There is the common misunderstanding that legalism entails an overly strict adherence to the words of God’s laws. This is false. The truth is that legalism takes words from God and twists them in a way that purports to obey those words, but in reality works around or against them to allow disobedience. Jesus said to the legalists, “You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel.” The point is not that we should swallow the gnat. He said, “These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” To the undiscerning, the legalists are able to maintain an appearance of faithfulness to God. This is because one feature of legalism is that it often stresses so intensely several details of a doctrine or even just man-made scruples related to that doctrine that it generates the impression of strict adherence, when it is only a smokescreen to cover up non-adherence.

Take the Sabbath for example. You must meet on Sunday! You must go to church! You must not work! Some even say you must not read the news or shop for groceries. Those who give up sports and various attainments on this day are hailed as heroes – for doing nothing. Since they themselves cannot do nothing all the time on that day, they make room for “works of necessity” that are permitted, and over the years people have asked for my help as they agonize over these works of necessity in fear and guilt as to whether it would be sinful to provide for their families due to the circumstances of their jobs. They are like members of this certain temple that I knew. They met on Saturdays, and they were not supposed to work on that day. They could not even drive home after the temple service. What to do? They hired the heathens to drive them! Why, these heathens were going to hell anyway, right? Why not pay them to dishonor this day that you claim to be so important to God? Wouldn’t another group say that they should not speak to heathens and handle money on the Super Sacred Saturday Sabbath? Or is that another work of necessity? There is nothing necessary about it. Why not sleep in the temple? Go home on Sunday. This is the true face of legalism and religious hypocrisy. The church is full of this.

After all the fights and debates, and leaving or expelling those who disagree, they finally have their precious Sabbath, and many of the rules and contingencies have been voted on and written out. They had the foresight to invent cessationism to make God shut up, so he did not get to vote or to say anything about this. Even the Scripture has been silenced. Later they will patch the loopholes that they do not need, and create loopholes for things that they wish to do on Sunday. This is great! It feels so religious! God must be so grateful! However, when they gather, they refuse to do what God tells them they ought to do when they gather. They do what Satan tells them to do – they oppress, they persecute, they criticize, and they speak against God’s promises and commands regarding healing the sick, casting out demons, prophecies, tongues, and the ministry of miracles. They strain out a gnat on defining what they are allowed or not allowed to do on Sunday, often not even according to the word of God but according to man-made scruples, but then they swallow the camel of unbelief, tradition, sickness, poverty, and all kinds of cruelty and hypocrisy on the Sabbath.

If it is a special day at all, it is supposed to be a day of healing and liberation, a day of miracles, but they have made it a day of oppression. Jesus clashed with the religious legalists of his day on this issue. He said in one place, “And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” Oh, do you see it? If you reverse the truth, thinking that God demands sacrifice, ritual, regulation, pain and suffering, rather than faith and mercy, then you would condemn the innocent. And this is what happens on every Sunday. You would condemn the wrong people, when you ought to condemn yourself for your unbelief and hardness of heart. Legalism is a counterfeit spirituality fueled by the flesh. Anyone living by the flesh can walk into church on a designated day. It is as easy as meeting any business appointment, or even an appointment to commit adultery and murder. It is not a spiritual achievement. Am I against the Sabbath? Hey, look at that red herring! You are missing the point. I am talking about the gnat and the camel. God is seeking those who would worship him in spirit and in truth.

The people split churches. They go to war. They form cliques and denominations. They set up their own banners and names. They vote on creeds. They debate policies and regulations. All of this and much more to insist we must meet on Sunday. You must meet, and you must meet on that day. Fine. But when Sunday comes, they stand up and blaspheme the Holy Spirit. When Sunday comes and the people arrive, they refuse to heal the sick, to cast out demons, to prophesy, to speak in tongues, to allow revelations and spiritual songs, to operate in the gifts and powers of the Spirit for the benefit of all and to astound unbelievers. They refuse, but rather condemn these things, even though the word of God commands these things to occur when believers gather. Jesus, in the context of the Sabbath, had repeated confrontations with the religious hypocrites on healing the sick. He said that’s what the Sabbath was for. He said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” But the people hardened their hearts and decided to murder Jesus instead.

Walk into church and sit down on a Sunday? Even a Satanist can do that, and since the Christians do not believe in casting out demons, he is not even nervous. They fight for what even the unbelievers can do, but they fight against the things that only believers can do. They go through the same charade with baptism and communion. They start wars over things that are only rituals to them, never touching the reality and the power. They will have sacrifice, and not faith, mercy, and justice. They insist on meeting on a day, but refuse to meet for a miracle. They glorify the suffering of man, but not the healing from God. For this reason, many of them are weak, sick, and dead. Even if we pretend that they have all these things lined up right – the Sabbath, baptism, communion – they do not have Christ. And the whole thing becomes nothing more than a weekly book club for people with wet hair eating tiny snacks. Then when this clown show fails to dominate the culture, they blame the government.

Now that is legalism, and it is rampant in the churches. It permeates the creeds. It floods the seminaries. The religious elite reek of it. However, the charge of legalism is sometimes false, as when it is claimed that the “spirit” of what God said is contrary to the “letter” of what God said. In a discussion on ethics, if your opponent alleges that you focus on the letter of the law but disregard the spirit of the law, then what is the spirit of the law? Demand an explanation. If he can verbally explain the spirit of the law to you, then shouldn’t that statement be the letter of the law in the first place? Why didn’t God say it that way? Why didn’t God say what he meant? If the spirit of the law could legitimately contradict the letter of the law, this would mean that the letter of the law was never necessary to communicate the meaning. If we could change the letter of the law to match the spirit of the law, this would mean that the first version never expressed the spirit of the law in the first place. Could this second version of the letter contradict the spirit? If not, then it means that when the letter of the law is accurate, the spirit of the law would not contradict it. This requires your opponent to declare whether God has intelligently expressed himself in his words, or whether your opponent is more intelligent than God himself, so that he is able to ascertain God’s true meaning, a meaning that God himself failed to convey or even stated in a way that contradicted his own intention. The other option is for your opponent to admit that he rejects Scripture. Then we can continue with this person as a non-Christian, and the issue becomes a difference in worldview rather than a single point in ethics or interpretation of a text.

On the other hand, if any attempt in the letter of the law can always be contradicted by the spirit of the law, then this means that the spirit of the law can never be expressed. This would mean that it is impossible for your opponent to know what the spirit of the law is through the letter. It would mean that there is no relationship between the two. Since this also means that he never understood the spirit of what you said, but only heard the letter of what you said, how could he say that you were wrong? Moreover, it would mean that what he said — the letter of what he said — and the spirit of what he said could be different and even contradictory. Therefore, when he said that you were wrong and that you were legalistic, the spirit of what he said could be that you were correct and that you were not legalistic. If you raise this point, and he answers that he meant what he said, it could mean that he did not mean what he said. Thus this “letter vs. spirit” move in argument, besides being cliché, also amounts to surrender. Everything he says becomes gibberish. He self-destructs and ejects himself from all debates.

Paul meant something different when he talked about the letter and the spirit, and the terms cannot be taken out and thrown around like this in order to subvert what a biblical text obviously says. He referred to the promised new covenant ministry of the spirit, in which God not only announces the letters of his commands, but also writes these commands in our hearts, empowering us to obey them. This ministry of the spirit infuses us with the power to follow the letter, not an excuse to overturn the letter. It is a ministry that changes hearts. In fact, a person who has benefited from such a ministry of the spirit would have the letters of God written on his heart, and he would not use the false dichotomy of “letter vs. spirit” to dismiss divine standards that he dislikes, since there would be nothing in the divine standards that he dislikes. He would love everything about God with a sincere and willing heart. The opponent’s use of the “letter vs. spirit” excuse illustrates the way that the letter alone kills, so that he resists its condemnation in fear and resentment, but one who has the same letter written in his heart would not resist, because it has become his natural instinct, and he would love the letter of God’s word. The letter alone condemns, since one cannot obey it, but just because it condemns does not mean that it is false. If it is false, it would have no power to condemn. The spirit is not something that contradicts the letter, but it infuses the heart to follow the letter. No one who has received such a ministry of the spirit would then challenge the letter, because this same letter is now his inherent nature.

We observe that the common misuse takes the words “letter” and “spirit” to mean something like “expression” and “intention,” and we follow this in our discussion, but remember that Paul meant something else in the original context. There are, of course, many instances when you can expect your opponent to stick absolutely to the letter of the law. Perhaps your opponent claims that the condemnation of homosexuality in the “letter” of Scripture somehow endorses homosexuality in “spirit.” You would be legalistic to follow the letter. Now what if you say that to love your neighbor can allow rape — in the “spirit” of love? Would your opponent applaud this liberation from “legalism”? If it is because of “love” that you do it, who is your opponent to complain? If he claims that this is a warped idea of love, then your answer could be that this is only the “letter” of his answer, and that the “spirit” of his words is that he encourages rape. A woman screams, “No!” But according to your opponent that is perhaps only the letter of the protest, because the spirit says, “Yes.” This is what your opponent teaches. Wait, is this the result he wanted all along by making the false distinction? To endorse his own evil designs? If he says that this is not what he means, it must mean that it is exactly what he means. Whatever your opponent permits others to violate, there are hundreds of things that he would not allow anyone to transgress, perhaps until he also wants to do those things. If words can mean their opposite, then there is no point in debating the meaning of certain words when we talk about ethical matters. It is futile for those who oppose biblical ethics to continue to appeal to the word of God, and attempt to make it endorse the opposite of what it clearly says. If you are not a Christian, just admit you are not a Christian, and start the discussion from there.

When Jesus brought out the “spirit” of the law in the Sermon on the Mount, he made every category he mentioned more strict and pervasive than the “letter” of tradition. For example, he says that even lust is counted as adultery and hate is counted as murder. This could be inferred from the Old Testament itself. Jesus was attacking religious teachings that circumvented the commandments. This is the spirit of the law, the intention of God’s commands. Notice that it does not contradict the letter, but the pretense to stick with the letter allows men to get away with more. If the letter condemns murder, the spirit would never endorse murder, but it condemns even the mere desire to destroy someone. The spirit of the law against adultery condemns the desire to possess someone who does not belong to you. Likewise, the spirit of the law against homosexuality condemns even homosexual desires and thoughts, as Paul states in his letter to the Romans. And the spirit of the law in a broader sense would condemn all desires and thoughts contrary to God’s definition of right and wrong.

Legalism is not too much obedience! It is a narrow and nitpicking assault on God’s expression to subvert God’s intention, in order to excuse disobedience, to grant greater liberty to sin. Thus when the religious experts read, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” they added, “And hate your enemies.” Then they wondered, “Who is my neighbor anyway?” This pretense to seek precision was so that they could dilute the command and allow themselves to love only a few people and even to hate all others. But Jesus answered, “Who was a neighbor to the one who needed help?” and then “Go and do likewise.” The spirit of the law had intended that we ought to show benevolence to everyone, not just a “neighbor” precisely defined by our narrowness of heart. He also portrayed the religiously and racially despised Samaritan as more in tune with God’s commandment of love than the “lawfully ordained” religious tryhards.

Paul referred to the words of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” The point is that the ox should benefit from the work it performs. Legalism would pretend to seek precision in order to minimize the application of this command. They would ask, “What is a muzzle?” “Is it just any ox? What if it doesn’t belong to me?” or “What counts as treading work?” and “So if it is not grain but something else, I can muzzle it.” This is like those who confront a prohibition from God and say, “Let’s make a distinction here. If it is done out of love, it is acceptable,” forgetting that if we are to be precise about it, we also need to define love according to the same set of commandments. Or they might say, “But the desires are not sin.” Paul made no such attempt to bully the ox, but he said, “Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Does he not certainly say this for our sake? It was written for our sake.” Then he applied it to preachers, declaring that they ought to receive payment for their work. God considers handling his word – preaching sermons, writing books, counseling, broadcasting, etc. – as a job, an occupation that deserves payments and salaries just like any other job such as construction or bookkeeping. And James wrote that wages that are withheld cry out to God, so that judgment will fall upon those who defraud the workers. If God will avenge those who work for farms and factories, how much more will he avenge those who work for the gospel! This is the “spirit” or intention of the command. It demands a broad obedience, not a narrow and feigned obedience designed to indulge a broad defiance.

Another illustration. Moses said that when a man divorced a woman, he had to write her a certificate of divorce. Legalism construed this to mean that if a man would grant the certificate, then he could divorce for any reason, at any time, and as often as he wished. However, the “spirit” of the law was likely to protect the victims of divorce and to prohibit wife swapping, for otherwise the men could have expelled their unwanted spouses without any certificate to show the women’s status. But in the hands of the legalists this command of mercy became a command of perversion. By making the command about the certificate alone, they could marry and remarry multiple times, even the same rosters of women, without technically committing adultery. The law was given to regulate the sin of divorce that men would have committed regardless of any prohibition because of their hardness of heart. It was not designed to offer a license for divorce. When it came to the legitimacy of divorce, Jesus said, “What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” And he pretty much said that when divorce happens, everyone involves during or after it commits adultery. Divorce should never happen. Christians try to squirm out of this too. Just as the religious hypocrites attempted to nitpick their way out of the words of Moses, Christians have tried to nullify the words of Christ with their elite scholarship. For hundreds of years, over thousands of pages and sermons, they have tried it. You see it everywhere. The shame that they feel and the condemnation of their conscience often propel them to speak against Jesus more and more. Instead of confessing their sin, failure, and hardness of heart, they attempt to twist the word of God to justify themselves, to create more liberty for their transgressions. This is the spirit of legalism, the spirit that murdered Jesus, the word of God.