Out in the desert

I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper.

But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together.

In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

C S Lewis in Mere Christianity, chapter 23. 

All in Christ

As the perfect embodiment of the moral law of God, Jesus Christ bids us come to him and find rest (a term loaded with exodus echoes). He also bids us be united to him through faith in the power of the Spirit, so that as he places his yoke (of law) on our shoulders we hear him say, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
So we are Ephesians 2: 15– 16 Christians: the ceremonial law is fulfilled.
We are Colossians 2: 14– 17 Christians: the civil law distinguishing Jew and Gentile is fulfilled.
And we are Romans 8: 3– 4 Christians: the moral law has also been fulfilled in Christ. But rather than being abrogated, that fulfillment is now repeated in us as we live in the power of the Spirit.
In Christ then, we truly see the telos of the law. And yet as Paul also says, “Do we abrogate the law by teaching faith in Christ? No. We strengthen it. For Christ did not come to abolish it but to fulfill it, so that it might in turn be fulfilled in us.” That is why in Romans 13: 8– 10, Ephesians 6: 1, and in other places the apostle takes for granted the abiding relevance of the law of God for the life of the believer.
The Old Testament saint knew that while condemned by the law he had breached, its ceremonial provisions pointed him to the way of forgiveness. He saw Christ as really (if opaquely) in the ceremonies as he did in the prophecies. He also knew as he watched the sacrifices being offered day after day and year after year that this repetition meant these sacrifices could not fully and finally take away sin— otherwise he would not need to return to the temple precincts. He was able to love the law as his rule of life because he knew that God made provision for its breach, pointed to redemption in its ceremonies, and gave him direction through its commandments.
It should not, therefore, surprise us or grieve us to think that the Christian sees Christ in the law. He or she also sees it as a rule of life; indeed, sees with Calvin that Christ is the life of the law because without Christ there is no life in the   law.
We appreciate the clarity of the law only when we gaze fully into Christ’s face. But when we do gaze there, we see the face of one who said, “Oh how I love your law; it is my meditation all the day” — and we want to be like   him.
This is not— as the antinomian feared— bondage. It is freedom. The Christian rejoices therefore in the law’s depth. He seeks the Spirit’s guidance for its application, because he can say with Paul that in Christ through the gospel he has become an “in-law.”
At the end of the day the antinomian who regards the moral law as no longer binding is forced into an uncomfortable position. He must hold that an Old Testament believer’s passionate devotion to the law (of which devotion, curiously, the majority of Christians feel they fall short) was essentially a form of legalism. But it is Jesus himself who shows an even deeper intensity in the law by expounding its deep meaning and penetration into the heart.
Neither the Old Testament believer nor the Savior severed the law of God from his gracious person. It was not legalism for Jesus to do everything his Father commanded him. Nor is it for   us.

Sinclair B Ferguson: The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters (pp. 172-173)

The Prodigal and grace

The power of this perspective is, of course, already present in our Lord’s parable of the prodigal son. Even if the parable is read as having only one main point in view, that burden is expressed in several dimensions. In terms of our discussion we might call it, from one point of view, “The parable of the Free Grace Savior”; from another, “The parable of the En-Graced Antinomian”; and from yet another (and in context perhaps the most pointed), “The parable of the Dis-Graced Legalist.”

The prodigal contemplates returning home because he knows his needs can be supplied in his father’s home:

But when he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger!” 

But while there is the supply of his needs in the home of his father, he is— very naturally— still wrestling with the remnant of the Edenic poison, the God as He-whose-favor-is-to-be-earned lie. What else could the father be to such a sinful   son?

I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.” 

As he approaches home his once-despised father breaks all social convention (the boy should have been received with a shaming ceremony). Instead he runs to greet him. The prodigal now stammers out his rehearsed words through the hugs and kisses of his father:

Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. 

But the final rehearsed words, “Treat me as one of your hired servants” are smothered by his father’s embrace! He will not have his son home only on condition that he “does penance” in order to work his way back into his father’s grace. He does not need to “repent enough” to be accepted.

Poignantly there is in the heart of the same father a deep burden for his elder son. He again leaves the house to find him. Luke’s introduction to Jesus’s narrative makes clear that it is this brother, not the prodigal, who forms the climax to the story: “The Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, ‘This man [Jesus] receives sinners and eats with them.’” That grumbling is echoed in the complaint of the elder son: “He was angry.”

The tenor of the elder brother’s response is well captured in the New International Version:

Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 

To which the father responds in love:

Son, . .  . all that is mine is yours. 

What Jesus unmasks here is a legalistic heart, one that has imbibed the poison of Eden. Such a heart sees the Lord as a slave master and not a gracious Father, as restrictive rather than generous. Everything the Father has is available to him. But the elder son’s heart is closed, and as far as he is concerned nothing is his. He was at home, but he was in a more distant place than his younger brother. He thought he had to earn by right what he could only enjoy by grace.

What is particularly illuminating is that we are given the impression that only in the context of a lavish display of grace did the hidden poison of the elder brother’s legalistic disposition fully manifest itself. Perhaps the same was true of the Pharisees? And was it, correspondingly, the lavishness of grace in the Marrow teaching that also caused so much heart irritation?

This is thought to be Jesus’s best-loved parable, usually because our eyes are on the prodigal and his father. But as with jokes, so with parables: there is a principle in both of “end stress.” The “punch line” comes at the end. That being the case the alarming message here is that the spirit of the elder brother, the legalist, is more likely to be found near the father’s house than in the pig farm— or in concrete terms, in the congregation and among the faithful. And sometimes (only sometimes?), it appears in the pulpit and in the heart of the pastor.

Then it becomes dangerously infectious. But what causes it?

Reflection on the Marrow Controversy and the literature it spawned suggests that a legalistic spirit can usually be traced back to the same basic principles, no matter what mask it might wear.

From Ferguson, Sinclair B.. The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters, chapter 5