Christ can be
taken out of the salvation equation either through blatant rebellion of the
will and law of God or through the less visible confidence in your own wisdom.
Paul speaks extensively about the latter and calls it “confidence in the flesh”.
Neither legalism nor liberalism offers answers!
But what is
legalism? It is not the presence of God’s law in our daily walk with God and
our desire for sanctification. No, it is an attempt to be acceptable before God by my own law-keeping and my attempts
to live by my own effort to stay within boundaries I perceive to be “Christian”.
The opposite
of legalism is not “antinomianism”, meaning being against the law or being in denial
of God’s law. God always remains God and his will for me and for all that he
created always remains intact. The opposite of legalism is not lawlessness.
No, the
opposite of legalism of any variety and often present in all the various Christian
traditions, is the gospel.
It is the gospel that teaches imputed righteousness by grace and
through faith in Christ alone. The
gospel is not a message of grace that adds protection of a Christian life that
bears fruit, through an obsession with any law, whether it comes from human
tradition or biblical tradition. Such qualified grace puts us back under
the burden of anti-evangelical self-justification.
Paul clearly
says in Galatians 3: 26 – 29: For
in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as
were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all
one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring,
heirs according to promise.
Paul takes the
Galatians to whom they were before their redemption in Christ: they were
accursed because they were law-breakers as well as slaves of rules and laws at
the same time. But in Christ they became
sons and daughters – even heirs - and
therefore own the full right of children who are in possession of their inheritance
by the indwelling Spirit; even though its fullness and perfection is still to
come on the Lord’s Day. But in spite of our
imperfection in this dispensation, we have already received the inheritance as
God’s children, because Christ was born of a woman, born under law, in
his perfect humanity, to redeem us from the curse of law-breaking and to make
us heirs united with and in Christ Jesus.
How did it come
about? Paul does not talk about what we are doing or have done, but proclaims
what our Lord, in whom we trust, has done.
When we did
not know God, we were enslaved by what is wrong, sinful and offends the very
character of God. But when we became God’s children we have come to be known by
God. How can you ever turn back to the weak, impure and worthless principles,
customs and traditions of the world, whose slaves you never want to be again.
Paul says in Galatians 4: 8 – 10: Formerly,
when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are
known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable
force? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?..... I fear for you,
that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you.
We cannot
trust ourselves to move from rebellion to salvation. Therefore we should not
trust in ourselves to “remain saved” by keeping rules and boundaries in our own
strength!
And in the
same way that legalism tries to protect my salvation, in the same way
liberalism tries to create and make acceptable a life without boundaries and
disrespect and apathy for God’s perfect will and law. As little as we can trust ourselves to
protect our salvations through our own efforts to keep the law, just as futile
is the notion to create your salvation by making your own rules and law that
suits your era and suits a society that exists as God’s very enemy!
Paul taught
that our spiritual, mental, and emotional well-being, both personally and as a
community of believers are at stake. Trying to be the keeper of our own salvation,
or the creators of our own salvation, always results in the absence of joy and
a life burdened with futility.
And our witness to the only true gospel of
salvation by the radical grace of the imputed righteousness of Christ in
our place and for our salvation, is at stake. Both legalism and liberalism
offer no gospel that is worth proclaiming to a world unable to save itself.
As messengers
of the gospel we can proclaim nothing but Christ, grace, faith, the Word and
the glory it gives to God which is the only, final, radical and complete source
of our salvation
Nothing can
ever be more relevant for the ministry of both individual believers and the
church, than free justification by faith in Christ, the only Righteous One.
The answer to
both the sins of the flesh (the result of legalism) and to the sin of confidence
in the flesh (the result of liberalism) is the same:
The imputed
righteousness in and through Christ Jesus, our Lord!
