First of all, human virtue is fiction according to the Bible. The Bible tells us, contrary to the highest human desire for virtue, that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23 ESV) “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 ESV) “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment…” (Isaiah 64:6 ESV) They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, but the first step to admitting you have a problem is identifying the problem you have. Our problem is not a deficiency of virtue, but a complete lack of it. In other words, we can’t feed the virtuous dog because it flat doesn’t exist. When we think that virtue exists in us by nature, we can easily believe that salvation is God ‘teaching an old dog new tricks’. As if He were ‘treat training’ the good dog in us to become better. For that to be true there would have to be a good dog somewhere in us to start with, which the Bible flatly denies. That’s one dog out of the fight.
In the way this illustration is typically applied, the bad dog is sin. If we choose to feed this dog, the reasoning goes, it will grow and grow until it destroys all the other dogs in the fight. The funny thing is we don’t want to feed this dog; we know better. We know deep down that if we strengthen this dog he will destroy us eventually, and yet he just keeps getting fatter and stronger all the time. The harder we try not to feed him, the more he finds to eat. Paul describes the struggle with the sin dog: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:18-19 ESV) I must be crazy! Somehow I keep feeding that dog!
Paul finally realizes something remarkable; there is another dog in the fight – the law dog – sin dog’s big brother. What is happening is that as Paul feeds the law dog, and the sin dog grows stronger. He comes to understand that sin is aroused by law and that feeding law is strengthening sin. “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members [my body] another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members [my body].” (Romans 7:21-23 ESV) Law is constantly barking that he wants to be fed, and his barking always gets the sin dog worked up. You will notice if you watch that sin seldom gets aroused until you allow law to start barking at you. So despite appearances, law dog is the real bad dog in this fight. He is the instigator.
Having properly identified the bad dog in the fight as law, we must now know who the good dog is. The good dog is promise. He sometimes goes by the name gospel. His proper name is Christ. Promise dog is a very good dog. He never barks at us. We can forget to feed him for years and he will never make a whimper. He is always happy to see us because he loves us, no matter how much we neglect him. He is constantly wagging his tail to tell us that he loves our presence – that he has forgotten any and all wrong we have done him. He is a graceful dog.
How does all of this get worked out in real Christian life? First of all, we have to realize that law is not really a bad dog. He is doing what he is trained to do. He is a watch dog and when he sees us doing something suspicious, he begins barking at us because that is his purpose. He has always barked at us when we sin as a means of warning us that what we are doing is not right. But what he can’t understand is that as Christians, we are no longer afraid of him because we are dead to him. “But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” (Romans 7:6 ESV) He still sees our old Adam (the flesh) as a very lively and active threat which is to be barked at. Being in Christ, to us he is nothing more than a silly old toothless dog whose barking is nothing but a nuisance. But since he and sin are always making such a fuss, we are tempted to feed and scold them and pet them to make them be quiet. All the while promise waits quietly for us to return to him.
As Paul said in Romans 10:17, faith comes through hearing. If what we hear is the vicious barking of law, we will place faith in the law and his promises to build our virtue - which he has no power to do - or we will live in fear of him despite the fact that he has no teeth. We need to learn to ignore law, knowing that his bark is worse than his bite. Actually Paul says “Faith comes through hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” If you want to see promise win, you have to feed Him. You have to seek out promise every day and learn to hear the still small swish of His wagging tail over the din of law and sin. That is the word of Christ. That is the gospel truth.
God Bless
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