The Legalist Distortion

The most common form of legalism is where we add legislation to God's law and treat it as if it were divine law. And Jesus rebuked the people this way saying, you teach human traditions as if they were the Word of God. Now that's a very dangerous thing because what happens then is that men presumptuously and arrogantly usurp the authority of God Himself. And where God has left men free, men put other men in chains. As you and I pursue holiness and have a zeal for righteousness, we must be careful not to, as Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, teach His doctrine the commandments of men.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and thank you for joining us today for Renewing Your Mind. If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you may at some point or another been accused of being a legalist. And we know that's a bad thing, but what exactly does that mean?

And how do we fall into that era? From his series Building a Christian Conscience, today R.C. Sproul walks us through and warns us of the legalist distortion.

Here's Dr. Sproul. You know, Jesus tells us that broad is the way, and wide is the gate that leads to destruction, and that there are many who travel on that way. But our Lord says narrow is the way, and straight is the gate that leads to life, and few there are who find it. We remember that in the first century, Christians were not first called Christians, but they were first called people of the way.

Now that's not the same as being narrow-minded or brittle or rigid, but they did have a clear focus of walking the razor's edge of godliness and of holiness. Now rather than use the graph as we did in the first session to refer to evil on one side and good on the other, let's look at it from a different perspective. Let's recall and understand that we can move away from the track that God is calling us to walk, and we can get lost either to the left or to the right.

We can err in either direction. We can sin by moving to either pole of the continuum, by moving into extreme positions on either side, too liberal, too conservative, too whatever. Now the twin disasters that lurk, as it were, in the bushes to disrupt the Christian who is seeking to live a godly life, historically are defined by the two terms legalism on the one hand and antinomianism on the other. Now antinomianism is a technical word that not everybody is familiar with. It simply means antilawism, and we'll explore that in our next lecture. But today we want to look at the meaning of legalism. How many times as a Christian have you been accused of legalism? How many times have you heard the word bandied about in the Christian subculture that such and such is a legalist? He's narrow-minded. He's this.

He's that. Well, what are we talking about when we're talking about legalism? We know whatever it is, it's bad.

But what is it? Well, it's not a simple matter either, because legalism as a term is a very broad term. It's kind of a generic concept, a large heading under which there are various species, particular types of legalism. So what is legalism? Well, legalism subpoints under the general heading. And so I think it's important if we are to understand what legalism is, since it's such a dangerous form of distortion of true godliness, that we need to be able to recognize the subtle forms in which legalism manifests itself. Let's give a basic definition of the first type of legalism. This involves what I call abstracting the law of God from its original context. That is, the first type of legalism is an abstracting of the law of God from its original context.

What does that mean? Do you know people who seem to be preoccupied in the Christian life with obeying rules and regulations, who conceive Christianity as being a series of do's and of don'ts, who reduce a Christian vital, vibrant faith that beats with a heart toward God to a very cold, deadly set of moral principles? That we can call moralism, where one is concerned merely with the keeping of rules. And you say, wait a minute R.C., doesn't God have rules? Doesn't God give commandments? Doesn't Jesus say, if you love me, keep my commandments?

Yes, He does. And a Christian must be earnestly concerned with rules. He has to be devoutly concerned with principles of conduct and with commandments.

Our God is a commandment-giving God. And not merely in the Old Testament do we find commandments, but we find them in the New as well. As I just said a moment ago, Jesus Himself said, if you love me, then keep my commandments. So if you love Christ, you've got to be concerned about rules. You've got to be concerned about commandments.

And that's precisely the point. Do you see the connection Jesus makes? If you love me, keep my commandments. That the keeping of the commandments are motivated by our love for Christ. It's because they are His commandments that we need to be concerned about keeping them. The original context in which God gave laws, God gave the Ten Commandments, was in the context of a covenant. God was first gracious.

He redeemed the people. He had just brought them out of bondage from slavery and captivity in Egypt, and entered into a loving, filial relationship with Israel. And once that relationship was established, it was built upon grace. In the midst of that gracious relationship, then God began to define the laws that are pleasing to Him. I had a professor in graduate school who said this, the essence of Christian theology is grace, and the essence of Christian ethics is gratitude. And what the legalist does is that he isolates the rules and the laws from the God who gives the laws.

He's not so much seeking to obey God or to honor Christ as He is to obey rules that are empty of any personal relationship. There's no love. There's no joy. There's no life.

There's no passion. It's just a rote, mechanical form of what we call externalism, keeping bare rules. That's legalism because it destroys the broader context of love and redemption in which the law comes to us in the first place. Now, a second type of legalism, which is also a second kind of externalism, it's very like the first. There's really only a subtle distinction between it, and that is when a divorce happens between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. The New Testament makes that distinction, doesn't it, between the letter of the law, its outward form, and the spirit of the law. Now, how is it possible for somebody to keep the letter of the law and violate the spirit of the law?

That sometimes is hard to illustrate, but one comes to mind immediately. Let's suppose that a person likes to drive his automobile at 50 miles an hour, and so he drives his car at 50 miles an hour because that's the way he's comfortable. That's the way it pleases him. He doesn't care at all about the corporate desires of the commonwealth in which he lives. He doesn't care what the will of the state is or the will of the community, and the state has come along and they've put up highway signs, speed limit signs, 50 miles an hour here, 35 miles an hour here, 15 miles an hour here, and so on.

Now, here's a man who has utter disregard for other people. He's going to drive his car to please himself and to please himself alone. He's committed to lawlessness. He answers to nobody, and he's driving down the highway, and he drives through a school zone where the sign clearly says 15 miles an hour. How fast does he drive?

He drives 50 miles an hour in utter disregard and casual negligence of the safety of the little children by the school. And then he passes through the community where the sign says 35 miles an hour. He's still driving 50 miles an hour. Now he's only breaking the law by 15 miles an hour instead of 35 miles an hour, but he's still breaking the law. And then he finally cruises out onto the highway, and the sign there says 50 miles an hour. But that's what he likes to drive, and so he's driving 50 miles an hour. However, the other godless people on the highway are driving their cars 55 miles an hour. And here is this man who now in this particular set of circumstances appears to the external observer as one who is scrupulous in his civic obedience.

He may even be selected by the state police for a Safe Driver of the Day award and be given some kind of recognition because he, and perhaps he alone, is scrupulously driving his car at exactly 50 miles an hour. But it's only by chance, it's only by fortuitous circumstances that he happens to be obeying the law. His only obedience is external, but he doesn't care at all about the deeper, underlying, penetrating spirit of what the law is all about. That's a second kind of legalism which does not please God. Obedience to externals while the heart is far removed from any desire to honor God or His Christ. A third type of legalism and perhaps the most common form of all and surely the most deadly to the kingdom of God is where we add legislation to God's law and treat it as if it were divine law.

Let me say it again. We add legislation to the law of God and treat it as if it were coming from God Himself. This is a perilous danger which has afflicted the church from the time of Cain and Abel. Jesus had to struggle with the Pharisees of His day over these very points. Throughout church history, the rabbis of the Old Testament had added to the law of God all kinds of legislation and bound the people's consciences as if the laws that they were suggesting had nothing less than the imprimatur of God Himself. And Jesus rebuked the people this way saying, you teach human traditions as if they were the Word of God. Now that's a very dangerous thing because what happens then is that men presumptuously and arrogantly usurp the authority of God Himself.

And where God has left men free, men put other men in chains. Now I'm not saying that the church of Christ doesn't have any right to have policies and ordinances and regulations. I mean it doesn't say in the Bible that you're not allowed to bring soft drinks into the fellowship hall of the church basement.

And the church has every right to put policies like that into effect into the church. But when they elevate these human traditions or these human policies to the level of seeking to bind the conscience in an ultimate way in which God and God alone can do, and what's worse make that the test of Christianity, then a serious distortion has come upon the gospel of Christ. There are lots of folks outside of the church who have gotten the impression that we define a Christian as a person who doesn't dance, as a person who doesn't smoke, who never drinks, who never goes to movies, who doesn't wear lipstick, and who doesn't play cards. People actually walk around and think that's what Christianity means. Now where does it say in sacred Scripture that a Christian cannot play cards, or that a Christian may not wear lipstick, or that a Christian, you know, may never drink wine? If that's the truth, and in terms of an absolute principle, then our Lord Himself wouldn't qualify to be a Christian.

Now I grant there are other principles that teach us to good discipline and healthful habits and all of that sort of thing that would certainly cast a shadow on matters of smoking and the like. But the point is these things are elevated as the external test of what makes a Christian. That is a deadly violation of the gospel because it is a substitution of human tradition for the real fruits of the Spirit that are enjoined upon us by God Himself. And we come perilously close to blasphemy by misrepresenting Christ, by elevating things to the public as tests of the faith where God has left people in liberty.

We must be very careful against that form of legalism. What happens here, however, is that the Christian community as such is a subculture, and Presbyterians have their subcultural associations, and Lutherans have theirs, and Baptists have theirs, and Episcopalians have theirs. In certain Episcopalian circles, you know, it's unthinkable that the parish priest wouldn't have a glass of wine with his parishioners.

In certain other circles, it would be scandalous for the minister to be seen drinking a glass of wine. And we'll talk about that whole question of Christian liberty a little bit later on in the course. But in the meantime, we have to be very careful that we are not putting before the world ethical principles that grow out of our own subcultural situation as if they were the unadulterated Word of God. That's deadly because it's a distortion of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now the gospel calls men to repentance. It calls men to holiness. It calls men to godliness.

It calls men to godliness. And the gospel, because it calls us to repentance, is an offense to the world. There is a built-in scandal, a built-in offense of Christ and His cross to fallen man. But dear friends, woe unto us if we add unnecessarily to that offense by distorting what Christianity is. And we can easily confuse it because Christianity is concerned about morality. Christianity is concerned about righteousness.

It is concerned about ethics. And we can easily make that subtle move from a passionate concern for godly morality into moralism, which is a distortion. It's a distortion to the right rather than to the left.

But distortions go in both directions. Now closely related to that is the form of legalism that we call majoring in minors. The Pharisees in Jesus' day were past masters of that. Jesus, how many times, was brought into conflict with the Pharisees, and He would say to them, woe unto you scribes and Pharisees. You tithe your mint and your cumin, but you omit the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy. Now notice Jesus complimented them for obeying some matters of the law. They tithed. They paid their tithes.

Now I want to stop for a second. We think of the Pharisees as models of ungodliness, but the latest report I saw indicated that only 4% of church members in the United States of America tithe their income. We don't even obey God at the lesser matters, but at least the Pharisees brought in their tithes. They didn't withhold things from God.

They didn't rob God. They paid their tithes and their cumin. And He said, you search the Scripture, and you do well to do this. They were rigorous students of the Bible. Most of us are negligent of the Bible. The Pharisees studied their Bibles.

That's good. The Pharisees said their prayers. That's good, but they mixed hypocrisy with their prayers, and they studied the Word of God, but they didn't live the Word of God. But at least they studied it, and our attitude is not supposed to say, well, studying the Word of God and not living it brings about the rebuke of Jesus, and maybe we haven't studied the Bible.

No, no, no, no. Jesus said, these things you ought to have done, but you omitted the weight of your matters of the law, justice and mercy. Now, why does it happen in sub-Christian cultures or Christian subcultures?

Maybe I was right the first time. It's really sub-Christian where we begin to put the test of Christianity in simplistic external things like dancing and lipstick and that sort of thing. The Bible tells us to be different from the world. The Bible tells us to be a light to a world. The Bible tells us to let our work shine before men so that people can have hope and people can see in us the reflected glory of God.

We are called to be a peculiar people, a holy people. Now, which is easier? You tell me, which is easier? To have the world notice that I am a Christian because I manifest to them a strange and radical degree of mercy? Or because they see in me one who is scrupulously just in my business relationships, whose word they can trust, whose honor they can depend upon?

Which is easier? To be known for your honor, to be known for your honor, your trustworthiness, your justice, and your mercy? Or to get simpler recognition by saying, look, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't dance, I don't do those things? In a sense, dear friends, those things in terms of what is at stake with the souls of men, those things are Mickey Mouse. And my apologies to Walt Disney.

Those are miners. The kingdom of God says the Bible is not in eating and drinking. Yes, it's a sin to be gluttonous.

Yes, it's a sin to be drunk and all of that. But the issues that God has called us to be passionately concerned about are much more major than that, concerned with integrity of justice, of mercy, of redeeming a world that is in pain, and so easy it is to distort the biblical ethic by the kind of legalism that majors and minors. One more, what I call loopholeisms. The Pharisees were also masters of interpreting the law and finding ways to get around the law.

They were the Philadelphia lawyers of their day. The law said that you couldn't go more than a Sabbath day's journey on Sunday, and a Sabbath day's journey was around a mile. And it was defined by the authorities as you couldn't travel more than a mile or so from your place of residence.

Now, legally and technically, residence was defined wherever some of your personal possessions were cashed or stored. And so, the Pharisees wanted to make a six-mile trip on the Sabbath day. Say they wanted to go from Jerusalem to Jericho. During the week they'd have some caravan trader take one of their toothbrushes and put it under a rock each mile along the way. There would be a separate toothbrush or an handkerchief or some other article of clothing or possessions, because by placing that toothbrush under the rock legally, technically, the Pharisee was now establishing legal residence where that rock was. And so, when the Sabbath day came and he could only go a Sabbath day's journey, which was only about a mile from his residence, he would never go more than a mile from his residence. He would just have six residences, and he would go from rock to rock, from rock to rock.

He makes the trip. He violates the whole point of the prohibition of the Sabbath day's journey by getting around the law with a technicality. That's what we call loophole-ism. But God wants us to obey His law from a heart that desires to please Him. May the Lord help us as R.C. Sproul described it, walk the razor's edge of godliness and holiness.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. Dr. Sproul often reminded us that right thinking, right doctrine, precedes right living, which makes the breadth of his teaching library so valuable as he taught theology and doctrine and applied it to various areas of the Christian life. And we've gone back through the archives and compiled 50 favorites from his teaching library and put it together on a single USB drive. This limited edition drive is available to you for your donation of any amount. So when you give your gift by visiting renewingyourmind.org or calling us at 800-435-4343, we'll send you this USB drive featuring messages that span decades of Dr. Sproul's ministry. So give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org. All week we have been featuring favorite messages from R.C. Sproul. Well tomorrow you'll hear a sermon that Dr. Sproul preached on Peter's denial of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. That's Friday here on Renewing Your Mind.