A Question: “If it can’t save us, why did God give the Law?”
- Romans 3:19-20.
- To clarify as we begin: when Paul here speaks of the Law, he has in mind the Mosaic Law given to Israel by God.
- By extension, we could make similar point about the truth of God generally.
- The Law does not save us, but it is through the Law that we become aware of our sin.
- This is important because our tendency would be to say that if the Law does not save us then it was a mistake or a mess. It serves a key purpose, though – just not the one we might have thought.
- Here Paul teaches us that the Law is there to make us aware of our sin. This is something that many of us haven’t thought much about, so I want to answer two basic questions on this subject: why do I need the Law to make me aware of my sin and why would I want the Law to make me aware of my sin?
Why Do I Need The Law To Make Me Aware Of My Sin?
1. Cultures become numb to certain things over time.
- On a whole host of subjects, sometimes different for each culture and sometimes strikingly similar across cultures, we get numb to certain things.
- We often presume that if everyone else is ok with it, then it must not be a big deal. We look around and figure that surely everyone is not way far off base. But we often are.
- Probably the most obvious example of this in American history is Southern slavery.
- Because of this, we need a standard of truth that is not more fixed than the ever-changing thoughts of a culture.
- Some people today want to argue that what a culture says is the ultimate truth, but that pegs “truth” to opinion polls.
- My experiences in China with how different the culture was and how we often presume that everyone thinks the way we do.
2. Conscience is not a reliable guide.
- We’ve been talking about the societal level, but let’s bring it down to a personal level. Here, we rely on our conscience. It is often a helpful guide. But it is not infallible and is often quite inaccurate.
- Sometimes people act as though our conscience is a perfect moral arbiter, allowing us to always know what the right thing to do is. Sure, we may not always follow it, but it’s always there helping us know what is right and wrong. Only that’s not true.
- Our conscience is affected by the Fall and therefore cannot be perfectly trusted.
- This is proven by people who say they are doing the right thing while doing something the Bible tells us is wrong. This is proven by people doing things the Bible says is wrong without feeling bad about it.
- Our conscience can be impacted by what we want to be true, what we wish to justify, what we don’t desire to change, and what we find comfortable, just to name a few.
3. We can justify just about anything given the right circumstances.
- It’s worth noting before we move onto the next big question that our ability to do wrong things literally knows no limit. So much of the horrors that the world has seen have not been shamefully done, but accomplished with eager participants believing they were doing good.
- “These people need to be extinguished because of what they’ve done to us.”
- “A woman has the right to choose what happens with a fetus inside her.”
- “Our society can’t succeed if we’re burdened with people like this.”
- “We need to make sacrifices to appease the gods.”
Why Would I Want The Law To Make Me Aware Of My Sin?
- Now we turn to the question that applies the truth to our own lives – why do I want to be aware of my sin? Won’t that just result in me feeling worse about myself? Why would I welcome that knowledge?
1. Being conscious of my sin is the first step toward change.
- If I want to be a different person than I am now, I need to know what the wrong things in my life are. It’s only as I know where I’m off track that I can begin the process of moving in the right direction.
- This is a difficult step, though. We don’t necessarily want to know what I’m doing that’s wrong. It’s hard to make changes
- Repentance is the first step toward salvation, but we can’t repent if we are unaware of our sin.
2. The gospel offers us freedom from our sin.
- To continue the thought under #1, we need to be conscious of our sin, but unless there is something more then we’ll just end up being aware of our guilt.
- Fortunately, the gospel offers us more: it offers us freedom from our sin. The Bible teaches us that we are enslaved to our sin. It also teaches us that we can be freed of our sin through the power of the gospel of Jesus. Jesus did not just come to earth to forgive us – He came to free us.
- This is enormously good news. We don’t have to live mired in our sin. We can experience victory over our sin. We can see spiritual progress. We can overcome our sinful temptations.
- If we see our sin as garbage on the landscape of our heart or, more accurately, cancer in our spiritual body, we should want it gone. We should not look at sin as something that is overall harmless to us but is less than God’s best for our lives. Sin is destructive to our lives. We should want it gone the way that a patient wants cancer out of his body.
- So I want to know where the sin is. I want to know it so I can get rid of it. I can understand where I am falling short of God’s best and make the changes that will get me to where I need to be. And God has given me in Christ the ability to get there.
3. Even as Christians, we should read and listen to the Word with the thought, “Lord, make me aware of my sin.”
- It’s easy to focus our attention in this message on the need to be saved, but there is an ongoing truth that is important here as well.
- We are justified before God when we are saved, but sanctification is a process. It’s one that requires us as Christians to have an ongoing desire to see our sin gone. God often begins that process with the bigger sins but then continues with some of the less obvious or more entrenched sins. This is an essential part of ongoing maturation.
- Do we want to continue to be closer to Christ?
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Jim Butcher is the pastor of Madison Baptist Church and the author of the book "Christian Pharisees."
