Living by Faith - Romans

No Condemnation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 28-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 028

Dictation Name: RR311O28

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Let us worship God. This is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the throne of grace with true hearts, in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee, and will look up. Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father, make us ever mindful how rich we are in Jesus Christ. Give us grace day by day to grow in Thee; teach us to love Thy word more and more, to hate our sins, and work day by day to grow in terms of Thy requirements. Forgive our sins and trespasses and make us strong in Thee, that by Thy grace we may be more than conquerors, and may go forth day by day filled with the joy of salvation, and the confidence of victory. In Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is Romans 8:1-2. Romans 8:1-2. Our subject: No Condemnation.

“8 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”

One of the problems of modern scholarship is that it endlessly refines and divides everything. We can commend scholarship in our day for the learning, the research, and sometimes insight that it brings to bear on a particular subject, but there is a serious problem in its endless division of things. I know that at one major university, the department of political science has divided endlessly, and I believe there are five or six departments where there was once one, each having their own majors and doctoral programs. I hardly believe that political science has been enriched by that division, especially since artificial lines have been created.

We have the same kind of thing with regard to the Bible. We have a department of Old Testament and the department of New Testament, and if seminaries grow enough I suspect that they will have a department in the historical books, and a department in the prophetic books, and a department in the Psalms and writings, and will divide perhaps the New Testament into 2 or 3 departments.

The result is that each of these specializes in his or her field; then as they teach they do not carry over what is valid in one field to another, or look to the other field for insights into their own. I have heard in seminaries of varying persuasions, professors say of something that they are asked about that deals with the Old Testament and they are teaching New Testament, “That is not in my field, you will have to go to doctor so and so for that question.” And the Old Testament department will make the same statement about something that carries over into the New Testament.

What have they done? They have artificially divided scripture, and the unity is lost. You cannot reduce a man to his heart, or his digestive system, or his muscles, or his skeleton, he is the unity of all these things, and he is a living breathing entity. The same is true of Christianity, of the Bible, and our problem today is in part due to scholarship that has wrongly divided scripture, that has overly refined and over specialized everything.

It has created divisions which are artificial, and these artificial divisions become hard and fast lines. In fact now you have books written for example, let us say, on Galatians; and the one will be an exegetical commentary written by a professor of the New Testament who goes into the meaning of the Greek words and gives you a very technical and detailed analysis of Galatians in terms of the words, but very little insight into the theology of Galatians; whereas you will have on the other hand a devotional study of Galatians which tries to pick out spiritual truths for the person who is a pietist. The result is, both pervert the meaning; and as a consequence, we have a deformed Christianity.

Now this is important, as we deal with Romans, because Romans cannot be understood without recognizing that Paul was a scholar, in the old sense, who knew the body of knowledge that makes up scripture, and who knew the unity of that knowledge; and so as Paul writes he has in mind the whole of the Old Testament, the life of Christ, the apostolic faith, and the unity of all these things.

Now Paul is supposedly, according to so many today, someone who was antinomian, who was doing away with the law; it is strange that in these two verses, he has a legal term, condemnation, in the first verse, and the word law twice in the second sentence. For a man who is supposedly getting rid of the law, he certainly speaks a lot of it from beginning to end in Romans.

The term ‘condemnation’, ‘katakrima’, refers to a sentence in a court of law, a sentence which has with it a judgement concerning the penalty. And so Paul begins by saying: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

In Christ we all face the court of Almighty God, and the sentence that is passed against us is no condemnation. We are declared justified, we are just before God because Christ is just, and we are members of His body; so in Christ we are acquitted. He takes the sentence, and we are in Christ if we live not in terms of our fallen nature, but in terms of Christ; if we walk not after the flesh, our human nature, but after the spirit.

Now I am going to read a long quotation that deals with this point, it comes from Calvin. It is important, because a question is raised that is related to what we have already discussed, the false approach to scripture. I quote:

“There is then etc. After having described the content which the Godly have perpetually with their own flesh, he returns to the consolation which was very needful for them, and which he had before mentioned, and it was this: that though they were still beset by sin, they were yet exempt from the power of death and from every curse, provided they lived not in the flesh, but in the spirit. For he joins together these three things: the imperfections under which the faithful always labor, the mercy of God in pardoning and forgiving it, and the regeneration of the spirit. And this indeed in the last place, that no one should flatter himself with a vain notion, as though he were freed from the curse, while securely indulging in the meantime in his own flesh, as then the carnal man flatters himself in vain, when in no way solicitous to reform his life he promises himself impunity, under the pretense of having this grace.

So the trembling consequences of the Godly have an invincible fortress, for they know that while they abide in Christ they are beyond every danger of condemnation. We shall now examine the words After the Spirit. Those who walk after the Spirit are not such as have wholly put off all the emotions of the flesh, so that their whole life is redolent with nothing but celestial perfection; but they are those who sedulously labor to subdue and mortify the flesh, so that the love of true religion seems to reign in them. He declares that such walk not after the flesh; for wherever the real fear of God is vigorous, it takes away from the flesh its sovereignty, though it does not abolish all its corruptions.”

The point Calvin makes here is valid. Justification leaves us without condemnation, but it does not leave us perfected or wholly and fully sanctified. So that, we know we are without condemnation, but we know we have faults. We know that we still do a lot of stumbling and falling flat on our face, when we should be doing such and such a thing. But there is no condemnation to those whose direction is in terms of that which the spirit requires, the walk of God.

Now, this is an important point. They are to seek after sanctification, and the question is how. There are two means of gaining that, but they are not both right. Two means whereby men have sought after holiness, but not necessarily wisely. The first means is the ascetic and the pietistic quest. It involves endless self-flagellation, an endless soul-searching, endless spiritual exercises, it means telling yourself how terrible you are, and how you have got to make yourself more holy, and spending endless time telling God how terrible you are. I think God knows that already, and gets bored listening to us recite our sins; not that we are not to confess them, but we are not to major in endless recitals of what our sins are. We are to take them to Christ and walk away from them.

There is no condemnation, and we are to do something more. The trouble with this first method is, and it is common to all churches, very prevalent among believers in all groups; holiness is made the direct goal. But is not holiness rather a by-product? When people make happiness their goal, they do not become happy. You become happy when you are realizing your life in terms of your calling, in terms of things that God requires you to do, happiness is a by-product. And people who seek happiness rarely have it.

When men embark on a direct quest for holiness, and say: “Go to now, I am going to be holy. I am going to be a saint.” We are justified if we are suspicious of such people. How would you react if some friend of yours or someone in your neighborhood said: “I am going to be a saint”? You would view them from a distance, preferably.

The saintly ones of our century were not those who said: “Go to now I shall be a saint” but people who sought to do what God required of them. I think we can safely say that Mother Teresa of India is a saintly person. Why? Because she is doing what God requires of her. The burden she feels for those poor, dying infants whose lives she saves in the streets of Calcutta and elsewhere, or the late Toyohiko Kagawa, who in his way sought to minister in the name of Christ to those in Japan who are in need spiritually and materially.

Neither of them went out saying: “Go to now, I am going to be a saint.” They sought to serve God, and if we serve Him at our work bench, or in the ministry, or in research, or in whatever we are doing, then we are serving God. You see, holiness cannot be our direct objective, but the service of God. We are to love God with all our heart, mind, and being; and our neighbor as ourselves. This sums up the whole of the law.

This tells us the second way of holiness, the true way, in which holiness is a by-product of the life of faithfulness, of obedience to the Lord and to His law, and to His calling. It is a way of saying to God: “Thy will be done.” That is the life of holiness. Our Lord tells us: “Not everyone that saith unto me: ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” Again our Lord says: “For whosoever shall do the will of my Father who is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother.”

In the Lords prayer, our Lord gives us not only a model prayer, but a program for holiness, for sanctification. “Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That tells us how to hallow Gods name, and how to hallow ourselves, to make ourselves holy. “Give us this day our daily bread.” We are to recognize that the source of all our blessings comes from God and His providence. ‘Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors, for Thine, not ours is the kingdom the power, and the glory.’ This is a program of holiness.

Then Paul goes on to say: “For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”

I began by calling attention to the problems of modern scholarship, and its falsity, its false approach. I am going to quote now from a German scholar whose writings have been translated into English, and are in use in seminaries, both modernist and fundamentalist; he is very highly regarded. And this is what he says concerning verse 2, I quote, the man’s name is Kasemann “The law of the spirit is nothing other than the Spirit Himself in His ruling function in the sphere of Christ. He creates life and separates not only from sin and death, but also from their instrument the irreparably perverted law of Moses.”

Now this is the kind of thinking that prevails. Kasemann is at least more blunt in so speaking. Now if Paul is so hostile to the law, why does he twice use the law in this verse? ‘Well,’ they tell us, ‘when he speaks of the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus and the law of sin and death, he is not talking about Gods law.’ Well what is he talking about? Is he talking about some vague law in outer space that has nothing to do with God, nor what He declared in scripture? Does he reach out and appropriate some kind of vague law like that? Well there is no such thing.

Paul believed that the express word of God is His law, that Gods word sets forth Gods righteousness and justice, to break it is sin and death; Gods law is a blessing when we obey it, and it is the law of sin and death when we disobey it. As God says, “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul, all they that hate me love death.” But also God says that His law is life and spirit, the law is spiritual, Paul has just said in the previous chapter. So, Paul is talking about Gods law and how it works in our lives, to bless us or to curse us.

In some of the recent position papers I have dealt with Marcionism which arose in the second century, and Marcion said there were two different Gods in the Bible, the Old Testament had the God of hate, of law, of justice, and the New Testament the God of grace and of love and of mercy, and these two Gods were at war with each other. Well, some of his followers moderated it and said: “It’s the same God but different dispensations.” And in that form, Marcionism entered the church. It has been an undercurrent, often rising and taking over, in both Catholic thinkers and Protestant thinkers.

For example, a contemporary Catholic scholar has said in his commentary on precisely this passage, I quote: “The law itself was abrogated as well as its penalties by the death of Christ.” Does he believe that nobody dies anymore? Well, the law is not abrogated if anyone dies, because that is the penalty for breaking the law.

One scholar, Goppelt has called attention to the fact that a great deal of scholarship in our time, both Protestant Modernism and Protestant Fundamentalism, is a revived form of Marcionism, and he says that it is due in part to Lutheranism. But Paul is saying that there is no condemnation because the law is functioning, and God in His court of law declares that in Christ we have paid the penalty. The law for us is now a blessing, it is the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus; now we have the power to keep the law, not in perfection in this life, but we are blessed the more and more we are faithful to it, and we are free from the law as a curse, as sin and death, because death now is only the gateway to eternal life for us.

We must therefore approach Romans not in terms of Marcion, but in terms of Jesus Christ, in terms of Paul. Not seeking to divide the word of truth falsely, but seeing it as the one word of God, the word that gives us no condemnation must not be condemned or wrongly divided; it is the word of life.

Let us pray. Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee for the glory of Thy word. We thank Thee that because of Jesus Christ, the law is now for us the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. How great and marvelous Thou art oh Lord, and we praise Thee, and we rejoice in Thee and in Thy grace. In Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience Member] If you are using the Bible to prove the Bible as we must, how is this breaking the Bible up in divisions trying to effect that, in other words, if you are concentrating just on one division of the Bible, how is that going to affect your proving or disproving you word?

[Rushdoony] Yes, it does destroy it, because the Bible is to be its own interpreter, and when you use one portion of the Bible to eliminate another portion, what you are doing is to import from outside the Bible categories, dispensations, philosophies, which you then impose upon the Bible. And it leads to the monstrous kind of thing where you call Gods law perverted. Yes?

[Audience Member] What would you say to the term, the concept that is popular today in some circles, being applied to the law, that is in terming it the reciprocity with regard to the dual, the dual function of the law, the cursing and the blessing, its termed reciprocity ?

[Rushdoony] The term reciprocity and the idea goes back to Emerson, unhappily Emerson who has been one of the most decisive thinkers in American history is all too popular in even Christian and Conservative circles, so that people take Emerson’s ideas of compensation and reciprocity, and then say: “Ah, this is Biblical.” But what they are saying is that there is some kind of automatic, natural law, separated from God, which creates these things; and they have in the process disposed of Gods law. They have created a pragmatic law, that you do certain things and certain things are going to happen; a law in terms of their benefits if you do something. It leads to what you have in Dale Carnegies kind of thinking, public relations, works. That is the law of reciprocity. Yes?

[Audience Member] In chapter 7 of Romans from 15 on is a very difficult passage, and I wondered how you would relate this passage in chapter eight that you just read to that?

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, we dealt with that previously, but it is related by the simple fact that it is prefaced by verse 14: “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin.” And then he describes what it means to be sold under sin, to be a sinner, and so he is describing the implications of that. He is not saying that this is an objective fact of Gods law, but a fact of our experience when we are sinners, and when we are not perfectly sanctified. Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, let us bow our heads now in prayer. For the glory of Thy word and Thy salvation, and the glory of our place in Christ and in Thy kingdom, our Father we thank Thee and we praise Thee. Thou hast called us to be heirs of all things in Christ Jesus; Thou hast made us rich beyond our imagining, give us grace therefore our Father to walk day by day in the confidence of our wealth and strength in Christ.

And now go in peace, God the Father and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect, this day and always, amen.