How should the Ten Commandments function in the life of a believer? If we’re no longer part of the nation of Israel, and we’re not under the same covenant they were, and we’re no longer under the Law, and now we’re entirely under grace … well, do those commands even play a role in the life of a Christian? If so, what is it? In Galatians 3:24, Paul says the Commandments are a “tutor” (or a “schoolmaster,” some translations say “guardian”) to “bring us to Christ.” That image suggests three functions of the Law in the lives of believers today—a curb, a map, and a mirror.
1. The Law as a Curb
The Law limits the damage of our sinful urges. Even though obedience to the Law can’t produce righteous desires in our hearts, obeying these laws keeps us from causing further destruction through our sin. For example, by obeying the prohibition against adultery, even in moments when your desires might be drawn the other way, you are not only preserving your spouse and your family from hurt and devastation; you are keeping the power of sin from multiplying in your heart.
2. The Law as Map
After being saved by grace, the Law shows us the best way to please the God who saved us. Jesus said the essence of the law was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. In theory, if we were all people of love, we wouldn’t need the Law. The trouble is, we aren’t naturally people of love. So we need some help knowing what love looks like in practice. For that, the commandments are incredibly useful.
A couple of years ago, this discussion popped back up in Christian circles about whether or not the Old Testament was helpful anymore. (This conversation is as old as Christianity, but it has bigger moments every now and then.) Some Christian leaders suggested that the Old Testament and its laws are now more of an obstacle to faith for this generation than a help in it, and thus we ought to unhitch our gospel witness from it. We should focus instead, they argued, on Jesus’ message of love and acceptance and grace—and in particular, the simplicity of the Great Commandment about loving God with all our hearts, souls, and minds and our neighbors as ourselves.
Now, I agree with part of that: We should use the Great Commandment to orient us to all of the Old Testament commands. But unhitching ourselves from the Old Testament actually makes it harder to understand what love looks like, not easier. One person might think that love looks like open marriage, affirmation of same-sex attraction, or protecting a woman’s right to abortion. Others say it means the exact opposite of those things. Absent some external standard, how are we to adjudicate? Does everyone just get to decide for themselves what love looks like? Has that ever worked in the past? Before the giving of these laws, nations wondered how to please God. For example, what kinds of offerings does the deity require? Does he want us to sacrifice our own children to him? Yes, some ancient cultures actually taught that. Today, most of us find that abhorrent—and rightly so. But how can we say, with confidence, that our view is right and that of these ancient cultures was wrong? We can’t just trust our own intuition. We need an external standard, a map that shows us what love for God and others looks like.
“Unhitching” ourselves from the Law basically means going back to “every man doing what was right in his own eyes,” and that is not the glorious freedom of the Promised Land; that’s the slavery of Egypt.
3. The Law as Mirror
The Law reveals to us how sinful we are, because it holds up before us an image of what a truly righteous heart would look like. Charles Spurgeon compared the Law to a set of clothes perfectly tailored to the ideal version of you. Over the years, as the weather changes, I’ve had the unpleasant experience of pulling out some of last year’s outfits and realizing, well, they don’t fit as well anymore. Let’s just say that certain things have moved. Now imagine if the only clothes you were allowed to wear were those perfectly tailored to your ideal build and weight when you were, I don’t know, 22 years old. Every time you put them on, the dilapidated state of your body would be on display. Things would pudge out, and other parts would be too loose. It would be a revealing experience, uncomfortable for just about everybody. And all God’s older saints said, “Amen.” (By the way, you young adults: Laugh it up; it’s coming for you too.)
This is what the Law does. When we honestly try it on, it exposes all the places our hearts don’t fit God’s mold. That’s what drives us to grace. Trying to obey the law brings us to the need for salvation in Christ. Here’s where so many people go wrong: Merely forcing myself to act right won’t change my heart at its root level! Just because I’ve changed my behavior doesn’t mean I’ve changed my desires. Martin Luther talked about “the dilemma of the Great Commandment,” that God is commanding us something that, by definition, cannot be commanded. If you love something, you don’t need a command to do it. You never have to command me to eat a steak, take a nap, or hug my kids. I do all those things naturally. On the other hand, if you don’t love something, no command can change that. For instance, I hate mayonnaise. It grosses me out, and I don’t understand you people who like it. If you put a mayonnaise jar in front of me and command me to eat a spoonful, I suppose if you’re a big enough boy, you could force me to do it, but your command will never make me love it. I’ll be fighting the gag reflex the whole time.
Thus, the dilemma of the Law is that, as Luther put it, “What the law requires is freedom from the law!” The Law is like the fence my granddaddy put up around his pigs. He’d take slop out to feed them, and sometimes he’d take me with him. The slop was the nastiest stuff you could imagine. Basically just rotting food. But man, the pigs loved it! Now, I was a rambunctious little boy (surprise to no one), but not one time in my entire life did my grandfather ever have to say to me, “Now, J.D., I’m going to put this slop down and go grab something, but don’t you eat it. I mean it. If you do, you’ll be punished.” I could sit there beside that pig slop all day long, completely unsupervised, and I’d never touch it. Even if Grandad gave me permission to scoop out a handful and eat it, I wouldn’t. The pigs, however, if they have a clear path to it, are going to devour it like it’s their last meal on earth. If you want to keep pigs from the slop, you have to restrain them.
God doesn’t want spiritual pigs in heaven who crave the slop of sin and only stay away from it because they are afraid of punishment. He wants people who wouldn’t choose sin even if they had the opportunity to, because they have his heart. God is not just after obedience. He’s after a whole new kind of obedience, an obedience that grows out of desire. An obedience in which you seek God because you crave God, and in which you practice righteousness because you love righteousness.
Pastor J.D. completed his Ph.D. in Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Chick-fil-A, serves as a Council member for The Gospel Coalition, and recently served as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Pastor J.D. and his wife Veronica are raising four awesome kids.
"Editor's Note: Pastor JD Greear's "Ask the Pastor" column regularly appears at Christianity.com, providing biblical, relatable, and reliable answers to your everyday questions about faith and life. Email him your questions at [email protected]."
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