What is the relationship between law and grace?

Question 7081.

Law and grace are usually discussed as though they were opponents, with the Christian obliged to pick a side. That framing has produced two centuries of unhelpful argument and a great deal of pastoral wreckage. I want to suggest instead that they are two instruments with different jobs, given by the same God, both good at what they were made for and useless at what they were not.

Get the jobs straight and most of the practical questions about the Christian life settle themselves. Get them muddled and you will spend your life oscillating between anxiety and complacency. So let me work through what each does, where they meet, and what the New Testament actually says about the believer’s position.

The verse that sets the terms

John 1:17 is where the discussion of law and grace has to start: for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Two dispensations named in one sentence, and note the verbs. The law was given, handed over as a deposit. Grace came, arriving as a person.

John is not disparaging Moses. Two verses earlier he has quoted the law’s own witness to Jesus. He is marking a transition, and the whole New Testament assumes that transition has occurred. Something has changed in how God administers His relationship with people, and law and grace name the two administrations.

That does not mean there was no grace before Moses or no law after Jesus. Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD, and Christians are under the law of Christ. The distinction concerns what governs, not what exists.

What law is for

Law states a standard and attaches consequences. That is its whole design, and it does the job superbly. It tells me what God requires, it tells me what happens if I fail, and it leaves me in no doubt about which side of the line I am standing on.

What law cannot do is produce the obedience it demands. Paul makes this the centre of his argument: the law is holy, righteous and good, and it is powerless to change a heart, because the problem was never a shortage of information. A speed limit sign has never slowed a single reckless driver who did not wish to be slowed.

So the honest function of law within the scheme of law and grace is diagnostic. Paul says the law was added so that transgression might increase, and by that he means it made sin visible and specific, turning a general uneasiness into a documented case. The mirror does not make you dirty. It stops you pretending.

What grace is for

Grace is God’s unearned favour towards people who have no claim on it. The Greek word charis carries the sense of a gift freely given, and Paul guards its freeness fiercely, because grace that is partly earned is not grace at all but wages under another name.

Grace does two things that law cannot. It pardons, dealing fully with the guilt the law exposed. And it empowers, giving the Spirit who works from inside to produce what the law only ever commanded from outside. Titus says grace trains us, and training is an interior process.

This is why the relationship between law and grace is complementary rather than competitive. Law identifies the disease with precision; grace cures it. Neither can do the other’s work, and asking either to try is where nearly all the trouble starts. I have set out the doctrine itself in the article on what grace is.

Where law and grace meet

They meet at the cross, and this is the heart of the matter. God did not resolve the tension between law and grace by relaxing the law. He resolved it by satisfying the law in the person of His Son, who kept it perfectly and then bore its penalty on behalf of people who had not.

That is why the cross is not a compromise. If God had simply forgiven without payment, the law would have been exposed as an empty threat and God’s justice as negotiable. If He had enforced the law without provision, none of us would be here to discuss it. At Golgotha both were honoured absolutely, and Paul can say that God is just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

So grace does not go round the law. Grace goes through it. Every demand was met, every penalty paid, and the resulting pardon is therefore lawful rather than sentimental. That is a far sturdier comfort than the vague notion that God overlooks things.

Not under law but under grace

Romans 6:14 states the believer’s position: sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. Read the whole sentence, because the two halves are connected. Freedom from law is given as the reason sin will not master us, which is precisely the opposite of what the objectors expect.

How can that be? Because law, for all its holiness, provokes what it forbids in a fallen heart. Paul says sin seized the opportunity through the commandment. Tell a rebel what he may not do and you have given his rebellion an address. Grace works differently: it removes the condemnation that fuelled the resistance and supplies a new nature that wants what God wants.

This is the practical payoff of getting law and grace right. Holiness under law is white knuckled and short lived. Holiness under grace is slow, real and durable, because it grows from gratitude rather than fear. I have written on the abuse of this in the article on antinomianism.

The dispensational shape of the question

Behind this discussion lies a question about how God has administered His dealings with humanity across time. My conviction is that the Mosaic covenant was given to Israel as a national rule of life and has been completed in Jesus, and that the church has never been under it. The article on whether Christians are under the Mosaic law works that through in detail.

Covenant theology takes a different route, treating the moral law as a permanent rule of life for believers under a single covenant of grace administered differently across the ages. I think that reading has to do too much work to keep the Mosaic covenant partly operative, and it tends in practice towards the very confusion of law and grace that Galatians was written to prevent. The comparison is set out in dispensational and covenant theology.

I hold my position with conviction and I hold fellowship with those who differ, because this is not a matter on which salvation turns. It is a matter on which a great deal of Christian freedom and Christian joy turns, which is reason enough to think about it carefully.

Galatians and the cost of confusion

Galatians is the letter where confusing law and grace is treated as a matter of life and death. The teachers troubling those churches were not denying Jesus; they were adding law to grace as a means of standing. Paul’s verdict is that this is a different gospel and that anyone preaching it is under a curse.

His argument is worth following closely. If righteousness came through the law, Christ died for nothing. Adding law to grace does not enrich grace; it cancels it, because the two are alternative answers to the same question. You cannot be justified partly by gift and partly by achievement any more than a debt can be partly forgiven and partly paid by the debtor and still be called forgiven.

The translation notes at Galatians 3 in the NET Bible set out the grammatical questions in that chapter clearly, particularly around works of the law, for anybody who wants to weigh the exegesis themselves.

Three practical tests

Here is how I check my own heart on law and grace. First, what do I do with failure? If I instinctively try to repair my standing by improved performance before I dare come to God, I am functioning under law regardless of what I profess. Grace sends the failure straight to the cross.

Second, how do I regard other believers who differ on secondary matters? Law breeds comparison and inspection, because a system of standing by performance requires a scoreboard. Grace can afford generosity, because my standing is not relative to yours.

Third, what actually motivates my obedience this week? Fear of consequence, or love for the One who took the consequence? Both can produce the same outward act, and only one of them will still be producing it in twenty years.

The law of Christ

Freedom from the Mosaic covenant is not lawlessness, and the New Testament has its own term for what governs us. Paul speaks of fulfilling the law of Christ, and James calls it the perfect law of liberty, which is a striking phrase to set alongside our discussion of law and grace.

This law is more demanding than Sinai in its reach, going after motive and thought rather than only action, and it is administered from within by the Spirit rather than enforced from without by penalty. It is also, in a way that Sinai never was, delightful. The psalmist loved God’s law by anticipation; the believer under grace loves it by possession.

So the answer to the question of what governs the Christian is neither Moses nor nothing. It is Jesus, whose commands are heavier and lighter at once. Heavier because they reach the heart. Lighter because His yoke is easy and He carries the weight with us.

Grace before Sinai and after it

It is worth noticing how much grace there is in the Old Testament, because a crude reading of law and grace can leave the impression that God changed His character somewhere around Matthew. He did not. God clothed Adam and Eve, spared Cain’s life, saved Noah, called Abram out of idolatry and rescued a nation of slaves who had done nothing to earn it.

The exodus is the clearest example. Israel was redeemed first and then given the law at Sinai, which is the order of law and grace throughout Scripture. The commandments open with a statement of what God has already done: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Obedience is asked of a people already rescued.

That order has never changed. What Sinai did was govern the life of a redeemed nation, not the securing of its redemption, and any reading of law and grace that makes Israel’s salvation depend on law keeping has misread Exodus as well as Romans.

Three New Testament pictures

Paul reaches for illustrations when he handles law and grace, and each one repays attention. In Romans 7 he uses marriage: a woman bound to a husband is free to marry another when he dies, and the believer has died to the law through the body of Christ. The bond is not defied; it is ended by death.

In Galatians 4 he uses the household, contrasting a child under guardians with a son who has come of age. Nothing is said against the guardians. The point is developmental, and to insist on remaining under them is to refuse maturity.

In 2 Corinthians 3 he uses Moses’ veil, contrasting a ministry engraved on stone that came with glory and a ministry of the Spirit that comes with greater glory. Both are glorious. One is passing and one abides, and Paul’s argument about law and grace consistently works by comparison rather than by denigration.

Living with people who disagree

Let me say something about temperature, because discussions of law and grace generate more heat than most. I hold my position firmly and I have to remember that sincere believers read Romans and Galatians differently, and that they are not motivated by a desire to enslave anybody.

The Reformed brother who believes the moral law remains the believer’s rule of life is not preaching another gospel, and I should not treat him as though he were. The Galatian error was adding law to grace as a means of justification, which is quite different from disagreeing about the believer’s rule of conduct after justification.

That distinction matters practically. It lets me argue vigorously about the framework of law and grace while sharing communion, sharing platforms and sharing the gospel with people who see the framework differently. Primary and secondary matters need holding apart, and a great deal of unnecessary division has come from refusing to do it.

One sentence to carry away

If I had to compress the whole subject of law and grace into a sentence for somebody with thirty seconds, it would be this. Law tells me what God requires and leaves me guilty; grace pays what I owed and changes what I want. Both are His gifts, and only one of them can save.

That sentence has served me at hospital bedsides and in doorway conversations, and it holds up under pressure because it is not a slogan against anybody. It simply states what each instrument does. Everything else in this article is an expansion of it, and if the expansion ever obscures the sentence, keep the sentence.

What this does to your Bible reading

Getting law and grace straight changes how the whole Bible opens up, and that is perhaps the most practical benefit of all. You stop being puzzled by the Old Testament and start reading it as the necessary first half of a story you already know the ending of. The sacrifices stop being strange and start being moving. The prophets stop being scolds and start being men longing for something they could see coming and could not reach.

It also settles a nervousness many believers carry about the harder parts of the Pentateuch. You no longer have to work out whether a given statute applies to your household, which frees you to ask the better question of what it reveals about God. That is a more fruitful reading and, in my experience, a far more enjoyable one.

And it will change how you hear preaching. You will begin to notice whether a sermon has put the foundation down before it starts building, and whether the obedience it presses is being asked of sons or extracted from servants. That is a useful ear to develop, and once developed it never quite switches off.

So, now what?

Read Galatians in one sitting this week, with a pen, and mark every place Paul contrasts law and grace. It is a short letter and it will do more for your understanding than any commentary, because you will feel the urgency of a man who could see what was at stake.

Then take the one place in your life where you are still working for what you already have, and stop. Not to become careless, but to become free, and to discover that obedience offered by a settled son goes further than obedience extracted from an anxious servant ever could. Which of the two have you been this year?

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie’s The Grace of God remains the most accessible treatment of this subject from a dispensational standpoint, and his Basic Theology covers the same ground within a fuller system. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Grace is older and more demanding but repays the effort, particularly on the distinction between the rule of life under law and under grace. J. Dwight Pentecost handles the covenantal framework in Thy Kingdom Come, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Israelology is valuable for understanding why the Mosaic covenant belongs to Israel’s programme. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology gives a fair statement of the alternative Reformed position on the abiding moral law, and John Walvoord’s work on the millennial kingdom is useful for seeing how law functions in God’s future dealings with Israel.

For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Romans 6:14)