Page 31-35/Index / Home / Next page Previous page

 

This false doctrine is useless for understanding our pardon in Christ and a total hindrance to focusing on sanctification and holiness.   God does not care about fictitious legal righteousness.  He cares about the real righteousness of Christ flowing into your life.[1]

            There are many who ignore these truths and who undermine them with what they say in the midst of the Church.  They have made themselves a conduit for the spirit of iniquity and the mystery of lawlessness.   By teaching against repentance, they have also taught against the gospel.   In fact, they have destroyed many beautiful scriptures concerning the gospel.

            We will now revisit some texts in Romans to show where the gospel has been deleted from the understanding of Christians.

 

Under the Law

 

            It is not hard to understand the phrase under law as meaning under judgment from the context it is used in:

 

                KJV Romans 6:14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace. 15 What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.

 

            What Paul is saying is that the justice of the law is satisfied for us by Christ.   That is what grace is.  Therefore, the law no longer condemns us.   Thus, Paul is teaching the gospel here, but he does not want anyone to think that because the just penalty of the law has been satisfied for us that they should continue to break it by sinning!    Nevertheless, millions of Christians think this text means they do not have to be subject to God's law.  Somehow, they have the idea that grace means freedom from repentance.   Somehow, they think that mercy means they can go on sinning and God will count them as righteous in his sight anyway.  Somehow, they think that it is impossible to lose their salvation.

            Nothing could be further from the truth.   The fact is that many of these have never understood the gospel in terms of a divine pardon.  They have thought of it as acquittal.  In addition, many more have been confused by errant teachings that suggest acquittal to them.   It is easy to see that "under the law" means “under judgment of the law” from this context in Romans 6:14-15, and one does not have to read the bible too regularly to know that God requires repentance.

            I knew a lady many years ago who told me she wanted to walk on the dark side for a while.  What she meant was that she wanted to sleep around.   I had given her bad advice about the impossibility of loosing one's salvation, as I was young and deceived by the once saved always-saved doctrine.   Although, I did not indulge in willful sin, I had said one could still be saved if they committed it.   When she said this, it was as if someone had socked me in the gut.   I felt spiritually alienated and cut off from her, as she was one of my good friends.   I think that she should have had more fear of committing such sins and my opinion did not help there.

            The idea that the gospel terminates any need for repentance unto righteousness, sanctification, and holiness, trips up a lot of weak believers in Christ because there are also many insincere believers in Christ who take His name, but who live in sin, and who perpetuate the false doctrinal traditions to make themselves feel comfortable, or to give them psychological relief from continuing guilt. This is taking the name of the LORD in vain (Exodus 20:7).  This is the reason that the Evangelical Church is in such horrible trouble. Statistics show that Church people are indeed involved in the world's sin and are sinking fast.   The reason they have continuing guilt after professing the gospel is that they are still sinning willfully against what they know in their hearts is wrong.   The Holy Spirit is making them guilty because of it, in spite of their profession of the gospel, so that they might repent.  Instead of repenting, they are seeking solace in false doctrines to give them Satan's psychological relief from guilt.   What they need is real trust in God and in his word, and not just lip service and religious appearance.

            The phrase "under the law" is even easier to understand when we consider the Greek sense of the word for "law".  This word is .  The first definition in Bauer's Lexicon is that "nomos" is a norm for something.[2]   Take a look at the photocopies on the pages below.      Read the explanation in Bauer's dictionary starting with "A special semantic problem for modern readers encountering the term n. is the general tendency to confine the usage of the term "law" to codified statutes.  Such limitation has led to much fruitless debate in the history of NT interpretation." 

 

            From the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament:

 

 

 

            From Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon:

 

 

            From BDAG (Bauer):

 

 

 

                Romans 6:14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the norm, but under grace. 15 What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the norm, but under grace? God forbid.

 

What is the norm for the one under the dominion of sin?

 

                KJV 2 Chronicles 25:4 But he slew not their children, but did as it is written in the law in the book of Moses, where the LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin.

 

            When Jesus' pays the penalty for your sin, then the norm no longer applies.   Jesus (Yeshua) is the exception to the rule!   In fact, the whole teaching of sacrifice for atonement in the Scripture is the exception to the norm.

 

The End of the Law

 

            Another misunderstood text is Romans 10:4.  Yet, when we straighten it out, it teaches both the gospel, and promises sanctification.   First, let us consider the sanctification aspect.

 

                Romans 10:4 For Christ is the end of the norm for righteousness to every one that firmly trusts.

 

            Those who are truly in Christ have repented of transgression; and they live (and think) above the world's norm of righteousness.  True Christians enjoy a greater level of sanctification than the norm of righteousness for the world.  Also in the first definition of is rule, custom.  Christ is the end of custom (tradition) for righteousness, because in Christ we learn to discern the difference between the commandments of God and the commandments of men.  Anything that is the status quo can be thought of as nomos in Greek.

            Paul does not just teach greater sanctification by this passage.  His primary sense is the gospel.  How can we say this?  Well, what is the norm for righteousness in God's courtroom?  Is it not that the defendant must demonstrate their total righteousness to obtain an acquittal?  That's the norm for God's righteousness where judgment is concerned.   To make this plainer, let us consider the primary meaning of the Greek word , which was translated "righteousness" in English.  This word is a noun, and it means "justice" plain and simple.   It comes from the same Greek stem or root as the Greek word we discussed before:  .  The very first definition of in Bauer's Lexicon[3] is "justice".  "Righteousness" is relegated to the second definition.   We know that "righteousness" is "justice", but the English loses sight of this sense of the word:


 

[1] The idea that the righteousness of another can compensate for transgression fails to recognize the unrepairable damage that sin does to the destiny of others.  Atonement was never an equitable justice that totally reversed all the damages of sin.   It was a merciful penalty assigned less than the death of the sinner that allowed the repentant to have life.   God’s choice of  the manner of atonement was meant to underscore the cost of sin, yet to allow His mercy to operate.   It was never meant to, nor can it, reverse all the evils caused by our sin.   For this reason, the attempt to legally balance God’s books by even the righteousness of Christ is insufficient.   God is not requiring an equitable form of justice in the death of Christ, because there is no equitable justice that can make sin as if it had never happened –and that is what equitable justice would require if God had insisted on it.

[2] This sense, and related usages in Paul dispose of numerous apparent contradictions caused by translators who lack a feel for the semantic domain of , and who are not in tune with Paul's context: apart from the norm, Rom. 3:21; not through the norm, Rom. 4:13; of the norm, Rom. 4:14; the norm worketh wrath, Rom. 4:15; a norm entered, Rom. 5:20; under the norm, Rom. 6:14-15; the norm hath dominion, Rom. 7:1; the norm of the husband, Rom. 7:2; she is free from that norm, Rom. 7:3; dead to the norm, Rom. 7:4; by the norm, Rom. 7:5; delivered from the norm, Rom. 7:6; I find then a norm, Rom. 7:21; another norm, the norm of my mind, the norm of sin, Rom. 7:23; norm of sin, Rom. 7:25, 8:2; norm of justice, Rom. 9:31; end of the norm for justice, Rom. 10:4; under custom, 1Cor. 9:20; without custom, 1Cor. 9:21; as also saith the custom, 1Cor. 14:34; the strength of sin is the norm, 1Cor. 15:56; through the norm, dead to the norm, Gal. 2:19; justice come by the norm; be of the norm, Gal. 3:18; what about the norm, Gal. 3:19; a norm given, by the norm, Gal. 3:21; under the norm, Gal. 3:23; the norm was our schoolmaster, Gal. 3:24; under the norm, Gal. 4:4-5, 24, 5:18; usage of commandments, Eph. 2:15; justice according to the norm, Phil. 3:9.  One of the reasons that translators have difficulty seeing this sense of is their lack of comprehension of Paul's argument and equal ignorance of ,  , , and .  Another part of the reason is that Paul's use of  is still closely tied to the Law.  The translator fails to see the fine distinction between the norm of the Law and the exception of the Law, and conflates the two due to ignorance of the law and a priori rejection of the law.

[3] BDAG, third edition, 2000.