I Am Not Ashamed of the Law

By Rev. David Petersen

The First Commandment: You shall have no other gods.

What does this mean? We should fear, love and trust in God above all things.

The Ten Commandments. Luther's Small Catechism. © 1986 Concordia Publishing House. www.cph.org. Used with permission.

St. Paul famously confessed, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ” (Romans 1:16). That confession needs to be carefully considered lest it end up seeming as though St. Paul were saying, “I am not ashamed of being nice, or loving my children, or of pretty things.” Why would anyone be ashamed of those things? No one would. But the Gospel is not simply about God being nice. The Gospel is Jesus Christ being roasted on the altar of the cross in His Father’s wrath, being our sin and a curse, forsaken by the Father and enduring hell on our behalf.

The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16). That is the problem—salvation—because salvation is only for sinners, and there is no Gospel without the Law. For without the Law, there is no knowledge of sin.

While it is certainly true that the new man in us delights in the Law and loves its precepts, the old Adam in us hates the Law as much as he hates the Gospel. He does not want to be accused or exposed. He wants to be stroked. In our day and age, no one would probably admit he is ashamed of the Gospel, but that is only because the Gospel is so misunderstood. And we wouldn’t have to look far to find those who are obviously ashamed of the Law. In fact, we could just look inside ourselves. Who hasn’t bristled at the Law’s prohibition against homosexuality and fornication? Or the Law’s insistence that only men serve as pastors? And what of the Law’s deadly accusation that we are not good people who do some bad things but that we are deeply sinful, that is, full of sin, enemies of God, that we are bad, bad people who cannot be trusted and who deserve to be tortured in hell?

This shame at the Law tempts us to try and soften the Law. Yielding to this temptation, we often make a feeble attempt to emphasize the positive aspects of the Law at the expense of the negative. We switch our emphasis from talk of sin to talk only of ethics. Instead of accusing people of violating the Sixth Commandment by lust in thought, word, and deed, we talk only about what God desires for holy marriage. Instead of talking about abortion and the sin of fornication, we talk only about how to help teen girls avoid pregnancy and the benefits of chastity. And instead of talking about doctrine, we talk only about life.

Don’t get me wrong. Ethics has its place. The Law serves in a positive way in the world: it restrains the fallen flesh by threat of punishment. It also serves Christians by revealing what sin is and what good works are. “You have this law to see therein / that you have not been free from sin / but also that you clearly see / how pure toward God life should be / have mercy Lord” (LSB 581:11). The Law is God’s revealed will. It is wisdom for life. But because the Law is holy, and we are unholy and sinful, the Law, whether spoken negatively or positively, accuses us and leaves us guilty before God.

The danger in focusing one’s preaching solely on the positive, ethical precepts of the Law is that we soften the Law because we downplay its accusations and God’s wrath. When we do that, we belittle our Savior’s death. If your sins are small or insignificant, then so is the death of Jesus Christ. And no matter how nice we try to be with the Law, it still accuses. If we only talk of the Law in terms of ethics or with positive statements, we are still holding up an ideal that fallen humans cannot obtain though already in this life Christians do begin to keep the Law. We are able to refrain, for example, in an outward way, from committing murder. But we cannot, and we do not, keep the Law in an inward way. Even if we don’t commit murder, we do feel anger. We do not have pure or perfect motives. Thus, we fall short even of the nicer demands of ethics. The Law, positive or not, accuses and exposes us. But our fiddling attempts to soften the Law and dull its edge. The Law then makes a sloppy cut into the sinner’s heart instead of the surgeon’s clean and healing incision. The accusation is there, to be sure, but it is not clear. The hearer is often left confused as to what he is supposed to do. He knows he hasn’t done it quite right. He hasn’t kept the Law in its fullness, but then what should he do? Try harder? Get some counseling? Lie about it?

That “doing” is the real problem and not just the lying. Doing is the death of salvation, because the Law should leave us speechless and dead. If we are doing, we are undoing ourselves. As St. Paul writes: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in (God’s) sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Romans 3:20–22). The righteousness of God comes as a gift that God bestows in His mercy through faith apart from, or after, the Law.

So maybe it is time to confess with St. Paul: “I am not ashamed of the Law, for by the Law the Lord reveals how worthless our deeds are for salvation and how desperately we need a Savior. And, I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation.”

Rev. David Petersen is pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His e-mail address is prdhpetersen@gmail.com.