This quick study on Law and Gospel was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, onApril 29, 2018. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve done this, so let’s review. God speaks in two ways, Law and Gospel. If you want to understand the Scriptures, you need to be able to distinguish between these two ways. And to be able to do this is brought about by the Holy Spirit in combination with experience. Our fourth thesis is this: understanding how to distinguish Law and Gospel provides wonderful insight for understanding all of Holy Scripture correctly. In fact, without this knowledge Scripture is and remains a sealed book.
If you don’t get how to distinguish Law and Gospel, you’ll look at the Word and see nothing but contradictions. Here you’re condemned, there you’re saved. Here Jesus says keep the commandments to be saved, there He says all you need to do is believe in Him. So, how do you make sense of this? Well, if you understand how to distinguish between the two, you will see no contradiction but the Word speaking to different people for different purposes.
It’s not like the Old Testament is a wrathful God, and the New Testament a merciful God. The Law and the Gospel are all over the place, God speaking both ways throughout both. We see that the Law was given to teach us that we can’t be holy. We see the Gospel was given to show us who it is that’s holy and why we need Jesus. The Law is there to bring us to the point of despair, that we should find ourselves in terror over our sin, that we have sinned against a holy God and we justly deserve His punishment. But the Gospel is there to be a medicine, a balm that soothes that woe. The Law makes you concerned over your salvation, but the sweet Gospel delivers it to you through Christ.
These two words must be kept separate. You cannot mingle them. If you do, you hide away all that Christ has done. You make sinners content in their sins or the repentant fear for their lives. This is to tell the unrepentant, and now dead, Charles Manson that Jesus forgives him. It would be to tell the parents of a dying child that it’s their fault for their sins. Either way, you do a great disservice to the person. You preach the Law to Manson until he repents for all of his sins. You preach the Gospel to these hurting parents, reminding them of the promises of Christ. You have to keep these things separate.
The fascinating thing is that when this distinction is rightly made, great things happen. When it’s not, abuses begin to occur. The monks of the Roman Church stressed obedience to the Law, and so it went from bad theology to worse: now your works helped merit salvation. Reformers before Luther stressed the Gospel and not the Law, in reaction to the Roman Church, and no one was able to hold onto the Gospel for the sake of freedom. But when it’s right, it gave light to the Reformation and caused a reclaiming of God’s Word in His churches.
If you cannot keep the words God uses rightly distinguished, you’ll never understand the Word. You’ll never understand what He has said to you. You’ll never understand the faith, and you risk falling away into unbelief. So many people, so many churches, so many denominations, even, have done this. They think they are so under the Law that they are rioting for God’s Law to be American law. Or they’re so under the Gospel that literally anything goes in the church. To keep them separate, however, unveils the Scriptures to see the beauty of God’s Word and how He maintained it for centuries to always be pointing to His Son, Jesus Christ.
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