Biblical law is a tricky thing. It is both positive and negative. It is positive in a negative way and negative in a positive way, while at the same time being positive in a positive way and negative in a negative way. It is something we are to live by, but it’s also something we are to die to. It instructs how we are to live, and yet it produces death. It can show us how far short we fall, and yet let’s us think we are doing pretty well. It is something that brings a blessing, and something that brings a curse. It confines. It frees. Confused? I don’t blame you.
The problem is not with the law, it’s with us. We are created to find our freedom, satisfaction, joy, indeed, our humanity in following God’s law. Instead, we seek to live by another law, one of our devising that is wholly inadequate to the task. It’s like trying to fuel a car with grass instead of gas. Grass is good for cows, not cars. So too with human beings. We need to feed on what makes us go.
The historic problem, of course, is that our default condition has become one of wanting grass not gas. So when the law is presented to us as that in which we need to walk, we either reject it wholesale, or take the bits of it that we like and leave the rest. This not only alientates us from God, it alienates us from oursleves. We are trying to be human without nourishing ourselves with what makes us human. It is a losing battle with eternal consequences.
There is hope, however. God has acted to change our appetite. He clears the way by reconciling us to himself through the atoning death of his law-loving Son. He places a new desire within us, one that is eager to walk in his will. He also renews our minds so that we can see how our thinking has been skewed by sin.
What a radical change takes place in the life of believers! What produced death now brings life. What once exposed our impotence is now a world of possibility. We can, by the grace of God, through his Spirit working is us, have a foretaste of the liberty we will experience when we are, at last, released from all the trappings of our old, fallen selves and are walking in “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21) This will not be apart from the law. It will be wholly defined by the law, and we will delight in it.
