CAN WE REALLY “LOVINGY” OBEY THE LAW?

We recently received an email revealing an ongoing confusion which, I believe, is common among many Christians and especially among former Adventists. The questions concern God’s commands to believers, and it reveals the confusion about the place of the law in the life of new covenant Christians.

Many Adventists as well as Christians say that instead of being under the law as believers, we now “obey in love”—yet this very paradigm raises new questions: 

• What law do we “obey in love”?
• Can we really arrive at a place of true obedience?
• How do we know if we are actually obeying well enough to please God?
• What is “obedience”, really?

I believe that there are a couple of basic understandings that blur the issue of Christian obedience—especially for former Adventists. First, because we were taught that humans are bodies that breathe without immaterial spirits, the issue of our naturally being “dead in sin” is unclear.

Second, I believe that many Christians underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit and His permanent indwelling in true believers. God Himself seals us, and He is the One who takes charge of our sanctification.

Since we are created in God’s image, and “God is spirit”, as Jesus told the woman at the well (Jn. 4:24), then we are created spiritual beings housed, as Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 5, in fleshly bodies. It is that immaterial spirit that is born dead and must be made alive through faith in the Lord Jesus.

When we believe and pass from death to life, we have eternal life at that moment. From then on, the Holy Spirit begins dealing with us as we learn to bring our still-mortal bodies under His authority. He teaches us to submit ourselves to the detailed commands of the New Testament—commands written to believers. Thus not only is our justification entirely God’s work, but our sanctification is also His work.

I will share the email we received and then the answer we gave the writer. 

Dear Former Adventist, 

I’m a second generation Adventist. First of all, praise God for your ministry! I truly believe the “flock” includes those from the greater Christian community and is not exclusive to the Adventist “remnant”. I can see God working through your ministry, and it’s obvious to me that the folks associated with Former Adventist are genuine, God loving people. Your podcast episodes with Colleen and Nikki regarding Galatians (#140s) really opened my eyes to how much God truly loves us, and as you said (and I mention again below), it seems so obvious that Jesus really is continually interceding for us. Do we have a circular argument going on here and is it even possible to follow the law (the Decalogue)? I understand that if we love God, we ought to lovingly obey Him. This is the key phrase I see which gets thrown around a lot: “lovingly obey”. To lovingly obey means that our hearts are changed so that we want to obey God. I know Adventists say that Jesus’s commandment to “love the Lord your God” is a summary of the first four commandments of the Decalogue. Similarly, loving one’s neighbor is said to summarize the remaining six of the Decalogue. I know, however, that each of the 10 Commandments go much much further and deeper than what they actually state. They are only a summation of how our characters should be if we are truly born again and reflect Christ’s character. For example, the first commandment is not limited to prohibiting the worship of idols in a Buddhist shrine; anything that takes away priority from our relationship/focus on God is a transgression (i.e., ranging from porn, to more subtle things such as neglecting one’s daily prayers in favor of Instagram, etc). As Jesus said, hatred is the same as murder. However, as we know, Jesus was sinless—a fact which made Him the perfect sacrifice. Let’s set aside the applicability of the Decalogue (and obviously the Mosaic law) to gentile Christians. Can we even possibly obey God, even lovingly, when we all know we have a fallen sinful nature? We know from Romans, “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard”—and we pay particular attention to that “glorious standard”. So we love God, of course, and our characters have changed from our “sordid past". We think we are obeying the Ten Commandments perfectly (including the seventh-day Sabbath) and all the nuances that come along with it. However, we have a circular argument again; “We ALL fall short of God’s glorious standard.” In other words, we are probably sinning, even though we don’t think we are. For me (a second generation Adventist re-evaluating my beliefs), is obeying God the way EGW would communicate to us even possible? Jesus did, but again, the rest of us fall short of God’s glorious standard. For us to do what EGW communicates to us doesn’t make sense to me. It seems logical that we can only do this once we are resurrected and finally glorified, and then our sinful natures are finally removed. It seems that until the time of glorification comes, we can only rely on Jesus’s CONTINUAL intercession for us (and not continual investigation of us). To me, this is a huge source of worry, and I know it shouldn’t be (as Nikki said). If we lovingly obey, we won’t be stressed because you’re obeying lovingly. But (again) we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. And on and on and on..... Can you please comment?

Response:

You ask a really important question, and I’m happy to address it.

What Galatians, Ephesians, Romans, and Colossians have taught me is this: Christianity has, to a great extent, been “afraid” to trust the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit fully as the Bible reveals it. I’m going to try to address your question beginning with Genesis and then showing how this reality is reversed in us who believe.

We Have Spirits in God’s Image

The significance of Adam and Eve’s sin is that when they sinned, they actually DID DIE the day they ate the fruit, just as God has said they would (Gen. 2:17). As Adventists we were taught that they “began to die” that day because they still were alive and living on earth. Yet God said they would DIE the day they ate—if they ate. They literally died spiritually.

This spiritual death is not metaphorical or symbolic. The significance of God’s making man in His image is that He made us spiritual beings—possessed of literal, immaterial spirits. In John 4:24 Jesus told the woman at the well that “God is spirit, and true worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”

Adventism in particular “metaphorized” this revelation because Adventism teaches that we do not have immaterial spirits that can separate from the body. To an Adventist, humans are merely bodies plus breath—and when we cease to breathe, we cease to exist. Thus sin is basically a physical phenomenon, somehow transmitted through the human gene pool and becoming increasingly degraded with the generations. We thus “inherit” what EGW called “propensities to sin”; Adventism’s idea of having sinful natures, then, is that we are born with sin-degraded genes that drive us to sin and to dealing with anxious temptations endlessly.

Adam’s sin, however, gave us a SPIRITUAL legacy. Our literal immaterial spirits died, and that spiritual death is our human inheritance from Adam. “As in Adam all died, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:20-21). Thus, we are, as Paul describes in Ephesians 2:1–3 and Romans 3:9–18, literally—not figuratively or metaphorically—born DEAD in sin. We are separated from the spiritual life of God by nature. We are born condemned, as Jesus Himself stated in John 3:18, and unless we believe in the Lord Jesus and His completed work of atonement, we remain condemned, and the “wrath of God remains on us” (Jn. 3:39). Jesus Himself taught us that we are born lost and condemned and that we must believe and thus be made alive in order to be saved.

As He stated in John 5:24, he who believes “HAS PASSED” (note the present perfect tense: it began at a moment of belief and continues without a break) from death to life. We see, then, that being saved is entirely about believing and being born again. We are lost and condemned by nature and remain condemned, under the wrath of God, until we believe. At that moment we pass from death to life, and that life is eternal because it is the resurrection life of Jesus that brings us to spiritual life (see Romans 8: 9–17).

Believers Receive Spiritual Life and the Holy Spirit

So, when Jesus died and propitiated for our sins, He took care of every bit of our debt against our holy triune God. He took the death each of us deserved. When we believe in repentance and acknowledgment of our natural inability to obey, seek, or please God (as Paul tells us—quoting the Psalms—in Romans 3), we receive His justification and forgiveness. He gives us new hearts and new spirits, as God promised through Ezekiel that He would (see Ez. 36:26–27). Even more, He gives us His own Spirit! This is the promised seal of the Holy Spirit that Paul explains in Ephesians 1:13,14. Jesus also promised that the Holy Spirit would indwell His followers after His ascension. (See John 16:1–11). Jesus even told His disciples that they knew the Spirit of Truth “because He abides WITH you and WILL BE IN YOU” (Jn. 14:17).

This promise of the indwelling Holy Spirit is a specifically new covenant promise that was not realized until AFTER Jesus shed the one perfect sacrifice for sin. The promised Holy Spirit who guarantees our eternal security is a new covenant gift that specifically defines the church—those who are born again through belief in the Lord Jesus. The Holy Spirit indwelling believers means that we literally carry within us the presence of the the LORD as we live our lives. He never leaves us. We also receive from Him our own new hearts and spirits. We are literally born again, as Jesus explained to Nicodemus in John 3. He gives us new, living, connected-to-God spirits—a reality that reverses the curse of our natural sinful nature.

We Still Have Sinful Flesh

At the same time, Romans 7 discusses our common dilemma: our new, living spirits that know and love God and His Word continually bump into our still-sinful flesh. The mystery of our justification and even our sanctification is this: when we believe, God deals with our spirits first. He literally transfers us from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son (Col 1:13) because the essential “us”—our spirits that identify US which separate from our bodies at death and go to be with the Lord as per 2 Corinthians 5:1–9—have been made eternally alive with Jesus’ own resurrection life! Yet our bodies are still mortal and sinful.

This is the place where an understanding of physical degradation from sin is helpful. When we are born again, our brains and bodies still have habits and patterns that are ingrained in our nervous systems. We have learned to sin. Even children who haven’t lived long still have the physical inheritances from their parents that lead them to sin: genetic tendencies to alcoholism, to mental issues and to personality aberrations, and so forth. These inherited tendencies push us toward sin.

Jesus, however, was unique: a miracle and a singularity. In the first place, He was never spiritually dead. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and within Himself as a human baby, He was never spiritually dead. This spiritual life is what made Jesus sinless. He is the only baby ever born that did not need to be born again.

Even his cousin John had to be filled with the Holy Spirit—as he was in the womb! (See Luke 1:15 and 41.) Jesus was ALWAYS connected directly to the life and eternality of God! He was conceived in life, unlike David who wrote that in sin His mother conceived him (Psalm 51:5).

Furthermore, Jesus was also God the Son. We are not told how this mystery “worked”, but we know that God cannot sin, and in a profound reality, the incarnate Lord Jesus never sinned, even in His thoughts. Always spiritually alive, He had nothing in Him that was attracted to sin. Oh, He was tempted! He was tempted beyond anything we endure—yet He resisted the devil and ultimately disarmed him by His death on the cross (Col 2:14).

So, returning to the Romans 7 dilemma, Paul explains that what he wants to do he doesn’t do, and what he doesn’t want to do, he does. He even states directly:

“For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in my members, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin which is in my members” (Rom. 7:22, 23).

In other words, we will have our sinful flesh until we are resurrected and glorified! It is after we are fully justified through faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus that God begins His work of sanctification in us. He literally teaches us, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, to say no to ungodliness. He, the living Law—the Author of the Law of God—indwells us. He teaches us how to apply His word to our lives. He convicts us of our sins, and He teaches us to submit to Him and to His word as we face the temptations of life.

We often sin, as Paul laments in Romans 7, because we still have a “law of sin” in our flesh, but our spirits are now made alive in Christ. We have a spiritual war within us when we face our fleshly temptations—our inclinations to rage, to jealousy, to punitive withdrawing, to self-indulgence, to despair and anxiety—yet the indwelling Spirit is there to remind us to give thanks, to rejoice in the Lord, to submit to Him before indulging our tendencies to blame and shame. We often fail, as Paul laments in Romans 7—but even these failures do not result in the loss of salvation because salvation is not about “being good”! Rather, salvation is about being made alive.

Salvation is the consequence of believing in the Lord Jesus and being literally made spiritually alive!! We have God Himself within us, and He is holding and protecting us. Our flesh cannot remove our spiritual life!

Also, it is important to recognize that the law of sin in our flesh is something that is ours by nature, and the Decalogue is not what we offend. The Lord Jesus came, as Galatians 4:4 says, born under the law. He perfectly fulfilled all its shadows because He is intrinsically righteous. His ability to fulfill the law was the result of His being sinless; He was not sinless because He managed not to sin. He was sinless because He was always spiritually alive, never dead, and under the wrath of God.

We, on the other hand, are born dead in sin, and our natural state of sinfulness affects our flesh as well as our spirits. So we see Paul expounding this dichotomy: as a born-again believer, his spirit is alive, and he now loves God’s law—His entire revealed will be given in His word. Yet Paul’s flesh is still unglorified.

Paul even concludes his Romans 7 lament this way:

Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand, I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death (Rom 7:24-25—8:1).

So, even though our flesh is still not glorified and we carry around a law of sin in our flesh, our spirits have been made alive, and there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!

The REAL Issue

The issue is not IF or HOW we obey the biblical commands; the issue is: have we trusted the Sin Bearer? Have we literally been made alive? Have we passed from death to life and been transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son?

If we have trusted Jesus, our eternal future is secure. The Lord will now deal with us as sons, as Hebrews 12 explains. He will discipline us. He will teach us to recognize our sinful tendencies and teach us to submit to Him even when we know we are being wronged. He will give us strength to love as He loves, to love even our enemies for Him.

This love doesn’t mean embracing our enemies as intimates; it does mean that we submit to the Lord when we are in trying times and facing powerful temptations. It means we trust Him and ask Him to show us how to proceed instead of reflexively acting. It also means we repent when we realize we have sinned—but this repentance is not about having lost our salvation. It is about restoring fellowship with our true Father, about agreeing with God about our behavior and our sin and giving up our “right” to defend ourselves instead of trusting our Father to care for us.

This kind of love and trust means realizing that God cannot break His promises: He is faithful to Himself. He has promised to complete what He begins in us (Phil 1:6). He promises to give us all that we need if we seek His kingdom first (Mt. 6:25–34). He promises that He will lose none of those the Father gives Him and will turn none aside who come to Him (Jn. 6:37).

Significantly, by the way, the commands in the epistles are all written to born-again believers. As an Adventist, I thought every command in Scripture was a directive to me for measuring my obedience and behavior so that I would be acceptable to God. No!

The command for unbelievers is simple: Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31). Once we have believed and have been transferred from death to life, then the Holy Spirit works in us to submit our temptations to Him, trusting Him to teach us how to live in our identity as God’s born again, adopted sons and daughters.

We will sin until the Lord takes us to Himself and glorifies our bodies. But these sins do not remove our status as true sons. Rather, they become the areas in which our true Father disciplines us and teaches us to trust Him.

In Christ Instead of Under the Law

The law was given to Israel for the purpose of revealing to them that they sinned; as Paul said in Romans 5:13, where there is no law, sin is not imputed. God had to make it very clear to the people whom He chose to bring the Savior to the world that they needed a Savior! He gave them the law to show them that they could not perfect themselves nor please Him in their natural state—that they were actually living under a death sentence!

Jesus fulfilled every shadow of the law and fulfilled its death sentence, satisfying God’s demands for full payment for human sin. Because His sacrifice was sufficient, He broke death from the inside-out, and on this side of the cross, we rejoice in our eternal life when we trust Jesus and receive His forgiveness for sin!

Obedience is the work of the Holy Spirit in us. We are not to fear our failures; we are to admit them and trust the Lord Jesus who knows our struggles and who took God’s wrath for us. We now ask Him to show us how to trust Him and to plant us deeply in the truth of His word.

Now, having been born again, we do not measure our progress by our improved obedience. Rather, we depend on the literal alien-to-us personal righteousness of the Lord Jesus which has been imputed to us. When we are in Christ Jesus, the Father sees Jesus when He looks at us. When we trust Him, the eternal righteousness of God is credited to us (Phil. 3:9). We are safe in Him!

The issue is not our obedience; the issue is our belief and our eternal life which is ours when we are in Christ.

Have you believed the Son and been born again? If yes, then you can know you are secure. The Lord will teach you and discipline you, and these realities are the evidence that you ARE HIS SON! (See Hebrews 12:1–17).