There exists a variety of man both rebel and legalist. He’s born to be wild, disobedient from birth, full of treasonous desire. We all know this man. This man is us. We say with David, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5).
Yet, at the same time, this man is a legalist. Law is his native tongue. We tend to think the rebel and the law keeper stand at odds against one another, resisting one another, trying to gain the advantage. But, in actual fact, they live and work together quite harmoniously. One can’t exist without the other.
Moreover, the rebel needs the legalist. Not just to make his career possible, but to provide something more gratifying. Though he wants very much to run in wild pursuit of his illicit desires, he doesn’t want to run “too far.” He wants, after all, to feel good about himself even though he does wrong. He needs his rebellion to be respectable, justifiable, even enviable. He needs to be able to “get away with it,” which in part means he needs everyone around him to think of him as a “good fella.” His rebellion can’t be seen for what it is–sedition, wickedness, an attempt at a cosmic coup. Instead, the rebel needs his rebellion to be named the most respectable of pseudonyms–“freedom.” He’ll settle for “bravery” or “own man” or “bold.” But the rebel most wants to be thought of as free. That way he gets to be both celebrated and inviting. Who doesn’t like a “free” man? Who doesn’t want to be a “free” man? As long as the rebel can convince himself and others that “free” means “doing what you want to do” and being respected for it, then the rebel thumps his chest and holds his head high. The coup has been successful.
But such pride actually depends on the law. It depends on the ability to say, “I haven’t transgressed. I’ve not gone too far. I’m within the bounds–even if I push them.” So he becomes an expert lawyer, a legalist, not a self-made man (which requires genuine responsibility and self-control) but a self-justifying man (which only requires legal argument). That’s why he argues from precedent that others are not as decent as he. That’s why he becomes quite skillful at cross-examining his accusers, making them out to be more legalist, more prudish, less “free” and “freedom” inhibiting than he. That’s why his favorite question begins, “What’s wrong with…?” He’s not looking for a stronger morality, one that actually binds. He’s looking to impeach the morality of others whilst maintaining the appearance of being law-abiding himself. “What’s wrong with…” is actually a legal defense of what is, in fact, wrong. It’s a perverse question that knows the answer and disarms the opponent precisely because it dares to impeach the right answer.
The rebel tends to be an extraordinary legalist. He walks an important tightrope between loosening the law enough to make his particular brand of rebellion acceptable, and keeping the back teeth of the law healthy so that it can at least grind some other transgressions less desirable than the rebel’s own. That’s no easy feat. But that’s what makes law so necessary and useful to the rebel.
But there does remain a problem in this symbiotic relationship. The rebel also knows the law cannot make him good. It can make him look good. But there’s a whole heap of difference between looking good and being good. It’s precisely at this point that the alliance breaks down. The rebel can’t explain why he wants to look good, except that at some point deep in his bowels he wants to be good. He sees goodness in himself–even looks for it when confronted with his badness. No matter how rotten he becomes or acts he keeps hoping for some glimmer of goodness, some satisfaction of the law. And he even goes so far as to hope the law might produce more of the goodness he finds at once uninteresting and irrepressible. But the law doesn’t produce goodness. He hears the hollow ring of his claims to have kept the law. He hears it deep down in that place where genuine goodness is spoken of and desired. Down there he knows all his jurisprudence and legal wrangling matters not. He ain’t what he ought to be and he knows it. The law is powerless. The alliance is vulnerable. Now he is Cross examined.
What he really needs is genuine freedom and genuine goodness, an unsullied righteousness. What he can’t easily understand is that such goodness and freedom come apart from the law. He’s prepared to pay for it. He’d happily work for it. After all, if he could pay or work for it then he could go on boasting about how good a man he is, even if a rebel. But what confronts him is a freedom so radically free that it not only comes to a man apart from the law but also makes that man free from the law. It even comes with its own language: grace. If this rebel lawyer would truly be free, he must learn an entirely new language. That sounds simple enough until you realize that learning a language requires more than simply acquiring some vocabulary, picking up a few grammatical rules or mimicking a few stock phrases. Nor have we learned a language with fluency when we become pretty good at hearing the language, translating it into our mother tongue, then translating our response back into the new language. No. He’ll have to learn to think in the new language. He’ll have to hear the language of grace as one who all his life has thought and spoken in grace. He’ll have to learn what grace thinks, what grace sees, what grace feels, what grace hopes, and how grace acts–all from inside the world of grace. Only then will he know genuine freedom. For only then will grace teach him to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions and to say “Yes” to self-control, uprightness, and godliness in an age full of rebel lawyers.
It’s possible that a man may genuinely discover grace and yet remain outside its thought structures. He may see the need to put down the rebellion, but he may try suppressing that rebellion with the crude and often cruel club of law. He thinks grace strengthens his grip on the law, so that it’s no longer grace that makes him free but rebelling against the rebel. Which is merely another kind of rebellion, an antagonism toward the self, a self-loathing, the pronouncement of a self-maledictory oath, a life of imprecatory psalms and prayers aimed at the enemy within. He will soon lose the joy that grace gives for he will not have truly entered the world of grace. He’ll be a child standing outside the carnival, hearing its sounds and seeing the lights, watching the excited and laughing faces of friends, but never truly tasting the euphoria of life in the fair. He’ll say he has come to the carnival, but the rush of the rides and the wonder of cotton candy will only be imagined, not experienced.
He’ll live knowing he should have joy but never seeming to grasp it. And it will be there for him to have if he can quit himself, if he can retire as a lawyer and live as a citizen who embodies the ideals of the law–not as a matter of self-justification but as a matter of other-justification. He may freely live the higher ideals of the law and even the details of the law if he seeks to live them out as a way of saying, “God you are right. Let every man be a liar and God be true.” In some strange way he finds himself free from the law and yet carrying the law written within. He now reads the law in the language of grace and it becomes to him yet more grace. Then he knows he has become a citizen of another country, speaking another language.
