Saved by the Law!

Maybe it doesn’t help to timidly concede, “No, the law (Sabbath, etc.) may not be ‘required for salvation’, but it’s a good idea nonetheless.” Maybe we should just go ahead and say it: “We’re saved by...

Maybe it doesn’t help to timidly concede, “No, the law (Sabbath, etc.) may not be ‘required for salvation’, but it’s a good idea nonetheless.” Maybe we should just go ahead and say it: “We’re saved by works!”

The blood cleanses us from our sins – it does not write the law in our hearts (Jer 31:33). For that we need the living Christ (Rm 5:10).

We are rewarded according to our works (Mt 16:27). And if there are no works [such as with the man who hid his talent – (Mt 25:28)], then we just may lose salvation along with receiving no reward.

Salvation is a free gift (Rm 6:23), but God will not give it to those who refuse to have the law written in their hearts. For it is the spirit that will quicken (Rm 8:11), which is the same as saying the law in our heart (Jn 6:63). And that law – those words of Christ – they are not Jesus’ words – they come from the Father (Jn 5:30-31; Jn 7:28; Jn 8:28; Jn 12:49-50; Jn 14:10; Jn 14:24), the same Father who gave us “the words of the covenant, the ten commandments” (Ex 34:28) – “which if a man do, he shall live in them” (Lev 18:5). His commandments are life! Jesus knew this: “And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.” (Jn 12:50)

“There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy” (Jas 4:12).

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Jn 8:32) – and this means the whole truth – including “the perfect law of liberty” (Jas 1:25).  “And [he shall] deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” (Hb 2:15) “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” (1Cor 15:26)

The law liberates us from this bondage. As Henry Hyde so eloquently said in the Impeachment hearings, “Israel found her liberty in Law.”

The image remains for all time – the route from slavery in Egypt was to liberty at Sinai.

Though our antinomians generally confuse the blood of reconciliation with the life that saves (Rm 5:10), they do understand that we must have Jesus in us. But here they have fallen for a pernicious heresy. I keep hearing that Jesus lives in us apart from any “law” that we can know before hand. Some say that Jesus directs us moment by moment independently of any written word. Their “law of Christ” is not knowledge that we can all share in advance. It is rather an on-going nudging of the spirit that operates apart from any codified law.

This evangelical “New Covenant Theology” is indistinguishable from the “situation ethics” of Bishop Pike that so ruffled feathers even in mainstream Protestantism back there in the Sixties.

They say that my church used to teach that we are saved by law. They err – it did not teach this. But it should have!

We must be reconciled to the Father because it is the Father’s Law we have broken, we are saved by the life of his Son – which is the same as saying that we are saved by having the Son write his Father’s law – Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5 – in our hearts.

There – let me proclaim it loudly: WE ARE SAVED BY THE LAW!!!

LeChayim!
 

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