Tuesday, 17 February, 2004

We continue a devotional journey focused around portions of Carl E. Braaten’s book “Justification.”



Braaten writes that a theology of the gospel can be developed only within a cluster of supporting concepts. This week will look at a few.

The gospel is not the word of God apart from the law. Each has a different function. The law of God somehow meets every person through the voice of conscience and the natural orders of life in history and society. The law terrifies, accuses, condemns, denounces, punishes, and kills. If this is not true, then the gospel cannot comfort, strengthen, forgive, liberate and renew. In the religious life law and gospel are correlative.



The law of God is a gift…a good thing…a word of order and boundaries that creates an environment of justice that shows us the limits of life. Those limits are as simple as death itself…our mortality…and the many ways individual and groups overstep the boundaries of their lives to undercut or destroy or defame the lives of others. There is always a voice that presents the law to us. In the hearing of that word, there is the word that comes to us when the law overwhelms and begins to dominate and even destroy us…this word is the gospel. In the face of the law, the gospel provides an oasis of hope that brings life beyond the bounds of the law’s and within the realm of our God whose grace is sufficient to heal and hold and renew us. The tension between the law of God and the gospel is, in itself, a necessary reality.



Connection: The Law brings life but it can also destroy us and leave people living in fear and dread. With the announcement of the gospel, there is a promise of new life that will not be overwhelmed. Today, we can count on the gospel to bring peace to our hearts and to our lives when we are being hounded by the voice of the law.



In many and various ways, O Lord, you gift us with your voice of love that comes by way of the law and the gospel. Help us to always hear your voice of consolation that gives us a new breath of life and pulls us up when we stumble and seem to be defeated by the voice of the law. Amen.