Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11089 The law of Christ is the phrase Paul uses when he wants to say that a believer released from the Mosaic covenant is not therefore released from moral obligation. It appears in Galatians 6:2 and again, in a slightly different form, in 1 Corinthians 9:21, where Paul describes himself as not being outside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have never met a Christian who was entirely free of it, including the one writing this. We know that we are saved by grace, we say…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4145. The liberty of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is the freedom Paul says belongs to everyone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, a freedom from the old covenant’s condemning, veiling, life-denying power, and from the despair of trying to please God through a law that could only ever expose sin without removing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4141. Receiving the Spirit by faith is the very first argument Paul reaches for when he wants to correct the Galatian churches, and he reaches for it because it settles the whole controversy in one stroke. “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by…
Reading Time: 17 minutesQuestion 07048 The question of whether the Christian is under the Mosaic Law is one of the most practical questions in the whole of Christian doctrine, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. Whole denominations have been formed on particular answers to it, Christian consciences have been weighed down or liberated by particular readings of…