THE ANTI-PAUL HERESY
IT is a sign of the last days that ‘there shall be false teachers among you who privily shall bring in damnable heresies,’ and so there are now many who are carried away by their strange doctrines. A recent example is the peculiar notion, propagated by an Arnerican, H.J. Hendriks, that Paul’s teaching is contrary to that of Jesus Christ, and that therefore Paul’s doctrines and his Epistles ought to be rejected. It is really surprising that anyone can be so arrogant as to maintain that he has only now discovered some fundamental flaw in Christian doctrine to which the whole Church has been blind for nearly two thousand years.
Although a long list of matters have been cited on which Paul is supposed to differ from Jesus Christ, the basic problem actually concerns our attitude to the divine Law. Jesus said,
‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled’ – (Matt. 5:17-18).
Against this we have Paul’s statements such as
‘Ye are not under law, but under grace’ – (Rom. 6:14),
and
‘If ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under law’ – (Gal 5: 18).
These are supposed to mean that the law has been done away with!
Now those of us who have read and understood Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in particular chapter eight, know perfectly well what Paul means, and that his teaching is not incompatible with what Jesus said. Chapter eight begins,
‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.’
There are two points to be understood here. First, those who are ‘in Christ Jesus’ are those who have accepted Him as Saviour, believing that He died on the Cross for their sins. By faith they have identified themselves with Him, not only in His death on the Cross, but also in His perfect life. Their sins have been laid upon Jesus who died for them, so that the righteousness of Jesus may be imputed to them; in consequence the sinner is declared righteous, and does not come into condemnation. The second point is that those who walk not after sinful carnal desires, but are led by the Spirit, are those who have received the Holy Spirit promised under the terms of the New Covenant announced in the Old Testament:
‘I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments and do them’ – (Ezek. 36:27).
The New Covenant
These two points are based on the two clauses of the New Covenant, as set forth in Jeremiah 31:31-34. Here the second point is put first, in view of its unique and exceptional importance:
‘Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.’
Then follows the second clause:
‘For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.’
Here the first and main clause says,
‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.’
This is brought about, as Ezekiel says, when God’s Spirit is put within you, to cause you to walk according to His Law. If God’s Holy Spirit is within you, causing you to obey His Law, then you have no need to have the Law written down on tables of stone, or on sheets of paper. The tables of stone may be done away with, but not the Law which becomes part of one’s new nature.
This is the fundamental basis of Paul’s teaching, and of John also, who says
‘No-one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God’ – (John 3:9 also v.6, NIV).
This teaching is rooted and grounded in the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah 31:31-34, and Ezekiel 36:25-31.
It is a great pity that one very rarely hears these verses explained from the pulpit in our churches, and how they apply to the individual. They are absolutely fundamental to a proper understanding of what Christianity means. The receiving of the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the New Covenant, is known as the new birth, and Jesus said,
‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ – (John 3:3).
The clergy seem to concentrate all their attention on the second clause concerning the forgiveness of sins, ignoring the need for the new birth.
The Two Dispensations
Let us now see how it is that some are so easily persuaded that Paul is contrary to Christ. Israel’s relationship with God and His Law was governed at first by the old Mosaic covenant, but after Christ’s death by the New Covenant. Under the Old Covenant the Israelites undertook to obey God’s Law by their own unaided efforts, and only by so doing could they remain in right relationship with Him. Of course they sinned, but they could be restored through repentance and the offering of the appropriate sacrifice as laid down in the Law. This covenant had been ratified at Mount Sinai, as were all covenants, by the offering of the prescribed blood sacrifice.
The terms of the New Covenant, as we have seen, were stated by Jeremiah, and explained by Ezekiel, but this covenant had to be ratified by a blood sacrifice before it could be put into operation. That blood sacrifice, as is explained in Hebrews 9:14-15, was offered by Christ Himself on the Cross. It follows, therefore, that the New Covenant was not in operation before the Crucifixion. This important fact explains all the differences between the teaching of Jesus and that of Paul.
It is important to realise that the whole of the life of Jesus was lived under the Old Testament dispensation, and the full rigour of the Mosaic Law, whereas in Paul’s day the New Covenant was in operation. It may seem paradoxical that the four Gospels, recording the life of Christ, which form part of the New Testament, actually record events that took place under the old Mosaic dispensation.
Consequently when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, He said,
‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfil!’
Living under the Old dispensation, He obeyed all the Law perfectly Himself. He did this moreover on behalf of all those who have put their faith in Him. By dying on the Cross He also fulfilled the Law on behalf of sinners, in that He took upon Himself the death penalty legally due to them.
Before Jesus died, He could obviously not preach the gospel of salvation, saying that He had died for sinners, for that had not yet taken place. So when one came to Him and asked,
‘Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?’
Jesus replied,
‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments’ – (Matt. 19:17).
Those commandments included the offering of animal sacrifices for sin. Obviously after the Crucifixion a totally different answer would have to be given, not only by Paul, but by every other Christian teacher.
However, when Jesus had to deal with someone well educated in spiritual matters, such as Nicodemus, He gave the same kind of answer that Paul would have given:
‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God,’
although at that time
‘the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified’ – (John 7:39).
It is evident from the ensuing conversation that Nicodemus, although ‘a master of Israel’, understood very little about the New Covenant and the giving of the Holy Spirit.
Even Paul, an intellectual lawyer, had to go away to Arabia after his conversion in order to work out what must have seemed to him the revolutionary implications of the New Covenant. Only after three years did he come back to Jerusalem to discuss it with Peter (Gal 1:15-18). As a legal expert God allocated to him the task of explaining it all to the world in his Epistle to the Romans.
There he first points out that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s requirements under the Law (3:1-20) but by God’s grace righteousness is imputed to the repentant on account of their faith (3:21-4:25). We believe that we are saved from the death penalty, which would have been required by the Law, because Jesus died for us. Thereby He put an end to the legal consequence of sin for those who have faith in His sacrifice (5:1-6:23). We are then released from bondage to our carnal desires by the help of the Holy Spirit within us (chapters 7 and 8). All this takes place by the grace of God, because He knows, and we confess, that we are not able by our own unaided efforts to keep the Law. Hence Paul’s saying
‘By grace are ye saved through faith’ – (Eph. 2:8).
Under the New Covenant Christians are enabled to obey the Law because the Holy Spirit gives them the desire to do so. There is no question of the Law being done away with; on the contrary, it is upheld. Of course born-again Christians are not without sin, but
‘if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins’ – (I John 2:1).
