The Apostle Paul wrote about the original four spiritual laws long before Bill Bright wrote his tract.
Centuries before members of Cru began using their evangelistic tool on college campuses, Paul wrote about the original four spiritual laws to Christians in Rome. In 1965, Campus Crusade for Christ founder, Bill Bright, wrote a simple tract entitled, “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” From its first publication until now, that little yellow booklet has been used to lead millions of people to make a decision for Christ. If you haven’t heard of Bright’s four spiritual laws, they are:
- God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.
- Man is sinful and separated from God. Therefore, he cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for his life.
- Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through Him you can know and experience God’s love and plan for your life.
- We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.
While these four “laws” have been effective in getting people to pray the sinner’s prayer, the version of the gospel which they represent tends to produce forgiven sinners rather than growing disciples. Campus Crusade’s follow-up material contains this quote:
“God knows of the existence of evil, yet God is not evil nor does He give in to evil. We, on the other hand, are attracted to it, and we give in to it.”
What Happens When You Sin? (startingwithgod.com)
That’s kind of a bleak outlook.
Perhaps full truth in advertising would require that they add a fifth spiritual law to the tract – “God’s wonderful plan includes an unsuccessful struggle against sin for the rest of your life.” I wonder how such an addition would affect the effectiveness of the presentation. I wonder how many people lose their joy or even their faith after years of continued failure.
Sadly, this experience of continued sinful behavior has become the norm for most Christians. Everyone I’ve talked with identifies with Paul’s struggle:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.
Romans 7:18-19
While it’s tempting to read our own experience into this passage, we will miss the point if we think Paul was simply commiserating with all the Christians stuck in sinful patterns. He was demonstrating the law of death which is one of the original four spiritual laws.
The original four spiritual laws are given in Romans 7-8.
It’s almost a given that religious people behave inconsistently with their profession. For years, unchurched people have blamed hypocritical Christians for their opting to stay home on Sunday mornings. I hate to admit that I assume most conservative politicians and evangelical leaders are hiding something scandalous. It’s just happened so many times and it hasn’t seemed to matter how unlikely the perpetrator was. Every scandal prompts organizational soul-searching, but questions about accountability only concede the argument that religious people can’t be trusted.
Religious hypocrisy didn’t start with Christianity, but Christianity was supposed to end it. According to Paul in Romans 1-3, salvation was for the Jew and the Gentile because both were under the wrath of God. Gentiles deserved God’s wrath because they had spiraled into immorality which they not only failed to restrain but even celebrated. The Jews on the other hand were under God’s wrath because they preached against sinful behavior while committing the very same sins. These words to first-century Jews could easily have been addressed to twenty-first-century Christians:
You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law?
Romans 7:21b-23 (NIV)
Just as the pagans needed the gospel to save them from their idolatry and immorality so the Jews needed it to save them from hypocrisy. That Christians are known for hypocrisy demonstrates how far the church has drifted from Paul’s gospel. The message he preached liberated believers from self-righteousness as much as from ungodliness.
Paul develops his proposition that the gospel is God’s power to save both Jews and Gentiles through the book of Romans. In chapter 7 he begins to explain that hypocrisy and inconsistency were both consequences of legal dynamics. Through chapter 7 and into chapter 8, Paul names four spiritual laws and shows how they relate to one another. You will find them in boldface in the excerpt below:
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and (the law of) death.
Romans 7:21-8:2 (ESV – parenthetical mine NAW)
Here is a list of the original four spiritual laws with definitions:
- The law of God – His written commands such as “You shall not covet.” (Romans 7:7)
- The law of sin – The antithesis of God’s law. Where God’s law says, “You shall not covet,” it compels us to lust. (Romans 7:8)
- The law of death – Defined at the beginning of this section and named at the end of it. This law states, “When I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.” It is “another law waging war against the law of my mind making me captive to the law of sin.”
- The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus – This law is stated succinctly in Romans 8:11, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” (ESV)
Sometimes chapter breaks keep us from recognizing the connections between the authors’ thoughts. By considering Romans 7:23-25 with 8:1-2 it’s easy to see that Paul meant for the Romans to recognize four spiritual laws that pertain to Christ’s saving work on our behalf.
While Bill Bright’s “Four Spiritual Laws” was intended to make Christians, Paul explained the original four spiritual laws to help Christians demonstrate their salvation from ungodliness and from hypocrisy. It seems to me that an understanding of Paul’s four would not only liberate Christians but would call more people into Christ’s kingdom through authentically righteous lives.
How three of the original four spiritual laws operate
I used to think that Christianity consisted of combing through the New Testament for every “command, example, and necessary inference,” which I must obey in order to get to heaven. Not only was the idea patently false according to the New Testament itself, it just didn’t work. It didn’t work for me or anyone else I knew. Everyone in that group would agree with the statement, “We all sin all the time.” Public prayers in that group would ask God to, “Forgive us for our many sins.” Looking back, my religiosity fit the very definition of insanity, “Doing the same time repeatedly expecting a different result.”
No one in our moralistic society would be offended by the gospel’s call for sinners to repent of their misdeeds. The offense comes when it calls religious people to repent of their virtues.
Somehow our self-congratulatory ego takes hold of the foolish hope that we’ll do better next time no matter how many “next times” we’ve blown. This was the case with so many Jewish people in the first century to whom Paul and others offered justification on the basis of faith. In Romans 10 Paul diagnosed them as having rejected Christ because they were seeking to establish their own righteousness. And yet if that were possible then Christ would have died for nothing. No one in our moralistic society would be offended by the gospel’s call for sinners to repent of their misdeeds. The offense comes when it calls religious people to repent of their virtues. And yet that’s the only way anyone will become truly righteous according to the original four spiritual laws.
According to Romans 7, the law of sin uses the law of God to imprison humans in the law of death. Since the law of sin is an evil, oppositional force it must be inert until it encounters something authoritative and righteous. The law of God, then, activates it. But since we are made in God’s image we don’t just succumb uncritically to sin but even while sinning we acknowledge that God’s law is righteous. This recognition might keep us from overt sin but can’t overcome the law of sin altogether since the law of God is external to us and the law of sin indwells us. Per the Jewish definition of death as the separation of spirit and body, Paul calls this moral disintegration “death” and the operation of it “the law of death.” So, the law of God or any perceived religious prescription becomes the instrument of spiritual death to the individual.
As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:56, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.”
Just to be clear, living out of sync with our values is spiritual death, not normal Christianity.
We need to be saved not just from eternal death in hell but from the hell of spiritual death now. It is from this wretchedness that Christ saves us today as Paul wrote:
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7:24-25a
So, I need to be delivered not just from legal guilt for sin but also from the dynamics at work between the law of God, the law of sin, and the law of death. Christ through his death and resurrection has completely snatched everyone who believes from the prison guarded by this three-headed dog.
Life to your mortal bodies
Real salvation must begin with the nullification of the law of God. So long as the law stands the sinner remains imprisoned on death row. Paul sums up the law of death in Romans 7:25b, “So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” As with capital criminals, release must begin with an overturning of the verdict. So Paul goes on to say, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1 ESV) But verdicts in the American justice system can only be overturned in the case of judicial error and that can’t exist under God’s law. For there to be no condemnation, that which has been violated must cease to apply.
Christ didn’t come to perpetually settle the score but to change the game entirely.
Christians often conceive of grace as God’s repeated willingness to overlook their many transgressions of his law. While some would argue that this “continual cleansing” inspires humility and gratitude it actually fosters disregard. When a person is expected to fail, they’ll do just that. Being told we’re fundamentally flawed doesn’t do much to inspire real worship for our creator. Christ didn’t come to perpetually settle the score but to change the game entirely. His death and resurrection don’t just allow us to cope with the law of sin and the law of death but to overcome them through a brand new law. As Paul goes on to say:
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’re under a new law that doesn’t consist of prescriptions and prohibitions written in a religious text. That sort of law will always fall into the hands of the law of sin and imprison us in the law of death. There’s a new sort of law that instead of arming the laws of sin and of death sets us free from them. We no longer need the law to show us sin’s ugliness because Christ has put that on display once and for all. Now we can turn our attention from our own legal culpability to his resurrected beauty. We can now turn from a law of works to a law of faith that puts its joyful hope in the power of the resurrection. That power is the Spirit of Christ who brought him to life from physical death and so will bring us to life from spiritual death.
The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus states, “…he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” (Romans 8:11b ESV)
Sin can’t be overcome by trying to avoid sin. Christ sets us free from (thinking about) sin so we can focus on him. The law of God was weak not because it was flawed but because it counted on human strength to accomplish it. The law of the Spirit of life counts on human weakness relying on God’s strength which means it can’t help but overcome. The Christian life consists of repeatedly offering our own human strength over to death so that resurrection power may fill the void. When that happens the law of death is broken by life which his Spirit gives to our mortal (the ones we’re in now) bodies.
We don’t live the Christian life by avoiding sin and pursuing virtue. Rather, we avoid self-righteousness and pursue Christ. With him as our whole focus, we will become more than good; we’ll become glorious.