Peace, Assurance, and the Law

Answer

Peace. Not a vague calm of temperament, but a settled standing — the war between you and God is over, because Another has ended it. Paul does not say peace is something we work toward after years of effort; it is the immediate consequence of being justified by faith:

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Read the order carefully. Peace does not come before justification, as something we must produce to qualify; it comes because we are already justified. Waggoner traced the same chain and would not let the cause and effect be reversed:

Again, what brings justification, or the forgiveness of sins? It is faith, for Paul says: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Rom. 5:1.

So the first thing the gospel hands a believer is not a list of duties but a relationship at rest. Dread is not the mark of the justified life. Peace is.

Answer

Scripture uses the word know, not hope-so. John says he wrote his letter for the express purpose of giving believers certainty:

And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life…

Notice where the certainty lives: not in your performance, but in the Son. Having Him, you have the life. Jesus said the same — the transfer from death to life is a present, accomplished fact for the one who believes:

…He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus…

“No condemnation” — not someday, but now. To doubt this is not humility; it is, in effect, calling God’s record into question. He has spoken plainly so that His children may live in confidence, not in fear.

Answer

No — and the difference is everything. They feel similar from the outside, but they rest on opposite foundations. Assurance rests on Christ’s finished work and the Spirit’s witness within. Presumption rests on self — on a vague confidence that I am “a good enough person,” or that grace excuses sin. One looks away from self to Christ; the other never really left self at all. Paul names the inner evidence of true assurance, and it is the opposite of slavish fear:

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.

This is the safeguard against both ditches. Against despair: the believer rests not on his own steadiness but on the One who bought him. Waggoner answered the trembling soul not with a pep talk about trying harder, but with the fact of ownership:

“Will the Lord receive me?” I reply by another question: Will a man receive that which he has bought?… For, most wonderful truth of all, He bought you for the very reason that you were not worthy. His practiced eye saw in you great possibilities, and He bought you, not for what you were then or are now worth, but for what He could make of you.

And against license: the same Spirit who assures the heart is the Spirit of adoption, not of indulgence. A child who knows he is loved does not use that love as a license to despise his Father. True assurance kills presumption; it does not feed it.

Answer

Here is where many stumble, assuming grace must mean the end of the law. Paul anticipates exactly that conclusion and rejects it in the strongest words he has:

Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.

Faith does not abolish the law — it establishes it. The cross is the loudest possible declaration that the law could not simply be set aside; if it could have been, Christ need not have died to honour it. Jesus said the same of His own mission:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

So the gospel does not lower the standard or cancel it. It saves us apart from our law-keeping as the ground of acceptance, precisely so that the law can stand in full, unbroken honour. Grace and the law are not at war. The law stands.

Answer

If the law cannot save us, what is it for in the Christian life? It is the transcript of God’s own character and the very shape of love. Far from being arbitrary rules, every command is love wearing working clothes:

Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.

And under the new covenant the law is not torn down but relocated — from cold stone to the living heart, so that obedience becomes desire rather than dread:

…I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people.

That is why, for the believer, keeping the commandments is not a nervous attempt to earn love but the natural overflow of love already received. John ties the two together inseparably:

And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him…

If ye love me, keep my commandments.

Read the order one more time, because it is the heart of this whole course: If ye love me comes first. Obedience is love’s response, never love’s price. The keeping flows out of the loving; reverse them and you are back in the ditch of legalism.

Answer

Like two friends with one purpose. First the law does its work: it shows us the standard we cannot reach and drives us, helpless, to Christ:

Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.

The law cannot pardon — that is not its office; it can only convict and point. But once it has handed us over to Christ, the gospel does what the law never could: it puts the very righteousness the law required inside us, and sends us back to live it out — not in our own strength, but in His:

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

See the beautiful circle: the law drives us to Christ; Christ fulfils the law in us by His Spirit. The law is not the enemy of grace, and grace is not the enemy of the law. They are friends serving one end — a people made righteous by faith and then made like the One they trust.

Answer

It looks like a child at peace in his Father’s house. Not anxious, not measuring, not forever wondering whether he has done enough — because the relationship was never built on his doing in the first place. The same Spirit who assures him also moves him gladly to obey:

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

And his confidence is never propped up by feelings, which rise and fall with the weather of the soul. It rests on something steadier — the word of God, witnessed to the heart by the Spirit:

God does not ask us to trust so unreliable a witness as our feeling.… But the witness that we are to trust is the unchangeable word of God, and this witness we may have through the Spirit, in our own hearts.

Peace instead of anxiety; obedience out of gratitude instead of fear; assurance grounded in Christ instead of self. This is the normal Christian life as the gospel intends it. It is also — and this is the sober turn the next lesson takes — a message the church that should have treasured it once heard, and largely turned away.

Personal response

Which ditch is closer to you? Some of us live in quiet dread, certain that God’s love is real but never quite sure it covers us — always one failure away from being cast off. Others of us have grown so comfortable with grace that the law has become an embarrassment, a thing to explain away. The gospel calls you out of both. It offers a peace you did not earn and cannot lose by a weak moment, and in the same breath it writes God’s law on a heart that now wants to keep it. Bring wherever you are to Him honestly:

Father, thank You that being justified by faith, I have peace with You — not because I have measured up, but because Your Son has. Take away both my fear and my carelessness. Let Your Spirit witness with my spirit that I am Your child, and write Your law on my heart so that I keep it not to be loved, but because I am. Keep me from despair, and keep me from license. Amen.

We have followed righteousness by faith from creation, through the fall and the cross, into the two Adams, into union with Christ, and now into the settled, assured, law-loving life. One question remains, and it is a painful one. If this gospel is so good, why has it so often been lost — even among the people who most claimed to hold it? Lesson 7 carries one focused thread: how this very message of Christ our righteousness was pressed upon the Adventist church in 1888 and largely resisted — and what that warning means for us.