Saturday, September 15, 2018

How Love is Superior to the Law

Only grace can transform the righteousness of Law on the outside into the righteousness of Love on the inside. However, both Law and Grace remain perfectly consistent. They will never contradict each other. Law remains holy, righteous, and good and its purposes continue unabated. Therefore, law and grace cannot ultimately be set against one another, in spite of appearances.

However, Love is superior to Law on several counts:

  1. It is God's righteousness within us--God's character becoming our own; transformation from the inside out rather than merely external compliance. 
  2. It is the end of the Law in the sense that Christ's redemptive purpose is to complete our transformation and to move God's righteousness from the outside to the inside of the human being. 
  3. It is both the fullest measure of and the fittest motivation for obedience, altogether in one thing. The Law is subject to other motivations and is an incomplete measure. 
  4. It fills in the gaps in a way no external Law could. No encodification of God's character can be complete. The infinite cannot be completely communicated to the finite in mere words. An external Law can never completely describe the perfection of the divine being in imitable ways. So rather than compliance to incomplete encodifications, God conforms character. By the way, efforts to fill in the gaps and produce compliance through man-made, external expansions of God's law is another kind of legalism. 

Love is what the Law is when it is no longer outside of us. It is the Law boiled down into a thick, delicious syrup, a concentrate of divine transformation. It is that summary of the Law spelled out by Moses and Christ--Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and being, and love your neighbor as yourself.

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