The Christian’s Relation to the Law

Dealing with a Christian who insists that we no longer have any relation to God’s Law.

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Look … Christ did not redeem us so that we might walk contrary to His Law-Word. The Law’s intent is not so that by the keeping of it we can be saved. We can’t keep it as it is needed to be kept. That is why Christ came as our covenant head. Our Lord Christ fulfilled the law in our stead and because of the righteousness accounted to us we are counted Law keepers. Similarly, our covenant head, the Lord Christ, bore our penalty in our place on the Cross that our indebtedness to the Law is fulfilled as we are united to Christ.

BUT now that the law has been fulfilled for us in Christ’s law-keeping and penalty bearing we now walk in terms of God’s law. We delight in God’s law now, not as means of gaining something we do not have. We delight in God’s law now, as a consequence of being given something we could not earn or merit.

Law and grace do doth sweetly comply (agree). We can not posit Grace against law. God’s law for the Christian is gracious and God’s grace unto the Christian was due to Christ-honoring all that the law required.

So, now we study God’s law in order to more fully delight in God’s grace.

Some will contend that we have been delivered from the law and so interpret that to mean that we have nothing to do with the law. This is an unfortunate error in interpreting and thinking. The aspect of the law that we have been delivered from is the condemning aspect of the law. Because we are in Christ we are delivered from the law’s condemnation. There is, after all, therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. However, deliverance from the law’s condemnation is not equal to the idea of no longer having anything to do with the law. This is why the inspired Apostle can say that; “The law is Holy, Righteous, and Good.”

Also, consider, how could we possibly define sin that we desperately want to avoid without the law? How could we possibly know what behavior, thinking, attitudes please our great Liege-Lord apart from His Law-Word?

Praise God for His kindness to usward as expressed by giving us His Law-Word. Praise God that the Lord Christ was and remains the embodiment and incarnation of God’s Law. To properly love God’s law is to love Christ. Correspondingly a lack of love for God’s Law-Word is a lack of love for Christ.

Twin Spin From Theologian James Orr

“He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, or to a view of human destiny found only in Christianity.”

James Orr
Christian View of God and the World — p. 4

Orr tells us here that believing in Jesus without having a biblical theology proper, biblical anthropology, biblical hamartiology, biblical soteriology, biblical teleology, (and we might add) biblical epistemology, biblical axiology, biblical ontology, don’t really believe in the Jesus of the Bible.
And herein is found the trouble with the modern Church in the West. Most of the clergy in our Reformed churches today are absolutely deaf and dumb clueless about these matters. They are not self-conscious in the least about these matters and so they end up teaching a Jesus that is a stranger to the Jesus who rules the Cosmos at the Father’s behest.

“If I were asked in what I think the distinctive peculiarity of twentieth-century Christianity will lie, I should answer that it is not in any new or overwhelmingly brilliant discovery in theology that I look for it. The lines of essential doctrine [except for eschatology as he had just admitted –BLM] are by this time well and surely established. But the Church has another and yet more difficult task before it if it is to retain its ascendancy over the minds of men. That task is to bring Christianity to bear as an applied power on the life and conditions of society; to set itself as it has never yet done to master the meaning of “the mind of Christ,” and to achieve the translation of that mind into the whole practical life of the age — into laws, institutions, commerce, literature, art; into domestic, civic, social, and political relations; into national and international doings — in this sense to bring in the Kingdom of God among men. I look to the twentieth century to be an era of Christian Ethic even more than of Christian Theology. With God on our side, history behind us, and the unchanging needs of the human heart to appeal to, we need tremble for the future of neither.”

James Orr
The Progress of Dogma — pp 353-354 (1897)

Here Orr anticipates the rise of Van Tillian presuppositionalism, Rushdoonian Reconstructionism, and Bahsenian Theonomy all sharing Orr’s insistence that all of life must be brought under the Lordship of Jesus Christ in very concrete ways. Interestingly enough, this plea by Orr was echoed over 100 years later by French Reformed theologian Pierre Courthial in his book, “The Day of Small Beginnings.” In that book Courthial argues that the Church must have a return to a consensus on the application of God’s law to all of life.

I hope that Courthial was more correct in his anticipation for the immediate future than Orr was.

Singer & McAtee on Historiography

“Without the Biblical doctrine of God, a valid interpretation of the realm of history is impossible. It is the sovereign God who created the world, and by His creation brought history into being. In creation, God gave meaning and purpose to the world. It is ONLY in this setting that man can meaningfully interpret and understand history. In his understanding of the Trinity, Augustine furnished the Christian study of history with an insight lacking to classical students. The Trinitarian God in Augustine solved the problem of the one and the many in ancient philosophy and made history possible to a Supreme Being rather than to fate or chance. It is this Supreme Trinitarian Being who created man in His image and thus conferred meaning and purpose upon human existence. History is not subject to the dictates of fate, which is neither the beginning nor end of the historical process and which cannot give to it any purpose. In these doctrines, Augustine rescued historiography from the grip of the classical concept of determinism which could only render history meaningless and irrational.”

C. Gregg Singer
Christian Approaches; Philosophy / History – p. 28-29

Without a Sovereign God determining history and meaning, all man is left is history by impersonal fate or impersonal chance. Interestingly enough, when God is eliminated from Historiography then fate and chance together work as limiting concepts that provide the framework in which history is penned. So, despite the idea that fate and chance are opposites, fate and chance work together as two wash-women taking in each other’s wash off the line. Pure chance will finally slip into fate and pure fate will finally slip into chance.

All of this means that we must read history through a definitively Christian theological grid which means that we will come to different conclusions from historians who are not epistemologically self-consciously Christian. Historical events then will be for the Christian historian interpreted diametrically differently than for the non-Christian.

Long Lost Stanzas From “O Little Town Of Bethlehem” Recovered

O corrupt town of Washington
How always thou art sly
Within thy halls move feckless creeps
Whose lips know naught but lies
And in thy dark room’s counsels
The re-occurring blight
The chains and tears combined with fears
Are put in law tonight
 
 
How stealthily, how stealthily
The freedom gift we were given
Now departs from our hearts
That legacy from heaven
No ear may hear it leaving
But in this world of sin
Where men will fight against the night
The Dear Christ is with them

Revolutionary Humanism; Out of Chaos, Order Comes

Genesis 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said …

One way that Christianity differs from Religions and philosophies that posit that man evolved from primeval chaos is that Christianity finds chaos being structured by order so that chaos is structured from and by the God of order.

The implication of this is that for Biblical Christians when confronted with the breakdown of social order, there is a call to return to order (God’s law) to answer the questions of breakdown and revolution and so provide solution. Not so for the Religions of chaos. For the philosophies and religions of chaos, order can only be achieved by returning to chaos. Chaos in a social order is thus healed only by more chaos and Revolution. This is seen perhaps most expressly in the Mardi Gras where chaos reigns. R. J. Rushdoony explains Mardi Gras;

“The Mardi Gras is a lineal descendant of the old pagan chaos cults whereby a religious revival meant not turning to God as it does in the Christian faith, but turning to chaos, because for the cults of chaos, the source of all things was not God. They did not believe in God, but primeval chaos, and so you sought a revival periodically, annually, you had to revive society by ritual acts of chaos. Now, in Rome, it was a Saturnalia whereby a condemned convict became the king in the early days of Rome and possessed the queen, whereby everything went. Incest, cannibalism in some societies, but not in Rome. Everything that was normally forbidden was practiced. Now, the Mardi Gras is precisely a modern form of the old chaos cults, the Saturnalia…”

As a small example of this return to chaos thinking, several years ago, I attended a school board meeting that was discussing the need for sex education in the classroom. The problem that was being addressed was the increase of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and STDs among students and the solution that was being offered was to teach the students how to have “safe” sex. You see, the problem was one of chaos and the answer being offered was a return to chaos to solve the problem of chaos. It didn’t matter that I had sundry studies demonstrating that teaching “safe sex” in government schools leads to an increase in out-of-wedlock births and STDs. This is because, at a presuppositional level, the modern humanists believe that order comes from chaos and so more chaos is the answer to chaos. Out of chaos order comes.

Of course, this is the whole theory behind the boneheaded theory that is evolution. Evolution presupposes that out of chaos order comes. Evolution teaches that chaos in development leads to the order of a new species.

Van Til called this process “integration downward into the void,” with the void representing chaos. Fallen humanist man will always embrace more chaos and Revolution to deliver him from chaos because fallen humanist man believes that out of chaos order comes.

This explains our daffy culture. Sodomy becomes a problem and the solution we embrace is Transgenderism. Chaos needs more chaos so that order will come. Marriages as an institution begin to go all chaotic and so we embrace sodomite marriage in order to “stabilize” marriage. Family breakdown is everywhere and so we redefine family to include two Lesbians and their in vitro fertilized “offspring.” Integration downward into the void. Chaos breeds a return to chaos in hopes that order will emerge.

Our expectation needs to be, short of God-given Reformation that we will continue in the West to go from chaos and revolution to chaos and revolution.