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Tag Archives: legalism

Thomas Shepherd, Is Your Obedience “Evangelical” or “Legal”

03 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Grace

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Evangelical Obedience, Grace, legalism, Parable of the Ten Virgins, Thomas Shepherd

In The Parable of the Ten Virgin, Thomas Shepherd asks the question of  how to discern whether we are “married to the law instead of to Christ.” The understanding of this question gets to the matter of what the Puritans called “evangelical obedience.”  This concept seems paradoxical: if we are saved by grace, and if we are not under the law but under grace (Rom. 6:14), then why would one such as Shepherd write, “When I speak of being married to the law instead of Christ, I do not hereby exempt yourselves from obedient to the law after you are in Christ?” (36)

He starts with the question of how do we respond when we are tempted and fall into sin. First, assume you have been troubled by sin, “what hath cheered thee?” How do you find relief for a subjective sense for the damage of sin. (36-37) 

Let us say you think to yourself, “”I have forsaken them, and cast out Jonah, and there has been a calm.” If so, you are reliant upon the law for your peace of mind.

Or if you fall into sin again, how do you calm your conscience? “I have repented and been sorry for them and purposed to do no more.” But that still is not reliance upon Christ, “This is the life of the law still.”

What if the sin has been unshakeable, habitual, “you find sins prevailing againt you, and you cannot part with them”?  Well, my “desire is good” and my heart has been resolved against them. “This desire is but a work of the law.” 

What if you say, “I have trusted Christ.” The answer, “You have done it.”

The proposition, “As obedience to the law done by the power of Christ an evangelical work, so to perform any evangelical work from a man’s self is a legal work.” (37)

This obviously is not a comprehensive answer, but it does put us in the right direction.

1 Kings 9 & the Definition of Legalism

16 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by memoirandremains in 1 Kings, Uncategorized

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1 Kings 9, Ephesians 2, John 15, legalism, Sinclair Ferguson

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Sinclair Ferguson in his book The Whole Christ has an extremely useful explanation of “legalism”:

Gerhardus Vos well expresses this in another context:

Legalism is a peculiar kind of submission to God’s law, something that no longer feels the personal divine touch in the rule it submits to.

Legal is simply separating the law of God from the person of God. Eve sees God’s law, but she has lost sight of the true God himself. Thus, abstracting his law form his loving and generous person, she was deceived into “hearing” law only as a negative deprivation and not as the wisdom of a heavenly Father….Thus, the essence of legalism is rooted not merely in our view of the law as such but in a distorted view of God as the giver of his law.

The Whole Christ, p. 83. Now see how this is shown in God’s appearance to Solomon:

1 Kings 9:1–9 (ESV)

9 As soon as Solomon had finished building the house of the Lord and the king’s house and all that Solomon desired to build, 2 the Lord appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon. 3 And the Lord said to him, “I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you have made before me. I have consecrated this house that you have built, by putting my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time. 4 And as for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my rules, 5 then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father, saying, ‘You shall not lack a man on the throne of Israel.’

This much could be read as a straight “legal” contract: If do X, then I will do Y. A quick reading could lead one to abstract God’s law from God’s person. But we when consider the negative clause in this covenant, we will see something very telling:

6 But if you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, 7 then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight, and Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples. 8 And this house will become a heap of ruins. Everyone passing by it will be astonished and will hiss, and they will say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?’ 9 Then they will say, ‘Because they abandoned the Lord their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore the Lord has brought all this disaster on them.’ ”

If you disobey my law, you will necessarily worship other gods.  We somehow think that God’s law can be abstracted and separated as just moral commands. Either we can have God without having his law; or we cannot disobey his law and yet not be following after other gods. The worship of God, the obedience to God, the love of God, all come at once or not at all. This paralleled in the New Testament:

Ephesians 2:8–10 (ESV)

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

We are saved by grace without works, so that we may live in a particular manner. We are not saved by good works; we saved by being in Christ. But, being in Christ necessitates good works, just as living necessitates breathing:

John 15:10 (ESV)

10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

The Relgion of Mrs. Clenham Part 2

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by memoirandremains in Charles Dickens, Literature, Uncategorized

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Charles Dickins, legalism, Literature, Little Dorritt, Mrs. Clenham

The previous post in this series concerning Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit may be found here.

Arthur Clenham comes home to the dismal, dark house of his childhood. The only decorations were framed  images of the Plagues of Egypt.  He and his father have in China on business for 20 years. His father died and has returned to London and the house of his bed ridden mother:

‘I am able,’ said Mrs Clennam, with a slight motion of her worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a tall writing cabinet close shut up, ‘I am able to attend to my business duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege. But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?’ ‘Yes, mother.’ ‘Does it snow?’ ‘Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?’ ‘All seasons are alike to me,’ she returned, with a grim kind of luxuriousness. ‘I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here. The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.’ With her cold grey eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the folds of her stony head-dress,—her being beyond the reach of the seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all changing emotions.

At this place we see more evidence the grim legalism of Mrs. Clenham. The Plagues are not seen from the perspective of God’s people as a glorious rescue. She sees them from the perspective of the judged slave masters, “The old articles of furniture were in their old places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and smoke plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls.” The Egyptians were plagued with flies; the flies are in this dark house ( darkness was also a plague).

She revels in her misery.  She bears her place with a false  humility: “a grim kind of luxuriousness.”

She is a sort of Medusa although her head is the one of stone.

The Religion of Mrs. Clenham, Part 1

28 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by memoirandremains in Charles Dickens

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Charles Dickens, Clenham, legalism, Literature, Little Dorrit

Mrs. Clenham broods over Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit with her brutal Christless, graceless religion. Her heretical “Christianity” in the end is spurs the trouble which the Christianity of Amy Dorrit (“Little Dorrit”) resolves.

We are introduced to the religion through its effect upon her son Arthur. He has just returned from 20 years in China. It is Sunday morning and we hear the bells through his ears:

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won’t come, they won’t come, they won’t come! At the five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair. 

‘Thank Heaven!’ said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped. But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on. ‘Heaven forgive me,’ said he, ‘and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!’

Arthur sees the paradox of his response: he thanks “heaven” that the call to church has ended; then he begs pardon that he hates the call.

The churches themselves abandon hope and continue in despair.

Dickens will later make plain that it is not Christ but this distortion which earns the rebuke. 

But what is this distortion; how was Clenham “trained” so?

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was going to Perdition?—a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy—and which, for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 & 7. 

We see first it is a religion of judgment of condemnation without redemption; justice without mercy. 

The Scripture tells us to forgive as we have been forgiven. Ephesians 4:32. But there is no forgiveness in Mrs. Clenham nor her religion.

Dickens continues:

There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. 

There was the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible—bound, like her own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards, with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves—as if it, of all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse. 

There was the resentful Sunday of a little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays, all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing before him.

Dickens lays the charge upon “her own construction” of the Bible. He charges construction with being only legal demands which could not be met and could not be escaped.

Moreover, it was not judgment on sin but on happiness and love!

as if it, of all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse

These are no sin – quite the contrary- but these are condemned by Mrs. Clenham’s religion.

Thus, Arthur had

no more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters

Her sin was condemned by Jesus in Luke 11:52:

“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”

Not only did Mrs. Clenham not convey true knowledge; she used the Bible to prevent such knowledge.

The Paradox of Grace

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Forgiveness, Grace, Leviticus, Uncategorized

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Christ is All, Grace, Henry Law, legalism, Repentance, Sin

It is absolutely true that a work of grace changes the human heart; that grace leads to holiness. Yet, such one in whom grace truly works never trusts that change as a basis for redemption. The more the heart and life are transformed, the more clearly one sees the need for Christ’s merit:

“Again, a trust in change of life is evidence of unchanged heart. The Spirit leads not to such rotten ground. He never prompts such arrogant conceits. The saintliest man increasingly sees evil cleaving, as the bark to trees—as feathers to the fowl. He knows no hope, but Jesus’ life, and Jesus’ death. This is the fire, which God prescribes. And this alone the child of God will bring”

Henry Law “Christ is all’.”

Not a greater enemy

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Uncategorized, William Romaine

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A Treatise Upon a Life of Faith, Faith, faith, Grace, legalism, Uncategorized, William Romaine

“The glory of the incarnate God, and his infinite sufficiency to save, have not a- greater enemy than a legal spirit, and therefore I have enlarged upon this point, that believers might be convinced from the word of God that they are saved from the law. They will never live comfortably till they see the law dead and buried, and then willingly give up themselves to be espoused to Christ, who will make them free indeed”

William Romaine “Treatise upon the life of faith.” Thomas T. Stiles.

True Godward Obedience Springs From Love

02 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by memoirandremains in Deuteronomy, John, Obedience

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Deuteronomy, Jesus, John, law, legalism, love, Love, Moses, Obedience

In closing his charge to Israel, Moses says:

15 “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.
16 If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

Deut. 30:15-16.
Jesus in giving closing instructions to his disciples says:

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

John 14:15. And:

9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.
10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

John 15:9-11.

Love and obedience do not stand in opposition but rather describe the same heart in action. Note that such an understanding protects against legalism, because God neither seeks nor needs bare behavior. Rather God engenders love which flows out in concrete expression of love.

A husband who “loved” but gave no concrete expression would not love his wife in any meaningful way. Likewise flowers given from a constrained duty would mean nothing good. But a child’s bundle of flowering weeds will cheer her Mother’s heart.

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