Living in the Now and Not Yet
When John writes his first letter to the churches in Asia- minor he reminds them that God loves us so much that he’s made us his children; and then he says “3:2Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. 3And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” In other words our future life has to shape our present life. If we’re to live with God in the future then we need to start learning to live now in a way that pleases God.
So how are you at living a god pleasing life? You don’t need to answer that out loud. Nor do you need to give yourself a score. But my guess is that if you’re like me you may regularly find yourself thinking back on something you’ve done and realising that you should have done the exact opposite if you wanted to please God? How often do you realise that you’re repeating those mistakes over and over again? And if so, what do you do about it?
Here’s what happens to some people. They realise they have a problem with a particular behaviour that they know God won’t like, so they decide to do something about it. They read something like Romans 6 that we read a couple of weeks ago and they decide that from now on they’ll be slaves of right living. Or they read that verse in 1 John and decide they need to raise their level of purity of life. So whenever they feel tempted to disobey God they’ll resist. They remember God’s promise to provide a way of escape and they resolve to ask him to provide it next time they’re tempted. Except that the next time that happens they somehow forget to ask for that way out. They fall into the same thing they’ve been doing for years. And they can’t understand it. It’s like they have a split personality. It’s like there’s a war going on in their brain. One moment they’re winning the war and the next they’re failing. Does that sound familiar? Does it ring true in your experience? It’s apparently how Paul felt, often. It’s a major reason why he puts such an emphasis on the importance of grace for the Christian. He’s very much aware of how often we fail to live up to our hopes and aspirations to Godliness.
What he’s found in his own experience, with depending on following the law to prepare himself for eternal life, is that inevitably it leads to death, rather than life. You’ll see that in the first part of this chapter. He’s worked out that the law can never help us. On the contrary, turning to the law only gives an opportunity to our sinful natures to rebel and that rebellion then leads to death. Only living under grace can lead to life.
Is there something wrong with God’s law?
But then that conclusion leads him to ask whether there’s something wrong with the law. Did God make a mistake perhaps? Or was this just a bad joke by God on us humans? He says: “What then should we say? That the law is sin?” Is that why we need to escape from its power? Is that why we’re told not to rely on it? Because it just provides our weak human nature with a reason to rebel once again? His answer is “By no means!” It’s not the law that’s the problem. The problem isn’t the law but our own weakness.
Why is the law a problem for me?
Can you see why he spends so much time warning us about trying to following a set of rules that will make us right with God? Why he tells us to forget the law and concentrate on grace? Well, he says, having a set of rules for life becomes a problem for me because all those rules do is show up my rebellious nature.
Back in Romans 5:13 Paul points out that sin had been in the world even before the law was given, but no-one recognised it until they had God’s law before them to highlight their failings. Now the problem is worse because when we’re told how to behave our natural human response is to want to do the opposite. He takes the example of covetousness. It’s a pretty good example because it’s one sin that everyone falls into from time to time. He suggests that covetousness wasn’t really a problem for us until we were told that it was wrong. But as soon as the law was given, sin began to produce all sorts of desires in the human heart.
It might be that Paul is thinking here of the covetousness that was at the root of the first sin, by Adam and Eve. If you remember back to Genesis 3, the devil pointed out to Eve that the tree was good for food, was a delight to the eyes and was desired to make one wise. It would make them like God. But it was even more subtle than that. The mechanism that the devil used to tempt them was to distort the commandment of God. To make it sound like God’s commandment was meant to limit their freedom. He was trying to provoke in them a desire to rebel against God’s rightful authority; to convince them they needed to throw off the shackles of his authoritarian rule; to assert their right to choose what was good for them, what would please them. Never mind that God had provided everything they could ever need. Never mind that God had provided them with the tree of life that fruits all year round. This commandment of God was there to rebel against. And they fell for it.
Now can you see that if there had been no commandment not to eat of the fruit of that tree there would have been nothing for Satan to tempt them with? There would have been no power in the temptation. The power of temptation comes from the idea that God’s law somehow limits us; that we’d be happier if we could have or do those things that he’s said no to. Notice that our whole economic system is built around that idea: of us being encouraged to see how we’re missing out; to want to have what successful people have; to want more than we have or even need; or to believe that we’d be happier if we could do certain things.
So as he says, if the coming of the law is the means by which sin is roused in me, if it’s the trigger for my rebellious character to rise up, then, paradoxically, the law that was given, apparently, to bring life, actually brings death. This is the paradox of every religious system that seeks to instruct us in the way of godly living, in the way to God. In the end, our fallen human nature prevents us from doing what that system requires, no matter how good its law may be. In the end, as we read in v11, sin will deceive us. It’ll tell us that following our religious system will bring us salvation, or happiness, or closeness to God. It’ll tell us that if we just do the right thing, God will owe us; that our obedience will put God under obligation to us. You may have noticed how this sort of thinking has been weaponised in American politics of late.
Even if we avoid that mistake and simply take God’s law as a framework for living what we find in practice is that at the very moment that we reach out to grasp what we’re seeking, to reach the level of obedience to God that we desire, our failed human nature will trip us up. It’ll make us fail the very commandment we’re seeking to follow.
So then, why did God give us the law in the first place? If the law itself is good, as we’re told by God’s word, what’s good about it?
What is Good about the Law?
In v13 we discover that the law has one significant and vital purpose. Its good and right purpose is to show us where we go wrong, where we fall down, where we need to change. It’s all very well to say no-one knew about sin before the law came in but it was still a problem. Humanity was separated from God from the moment Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. So it’s a good thing to be reminded that we have a way to go before we can meet the standards that God expects even if it doesn’t help us get there.
And not only that: the law acts in our lives in such a way that our inability to reach God’s standards on our own becomes obvious and we’re driven back to our need for something beyond ourselves, to our need for grace. That’s where Paul goes in the passage we heard today, where he thinks about the way the law affects us.
How does the law affect me?
So how does the law affect me? How does the law help me to rely on God rather than on myself?
Now there’s been much discussion by theologians about who Paul is thinking of in these verses from 14-24. Is he talking about the Jew trying to obey the law? Is he talking about his own experience prior to becoming a Christian? Or is it his current experience? Or is he saying this is the experience of all Christians as they seek to obey God. Well, we haven’t got the time to go into the various arguments, but let me just say that I believe he’s talking about his own experience both as a Jew following the law to the letter and as a Christian, as an example of what every Christian experiences as they seek to live lives as slaves of righteousness.
First he explains the problem. The law is actually a spiritual thing. To truly obey the law requires me to do so from the inmost heart, from the spirit. But I’m naturally unspiritual and I live in an unspiritual body. So I have a problem. I know what I want to do, but I can’t do it. In fact what I find is that over and over again I do the very things I hate. So what does that prove?
The Law is Good
Well, it proves that deep down I believe that God’s law is good. The very fact that I hate being unable to consistently do the right thing means that I understand that the thing I’m aiming at is good.
There is a war within me
But it also shows that there’s a duality at work within me. There are two forces warring with each other within me. In my inmost self I delight in God’s law. God’s Spirit who dwells within me has changed the way I see things. I no longer delight in wrongdoing. Rather I delight in the things the law requires.
But at the same time I find that my old sinful body, the old me, continues to choose the wrong thing whenever I let it. And this is so frustrating. I know what’s right. I want to do it, but the moment I choose the right thing to do, evil lies close at hand, he says. In fact this is like a law within me, like the law of gravity. It’s as though I can’t choose to do something right without the possibility of wrongdoing being presented to me. It’s like my old self is so affected that whatever I do ends up crooked. It’s like you get out your favourite plane to smooth a piece of wood and discover that there’s a chip in the blade, so that no matter how hard you try, the wood never gets completely smooth. Or you get out the broom to sweep the floor and discover there’s a clump of bristles missing, so that no matter how much you sweep, there’s always a line of dirt left behind.
And then you get into this spiral of frustration. You can hear it coming out as Paul recounts his own experience. The harder you try, the more you fail. The more you try to suppress your sinful nature the more it asserts itself. The more you try to give yourself over to the service of God, the more sin takes you captive. And in the end you feel like screaming, as Paul does: “24Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
And so the law achieves its purpose. It drives us back to God. And the answer rings out as clearly as the plea: “25Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
The only answer to the plight of humanity is this: that Jesus Christ would rescue us from our own fallen nature; that God would give us his Holy Spirit to dwell within us and enable us to keep this spiritual law in our inmost hearts; that he might take our unspiritual bodies and transform them. In fact that he might give us new bodies and minds that’ll be able to serve him as he desires. That’s what we’ll see over the next couple of week as we look at Romans ch8 and life in the Spirit. God in his grace has provided a way that we can be right with him.
Only Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit living within me can rescue me from this body of death. And that will be an ongoing struggle while ever I live in this old fallen body. But in the meantime even if my flesh remains enslaved to sin I’ll seek to be a slave to the law of God in my mind. And with God’s help in the end I will conquer. But that will probably have to wait until that day when Christ returns.
