What Does the "Lawless Person" and the "Legalistic Person" Have in Common?

Legalists who are not Christians –

As a general rule, you cannot successfully keep the externals of the law. Without Christ, insofar as you are successful, you have satisfied your own conscience. You are proud of your success. This is what characterized the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable who saw himself as righteous and viewed others with contempt (Luke 18:9-14). And legalists do generally view others with contempt. And their religious centers of worship are breeding grounds for those kinds of people. Their common trait is that they view God as a strict judge. They are self-righteous and dutifully bound to their observances.

Lawless Persons (Antinomians) who are not Christians –

But other completely pagan, and non-religious persons, don’t believe in trying to keep the law in any way, shape, or form. These persons overtly, if only by their actions, hate the Christian God and His law. They are indifferent towards Him at best. They tend to imagine the Christian God as a tyrant who doesn’t deserve any effort from them, or even for them to attempt to please Him.

So, he or she wears this rebellious demeanor on their sleeve in order to smite God and His followers. The Apostle Paul said that he filled up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ (Colossians 1:24), and that is how rebellious non-believers like to either aggressively or passive-aggressively smite God. They smite us as well.

Yet both these types of nonbelievers do not believe the gospel. The religious legalist as well as the overtly pagan person demonstrate disregard for the compassionate Father of the Bible. The religious legalist wants to please Him in just the way in which he perceives God, as a strict judge. He wants to “appease Him” with strict and dutiful religious rituals. The pagan hates God for the same reason and wants to disown Him by rebellion and cynicism.

Legalistic Christians –

A lot of genuine believers are also legalistic. The key difference is that these persons believe the Gospel, but they have a propensity to view their relationship to God as based on their own performance. They truly need to delve into the deep love that God exhibits for them in Christ and in His word. Ferguson writes,

The truth was that the Lord had given Adam and Eve an entire cosmos of good gifts to enjoy. In turn he provided them with a single “positive” law. They were to show their love for him by refusing to eat the fruit of only one tree, on the basis that their loving Father said so, and that whatever he commanded must be for their good. The lie by which the Serpent deceived Eve was enshrined in the double suggestion that

1) this Father was in fact restrictive, self-absorbed, and selfish since he would not let them eat from any of the trees, and

2) his promise of death if they were disobedient was simply false.

Thus the lie was an assault on both God’s generosity and his integrity. Neither his character nor his words were to be trusted. This, in fact, is the lie that sinners have believed ever since—the lie of the not-to-be-trusted-because-he-does-not-love-me-false-Father. The gospel is designed to deliver us from this lie. For it reveals that behind and manifested in the coming of Christ and his death for us is the love of a Father who gives us everything he has: first his Son to die for us and then his Spirit to live within us.¹

Lawless (antinomian) Christians –

And there are dismissive and antinomian believers as well who also believe the biblical gospel, but to some degree, don’t care about God’s standards. They take the perspective of doubting that He said what He did. The fact is that we are all on this spectrum. The solution is always Christ.

Many of these caricatures, both with the above non-believers, and even in the case of these true followers, who reflect similar attitudes, need to more fully understand that duty to the Lord becomes a delight in Christ. However, they wax about free grace and publicize the fact that God forgives all sins and sinners who name the name and profess the faith. I once had a brief conversation with a minister in our town who said that I could sin as much as I wanted to, but if I had faith in Christ, it didn’t matter. There is doubt whether such people who do in fact take advantage of such theology are in fact born-again.

The Biblical Understanding of Grace

The Biblical answer and balance to these different positions are found in understanding what made the original sin so greivous (Ferguson above), and in many passages like Ephesians 2:8-10 and Titus 2:11-14 which juxtapose, on the one hand, grace as a gift with, on the other hand, our also being made a workmanship in Christ for good works (Ephesians), yet also the word declares that the grace of God has appeared to us which is a teacher for us to say “no” to ungodliness and worldly passions and to pursue good works in Christ (Titus). Grace is a cause for good works.

It is the most difficult concept to understand about true biblical religion which says that in Jesus Himself who is the gift to us from the Father, He and His commandments are good and possible to live out more and more as we grow in our faith. Jesus Himself is the one human being who did in fact live a perfect life and subsequently died a criminal’s death on a cross. This was so that you and I could be forgiven in the first place and declared righteous in His name. (1 Corinthians 15:2-4; Romans 5:1-2). God treated Christ as sin, so that if we believe in Christ, we can be declared righteous. But for us to purposely turn around and live a sinner’s life after knowing that and enjoy the things that Christ died to save us from is not possible for someone who genuinely loves the Lord who did all this for him or her.

It all comes down to one’s relationship with Jesus. If you abide in His love, as He said to His disciples, you will keep His commandments in John 15:10. But the preceding verses say that if you do not abide in Christ as well as bear fruit, then you will be thrown out and burned (John 15:5-6). To some of us, that inspires legalism, and to others of us that inspires not much of anything because we believe contrary to God’s testimonies that “love wins” in some kind of upbeat counter-scriptural sense.

But some Christians try really hard all the time to keep His commandments, and they punish themselves and do penance and religious rituals to appease their lack of success, and they even proactively do the sacraments like baptism and communion and are obedient in order to prove their position in Christ. Maybe they do all this and they mourn and feel terrible trying to appease God with earnest prayer as if to do a type of penance. Not that mourning of sin is a bad thing, but other believers don’t care as much. They brag about being “perfectly imperfect” and “God loves them just the way they are.” They are into popular Christianity with its religious version of popular therapy in biblical terms.

Both the legalistic Christian and the antinomian Christian, in the strictest sense, do not love God as they should. I too still struggle with these ebbs and flows of sentiment all the time, as do we all, but the problem lies in trusting in the grace of Christ alone and desiring to walk with Him obediently because we know that is what He wants. He doesn’t require it in order for us to be right. But He commands it, so we trust in His grace to supply us with the necessary strength, and we pray and read and fellowship with others towards the goal of living more and more obediently.

Can Christians sin grievously? Yes. That happens all the time as well, but they won’t really enjoy it. It has a bitter aftertaste, and saints cannot stay in that condition for long. We all struggle all the time with attitudes of legalism on the one hand, or lawless attitudes as well, but we come back to Christ, and we keep coming back to Christ. That is the pattern. And as we grow closer to Him, we set aside our sinful patterns whether they involve self-righteousness as a legalist, or self-indulgence as someone who doesn’t care what God’s standards are.

But Grace is a teacher that trains us for obedience. Jesus Himself, and in His word, shows us our sinfulness and short-comings and leads us to be motivated by the extreme love that He has shown us in dying for us and in currently interceding for us continually at the right hand of God (Romans 8:34). He is faithful. If you have faith in Him, nothing can separate you from His love (Romans 8:31-35), and that is the single greatest truth that we posses.

The Answer to the Original Question

So to decisively answer the original question in the title, both the legalistic person and the lawless person, whether a true Christian or without Christ, have in common an orientation towards God based on His law, as if He were a miser. They both see God as a judge. They may believe the Gospel (in the case of the believer), but they think more about the law, or about God as judge, in respect to their relationship to God than they do about Him as a loving Heavenly Father. Even these sincere believers can tend to either admire God’s commandments and try hard to fulfill them in their own strength, or they can be dismissive towards God’s commandments claiming that He doesn’t care because of a very prevalent and sentimental definition of love.

Either way, they choose to disregard Him and reflect on their status in light of the law, either not having to worry about it because of “grace,” or worrying about it all the time because of the clarity of His commands. His law and commandments are in fact the epitome of love, but grace covers our complete lack of ability to ever fulfill it as we should. Neither is God a harsh judge who only loves us based on our performance insofar as we are successful. Grace is the free gift from our Heavenly Father through His Son, Jesus Christ, and it transforms our lives through His Spirit. It even enables us to grow in our ability to live these truths out daily. MacArthur is quoted as saying below:

The legalist says you must keep the law to earn God’s favor. The Antinomian says you must not keep the law to earn God’s favor. And both of them define their relationship by the law. The Antinomian has not escaped bondage to the law. He is not free from the law….True salvation is never defined by your relationship to the law. It is defined by one’s relation to whom? Jesus Christ, not the law. I would never define my relationship to God by the law. Either by my keeping the law or being free from keeping the law.
John MacArthur – at a recent TMU chapel

For my blogpost about how to “walk in grace,” click here.