be without the Law is to be free, to be alive. To do exactly what you please, uninhibited and unrestrained. This is life. To spend 2 million pounds a month on flowers and other fancies (like a notable figure in the paper last week—Sir John Ethan). Even if your fancies and your funds don’t go so far, to be free is fine. But the Law steps in with its ugly “Thou shalt not” and freedom is gone. But it may also cut the other way as the Law may say ‘Thou shalt.” And again, freedom is curtailed and I must spend time and energy doing things I don’t really want to do.
Is it really so bad? Does Law trouble us so much? There is no law that prevents us from spending 2 million pounds a month. Any society must have rules. A state must, a town must, a college must. Some of them we don’t like, some of them we ignore, but we don’t need to get tragic about it. But we are not talking about the law of the state, or even the rules of the Church. We are talking about the Law of God. For Law, the Law God made for his people, is religion. We are talking about religion. “Religion,” said Barth long ago, “divides people in two halves.” You may snap your fingers at the lawmakers at Westminster, but as Paul says in another letter, God is not mocked. You can’t get away with it there.5
Law is right there in the text; twice over so you don’t miss it. Two laws then? It may look like that but I think it is really one law, appearing under different managements. And the thing itself, before you get to the managements you can find in concrete terms. It is written there in the Old Testament. The Old Testament Law, as we know, was expanded and interpreted, but I think we can afford to neglect the expansions and interpretations this evening.
This Law came from God, it was God’s good gift, a gift of love, to his human beings, or to an especially favored family of humanity, who, when the time was ripe, would convey God’s benefits to the rest of the human race. This Law, says Paul, was spiritual, because it came from God’s Spirit. Its commands were holy, righteous, and good. Every society needs rules for the protection of its members. And they are needed to give the society an object, a purpose, something to aim at. This too was clear. The purpose was life in obedience to God, in fellowship with God, in enjoyment of his love.
This was God’s law—“this do and you shall live.” But sin found its opportunity in the law and used it to kill me. It does it in two ways (I hope this does not grow too complicated). There is the direct attack. In terms of the old story which we all know, if the Lord says, “don’t, for your own good, eat the apple on this tree” then I will eat it. That will show God what a free independent fellow I am. I will construct idols, I will take my neighbor’s life, or his goods, or his wife. That leads to the way out of the Garden.
But sin has a more subtle method. It says, “see all these commands; do them all, everyone, leave nothing out. What a wonderful reward you will get!” That is an even better and more certain way of approaching God on equal terms and saying, “What a fine fellow I am! Now I want my pay.” It is not a matter of mere abbreviation, economy of words, that when Paul quotes the last of the ten commandments, “thou shalt not covet, shalt not desire,” he leaves out all the objects of the verb. Of course it is wrong to desire your neighbor’s home, or his wife. But the real trouble is desire, desiring to have for myself, when the object of desire is a religious object. But this gives us a start with the second word: flesh.
FLESH
And again, there are two kinds of flesh. One of them we do not need to talk about in this setting. We all have it. Some of us preachers have too much of it. Paul had it. There is no harm in it. “The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul was a Christian in the flesh. If we are Christians we are Christians in the flesh. There is no other way here and now in which we can exist. This is a very elementary fact of life.
“But the mindset of the flesh is death. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” This is, this must be something different. We know what the sins of the flesh, in traditional usage, are—Greed, drunkenness, fornication and the like. But Paul’s use of the term flesh is more than that. It is best defined in terms of its opposite, which is love. There is no better alternative than Luther’s “cor in curvatum in se” the heart turned in upon itself, settled in an inward direction. Love is unself-centered life, flesh is self-centered life.
And this kind of flesh can and does get hold of God’s good Law and it becomes the law of sin and death and it makes war upon the good law. The two greatest commandments in the Law according to Jesus are “thou shalt love the Lord your God and thou shalt love thy neighbor.” They are only two safe ones, and that, I suppose is why they were picked out. Love is by definition the opposite of flesh, and cannot be taken over by flesh. Anything else can be, anything else can be done with a self-regarding, self-seeking motive. Anything, including for example jobs in the Church. To borrow the theme allotted to Professor Dunn in the first Tuesday service of the term, “Beware of Religion.” A cloak of religion is a fine, and a much used disguise for a flesh-centered way of life. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, though I have all knowledge and understand all the problems of theology, if I have not love, I am no better than a noisy gong.” There is one more word: mind.
MIND
What are we to say about this? Perhaps I am forcing the pattern a bit, but I think I can say that there are two minds to match the two laws and fleshes. Once more I can use Paul’s own language—“I will pray with the Spirit, and I will sing praise also with my mind. In the meeting I would rather speak five words with my mind . . . than tens of thousands of words in tongues.” The mind here is quite simply that rational agent that knows and understands what it is doing and will not allow itself to talk nonsense. A very good and useful property shared of course by Christian with many heathens.
But there is another mind, or perhaps the same mind, renewed, refined, raised to a higher level. Again I take Paul’s own language—“I beseech you brothers and sister by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, and acceptable to God as your rational service. And do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of the mind, that you may test and approve what is the will of God, holy, and acceptable and perfect as it is.” So there is a mind that is capable not only of distinguishing good logic from bad, but a renewed, transformed mind, which is capable of discerning the will of God. This is the mind with which I serve God’s Law.
And that is the end. The end of the chapter and the end of the story, in that it is the point at which the reader stands. He still, in the words of the joyful and triumphant chapter 8, groans as he awaits redemption. We are not introduced into a state of automatic faultlessness, unable henceforth to do wrong. Over every page of my life stands a question mark. Which is it to be? The transformed mind which delights in the Law of God? Or the flesh, which delights in nothing better than itself and it therefore is subject to the law of sin? The theological question is answered NO—the Law is not sin, but this is why it sometimes looks like it. Whether or not I am sin is a question that will be answered on the last day.
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5. Editor’s Note: These last three paragraphs are crossed out in the notebook, apparently in the interest of confining oneself to the time limit, but they help us understand better CKB’s views on this matter.
“NOTHING CAN SEPARATE US FROM GOD’S LOVE”—Romans 8.38–39
[Preached thirty-two times from 10/17/43 at Bondgate, Darlington to 10/21/01 at Bowburn]
“There is no arguing with such a certainty. Either you simply don’t believe it, or you recognize it as the Word of God.” So says Professor Dodd in his very learned commentary on Romans and he is quite right. Before such an assertion
