Paul Vs. James - An 8-Day Study On Faith & Works By Chris BrunoSample

 

DAY SEVEN

While Paul stayed connected to the apostles in Jerusalem in different ways, he spent most of the rest of his life taking the gospel further and further west. As he traveled, preached, worked, and served the growing church, Paul started writing letters to the churches that he had established, to leaders in those churches, and even to other churches he planned to visit soon. Thirteen of those letters were inspired by God as authoritative Scripture and have ended up in our New Testament.

Like the epistle of James, we could write many books about Paul’s theological emphases in these letters—and trust me, many books have been written. I want us to consider the same three emphases that we saw in James’s epistle. Obviously, we have a lot more material to work with from Paul’s thirteen letters than we did from James’s one letter. But as we think about the fulfillment of God’s promises, the Old Testament Law, and the nature of Christian obedience in this new era, we’ll see that even when they are playing a different melody, Paul and James often hit the same notes. We can see these themes in many places in Paul’s letters, but we’ll stick mainly to Romans, Galatians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians here.

Like James, Paul sees the sovereign power of God on display in His new-covenant promises. In 2 Corinthians 3, Paul is explaining and defending his status as a minister of the new covenant, and he too alludes to God’s promises from Jeremiah

31. He calls the Corinthian church a “letter” because the tablet of their heart has been written on with the “ink” of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:3). In other words, Christians in Corinth were now experiencing the promises of the new covenant. God had replaced their hearts of stone with hearts of flesh and wrote the law on their hearts. Paul goes on to speak of the amazing glory of the new covenant that surpasses the glory of God that was on display in the Law (2 Cor. 3:7–8). The new-covenant era had dawned through Christ, and because of this, the Spirit Himself had been poured out on God’s covenant people.

Paul also emphasizes the centrality of Christ in these new-covenant promises (2 Cor. 3:14). Because Christ has taken away the veil that blinded his eyes to the gospel in the Old Testament, Paul says, he was now able to see the glory of the Lord. When he saw this glory, he was transformed (v. 18). Do you see that process? Because God is fulfilling His new-covenant promises in Christ, we are enabled to see Him more clearly, and as we see Him more clearly, we are transformed more fully into the image of Christ.

We can see in Romans that Paul’s understanding of the Law is also rooted in the new covenant. In Romans 8:2, he writes, “the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Then in verse 4, the “righteous requirement of the law” is fulfilled in us. Some people claim that this “righteous requirement” refers only to the obedience of Jesus that is counted to us. To be clear, the imputed righteousness of Christ is very important. By His obedience to the Law, Jesus did what we could never do. When we are united to Him by faith, His obedience to the Law is counted as our obedience (see, for example, 2 Cor. 5:21). But there is more to our obedience than counting His obedience as our own.

Because we are united to Him and Jesus’ obedience is credited to us, we are now able to begin to fulfill the Law ourselves. We see this again in Galatians 6:2, where Paul writes that when we bear each other’s burdens, we fulfill the law. This is another way of talking about loving your neighbor as a way to fulfill the “law of Christ.” Because Christ has fulfilled the law for us, we can now fulfill the law through Him. That is to say, we can actually reflect the moral principles behind the commands of the Law in our new-covenant obedience.

This new-covenant, Spirit-driven, Christ-focused keeping of the law then becomes the foundation for Christian obedience in Paul’s letters. When we read any of his letters, we quickly see that obedience is not optional for a true Christian. He writes that if we continue in unrepentant sin, we will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9; Gal. 5:21). Apart from repentance and obedience, we will not be saved.

Paul even calls us “slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:18). Everyone who believes in Jesus has been set free from slavery to sin, but this does not mean we are left to do whatever we want. Because of the new-covenant gift of the Spirit and Jesus’ fulfillment of the Law, we are called and enabled to obey. If all this sounds familiar, it should. I hope you’re beginning to see how much unity James and Paul really had.