Are You a Cheater?

The unmerited favor of God can sometimes feel like cheating. It seems too good to believe that all one has to do to gain God’s favor is to believe – as if we are trying to cheat our way into the Kingdom. That is one of the primary objections that humans use against grace – that it is not demanding enough. Certainly God demands that we must change in order to have a relationship with him?

God does demand change, but not the kind of change we reasonably expect. We think that we must become more morally pure for God to accept us, and nothing could be further from the truth. If moral purity were the qualification for our relationship with God, then we could have no relationship as we possess no capability for moral purity. The change God demands is nothing less than death.  We cannot clean ourselves up in expectation of receiving grace, but the work of grace is to resurrect that which is dead to the law. The reason we feel we are cheating God by our law-breaking is that we are. Not because we are breaking the law, but because we are trying to keep it.

Paul uses the following illustration to make the point:

Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. (Romans 7:1-3 ESV)

As long as we reckon ourselves alive to the law – trying to live according to the written code – we are cheating that law every time we break it. We feel the guilt and the shame of our endless failure to live up to the perfection that God demands. God’s answer to this problem is not to empower us to become ‘law-abiding’, nor to diminish the demands of the law, but to reckon us dead to the law; to release us from the husbandry of the law that we may be wedded to Christ without any charge of adultery. Is a woman cheating on a dead husband if she marries another? Not in the eyes of the law.

Law is not concerned that we are cheating it as Christians. If we are Christians, the law has fulfilled its duty by bringing us to the realization that we must have grace or else we cannot please God. “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.” (Galatians 2:19 ESV) The law kills that grace might resurrect. Law dies to us, and us to the law, so that we might really and truly live for God alone. So that we might be wedded to Christ without the slightest hint of adultery.

Is God then cheating against His own law? No, because it was fulfilled in Christ, who met its requirements in life and died to satisfy God’s just wrath for our law-breaking. The Bible tells us that the only thing we must do to make Christ’s righteousness our own – to be wedded to him - is to believe that he died and rose again. By participating in his death, we die to the law. By participating in his resurrection, we live to God. Those who are dead cannot legally cheat the law. That is the gospel truth.

God Bless