Word of Salvation – Vol.44 No.24 – June 1999
The Law of God and Our Human Misery
Sermon by Rev M.P. Geluk
on Lord’s Day 2 (Heid.Cat. Q&A 3-5)
Scripture Reading: Romans 7:7-25
Suggested Hymns: BoW 63A; 348; 301; 529
Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
With Lord’s Day 2 the Heidelberg Catechism begins to look at human misery. The Catechism is divided into three parts and we’re now in Part One. It deals with sin, it’s origin, nature and power.
Surprisingly the Catechism only spends three Lord’s Days on this subject. With Lord’s Day 5 it is already dealing with deliverance in Christ, which is Part Two of the Catechism. But in these three Lord’s Days, it manages to say enough about the Scriptural doctrine of sin to make us realise how much we need the forgiveness of God through His Son Jesus Christ.
Let’s begin, then, with Lord’s Day 2, and it’s about THE LAW OF GOD AND OUR HUMAN MISERY.
1. The Law Brings the Knowledge of Sin
Please note that the law of God does not say specifically that you and I are sinful people. It simply says what God wants us to do and not to do. It’s the application of the law to our human situation that shows up our sinful natures.
When the rich young ruler heard God’s commandments from Christ, then he sincerely believed that he had kept them. God’s law simply told him what to do and he felt that he had done that. It wasn’t until Christ applied the commandment about coveting to his own personal situation that he discovered that he was not really doing what the law demanded.
How simple is the law of God? It is as simple as this: love God and love your neighbour (Mt 22:37-40). When you do that, then you’ll be obeying all the commandments. Love is the fulfilment of the law (Rom 13:10). The Bible, of course, spells out the nature of this love that God is asking. When we discover what that is, then we begin to see that loving God and our neighbour may not be quite so simple.
Scripture says: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Lk 10:27). This is the first and greatest commandment. Love God totally and perfectly. The Law of God does not ask for a mere good intention to love God, nor a mere trying to love God, but to actually do it, and do it all the time, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, all of your life, in every situation and circumstance. Love God with every part of you: heart, soul, strength and mind.
And the law of God also says: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” This presupposes that we love ourselves. We can take this in two ways. When you’re always giving the impression that you’re the best, then people will soon say that you love yourself too much. What they mean is that you have an inflated opinion about yourself. You lack humility.
But this is not the way God meant it when He commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves. God is saying that no one in his right mind hurts or destroys oneself. We look after and care for ourselves. You probably had a shower today, brush your teeth at least once a day and wash the bed sheets from time to time. I am simply saying that we look after ourselves. It is not a love for self that says that I am the greatest. It’s just a natural, normal self-love in which we seek our own well-being. And now God says: I want you to love your fellow men in the same way. God wants us to seek our neighbour’s well-being. God does not want us to harm or hurt our neighbour. Even if we were not looking after ourselves very well, God wants us to seek our neighbour’s greatest good.
Some mistakenly think that loving God and their neighbour is only a New Testament commandment. They think that the Old Testament was an eye for eye and tooth for tooth situation. But love to God and neighbour was already an Old Testament requirement (Deut.6:5; Lev.19:18). God’s will for mankind has always been total love to God, and love to neighbour. It was what Adam and Eve had to do before the fall into sin, and God did not change the rules after sin had entered. He still required everyone to love Him and one another. Love to God and neighbour has always been the will of God for human beings.
But now is love related to law? God’s law demands love, but should not love be a spontaneous action coming from the heart? Yes, love is that, but love needs direction. It’s one thing to love someone, but how to love that someone is quite another thing. The Lord Jesus explains it for us. He says, “If you love me, you will obey what i command” (Jn.14:15). Can you say that you love Christ? Good. May the Lord be praised. But how are you to love Him? By obeying His commandments. By doing what He says. Scripture also says that love does no harm to its neighbour (Rom 13:10]. No, not if we obey God’s command to seek our neighbour’s well-being.
So, that makes the law to love God and our neighbour a good law. We can see how good the Law of God is when we look at the 10 commandments. The first commandment says to worship God only. It seeks to honour God as the only true God and tells to keep away from false gods. The second commandment says how to worship God. We are not to take a bird, or an animal, or a creature from the sea, and say that such a creature gives us an idea of what God is like. We are not to use our own imagination to worship God. God does not like that because we are putting the Creator in the same class as the creatures.
The third commandment is about God’s name. Keep it holy. Don’t use His name flippantly or as a curse. The fourth commandment is about God’s day. By keeping it we will experience well-being because God knows we need regular rest in order to be refreshed and have an opportunity to worship Him.
So you can see already from a quick glance at the first four commandments that each one aims to glorify God, and that is a good thing. By obeying them you will show that you love God. It’s the same with the remaining six commandments. The fifth commandment says to honour your father and mother, and it’s all about authority. The sixth says, do not murder another, and it’s about the sanctity of life. The seventh says, do not commit adultery, and it’s about purity. The eighth says, don’t steal, and it’s about having rights to personal property. The ninth says, don’t give false witness, and it’s about preserving truth. And the tenth says, don’t covet, and it’s about contentment. When you are not content with what God gives you then you will be inclined break the other commandments, to steal, commit adultery and murder.
You can see how these last six commandments are all aimed at the neighbour’s well-being and again our quick glance shows that these also demand something good. Obey them and you will show that you love your neighbour.
So the Law of God is good because it aims to glorify God and seek the well-being of the neighbour. From Romans 7, which we read earlier, we see Paul as a Christian believer confessing that the law is good” (VS 16). In his inner being he “delights in God’s law” (vs 22). He says: “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good” (vs.12). Every child of God will have the same experience about the law of God. The believer will readily acknowledge that the law is good in itself. Why, what else can he say about the law? He can’t say that it is bad, for it isn’t it. The law aims to glorify God and it seeks the well-being of our fellow men. You can’t think of something better than that. You can’t improve on it.
But now another question: how does the unbeliever see God’s law? He sees it quite differently. He does not love God. He is indifferent to whatever God may say. The attitude of some unbelievers is, in fact, quite hostile to God. They’re always giving off at God and the Christian faith. Such people do not want to submit to God’s law (Rom 8:7). Just try and tell them what God thinks of Sydney’s Mardi Gras parades. What God has to say about homosexuality, abortion, adultery, divorce and euthanasia. They will soon tell you that they don’t want to listen to biblical morality. They refuse to submit to God’s law and are hostile to it. They want their own rules.
But argue the same case to the Christian believer who is willing to bow before God’s authority, and you will find whole-hearted agreement with God’s Law. In fact, what people think of God’s commandments usually indicates how much they love God. Remember Jesus’ words? “If you love me, you will obey what I command you.” The law of God actually does more than just telling us how to love God and our neighbour. It makes us see that sin and its terrible power are lurking in our human nature. God demands that we love Him and our neighbour, and when we hear this, we discover that we actually do the opposite. We do not totally love God in the way He demands it. And we do not always seek the well-being of our fellow men. Once more we can identify with Paul’s experience. He says: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin” (vs.14).
Another of our Reformation Confessions, the Canons of Dort (III/IV, art 5) explain that the more we understand the high requirements of God’s Law, the more we realise how low we have fallen and the greater our guilt. Like it says in Scripture: “through the law we become conscious of sin” (NIV). Another translation says, “For by the law is the knowledge of sin” (NKJV) (Rom 3:20).
Paul gives an example to help us see how the law does this. He says: “I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, Do not covet.” (vs.7). So here you are, eying off the beautiful things someone else has got and you no longer like what you have. At this stage things are not so bad because you can go and buy what you now like, if you have the money and it is a reasonable thing to do. But suppose it’s something that is not readily available.
King Ahab badly wanted Naboth’s vineyard because it was right next door to his gardens which he wanted to extend. Naboth politely explained that it was not up for sale. This upset the king. Naboth stopping him in his greed put him out. Ahab’s evil wife Jezebel fixed the king’s problem. She had Naboth murdered so that Ahab could have his vineyard. Here is a clear example of how the commandment ‘Do not covet’ made Ahab discover that there was a lot of covetousness in his heart. And by not resisting that evil it caused the terrible sins of lies and murder to happen.
The purpose of this example was to show that when a person clearly hears what God’s law requires from him, it make him see that he is disobeying God all the time. This also implies that he is not loving God nor seeking his neighbour’s well-being. The law of God, then, makes us see that sin and its terrible power are lurking in our human nature.
In fact, it’s worse than that. The various commandments provoke us to sin. Yes, they actually arouse the sin in our nature. The tendency to sin is always present in our nature. That’s something we inherited from The Fall into sin and it’s passed on through the generations. God’s commandments actually bring that tendency to sin in our nature to the surface.
What are we actually saying? Listen once more to the apostle Paui. He says: “Apart from the law, sin is dead” (vs.8). What does that mean? We all know that when you tell a child not to touch something, he will want to go ahead and touch it. In one of the places we used to stay for holidays there was a stove that had no protective barrier around it. We had to tell the kids not to touch it for it would burn them. They were too small to realise that themselves. So here was a law: ‘don’t touch the stove’. This law was for their good. Well, you know, of course, what happened. One of the children went and touched the stove and got his finger burnt. Before we gave the law, there was no interest in the stove. But to prevent accidents we had to warn: ‘don’t touch the stove’. The same command that was designed to protect them also invited disobedience.
We’re still dealing with the point about the law bringing knowledge of sin and it does so in yet one more way. In the face of God’s law we also discover that we are unable to give that total love to God as we should and we are unable to love our neighbour in the manner that God asks. We just can’t do it! Paul expresses the despair of every believer when he says: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”(vs.16).
God reminds us many times of the good requirements of the law but it faces us with our inability to live perfectly. Thus we realise we are held captive by our sinful natures. We can’t break out of our sinful habits. We hate it. We complain, “why do I have such a sinful nature and why can’t I overcome it?” We’re like Paul: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” For a while we seem to succeed. But then once again we are doing the very things we don’t want to do. It’s the experience of every alcoholic, every drug addict, and every overweight person addicted to food but wanting to slim down.
But it’s not just in those things. It’s the same with everything that is sinful to which we are hooked. We hate ourselves because of it and get depressed because the bottom line says to us: “I know what God wants me to do but I can’t do it. I am too weak.” The Law of God, then, also makes us aware that we in our own nature are not able to do what it asks. And there is nothing so depressing as wanting to do something good but being unable to do it.
Answer 5 of the Catechism, then, is so true. We can’t live up to the good requirements of the Law. We have a natural tendency to hate God and our neighbour. But wait a minute! We were talking about hating our sinful self and now it’s also hating God and our neighbour as well. How did we make that jump so quickly?
Do you really hate God and your neighbour? Most would say: “I don’t think so. I don’t really hate God and I don’t really hate my neighbour.” But go back to Jesus’ words again: “If you love me, you will obey my commands.” You love Jesus? Well, stop sinning! Completely! But we can’t, can we! And that is the same as saying that we don’t love God in that total way. We also still love to sin. Nor do we love our fellow men because there are many times that we don’t bother about his or her wellbeing. We seek our own well-being to a degree that leaves us well short doing the same to our neighbour.
There is then, in our natures, a tendency to not love God totally and to not love our neighbour as much as we love ourselves. And there will be times in which that tendency can go as far as actually hating God and hating our neighbour, especially when they stand in the way of us wanting to do some of those sins we love.
2. This Knowledge Drives Us to Christ
To know about our sin and misery is one thing; to break with sin is quite another thing. When we realise that we haven’t got it in us to truly love God and our neighbour in the way God says we should, then our problem is as Scripture describes it: our nature is dead in transgressions and sins (Eph.2:1). And something that is dead cannot come to life again. Not by itself.
So how can spiritually dead sinners come to the living God? The sinner can’t save himself; he can’t change his sinful nature. We begin to see that there has to be some power outside of us to turn to God. The sinner dead in sin needs the Holy Spirit to cause the spark of new life in him. As much as you cannot start the engine of your car without some kind of starting system, so also is it impossible to begin a spiritual life within yourself apart from God’s Spirit. It is God who causes you to be born again. It is God’s Spirit who makes us aware of the good we ought to do, who makes us want to be better than we are and who gives us the longing to be free from our addiction to and love for sin.
The law by itself will not do it. Whilst the law itself is good, holy and righteous, it cannot offer us a remedy. It simply says: “obey perfectly and you will be free.” But to obey perfectly is the very thing we can’t do and does not provide us a way of escape from the shackles of our sinfulness.
God makes us see what we are really like in ourselves and God awakens in us the desire to be forgiven, cleansed and pardoned. When we find ourselves wanting to hear about Christ the Saviour, then it is the Spirit who has put that spiritual hunger within us. The Spirit does this by applying God’s law to us, as we described earlier.
The Christian believer discovers that in order to continue to enjoy the comfort of belonging to Christ in life and in death, he needs to be driven to Christ again and again. It won’t satisfy our spiritual thirst by drinking once from the well of salvation and then no more. The believer will become thirsty again and again and that drives him back to drink from Christ every time.
In the same Romans 7 passage, Paul explains how it all works. He says that he finds himself doing sinful things which he hates doing. He says: “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer / who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (vss.18-20).
Some say that Paul is here talking of his life before he was a Christian. In the verses leading up to this, vss.7-13, he probably did refer to his pre-Christian state because he explains how God’s law made him discover his sin and his sinful nature. It was despair about his own wretchedness that drove him to Christ. But once he became a believer, then he still finds himself in conflict with sin and many believe that he is describing that conflict in vss.18-20.
In fact, it has to be a Christian believer who experiences this fierce conflict with sin. The Christian in his turning to God has come to experience both self-disgust and despair. He has come to realise in the light of God’s holy and pure law that nothing good dwells in his nature. The believer admits to his wretchedness and wants to be delivered from the power of sin, and it is he who flees to Christ again and again to drink to be refreshed. He sees himself as God sees Him. He knows that his obedience to God is still so often not honouring and not glorifying God. This is what makes him unhappy. He wants to serve the Lord better The difficulty of this is his conflict.
Realising that his own nature is weak and open to temptation to sin makes the Christian believer seek Christ again and again, and he prays that the power of the Holy Spirit works freely in him. He knows that he is still such a beginner in the holiness of life. So he is driven to Christ. He is humble before God. And he is determined once again to obey and serve His Savour and Lord.
That, then, is the conflict of the Christian believer, who knows the will of God, loves it, wants it, longs to be obedient to it, but who finds that by himself he still cannot do it. His whole being, his mind and his will, agrees with the law of God. He longs to do good. He hates doing evil – hates it with a holy hatred. And if he does sin, then it is against his mind and his will. It is against the whole nature of his life because he is of Christ.
And when he still finds himself attracted to sin, yes, a perverse love for things he knows to be wrong, then he knows he must wage war on those sinful inclinations. He can’t allow that sinful part in him to gain the upper hand in Christ’s strength he must subdue it. And when this conflict is fierce and at times seems unwinnable, then he must remember that Paul, too, had the same struggle. He, too, saw two forces in him – the force of sin and the force of Christ. He even cried out: “What a wretched man i am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom.7: 24).
He gives the answer. Ever since he was a Christian he has known this answer. All believers know also what this answer is. It is this, “Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (vs.25). Yes, through Christ we are always overcoming sin.
Amen.