First Things First

We have a table-surfing dog. A backpack-opening, lunch box-unzipping, bag-ripping dog who does not discriminate between a cheese stick and a chocolate bar. As we get more savvy in hiding food, she gets more sophisticated in stealing it. When she lies down to sleep after an incident, we can hear her stomach gurgling from ten feet away. I am not exaggerating. Even though she’s up half the night paying for her waywardness, she always goes back to it.

There’s something familiar about that.

Watching her suffer, I hear Paul’s voice in the back of my mind: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Obedience can be as hard for rescued humans as it is for rescued dogs.

Which is why I cringed when I recently heard Old Testament scholar Christopher Wright pose this question: What if God had appeared to Moses in the burning bush, given him the Ten Commandments, and told him, “Now bring these commandments back to Egypt and tell Israel that if they can obey my commandments, I will rescue them from slavery”?

In posing his question, Wright emphasizes the same truth we have been studying lately at KCC: God puts first things first. Grace first, obedience second. In Exodus, God does not wait for Israel to obey him before he literally moves heaven and earth to draw them out of slavery into freedom to worship him alone. Until Israel reaches Mount Sinai months later, all God asks them to do is trust him.

When God does give Israel his law, they have every reason to obey. They just witnessed ten astonishing and downright scary displays of God’s power over their Egyptian masters. They just watched nature bow to God’s authority in a pillar of fire, a pillar of smoke, a dry valley in the middle of the sea. They stood trembling at a distance while the thunder and lightning of God’s mighty presence shook the ground beneath their feet.

If anyone should be able to obey, it’s Israel at Mount Sinai. But, like my rescue dog, they bow to a golden calf almost as soon as Moses leaves them unsupervised. Even when they pay for their sin with their own lives, they don’t learn. The Old Testament recounts that as time goes on, God’s people continue to ignore his messengers and run after idols, continue to pay for their sin in their own bodies. It makes me wonder, if the people of Israel couldn’t obey after painting the blood of a lamb on their doorposts and watching the angel of death pass over their firstborn sons, what hope is there for me? Paul echoes this frustration in Romans 7: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” (v. 24).

Here’s the thing: if Israel-or anybody- were able to earn God’s grace through obedience, who would get the glory? Our generous, self-sacrificing God is very clear that glory is one thing he does not share: “I am the LORD; that is my name, my glory I give to no other” (Isaiah 45:8). God is not selfish or insecure, that he would hoard glory at others’ expense. No, he protects us from a weight our shoulders cannot bear. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God explained that a person cannot even see his glory pass by and survive (Exodus 33:10). It was all Moses could do to catch a glimpse of God’s back, and even then, he needed God’s protection to keep him alive. How, then, could God’s people bear to share his glory? And even if they could, how would they know they had done well enough to earn it?

So we can’t perfectly obey and we can’t share God’s glory; where does that leave us? God knows that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), but he still wants a relationship with us (Revelation 3:20). This is why, as Pastor Austin said recently, “the law is bookended by grace.” From the day God warned the serpent in Eden that his head would be crushed (Genesis 3:15) to the day “he made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21), God’s order of operations in our hearts has always been grace, obedience, grace.

As the New City Catechism explains, the purpose of the God’s law is not that we would perfectly obey it, but “that we may know the holy nature and will of God, and the sinful nature and disobedience of our hearts; and thus our need for a Savior.” Through the commandments, we see God’s holy nature and the perfection of his design for how life works best. We also grieve our inability to achieve that perfection. In this way, the law points to the grace of Jesus Christ.

Grace is not a compromise. God never accepts less than perfection (Matthew 5:48). Grace is a gift, the gift of a perfectly holy life credited to our account because Jesus paid the death-debt we owed (Romans 6:23). Before leaving Egypt, the Israelites had to trust the blood of a slain lamb on their doorposts to save them from death. Nothing has changed. God’s people still trust the blood of his slain Lamb on the cross to save us from death.

This is why Paul’s lament in Romans 7 gives way to his encouragement in Romans 8:

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (v. 1-4)

Instead of excusing us from obeying his commands or compromising his requirements, God energizes us to obey with the assurance that our part in the covenant of obedience is fully upheld in Christ. His great love through Jesus motivates our obedience. His power through the Holy Spirit sustains our obedience (Colossians 1:29). Obedience motivated by grace in this way puts the glory where it belongs: at the throne of our saving, holy, and gracious God.

Scripture for meditation: Romans 7:15-8:4