The Law and the Gospel

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. GALATIANS 3:24

In the two winters after the Lectures on Revivals, Finney preached a series of lectures to Christians in the Broadway Tabernacle. They were published as Lectures to Professing Christians, and they are relentless. Many who heard them, he admitted in his Memoirs, regarded them as rather an exhibition of the Law than of the Gospel. Finney did not accept the criticism. “For me,” he wrote, “the Law and Gospel have but one rule of life; and every violation of the spirit of the Law, is also a violation of the spirit of the Gospel.” How he held law and gospel together is one of the keys to his ministry, and to its strengths and weaknesses.

The law of love

For Finney, the law of God was not a set of arbitrary rules. It was the law of love, which Jesus summed up in two commandments: love God with all your heart, and your neighbour as yourself. Finney usually called this love benevolence — a settled choice of the highest good of God and all His creatures. The law, he said in God’s Love for a Sinning World, is designed and adapted to secure the highest good of the universe. Obedience to it is essential to happiness; without it there could be no blessedness even in heaven.

Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. ROMANS 13:10

Sin, on this view, is selfishness — the choice of one’s own gratification above the good of God and others. And conversion is the change from selfishness to benevolence. That is why Finney could say that law and gospel have but one rule of life. The gospel does not bring a different standard. It brings sinners back to the standard they abandoned, and the power to keep it.

The law must search

Finney was convinced that the law must do its work before the gospel can do its. “I have long been satisfied,” he wrote, “that the higher forms of Christian experience are attained only as a result of a terribly searching application of God’s Law to the human conscience and heart.” That is why he preached as he did. He wanted sinners to feel their guilt, not merely their misery, and he thought the popular religious books of his day made sinners pity themselves rather than condemn themselves. He wanted Christians to see their sins one by one. He wanted preachers to deal with the conscience and probe to the quick.

Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. ROMANS 3:20

There is much wisdom here. A gospel preached without the law becomes sentimental. People who have never seen their sin have no use for a Saviour. Finney’s refusal to let the law be softened was a service to the church, and his insistence that grace does not lower God’s standard is thoroughly biblical.

Orthodox in practice

Finney pressed the same point on the church. In his lecture Instructions to Converts he complained that the church was “mighty orthodox in notions, but very heretical in practice.” It would discipline a member for denying the divinity of Christ, but not for covetousness. It would guard its creed, but not its conduct. He wanted a church as vigilant about heresy in practice as about heresy in doctrine, and he said that covetousness fairly proved should exclude a man from communion as certainly as adultery.

What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him? JAMES 2:14

This is a word the church always needs. Right belief that does not issue in right living is not the faith of the New Testament. Finney refused to let anyone hide behind a creed.

Where care is needed

And yet the charge that Finney’s lectures to Christians sounded more like law than gospel was not entirely unfair, and it points to a real weakness in his theology.

The gospel is not only a restoration of the law’s standard. It is the announcement that Christ has done what the law demands, for sinners who could not. The law says do this and live. The gospel says it is finished. Paul’s great argument in Galatians and Romans is that we are justified not by the works of the law but by faith in Christ, whose righteousness is counted as ours. The law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ; it is not the road on which we walk to acceptance with God.

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. ROMANS 8:3–4

Finney, having rejected the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, had difficulty saying this plainly. In his system justification is pardon, granted to those who repent and believe, and continuing acceptance depends on continuing obedience. The gospel becomes chiefly the most powerful motive to keep the law. That leaves the earnest believer, who knows how far short of perfect benevolence he falls, with nowhere to rest but his own consecration. Many who sat under Finney’s preaching found it searching and stirring. Some found it crushing.

Strikingly, Finney’s own conversion shows the better way. On his way to the office that October morning, he wrote, an inward voice asked him whether he was trying to work out a righteousness of his own. He saw that salvation was an offer to be accepted, full and complete, and that he had only to submit himself to the righteousness of God through Christ. That is the gospel, and it is the gospel he preached at his best. His theology did not always keep up with it.

For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. ROMANS 10:3–4

Both, in their places

The right response is to keep both law and gospel, each in its place. Let the law search you, as Finney insisted; do not soften it. Let it drive you to Christ. Then rest in Christ, whose righteousness is yours by faith. And from that rest, walk in love, which is the fulfilling of the law, by the power of the Spirit.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read the Ten Commandments and the two great commandments slowly this week, and let them search you.

2. Ask whether you are more orthodox in notions than in practice. Name one area where your conduct contradicts your creed.

3. When you see your sin clearly, go straight to Christ. Do not try to make up the shortfall with more effort.

4. Ask where you rest when you know you have failed: in your consecration, or in Christ’s righteousness.

5. Choose one practical act of love this week that costs you something, as the fruit, not the root, of your acceptance.

A PRAYER

Lord, Your law is holy, just and good, and I have broken it. Let it search me until I have no excuse left.

Then show me Christ, who fulfilled the law for me and bore its curse in my place. I submit to Your righteousness, not my own.

Keep me from being orthodox in words and heretical in deeds. Let my faith work by love.

And by Your Spirit, fulfil the righteousness of the law in me, that I may walk in love to Your glory. Amen.