Legalism
enslaves, but Christ frees us from all that binds us, among others, sin (Rom 3: 20; 6:6-7) and death (Rom 5: 12, 21; I Cor 15:56-57). Freed from sin’s
dominion, we now live under the reign of grace. The despair associated with
legalism, however, is best demonstrated in the narrative concerning Jesus and
his encounter with the rich young ruler (Mk 10:17-21).
This
man begins the dialogue by enquiring how he can obtain “eternal life,” a
reference to the eschatological life recorded in Daniel 12:2, which signifies participation
in God’s sovereign rule over all his creation. Clearly, this question was not a
case of faith questing for understanding (fides
quaerens intellectum); it was not prompted by a desire to fulfill an
imperative. Rather, it was a sense of failure and crisis that precipitated the
young ruler’s encounter with the Savior.
Notwithstanding his moral scrupulosity, the
rich young ruler senses his spiritual inadequacy. Although he confesses that he
has kept the commandments from his youth up, we infer that it was not mixed
with faith but was merely observance of the letter of the law, that is, a
legalistic preoccupation. Indeed, when Jesus commands the ruler to sell all his
possessions, give to the poor, and follow him, the Lord was reminding the ruler
that his actions were not motivated by faith which pleases God, for the “one
thing” he lacked was not the keeping of an additional law. When Jesus remarked
that the ruler lacked “one thing,” he was exposing the young ruler’s legalism
that had ensnared him all his life and pointing him to the obedience of faith,
which saves and emancipates (Rom 1:5; 16:26). Thielicke observes, “The critical
point [was] obviously that the rich young ruler, for all his ethical and
religious idealism, was ultimately self-centered. For him, obedience and action
were a kind of self-development and self-enrichment. They might almost be
called the cultural extension of his outward standard of living.”[1] Regrettably,
when Jesus highlighted the fundamental issue - radical faith in God’s saving
justice - the ruler disobeys the Lord’s command and goes away sorrowing. Indeed,
legalism is always associated with a spirit of oppression, a spirit of fear, a
spirit of doubt, and profound despair, a state of affairs similar to Luther’s
distresses in the cloister. The man’s earlier zeal for the letter of the law,
juxtaposed with his present failure and his spurning of a life of commitment to
the Lord, underscores his previous efforts as “a sublimated egoism which does
not fear, love, and trust in God above all things, but serves only . . . ego.”[2]
This is the garb of legalism.
