|
|
USING THE LAW LAWFULLY1 Timothy 1:3-11INTRODUCTION I am persuaded by both experience and training that the most helpful and safest way for a pastor to lead the congregation God has assigned to him is to teach his way through books of the Bible on Sunday mornings. There are several benefits to this approach to teaching the gospel to the church. First, it keeps the pastor honest. When the Sunday sermon is determined by subjects about which the pastor wants to speak, it is more than likely that the congregation is only going to hear the things that the pastor thinks are important. There will be subjects that make the pastor uncomfortable that will never be addressed. By working through books of the Bible the pastor is forced to deal with all the complexities of life lived with God. A second reason for preaching through books of the Bible is so that the congregation will learn over time to be better Bible readers. The Bible is not a collection of truths about God nor is it a textbook of theology. It is not a collection of inspirational sayings to help you in your darkest hours. The Bible is full of stories and laws and letters and poems written by real people living in a real world who were led and directed by the Holy Spirit to write exactly what they wrote in order to reveal God and his ways. It takes time to learn this book and if you get a steady diet of topical sermons based on scattered verses you will not learn to read the Bible as it is actually written. Therefore, it has been our practice since we began public worship services in 1998 to work our way through books of the Bible. As a congregation on Sunday mornings we’ve studied our way through Genesis, Matthew, Galatians and the first 17 chapters of Exodus. On occasion I have done a series that is more topical in nature but yet based upon particular passages rather than scattered verses. However, this morning I’m going to do something I’ve only done a couple of times in the past eight years. The sermon is not based upon one text but upon dozens of passages. The reason I am doing this is because next week we are going to begin a series from Exodus 18-24 titled, “God reveals his righteousness”. About a year ago we concluded an examination of Exodus 1-17, which is the story of God’s delivering the nation of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. We left off in Exodus 17 with over 1 million Israelites, having crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land, marching through the desert towards Mt. Sinai. Only Moses knows that they are heading for a rendezvous with God and even he doesn’t know exactly what that meeting is going to entail. It will be on Mt. Sinai that God will give to Israel his law, which includes the Ten Commandments as the summary of his moral will for human beings. This means that over the next couple of months we are going to be talking about God’s law as it is revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. This morning I aim to prepare us for this extended examination of the law of God by considering in broad terms the purpose of the law. If you’ll look with me at 1 Timothy 1 I think you will be able to see why it is that before we begin to examine the law of God that it will be useful for us to think about the purpose of God’s law. Timothy is a young man whom Paul has trained to be a minister of Christ. He has sent him to Ephesus for the express purpose of confronting a group of people who were teaching false doctrines in the church at Ephesus. Paul describes their teaching as being devoted to myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations and end up in lots of empty talk. Their teaching is in direct opposition to Paul’s teaching of the gospel of Christ. Notice that in v. 7 that these false teachers “want to be teachers of the law.” The false teachers are using the Law of Moses to teach false doctrines about God and his salvation. We don’t know exactly what they were teaching but we do know that Paul considered their teaching to be in opposition not only to the gospel but to the law they claimed to be teaching. They did not understand either what they were saying or the things about which they made such confident assertions. In v. 8 Paul tells his young protégé and us along with him, that the Law of Moses is good, provided that it is used lawfully. In other words, the law is good but it must be used for the purpose it was given if the good law is going to have a good effect. This power saw of mine is a good tool when used for cutting wood. However, this good tool will have a very bad effect if I use it to cut a piece of apple pie or if I use it to trim my toenails. In the same way certain people in Ephesus are misusing the good and powerful law of God and it is having a very bad effect upon the church. The false teachers in Ephesus were among the first in a long line of supposed Christian teachers who were using the good law of God in an evil way. Therefore, as we are going to be spending several months examining the law of God I thought we should start by reflecting on the good use of God’s good law in order that we might recognize when it is being misused. This is a very large subject about which there has been much written over the last 2000 years of church history. I am not making any claim to an exhaustive examination of this subject. But I think you will find the following outline helpful as you think about, not only the Ten Commandments but about how all the OT relates to your life. (There is one aspect of the good use of God’s law that I am not going to address at all and that is the relationship between God’s law and human laws; between God's law and civil government. This is a very important subject about which there is much confusion and wrong teaching but we don’t have time to deal with it this morning.) You will see in the note taking outline that there are lots of verses. I will not be going over every verse but include them for your later consideration. MAIN POINT We use the law lawfully when we use it to…I. Condemn humans for their sins I know the word “condemn” is pretty strong and not very politically correct. However, it captures the primary purpose for which God gave the law. In 1 Timothy 1:9 we are told that the law was not made for the righteous (We’ll talk about what that means in the next point) but that it was made for the lawless and disobedient, etc. What does it mean to say that God made the law for those who break the law? We need to turn back to Romans 7. This entire chapter is about the purpose of the law of God. Look at vv. 7-13. Paul says that the law functioned in his life in two ways. First, it revealed his sin. He would not have known what sin was if there was no law. He would not have known when he was transgressing the law if he was not informed of the law. A number of years ago I was leading a small group Bible study with a number of people who had little knowledge of Christianity or the Bible. We were talking about how God forgives us of our sins when a woman in the group asked, “I don’t want to sound stupid but how do I know what sin is? How do I find out what God thinks is wrong?” The answer to that question is, God’s law tells us what sin is because it tells us what righteousness is. 1John 3:4 says, “Everyone who sins breaks the law, in fact, sin is lawlessness.” God's law is the perfect expression of his perfect will for human beings. It is an objective standard that applies to all people at all times in all cultures. The God who made us has told us what he wants us to do and what he doesn't want us to do. Therefore, the law is an infallible standard against which we are to measure our lives. The second thing that Paul says about the law is that the law does not keep him from sinning. In fact, when he was confronted with the law, rather than sinning less he sinned more. When he heard that it was a sin to covet what others had, sin, that is who he is apart from God’s grace in his natural, human condition, produced in him every kind of covetous desire. His own sinfulness, when confronted with God’s law did not and does not submit to God’s law but rather promotes law breaking in him by deceiving him. Sin promises greater pleasure is to be had in breaking God’s law than in keeping God’s law. Anyone who has ever dieted knows how this feels. Let’s say your diet commands that you not eat desserts. Before the command came into your life you ate desserts without any thought given to it. You ate desserts and didn’t eat desserts whenever you felt like it. There was no longing or lusting after cakes in you. However, when the command, “thou shall not eat desserts” came into your life, suddenly your heart is in turmoil. There is a piece of chocolate cake that you are under command not to eat. However, inside you are flooded with thoughts of how good it would be to eat that piece of cake. “One piece of cake won’t hurt. You’ve been such a good girl you deserve to indulge yourself. Eating that piece of cake will make you happier than losing a few pounds. Nobody will know, go ahead and eat it.” The law provides sin with the opportunity to deceive me by producing all kinds of coveting desires in me. My desires for pleasure fight against the restriction of the law and goad me on to break the law. The law is good, not bad. I’m bad, not good and that is what the law proves, as v. 13 says. The law cannot make me good, it only proves how bad I am. But how does it condemn me? Look back a few pages to Romans 3:19-20. In Romans 3:9-18 the apostle Paul is concluding the opening argument of his letter to the Romans. This letter is the fullest summary of the gospel in the Bible. In the opening three chapters Paul is out to show the sinfulness of humanity and why it was necessary for Jesus Christ to come into the world, live a perfect life and die a brutal death on the cross. To do that he is out to show that all human beings are guilty of sin towards God and therefore deserve God’s condemnation. In vv. 9-18 he quotes a series of statements from the OT, mostly from the Psalms. If you will notice, the force of these quotes is that all human beings are sinners. There are no righteous people. There are no good people. There are no people in the world who by nature are seeking after God. Notice that in v. 19 Paul says that the function of the law, here he means all these quotes from the Psalms, is to silence every mouth and hold the whole world accountable to God. What does this mean? Imagine you are a parent and you have told your six old in very clear terms that she is not permitted to ride her bike in the street. You also inform her that if she rides her bike in the street that you will spank her and she will not be allowed to ride her bike for a month. One day, while you're working in the backyard you look out to the front of the house and there see your little girl riding her bike in the street. By the time you get to the front of the house where she can see you she is back in the driveway. You ask her, "Honey, were you riding your bike in the street?" She looks at you and very slowly says, "No, I wasn't." "Sweetheart, that's a lie because I saw you riding in the street." She frantically begins to explain how her older sister had ridden down the street to the neighbor's house and she thought it would be OK with you if she went along because her big sister would watch her and it wasn't far and she never got to do anything fun and besides she's six years old and her friend can ride in the street and she's only seven and she starts to whimper a little and put out her bottom lip and… Then you get down on one knee and look her straight in the eye and you say, "Honey, didn't I tell you to not ride in the street? Didn't I tell you that if you rode in the street I would discipline you?" The talking stops and she is silent because she cannot stand before the law and the lawgiver who knows that she has broken the law. She cannot argue because she knows she is guilty and her judge knows she is guilty and she knows she deserves the punishment that is due to her. Her mouth is silenced. This is what the law does. It reveals our sinfulness and then condemns us for our sins. We have no excuse for our sin. The law proves us guilty and therefore subject to the punishment prescribed by the law. Paul says it a little differently but to the same effect in Galatians 3:10 quoting Deuteronomy 27:26, "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law." The law requires perfect obedience all the time and so I am convicted and condemned as a criminal by the law because I do not keep all the law all the time. The law stands as an objective marker as to whether or not I've obeyed God. It proves that I have not done the will of God and therefore I am a condemned criminal waiting on death row for my execution. I cannot escape by keeping the law because the law requires perfect obedience to all God's law at every moment, no exceptions. This I cannot do because I do not want to do it. God did not give the law, the 10 Commandments, so that by keeping them you would go to heaven. He gave the law to prove that you are a lawbreaker and show how just it would be for him to send you to hell. Practically, what this means is that whenever you read or hear a portion of God's law, by that I mean his moral demand upon your life, you should be afraid. The law is meant to terrify you and to weigh you down with guilt and the fear of hell. When you read the law you should never congratulate yourself for how well you've kept it because there is not a single person sitting in this room who has ever kept the perfect law, perfectly. One of the emotions the law is to provoke in us is the emotion you feel when you look in the rearview mirror and see the lights of a police car and then you look at your speedometer and see that you are going fifty in a 25 mph zone. However, there is a difference between the fear the law provokes in the Christian and the fear it ought to provoke in the non-Christian. If you are not a Christian, the only emotions that you ought to have when you hear the law is terror and hatred, just like the emotions a criminal has when he is caught. You ought to feel the terror a mountain climber feels as he clings to the face of cliff and sees a massive snowstorm with 100 mph winds come sweeping in from the north and he has no way to escape and he knows when it hits it will sweep him from the cliff and he will plunge to his death. For the Christian, the fear we feel is that of the mountain climber who sees the storm coming and at the last moment finds a small cave in the face of the cliff and scrambles into it and is safe as the storm sweeps across the face of the cliff. He feels relief and safety and joy at being saved but yet a trembling seizes him as he realizes how close he came to death and as he sees the power of the storm just feet away. However, there is another response that the Christian is to have to the law that we will see in the next point. We use the law lawfully when we use it to…
II. Glory in the greatness of Christ as our Savior from sin Back in 1 Timothy 1:8, what does “we know that the law is not made for the righteous”, mean? Who are the "righteous"? The righteous are all those who by their faith in Christ have been forgiven of all their sins, declared perfectly righteous with the righteousness of Christ and who now live by the Spirit, thus fulfilling the law by loving God and others. In this short statement Paul is summarizing what he spends chapters describing in his other letters. This is the same thing as what he says in Romans 7:4, "So my brothers you also died to the law that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead." It is what he says in Galatians 5:18, "But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law." So what does it mean that the law is not for Christians? It means three things. First, the law of God, whether the 10 commandments or any other moral imperative in the Scriptures cannot condemn us because Christ fulfilled the law for us and he bore the just punishment due to us for our sins when he died on the cross. We are safe from the wrath of God and look forward to being warmly welcomed into heaven because of what Christ did for us. The Christian learns as she hears the demands of the law and the threats of condemnation for those who do not perfectly obey it to flee to Christ who fulfilled the law and bore the curse of the law for us. This is what we celebrate in communion every month. Second, the law is not for us in that it contains no ability to empower us to live a life of obedience to God. We don't go to the law to find the motivation and the power to do the will of God. We know that all the law can do is condemn us or make us self-righteous so we do not go to the law, to the commands of God to find the will and power and motivation to obey God. Third, the law is not for us in that it is not the focus of our attention. Christ is the focus of our attention. When we go to the law we first see Christ, not a command for us to obey. We see in the law the portrait of Christ whom we trust in for all things. We live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave himself up for us. This is the point of what Paul says in Galatians 3:24-25. "So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we may be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law." As we spend these next months in the Law of Moses it will be my goal to see and to show you the glory of Christ in the law. The law is given to point us to Christ, to reveal his glory. Let me summarize the four ways the law reveals the glory of Christ. The law reveals the glory of Christ by his obedience to the law (Hebrews 10:7, John 4:34 , Hebrews 4:15 ) A we consider the perfect righteousness of God that is revealed in the law, we will rejoice in Christ's fulfilling this righteousness perfectly. He always did exactly what God commanded to be done and he always did it by trusting God and for God's glory. He was never angry with his parents. He never fought with his siblings. He never complained about the weather. He always did what he was asked to do by those in authority over him, cheerfully and eagerly and to the best of his ability. He never stretched the truth in order to make himself look good. He never took what was not his. He never became short tempered when he was tired or sick. He always loved God and people from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. He performed all this obedience not so that people would like him or to gain power over others but he did it for the glory of his Father. He did this for all who trust in him so that his very righteousness can be credited to our account. Therefore as we read the law we will be rejoicing in the glory of the perfect obedience of Christ. The law reveals the glory of Christ by his suffering the curse due to lawbreakers (Galatians 3:13 , Hebrews 9:15 , 10:10 , Luke 13:1-4) The law and the prophets are full of God's threats to destroy the wicked and his actions in destroying the wicked. What the law as it is revealed in both the OT and the NT tells us is that all lawbreakers deserve death and hell. As we consider these ominous threats we will continually return to the cross of Christ where God punished the sins of all who trust in Christ. We will rejoice in this great Christ who drank the cup of God's wrath down to the very bottom, not for any sins of his own but for the sins of all who trust in him to be a curse for them. If you would like to help yourself spiritually go read the first 25 chapters of Jeremiah which is full of descriptions of God's wrath against the disobedient and think about how much you deserve to suffer all the misery described there. Then consider how Christ, by his death on the cross suffered all that misery in your place. When we read in the OT law the suffering that is threatened and then the suffering that is experienced by Israel for their sins we are to see the sufferings of Christ for our sins. When we see the enormity of this suffering we are to rejoice and be grateful in the same way we would rejoice and be grateful to a rich uncle who paid off our mortgage when we were unemployed or our sibling who gave us one of her kidneys when our kidneys had failed and we were going to die. The law reveals the glory of Christ by his fulfilling the entire law (Matthew 5:17 , John 5:45-47, Romans 10:4, Galatians 3:23-25, Acts 26:22-23, Hebrews 10:1) What I mean here is this: when I read the OT laws concerning animal sacrifices and the priests and the temple worship and the food laws and other cleanliness laws and when I read of David and Moses and the prophets I am to see all of this as a foreshadowing of Christ and his salvation. Every verse of the OT is about Jesus in some way. Christ has fulfilled, is fulfilling or will fulfill every verse of the OT. Therefore I cannot read a single verse of the OT without considering in what way it is related to Christ. This is fairly obvious in many places but is not so obvious in others. We know that we do not offer animal sacrifices anymore because all the animal sacrifices were merely a prophetic picture of Christ, the Lamb of God's final, once for all sacrifice. We can read the book of Leviticus with profit because we see in all of those bloody sacrifices the suffering of Jesus. So as we study the law in Exodus we will be continually looking for the ways that Christ is revealed in his various offices on our behalf. The law reveals the glory of Christ by his fulfilling the law in us by his Spirit (Ezekiel 36:26-27, Romans 7:6, 22, 25, 8:3-14, Gal 5:6 & 16-18, 1 John 3:1-6) The OT promises that when the Messiah comes one of his works will be to give the Holy Spirit to all of his people so that all of his people delight in God's law and seek to follow it. The coming of the Holy Spirit to create new hearts, to impart God's very own life to his people is one of the distinctive features of that final day of the Lord that the coming of God's Messiah will accomplish. We live in that day. The Holy Spirit has been poured out by Christ upon all of his people so that we have hearts that love God and delight in his law. This is described throughout the OT and the NT. I want you to see one of those places. In Romans 7 after Paul has said that we died to the law in v. 4 and in v. 6 he says we have been released from the law so that we serve God in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code yet says in vv. 22 &25 that, "…in my inner being I delight in God's law…. So then, I myself, in my mind am a slave to God's law." Then in Romans 8:3-4 God says, "For what the law could not do in that it was weakened by the flesh, God did in sending his son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering and so he condemned sin in sinful man in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." I don't have time to work this all out but I want us to understand how we, as Christians, hear the law of God, that is, all of his moral commands. The new heart that the Holy Spirit gives to Christians is a heart that yearns and longs above all else to love God and people. The law is not an external command but an internal desire. We do not view the commands of God as a burden but as a delight. The real us, the Spirit created us, views God's commands like children view the command of their father to get in the car so we can go get ice cream. We can think of nothing better than to be a person who is full of joy in God and full of joy in loving others. We hunger and thirst for God's righteousness; to be like our Father in heaven. We see in the law that perfect righteousness for which we long. But we don't go to the law to find the strength and motivation to obey it. We go to Christ. We live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. We believe that to be like Jesus is the best thing that could ever happen to us. John Calvin describes how we relate to God's moral commands in this way: "The law does not bind our conscience but is like a friendly uncle to whom we go for advice." For example: I see that Jesus was sexually pure and that he commands me to be sexually pure and the Holy Spirit who dwells in me loves sexual purity. But what is sexual purity? Even though the Holy Spirit lives in me, yet because I live in a fallen world and I yet have a sin nature dwelling in me, I cannot simply depend upon my feelings about it. I must go to the objective word of God to find out what sexual purity is. I go to the law to find out. I find in the law that sexual purity is never doing or thinking anything that promotes sexual desire in myself or another person unless I am married to that other person and that other person is of the opposite sex. So I ask Christ to so fill me with his Spirit that I love sexual purity far more than I love the pleasures of sexual arousal in ways he forbids. I seek to kill the desire for sexual pleasure in forbidden ways by guarding what I watch on TV, by entering into an accountability relationship with another man, by meditation and memorization of God's word, by developing godly and guarded friendships with women. I am in a war against my sin and for conformity to the righteousness of Christ as he is revealed in his law knowing that any progress I make is a work of grace and that all of my righteousness is always deficient and only pleasing to God because of Christ's perfect righteousness and his suffering death for my imperfect righteousness. There is so much more to say here but I must give you the final way to use the law lawfully. We use the law lawfully when we use it to…
III. Live in the hope of righteousness (Galatians 5:5, 2 Corinthians 1:20, 1 John 3:2) When we read the law we see perfect righteousness described and as Christians who have been born by the Spirit we hunger and thirst for it. The promise to us is that, at the resurrection, we will be perfectly righteous. "We will be like him for we will see him as he is." Now our righteousness, that is, our obedience to God's law is always imperfect. However, in heaven, at the resurrection, we will perfectly love God and others. Heaven is a world of love. There we will never struggle with anger or jealousy or worry or lust or overeating or drunkenness or self-pity. We will be perfectly righteous, just like Jesus. Not only will we be perfectly righteous, with no more mixed motives but we will experience all the glorious pleasures that have been promised to the righteous in the Bible. All the promises of God are yes to us in Christ. Whenever you read the promises in the law attached to obedience to the law you can know that one day you will experience all those blessings, not because of your obedience but because of Christ's obedience. The promises are only tasted while we live on earth but they will be fully ours in the new heavens and the new earth. When we read the promised blessings of obedience in the Scriptures we rejoice that one day we will enjoy all those blessings because of the obedience of Jesus. We remember that we will not experience those blessings in fullness now, but only in part. We are waiting for that day, not demanding that day to be here now. © Copyright
2005 John Swanson.
|