Where the Law Fails--June 21, 2024

Where the Law Fails--June 21, 2024

"Is the law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law. but the scripture has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe... But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying 'Abba! Father!' So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God." [Galatians 3:21-22, 4:6-7]

When you're in the hospital, you know what they never do?  They never say, "Instead of performing that heart surgery you need, we're just going to put up a big sign at the foot of your hospital bed that says, in big letters, DON'T HAVE A HEART ATTACK. That should do the trick!"

Of course, the reason that they don't merely put up a poster warning you not to have a heart attack is that a written instruction isn't powerful enough to actually save your life in that moment.  Sure, it's good advice--don't have a heart attack.  But if you are already in the cardiac care unit of your local hospital, it's likely because your body has already decided to disobey that order and you've already had one.  Your mind might agree that "Don't have another heart attack" is a good policy, but your actual heart and the blood vessels feeding it may not be able to carry it out.  So the problem is not that "Don't have a heart attack" is bad advice or even a bad rule; the problem is that just posting a rule in front of your eyes cannot make you follow it.  If you are hospitalized for a heart attack, the thing you need is neither advice nor printed rules which your body is incapable of obeying; what you need is someone to heal your heart and save your life in ways that you cannot do for yourself by sheer willpower.

And this, dear ones, is the point Paul was making as he wrote to the church in Galatia: it's not that "the law" (summarized so often by the Ten Commandments) is bad--it's just weak.  The most that any law, even laws spoken by the voice of God on Mount Sinai, can do is to bark orders, "Do this!" or "Don't do that!" at us.  But if there is something inside us that keeps us from doing whatever wise thing the law says, then putting it in bigger letters or shouting it louder won't help.  It's like trying to help a heart attack patient with a sign that says, "DON'T HAVE A HEART ATTACK."  The sign is simply unable to do, or even to enable us to do, what it says.

And for the apostle Paul, this is exactly why the story we call the gospel is genuinely good news:  the Spirit of God is doing something within us that the printed rules and carved commandments of "the Law" could never do: the Spirit enables us to own our new God-given identity as children of God, sharing the same status as Jesus the Son.  And that same Jesus came among us, living a life under the same Law that could never prod us into good behavior, and redeeming us to belong in the family of God.  Jesus' death and resurrection free us from the power sin held over us.  The Spirit's presence in our deepest selves transforms us from the inside out.  All of those are things that the Law just could not and still cannot do, no matter how big the print is or how loudly you shout it.

This is the crucial difference between Gospel good news and dime-a-dozen self-help schemes, including the ones dressed up in religious garb.  If all we have to say to the world is, "Here is a list of rules we printed up and put right in your face," there's no good news, because we're all heart patients dying on the inside.  But rather, the Gospel's good news is instead, "Jesus is raising us to new life, healing these broken and crooked hearts of ours, and claiming us in the family of God through the Spirit!" The good news is not ultimately about our ability to follow commandments or read the rules--those just aren't powerful enough to help us.  But the Good News has everything to do with what God can do that the Law cannot.  God succeeds where the Law fails.

Like Robert Farrar Capon put it once so well, "Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works."  His point, like Paul's is not that commandments and rules are always inherently bad, but that they are ultimately ineffective: the most they can do is scold us and show us where we've failed.  But the Law cannot give life or heal these hearts of ours while we're laying in the hospital bed.

Plastering the rules on every wall will not make us any better at keeping them (even good ones), any more than you can cure a patient of cardiac arrest by telling them, "The rule is, no heart attacks." From a Christian perspective, posting commandments or shouting rules at people is at best a colossal waste of time (and at worst just an attempt at a culture-war power grab), not because the rules are bad, but because it is Spirit-born Love that transforms us, in ways that the Law never could.  The Law isn't wicked, just impotent. Expending all our energy putting the rules on every surface we can find won't change that.

So, bad news: no amount of having rules yelled at us will mend the sin-sickness in our hearts.

But also good news: no shouting or posting of rules is necessary, because God has done through Christ and through the Spirit what the Law by itself could never do.  We have been made children of God.

Lord Jesus, let your Spirit make us into what you say we already are: children in the very family of God.