The Law – Part Five – Christ is Supreme
January 7, 2009
In the last post we attempted to put some definition around the New Testament law. We are now brought to the climax of the law, which is the person of Jesus Christ. As we have seen in these last installments, God’s requirement of mankind in the New Testament, far from being minimized, is actually filled up and maximized in the revelation of Jesus Christ. As God has now indwelt man, He now has every legal right to make inner requirements of man that far exceed the Law of Moses. We have seen how this dramatically affects our evangelism and our understanding of our own calling.
The Great Need of Mercy
You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. – Matthew 5:48 (AMP)
As we consider the requirements of God’s morality upon the inner man, we see that absolute need of Christ. We see that there is no way any living human being will ever be able to assert any measure of morality against the standard of God, for we are all left completely helpless before His requirements. When we finish the words of the Sermon on the Mount, if we have truly understood it, our hearts cry out, “What shall we do?”
The requirement of God is so deep, so vast, and yet so just that you and are are left without excuse and without hope before the judgment bar of God. This is not without purpose however, for we are left in this great place that God may be all in all. God Himself, in His own perfect love for man in our predicament, brings salvation through His own right hand in the person of Jesus. By understanding the law, and its present application, we can understand more than ever the great need of the person of Jesus. Jesus said, “those who are forgiven much love much,” and as the law of God penetrates our heart, our inner man should sing the highest praises to the One who has made a way for us to be redeemed from the just and proper condemnation of God’s law.
Let us now see that great paradox that God uses our very violation of the law to bring us into the demonstration of its requirements. As the gospel is proclaimed in truth and power our hearts become heavy under the weight of condemnation and conviction. This condemnation is just and true for we can never fulfill God’s requirements on us. Many avoid this pressure point by lessening God’s requirements, but the solution is not to lessen God’s requirements, but to come into the reality of our spirit’s situation and then receive God’s solution.
While we struggle under the weight of our own condemnation and the black hell of hopelessness closes in on our hearts which have been awakened to God’s law, God comes in like a shaft of light and presents Himself as the ultimate sacrifice and rescue from our own black heart. We see Him in that instant as the liberator from all that we are and all that we have become. This experience is slow for some and quicker for others, but for all there is that moment when light dawns and we see that the very One who has condemned us by making just requirements of our heart, now offers Himself to us as the very redeemer for our blackness. At this moment, we are born again as we grab onto the glorious hope of God whose love is so vast that He is, in that moment, both the One who condemns and the One who rescues.
God’s plan is so glorious though, that it continues from there. Being liberated by His glorious love, the natural response of the human heart is then to love Him desperately, passionately, and completely for His act of redemption from our own condemnation. In the wisdom of God then, it is the pressure of our condemnation that forms in a heart a love for the God who rescues us and this love then naturally begins fulfilling the first great commandment of God’s law to love God with all our hearts.
You see, it is the knowledge of the depth of our depravity and condemnation that leads us to the heights of love. We become those with the capacity to fulfill the law only once we have been awakened to our birth position as those under the condemnation of the law. Only the wisdom of God could take the very thing that condemns us and sets us at odds with Him and use it as the seed of eternal love and holiness in His redeemed people. Once again, we find that God is all and all and that Jesus is worth of supreme adulation for His great redemption. He alone provides mercy for our sins as we stand helpless before the judgment bar of God. Let us love Him desperately for the mercy He provides and then vigorously share that mercy with others understanding that God uses the tool of condemnation as the key to open the door to divine mercy.
The Gift of Grace
We often declare that we live under grace and by that we typically mean that we are no longer under the requirement of God, but rather live in a time when God stands quick and ready to forgive all things and so we need not worry too significantly about how we live. The irony of this way of thinking is that as believers we declare grace over every area that we feel we personally fall short, but then we make requirements of other believers when they sin and stumble. In other words, though we claim “grace” we often live in an Old Testament way expecting other believers to conform to certain norms of behavior while we then claim “grace” for those aspects of our behavior that we feel unable to change. We need a new understanding of grace.
Hopefully by now, we all see to clearly our great need of the mercy of God. There is no solution to the weight of our offense before God other than the person of Jesus Christ and how glorious is His perfect deliverance! For those of us that have been redeemed, we do indeed live under grace, but we need to understand what the nature of the grace we live under is.
True, God’s grace covers our sin, but His grace is also active empowering us to live in accordance to His law. Grace is an active gift that God gives us, not only to cover our sin with His mercy, but also to empower us to keep the commandments Jesus gave. God intends to have a people that are not only forgiven, but also who demonstrate His nature in the way that they live. If we see grace only in the context of forgiveness, we have missed the demonstration that God desires to make through His people as grace empowers them to live in the context of Jesus’ commands.
By this shall all [men] know that you are My disciples, if you love one another. – John 13:35 (AMP)
We can easily see from the Scriptures, that Jesus expects the saints living under grace to demonstrate His commandments so that the world may receive a witness to the reality of the gospel. Jesus’ primary witness to the world of His resurrection is the life of His people on the earth (Acts 1:8). We are to be His witnesses, not just in the words we use, but in the life that we demonstrate. It is this witness that not only is the evidence of Jesus resurrection to the world, but is also the ultimate blow to the powers and principalities that oppose the gospel. They can oppose rhetoric and theology, but they cannot oppose the witness of a people demonstrating the operation of the law of God within their midst.
The New Testament Sinai
While Jesus declared His law to us, He knew that the saints would not be able to demonstrate the practical working of this law without supernatural power. It is for this reason, that He instructed them to tarry until they be endued with His own Spirit. The church had already received forgiveness through Christ’s death and resurrection, but God desired something far greater than forgiveness. He wanted a people that were a demonstration and the only way to get that demonstration was to fill people with His own Spirit.
So then, on the day of Pentecost, Jesus poured out His own Spirit upon His body that the saints might be empowered, and not just forgiven. This empowering was the fullness of God’s grace being poured out on the people. Not only had He forgiven them, He now gave them power to walk in a way that was in keeping with His law.
In many ways the events in that upper room were a parallel to God’s law giving at Mt. Sinai. In both instances, God came in fire, only this time rather than resting on a physical mountain away from the people, this time the first came and dwelt upon and within the people themselves. Just as there were voices at Mt. Sinai (some translations say “thunders” where it more properly should be voices that proceeded when God came down at Mt. Sinai), so too now there were supernatural voices that emanated and those voices came as God supernaturally spoke through His people rather than to His people.
This is significant. In times past, the voice came from God to His people from above. Now the voice was coming through God’s people. God had now indwelt His people empowering them to be the demonstration that He desired on the earth. God, now incarnate among man in the person of Jesus Christ, speaks on the earth now through men. No longer does the voice come from heaven, the voice is now on the earth. It is the voice of God, but it is the voice of God through men. Since God has chosen the mystery of His Son, in keeping with that mystery, He extends His ministry on the earth through other men that are in union with His Son. What a mystery this is and how little the church has looked into it! I fear we barely understand the incarnation. It is a doctrine of theology that we associate with the babe in the manger, but we have not plunged the depth of the eternal mystery of the incarnation.
Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was their Husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel: After those days, says the Lord, I will put My law within them, and on their hearts will I write it; and I will be their God, and they will be My people. And they will no more teach each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. – Jeremiah 31:31-34 (AMP)
Amidst the voices and the fire at Pentecost, God wrote His law again by His own hand just as He did on Mt. Sinai. For Moses, God wrote on tablets of clay because His declarations to Moses were earthly and external. They were requirements upon the outward frame of man, or the clay part of man. Now God has filled up His law and He makes His requirement upon the very heart of man. On Pentecost then, God wrote His law again but this time on tablets of men’s hearts. The law that He wrote is now proclaimed, not through a clay tablet, but through the witness of a people whose lives form a demonstration of the law written by God Himself on their own hearts.
Let us as a people approach the law of God with all the seriousness of its requirements as well as with all the joys of its fulfillment through Christ. Truly we should be a joyous people that God would so honor us as He has with the requirement of His law. Our hearts should be filled with rejoicing that the very God who makes such high requirements of us, makes a way of redemption for us and then, as if redemption is not enough, He empowers us as a people to keep His law and further more uses us as His demonstration both to the earth and to the powers and principalities of His great law.
Saints, we are God’s image on the earth and the display of His beauty and wisdom through His law. Let us ask Him to give us full understanding of His law and the power to live under a complete New Testament understanding of the law, rather than our misguided understanding of His law. Let our hearts be fascinated by the God whose nature is so perfect and so high above ours and yet stoops so low as to cover our sin and give us access to participate in His nature and demonstrate His law. Truly, what other people has a God like this?