Clarifying on The Law of Christ: Charles Leiter Interview

Question: Do you deny God's moral law?

Charles: There's no possibly way

if you put Christ as your standard,

there's no way you could be

denying the moral law,

because He is the highest revelation

of the moral law that there is.

The only explanation that I could have

for why that would be misunderstood

is that people so revere

their reformed tradition

and the things that they've been taught

that they don't listen to
what's actually being said.

In fact, a lot of times,

they're not even willing to listen at all

because they have in their mind:

this must be heresy.

I've had similar things in my own life

whenever I was a new Christian.

I'd hear some term and I'd think

that must be the worst heresy around.

I'd find out ten years
later that it was true.

I think that's probably the reason.

People don't allow themselves to listen.

Interview of Charles Leiter on
"The Law of Christ."

Question: Why is the
topic of the law of Christ

important to understand?

Charles: Well, first of all,

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9,

he says speaking of the Jews,

he says to the Jews I became as a Jew,

to those who under
the law as under the law.

And then he immediately says

though not being myself under the law.

So he's saying that he's not under

the Law of Moses.

And then he goes on and he says

concerning the Gentiles,

to those who are without law -

that is, those without the Bible,

without the law of Moses,

I became as one without law.

So immediately you have the thought,

well, he became as one without law.

Did he just become totally lawless?

Immoral?

And he immediately corrects that.

He says though not without the law of God,

but under the law or in law to Christ.

So he mentions that his standard there

is the law of Christ.

Another question comes up for Christians.

You'd have the question
of what is my standard?

What is my rule of duty?

And Paul immediately
says it's the law of Christ.

And so the question comes up,

what is the law of Christ?

And why haven't we been taught

about the law of Christ?

Can I articulate what's
the really big things

for me to keep in mind as a Christian?

What is the standard

that the Lord Jesus Himself put forth

as being the ultimate thing
for me to remember?

The guideposts?

So, immediately we're faced
with that question -

the law of Christ.

This works itself out in many areas.

He said to those who are under the law,

I became like one under the law.

(incomplete thought)

We even find him in the book of Acts

taking a vow and shaving his head,

so he's trying to reach the Jews

who are under the law,

but he says though not being myself

under the law.

So that was something he voluntarily did,

but it was not required of him.

So, a lot of questions begin to come up.

And as soon as you become a Christian,

you face this question of:

how do I understand the Old Testament?

I see these verses about homosexuality

as an abomination to God,

but then there's another verse that says

eating pork is an abomination to God.

And how am I to sort through all this?

Tattoos - tattoos are mentioned.

But right next to the verse about tattoos

is "you shall not harm
the edges of your beard."

So shaving your beard...

So it's a very practical thing.

How do Christians relate
to the law of Moses?

How do we sort through all that?

So these are things that
the book deals with.

What is the law of Christ?

What is the Christian's relationship

to the law of Moses?

How are we to understand all that?

They're very practical issues.

I might just say a little bit more.

Some people, they have the idea

that the ceremonial
laws as they're called,

as we call them now as Christians,

they have the idea that those

are sort of like health food laws from God

or health laws from God.

And they kind of have
in the back of their mind,

well, it's bad for you to
eat pork, for example.

And some people don't eat pork.

And they kind of have in
their mind that that's biblical.

That's more biblical if I
don't eat pork than if I do.

So there's divisions that
come up between Christians.

And those can be more or
less extreme depending.

All of those things are
very practical issues.

It keeps on going clear into areas

of Christians being involved in war

and there's all kinds of
questions that come up

about God commanding Samuel

to hew Agag to pieces.

And commanding the children of Israel

to spare neither man, woman, or child.

All of those things we have to try

to begin to work through

when you become a Christian.

So it's a very practical area.

Question: What would your response be

to those who might accuse you

based upon the teachings in the book

that you deny God's moral law?

Charles: Well, of course, the statement

that you've denied God's moral law,

that comes from the idea

that the Ten Commandments

are the moral law of God.

And of course, in the book

what I'm presenting is that Christ

is our standard;

that He represents a much higher standard

than the Ten Commandments.

We can see that in several areas.

For example, the Ten Commandments say,

"you shall not commit adultery,"

but yet men were allowed
to marry multiple wives.

King David had multiple wives.

Solomon not only had multiple
wives but concubines.

And that was not considered adultery,

but when David committed
adultery with Bathsheba,

that was treated in an
entirely different way.

It was totally different than
him taking multiple wives.

So, what that means is that the definition

even of adultery under
the Ten Commandments

was a looser definition - more permissive,

not as high of a standard

as we have in the New Testament.

Also, the Ten Commandments acknowledged

or recognized the validity of slavery.

And if we look at the kind of slavery,

the standards of slavery;

that God gave those different
regulations of slavery

in the Mosaic law,

one of the examples is that you could

beat your slave.

If he lived longer than 3 days,

then there wasn't guilt
associated with that.

Well, that's a much lower standard

than to love others as Christ loved us.

And so, it's not to say

that the law of Moses was imperfect

in any way.

There was not one dot in the law of Moses

that was not perfect.

It was exactly right for the
situation that it was in.

But it's the same way with the commandment

about divorce.

Jesus said because of the
hardness of your heart,

Moses permitted that.

The law of Moses had that written in,

and it was basically a
protection of women.

There were many things like that

where God in giving these laws,

they were wonderful laws.

No other nation had such laws

as the nation of Israel.

And God says they'll look at you

and they'll see what a wise

and discerning people

and what great laws God has given you.

And that was true.

And all you have to do is compare

the law of Moses with
the code of Hammurabi

and you can see how superior it was.

But God was dealing with them

on the level that they were in some way.

And He's pulling people
up out of a culture

that's totally corrupt

and preparing them more and more

for the coming of the Messiah.

(Incomplete thought)

If you say the Ten Commandments

are the moral law,

then what that means is

there's nothing higher than this.

This is the highest thing there is.

So what it means is there can be

no greater revelation of man's duty

than what we see in the Ten Commandments.

And the life of the Lord Jesus

and His commandments

and the commandments of the apostles -

all those things are simply viewed

as footnotes to the Ten Commandments.

And so if you read a
lot of reformed theology,

there's hundreds of pages

written on the Ten Commandments

trying to show that all the commandments

of the New Testament

are really there in the Ten Commandments.

But if you look at, for example,

"you shall not commit adultery,"

that's a much lower standard

than, "husbands, love your wives

as Christ loved the church."

We have a much higher revelation

of duty and of law.

Law in an expression of
the character of God.

And so it spells out for us

what our standard is to be.

The standard of loving your wife

as Christ loved the church

is a much higher standard,

and it gives us a clearer picture

of God's character than what you would see

in the negative commandment:

"you shall not commit adultery."

I don't know, maybe there's more

that I could say on this.

Here's another problem.

First of all, the Bible does not

divide the law into parts.

It doesn't divide it into the civil,

the ceremonial, and the moral.

That's something that basically

the reformers followed Aquinas in that.

And it's a helpful
distinction for Christians

because as Christians,

we can look back and we can

pretty much sort out,

this is ceremonial,

this is civil.

For example, a civil commandment

would be what type of penalty

is attached to adultery.

Well, the death penalty
was attached to it.

That's a civil thing.

Ceremonial - well, circumcision.

But the problem is,

how is that I know that circumcision

is a ceremonial law?

Well, I know it because Paul says

in the New Testament

circumcision is nothing.

And no Jew would have ever said

circumcision is nothing.

In fact, if you wouldn't be circumcised,

you'd be cut off from Israel.

And Moses just about died

because he delayed circumcision.

His wife didn't like that idea.

And you can see why.

It's a bloody thing.

But this was the sign of the
covenant with Abraham.

And to break that commandment

was very serious.

They would never have said

this is just a light thing; it's nothing.

And Paul says it's nothing.

So when you say, well,

why does a civil/ceremonial/
moral distinction

work as well as it does?

Well, the reason it works
as well as it does

is that as Christians,

we have that perspective

and we can look back

and look at those things through the lens

of the New Testament.

That's the first point.

Those distinctions are not made.

So when Paul talks about the law,

for example, he almost always has in mind

the Mosaic covenant;

the old covenant.

For example, he says,

the law entered that sin might increase.

Or he says until the law,

sin was in the world.

Death reigned from Adam to Moses.

That's when he's talking about

the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai.

So, law is viewed as a unit -

the Mosaic law, the Mosaic covenant.

So when Paul says we're not under law,

he means that whole thing.

And when you get the
civil/ceremonial/moral

distinction in your mind

and you practice it a little bit,

you find yourself unconsciously

reading into it.

For example, "sin shall not
have dominion over you,

for you're not under
the law, but under grace."

And people read into it
immediately in their mind.

Well, I'm not under the
condemnation of the law.

I'm not under the ceremonial law.

They'll read something like that into it,

but Paul does not do that.

In fact, he immediately says, what then?

Shall we sin because we're
not under the law?

So he's thinking of moral things there.

And he's thinking of the whole thing.

So there's never this
division that we make.

All the law is viewed as a unit.

So, there's all kinds of things wrong

with the idea that you divide it all up.

And the biggest thing wrong with it

is that some commandments,

we can't figure out whether they're

partly moral or partly ceremonial

or partly civil.

There's a mixture.

And back on the Ten Commandments,

if you say they are the moral law,

then what you're saying is

these are the ten greatest,

most important things for all mankind.

They're binding on the
Gentiles as well as the Jews

for all time.

So these are the big things.

Well, concerning Sabbath keeping,

right now, for example, I myself

do not believe that the 4th commandment

is enjoined upon Christians

and somehow now we keep the Sabbath

on a different day even though

there's no commandment to do that,

and that we don't keep it

the same way that the Jews did

even though there's no
commandment about that.

You know, all these things
have to be added in.

Well, if I don't believe that way;

if I don't "keep" the Sabbath,

and this is on par with adultery

or stealing or murder,

then you can't say this
is a Romans 14 issue

or you're welcome to be in our church

or whatever even though
we don't believe that.

What you have to say is
is that you're not a Christian.

Just as we would say if a man

was an adulterer or a murderer,

and he continued on in that

in an unrepentant state.

So, it's a very inconsistent position

to say this is the moral law,

and then to say, well, we differ on this,

but you can be part of our church.

It's one way or the other.

You can't have it be sort of a moral law.

So the problem with that is that

there are many inconsistencies in that.

Question: So as far as those who say

that you deny God's moral law?

Charles: There's no possible way.

If you put Christ as your standard,

there's no way you could be denying

the moral law.

Because He is the highest revelation

of moral law that there is.

Usually what they're thinking there

is that you don't believe

that the Christian is under
the 4th commandment

of the Decalogue.

And I would say that the Christian

is not under any of the commandments

of the Decalogue.

We fulfill all those and far beyond.

If you love your wife as
Christ loved the church,

you're doing far more than:

"Thou shalt not commit adultery."

All those things - even the
Sabbath commandment

the Christian fulfills in
its deepest meaning

which had to do with resting in Christ

and ceasing from our own works and so on.

We don't deny any of the moral law.

That's never an issue.

If you had a group of people

that were just like Christ,

you wouldn't have to worry about

any of them denying the moral law.

They would be perfect fulfillments of it.

But even in the Lord's life,

He broke the Sabbath on some occasions.

So, I can talk about a little if you want.

I don't know if you had
another question on that,

or if I've said enough on this.

Question: So what is the most

misunderstood aspect of your position

and could you clarify on it

and why is it misunderstood?

Charles: I think probably

the most misunderstood aspect

would be for people to have in their head

that somehow I'm saying that holiness

is not necessary for a Christian;

that a Christian shouldn't be concerned

about holiness.

And of course, I'm saying
the opposite throughout,

that Christ is the higher standard,

and that the Christian
should be like Christ.

The only explanation that I could have

for why that would be misunderstood

is that people so revere

their reformed tradition

and the things that they've been taught

that they don't listen to
what's actually being said.

In fact, a lot of times, they're not even

willing to listen at all

because they have in their mind:

this must be heresy.

I've had similar things in my own life

whenever I was a new Christian,

I'd hear some term and I'd think

that must be the worst heresy around.

I'd find out ten years
later that it was true.

And so I think that's probably the reason

that people don't allow
themselves to listen.

In fact, they either would not
make it through a sermon,

really give it an opportunity to hear

what's being said,

or they wouldn't make it through the book.

They'd put it down.

They didn't like to even
think about that possibility.

In my own testimony,

I'd been a Christian for over 20 years.

I look back at this as to the time

where the transition really took place,

and it had been over 20 years
that I'd been a Christian,

and a lot of the things

that began to make me change my mind

were things that I already knew,

but it was like they hadn't

had their full impact in my life.

(Incomplete thought)

The situation where
things began to change,

I was speaking through the Gospel of John

in a series and I got to John 5

and the verses about how Jesus

was breaking the Sabbath

and how He defended His position:

"My Father works until now and I work."

And in the course of that,

I began teaching the people

the different views and so on

and it began to dawn on me

that the early church specifically said

we do not keep the Sabbath.

And the fact was that they worshiped

early in the morning -

the Gentile converts worshiped
early in the morning.

And of course, when they said,

we don't keep the Sabbath,
they meant Saturday.

We're not resting on Saturday.

But the Lord's Day - they said
The Lord's Day we give to joy.

So they worshiped early in the morning,

and then they went to work all day.

And sometimes they met again at night.

So what other commandment would there be

where we would say, well, you know,

a man's got to do what a man's got to do?

You've got to break one of the ten

greatest moral laws of God

because otherwise you'll get in trouble

with your boss or whatever.

No one would ever say that,

and yet they went to
work on the Lord's Day.

And so that began to dawn on me.

John 5 there also where it says

for this cause, the Jews were seeking

all the more to kill Him

because He not only
was breaking the Sabbath,

but was calling God His own Father

making Himself equal with God.

One time I had a discussion

with some Jehovah's Witnesses.

And I brought up that passage.

He was calling God His own Father,

making Himself equal with God.

They said well that was
what the Jews said;

that's not what He was actually doing.

And I pointed out, no, this is
what John said He was doing.

That He was calling God His own Father,

making Himself equal with God.

And later it dawned on me

that it was also John who was saying

He was breaking the Sabbath.

So what about this thing of Jesus

breaking the Sabbath?

That was very difficult for me to accept

because I always had in my mind

that He kept the Mosaic law

in the letter of the Mosaic law.

And I began to see that
actually He broke it a lot.

But He broke it in a way -

not of someone who is less than,

but someone who is sailing over it;

He's magisterial in His approach.

So He's touching lepers.

You're not supposed to touch a leper.

He touches them and instead
of Him becoming unclean,

they become clean.

And it's just glorious stuff.

They come and they say

why are Your disciples
doing what's not lawful

on the Sabbath?

And He doesn't say it is lawful.

He says don't you see the priests

in the temple, they break the Sabbath

in order to serve the temple.

What's that mean?

Well, they're in there working

and slaving away on the Sabbath.

But then He says,

something greater than the temple is here.

So He's saying My disciples

are breaking the Sabbath
in their service to Me,

but I'm so much higher than the temple

that the Sabbath takes subservience to Me.

And then He goes and says the Son of Man

is Lord even of the Sabbath.

And so, He was breaking the Sabbath.

They were breaking the Sabbath.

But He was keeping on the highest level,

He was keeping love to God

and love to your fellow man.

And those two commandments

are sufficient to totally fulfill

man's obligation to God.

A certain scribe came to Jesus and said

what must I do to have eternal life?

If you want to lay out the highest,

if you want to talk about moral law,

and the highest standard imaginable,

(Incomplete thought).

Jesus said what do you read in the law?

What's it say? How does it read to you?

And this guy must have been brilliant.

He said well, two things -

love God with all your heart,
soul, mind, and strength,

and love your neighbor as yourself.

And Jesus didn't say, well, no,

there's a lot more than that.

You've got 613 commandments.

He said you've answered correctly.

You do those two things

and you'll have eternal life.

"Do this and you shall live,"

and He quotes from Leviticus.

And that's what Jesus did.

And that's how He earned,

merited righteousness for us.

And Romans 5, we receive

the gift of righteousness.

It's His righteousness.

Our sins are imputed to Him.

He gets the curse that we deserve.

His righteousness,

His perfect fulfillment of the law,

His merit is imputed to us

and we get the blessing that He deserves.

I kind of like to think
of it like a time card.

You know Paul says not having

a righteousness of my own
derived from the law.

Well, there's the idea that
if you keep the law,

it will be righteousness unto you,

and you'll live because
of that righteousness.

In other words, you fulfill it perfectly,

you get its reward.

He that does those things shall live.

And Paul says I don't have
any righteousness of my own.

But Christ did have righteousness.

He perfectly fulfilled everything.

And so He made Him to be sin for us

who knew no sin,

that we might be made the
righteousness of God in Him.

And when you think of a time card,

you go in every day,

you punch your card.

At the end of the week,
you've got this card

that has all these times on there.

You fulfill your time.

You put in your time.

You're entitled to a reward.

And that's what Christ
gives us is His time card;

His righteousness that He's earned;

that title to eternal life.

Question: So as you study
John 5 and these things,

is that when your position
started to change?

Charles: Yeah, what happened was

I actually left that series
and I've told people

that I didn't come
back until a year later,

but it was actually over two years later.

And I came back to John 5

a couple years later and took up again.

And I had already prepared
a standard message

on the Sabbath.

It was already ready,
and I couldn't give it.

And so the next morning,

I don't remember what I gave,

but I gave something entirely different.

And another thing, I began to realize

that all of my studies -

all the theology and everything

that I had read

was from a couple
centuries of church history.

And I'm sometimes asked,

this new covenant theology,

it's a new thing and that's dangerous,

which I agree with totally.

But my response to that is that

covenant theology is the new thing

in terms of church history.

You look at that and John Murray

has a history of covenant theology

and goes into where it really
began to be developed.

It's not the idea that covenant theology

is some thing that's existed
since the 1st century.

A lot of people have that in their mind

because that's all they've ever heard.

And I had the standard view.

I had those books about how

the day has been changed

and the Sabbath has been preserved

and all of those things to try to explain

how you could have the 4th
commandment shift over.

The early church, in church history,

they never viewed the Lord's Day

as fulfilling the 4th commandment

until much later, like 700 years later.

And so, the idea that we're under

the Ten Commandments

and the Ten Commandments -

the 4th commandment we
fulfill on the Lord's Day,

even when they began
resting on the Lord's Day,

when Constantine made it a legal holiday,

he called it the Venerable Day of the Sun

(S, U, N.)

And made that a legal holiday

when Christianity became

the official religion of the Roman Empire.

And so they began having the day off,

but even then, it wasn't thought of

as we're fulfilling the 4th commandment.

Those are things that came later.

Question: When you changed your views,

did anyone cut their
relationship off with you?

Charles: No, not at that time.

A lot of these things were things

that under the surface bother you

as to how does this fit?
How does that fit?

But it never came down

with real weight on me where I really saw

that this is so inconsistent.

It's like it kind of fell apart.

Question: Did you at any point

have a shift to where the Scriptures

had a greater emphasis on your life

in comparison with church
history and confessions?

Charles: I never was affected a lot

by the confessions

as much as I was affected by men

that I admired theologically.

And covenant theology has a lot

of really good things.

One of the dangers -

and I don't want to identify myself

with new covenant theology either,

because I feel like there's extremes

and errors - I may talk about that.

James: That would be good to hear

what some of those errors are.

Charles: Well, covenant theology

is founded on the idea that there are

two basic covenants:

a covenant of works and
a covenant of grace.

And the covenant of grace

is this super-historical or a-historical

thing that unifies this overarching

covenant of grace.

The Bible never talks about
"the covenant of grace."

And when the Bible talks about covenants,

it's covenants that are made in time

with specific people.

And so this is a theological construction.

And what happens when you bring in

"the covenant of grace," -

the theological construction -

then you say, well, the Mosaic covenant

was one administration

of the covenant of grace.

The new covenant is a
different administration

of the covenant of grace.

And so you end up saying

that the Mosaic covenant
was a gracious covenant

and basically similar to the new covenant.

Rather than, contrasting.

Paul says the opposite.

He says the law was not of faith.

He says the law has to do with works.

The principle of law is:
do this and you shall live.

And so the Mosaic covenant
was very gracious

in that it had a gracious purpose

and it was part of God bringing them

toward the Messiah.

But to say that the covenant itself
was gracious misrepresents.

It's not at all what Paul said about it.

The Mosaic covenant represents

this principle of blessing and curse.

You have those there in Deuteronomy.

Verse after verse after verse

about all these curses:

If you don't do...
If you disobey...

Curse, cursed, cursed, cursed.

If you obey, blessed, blessed, blessed.

And those things had to do
with temporal blessings -

life in the land,

living along in the land
and being blessed,

having rain from heaven
and all those things,

victory over your enemies.

But that represented a legal principle

that is true in the realm of eternal life.

And the way we know that for sure

is whenever they ask Jesus

what must I do to have eternal life?

He went back and talked about things

out of the law.

And those were representative,

like loving God with all your heart,
soul, mind, and strength;

loving your neighbor as yourself.

That was a principle there
that if you did that,

you would have eternal life.

Do this and you will live.

And Paul does the same thing.

He talks about this curse of the law.

Well, the curse of the law

ultimately it was not being
kicked out of the land,

but it was eternal punishment.

And Christ redeemed us
from the curse of the law.

The Mosaic covenant is a
legal covenant of works.

Initially of works that they could do

to remain in the land or not do.

But then representing a deeper meaning

of works in terms of
meriting eternal life or not,

and of course, no one ever
did that for a moment.

Except for the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's covenant theology.

Let me say a little more.

(Incomplete thought)

Covenant theology makes

too little of a discontinuity

between the Old and New Testaments.

It sees too little of a shift.

And so you have men like B.B. Warfield

saying God put children in the church

in the days of Abraham.

It's a total anachronism -
it's from back here.

And a lot of covenant people

view Old Testament Israel

as basically the same as the church.

And you have John Stott getting up

and rebuking Martyn Lloyd-Jones in 1966.

Rebuking him basically.

Lloyd-Jones was calling people

to come out of these apostate churches.

And he said, "Dr. Lloyd-Jones,

both history and the
Bible are against you.

The remnant is not outside the church.

The remnant is within the church."

In other words, this remnant is believers.

And "the church" is this big apostate mass

like Anglicanism is

where you can have an archbishop

that denies the Bible
and the virgin birth.

So that's what he views as the church.

And the remnant is inside -

this little group of believers

and they're supposed to stay in.

Well, of course, the logic of that

is that the reformation should
never have happened.

They should have stayed in the Catholic -

"the church" - the Catholic church.

And the remnant should
have stayed inside there.

And lo and behold, that's what happened.

There was this shift and those
men that believed that way

there was a shift back
towards Catholicism,

both by John Stott and by J.I. Packer.

So, in covenant theology,

there tends to be this
too little distinction

made between the two covenants

and too little of a contrast

and too little of a break.

In dispensationalism, it's
the opposite problem.

There's too many breaks

and there's no continuity.

And in the old dispensationalism,

like with the original Scofield Bible,

basically almost taught that they were

saved by lawkeeping in the old covenant.

And many wrong views there.

Not enough continuity particularly between

true believers in the Old and in the New.

New covenant theology

is closer to the truth on all of it,

and of course, that's what my position

would be categorized as.

But the problems with it

if you just identify yourself with that,

there's a lot of things

that I feel like sometimes they tend to

react too much to covenant theology.

There's many wonderful
things in covenant theology

and wonderful theologians

that have taken those positions.

If we study through in
our men's theology time

on Saturday mornings,

if we study through a systematic theology,

we're going to get one of these guys

that is a really good covenant theologian

because they're just better.

But that doesn't make them infallible.

And there are certain areas

where you get into certain
areas of their teaching,

and they're floundering

and pulling things out of the air.

But other areas, they're very, very good.

It's possible to overreact.

That's the biggest danger I would say

about new covenant theology.

All of these things,

we say that we're always reforming,

but as long as you don't change anything.

You're always reforming as long as you

stick to whatever's accepted.

And there's always a danger

in trying to come up with a
better definition of something

or a little closer to the Bible.

There's always danger there.

That's what happened when Luther

stood before the emperor.

And the emperor said,

"a thousand years of church
history can not be wrong

and one monk be right."

Well, he had a great argument.

The only trouble is he was wrong.

A thousand years of
church history was wrong.

He had a wrong view of the church.

That was the problem.

Question: So in regards to those

who would label themselves
as new covenant theology,

where do they take things
too far to an extreme?

Charles: Well, one example is

that some have denied the idea

of Christ's righteousness being imputed.

Some have denied that Christ merited

eternal life by His positive obedience

to God's law.

They say that the Bible only talks about

the death of Christ and not about His life

and not about what's
called His active obedience.

I think those things go too far.

In that area for example,

we have Paul specifically talks about

through the obedience of the one,
the many are made righteous.

And I think he's talking about

more than just the cross.

It's this whole righteous life

viewed as a unit.

And it says that we receive

abundance of grace

and of the gift of righteousness.

That's very clear there.

We receive a gift of righteousness.

That would be one area.

Question: If they hold to that position,

what does that lead to?

Charles: Well, if you lose

the imputation of righteousness,

to me, that's a very big thing.

If you lose the fact that we're saved

not only by Christ's death,

but by His obedience.

I had one dear brother say to me

Jesus could have died
when He was an infant

and it would have put away our sins.

I don't think we see
that at all in Scripture.

Righteousness and testedness

is something that cannot be concreated,

that is, you cannot be
created with testedness.

That'd be like faking it.

That's like God creating a tree

that's already old and has rings.

And it has a fake history.

He had to pass through,
He had to go through;

He learned obedience through
the things which He suffered.

For futher study on this topic,

you can listen to Charles' series

on the Law of Christ.