Law and Gospel

Galatians 3:24 is the anchor for this lesson because all three traditions you are about to meet build on it, and all three read it a little differently. Paul is arguing with people who want Gentile Christians circumcised and brought under the law of Moses. His reply is a history. The promise came to Abraham first; the law came 430 years later and cannot cancel it (3:17); the law was added because of transgressions, until the seed should come (3:19); before faith came we were held in custody under the law (3:23); so the law became our guardian to lead us to Christ (3:24); now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian (3:25).

The word guardian translates paidagogos, and the picture is exact. In a Greek or Roman household of means the paidagogos was a slave, often an older man, who took charge of a boy from about the age of six until adolescence. He walked him to school and home again, carried his things, watched his manners and punished his faults. He was not the teacher. He was the supervision that kept a child safe and in order until the child came of age. Then the boy left the paidagogos behind, not because the man had been bad but because his job was done. The KJV's schoolmaster is a well-known rendering and a misleading one; custodian or guardian is nearer.

Two readings of the verse follow from that picture, and you will hear both from pulpits. On the first, Paul is speaking of history: Israel was under the law's custody from Sinai until Christ, and now that Christ has come the era of the law's custody is over. The little preposition eis then means until Christ. On the second, Paul is also describing what the law does in a person: it shuts him up under sin, exposes him, gives him no rest, and so drives him to Christ, which is how the KJV and BSB take eis, to bring us to Christ. Luther in his lectures on Galatians of 1535 read the passage both ways at once, insisting that the time of the law recurs in the conscience of each believer. Many modern commentators lean to the historical reading. The verse does not by itself settle how the law should sound in a Christian sermon, and that is the question this lesson is about.

First, what is settled, because a great deal is and the preacher should say so. Nobody is justified by works of the law (Galatians 2:16; Romans 3:20). The law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good (Romans 7:12). Faith does not nullify the law; we uphold the law (Romans 3:31). Christ is the end of the law, to bring righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:4). And the preacher must know, at every point in a sermon, whether he is telling people what they must do or telling them what God has done, because those two words do different things to a human being. Every tradition in this lesson agrees on all of that. They divide over the order of the two words, their proportion, and what the law is for in the life of someone already justified.

For Lutherans the distinction between law and gospel is not one doctrine among others but the skill on which right preaching depends. Luther preached on Galatians 3:23-29 on New Year's Day 1532 under the title of how law and gospel are to be thoroughly distinguished, and said there, in substance, that whoever has mastered the art of distinguishing them should be put at the head and called a doctor of scripture. The law is the word that commands, demands and accuses; the gospel is the word that promises, gives and forgives. Both are God's word. Neither may be turned into the other. When the gospel is preached as a new law, a set of conditions to be met before grace is given, the terrified conscience is left with nowhere to go. When the law is preached as if it were good news, a programme of improvement that the hearer can carry out, the secure sinner is never brought to the end of himself.

The Lutheran confessions put this into a sentence that the tradition repeats as a watchword. Melanchthon's Apology of the Augsburg Confession, of 1531, says in its fourth article that the law always accuses, lex semper accusat. The point is not that the law is evil, or that it has stopped telling the truth about what God wants. It is that a sinner who hears the law, any sinner, including a baptised one, hears in it a demand he has not met. The Formula of Concord of 1577 then gave the distinction its own article, the fifth, defining the law properly as the teaching that shows what is right and pleasing to God and rebukes all sin, and the gospel properly as the teaching of what a sinner should believe in order to receive forgiveness, which is that Christ has paid for all sins. The sixth article, against those who said the law has no place among Christians at all, affirmed a third use of the law for the regenerate: the law is to be preached to believers too, as a fixed rule for their life, and because the old Adam still clings to them.

The classic statement for preachers is by C. F. W. Walther, the first president of what became the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. In a series of evening lectures to his students at Concordia Seminary in St Louis in 1884 and 1885, published in German in 1897 and in English in 1929 as The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, he laid out twenty-five theses. Early among them he claims that rightly distinguishing law and gospel is the most difficult and the highest art of the Christian, which the Holy Spirit alone teaches in the school of experience, and that without the distinction scripture remains a sealed book. Most of the remaining theses are diagnoses, each beginning with the phrase that the word of God is not rightly divided when the preacher does a particular thing: when he preaches the law to the terrified and the gospel to the secure, when he makes faith itself a work, when he makes contrition a cause of forgiveness alongside faith, when he mixes the two so that neither is heard. The last thesis says the word is not rightly divided when the preacher does not let the gospel predominate in his teaching.

Here is how that shapes a sermon. The preacher reads his congregation as well as his text. To the secure, the comfortable, the self-justifying, he preaches the law in its full severity, not as advice but as God's verdict, so that every mouth may be silenced (Romans 3:19). To the terrified, the bruised, the person who already knows he is lost, he preaches the gospel without condition, and he does not make the comfort wait on the hearer's sorrow being deep enough. The gospel is not explained so much as declared. Gerhard Forde, in Theology Is for Proclamation (1990), argued that the sermon's decisive moment is when the preacher stops talking about God and speaks for him, in the first person and the present tense: your sins are forgiven, for Christ's sake. That is what absolution sounds like, and on the Lutheran view the sermon should sound like it. The texts the tradition leans on are not marginal ones. Romans 3:19-24, where the law silences and grace justifies freely. Romans 7, where the law, holy as it is, kills. 2 Corinthians 3:6, the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. And this one: the law as guardian until Christ.

Two cautions keep the Lutheran view from being caricatured. First, it is not antinomian. Luther wrote against Johann Agricola, who taught in the late 1530s that the law should not be preached to Christians at all, and the Formula's sixth article was written to close that door. Good works are necessary and follow faith as fruit follows a good tree. Second, it is not quietist. What the Lutheran insists on is the source of the new obedience, not its absence: the gospel produces it, and the law, though it directs, cannot. Pressing the law on a Christian as the engine of growth gets, on this view, either despair or pride, and never the free, glad obedience the New Testament describes.

Calvin agreed with Luther about justification without reservation, and he agreed that the law accuses. In the Institutes, at book two, chapter seven, he set out three uses of the law. The first is a mirror, showing us our sin and driving us to seek grace. The second restrains the wicked by fear of punishment, which protects the community and prepares some for grace. The third, which Calvin at 2.7.12 called the principal use, belongs to believers in whose hearts the Spirit already lives and reigns: the law teaches them more thoroughly each day what the Lord's will is, and it exhorts them, stirring them up from sloth like a whip on a lazy animal. For Calvin, the law in the hand of the Redeemer is not the covenant of works that condemns; it is the instruction of a Father to children who already belong to him.

The Reformed confessions built that into their structure, and the structure itself preaches. The Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 has three parts: our misery, our deliverance and our gratitude. The law appears near the start, where the catechism asks how you know your misery and answers that you know it from the law of God. But the Ten Commandments are expounded in full in the third part, under gratitude, as the shape of the life of a person who has been delivered. That is the third use as a teaching order: law that exposes, gospel that saves, law again as the pattern of thankful obedience. The Westminster Confession of 1646, at chapter nineteen, says that believers are not under the law as a covenant of works, to be justified or condemned by it, and that it is nevertheless of great use to them as a rule of life, informing them of the will of God and their duty.

The tradition's preaching followed the confessions. William Perkins, in The Art of Prophesying of 1592, taught that the preacher must first decide whether a passage is law or gospel, and then apply it according to the kind of hearer in front of him, and he described seven conditions of hearers, from the ignorant and unteachable to the believer and the backslider, each needing a different mix. The law, preached to an unhumbled sinner, prepares; the gospel, preached to the humbled, comforts; and the law, preached to the believer, directs and is now sweet, because it is no longer a covenant he must keep to live. The Puritan sermon, with its doctrine and its uses, the uses of instruction, reproof, exhortation and comfort, is the third use in homiletic form. The fourth module of this track takes that plain style apart in detail.

Reformed preachers have also had their own battle on the other flank, and it shows they feared legalism as much as Lutherans did. In the Church of Scotland in the early eighteenth century, the presbytery of Auchterarder required candidates for ministry to affirm that it is not sound to teach that we must forsake sin in order to come to Christ. The General Assembly condemned that statement in 1717. In 1718 James Hog republished an old book, The Marrow of Modern Divinity of 1645, which set out the free offer of the gospel to sinners as sinners; the Assembly condemned the book in 1720, and a group of ministers, among them Thomas Boston and Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, protested. The Marrow controversy was a fight within Reformed theology over whether the preacher may offer Christ freely before the hearer shows evidence of repentance. Sinclair Ferguson's The Whole Christ (2016) retold it for modern preachers, arguing that legalism and antinomianism grow from the same root, a failure to see the grace of God in the giving of the law itself.

Here is how that shapes a sermon. The Reformed preacher reads the commands of scripture, Old Testament and New, as the good word of a saving God to his people, and he preaches them with confidence. He notes that the Ten Commandments begin with a redemption: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Exodus 20:2), and only then do they command. He grounds every imperative in what God has done, because that is the grammar of the law itself, and then he presses the imperative concretely, expecting the Spirit to use it. His texts are Psalm 19:7, the law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; Psalm 119:97, oh, how I love your law; the promise of Jeremiah 31:33 that God will write his law on his people's hearts; Ezekiel 36:27, that he will put his Spirit within them and cause them to walk in his statutes; Romans 8:4, the righteous standard of the law fulfilled in those who walk by the Spirit; and Paul's quotation of the fifth commandment, with its promise, to Christian children in Ephesians 6:2-3. The law has not been retired. It has been rehoused, in the heart of a forgiven people.

John Wesley belongs in this lesson not as a footnote to the other two but because the Methodist revival produced a third way of holding law and gospel together in the pulpit, and because that way shaped Methodist, Holiness and much Pentecostal preaching across the world. Wesley held justification by faith alone, and the assurance of it came to him at a meeting in Aldersgate Street on 24 May 1738, while someone was reading Luther's preface to Romans, the evening his heart was strangely warmed. What he refused was any account of the gospel that made the law unnecessary afterward.

In his sermon on The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law, Wesley named three uses of his own. The first is to convince the world of sin, to slay the sinner's confidence in himself. The second is to bring him to Christ, that he may live. The third is to keep him alive, by showing the believer the sin that remains and the holiness still to be attained, and so keeping him close to Christ. He said that the law and Christ are always sending the believer to each other, the law to Christ and Christ back to the law, and that he could no more do without the law for a moment than he could do without Christ. Two further sermons, on The Law Established through Faith, preached from Romans 3:31, argued that one way of making void the law is to preach faith as if it superseded the need for holiness, and that the gospel establishes the law by producing the love that fulfils it.

The most distinctive thing Wesley said about law and gospel is in his fifth discourse on the Sermon on the Mount. There he argued that the same words can be law or gospel depending on how they are heard, and that the law continually points us to the gospel while the gospel continually leads us to a more exact fulfilling of the law. And he said that every command in holy writ is only a covered promise. When God says you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, he is also saying that he will make you able to. The command Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48) is, read this way, a promise of what grace will do, and the preacher should preach it as both. 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24 is the shape of it: may God sanctify you completely, and the One who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

Wesley also left explicit instruction about the preaching itself. In a letter of 1751, usually printed as his Letter on Preaching Christ, he defined preaching the gospel as declaring the love of God to sinners and the life, death, resurrection and intercession of Christ, and preaching the law as explaining and enforcing the commands of Christ, which he took to be summed up in the Sermon on the Mount. He then described what he thought the right method was in a new place: a general declaration of God's love and willingness to save, then the law preached as closely and searchingly as possible, with the gospel intermixed, and then, as hearers were convinced, more and more of the gospel, still without dropping the law. And he complained about preachers he called gospel preachers, who preached only the promises and the love of Christ, and whose hearers, he said, grew unable to bear plain practical preaching at all.

Here is how that shapes a sermon. The Wesleyan preacher expects things to happen to people. He preaches the law to awaken, because many in a congregation are asleep. He preaches Christ freely to those who are awakened, and expects them to come, which is one root of the invitation at the end of the evangelical sermon. And he preaches the commands to believers as invitations into a holiness that grace makes possible, with a confidence about change that neither of the other traditions quite shares. Its texts are Romans 3:31; Matthew 5-7 read whole; 1 John 5:3, that his commandments are not burdensome; and Deuteronomy 30:6 and Ezekiel 36:27, where the God who commands also promises to give the heart that obeys. And the Wesleyan pulpit was never meant to stand alone. The class meeting, where believers met weekly in small groups to give account of their souls, was where the law preached on Sunday was worked out on Monday.

These three accounts are not three flavours of the same thing. Each thinks the others get something important wrong, and you should be able to state their objections and their replies in a form each would accept.

Reformed and Wesleyan writers press the Lutheran account at the same point. If the law always accuses, what positive work do the hundreds of commands in the New Testament do? Paul fills whole chapters with instruction to believers, and he does not seem to think he is merely exposing their sin. A sermon shaped by law-then-gospel, they say, can leave a congregation forgiven every week and instructed in nothing, and the risk that worried Luther about Agricola is not imaginary. Lutherans reply that the law always accuses not because it has changed but because the hearer has not finished changing, that the Formula of Concord already provides for the law to instruct believers, and that the New Testament's commands are always given inside the gospel and not as its replacement. They add that what looks like a lack of instruction is often a refusal to make instruction the engine of growth, which is exactly the point.

Lutheran and Wesleyan writers press the Reformed account in different ways. Lutherans ask whether calling the guiding use the law's principal use puts the believer back under the pressure the gospel removed, so that the sermon slides into how-to advice and the conscience is never allowed to rest; Gerhard Forde was among those who argued that any third use, including the one in the Formula, risks this. Wesleyans ask whether the Reformed expectation of progress that is real but always partial expects too little of grace. The Reformed reply to the first that the law in the hand of Christ is not the covenant of works, that the confessions explicitly say so, and that Psalm 119 is not the prayer of a man under pressure. They reply to the second that Philippians 3:12, not that I have already obtained all this, is the apostle's own testimony, and that a doctrine which expects arrival in this life sets believers up for pretence or despair.

Lutheran and Reformed writers press the Wesleyan account together. Both ask whether Wesley's expectation of perfect love turns the believer's gaze inward, to measure his own progress, instead of outward to Christ, and both suspect his account of grace gives the human will a part in salvation that their confessions deny. Wesleyans reply that Wesley defined the sin perfect love excludes narrowly, as a voluntary transgression of a known law, and denied that it removed ignorance, mistake or temptation; that the covered promise directs the gaze to God's faithfulness, not to the self; and that the grace which enables a response is itself God's gift from first to last. They add that Romans 6, Romans 8 and 1 John read like the expectation of real victory, and that a theology which explains failure more fluently than it expects change has its own pastoral cost.

Settled, among all three. The law is not the ground of anyone's justification. It is God's holy word and is to be preached. The gospel is God's free gift in Christ and is to be preached as a gift, not as a reward for sufficient sorrow. A preacher must know, sentence by sentence, whether he is demanding or giving. And the life of a forgiven person is meant to be a changed life. Not settled: whether the law's chief use for a believer is to guide or to keep driving him back to Christ; whether a believer hears the law first as accusation or first as instruction; and how much change to expect this side of glory. These three traditions have argued about those questions for centuries with open Bibles, and none of them has persuaded the others. The question for you is not which one sounds most like your church. It is whether you can preach your own tradition's account while describing the others in a way their own preachers would recognise.

Take your passage, your main idea and whatever outline you have so far. You will need a notebook, two pens of different colours if you have them, and the free tools on your phone.

First, read your passage and mark every sentence in it that tells someone what to do, and every sentence that tells what God has done or promised. Then do the same with your main idea and your outline. Many sermons say far more of one than the passage does. Write down the proportion in your passage and the proportion in your sermon, and if they are very different, ask yourself why.

Second, write three short paragraphs, each of which brings the main demand of your passage to your hearers in the way one tradition would. The Lutheran paragraph lets the demand expose the hearer's failure and then declares forgiveness in the first person and present tense: for Christ's sake your sins are forgiven. The Reformed paragraph grounds the demand in what God has already done, with a because and a therefore, and then makes the demand specific enough to obey this week. The Wesleyan paragraph presents the demand as a covered promise, says plainly what God has promised to do in those who trust him, and invites the hearer to trust him for it now.

Third, read all three aloud. Note which one your congregation would recognise as their own, and which one you find hardest to say with conviction. Then decide, on purpose, which shape your sermon will take, and write one sentence explaining why your passage suits it. Whatever you decide, check one thing before you move on: that a hearer who is crushed by his sin will hear somewhere in your sermon that Christ has dealt with it, and that a hearer who is comfortable in his sin will hear somewhere that God has a claim on him. Every tradition in this lesson requires both.