December
31
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The Law of God Applies to the Christian
For Christians who believe the law of God is done away with and does not apply to believers, let me ask you:
Which of the commands of God are you comfortable breaking? Murder? Adultery? Lying? Idolatry? Others?
No, we are not justified by the Law, but by faith, yet neither is the law of God abrogated.
5 Pt. Salt 
“Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.” (Romans 3:31)
For more on how Yahweh’s triune moral law (His commandments, statutes, and judgments) apply today, see our free online book “Law and Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant” at http://www.bibleversusconstitution.org/law-kingdomFrame.html.
Ye that love the LORD, hate evil.
Ps 97:10.
Of course there are many Arminian antinomians with us today who teach that the Holy Spirit takes over the agency from Christians so that Christians have no duty to obey the law of Christ. Those who teach the “exchanged life” fall into this category, people like Steve McVey, Malcolm Smith, Andrew Farley and Paul Ellis. The tolerant Anglican J I Packer is rightly intolerant to this kind of antinomianism.
Packer is certainly right to criticize the “hyper-grace” movement which either denies or is ignorant of Christ’s satisfaction of the law for the elect. But in a day when those who teach penal satisfaction by Christ’s death for the elect alone are known not as “five point” Calvinists but as “scholastics” living in the past, we need to say that not all ideas denounced as “hyper” are really antinomian. Instead of throwing all accusations of antinomianism together in one convenient “package” (as Jones does), we need to look at the identifying descriptions one by one, to see which are accurate and which are not. Certainly the distinction between law and gospel is not inherently “antinomian”, because the Bible itself tells us that “law is not of faith”.
And when it comes to the word “sanctification”, first we need to define the word, because biblically it has more to do with binary status than it does with process or progress. I would recommend David Peterson’s Possessed by God on this, but in brief we need to always remember the teaching of Hebrews 10;10-14 that those individuals being sanctified in time are thus sanctified by the blood of Christ. It is election that first sets us apart. Christ died only for the elect, and it is Christ’s death which sets the elect apart when God imputes the death of Christ to them. So we need to define sanctification.
Even when we say “definitive sanctification”, we need to make it clear if we are talking about the work of the Holy Spirit in initially causing us to understand and believe the gospel (II Thess 2:13) or if we are talking about a claim that Christians cannot sin as much or in the same ways as we did before conversion (John Murray)