Antinomianism

My hair needed cutting recently, and I tried a new place. The man cutting my hair turned out to be very chatty and very opinionated. So I listened intently, as one does when someone is holding something very sharp and pointy near one’s head.

As it turned out, my friend the barber had become a Christian only four years previously. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but he mentioned that he’d never been baptized and had no intention of ever being baptized.

At this point, I decided to pipe up. “Doesn’t Jesus command us to be baptized in Matthew 28?” “What will happen if I don’t?” he said. “Will that mean I’m not saved?” “Not necessarily,” I said, “but if Christ commands it, don’t you think followers of Christ ought to take that seriously?”

“That sounds like you’re trying to place me under the law,” he said. “Anyone who is in Christ is no longer under the law!” (At this point, I could tell that the other customers were looking at us and thinking, wow, that British guy really chose the wrong barber to cut his hair.)

Now, I don’t know if my friend the barber falls into this category, but it sounded to me as if he was in danger of what theologians call antinomianism.

The word antinomian literally means “against law.” It describes someone who believes that a Christian is someone who is free from the demands of God’s law.

As Christians, it seems to me we’re often in danger of being so infatuated with the idea that our sin has been paid for, put away, dealt with, forgiven, that we can—without realizing it—become functional antinomians. Of course, we would never say that sin doesn’t matter, and yet we can start to live as if it really didn’t. What does it matter, we say to ourselves, if we let ourselves slide a little—the Bible tells me I’m forgiven if I’m a Christian, so what’s the big deal?

We can become like the poet Heinrich Heine, whose last words were apparently, “Of course God will forgive me; that’s His job.”

But if sin matters to us that little, what makes us think we really are Christians? Biblically speaking, the mark of a saved person is that we bear spiritual fruit. And if our spiritual “fruit” is some kind of ongoing laxity about sin, then we have no grounds for confidence that we’re saved at all.

One essential mark of a person who is truly in Christ is not that we take God’s law less seriously but that we take it more seriously. A truly changed heart loves God so much that it sincerely longs to please Him by obeying Him. That obedience won’t be perfect, of course, but we’ll seek to repent whenever we see sin in our lives.

According to Psalm 1, the blessed man is the one who takes delight in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night.

Psalm 1 also tells us that the person who delights in God’s law

is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

If that’s true, then why would we want to ignore God’s law? Why would you not want to prosper?

When my friend the barber said, “Anyone who is in Christ is no longer under the law,” he was, of course, quoting Romans chapter 6 verse 14. But we need to read on to the next verse, where the Apostle Paul says this: “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!”

In other words, we’ve been set free from sin, not to sin. Just because we’re no longer under the condemnation of the law doesn’t mean that the law has nothing to say about how we should now live.

The gospel says I’m justified by faith alone. And one of the essential proofs of that saving faith is a genuine delight in obeying God’s law.