them to walk in his statutes, he was describing something more than a present psychological renovation. He was describing the inbreaking of the age to come, the arrival of powers that belong properly to the consummation. The Spirit who indwells believers is the Spirit of the resurrection, the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead and who will one day raise our mortal bodies. His work in producing cheerful obedience is therefore a foretaste of heaven, a down payment on the perfected holiness that will be ours when we see Christ as he is. The believer who finds himself, by the Spirit's enablement, loving the law and obeying it from the heart is experiencing, in embryonic form, what every saint will experience in fullness. He is not earning his way into the kingdom; the kingdom has already come to him, and his obedience is the evidence that it has. This eschatological perspective guards against both the despair that comes from measuring one's present obedience against the law's perfection and the presumption that treats the law as irrelevant to the life of grace. The obedience is real, but it is also partial. The Spirit's work is genuine, but it is also progressive. What the believer now tastes will one day be his permanent fare.

Puritan Application

First, examine your own attitude toward the law of God. Every believer can place himself somewhere on a spectrum between dread and delight when the commandments are read. For some, the reading of the Decalogue in public worship stirs a vague unease, a sense that standards are being invoked that they know they do not meet. For others, the same reading stirs a quiet gratitude, an inward assent to every prohibition and every precept. The difference between these two responses is not primarily a matter of temperament or upbringing. It is a measure of how fully the Spirit's work of subduing the will has progressed. A will that has been subdued by the Spirit does not bristle at the law's authority; it welcomes it. It says with the psalmist, "I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart." If you find that the law's demands provoke resentment rather than reverence, do not solve the problem by avoiding the law. That is the antinomian shortcut, and it leads to a Christianity without content. Instead, bring your resentment to the Spirit. Ask him to continue the work of subduing your will, to show you that the law's every command is an expression of the same love that sent Christ to the cross. The law is not your enemy. Your residual resistance to it is the enemy, and the Spirit is well able to overcome it. Second, stop attempting cheerful obedience in your own strength. This is a common cause of spiritual discouragement among serious believers. We hear the law's demand and we resolve to meet it. We gird up our wills, we make fresh resolutions, we determine that this time we will be patient, this time we will be pure, this time we will keep the commandment from the heart. And for a day or a week we manage an external conformity that looks like obedience. But it is not cheerful, and it is not free, and sooner or later it collapses. We have attempted the Spirit's work with the flesh's resources, and the flesh cannot produce what only the Spirit can give. The remedy is not to lower the standard, as though God would be satisfied with a grudging compliance. The remedy is to acknowledge, honestly and daily, that we cannot produce the obedience the law requires, and to look to the Spirit for the enablement he has promised. This is not passivity. It is the active dependence of faith, the posture of a branch that knows it can bear fruit only by abiding in the vine. Pray specifically for the Spirit's enablement in the areas where your obedience is most reluctant. Name the commandment you find hardest and ask the Spirit to make it sweet. He is not reluctant to answer such a prayer, for it is his office to glorify Christ by producing in Christ's people the obedience that Christ's sacrifice secured. Third, distinguish carefully between the law's condemnatory voice and its directive voice. The believer who has been genuinely converted has heard the law's condemnatory voice, "Cursed is everyone that continueth not in all things," and has fled to Christ for refuge. But many believers continue to hear that condemning voice long after they have taken refuge in Christ, and it robs them of the cheerfulness that should mark their obedience. They read a commandment and immediately feel condemned because their obedience falls short of its perfection. This is to confuse the law's function. For the justified believer, the law no longer speaks condemnation. Christ has borne the curse, and there is no condemnation for those who are in him. The law now speaks direction, not condemnation. It says, "This is the way; walk ye in it." When the believer fails to walk perfectly, and he will daily, the law's directive voice does not change into a condemnatory voice. It remains directive: "This is still the way. Rise, and walk again. Your Father is not waiting to cast you out but to restore you." The believer who understands this distinction can face his failures honestly without despairing. He can say, "I have fallen short of what the law requires, but I am not under the law's curse. Christ has borne that for me. Now let me rise, by the Spirit's help, and walk again in the path the law has marked." This is not making light of sin. It is taking sin seriously enough to mourn it, and taking grace seriously enough to believe that it covers every failure. Fourth, cultivate the practice of meditating on the law as the expression of God's character. One of the reasons believers find the law burdensome is that they think of it primarily as a list of restrictions: things they may not do, pleasures they must forgo, freedoms they must surrender. But this is to read the law from the flesh's perspective. Read from the Spirit's perspective, the law is a portrait of the God who gave it. The first commandment reveals a God who will not share his glory with rivals, a God worth worshiping exclusively. The second commandment reveals a God who cannot be reduced to an image, a God whose transcendence refuses domestication. The third commandment reveals a God whose name is weighty, a God who is not to be invoked lightly. The fourth commandment reveals a God who gives rest, a God who is not a taskmaster but a Father who provides for the renewal of his creatures. And so through the whole Decalogue. The believer who meditates on the law in this way, asking not merely "What am I forbidden to do?" but "What does this command teach me about the God who gave it?", will find his attitude toward the law gradually changing. He will begin to love it, not because he has become a legalist, but because he has learned to see the face of his Father in its precepts. This is the meditation the psalmist practiced when he wrote, "Mine eyes prevent the night watches, that I might meditate in thy word." It was not a grudging discipline but a glad discovery. Fifth, let the law drive you to prayer rather than to pride or despair. The law, rightly used, always has this effect: it shows the believer his need. Pride is the response of the man who measures himself by a crooked standard and concludes that he has kept the law tolerably well. Despair is the response of the man who measures himself by the law's straight standard but forgets the gospel. Prayer is the response of the man who measures himself by the law, finds himself lacking, and brings that lack to the throne of grace. "Lord, I see what thou requirest. I cannot do it. Enable me by thy Spirit. Subdue my resisting will. Write this commandment on my heart. Make obedience sweet to me." Prayers of this kind honor God because they acknowledge both the rightness of his law and the sufficiency of his grace. They neither lower the standard nor doubt the supply. They are the breath of a soul that has learned the lesson of the Confession: the law and the gospel sweetly comply, and the Spirit is the one who makes that compliance a living reality in the believer's experience.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who art righteous in all thy ways and holy in all thy works, we bless thee for thy law. We confess that we have not always loved it as we ought. We have felt its demands as chains when they were in truth the cords of thy kindness. We have resented its prohibitions when they were the fences that kept us from destruction. Forgive us, we pray thee, for the stubborn resistance of our wills, and for the many times we have attempted obedience in the strength of our own resolutions rather than in dependence on thy Spirit. We thank thee for the promise of the new covenant, that thou wouldst put thy law in our inward parts and write it on our hearts. We thank thee that what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, thou hast accomplished by sending thy Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. Grant us, O Spirit of Christ, the inward work we so desperately need. Subdue the remaining rebellion of our wills. Overcome our native aversion to thy authority. Enable us to do freely and cheerfully what thy law requires, not as slaves who fear the lash but as sons who love the Father, not as mercenaries who work for wages but as children who delight to please the one who has already given them everything in Christ. Teach us to read thy law as the transcript of thy character, and grant that as we contemplate its precepts we may grow in our knowledge of thee. Let the law drive us, not to pride in our achievements nor to despair over our failures, but to prayer, humble, constant, expectant prayer, for the Spirit's help. And when we fall, as we so often do, let the law's exposure of our sin send us not inward to self-reproach but outward to Christ, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of thy grace. Bring us at last to that day when the law shall no longer need to be written on tablets or pages, for it shall be the very element of our perfected nature, and we shall serve thee without hindrance or reluctance, world without end. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit be all honour and glory, now and evermore. Amen.