The Law, the law, and Anxiety

Yesterday I preached through Galatians 3: 15-22.  I was drawing upon Paul's insistence that the Law is always secondary to grace.  I was explaining (or attempting to explain) that the Law was 1.) added because of transgressions (because it has a restraining feature); 2.) holds us prisoner until the coming of Christ; and 3.) is a tutor or guardian that leads us to Christ by pointing out our failings.  

What does this mean?  I argued that there is a way that seems right to us as fallen beings.  We believe that if we know the rules and follow the rules, it will go well.  This patterns is how we live.  It is our reality.

Yet, does this pattern that we know and live really give us life?  I would argue from Paul a firm no!

I also explained that anytime we feel peer-pressure, we are feeling the effects of the law.  Why?  Because peer-pressure is a cultural law that all of us feel, but from which none of us truly gain life.  Instead, peer-pressure makes us miserable by proving us to be "not quite with it" or miserable because we are self-righteous bullies who look down on those who do not make the grade.

Why?  Because "if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law." (Gal. 3:21)  I think one reason why depression and anxiety are such an epidemic today is because our cultural standards produce and induce death with us.  We feel the "peer-pressure" and we know we do not make the grade.

This morning as I was thinking about this passage and the many words I spent yesterday attempting to explain it, I remembered a quote by Paul Zahn concerning this very same point.  As he states,

The commandment of God that we honor our father and mother is no different in impact, for example, than the commandment of fashion that a woman be beautiful or the commandment of culture that a man be boldly decisive and at the same time utterly tender.

Take the idea that a man should be decisive as well as outwardly expressive of his feelings, or that he should lead and be the passive sidekick for a strong woman.  You may be thinking that this trivializes law by equating it with ever-changing, culturally conditioned "laws."  But I am saying that they are the same thing.

How is this possible?  How can Sinai law, with its ennobling demand for personal and social rectitude, be equated with the world of fashion or the world of psycho-sexual politics?  But that is my point: they function exactly the same way in human experience.  Men become bowed down and paralyzed in fact by demands from the other half of the human race, and women are utterly freighted by the conflicting demands to be a perfect professional and the mother of dazzling children.  The weight of these laws is the same as the weight of the sublime moral law.  Law, whether biblical and universally stated or contextual and contemporarily phrased, operates in one way.  Law reduces its object, the human person, to despair.

This theology of everyday life makes no distinction between the law of God and the laws of human interaction individually felt and socially expressed.  Law and laws constitute a unity in their effect!

Why is this idea resisted?  It is resisted because it brings the faith of Christians too close to home.  If the demand of God has to do directly with the subduing and depressing demands of one's faith or mother, or the guilt one feels in relation to one's siblings, or the high pressures of a job or a boss, then this Christianity might actually touch somebody.  It might actually relate to people.  Someone near me commented about a devout evangelical Christian in her family: "She is wholly sold out to the gospel just so long as it doesn't come anywhere near her real life." 

Grace in Practice, 29

How do we escape the despair of the law or Law?  Most try to ignore it, or they try to make themselves out to be better than they really are.  I firmly believe such efforts are fallen human foolishness!  All these attempts do is make us psychologically fractured, self-righteous, and self-deluded.  It is time we get off this false treadmill!

How?

Believe the gospel.  Armed with God's grace, confess that you have sinned against God by violating the Law.  Confess to God, yourself and others that you cannot keep the laws of "proper" society.  Repent and believe!

Jesus Christ is the substitutionary atonement for sinners like us.  He came to fulfill the Law and law (Matthew 5:17), and He did so perfectly.  In the process, by His grace, we have fulfilled the Law and laws!  "Do we then overthrow the law by this faith?  By no means!  On the contrary, we uphold the law." (Romans 3:31)

If believers in Christ would just believe this truth!  Our feelings of guilt are real because we are law breakers everyday.  How should we handle these feelings?  Repent and believe!  Cling all the more to Jesus.  Our "trying harder" or our insisting on living in guilt leaves us disconnected from the power source of the Christian life- the Holy Spirit who comes in response to our repentance and faith.

May the Lord bless us with joy as you reflect upon Christ's love for us and His work for us in fulfilling the Law.  May despair, guilt, and self-effort/self-righteousness fall away as the Lord leads us to repentance and faith.

By the way, you can listen to this week's sermon at www.seattlecrc.org.