Misusing grace and law


"The twin heresies, antinomian and legalist, are not two extremes with orthodoxy in the middle, but aberrations that deny the gospel, each in its own way. They are mirror opposites of one another but reflect only distortions."

 Here is a scripture that reveals a great deal about the nature of law and grace, and it occurs in the Old Testament. Examining it may surprise some people who think law versus grace is entirely a New Testament issue.

2 Chronicles 30:17-20 New International Version (NIV)
Since many in the crowd had not consecrated themselves, the Levites had to kill the Passover lambs for all those who were not ceremonially clean and could not consecrate their lambs to the Lord. Although most of the many people who came from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover, contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, “May the Lord, who is good, pardon everyone who sets their heart on seeking God—the Lord, the God of their ancestors—even if they are not clean according to the rules of the sanctuary.”And the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people.

That is a perfect example of grace delivering people from the demands of a law they are unable to keep. The people were unprepared to receive the passover meal properly and so God granted them grace to do it anyway. It is a reminder not to be too doctrinaire in the distinction between the Old Testament and New Testament ideas of law and grace, for God is of course the same God in both places.

I am sometimes mistaken for a legalist, because I oppose antinomians. Of course I am neither one, and the charge of legalism is simply the reflex response of the antinomian heretic to any criticism. The twin heresies, antinomian and legalist, are not two extremes with orthodoxy in the middle, but aberrations that deny the gospel, each in its own way. They are mirror opposites of one another but reflect only distortions. One excuses us from God's righteous demands by saying our infractions do not matter. The other excuses us by substituting our own rules, just as the Pharisees did. (Mark 7:13)

What shall I say of God's grace? I seek it daily, rely on it in all that is most important and it is all I have to save me in the judgement. So it is important to be clear on what grace is. God has his ideas of holiness, to which we are to aspire. "We all offend in many things," but we should be trying always to become holier than we now are. Instead of being misled by this or that distortion we are to grow in grace (2 Peter 3:17-18). We cannot honor God's demands by being indifferent to them, as the antinomian is, nor trivializing them with rules that don't really capture the truth of those demands, the heresy of the legalist.

Progress toward unity among the separated churches will depend, I think, on all of us recognizing that both views are heretical. We must stop excusing them as mere peculiarities in one another's doctrine. We need, instead, to be calling each other to account: We are called to preach only the gospel and it is neither of those things.

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