Law and Love and Grace

By Doug Floyd
8/1/08

As a Special Agent for the FBI, my father spent his days enforcing the law of the
land. With the weight of the Federal Government behind him, he arrested bank
robbers, diffused hostage situations, and even followed Russian spies. I grew up
under the shadow of the law.

This law provided a sense of security to a child with an overactive imagination.

My world of fantasy seemed as real of the physical world, and so I always sensed
aliens, monsters and ghosts were just around the corner waiting to reach out and
grab me. My dad, as the physical presence of the law, represented a protection
from this impending chaos.

Oddly enough, the law meant something entirely different in the context of church.
It was repressive, controlling, announcing impending judgment and always holding
before me the terror of either being “left behind” to live in a land with a cruel
and evil antichrist, or being cast into hell for torment and repression.

So I carried within me two very different images of law: one of protection and
safety, and one of doom and terror. In my childlike mind, I never tried to
reconcile them. Once the idea of God’s grace penetrated my mind, I discovered such
joy and freedom in faith that I assumed law and grace were opposites.

So my first venture into grace meant abandoning and running in terror from
anything that hinted of law. Love was the only law that commanded my allegiance.
And yet, this didn’t work out as clearly as I would hope. I watched people use the
words love and then act in ways that seem to betray the very idea of love.

I served in a church where people freely embraced and cried together and
reaffirmed their love for one another. Yet all the while the same people were
betraying each other, lying to each other, stealing from each other. Sadly, I
watched this behavior repeated in multiple churches where I served or
participated.

I reached a point where I was prepared to abandon church altogether. I often said,
“I love sinners but I can’t stand Christians.” While this is not really possible
according to a Biblical understanding of love, it reflected my anger and
frustration at what seemed to be a disconnect between words of love and actions
that violated love.

At that time (and for many years later), I failed to realize that I was just as
guilty as anyone around me in my failure to love. I knew nothing of the painful
calling and challenge of love. What seems so simple often requires many slow and
painful deaths.

This failure of love in the church and in my own life brings me back to the law.
When Jesus commands the disciples to love, he puts it in the context of keeping
his commandments. He links law and love together.

If I pay attention to the pattern of law and love throughout Scripture, I found
out that they are often linked together. When Moses reviews the commandments in
Deuteronomy, he reiterates the call to love the Lord your God with all your heart
and soul and strength. And even more strangely, the psalmist will link the giving
of the law with God’s grace.

So law and love as well as law and grace are not the opposites I would have
imagined. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I’m not the only one that has
struggled with the relation between these words. In fact, many theologians
continue to wrestle with the connection of law and grace in relation to the
gospel.

In this short essay, I cannot begin to explore all the nuances of such a question,
but let me suggest that I am coming to realize the Scripture does not pose these
ideas as opposites in the way we might tend to do. In order for me to begin to
even grasp how this might play out, I must return to the idea of law in my
childhood.

The law my father represented in some small way begins to help me reframe how I
think about law in the Biblical sense. So I want to offer a few images that are
helping me to reframe my image of law. These images are drawn from Scripture and
help me begin to think about how law is both a gift and a judgment in Scripture,
and why we should spend more time considering God’s law in our lives.

First, I want to think about Hurricane Katrina. A catastrophic storm blew into New
Orleans. The power of wind and rain sent the city into chaos. Homes flooded.
People drowned. The city fell apart. Even as natural order seemed to break down,
the social order broke apart. The world watched in terror as a whole city
descended into chaos.

This terrifying image of a chaos-inducing storm reaches a global terror in the

story of the flood. Think about Katrina repeated on a national, international and
global level. After a few days, cities break apart in chaos. All social order is
gone.

In the fight for survival, people lose all restraint and every imaginable evil
explodes within the cities. Yet the storm continues. The chaos of natural disaster
mixes with the chaos of social disaster. All order disappears. An ocean of chaos
consumes everything until nothing survives but the chaos.

This terrifying image grips the imagination of the psalmist who pens psalm 46. He
writes,
“God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Even though the earth be removed,
And thought the mountains be carried
Into the midst of the sea:
Though its waters roar and be troubled,
Though the mountains shake with its swelling.”

In this image of the sea swallowing the earth, we see an image of chaos
encompassing order. Our ability to function and live in the world is dependent on
the regular order of the world. The sun rises each day. The stars don’t fall from
the sky. The oceans may swell but they don’t overwhelm the earth. And when a
furious storm brews and the ocean does overlap the land, we are overawed by the
terrible power of the chaotic waters.

This sense of order, of regularity is sometimes referred to as law or the laws of

nature. In this sense, law is not viewed as a bad thing but as the order in our
world that allows us to have some predictability over life. We expect winters to
be cooler than summers. We expect the sun to shine and rely on the energy it
provides. We expect to remain fixed to the planet and for all the spheres to
remain in the heavens.

The psalmist considers what happens when this expectancy disappears and the seas
surge over the land. In this moment, the psalmist realizes that expectancy and
security are really found in God. While the natural world may have something like
law, the real law is found only in God. True order and absolute reliability is
found in God alone.

God is the ruler because the rule proceeds from God. All order, all law, all
security proceeds from God. He is the rule and the rule proceeds from Him. One way
for me to understand this is to think back to my father. He embodied the law to
me, therefore I found security in him. In our home, he was the law, he embodied
the law and the law proceeded from him.

Think of Robin Hood. In this story, roles are reversed, and the bandit is actually
good because he represents true justice. He is standing against the oppression of
the false law that oppresses the people—the rule of the Sheriff of Nottingham. The
great hope in Robin Hood is for the return of Richard the Lionhearted.

In this story, Richard represents the true law. When Richard returns, Robin Hood
will be vindicated. The false law of the Sheriff will be exposed as lawlessness
and true justice will be restored to the land.

In one sense, this was the hope of the Jews. They were waiting for the true law to
come in the person of the Messiah. When Messiah comes, he’ll overthrow the
oppressor and restore true justice in the land. It will be a day of vindication
for the people of God.

While many don’t recognize him, the Messiah has come. Jesus comes as the true law.
He says that the kingdom of God has come. What is the kingdom of God? The rule of
God or the law of God. He appears as the embodied word. He embodies the fullness
of the law. He is the law and the law proceeds from him.

And in an unexpected turn of events, he also bears the judgment for breaking the
law. In Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham is imprisoned for breaking the law.
But in the gospel, Jesus the lawgiver and law-fulfiller also bears the weight for
the transgressions against the law. And in so doing, he frees us from the curse of
the law.

He doesn’t bring this gift to do away with law and order, allowing chaos to
descend upon the earth. Like King Arthur, he does this to establish a land, a
world of true justice. For me, Camelot embodies the hope of justice. In Camelot,
true peace is brought to the land.

The glimmering and fading glimpse of Camelot is but a picture of the kingdom that
Jesus establishes by His Spirit. He fulfills the law that is first revealed to
Adam. This law that establishes proper order between God and humans, humans and
other humans, and humans and the land is fully revealed and perfected in Jesus.

This kingdom is now growing and emerging in the midst of another kingdom. In the
midst of a sinful world at war with God and with the law of God, the kingdom of
God is firmly established and set in place. The kingdoms of the world must and
will eventually fade and fall away completely.

The triumph of kingdom of God will ultimately be revealed, and all people will
confess Jesus as the Lord of this permanent kingdom.

So how do we live in this kingdom of God while still existing in the midst of
other kingdoms that are at war with God? How does the rule and law of God function
in our lives?
I’ll offer some thoughts in part two