The Mirror

A mirror is a handy tool when we need to fix an out-of-place hair or straighten a tie, but what do we do if we need to identify something far more important?

Stay with us. Renewing Your Mind is next. The content of our hearts is far more difficult for us to see. If we want an accurate reflection of our moral character, we need a different kind of mirror.

Today, Dr. R.C. Sproul will show us that God's law is the only thing that reveals the stain of sin on our souls. Let's join him now as he continues his series, God's Law and the Christian. As we continue now with our study of the law of God, we're asking the question, in what way and to what extent does the Old Testament moral law, particularly the Ten Commandments as an example, bear upon the lives of New Testament Christians? We have seen that at the time of the Reformation, great attention was given to this question, and that John Calvin, for example, delineated three specific important uses of the law in the life of the Christian.

And in our last session, we began to give an exposition of those three uses, the first one being the law as a mirror. And we spent some time looking at the idea of where the law of God comes from in the first place. And you will recall that we discovered that the law is not something that God Himself receives from some lawgiver outside of Himself or from some higher standard, but the source of all law is God Himself. Now, what's the significance of that?

Well, there are several significances to that. First of all, when people are called to obey the law of God, what that means is that we are called to obey Him. It's not simply that we are trying to conform to an abstract set of principles or to a disembodied list of rules, but rather we are trying to live in relationship to our God. We are trying to please God. We're trying to do what God wants us to do.

And we also recall that part of the nature of God is that God has within Himself supreme and absolute authority by which God and God alone has the authority to bind the consciences of His creatures. Now, when we are concerned, for example, with the science of ethics, and we are all concerned about that, we use words all the time like ought or must or should, and we load these terms frequently with a concept of moral obligation. I say, you ought to do this or you ought to do that. A legitimate response to that if I say you ought to do something is, who says? Why should I?

Give me a reason for that. Am I responsible to do everything that any person comes along and commands of me? Or must there be some ground basis of authority for somebody to impose an obligation upon another person? Who obligates you? Who has the right ultimately and absolutely to bind your conscience? I'm asking a question about authority, and we notice that in the word authority, there's contained another English word, author. Well, the one with the authority is the one who is the author. In this case, the author of the universe and the author of law and the author of human life is the one who supremely has the right to impose obligations upon us. I've mentioned several times my response to the bumper sticker that you see frequently on the highways, God said it, I believe it, that settles it. And I've given my objection to that bumper sticker for introducing an element in it that ought not be there.

And that is the second element. It says, God says it, I believe it, that settles it. Well, ladies and gentlemen, if God says it, it's settled, whether you believe it or not, because His authority is not a rule by referendum that requires your assent. We may believe that in terms of human government, that government rests on the assent of the governed, but not in the cosmic scope of things. God does not require our assent before He has the right to impose obligations because being God, He has that right sovereignly and absolutely. And if God commands that something be done or that something should be done, the norm of norms and without norm has spoken, and there's no higher court of appeal.

We may choose to disobey that command. We may argue with the rightness of it, and we may in that regard say, I don't believe it, and so for me it's not settled, but cosmically it's settled. I think there's a reason why when the Scriptures give graphic description of the last judgment, the final tribunal in the court of heaven where every human being is giving an account of himself or herself before God, that the universal response of those who are being judged is silence because the final judgment is not a court of appeal. That when God speaks and judges, He judges according to His law, and there is no argument to be given. And we are told and warned that He will find all of the world guilty before His law and before His commandments. Now, I'm laboring this point that we may understand that the law to which we are called to obey is a law that comes from Him. It is His law.

It is a law that defines a relationship, the relationship between Creator and creature, between the sovereign and the dependent vassal, between the king and his subjects. Now, not only is it His law in the sense that it comes from Him, but most significantly it is a law that comes from His own character, and it reflects His own character. It reveals His character. It shows forth and displays His righteousness and therefore displays righteousness. Now, notice that order. It's not that we first of all have a sense of righteousness and then say, oh, God conforms to it.

No, no, no. First there is God in His perfect character, which is the standard of righteousness, and it is the revelation of who He is. Now, do you realize that every time there's an ethical issue, people debate the pros and cons on both sides? I can't think of any form of human behavior that somebody hasn't risen up to defend. We have all kinds of arguments and rationalizations to defend all kinds of disobedience and all kinds of evil, and we argue constantly about what is right and what is wrong. Well, what Christianity is asserting, when Judaism asserted, was that there is an absolute standard that what is right and what is wrong is not a matter of relativity, but that that ultimate standard is the character of God, which character then is manifested in His law. Now, when I was a little boy, I had to learn the catechism for a short period of time to pass a test. Most of the words of the catechism are since forgotten. But one of the simple questions in the catechism was this question, what is sin?

Have you ever thought about that? I mean, we know it when we do it, and we know it when it's done to us, but if we were forced to write a definition on a piece of paper, what would you say? How would you define sin? Well, in the catechism I learned, the rote response that we gave was this, sin is any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. Let me write that down.

You might want to write it down. Sin is any want of conformity to. That's kind of an archaic way to say things, isn't it? What do we mean, any want of conformity to something? Here the want does not describe desire, but it means lack, any lack or absence of conformity to or transgression of the law of God.

Now there are some vitally important concepts in this. Sometimes we simplify this dual definition of sin by reducing it to the two kinds of sins that we elaborate, sins of commission or sins of omission. A sin of commission is when we commit an action that transgresses the law of God.

That means it goes across the border. It violates the boundary. It steps over the line that God has drawn when He says, you must not do this. If God says, thou shalt not, and we do it, we have stepped over the line. We have violated the commandment. We have transgressed His law by committing that act. A sin of omission is when God says, you shall do such and such, and we fail to do what we are required to do. So on the one hand, we can sin actively by directly violating the negative prohibition or passively by failing to perform the positive requirement that God sets before us. And so what we're dealing with here is a lack of conformity to a standard. We fail to live up to the standard. We've seen that the New Testament word for sin, harmortia, means literally to miss the mark. And usually the metaphor that is in view is that of a target where the archer fires his arrow at the target and not only fails to hit the bull's eye, he doesn't even hit the target at all. He's wide of the mark, and the mark being the standard or the norm that we are supposed to reach. And that's why the New Testament says all have sinned and fallen short.

Again, the metaphor of falling short, failing to reach, failing to rise up to the level that is not only possible or achievable but is required. We miss the requirement so that sin is anyone of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. Well, now here's the question. What if there weren't any laws? We see that in the catechetical response, sin is defined for us in terms of a relationship to law.

What if there weren't any laws? Well, in simple terms, the formula would be this, no law, no sin, because you can't be guilty of sin unless there is a law to transgress. And the Apostle Paul says, you know, without the law, there's no knowledge of sin. And he labors in Romans the question of whether there was law in the world before Moses. And how does Paul answer that? He says, yes, because death reigned from Adam to Moses, and there wouldn't have been death had there not been sin.

And so he argues that in addition to the tablets of stone that were delivered at Sinai, there was also God's natural law that He revealed in nature and inscribed upon the hearts even of pagans so that everybody in this world has some light of nature, some knowledge of the law of God, some awareness of what is right and what is wrong, the kind of thing that Immanuel Kant contemplated with his famous categorical imperative, that no one is without some knowledge of the law of God. And I sit and listen to people argue about all kinds of behavior, and sometimes I just want to say, hold it. You're arguing as cleverly as you can for this mode of behavior, but you know very well that that's wrong. You know adultery is wrong. You know that stealing is wrong. You know that murder is wrong.

We can debate these things if you want, but you know better than that. And as the New Testament says, not only do we approve of things we know are wicked, but we seek to persuade others of that same approval. That only underscores the sinfulness of sin.

All right. The first function of the law then is as it manifests the character of the God whose law it is. It is a mirror, not simply a mirror that reveals the face of God, but it is a mirror for us. Why do you use a mirror? It's been said that we never see ourselves as others see us. That's because we don't have the perspective of being able to look at ourselves from without.

The best shot we have is to look at a mirror, which is to some degree distorted because it's a backwards image of who we are, and we don't exactly look like our mirror reflection, do we? But we glance at the mirror to see that our hairdo is okay, you know, that there's no ketchup on our tie, that we haven't left a stain of food on our cheeks. We look at that mirror out of our own vanity and our concern for how we look, and the thing about the mirror that is so dreadful is that the mirror reveals to us our blemishes, the stains that can be observed. Now, what Calvin is saying is we can have a looking glass to tell us whether there's soil on our faces, but how can we tell if there's a stain on our soul?

There is no glass bright enough, reflective enough to penetrate to the core of our character. If we want to see an accurate reflection of our moral character, we need a mirror far more powerful than the lenses or the glasses that we look at routinely, and that mirror is the law of God. Because in simple terms, beloved, what happens is I can deceive myself into thinking that I'm a righteous man.

I can compare myself with other people and look at the laws of humanity and measure myself and give myself a high score. But once I look in the perfect mirror, once I examine the law of God, I'm devastated because I see the darkness of my sin when I see myself against the standard of perfect righteousness. Remember Isaiah? Arguably the most righteous man, relatively speaking, among the Jewish people. The paragon of virtue gets one slight glimpse of the unveiled splendor and glory of God, one simple glance at the absolute perfection of his righteousness, and he screams a curse upon himself. Woe is me, he cries, for I am undone.

I am a man of unclean lips. As soon as he saw the purity of God, he at the same moment saw the filthiness of Isaiah. And Isaiah would have gone through his whole life deluded in his own evaluation of his righteousness, of his personal excellency, had he not looked in the mirror and looked at the norm and saw his own reflection in it. We can only see ourselves as God sees us when we look at His law—such an important message. We're focusing on how the Old Testament law applies in a New Testament context this week here on Renewing Your Mind. We're glad you've joined us. I'm Lee Webb, and we're so pleased to have the president of Reformation Bible College, Dr. Stephen Nichols, with us here in the studio.

Steve, R.C. said that there is only one authority with the power to bind our conscience, and that's the author of the law. But unfortunately, so many today say that God's Word isn't authoritative or even true.

Yeah, that's correct, Lee. And in fact, we've got some statistics to bear that out. Folks listening to Renewing Your Mind know that one of the things that we've recently undertaken here is our biannual State of Theology survey.

We started this back in 2014, and every two years we administer this survey, the State of Theology, and here we are in 2020 with the fourth time giving this survey. One of the questions on that survey is this, the Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths, but is not literally true. Well, when you look at the answer in the general U.S. population to that question, back in 2014, 41% of Americans agreed with that statement. The Bible is not literally true.

The answers to this question just steadily ticked up, and so in 2020 it went from 41% up to 48%. And so basically half of Americans do not think the Bible is literally true. And of course, we recognize the problems that that's going to cause, and we see some of those problems, don't we, even manifesting themselves. But the other issue here, Lee, is the impact of that on American Christians, and the reality is we're not immune from the culture that surrounds us.

And sometimes those cultural views and attitudes can seep in, and we can begin to reflect those same views of the culture around us. And when it comes to that view of the Bible that our culture has, well, that's a deadly view. The reality is we follow an ancient book living here in this modern world of 2020. We are called to follow an ancient book, and God's law is not to be adjusted.

It's not to be negotiated. It's not to be trifled with, and it's certainly not to be compromised. God's law stands, and it stands as authoritative, and it stands as true. And we as Christians need to recognize that, and I think especially in this day, we need to recognize that all the more. Thank you, Dr. Nichols, for that, and that's exactly why we think this series is a critical study for all believers. So often we struggle to understand the purpose of God's moral law and how we're supposed to respond to it. So contact us today with a donation of any amount, and we will send you this 15-part series on five CDs, along with Dr. R.C. Sproul's booklet, How Does God's Law Apply to Me?

You can give your gift when you go to renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. Well, certainly a lack of understanding of God's law can hinder our growth as Christians, and with that in mind, let's hear a final thought from R.C. I don't know about you, but I don't always enjoy looking in mirrors. I remember the first time I joined Weight Watchers, and the routine question that was asked by the teacher for new members is, What brought you here? What caused you to decide to come and enroll in this class?

And he would pass out drinking straws, soda straws, and we were to use this straw to symbolize the straw that broke the camel's back. What was the last straw that drove you to come in here? When he asked me that, I said, because I got tired of averting my eyes from the glass in front of stores as I would walk past, and I could see the reflection of my stomach in the glass. I got so tired of seeing that and artificially sucking in my stomach because of what I was seeing in the mirror. It got me there that time, and if you're looking at me now, you're wondering why I don't look in the mirror and get over there again. But the point is I found that I didn't even want to look in the mirror because I didn't like what I saw. I wonder if that's why we avoid the law of God, because we don't want to look in that mirror. But we need to look in the mirror because what we see in the mirror drives us to the gospel, alerts us to our desperate need for a gospel. The mirror of the law of God, beloved, is bad news, and until we look in it, we'll never understand the goodness of the good news. Well, over the past few days, Dr. Sproul has examined how we're to relate to God's law, and I hope you'll join us tomorrow and Friday as he explains our obligation to man's law, and he'll address some timely issues like civil disobedience. That's beginning Thursday here on Renewing Your Mind. .