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“Dead to the Law”

Romans 7:4

 

Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.” — Here we are taught that God’s elect have been delivered from the law by the body of Christ. By his obedience in our nature, as our Representative and covenant Surety, the Lord Jesus Christ rendered to the law, in its precept and its penalty, by his life and by his death, all that the law required of us. Having died with Christ, in union with him, being crucified with him, every believing sinner is as free from the law, as a woman by death is loosed from the law of her husband (Romans 7:1-4).

 

Not Licentious

Legalists scream, “Licentious doctrine! Such doctrine is antinomian. It opens the floodgates to sin and ungodliness!” “Not so,” says God the Holy Ghost. So far is this doctrine from leading to licentiousness, that it is essential to godliness. There is no godliness without it. — “For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God” (Galatians 2:19). Gospel life flows from legal death. I cannot live unto God except by having been crucified with Christ. Though we cannot be justified by the law, we are subject to its penalty, which is death. And we cannot live unto God, except by death to the law.

 

Holiness

I live,” says the believing soul, “yet not I.” Being crucified with Christ I died; “but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). Christ dwells by faith in the hearts of his people. His living in us is our deliverance from sin’s dominion. Being made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), we live unto God. We are commanded to hold fast our confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end (Hebrews 3:6). That is to say, we are commanded to look away from self to Christ for everything pertaining to life and godliness.

      That does not mean that we are lawless rebels. Just the opposite. We are “not without law to God, but under the law to Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:21). The love of Christ constrains us to live not unto ourselves, but unto Christ who loved us and gave himself for us.

      In order to live in holiness and communion with God, we must have no connection to the law; we must have nothing to do with the law; we must be dead to the law, completely freed from the law. Religious legalists, following the wisdom of this world and not the revelation of God the Holy Spirit in Holy Scripture, denounce the gospel of God’s free grace in Christ as an encouragement to sin (Jude 4). Free grace appears to those who have never experienced it to remove every restraint to sin and give license to every imaginable wickedness.

      That we are sanctified as well as justified in Christ, by grace, and not by any works performed by us, is a mystery human wisdom can never fathom. Yet, this is the clearly stated doctrine of Holy Scripture. Is it not? Who can read 1 Corinthians 1:30-31 and Hebrews 10:10-14, and say otherwise?

 

 

 

Don Fortner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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