The New Testament Protest

The sharp protest against legalism in the Old Testament is picked up and intensified in the New Testament.

Jesus, for example, is quite unwilling to let life be reduced to a set of rules. Good Jew though he was, he put concern for people above concern for the law. He was willing to break the law about not working on the Sabbath when people's needs were involved. To the surprised horror of the people about him, he healed a sick person on the Sabbath. If the Sabbath laws stood in the way of ministering to human need, then so much the worse for the Sabbath laws. As Jesus put it, "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath" ( Mark 2: 27). It was more important to have regard for your neighbor than to have regard for a law. In a way that utterly shocked his contemporaries, he said on a number of occasions, "It has been said to you of old [and then recited some portion of the law], but I say unto you [and then gave a new statement of his own]." This suggests that when Jesus made the apparently contradictory statement, that he had come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it (see Matt. 5: 17), he meant that he came to rescue the law from the kind of ridiculous absurdity to which the Pharisees had brought it, and "fulfill" what had been the original intent of the law -- to bring God and man into living relationship. He did this by stressing, out of all the rules and regulations and requirements, the command to love God and to love one's neighbor. (See Chapter 20.)

The thing that makes this discussion so important for us today is that legalism is always the temptation of "religious" people. You probably know individuals who take Jesus' teachings, and try to make a new set of rules out of them. Or they develop a new code of rules to fit a particular situation, and then say: "If you obey these rules, you are a Christian. Otherwise not." There are lots of these rules:

1. A Christian doesn't go to the movies (at least, not on Sunday).
2. A Christian doesn't smoke.
3. A Christian doesn't drink.
4. A Christian doesn't dance.
5. A Christian spends -- minutes in prayer every day.
6. A Christian always goes to church on Sunday.

This is a new form of legalism. It is living life by a set of rules (mostly negative, it often turns out). You are "good" if you obey the rules, "bad" if you break them.