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As he began teaching in “Causes of Antinomianism, Sinclair Ferguson made a startling statement: “We are all legalists, and all antinomians are by nature legalists.” Most Christians, he said, would think the opposite of antinomianism was legalism. In a dictionary sense, that seems to be true; they seem to be opposites of one another. “But actually, the opposite of antinomianism is gospel. And the opposite of legalism is also gospel, or grace, or Jesus Christ.”

This statement suggests antinomianism and legalism are rooted in the same errors. But they respond differently “to the character of God.” Legalism divorces the law of God from the character of God. It sees the law of God as simply commandments, commandments not related to God’s loving generosity to us. Therefore, they are no longer suffused with God’s desire for our very best, with His concern that we should enjoy Him and enjoy living for His glory. The is true of antinomianism.

Most antinomians think they are reacting against the crippling effects of the law of God in their life. “But actually, they’re really reacting against the gracious God who gave that law.” While the reactions pull us in different directions, they share the same sickness. That sickness goes back to Genesis 3, to the legalism that was generated in the heart of Eve. The serpent tempted her and distorted her understanding of God; he bent her sense of God’s generosity.

God gave Adam and Eve commandments to enjoy everything in the Garden. As for the one tree, it was as if He said, “Show Me that you really love Me by not eating the fruit of that tree.” You could almost say it was an incidental part of His commands. Ferguson said it was as if God said, “Just remember who your Father is by obeying this one command.” And then the whole state of affairs was turned on its head by the serpent.

“Both legalism and antinomianism are bad reactions to God’s graciousness.” At it happened with the Fall, it all begins with legalism. Individuals who become antinomians never really delivered their hearts from legalism. “It never really sets their hearts free from the spirit of bondage that their legalism had produced in the first place.” An individual who was once a legalist and then becomes an antinomian also seems to have had an exceedingly low view of the grace of Christ.

When we have a low view of the grace of Christ, it’s as if our “immune system” to legalism and antinomianism is weakened. This immune system “is the understanding of our union with Christ, and the grace of God and the favor of God upon us in Jesus Christ, the reality of our justification.” This God-given immune system keeps us from becoming imbalanced—either towards legalism or antinomianism. It helps us see that the grace of Christ, in union with Him, is the solvent that dissolves our legalism and antinomianism.

Ferguson said people are sometimes astonished when they hear him say, “we are all legalists at heart.” They are even more astonished if he says, “Antinomianism is simply a false escape from our legalism, and it doesn’t really deliver us.” But don’t simply take his word for it. Consider what a few of the ministers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, around the time of the Marrow Controversy, said about antinomianism.

Richard Baxter (1615-1691) wrote, “Antinomianism rose among us from an obscure preaching of evangelical grace, and insisting too much on tears and terrors.” Ferguson said Baxter was talking about the very thing that caused the Marrow Controversy (see “The Marrow of the Whole Christ”). In other words, preaching that insisted if you were going to come to Christ, you needed to have a radical, dramatic repentance experience. You needed to repent with tears and terrors. Sometimes these experiences were held up as models of how we should come to faith in Jesus Christ.

The problem was if you didn’t have the agonies of Martin Luther, or felt the burdens the pilgrim had in Pilgrim’s Progress, then people concluded they weren’t ready to come to Christ. Baxter was saying there was such an insistence on getting ready, that people never thought they were ready. “They could count their tears, but how could they know they had shed a sufficient number of tears to be ready to come to Christ?” Baxter supposed antinomianism arose as a result of the ambiguous preaching of evangelical grace. When the grace of God in Jesus Christ is not adequately preached or understood, he thought antinomianism results.

Ralph Erskine (1685-1752) was a minister in Scotland and one of the original Marrow Men. He said: “The greatest antinomian is actually the legalist.” Ferguson said Erskine had seen it in himself and in others. “It’s this whole idea that we try to dissolve our legalism but we use the wrong chemistry.” Instead of dissolving it, we just push it further down into our hearts, and remain legalists.

We see this when people take pride in their antinomianism—”dismissing and demeaning those who don’t have our liberties.” People enter into what they regard as the liberty of the way they live their lives, and they demean Christians who don’t do what they do. Doesn’t that remind you of the Pharisees? They didn’t realize how much they were still in bondage. Although he wasn’t thinking of them in particular when he wrote this, Thomas Boston (1676-1732) said:

This antinomian principle that it is needless for a man perfectly justified by faith to endeavor to keep the law and do good works, is a glaring evidence that legality is so engrained in mans’ corrupt nature that until a man truly come to Christ by faith, the legal disposition will still be reigning in him. Let him turn himself into what shape or be of what principles he will in religion, though he run into Antinomianism, he will carry along with him his legal spirit which will always be a slavish and unholy spirit.

The freedom of the gospel is a freedom for obedience. The gospel creates a freedom that makes obeying God a delight. Instead of the law feeling like a burden that weighs us down (as it felt before we became Christians), the law now feels as though it were our wings, helping us to fly. Consider the transformation of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:2-10).

He was a rich, “chief tax collector.” Tax collectors were private subcontractors, as it were, for the Roman government. They earned a profit by demanding a higher tax from the people than was owed to the Roman government. This system led to widespread greed and corruption, as it did with Zacchaeus. Since the Jews considered themselves to be victims of Roman oppression, Jewish tax collectors like Zacchaeus were particularly despised. The Lexham Bible Dictionary said Rabbinic sources considered Jewish tax collectors to be robbers.

Zacchaeus told Jesus that he would restore fourfold to anyone he had defrauded. The law required only a fifth (Leviticus 6:5). Zacchaeus was going beyond what the law required, not because of the law, but because he found salvation; he was saved. “The commandment that he hated because he was breaking it became a commandment he began to love because he loved Christ. And the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ brought him into conformity with the Word and law of God.”

As he concludes his teaching video, Dr. Ferguson said: “We’ve been saying all along that both legalism and antinomianism fail to understand the gospel. But it is also true that both legalism and antinomianism fail to understand the law of God.” He asked us to recall how Paul wrestled with this Catch-22 in Romans 7. Paul spoke of the great sense he had that he was a sinner, and that he wanted to keep the law, but could not. You could say he was in the “prime position” to just forget about the law and become an antinomian. “In a sense, he felt that the law was his problem.”

But he came to a two-fold realization. The first realization was the law is good, God-given and spiritual. Paul emphasized this in verses 7, 12, and 14 of Romans 7. He was helping the Roman Christians—and us—to discover the law itself is good because it is God’s law. “The problem is not with the law. The problem is with me and my sin.” When he sees that, he then sees the way to deal with sin is not to get rid of the law and become an antinomian.

The way to deal with it comes at the end of the chapter (Romans 7:25), who will deliver me from this body of death, in which I continue to break the law and feel sometimes the law is accusing me as if it were my enemy? “Thanks for to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” His second realization was that grace deals with sin. “Not legalism or antinomianism, but the grace of God in Jesus Christ.”

This article has been based on Causes of Antinomianism the 8th video in Sinclair Ferguson’s teaching series, The Whole Christ, from Ligonier Connect. Here is a link to Ligonier Connect. The video series is itself based upon his book of the same name. You can review summaries of the Marrow Controversy here and here. If the topic interests you, look for more of my ruminations under the link, The Whole Christ.