How Does God's Law Apply to Me? (Crucial Questions)

by R.C. Sproul

We are much more likely to hear Christians voice depths of passion with exclamations such as “Oh, how I love You, Jesus!” or “Oh, how I love You, Lord!” But how might the Lord Jesus respond to these sentiments? His words to the nascent church are likely the same words He would speak to us today: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

Jesus viewed His entire life as a mission to fulfill every single point of the law and to achieve perfect obedience to the commandments of God. His motive was not to keep a list of rules but to do the will of the Father. And the Father clearly expresses His will through His law.

The first thing to note is that the law expressed God’s commandments, that which He wanted His people to do.

The fall of Adam and Eve was a transgression against the law of God. Absolute wickedness in the Scriptures is associated with lawlessness (1 John 3:4). And the supreme manifestation of evil incarnate is the man of lawlessness (2 Thess. 2:8–10).

The actions of God are always in conformity to the law of God’s own nature and character, which is inherently righteous and eternally holy. All of His actions come forth according to who He is. This is significant because when we are called to obey the law of God, that means that we are called to obey Him.

The law we are called to obey is a law that comes from Him. It is His law. It is a law that defines a relationship— the relationship between the Creator and the creature, between the sovereign and the vassal, between the King and His subjects. Not only is it His law in the sense that it comes from Him, but most significantly, it is a law that comes from and reflects His own character.

A sin of commission occurs when we commit an action that transgresses the law of God. If God says, “You shall not,” and we do it, we have violated the commandment and transgressed His law. A sin of omission is when God says, “You shall,” and we fail to do what is required.

In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin provided an exposition of what he called “the threefold use of the law.” In other words, Calvin said that the Old Testament law is useful to the New Testament Christian in three distinct ways. First, the law functions as a mirror; second, it functions as a restraint; and third, which Calvin saw as the most important, the law functions as a revealer.

but how can we tell if there’s a stain upon our souls? There is no mirror bright enough to penetrate to the core of our character. If we want to see an accurate reflection of our moral character, we need a mirror far more powerful than the ones we usually look into, and that mirror is the law of God.

We don’t always enjoy looking in mirrors. We often don’t like what we see as it relates to our physical appearance. Perhaps that’s one reason we avoid the law of God: we don’t want to look in that mirror.

The mirror of the law of God is bad news, but until we look at ourselves in it, we will never understand the goodness of the good news.

Yet the presence of laws that legislate morality does restrain evil in some measure. Without laws restricting certain behaviors, evil would abound more.

God gives the power of the sword to human governments to restrain evil, for if evil is unbridled and unrestrained, society is impossible, and civilization becomes barbarian.

This is an important point. If the only reason we obey the law is out of fear of punishment or dread of the consequences, and not because our hearts are inclined to please God, we are no better in the sight of God than the person who, with reckless abandon, violates His standards and His law.

The worst form of government is no government at all, where there is no restraint and the common grace of God is obscured.

Jesus made clear the abiding significance of the law in terms of pleasing God when He said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

The New Testament calls us to grow up into maturity in Christ, to be conformed to the image of Christ, and to seek the mind of Christ. To have the mind of Christ means that we think like Christ so that we act like Christ. The New Testament calls us to the imitatio Christi—the imitation of Christ—and the Apostle Paul sets forth the idea that we are to imitate Christ as Christ imitated the Father. How did Jesus do that? By His perfect obedience.

The apodictic law of Old Testament Israel is found in the Ten Commandments.

worship means ascribing to Him the honor and glory due His name. To ascribe that honor and glory to any other thing is idolatry.

In reality, idolatry takes place when any attribute of God is stripped from His glory, and we replace the biblical God with a god that we create in our own image.

We cannot pick and choose the attributes of God that we happen to like and discard the ones we don’t, for then we are constructing a false god. The true God is the God who reveals Himself in sacred Scripture.

Rather, he meant that the ultimate trust we cling to for our salvation must be in God. We may be tempted to trust in many things that are not God: ourselves, the church, our friends, or our labors. But our trust must rest ultimately in God, who alone is trustworthy in the ultimate sense.

Paul says that while God reveals Himself through creation, men suppress this truth in unrighteousness and fall into idolatry. He convicts mankind of two particular evils: the refusal to honor God as God and the failure to give thanks to God. In other words, there is another sin that accompanies the primary sin of the fallen human race: in addition to refusing to adore, honor, and worship God, we also refuse to be thankful to God.

One way this lack of gratitude manifests itself is when we murmur and complain about our situation in this world.

If we are ungrateful, we violate the first commandment because we are not keeping God, who is rich in mercy and goodness, before our eyes. We are not worshiping Him with the praise of our thanksgiving and gratitude.

Calvin said that fallen man, by nature, is a fabricum idolarum, meaning “idol factory.” We’re not prone to occasionally and accidentally getting involved in the making of idols—we are idol factories. We continually manufacture rivals to God for our devotion.

Calvin, on the other hand, argued that art depicting real historical events is legitimate. What the church has to guard against, according to the commandment, is any attempt to render God in any concrete form.

By implication, the second commandment is also a prohibition against superstition. Idolatry and superstition often go hand in hand because people begin to impart the power of magic to elements of the created order.

We should remember Luther’s statement: “Let God be God.” This simply means that we must keep the character of God in front of our eyes at all times, not seeking to alter it or trying to appropriate the powers of God to ourselves.

Jesus took the swearing of vows and oaths very seriously and gave instruction on how to take—and how not to take—vows and oaths (Matt. 5:33–37). The book of James tells us that the word of Christians should be trustworthy and that people should be able to take us at our word (5:12).

Oaths are to be taken in the name of God if they are to be legitimate because the swearing of lawful vows and oaths is in itself an act of worship. We are bearing witness to our faith that God can hear all things and see all things—that He is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He has the power to judge between us, and He has the authority to be the final arbiter among people.

Instead, it says to remember that it is already holy; the command is simply to keep it that way. In the most elementary sense, to be holy means to be different. God is saying: “Remember to keep this day different. This is the one day that I have consecrated and set apart.”

One of the reasons we rest is to reflect the image of God and to remember our Creator and His labor of creation—we’re honoring God, not indulging ourselves.

We are part of a group that comes together on the Sabbath day for a solemn assembly. We gather to celebrate not only creation but also our redemption—to celebrate the resurrection of Christ and the gift of salvation that God has given to His people—and to honor God and enjoy His presence.

In the New Testament, particularly in the book of Hebrews, the Sabbath points to the final goal of our redemption: our entrance into heaven. When we enter into heaven, we are entering into our rest.

Every time we come together to worship on the Sabbath day, we not only remember God’s work of creation but we involve ourselves in the sacramental sign of His promise of redemption. The Sabbath is to be a taste of heaven, the place where there will be no tears, no death, and no darkness. Heaven will be full of activity, but it will be the end of restlessness and anxiety, a place where we will enter a peace that transcends all human understanding.

God understood that to maintain the structure of society, there must be a sense of honor at its core, and this is why the concept of honor is central throughout Scripture.

At the very heart of honor is the dimension of respect—recognizing the dignity of a person and treating him accordingly.

It is the duty of children, before God, to honor their parents. It is the duty of parents to teach the children what honor and respect mean, and if the children grow up to behave in a disrespectful manner, it is possible that the parents haven’t instructed them and demanded honor and respect in the home.

but God doesn’t say, “Honor your father or mother only when they’re honorable.” They hold a position, an office, and even if they’re unworthy of that office, the office itself is still to be honored.

That is true, but even insulting a brother, calling him a fool, slandering him, or doing anything that injures him is prohibited in the wider application of the command, “You shall not murder.” The negative aspect of the command includes all acts of sinful anger or hatred and unjust violence.

The deepest sense of the sixth commandment means that we should do everything in our power to protect, preserve, maintain, and honor the lives of our neighbors.

Capital punishment is required because man is created in the image of God, and God regards a malicious assault upon any human being as an assault upon the life of God Himself.

God certainly did not have to design the human body in such a way that sex would be pleasurable, but He did. There is only a narrow window of time each month that a child can be conceived by a couple, yet there is a dimension of the physiology of sex that makes the desire for mating far more frequent than what is actually necessary to preserve the species. It’s as if God, in nature itself as well as in His Word, is prescribing an intimate relationship in marriage that is not only spiritual, emotional, and mental, but also intensely physical.

The first time God says something is bad is when He looks at Adam and says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18).

The first sin in the garden of Eden led to an awareness of this nakedness, followed by shame, a flight into hiding, and a search for a covering. Then, in the first act of divine mercy, God discovered His shameful creatures, embarrassed in their sin and aware of their nakedness, and He clothed them.

The Bible, when it speaks of the sexual relationship, uses a phrase that is much more than simply a euphemism. It is the phrase to know. Adam knew his wife and she conceived. Abraham knew Sarah and she conceived. This does not mean they were introduced on the street one day and suddenly the women became pregnant. The phrase to know means to know another person at a profound level of intimacy.

Because nakedness involves more than the lack of physical clothing. It means being exposed to the scrutiny of another human being in our weakest, worst, and darkest moments.

Statistics reveal that in the evangelical church (not the broader Christian community), only 12 percent of members tithe. God commands that 10 percent of our income be given to the work of His kingdom, which means that 88 percent of us who profess to be Christians systematically, regularly, and consistently rob God. We have been derelict in our duty to support the work of God.

When justice is at stake and judgment is to be made, getting to the truth of a matter is critical. Before a person’s guilt or innocence can be determined, the facts must be assembled and evaluated. Witnesses offer testimony, and this testimony is evaluated to determine whether it is credible.