Meditation on the Text of the Week

The Impotence of Law

For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh.
Romans 8:3

Every human being on the planet has at least one common shared meta-view. Everyone believes that things are not as they should be. The world is not perfect. The world is not a utopia. There are some things wrong with the world, or their particular personal existence. There is need. There is lack. There are some things that are not right. (If anyone finds themselves disagreeing with this broad, all encompassing absolute statement, they thereby prove the point.)

Now strenuous debates can be had as to what precisely the lacks and imperfections are. But all alike agree that things are imperfect. Even more debates can be heard over how to put things right. Where the solutions lie is as contentious a matter as where precisely the problems lie.

When people come to focus on "putting things right", or stopping wrongs, or removing evil from self and society, without fail law and laws intrude into the discussion. And this is itself right and proper. For law is intrinsic to the creation itself. Christians believe in a maximal-law-ordered world. For the Christian, however, the wrongs and imperfections of the world are those which run counter to the character of God Himself. Thus, the law that needs to be brought to bear upon these wrongs and imperfections is God's law.

But as our text teaches, law itself is powerless to make people righteous or good. If they are righteous and without sin, they will seamlessly, effortlessly, and naturally keep God's law, with pure intent and motives. But if they are sinful in heart, mind, and will the law is powerless to make them good. It only shows up the degradation of their hearts. The law of God condemns sinful men; it is powerless to make them righteous.

Thus our text tells us that the Law of God was weak because of the raw material with which it had to work--fallen man. You cannot build a suspension bridge out of sand, no matter how many engineering laws, equations, and principles you apply. The laws of engineering serve only to highlight how useless sand is for building bridges. And so it is with God's Law when it works with sinful men and women. It highlights how corrupt we are, but is itself powerless to change us.

The glory of the Gospel is that our Lord recreates those He draws to Himself: He changes their natures from the inside out, so that they can indeed start obeying the Law of God freely and truly.

But outside of Christ, sinful men and women have one recurring "solution" to the imperfections and problems they encounter: law. Rules, regulations, resolutions, agreements, governments, and administrations--countless rules, layers upon layers, each law failing and inadequate, requiring yet more layers of supporting, interpreting, qualifying, and stipulating regulations. Very soon the swelling edifice of human law becomes a bigger problem than the original evil. But law does not change human nature: law is powerless to redeem. In the end, it can only condemn.

Redemptive law is an oxymoron. Nonetheless upon it is heaped the hopes and longings, aspirations and ideals of Unbelieving souls. It always disappoints. It always fails to deliver. In the end law itself becomes the problem, not the solution. "What the Law could not do . . . God did, sending His own Son, . . . in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit." Romans 8:3--4