The Marrow Controversy--The Dangers of Legalism

... have not doubt in recent years purchased the two volumes of the works of Robert Traill and perused them with some interest, and you may know these words that appertain the subject with which we are to deal with this morning.  In one of those several majestic works that he wrote, this particular one bearing the succinct title, "A Vindication of the Protestant Doctrine Concerning Justification and of its Preachers and Professors from the Unjust Charge of Antinomianism in a Letter from the Author to a Minister in the Country."  Robert Traill has this very striking and important thing to say,

That which concerneth our case is that the middle way betwixt the Arminians and the orthodox had been espoused and strenuously defended and promoted by some non-conformists of great note for piety and parts, and usually such men that are for middle ways in points of doctrine have a greater kindness for that extreme to which they halfway go than for that from which they half way come. 

And it was something of that subtle order of things that you and I have often recognized as we have looked upon Christendom and as we have looked perhaps upon our own people that was beginning to happen in the days of the Marrow Controversy.  We saw very briefly in our first study yesterday that on the day the General Assembly had condemned the AUK Creed and condemned those who were to follow it, known as the Marrow Men, two cases had in fact appeared before the Assembly for jurisdiction. 

The AUK Creed on the one hand was taken and condemned.  But on the same day, John Simpson professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow had been accused of propagating Arminianism.  This case had dragged on since the year 1715.  Indeed there can be very little doubt that he had given vocal expression to Arminianism in contradiction to the Confession of the church.  And he was later it seems in his own peculiar way to teach Arianism.
 
But in effect, Simpson received little more than a rap over the knuckles, and was acquitted with a warning, I quote, "...not to attribute too much to natural reason and the power of corrupt nature to the disparagement of revelation and efficacious free grace."  And yet despite the wording of the churches and the Assembly's rebuke where the father and brethren really stood on that occasion was far more evident from their harsh reaction to the Marrow Doctrine than from there relatively sympathetic reaction to Arminianism.  Even although, that Marrow Doctrine had been sharply, and perhaps unhappily, expressed. 

And the truth of the matter historically speaking was that this Presbyterian Church was on a doctrinal and spiritual slope.  It was falling away from the wonders of free grace towards the  bondage of legalism and it was gaining momentum with every turn on the way down.  It was therefore as you see from Traill's comments showing greater kindness to an Arminianism which proved to be a halfway house to full blown legalism and allowed some place for the works and righteousness of man in the great work of salvation.  It's confession taught that salvation was by free grace and by free grace alone, and to that confession to a man, the General Assembly gave verbal assent and consent.  And all the while the members hearts, many of them, were the stoney hearts of men hurdling towards a most subtle and dangerous form of legalism.

And what we are therefore dealing with when we come to study together some of the pastoral lessons which arise from the Marrow Controversy is as I suggested yesterday the dangers of legalism on the one hand and the danger on the other of antinomianism.  That danger that I want us to address ourselves this morning is the danger of legalism.  And I do so among many other reasons, because as God willing we shall discover tomorrow it is impossible ever for us to understand the nature of antinomianism until we have first understood the nature of legalism. 

And this was the great concern, I say to you this morning, of the Marrow Men in the 18th century.  They had begun with these spiritual antennae that God had given them to detect the presence of a legal strain in the thinking and then in the preaching of professing Calvinists and they saw clearly in the Assembly's reaction to the AUK Creed that the storms of legalism they had detected coming over the horizon were now ready to burst in a great cloud to cover over the sunshine of the glory of the free grace of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
 
And I want to say to you brethren that increasingly I feel and believe that we all ought to feel that this is a matter of immense practical and pastoral importance and relevance.  When we are speaking of legalism, we are not speaking about some curiosity that belongs to the schools, some remote recondite academic problem that could never touch us in our pastoral situation that could never touch us who have come to an understanding of free grace.  When we address ourselves to the condition known as legalism and that legal frame we are speaking about one of the most subtle and all pervasive influences that can ever twist a man's soul away from the God of grace and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

And I want to say to you brethren today that when we consider legalism, there is a sense in which we are considering the ultimate pastoral problem of all, because what we seek to do in bringing men from legalism into free grace is to undo what Satan did in the garden of Eden when he persuaded man that God was not only a God of moral law written in man's being, of positive law expressed in the vocalized commandments of God.  But when Satan came and sought to persuade that man and woman that the God whom they had come to know and worship of a God of essentially legalistic and binding tendencies of narrow and restrictive spirit shutting man in top a way of self merited justification with no gracious promise at what lies at the back of Satan's words to these our parents in the Garden of Eden when he said, "Did God say you cannot eat of any fruit of any of the trees of the Garden?"  He was simply seeking to persuade Adam and Eve that the God who reign in glory above, is a God who seeks to bind his creatures with a spirit of legal framework in their relationship to him and perverts the free grace of God.  "You may eat of the tree of ANY of these in the garden, but this one in which I establish my moral law."

And so with this persuasion of legalism, persuasion of the narrow restricted restrictive legalistic heart of God as Satan sought to pervert it.  the very first pastoral situation that needed to be dealt with in the history of the human race was the matter of a legal frame and bondage to a legal spirit.  Because at the end of the day, you see brethren, it is Satan who is a legalist.  If I may so express it, it is Satan who has taken the gracious promise of God in the garden of Eden and turned it into what has sometimes been regarded as the baneful and malignant influences of a covenant of works.  That which is held out to us if we so understand it in these early chapters of a gracious promise of life, a covenant of life.  And how often Satan has come in especially those who have been adversaries of Reformed theology and seen in what has become known as the covenant of works a restrictive and restricting and a legalistic God. 

So that what we deal with when we speak about legalism is something that is embedded in the heart of man almost from the very day of his creation.  And that is why in this matter we need the wisdom of Solomon if we truly are to be pastors and nursing mothers to the children of God.  And my dear brothers in the gospel we come to recognize this situation with which we deal of seeking to bring the gospel of grace to those who are of a legal frame is all the more complicated because we who bring such a gospel of free grace to them come often ourselves with a legal frame in our own hearts. 

And so we give attention to some of the most important areas of our pastoral work.  And we discover, do we not, that when we are faced with practical antinomianism or what you Americans call "easy believism" so often our instinctive response is a response of legalism rather than the response of free grace.  So this is not a matter for the schools, my brothers.  It is not merely a matter for our congregations.  This is a matter for our own hearts.  And it was as these Marrow Men found their own hearts exposed before the power of the grace of God ands were delivered from their natural legalism.  And every single one of them confesses by nature that he was a legalist as we ourselves do, we find that indeed this is meat and drink for the pastoral ministry.

Now there are five areas, God helping us, that I want us to address ourselves to this morning.  First of all, we will discuss together the nature of legalism.  Secondly, the specific development of legalism to the time of the Marrow Controversy.  Thirdly, we will look at some of the causes of legalism.  Fourthly, we will look at some of the pastoral dangers of legalism.  And fifthly we will look at the Biblical remedy for legalism. Unless you think you would be quicker if you got that copy of the Marrow in the back, let me say that we will only be able to deal with these five points in a very hasty manner.

I.  Nature of Legalism
First of all, then, the nature of legalism.  You will discover, I'm sure, in your dictionaries that they tend to define legalism in terms of a straight forward doctrine of a justification by works rather than justification by grace.  But of course as you know from your ministry, things are rarely as straightforward as the dictionary's define them.  And since the days of the Marrow Men and the days of the Apostle and since the days of our own blessed Savior here upon the Earth it has frequently been discovered that legalism takes many forms and has many faces. 

The essence of legalism, whatever face it may wear, is that at the end of the day it proves to be a distortion of the grace of God.  And for that reason, as you will often have noticed, legalism is also necessarily, not only a distortion of the gospel, but by its very nature it must be a distortion of the Law.  And you will remember when Paul sets out in his letters to Rome and Galatia for example to deal a death blow to legalism he does not do so at the expense of the Law.  Do we overthrow the Law by this teaching of grace through faith, he asks in Romans 3, by no means, on the contrary.  Grace does not overthrow the Law.  The reverse- grace confirms the law.  It is legalism that destroys grace and it is legalism that also distorts Law from its God-given character and function. 

Take for example, the Pharisees.  In the evangelical tradition, these men have often been presented in popular preaching as men whose creed was a straightforward form of works righteousness.  But you well know that their true theological and practical position was infinitely more subtle than that.  Just as the true position of Roman dogma is never presented as straightforward works righteousness, but is always disguised in an infinitely more subtle form.  The Pharisees did not so much oppose the way of works to the way of grace impliciter, but rather so often mixed the way of works with the way of grace. 

The same is true as you'll recall in the epistle to the Galatians.  And Paul has to argue to argue to the logical conclusion of mixing grace with works is to destroy grace.  The position the Galatians believed they held was not a denial of grace, but a mingling of grace with works that was indeed a denial of grace.  Listen to these words of John Calhoun of Leith.  A Marrow Man as many of you may know born out of due season writing in one of his fine works The Law and The Gospel, he says,

A man is to be counting a legalist or self righteous if while he does not pretend that his obedience is perfect he yet relies on it for a title to life.  Self righteous men have in all ages set aside as impossible to be fulfilled by them that condition of the covenant of works which God had imposed on Adam, and have framed for themselves various models of that covenant, which though they are far from being institutions of God and stand upon terms lower than perfect obedience  yet are of the nature of a covenant of works.  The unbelieving Jews which sought righteousness by the works of the Law were not so very ignorant or presumptuous as to pretend to perfect obedience.  Neither did those professed Christian in Galatia who desired to be under the Law and be justified by the Law of whom the Apostle therefore testified that they had fallen from grace presumed that they could plead that they could yield perfect obedience. 

On the contrary, their public profession showed that they had some sense of their need of Christ's righteousness, but there great error was this: they did not believe that they r'ness of Jesus Christ alone was sufficient to entitled them to the justification of life.  And therefore they depended for justification partly upon their own obedience to the moral and the ceremonial law.  It was this and not their pretensions to perfect obedience that they Apostle had in view when he blamed them cleaving to the law of works and for expecting justification by the works of the Law. 

By relying for justification partly on their own works of obedience to the moral and ceremonial laws they as the Apostle informed them were fallen from grace.  Christ was become of no effect to them and they were debtors to the whole Law.  You see he pushes them to logical conclusion of their position, which they failed to see in their joining of works and grace.  By depending upon justification partly by their obedience to the Law, they framed the Law into a covenant of works and such a covenant of works too as could admit of imperfect instead of perfect obedience.  And by relying partly on the r'ness of Christ, the mingled the Law with the gospel and works with faith in the affair of justification.  Thus they perverted both the Law and the gospel.  And formed for the themselves a motley covenant of works. 

And this is the very distortion that we generally face when we preach the gospel to the natural man.  And it's a very subtle distortion of the truth indeed, and it's compounded you see in our pastoral work, by this fact: that we encounter not only what we might call a doctrinal legalism but there is also sometimes accompanying it and frequently separate from it, an experimental legalism.  It is possible as we all well know to have a legal head and a legal heart.  But it is also possible to have an evangelical head and a legal heart.  And it was this very position that the Marrow Men found themselves controverting. 

And that is why one of the problems of the Marrow Controversy was that there opponents professed the most thoroughgoing orthodoxy this world has ever seen in the Westminster Confession of Faith.  Men who tenaciously subscribed, as I said yesterday, to Reformed and evangelical theology in its most comprehensive and potentially most powerful form.  And that was why to took a creed like the AUK Creed and a book like the Marrow.  The free grace of God expressed in perhaps clumsy and certainly in radical terms to smoke out of the dark burrows of legalism.  The hearts of men with an orthodox theology and a legal spirit.

    And in that sense what the Marrow itself and the AUK creed and the Marrow Controversy did was this: these things acted as it were like a piece of litmus paper- of no great significance in and of themselves.  But demonstrating by their touch there was the presence of acid or alkaline.  Grace or legalism.  These men, the Marrow Men, were neither legalists nor antinomians, but the moment their teaching in all its radical form touched the heart of men that were, they were inevitably shown in their true colors.

And so we may say that legalism is any teaching which either distorts the free grace of God in the gospel or distorts the true nature of God's grace in the Law or even fails to place the gracious law of God in its proper place in redemptive history.  And it was on all these fronts that the Marrow Men wrote in polemic fashion for the free grace of God. 

So there briefly is the nature of legalism, or we might say the natures of legalism.

Development of Legalism
The reason the AUK Creed ("I believe that it is not sound and orthodox to teach that we forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ") created so much consternation was because it struck exposed nerves in legalistic hearts.  Over the years in the Reformed tradition certainly in Scotland and possibly elsewhere, there had taken place an unnoticed but very real change in the Reformed ordo salutis, or the personal experience of the benefits of redemption. 

What the AUK Creed was saying was this: that in the preaching and proclamation of the gospel, it is ever grace that precedes faith, that repentance is a condition neither of the gospel offer, nor is it indeed strictly speaking to be considered a condition of salvation.  In pristine Reformed theology as you will probably know repentance for example in Calvin was never seen as a cause of grace, nor as a condition of grace.  But always as the consequence of grace.  And it was the overcoming of this truly evangelical order that led to truly evangelical repentance which was at the heart of the controversy in the early 18th century in Scotland. 

Now the Marrow of Modern Divinity already in the 17th century had puts its finger on exactly this point.  It suffered of course from the traditional divisions of the Puritans, but in part 1, chapter 2, section 3, subsection 4, the following conversation is recorded between Evangelista, the minister or pastor, and Nomista, the legalist.

Nomista:  But yet sir, you see that Christ requires a thirsting before a man come unto him, but which, I conceive, cannot be without true repentance.
Evangelista:  In the last chapter of the Revelations verse 17, Christ makes the same general proclamation saying, "let him that is athirst come."  And as if the Holy Ghost had so long since answered the same objection which is yours, if follows in the next words, "and whosoever will let him take of the water of life freely even without thirsting if we will..." (John 6:37)  but because it seems you conceive he ought to repent before he believe I pray you tell me what do you conceive repentance to be?  Or wherein does it consist?

 And you will notice already here, if I may interject, that subtle confusion that has so often taken place in Reformed thinking between conviction of sin and repentance from sin.

Nomista:  Why, I conceive that repentance consists of a man humbling himself before God and sorrowing a grieving for offending Him by sins and then turning from them all to the Lord.  
Evangelista:  And would you have a man do all this truly before he comes to Christ by believing?
Nomista: Yes, indeed, I think it is very meet he should.
Evangelista: Why, then, I tell you truly, you would have him do that which is impossible.  For first of all, godly humiliation and true penitence proceeds from the love of God, their good Father, and so from the hatred of that sin which as displeased him.  And his cannot be without faith.  Secondly, sorrow and grief for displeasing God necessarily argue the love of God and it is impossible we should love God until by faith we know ourselves loved by God.  Thirdly, no man can turn to God except he be first turned of God.  And after he is turned, he repents.  So Ephraim says, after I was converted I repented, Jeremiah 31:19.  The truth is, a repentant sinner first believes that God will do that which he promiseth, namely pardon his sin and take away his iniquity, then he rests in the hope of it and from that and for it, he leaves sin and will forsake his old course because it is displeasing to God.  And will do that which is pleasing and acceptable to him, so that first of all, God's favor is apprehended and remission of sins believed and then upon that cometh alteration of life and conversion.

Unto these words, Thomas Boston set his seal.  He indicates in lengthy notes that this is his understanding of  the way of salvation.
 
And I want to try to show you briefly this morning that this is also the position of the man from whom so many of us take our name, nickname though it so often be, so that we may be in no doubt as to the Reformed pedigree of this great emphasis on the free grace of God that brings us to repentance.  You may well know that Calvin's presupposition is that of all good Reformed divines is this: that we cannot divide faith and repentance chronologically.  The true Christian believes penitently and repents believingly.  But in the order of nature, Calvin argues, repentance can never precede faith.  In the order of nature the only way we can conceive it is that faith precedes it, in the order of nature, I say, never in the order of chronology.  Just as grace and regeneration precede faith.  Listen to Calvin,

Both repentance and forgiveness of sins, that is, newness of life and free reconciliation are conferred on us by Christ and both are attained by us through faith....  It ought to be a fact beyond controversy that repentance not only constantly follows faith, but is also born of faith.  For since pardon and forgiveness are offered through the preaching of the gospel in order that the sinner, freed from the tyranny of Satan, the yolk of sin, and the miserable bondage of vices, may cross over into the kingdom of God.  Surely no one can embrace the grace of the gospel without betaken himself then from the errors of his past life and to the right way and applying his whole effort to the practice of repentance.  There are some, however, who suppose that repentance precedes faith rather than flows from it or is produces by it as fruit from a tree.  Such persons have never known the power of repentance and are moved to feel this way by an unduly slight argument....When we refer the origin of repentance to faith we do not imagine some space of time during which it brings it to the birth, but we do mean to show that a man cannot apply himself seriously to repentance without knowing himself to belong to God.  But no one is truly persuaded that he belongs to God unless he is first recognized God's grace.  

What then is it?  What then is the doctrine of the Marrow and the AUK Creed and the Marrow Men so strenuously oppose?  It was essentially at the root of matter a failure to be Biblically evangelical.  It was certainly undoubtedly a failure to be Reformed in the most in depth sense.  Because they saw the legalism that was rising to be a subtle falling back into the old Medieval pattern of salvation by works against which Calvin and Luther fought tooth and nail.

Penitence meriting grace.  Penitence meriting forgiveness.  However carefully that change in the ordo salutis was disguised under the canopy of a Reformed title, repentance that merits grace in the eyes of the Marrow men was the same thing as bondage and legalism. 

My brothers, I wonder if something of the power of this has gripped and grasped our own souls.  Its already there in the Parable of the Prodigal Son or as we might well call it, the Parable of the Free Grace Father, the Prodigal the sinner who is welcomed home.  And you can see him, can you not, wondering in his heart, "Have I felt sorry enough for my sin in order that my Father might accept me?  Have I repented enough for my sin in order that my Father may accept me?"  but you see it is the knowledge of the supplies of grace that there are in the heart and in the house of his father that bring the man to himself in the first place and then begin to draw him home.  And in the father's arms as he is drawn to his bosom, any talk of conditions that must be met to qualify for the unmerited love his Father pours upon him are silenced in the loving embrace of the bosom of the Father. 

And yet in that same father's heart lurks anxiety for his firstborn.  "Did not I meet all the conditions?  Have not I merited the ring and the robe and the fattened calf and the feast?  Did I not merit them?"  "Oh," says the Father, "it is all yours unconditionally and freely, but your legal heart will never set you free to enjoy it.  you will only take free grace on condition that you have merited it.  And under those conditions you can never have it."

Brethren, scarcely need to underline for you there that there is always the danger that the spirit of the elder brother, the spirit of the legalist, will invade both the preaching of the free grace of God and our pastoral application of it to the flock of God.  
So we consider briefly something of the nature of legalism, something of the development of legalism in those days of the Marrow Controversy.

Causes of Legalism
    And in the third place we give attention to what I have called the causes of legalism.  One of the plain facts which began to emerge the Marrow Controversy was that legalism could almost always be traced back to the same basic principles, no matter what particular face or mask it might wear.  And we have time to consider only three of these.  They may not be the most common in your experience, in some ways they may not be the most important, but they are three very real causes of legalism at all time and in all places in the hearts of God's people.
 
And it will be clear that when we look at them that when we come to deal pastorally with legalism we will find some evidence of these causes needing to be rooted out of the hearts of our people.  And we will need to know, brothers, what maladies may be brought to birth by a spirit of legalism, why they are there, and what gracious medicine the gospel provides to deliver men and women and yes boys and girls from such malignant spiritual disease.

What are three of the causes of legalism in the hearts of men and even in the hearts of God's people?  A first cause of legalism is

1.  A failure truly to grasp that justification is by free grace and received by faith.
You remember it was Martin Luther who said that justification was the standing or falling article of the Church, but brethren it is also the standing or falling article of the individual believer.  And the strength or weakness of our grasp of justification by faith and its domination of our hearts is bound to be the index and the measure of the liberty God's children that we enjoy. 

You remember the Apostle's burning passion to make free justification by grace alone through faith in Christ alone, the foundation stone of the gospel.  And you remember the great blessings he promises it brings: peace with God, joy in tribulations, joy in the hope of the glory of God, joy in God Himself.  No condemnation for the believer, no prison cell existence, no spirit of bondage.  For what the Law could not do in that it was weak through our flesh, God has done sending his Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and for sin condemning sin in the flesh that those who walk in the Spirit might have the just requirement of the Law fulfilled in them in the total liberty of the bondage of the yolk of Christ.  There I no room for legalism, boasting is excluded says the Apostle.  On what principle?  On the principle of works?  NO! he says, not even on the principle of works, but on the principle of the free grace of God.

And these are some of the glorious fine declarations that we proclaim to lost men and women: that God in Christ reconciled the world to himself and comes offering arm loads of free grace to any who will come. 

But we would be very naive to assume that evangelical or even Reformed people have grasped this the way they need to.  Beloved, the sooner we learn in our ministries it is not teaching on the so called "deeper truths" of the Christian life that our people need the better.  It is the uncovering of the mighty power of God in these fundamental truths of the gospel that will lead our people out into such heart felt liberty that they will cry, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his Holy Name, that I am a justified and eternally justified sinner by the grace of God in Christ and I am free from the condemnation of the Law to serve him for his glory. 

And yet you see the spirit of legalism so easily creeps into our thinking.  Particularly in two areas.  It is so easy for the legal spirit to creep into our thinking 1) about the gospel offer.  You know Samuel Rutherford, than whom surely there has never been an more intellectual experimental Calvinist, once said this.  I put this to you as the litmus paper of Samuel Rutherford.  "The reprobate hath the same warrant to believe in Christ as the elect."

You see it is nothing less than that kind of extreme statement of the free offer of the gospel that unravels rather our hearts still smack of that legalistic framework that we introduce an "if" and a "but" into our offer of the gospel of Christ to lost sinners.  Let me quote to you again from Traill's fine work on justification.

Is it desired that we should forbear to make a free offer of God's grace in Christ to the worst of sinners?  This cannot be granted by us, for this is the gospel faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation and therefore worthy of all our preaching of it that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners and the chief of them.  This was the Apostolic practice.  They began at Jerusalem, where the Lord of Life was wickedly slain by them.  And yet Life in and through his blood was offered to and accepted and obtained by many of them with the Blood of our Savior on their hands.  The free offer of Christ was made to such Jerusalem sinners.  And so would we unconditionally offer Christ to Jerusalem sinners.
 
Shall we tell men that unless they be holy they must not believe on Jesus Christ?  That they must not venture on Christ until they by qualified and fit to be received and welcomed by him?  This were to forebear preaching the gospel at all or to forbid men to believe in Christ for never was any sinner qualified for Christ.  He is well qualified for us!  (I Corinthians 1:30)  But a sinner out of Christ hath no qualification for Christ but sin and misery.  Nay, suppose, suppose an impossibility that a man were qualified for Christ.  I boldly assert that such a man would not nor could ever believe on Christ for faith is for lost helpless condemned sinners casting themselves on Christ for salvation.  And the qualified is no such person. 

Shall we warn people that they should not believe on Christ too soon?  It is impossible that they should do it too soon, can a man obey the great gospel command too soon?  Or do the great work of God too soon?  Oh, Beloved, let us not put stumbling blocks in the way of Jerusalem sinners.

But legalism, you see, creeps not only in our thinking about the offer of the gospel, it also creeps into our thinking 2) about the character of sanctification.  And you'll remember that this is what was happening in the Churches in Galatia and Colossae.  Those letters in which Paul has such striking things to say about the relationship of the believer to the law.  It was legalism in the heart that was at the root of the distortion of the gospel in Galatia.  They had begun with the Spirit who was fulfilling in them the things that the law required and now they were ending with the flesh.  They had begun with faith but now they were seeking a sanctification that had works as its foundation and merited favor with God as a result.

And the same basic principle was operated in Colossae.  There was the promise made of a second blessing, a fullness, not hitherto known by justifying faith.  But what was this second blessing rooted in?  It was rooted in that deviation that has since haunted evangelical churches like a specter.  Legalism, merit the second blessing by obedience to the Laws.  And what does it do, says Paul, it detracts from the fullness of our Lord Jesus Christ for justification, and at the end of the day it has no power to mortify sin, but only serves to indulge it.  For this reason, that is legalistic based on works.  And therefore fleshly and carnal and never spiritual and gracious.

So the first cause of legalism often theologically speaking is a failure to grasp the shear liberating power of the truth that justification is sola gratia, sola fide, solo Christo.  It is by grace alone!  It is received through faith alone unmixed with works.  It is to be found in Christ alone who is full of grace for Jerusalem sinners.  

But a second cause of legalism is this:
2.  A failure to distinguish between the law as a covenant of works and the Law as a rule of life.
Now that of course as you immediately recognize is the language of the Marrow, of the Marrow Men, and of the whole Westminster Confession tradition of theology.  So says the Confession, "True believers be not under the Law as a covenant of works to be thereby justified or condemned yet it is of great use to them as well as to others as a rule of life."

Now beloved, whether we as individuals employ this time honored language of the covenant of works or not (which is certainly not the issue we are presently discussing) the point that is being made is surely clear enough: legalism arises not only out of a distortion of the grace of God in justification.  It arises when a man looks upon the law of God as though it itself were the way of works righteousness.  We could put it this way: that legalism arises when we fail to see the difference between the gracious covenant of law that God made with men at Sinai, and a contract of law by which we bargain with God as a way of salvation.  His covenant is his free, sovereign gracious disposition, his self-giving, his "whole-souled self-giving," as Professor Murray used to say.  And a contract is a bargain negotiated on agreed terms for salvation. 

Now Sinai was never such a contract.  It was never a legalistic bargain expounding conditions for grace.  it always was and remains the word of God's unconditional grace, "I am the Lord who brought you out of land of bondage out of the house of Egypt."  And his unconditional demands, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me."  And you see this is why the Marrow Men and we who follow them, if we do, needed to learn to press home upon their people not only the message of free justification by the grace of God, but to press home upon the people the free grace of God in the giving of the Sinaitic law.  For until they are persuaded that the grace of God has been deposited in his Law as well as in his Gospel they will never find anything at Sinai but thunder and lightening and eternal judgement. Listen again, will you, to John Calhoun,

The distinction of the divine law especially unto the law as a covenant of works and as a rule of life is a very important distinction.  It is a Scriptural distinction.  And it is necessary in the hand of the Spirit to qualify believers for understanding clearly the grace and glory of the gospel as well as the acceptable manner of performing every duty required by the law.  To distinguish truly and clearly between the law as covenant and the law as a rule is, as one expresses it the 'key which opens the hidden treasure of the gospel.' No sooner had the Spirit of Truth given Luther but a glimpse of that distinction that he declared he seemed himself to be admitted into Paradise and that the whole face of Scripture was changed to him.  Indeed, without a spiritual and true knowledge of that distinction, a man can neither discern nor love nor obey acceptably the truth as it is in Jesus.  And so long as men fail to see that the full revelation of grace in Jesus Christ shows us that Sinai was a pale revelation of that same redemptive grace that in Christ the ten fingers that they have seen as mighty accusations of their sin become gracious friends upon a gracious foundation by which they may frame their way of life so long a man in a bondage frame of Spirit, and stand in need of the grace of God in law and in gospel that they may be delivered.

My brethren, we need in our ministries to labor to some of our people some of the time, if not in every situation, all of the time, at least in some places some of the time we need to labor in our exposition of the fact that they law is not a means to salvation, but the law is the gracious way in which our salvation takes us.  It is the moral shape that salvation takes.  The law is not a motor car to heaven, an automobile to heaven, it is in and of itself and separated from grace, lacking an engine, lacking an oil, lacking in petrol, lacking in gas, lacking in wheels, lacking in road, but it is in the hand of God a map for those who have already been energized by the power of the Spirit, to set out before them those glorious signposts that point to the Celestial City, for those who are travelling in the triumphal chariot of our Lord Jesus Christ the pastor of the gospel is the man who sits as a map reader with the law of God in his hand.  And leads his people in the way of perfect righteousness through the grace of God in the giving of the law. 

And so we need to labor to bring to bear upon our people this distinction, however we may express it.  And all of us recognize we are at liberty to express these truth in other words than our Reformed fathers, but we need somehow to distinguish between the law as a covenant of works and the law as a rule of life.

The third cause of legalism is this:  (and perhaps the most subtle...)
3.  The legality inbred in men's hearts.
In many ways, I think, this is the key to that terrible cry of grief and frustration from the lips of the holy Apostle Paul in Romans 7, "I know that the Law is holy and good, it is full of grace like God himself, but as for myself I am carnal, sold under sin..."  "Εγο δε σαρκινοσ ειμι, πεπραμενοσ υπο την αμαρτιαν," he cries.  Πεπραμενοσ, as you may well know, the perfect participle passive, "having been sold under sin."  As A. T. Robertson expresses it vividly, "Sin has closed the mortgage and owns its slave."

And what Paul is surely saying and we know something, surely, of this in our experience is this: I am one whom having been sold under sin, one upon whom sin had closed the mortgage, have now been purchased by the precious blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, no longer under the law as a covenant of works, but under grace.  But my dear friends, when legality has paid and closed the mortgage over your life for many years, since you were conceived in your mothers womb, for many of us it takes days, and months, and years, before the effect of the mortgaging of Jesus Christ and his heavenly purchase begins to dismantle all the influences and the effects that have been sown in our hearts by the previous occupier. 

We know a little of this, if I may illustrate rather mundanely in our own home.  For some two and a half years now we have been living in our house and since we moved in we have been undoing almost everything the previous occupants did, we have been doing what the previous occupants had undone.  In our kitchen where there had been cupboards, we put in cupboards.  And we have been saving up our pennies to put in our cupboards.  In two of our public rooms, they decided to knock down the wall, and we have been saving our pennies to knock the wall back in.  in all the corridors in our houses in the United kingdom as you know are so different from your houses here in the United States, they had knocked down all the doors.  And it has taken all this time, indeed, to just before I came away two weeks ago, it has taken all this time at last to get some doors back in. 

And you see we know in our people that something of the same order they have been under the spirit of bondage and legality since the day of their conception.  And purchased by our Lord Jesus Christ as they are, it takes the constant application of the influence of Christ's powerful grace, to remake them into the image of the child of God who enjoys the liberty of the children of God and we know from God's word that such liberty only awaits the day when the bondage of decay under the curse of the law is removed in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

And in so many of our people hidden in so many guises our pastoral ministry my brothers is to seek to remove those deep seated levels of legal spirit and framework, because they are all like ourselves, men and women, boys and girls to, who by nature sin through the law had close the mortgage.  And even those of us who may be on in life and may be well acquainted with the covenant of grace