(A continuation of C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: We are continuing this wonderful, memorable time with Sinclair Ferguson. And here is the second quote and we eagerly anticipate, Sinclair, your response.

The glory of the gospel is that God has declared Christians to be rightly related to him in spite of their sin. But our greatest temptation and mistake is to try to smuggle character into his work of grace. How easily we fall into the trap of assuming that we can only remain justified so long as there are grounds in our character for justification. But Paul’s teaching is that nothing we do ever contributes to our justification.

So if you would comment in particular on that great temptation and mistake, which is, I think, a daily tendency and temptation: to try to “smuggle character into his work of grace.”

Sinclair Ferguson: I guess, C.J., what lies behind this, the thought is that at the end of the day what Satan did in the Garden of Eden was to introduce the notion of legalism into the nature of the relationship that Adam and Eve had with God. And although there is a dialogue in which Eve is defensive in Genesis 3, what Satan asks is, “Has God put you in this garden and said, ‘You are not to eat of any of the trees of this garden?’”

And I think you can see in the narrative from that point onward she struggles with the answer. “Well, now there is this one tree.” But there is no recognition that he has showered upon us these great things, these other trees.

I was reared in the notion that what Satan was doing there was questioning the authority of God’s word (which he does). But more important, in that context, he was really questioning the character of the God by saying, “Don’t you see he really isn’t generous?”

Satan is saying God is like a father who takes his child into some phenomenally wonderful children’s department store the week before Christmas, shows him everything, and says to him with a cynical laugh, “And none of this is going to be yours this Christmas.”

It is the distortion. I am no psychiatrist, but I think at the human level that inevitably produces a child who will either willfully rebel or find himself always feeling he has got to do something to earn his father’s love.

It may be speculative to ask what it is the deepest thing in Satan’s heart against God. But I think there clearly is that jealously to demean his character. And the demeaning of the character of God, I think, injects into all that lies behind what we call legalism.

Geerhardus Vos has some amazing one-liners in the midst of all that kind of very dense language...

CJM: Is he known for his one-liners? I have not heard him characterized as a one-line kind of guy.

SF: There is a great book produced by P&R of quotes from Geerhardus Vos [A Geerhardus Vos Anthology]. It’s great because Vos is so heavy and thick that sometimes it’s difficult to read and you lose the good things.

Anyway, Vos says that the heart of legalism is when we separate the law of God from the person of God. And what we have got then are bare imperatives that don’t have an indicative that will sustain them.

God himself in his grace, love, kindness, and generosity was the indicative that would have sustained the imperative of “Don’t eat the fruit of this tree.” And I see that distortion of God’s character, and the notion of legalism that seeks to earn what now as fallen creatures we can never earn, and blinds us to his a priori love for us in Christ.

Satan is cast out in terms of his dominion over our lives from the beginning of our Christian lives, yet we are still living in a world and with a memory and as a being for whom, I think, that battle against legalism is a lifelong reality.

And this gets back to the quiet time. I have met a lot of very fervent Christians who, if they haven’t had their quiet time, feel things will go wrong in the day. They turn the gospel on its head.

There are imperatives that flow out of the indicatives of God’s grace, but it is so easy for us, I think, to just fall back into that old trap—as Owen would have said—mix the rubbish of our own qualifications into the foundation of our Christian life, which is absolutely, purely, completely, totally the unmerited (and de-merited) favor of God.

And I think it’s interesting in the history of the Christian church. One of my areas of special concentration has been in the seventeenth century and the antinomian controversies in the seventeenth century. Reading the men who were involved on the antinomian side, I was fascinated by the fact that they all said basically they had been legalists. One of the things I began to notice was that everybody who I ever read who was known as antinomian in the technical sense, this had become their way of dealing with legalism.

They were godly men and their theology could be a bit slippery. But reading what they wrote, it really kind of impressed upon me that Paul does not deal with legalism by saying, “Now what you need is three grains of antinomianism, and that will dissolve your legalism.” No. He always said, “It is the grace of God in Jesus Christ that will dissolve both legalism and antinomianism.” I saw the way Paul keeps dragging people back to the same basic principles in the gospel.

It kind of underlined to me: If he is doing that, then actually whatever spiritual sickness may be presented—if I can use like a medical analogy—the good spiritual diagnostician is going to see that the fact that you are hurting here doesn’t mean that the source of the problem is here.

And that, of course, was a helpful thing for me to think about both theologically and pastorally.

One thing that dawned on me was I had met people, as you do in certain branches of the Reformed church, for whom assurance is a great problem. And they get fixated on assurance and they want to talk about assurance. And I realize: Well, but, the resolution of assurance doesn’t lie in the doctrine of assurance. It lies in the doctrine of justification by grace through faith. And so, you know, we have got to struggle with this person who is becoming obsessed with the pain of not having assurance. You have got to drag them out of that and say, “No, really, the source of this is to be found in something even more fundamental than that.”

And so that takes us back to our golf conversation. I have noticed listening to others (and in a minor way) from my own experience that when you hit your best golf shots, you are not actually thinking. It flows out of an instinct. And you are “in the zone” as they say. And that is true of all sports, isn’t it? You see a basketball player in slow motion. When you see what they are actually doing, you realize there is no way they could think through all that’s going on.

I sometimes say you have got to be “thunked” about the Christian life. It has got to get into you, to be part of you. Otherwise you are saying, “Oh, there goes a little antinomianism. I’ve got to balance there. There goes my legalism, got to balance that.” No, it’s more and more the penetration of the gospel of grace and the person of Christ.

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The Ferguson quote at the top originates from Know Your Christian Life (IVP, 1981), p. 73.

Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke