Psalm 33:4-6 For the word of God is right, and all God’s works are sure. God loves righteousness and justice; the loving-kindness of God fills the whole earth. By the word of God were the heavens made, by the breath of God’s mouth all the heavenly hosts.

Introduction

When the law becomes all encompassing, human beings suffer. When the law is Lord, no one is safe. When the law is king, his ministers become executioners. If living life is all about obedience to the law, then we have no choice but to enter into an agreement with an oppressive state wielding threat and punishment. Ironically, in this situation, living life is the last thing you do because when the law becomes too heavy and controlling it suffocates human living and falsifies true, loving obedience. In this locality relationships fall apart because I begin to resent the one I am being forced to serve by appeasing the law rather than loving the person—and in all actuality, the person falls secondary in that equation, right? What is primary: the law or the person? The law. This is why controlling relationships—if you’ve ever been in one—are so tremendously destructive: human beings are lost for the sake of an inanimate thing that is being given the status and honor of a living, breathing entity, served as if it is God.

Law conceived in this way brings animosity, it creates division between people: those who uphold the law and those who do not, those who enforce the law and those who do not. Herein is the crux of Paul’s claim, in Romans 4, for the law is brought about by wrath/anger (v. 15a).So far I’ve only been speaking about a heavy handed civic use of the law, but Paul is speaking about what happens when law becomes the lord of people in relation to God. Paul says further,

Romans 4:13-25

By this [reason it is] from faith so that in order to secure the promise according to grace for all the offspring, not only to those of the law but also to those of faith of Abraham–who is the father of us all, just as it has been written that ‘I have established you as the father of many nations’—before God in whom he believed, the one who makes alive the dead and calls that which is not being as being…Therefore it was reckoned to him to righteousness. Now it was not written for him only that ‘it was reckoned to him,’ but also to us… (Rom. 4:16-17, 22-24a)

Access to God is bigger than law-obedience. Thus, Paul tells the Romans that it is not by the law they are saved and brought into union with God. The promise of God is not a command it’s a calling; Abraham, explains Paul, is summoned unto God, to follow God, to believe in the grand promise that Abraham—at his ripe old age and yet without heirs—will become the father of many nations. That Abraham follows God (obedience to the summons) is a result of Abraham believing God, having faith in the promise of God to bless Abraham not only personally (receiving an heir) but also that this blessing will be a for the whole world. It is Abraham’s trust and faith in God that brings God glory because God is trust-worthy and worthy of the honor of faith. The reality of Abraham’s faith as that which credits to him the righteousness of God extends to Abraham’s heirs who also believe in and trust God’s promises to be true.[1] For Paul, righteousness either comes by faith or it is null and void if by the law. It’s not by a little bit faith and a little bit law; to bring God glory is to first declare God to be truthful, by believing God’s promise, by faith, and then from here obeying God.

Why? Is the law bad? No. But the law cannot be satisfied, ever. It can never be a point of surety, it cannot give you the fullness of righteousness because it must be done every day, all the time, every minute, forever. Being righteous according to the law means that it only lasts as long as you obey the law, and all of it. This is why, for Paul (and Luther) the law works wrath because when broken it condemns—it does not praise you for a job well done, that praise comes in the medium of silence. In this way wrath comes because not only is the law giver forced to punish the lawbreaker, but the lawbreaker is forced to endure punishment for breaking the law. Wrath, here, is not just a tyrant God stomping about, here that the law brings wrath is more about that fractured law is fractured relationship, herein is wrath on both sides. Thus when the relationship with God is founded strictly on law, the law becomes threat: do this or else, don’t do this or else. But Paul is saying that the relationship with God is founded not on law but on promise believed, taken to be true, and this demands not obedience of law abidance but of faith and trust, obedience (or following) comes after the faith and trust. Otherwise, if the promise is first met with obedience to the law, as if the promise is only yours if you do x, y, or z then it isn’t a promise, it is a threat because it becomes law, stripped of its ability to bring anything beneficial, it will bring punishment and fracture, and if the promise is fulfilled by obedience before faith, the faith is superfluous and rendered false.[2]

And if faith is false, according to Paul, then the heirs of Abraham are only those who perform the works of the law or those who are born of Abraham which means that you and I (most likely) are condemned where we sit because we have no hope of being righteous before God by the law or by physical genetic similarities.[3] But yet Paul makes it clear that Abraham is and will be the father of many nations, thus this demands faith because Abraham could not bear many nations from his own body and the obedience to the law would demand not many nations but one. In this way faith renders those who are not related to Abraham literally—those who exist in different eras and times, those who are of different cultures and contexts—to be a part of the grandness of God by faith in God’s promises.[4] Those who trust God, believe that God will do what God has promised, are those who participate in God’s righteousness and become the children of Abraham, rendering the promises of God true and right, confirming that God is the God of the living and not of the dead!

Conclusion

A major theme in Protestant Christianity is the concept of justification, specifically that the righteousness of God comes to the those who are justified through faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit apart from works of the law. But we forget this, and we reach for the law to verify our relationship with God, to secure it. But this then renders the law more powerful than it should be, and we become consumed with obedience to the law for fear of letting the law down—forgetting God and ourselves. We will do whatever it takes to obey the law even if it means stripping ourselves and our neighbors of dignity, sacrificing everyone on the altar of the law. The law cannot ever be the sole means by which order and structure are maintained; when this happens we have a dire situation: the law is an idol we’ve allowed to dethrone God.

Without love, the law will become a ruthless tyrant set on death and destruction; the irony of law run amok without love. For it is in love where mercy can find ground and the law can become, once again, a means through which human beings serve each other, putting each other first, remembering that we live in communities that need order and structure. The law is to serve human beings; human beings are not meant to serve the law. There is more to life than obedience to the law because with only obedience to the law as the guide there is only fear and terror of threat and punishment and these hinder life and do not stimulate it.

You do not need to do anything to get God on your side, make God love you, demonstrate your love to God; you just need to dare to believe that God is on your side, that God does love you, that God knows you love God. And then, from here, let God in you, the Holy Spirit, cultivate that love so big that it spills over into the lives of other human beings lost in the shadow of the law.

[1] Martin Luther Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia (1515/1516) LW 25 Ed. Hilton C. Oswald. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1972. 278-279. “For not through the Law. Again he proves that righteousness does not come from the Law but from faith, according to the fruit and merit of both. For the Law and faith deserve opposite things. That is, the Law merits wrath and the loss of the promise, but faith deserves grace and the fulfillment of the promise, as if to say, if you do not believe the Scripture and its example, at least believe your own experience. For through the Law you have deserved wrath and desolation, but through faith grace and the possession or the whole world, as is clear in the case of the apostles, who reign with Christ in all the world. Thus also the promise was not given to Abraham through the Law but through faith, and the same will be the case with you who are his seed.”

[2] LW 25, 279. “Thus the Law works wrath, that is, when it is not fulfilled, it shows the wrath of God to those who have failed to provide for its fulfilment. Thus the Law is not evil, but they are evil to whom it was given and to whom it works wrath, but to the others (that is, the believers) it works salvation; actually it is not the Law that works this but grace. Therefore, it the promise were through the Law, since it works wrath, it would follow that the promise is not a promise, but rather a threat. And thus the promise would be abolished and through this also faith.”

[3] LW 25, 280. “The promise to Abraham and to his seed that they should be the heirs of the world was not through the Law nor through his seed but through the righteousness of faith. For if they are heirs through the Law and because of their physical relationship, then faith is done away and the promise annulled. ‘For the Law works wrath’ (4:15).”

[4] LW 25, 282. “Now ł ask, was he their father according to the flesh or according to the spirit? He cannot be so according to the flesh, because there were then and there were going to be many nations always who were in no way descended from him. And yet he was given the promise that he would be their father. But if you say that all the nations at going to be destroyed so that only the sons who are descended from him will reign throughout the world, then he will be the father of only one and not many nations. On the other hand, if all the nations will be reduced to slavery and live in servitude, then he will no longer be their father nor these nations his sons, for they will be slaves and he the lord of the nations; in this case fatherhood is eliminated, and oppression and violence are indicated.”