God—The Law

God—The Law

Our relationship to the law is the same as our relationship to God. God has bound Himself to His own laws. These are commandments of wisdom, which are eternal laws. The crucial point as far as our relationship to the law is concerned is whether the spirit of the law is working in us. At first it has the effect of an unpleasant and merciless schoolmaster because it is inflexible. Someone who is under the law does not have the mind of the law, and since the law is immovable, it will affect him like repeated blows. A person who is in this state does not like the law, seeking to avoid it as much as possible. However, since such an attempt will only meet with failure, one can constantly hear questions like this advanced: “Don’t I have permission to do this?” “Is it sin to do this?” These questions are the result of dreading punishment, and you can be sure that someone who asks such questions is under the law.

Then, where the spirit of the law is in us and works through us, the law is quite naturally our life and our delight. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord should come to this state. This is a blessed state. Blessed is the man whose great delight is in the laws of the Lord! Yes, indeed, someone who loves the Lord Jesus shall be filled with the law! Jesus overcame sin in the flesh so that the requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh. Rom. 8:3-4. The person in whose life the requirements of the law are being fulfilled—who is filled with the law—is a chastisement to someone who is under the law to the extent that he is filled with it. You cannot avoid being a judgment to those who are under the law in any other way than by denying the law (the light, the truth) in yourself—or in other words, by unfaithfulness.

Notice carefully two extremely harmful misconceptions:

It is painful to see so many people in bondage to sin who call on God for as long as they live. The worst of it is that they themselves believe this to be God’s will for them despite the fact that God’s Word testifies to the contrary and despite the fact that brothers and sisters testify that the requirements of the law are increasingly being fulfilled in them. Dear reader, if you do not have victory over sin, then you must desire from God that His word might be fulfilled in you. Be strong in your faith, giving glory to God!

It is even more painful to see Satan deceiving those who were once freed (dead to the law) to the extent that they believe that they must (or can) be without law. If you are such a deceived soul, you must wake up and cast these chains from you—because you are not free at all; on the contrary, have been taken captive again by Satan in one of his many nets. You were not supposed to be set free from the law as something evil— because it is holy and good—but you were supposed to (as a transgressor of this good law) die with and in Christ so you could be made alive and live with Him, not as someone without law—because God Himself is a law unto Himself—but as someone who possesses the spirit of the law (the Spirit of God), and walks in harmony with it.