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The law of love

In heaven, doing what God wants will be second nature. Till then, reflection on God’s law is an indispensable part of discerning what it means in practice to love God and to love our neighbour.

Jesus is plain that obedience to his commands is the expected evidence of our love for him. Whilst their obedience in this life will never be perfect,[30] it is to be expected that with the Holy Spirit’s assistance, Christians will grow to become more Christ-like. As Jürgen Moltmann put it in a sermon he preached on Jeremiah 31:33, because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Christians no longer live ‘under’ the law but instead ‘in’ the law.[31]

But how can this living ‘in’ the law be understood as Christian freedom? This can perhaps best be explained by giving an analogy. Imagine you are a fan of the music of Bach. You want to introduce your friend to that music so you ask them to listen to it. At first they listen to it because you have asked them to. Your hope would be that as they listen to it more and more, so they would discover for themselves the beauty in the music. The Christian life is a bit like that: at first we live by God’s laws simply because they are God’s laws, but as we go on so we discover that they are good, that they show us healthy patterns of living, which enable every member of the community to flourish in their unique identity before God.[32]

Christian freedom is not the aimless licence of having the right to do absolutely anything; it is the joyous discovery of our true humanity which results from our relationship of love with a God who is triune. Through the guidance of the Spirit, we learn wisdom, we discover that God’s laws are good, and we discern what it means to love God and to love others. If we were to co-operate fully with the Holy Spirit, Christians would be beyond the law, in the sense that we would freely and fully obey all that God’s laws require, because we would have perfectly internalised God’s law and integrated it into our lives.

However, only when the Spirit’s work of sanctification comes to completion in our glorification will we experience the full reality of God’s solution to the experience of law as an extrinsic burden. Through Jesus we are brought into a relationship of sonship with God the Father.[33] Christians are predestined by the Father to be conformed to the likeness of his Son (Romans 8:29). Our resurrection into Christ-likeness is assured by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.[34]

One day, because we will be indwelt by the fullness of the Holy Spirit we will become totally holy, that is to say our wills will be wholly aligned with the will of the Father. Our love for God, empowered and mediated by the Spirit, will be perfectly expressed, so that the possibility of sinning will simply be unthinkable. Doing what God wants will be second nature. Till then, however, reflecting on God’s law, including the Torah, is an indispensable part of the Spirit-guided wisdom of discerning what it means in practice to love God in this world.

Dr David McIlroy, a guest contributor to Cambridge Papers, is a practising barrister and a theologian. He has recently completed a PhD on ‘A Trinitarian Theology of Law’. This article first appeared in the Cambridge Papers Vol 17 No 2, published by the Jubilee Centre www.jubilee-centre.org, and printed in Christian Today with permission.


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