Law and Gospel

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. JOHN 1:17

Luther once said, in effect, that whoever knows how to tell the law from the gospel rightly may thank God and know that he is a theologian. It sounds like a modest skill. It is in fact, he believed, the hardest thing in the Christian life, and the most important. Almost every error in the church, and almost every trouble of the anxious conscience, comes from confusing the two: turning the gospel into a new law, or turning the law into a way of salvation. Get the distinction right, and the whole Bible opens. Get it wrong, and you will either despair or grow proud.

Two words from one God

Both law and gospel are God’s Word, and both run through the whole Bible, Old Testament and New. The law is everything in Scripture that tells us what we must do and be: love God with all your heart, love your neighbour as yourself, do not covet. The gospel is everything that tells us what God has done and gives in Christ: your sins are forgiven, Christ died for you, He was raised for your justification. The law commands; the gospel promises. The law says, do this; the gospel says, it is done.

Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. ROMANS 7:12

Luther never despised the law. It is holy, just and good, because it comes from God and describes a life of love. The problem is not with the law but with us. We cannot keep it, and the law cannot give us the power to keep it. It can show us the way, but it cannot carry us down it.

What the law does

Luther taught that the law has more than one use. In the world it acts like a bridle, restraining wickedness through fear of punishment, so that society can function; this is its civil use. But its chief spiritual work is to be a mirror. It shows us our sin. It strips away our illusions about ourselves, and drives us to despair of our own righteousness. He calls this its proper, theological work.

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

In his Easter sermon, meditating on Paul’s words that the strength of sin is the law, Luther puts it briefly: “The more clearly we understand the law, the more sin oppresses and stings us.” That is not a failure of the law. It is the law doing its job. A man who does not know he is ill will never go to the physician. The law makes us know it.

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

The letter and the Spirit

Luther’s Pentecost sermon on the office of the Holy Spirit develops this with great beauty. Pentecost, he points out, was the Jewish feast that remembered the giving of the law at Sinai, fifty days after the Passover. On the Christian Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, God gave a different kind of law: not written on stone, but written by the Spirit on the heart. The written law, Luther says, stays outside us. It commands, but the heart resents it, and at best it produces fearful, outward obedience. He concludes:

“Hence we see that the Law, as long as it is merely written, a Law in letters, makes no one righteous, for it enters not the heart.”

The Spirit does what the letter cannot. Through the preaching of Christ, He writes on the heart, sets it on fire, and makes a new person who loves God and gladly does His will. Luther insists that this is the real difference between the two: not that the gospel asks less, but that the gospel gives what the law demands.

Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. 2 CORINTHIANS 3:6

I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. JEREMIAH 31:33

This is why, in the same sermon, Luther says that preaching the law alone accomplishes nothing: “For, briefly, there must first be love in the heart, otherwise nothing is accomplished in keeping the Law.” And love comes only from the Spirit, through the gospel.

Keeping them distinct

So the preacher, and every Christian, must learn to use the right word at the right time. To the proud and careless, speak the law, that they may see their need. To the broken and terrified, speak the gospel, and speak nothing else. It is cruel to lay the law on a conscience already crushed, and foolish to offer cheap comfort to someone who is not yet sorry. Luther saw both mistakes all around him. Medieval preaching, he believed, had too often turned Christ into a new Moses, a stern judge whose commands must be satisfied. Some of his own followers, on the other hand, began to preach grace to people who had never felt their sin.

For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. ROMANS 10:4

An honest caution

Luther’s language here is sometimes so bold that it can mislead. In the Pentecost sermon he says that the Holy Spirit comes to abolish the letter of the law, and that Christians are not to be governed by laws. Read alone, such phrases could suggest that the commandments no longer matter for believers. That is not what Luther meant, and he had to fight it in his own lifetime. In the late 1530s his former student Johann Agricola began to teach that the law should not be preached in the church at all, and Luther opposed him firmly. The Christian, he insisted, is still a sinner as well as righteous, and the old Adam still needs the law’s mirror and the law’s bridle. His own catechism begins with the Ten Commandments.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. ROMANS 6:1–2

Lutheran and Reformed teachers after him debated whether the law also has a third use, as a guide for the believer’s grateful obedience. Whatever one’s view, both sides agree on the heart of the matter. The law cannot justify, and it is not the gospel. But the gospel does not abolish the good will of God. It writes it on the heart.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 as a mirror. Which one shows you most clearly your need of Christ?

2. Then read Romans 8:1–4 and hear the gospel spoken directly to that need.

3. Notice whether you tend to hear the gospel as a new set of demands. Ask God to let you hear it as good news.

4. If you teach or lead others, consider whether you speak more law or more gospel, and whether you speak the right word to the right person.

5. Pray for the Spirit to write God’s law on your heart, so that you do gladly what you once did only from fear.

A PRAYER

Holy Father, Your law is holy and just and good, and it shows me how far I have fallen short.

Thank You that You have not left me with the letter that kills, but have given me Your Spirit who gives life.

Teach me to hear Your law as a mirror that drives me to Christ, and Your gospel as the promise that rests in Him.

Write Your will upon my heart, and let me love what You command, for the sake of Jesus Christ, the end of the law for all who believe. Amen.