Law and Gospel: A Debate Starts Here

John 1: 16                                           February 5, 2021

¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ ²⁰He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ ²¹And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the prophet?’ He answered, ‘No.’ ²²Then they said to him, ‘Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ ²³He said,
‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
“Make straight the way of the Lord” ’,
as the prophet Isaiah said.

24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. ²⁵They asked him, ‘Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?’ ²⁶John answered them, ‘I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, ²⁷the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’ ²⁸This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

            Law versus Grace, the no-holds-barred wrestling championship of the Bible!  Moses versus Jesus, the champions standing in for each.  Well, that is how it will develop.  Paul has some complicated passages dealing with the interrelationship between these two Summaries.  Because that is what they are.  Law and Grace (and truth) are code words, technobabble, that summarize huge concepts in God’s Word. 

            If this all seems really scary, it does not have to be, if we can get a handle on what each one means.  These distinctions are found in the broadest divisions of the Bible.

            Think Old Testament and New Testament.  The central figures around whom each are organized are Moses and Jesus.  Jesus is the easier one to understand, the whole gospel is about him.  He is the Reason for our Religion.  But unlike creation, which came ‘ex nihilo’, out of nothing, Christianity came out of something.

            It comes out of Judaism, the Jewish faith.  Jesus was Jewish.  Where the structures of our faith, as Christians, come out of the New Testament, on what Jesus taught us, on how we apply those teachings to our lives, those of the Jewish faith are based on the Law of Moses.  Also called the Torah, these are the first five books of the Bible.  Their authorship is traditionally assigned to Moses, but that opens up a whole other set of discussions. 

            Those five books are organized around the founding event of the establishment of the People of God, the Israelites, the Jews as a nation, that event being the Exodus.  What began as a slave caste in Egypt ended up as an organized nation about to take possession of the Land that God promised to them.  It begins with the history of and the founding of the Chosen People when Abraham was Chosen, and it concludes with an entire book laid out in the formula of an ancient covenant, Deuteronomy.

            This is the Law.  It includes the usual ‘do’s and don’t’s’ but also has municipal codes, rules of religious conduct, of religious holidays, an extended ‘holy architecture’ of the tabernacle where God was to be worshipped, and it tells the history of the people.  The ‘Law’ is far more inclusive than just what is legal and what is illegal.  It lays out the story of God and the People who came into covenant with each other, a covenant marked by a law set by God, known to us in its most basic form as the Ten Commandments.

            The Law.  Thoroughly confused yet?  It is what Jesus and both John’s, the Narrator and the Baptizer, came out of.  The work of Jesus is the progression of God’s plan from the Law to the other term of interest, Grace.

            What then is Grace?  And why do I separate it from Truth in this interpretation?  Honestly, Grace is easier to hang a definition on than Truth.  The Truth comes in the basic structure of the Covenant behind both Law and Grace.  “I shall be Your God, and You shall be My People.”  That’s in Deuteronomy somewhere.  Like I said, Leviticus (as I felt the shame to look it up), Leviticus 26:12.  The purpose of the Covenant has not changed, but the mechanism has.

            It seems to me that the popular understanding of the Law among Christians is ‘the carrot and the stick’.  God offered the carrot when they behaved and the stick when they did not.  The carrot was prosperity in the land their God had given them.  The stick was foreigners coming in and taking their stuff, including their freedom and independence.

            What is Grace?  Well, John (the Narrator) is holding it in contrast to Law, coming through Jesus.  Grace comes to us by what Jesus has done for us by His death and resurrection, carrying out the Plan of God that we would be made right with our Lord, believing in Him and receiving eternal life.  This gospel speaks of this grace that comes in Jesus.  And it is no longer the carrot and the stick, it is a free gift of God.

            Notice the verb distinction.  The Law was given (by God) through Moses, Grace and Truth came through Jesus Christ.  First, the Law was given by God, then God came in the form of the Word made flesh.

            Final note, this is the first time Jesus is explicitly named in John’s Gospel.