The Law and Judgement

The purpose of law
The Sermon on the Mount as a kind of 'new law', like the
old law, has two divine purposes ... First, it shows the
non-Christian that he cannot please God by himself (because
he cannot obey the law) and so directs him to Christ to be
justified. Secondly, it shows the Christian who has been
to Christ for justification how to live so as to please
God. More simply, as both the Reformers and the Puritans
used to summarize it, the law sends us to Christ to be
justified, and Christ sends us back to the law to be
sanctified...

Paul's attitude to the law
From Romans 7 we may summarize three possible attitudes to
the law, the first two of which Paul rejects, and the third
of which he commends. We might call them 'legalism',
'antinomianism' and 'law-fulfilling freedom'. *Legalists*
are 'under the law' and in bondage to it. They imagine
that their relationship to God depends on their obedience
to the law, and they are seeking to be both justified and
sanctified by it. But they are crushed by the law's
inability to save them. *Antimonians* (or libertines) go
to the opposite extreme. Blaming the law for their
problems, they reject it altogether, and claim to be rid of
all obligation to its demands. They have turned liberty
into licence. *Law-fulfilling free people* preserve the
balance. They rejoice both in their freedom from the law
for justification and sanctification, and in their freedom
to fulfil it. They delight in the law as the revelation of
God's will (verse 22), but recognize that the power to
fulfil it in not in the law but in the Spirit. Thus
legalists fear the law and are in bondage to it.
Antimonians hate the law and repudiate it. Law-abiding
free people love the law and fulfil it.

--From "The Message of Romans" (The Bible Speaks Today
series: Leicester: IVP, 1994), p. 191.

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--Excerpted from "Authentic Christianity", p. 185, by
permission of InterVarsity Press.