The Spirit of the Law is Christ
Through the gospel, we see through the letter of scripture to Christ who is the spirit of the law.
“The Spirit of the Law” episode notes:
While we strongly reject biblicism, we wholeheartedly accept the entire Bible as a blessed gift from God for the benefit of his people. We agree with Paul that:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
(2 Timothy 3:16-17 NIV)
Through Reformation lenses, this passage might look like it refutes everything we’ve said. Let’s lay that eyewear aside for a minute and take a fresh look at the legitimate role of Scripture.
Once we’re free from Scripture as a taskmaster, we can come to love it as a mentor and friend. That sword from Hebrews 4:12 ceases to be an implement of death and takes on a therapeutic role as it reads us and the people we’re called to serve. That’s how the author of the Hebrew letter used Psalm 95:7-8 to provide insight into God’s plan and our tendency to resist it.
As a highly literate society with unprecedented access to Scripture in our language, we understand 2 Timothy 3:16-17 to mean that Scripture is useful to teach, rebuke, correct, and train us as we read it. But Timothy lived among a largely illiterate population with almost no direct personal access to copies of Scripture. Instead of a road map or a user’s manual to guide his life, Paul commended the Bible to Timothy as a ministry multi-tool. Notice that the functions for which Paul says Scripture is useful are all ministry related. The Bible equips God’s servant to teach, rebuke, correct, and train in righteousness.
We may be accustomed to ministers dictating Christian behavior to us from the Bible, but this isn’t what Paul meant. How can we know? Context. Historically, neither Paul nor Timothy had a New Testament so for them the Old Testament was “all Scripture.” And we know that Paul opposed requiring people to observe the Torah. Even so, Paul affirmed the wonderful value of the Hebrew scriptures for Christian ministers. The immediate context gives us a picture of the kind of person who can properly wield Scripture:
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
(2 Timothy 3:14-15 NIV)
Timothy had been taught a message which he had become persuaded through the lives of his teachers was true. Before that, though, he had been taught the Holy Scriptures which equipped him to join the saved by faith in Christ. 2 Timothy 3:14-17 depicts the way Scripture, and the gospel should relate to one another:
- Scripture points toward the gospel.
- Saving faith enables access to the lifegiving spirit of Scripture.
- New Scripture arises from God’s presence in the redeemed community.
I’ll briefly unpack each interrelation below.
Scripture points towards the gospel
The preaching of the gospel didn’t begin in Acts 2; it began with Genesis 1. The apostle John in both his Gospel and his first letter claims that the message they preached was what was heard at the beginning. He then goes on to root the proclamation of eternal life through Christ in the revelation that God is light, the source of all light. Yes, he had had an encounter with God in the flesh, but he doesn’t suggest that encounter was the beginning of God’s self-revelation. Rather, it was the revelation that had been given to Israel all along now come in person. The Holy Scriptures had made Timothy wise for salvation because that was their intent.
Paul opens his letter to the Romans like this:
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures…
(Romans 1:1-2 NIV)
God had spent nearly two thousand years preparing Israel to ask the question for which the gospel was the answer. Even though nationalist pride kept the majority of Israel from receiving the answer, Gentile seekers all over the Roman Empire had begun to ask the question after years of listening in at the synagogue window. The gospel answer found those humble Jews and hopeful Gentiles through the preaching of Christ’s chosen ambassadors. The synagogues which had sprung up from the Jewish dispersion became tinderboxes for a movement that would consume the Roman Empire.
We can learn from God’s example and take the time to help others know what questions to ask before giving them the gospel as the answer. In previous eras of ubiquitous Sunday Schools, bus ministries, and Vacation Bible Schools, most people had at least some inkling of the question. That can no longer be assumed. We must put an end to canned evangelistic presentations aimed at pushing for immediate decisions. At best, they luck into reaching someone with a Bible background. As those people become scarcer, these presentations will be more likely to inoculate unbelievers against the gospel or, even worse, produce false disciples.
One great example of the synergy between the Scripture and the gospel is Chronological Bible Storying. In this approach the evangelist tells a series of between five and twelve particularly relevant Old Testament stories to share with a seeker over several sessions.[i] At the final session, the evangelist presents the gospel and shows how it answers the question. A hearer who shows interest throughout the entire series of studies will most likely be ready to believe the gospel when she hears it. Others may self-eliminate, sparing the evangelist’s time. If someone goes through all the sessions and still rejects Christ, we can be confident at least that they know what they are rejecting.
Paul’s sermon to the Athenians in Acts 17 serves as a case study for Scripture as evangelistic aid. One needn’t refer to Scripture to present the gospel and they probably shouldn’t where the Bible is rejected or held in low regard. This was the case with the Athenians who took Paul to Mars Hill. Paul reasoned from creation and referred to their own religious and cultural insights about God. Then he told them about Jesus Christ raised from the dead. While this was a solid gospel presentation without reliance on Scripture, it wasn’t nearly as fruitful as when he proclaimed it in the synagogues.
The gospel validates Scripture as it depicts Christ, the spirit of the law.
55% of all ethnic Jews are atheists. Something has gone wrong with Israel’s understanding of God. Christians know it was an unwillingness to relinquish their pretentions of ethnic superiority. This doesn’t in anyway suggest a disdain for Jewish people on the part of Christians. As Paul wrote:
Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.
(Romans 10:1-4 NIV)
Because the gospel arose from God’s relationship with the Jewish race, every true believer longs for their salvation. We acknowledge God’s love for them for the sake of the patriarchs and even for the very earth upon which they walked. Until physical Israel unites with spiritual Israel our hopes will remain unfulfilled.[iii]
But the rejection of Christ by Jewish people didn’t end God’s relationship with Israel. Instead, Christ realized God’s purpose for Israel to become a nation made up of people of all nations. Christ didn’t institute a new religion but removed the provisional props of law, temple, and nation to call forth a people with the faith of Abraham.[iv]
When seen as the story of God’s preference for one race of people, the Old Testament looks despicably racist and utterly untrustworthy. Surely the one true God wouldn’t limit his interest to one politically insignificant nation. How could he exclude millions around the world through the ages who’d never heard of Abraham, or circumcision, or the temple cult? While I acknowledge that a sovereign God can do as he pleases, these considerations raise serious questions for non-Jews about God’s fairness.
For the Jews, it must seem that God’s promises have utterly failed after the destruction of their temple in 70 AD (after prophetic promises that it would not be destroyed).[v] From that time until 1948 the Jews were scattered, hated, hounded, and nearly exterminated. Even now Israel exists as a besieged client state astride a high-pressure political fault line. The promises of Scripture must sound to modern-day Jews like the empty bluster of a fictional tribal deity.
Through the lens of the gospel of the kingdom, though, the promises of Scripture come alive as the Suffering Servant[vi] assumes sin’s penalty, conquers death, and pours out his Spirit on all flesh.[vii] Even as the nation of Israel met its nadir in 70 AD, the kingdom of God advanced around the known world eventually toppling the mighty Roman Empire according to Daniel’s visions.[viii] No longer limited to one bloodline or even one culture, this kingdom encompasses every human that takes hold of the Abrahamic faith. Through the gospel, God’s promise in Genesis 17 continues to find fulfillment through the expansion of a worldwide nation – ever more diverse, ever more unified under the Davidic King, the Son of the God of Israel.[ix]
Saving faith enables access to the life-giving spirit of Scripture.
The Decalogue is famously negative. As I’ve already pointed out, Paul found it deadly as well. The only way for him to find freedom from the disintegration between his flesh and his spirit was for the law to lose its grip on him. The answer to his plea for deliverance from the law of death in Romans 7 began with Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (ESV)
Christ’s salvation includes absolution but that’s certainly not the end of his work. Having banished the law of written ordinances, God has replaced it with an unwritten law of the Spirit.[x] This isn’t a flight into subjectivism, but a dynamic relationship guided by objective facts. Only from a literate, legalist bias would we assume “unwritten” means “amorphous.” If we can get past this false dichotomy, we’ll see that Paul clearly defines the unwritten law:
For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
(Romans 8:2-4 ESV)
We no longer concern ourselves with meeting a prescribed standard because Christ conquered sin not through the effort of the flesh but through its utter weakness, that is death. We now follow him by relinquishing our every pretense of personal virtue so we can live by his Spirit. He is the Spirit of Christ and so he leads us to express the death and resurrection of Christ which is the unwritten standard. Paul goes on to describe “law of the Spirit of life” in Romans 8:10-13:
But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.
Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. (NIV)
Those who put their faith in Christ receive the gift of God’s Spirit. By that Spirit we reenact Christ’s death and resurrection[xi] as we put sin to death in our bodies and find resurrection power to overcome it in these mortal bodies. This dynamic is the hallmark of the Israel of God[xii] as circumcision and the letter of the law were for physical Israel.
Since those who belong to Christ have the law of his kingdom already written on their hearts, they go to Scripture not to receive specific guidance per se, but to encounter the one who indwells them. According to Paul, Christ is the spirit of Scripture and through the eye of gospel faith we can see him there. Every believer has the means to find Christ in the Old Testament and know they have encountered the true Spirit of the Lord.[xiii] This truth opens a trove of spiritual resources if we will learn to use the Christological hermeneutic when reading the Hebrew Scriptures.
The authors of the New Testament books showed no reticence over teaching Christ from the figures and forms of their Scriptures which was the Hebrew Bible. They surgically removed verses and segments from their original context and applied them to the work of Christ in their day.[xiv] Their confidence over this approach arose from their presupposition that their Scriptures were written to attest to Christ. Where we share that presupposition, we will find that the Spirit of Christ is truly there even though we may initially be too obtuse to find it.
The Book of Ruth presents a helpful example of the potential for finding the Spirit of Christ in the Old Testament. Christian expositors for years have seen the connection between Boaz as the kinsman redeemer and Christ, but there’s so much more to glean. The story of Naomi’s decline, unlikely alliance, role as matchmaker, and ultimate restoration to her inheritance follows the history of Israel from the time of the judges to the return of Christ in glory. While Paul doesn’t seem to reference it, Ruth dramatizes his Romans 11 eschatology point by point.[2]
Insights such as the one I’ve described are often met with accusations of eisegesis from the hermeneutically cautious. That concern is only warranted if Scripture is the final authority. If that were the case, then we couldn’t afford to interpret Old Testament passages outside of their original historical context for fear of undermining the integrity of the text. It seems this is the wrong approach since the authors of the New Testament show no regard for such concerns.
The fear of misusing Scripture to illuminate and be illuminated by the gospel falls to the side when we accept the gospel as the final authority.
New Scripture arises from God’s presence in the redeemed community.
Except for Revelation, the books of the New Testament don’t present as Scripture in the same way that the Old Testament does. In the Prophets, we get “Thus sayeth the LORD,” but in the Gospels we get, “Thus did the Lord say as nearly as we can remember it.”[xv] Even though they also contain promises purportedly from Christ that the Holy Spirit would help them to remember, the Gospels are still a human recollection or in some cases just a collection. The array of discrepant details between the Gospels suggests that the help of the Holy Spirit didn’t guarantee word-perfect accuracy.
The Acts of the Apostles, while encouraging, offers very little usable instruction except to the most-lockstep ecclesiastical mimics. If anything, the work should tell us that the Holy Spirit is too wild and free to fit into any prescriptive template. Absent any presumed precedential pattern, Acts reads just like many later missionary accounts even up to the present day. Assuming that Jesus Christ is indeed the same yesterday, today, and forever that should be expected. Why should we canonize Acts and minimize The Narrative of God’s Dealings with George Muller? From the prologue, it doesn’t seem that Luke meant for his account to reach beyond the desk of Theophilus anyway. I’m thankful that it did, but I’m not thankful for the people who’ve turned it into something it was never meant to be.
As with Luke’s account, it doesn’t seem that any of the writers of the letters which make up the bulk of the New Testament expected that their correspondence would be read much past their own lifespans. They express immediate concerns and offer advice that is situational and at times even contradictory from author to author and even letter to letter.[xvi] Near the end of the letter to the Romans, Paul admits that the church already had enough knowledge of the gospel before receiving his treatise.[xvii] In 1 Corinthians 7 he offers extended advice through equivocation about it being from his own insight and in the hope that the Spirit of God might be with him in his ruling.[xviii] Paul writes to the Galatians that the apostles in Jerusalem were nobody special even though he went to present his gospel for their review and approval.[xix] The other authors of New Testament letters take the trouble to support their teaching from the Hebrew Scriptures and even refer to Paul.[xx] These features suggest the writers saw their authority as contingent rather than implicit. The definition of apostolic authority seems to have been elevated by later despots to wield it first by a claim of succession and then by a claim of exposition. Surely self-doubting Paul and hypocritical Peter didn’t become greater in death than in life. Why would we elevate their writings to timeless utterances of the divine?
Of the 27 books in the New Testament, only Revelation reads like words directly from the Lord. From its literary genius and insight, I’m persuaded that it is. Not coincidentally, it’s the only book in the New Testament to call down curses on any who would deign to add to it or take away from it.[xxi] Ironically, it’s probably the work we’re most likely to ignore or augment.
None of what I’ve said has been meant to disparage the New Testament. It should be read and reread by everyone blessed enough to own a copy. Within its pages we hear the words of Christ, and we receive great insights from those who were singularly equipped to comment on his work and kingdom. The New Testament is a compilation of the wisdom of unrivaled spiritual masters. Its value is in the spiritual value we derive from it and not from any pretension of infallibility or timeless dictates. Those who wrote it made no such claims. Surely those who later insisted otherwise have sought to return to the yoke of legalism with all its institutional benefits.
[1] Through this section, the word “Scripture” will refer to the Old Testament.
[2] See Appendix ___ on the comparative structure of The Book of Ruth
[i] Share links and resources for CBS
[ii] Reference for statistics on Jewish atheism
[iii] Romans 11
[iv] Lots of references from Romans and Galatians about the faith of Abraham
[v] Reference in Isaiah about the temple never again being destroyed
[vi] Isaiah 52-53
[vii] Joel 2
[viii] Daniel 4 and Daniel 7
[ix] Stuff from Ephesians about unity in diversity
[x] Romans 7:6
[xi] Christ offered himself by the eternal Spirit and by the Spirit he was raised from the dead – add references.
[xii] Galatians 6:14-16, Col. 2:11-13
[xiii] 2 Corinthians 3
[xiv] Share examples such as in Romans 8 and the virgin birth in Isaiah 7
[xv] See Luke 1
[xvi] Paul tells women to both cover their hair and to refrain from overly adorning their hair.
[xvii] Romans 15:14
[xviii] 1 Corinthians 7:25-40
[xix] Galatians 2:1-6
[xx] Cite from James, Peter, Hebrews, Jude, and especially 2nd Peter
[xxi] Revelation 22:18-19