“Two Problems With Grace, One Cause Of Both”

Tuesday, March 06, 2018

In the midst of his grander point in one of Sunday's lessons, I found a great deal of wisdom in one of brother Tack's short asides. Here's a quick reminder of his point and then a reflection on it from me:

To deviate to the right side of the path of faithfulness to God is to wander into legalism; the belief that you must be good enough to redeem yourself from sin and its consequences. And to deviate to the left side of the path of faithfulness to God is to wander into libertine religion; the belief that God's grace will freely cover even the sins we commit willingly—that we should continue in sin so that grace may abound.

Of course, neither of these is the God-given, Biblical path to redemption, and the reason they both fall short is a fundamental truth that both of them misunderstand in the same way.

What do both liberalism and legalism have in common? They both underestimate the horror of sin. Legalism purports that sin's contaminating power is small enough that I have the power to overcome it on my own. Liberalism imagines that sin is not really all that bad in the first place, so its consequences toward us are negligible. Both misunderstand the compulsory life-debt incurred by sin and imagine that it is something small.

Which leads to the other problem with both deviations from Biblical truth: by downplaying the gravity of sin, both erroneous philosophies trivialize the grace of God. It's either not necessary at all (the legalist), or it is just a cheap band-aid for a petty problem (the libertine). Neither is the case when we look at what the apostle Paul says about the grace of God.

"...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith." (Rom. 3:23-25)

- Dan Lankford, minister

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